REVIEW From the onset, it seems as though a documentary about a choir of seniors behaving badly would be a comical one-trick pony. But because of the involvement of a very savvy choral director and the endlessly unpredictable antics of high-spirited octogenarians, Young@Heart is a sweet, wonderful, harrowing laugh riot from start to finish. Seriously, I didn’t laugh this hard at Superbad. Director Stephen Walker also narrates; he’s a British expat whose dry delivery is well timed and well chosen. The singers are instantly lovable, and they do nothing but outfox their physical maladies — they’ve earned their age and let nothing restrain their appetites for living. The inevitable tragedies that befall a few subjects make for painful plot twists, though certain changes of context make this a unique meditation on age; the videos tapped by Walker to illustrate the unconventional songs this choir sings are clever cues. "I Wanna Be Sedated," anthem of disaffection and recreational drug use, is set in a convalescent home. Meanwhile, other more melancholic meditations (like the choir’s version of Talking Heads’ "On the Road to Nowhere" — placed in the doc just after the passing of a central member) seem pointed at the possible conclusion that the subjects of Young@Heart grasp their existential crises, and simply choose not to be bothered.
Yuck. Ecuadorian oil pit. All cleaned up, you say? Photo courtesy of Amazon Watch
As if publicly disputing the credibility of the Goldman Prize weren’t enough, Chevron has gone into serious corporate spin cycle, taking out a full page ad in today’s Chron and penning a guest editorial claiming they’re not to blame for 18 billion gallons of toxic waste dumped in unlined pits in the Amazon rainforest. The repeated cry of Charles A. James, Chevron’s vp and general counsel: It’s not us, it’s the government. Chevron, the parent company of Texaco, which began pumping Ecuadorian oil back in 1964, says noone cared about the environment back then, they’ve cleaned up their mess anyway, and anything left over is the fault of Ecuador’s national oil company, PetroEcuador.
Lawyer Pablo Fajardo and activist Luis Yanza, two natives of Lago Agrio, Ecuador – a small village in the heart of the spoils — were just awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, what our congresswoman Nancy Pelosi called “on par with the Nobel Peace Prize.” Fajardo put himself through law school to take the lead in a suit against Chevron, claiming the company’s responsible for destroying soil, water, and natural resources. Lago Agrians suffer significantly elevated incidences of cancer, disease, and death.
Chevron, which ignored Fajardo at last year’s board meeting, now has Sam Singer handling spin. Singer’s other recent clients: the SF Zoo, post-tiger attack, and Don Fisher’s Presidio art museum. They also have William Haynes on the case. Why does that name sound so familiar? Yes, a la Kevin Ryan, we have another Bush Administration fall guy washing ashore in the Bay Area.
Reading through Chevron’s website on the lawsuit and taking in the pretty green pictures, it seems like there isn’t a thing wrong with this Amazonian rainforest. Everything’s been cleaned up, and if the indigenous people who live there are getting sick, it’s because they shit where they eat.
But MoFilms, an Oakland-based documentary company, shot footage of the region that shows someone has been wrecking environmental hell down there. Their film, Justicia Now, is screening this Thursday at the Roxie, 8 pm, 3117 16th St. San Francisco. The filmmakers will be on hand to answer questions about the issue and the movie, which they also distribute for free on their website.
SONIC REDUCER The money, the fame / And the public acclaim / Don’t forget who you are / You’re a rock and roll star." These bitter words by the Byrds roll over through my mind while watching the resurrection of three generations of rock hope realized — reappearing at a time when industry majors like Universal, Sony, and Warner Music are busy bowing to the social networking sphere, i.e., MySpace. The sands are shifting beneath the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and REM, all bands I’ve waved my adoring fangirl flag for, all once toasted as the future of rock ‘n’ roll when the form was the sexiest game in town. Well, the future — along with the classic LPs, the heavily referenced and canonical tunes, the wives, the money-printing tours — has come and gone, so why not step back from an eyeballful of IMAX and think about whether such once-seemingly-ageless, now-clearly-aging mortals are holding the course or moving forward? Does size still matter?
Lord knows — and Sir Mick Jagger surely realizes — you can throw money at a prestige project: the new Stones–Martin Scorsese business partnership, Shine a Light, is proof. Sure, it’s a decent, energized Stones performance — much better than their 2005 date at SBC Park — and certainly the band comes off well in their love for the music (Keith Richards) and artfulness (Mick Jagger). Ron Wood even gets off a nice solo or two. But why bother documenting a Stones live period — the "Bigger Bang" jaunt, otherwise known as the highest grossing tour of all time — essentially recognized for simply raking in a buttload of money for the band? Not only have the Stones been the subject of a much better concert film-documentary — the Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter (1970), which Scorsese bows to by enlisting Albert Maysles for some camerawork — but rock fan Scorsese has already made a much more multidimensional and affecting concert flick (The Last Waltz, 1978) and a more evocative and heartfelt documentary about a musical icon (No Direction Home, 2005).
Rather, the Stones appear to be recontextualizing their dirty blues-rock for a new, well-heeled generation that can afford them: denuding "Sympathy for the Devil" of its menace and recasting it as a party anthem, far from the madding Altamont crowd. Jagger’s toned, dancer’s physique looks downright expensive as he attempts to repurpose arena poses in the intimate Beacon Theatre, as pricey as Richards’ Louis Vuitton ad and as well-fed as the scrubbed and fratty crowd down front in Shine a Light. Is such a display of power and funds sexier — or offensive — during a recession? Still, the last laugh seems to belong to the Stones: how else to read the final image of Shine a Light as the moon morphs into the Stones tongue than as, "See ya, suckers"?
Springsteen’s aging, gray-tressed mob at HP Pavilion on April 5 would never tolerate such winking behavior. As earnest and idealistic in their Silicon Valley fleece and chinos as the so-called New Dylan so many decades along, they yelled back at the holy rollers picketing the front of the Shark Tank — o demon rock "Born in the U.S.A." — and dutifully lowed, "Broooce!" after each song. Springsteen returned their devotion in kind with two and a half hours of superhuman passion that drew from new releases as well as from Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River (both Columbia; 1978, 1980). Even as Broooce rocked "Reason to Believe," off Nebraska (Columbia, 1982), as a bluesy rave-up, or told stories of leaving wife Patti Scialfa at home to monitor their teenagers, his hard-working, well-meaning decency kept shining through. These days sax sidekick Clarence Clemons may find it necessary to sit out many songs on his throne/easy chair set to stage left and organist Danny Federici is sidelined by melanoma, but the leader still possesses a unflagging fire and expansive romanticism — even if it is spent stumping for Hillary Clinton as of late. On Saturday night, what was striking was less how indebted the latest long-players by younger artists like Arcade Fire and the Killers are to Broooce than the long arm of his influence on so much ’80s radio rock: everyone from Don Henley to Patti Smith to the Pointer Sisters to John Mellencamp.
And whither goes the next greatest rock band, after Springsteen, to attain critical mass: REM? The combo drew kudos for their recent South by Southwest turn — and as with Brooce and the Stones, Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, and Peter Buck have chosen to grow louder with age, writing their new album on electric guitars rather than toning it down with dinner background Musak. More than 25 years into the band’s history, REM’s 14th album, Accelerate seems to plonk down in the Stones’ tax bracket with the opening "Living Well Is the Best Revenge," if not for the clearly articulated, biting irony of Michael Stipe’s lyric, "Baby I am calling you on that." Favoring rock ‘n’ roll blast in a compact 34 minutes, with only traces of the Velvety subtlety and Southern primitive melodicism I once treasured the band for, REM has instead picked up where "It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" left off, retuning its glib soothsaying for post-WTO riots, post-Katrina times, driving it through a pop filter, and sprinkling "Sympathy for the Devil" whoos on the closer, "I’m Gonna DJ." "Look at the world and see plenty of reasons to be angry," guitarist Peter Buck has said, describing Accelerate. We’ll see if they still rage, live.
Signage modification – Austin, Texas-style. All photos by Kimberly Chun.
What a weird lil’ South By this is? Can it get any stranger than the evening of March 13, which started out at Stubb’s for a sold-out anti-war concert, “Body of War,” linked to the feature documentary on 25-year-old Tomas Young, who was paralyzed from a bullet to his spine, taken after serving in Iraq for less than a week. System of a Down’s Serj Tankian accompanied himself on piano, Billy Bragg presented a powerful “Farmer Boy,” and Kimya Dawson, Ben Harper, and RX Bandits filled out the bill. (Sightings of the Dawson’s infant being cartered by her partner, abounded throughout the fest).
Gimme more Ex Cocaine.
Then it was off to the Siltbreeze showcase at Soho Lounge for a hand drum-driven Ex Cocaine from Missoula, Montana, and the stirring guitar-electronics invocations of Blues Control from Brooklyn. Good to see such a sizable crowd out for what many might see as a micro-niche night.
Outta-hand Blues Control.
Made few pitstops at Friends for the soon-to-be capacity Carbon/Silicon showcase (witness the scores of disappointed Clash fans milling around before their 11:30 p.m. set outside, cordoned off by police tape just so they don’t get raucous). London’s Noah and the Whale plied their rootsy folky harmonies with sweetness and high spirits.
Swallow this: Noah and the Whale.
More ambitious but definitely more streamlined lineup-wise, was Florence and the Machine, also from London town, over at BBC/Steve Lamacq’s event at the Rio. Like a sweet, over-the-top cross between Kate Bush and a high school musical theater star, Flo mimed drowning, quasi-tap-danced, and threw her gold-sequined jacket to an audience member when she grew encumbered. All accompanied only by ukulele. And with plenty of drama for all.
The Fantasticks, anyone? Florence and the Machine.
Time to queue for the Playboy/C3 (presenters of Lollapalooza, et al) ninth annual late-night party. The line wound round the block of the “301” warehouse and the media line (through the back entrance – I felt like I ought to be helping with the dishes!) was just as crazed. Once inside, after watching oodles of would-be media types getting turned away at the list, I spied Perez Hilton all in white, with white shorn locks, got my beverage (check the ample barbecue midnight snack), and studied the Heavy as they cozied up to playmates in sad drooping bunny ears and cotton tails.
REVIEW As far as I know, Karl Lagerfeld is the only fashion designer to have had his likeness made into a collectible figurine. With his instantly identifiable uniform that foppishly mixes old (the white ponytail and high starched collars) and new (his omnipresent sunglasses, a small mine’s worth of silver jewelry, exquisitely cut clothes in every shade of black), he has become as iconic as the Chanel bouclé suits he has designed for the house for 20-plus years. Rodolphe Marconi’s documentary Lagerfeld Confidential performs a nice trick in letting us think we’re getting a candid portrait of the man behind the sunglasses. Depth, though, is a tall order when his subject declares, "I don’t want to be real in other people’s minds; I want to be an apparition." What we do learn across this extended interview, goaded on by Marconi’s softball needling, is that Lagerfeld’s mother was a formative influence (she "exuded frivolity" and "made slaves of everyone") and that he was a sexually precocious youth. But as Wilde and Warhol have shown, the dandy’s mode of address is aphoristic, not confessional. Given the frequency with which he dispenses such obfuscatory pronouncements as "Every friendship needs a sword of Damocles hanging over it" and "Fashion is ephemeral, dangerous, and unfair," perhaps Lagerfeld’s next project should be a little book of quotations à la Chairman Mao. Of course, Lagerfeld’s would be bound in black leather.
LAGERFELD CONFIDENTIAL opens Fri/14 at the Roxie Film Center.
Click here for details on the First Amendment Awards Dinner.
Norwin S. Yoffie Career Achievement Award
DAN NOYES (COFOUNDER, CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM)
If journalists were the subjects of trading cards like baseball players, the Dan Noyes rookie card would be just as impressive as a 2008 career highlights card. Think Reggie Jackson: a long, impressive career, spanning multiple organizations and a propensity to come out swinging big at the end of a hard-fought battle.
Over a career spanning 30 years, Noyes has pursued serious investigations, some lasting as long as a year, into everything from questionable Liberian timber imports to illicit gun trafficking from United States suppliers to the Nuestra family gang. Journalism first interested Noyes during the crucial investigative reporting that sparked Watergate scandal in the early 1970s.
In 1977 Noyes cofounded the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), an independent news organization which produces in-depth stories and documentaries for all major news outlets. In 1979, reporting for the ABC News program 20/20, CIR broke a story on a swindling United Nations charity organization and its connections to international drug trafficking.
More recently, Noyes has done a series of print and broadcast pieces concerning gang violence in California and its effect on the lives of those surrounding the lifestyle. Noyes still holds an executive position at the CIR and continues to contribute to the world of investigative journalism.
Beverly Kees Educator Award
CLIFF MAYOTTE
Cliff Mayotte sees his Advanced Acting Class at Lick-Wilmerding High School as one that merges students’ "consciousness and awareness as young adults with their skills and energies as performance artists."
The subtitle of the course is "Theatre as Civic Dialogue," and the eight students enrolled during the 2007 spring semester used all their abilities to pull off a notable show.
After an introduction to Documentary Theatre — a form he described as "oral history turned into performance" — the group selected a topic that was important to them, giving birth to the "Censorship Project."
The students interviewed their peers, teachers, and administrators to gather perspectives on the ways in which expression and opinion can be muted or altered, both voluntarily and involuntarily. They reached out to organizations such as Project Censored, the First Amendment Project, and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. They transcribed interviews and studied subjects in order to capture statements, word patterns, and mannerisms of interviewees, then shaped the themes into a 60-minute performance.
Professional Journalists
WILL DEBOARD
"Being a high school sports guy, I don’t get to do this very often," the Modesto Bee‘s Will DeBoard said of his first major foray into investigative reporting. He had gotten a tip that the California Interscholastic Federation was investigating recruiting violations by the football program at Franklin High School in Stockton, which competed with schools in his area. DeBoard asked the school and CIF about recruiting violations, but the football coach flatly denied the allegations and the CIF wasn’t much more helpful.
So DeBoard decided to make formal requests for public records with the help of business reporter Joanne Sbranti, and after fighting through some initial denials, he obtained hundreds of pages of investigatory documents from CIF showing how the school was recruiting players from American Samoa. "It really was a treasure trove of great stuff. We got two weeks’ worth of stories out of these documents," DeBoard said. "It really showed us that what the school was telling us just wasn’t true."
The documents detailed the recruiting scheme and gave DeBoard tons of leads for follow-up stories, including the address of "a home owned by the coach where there were all these gigantic Samoan linemen living there." DeBoard called the effort an "adrenaline rush" better than that caused by the best game he’s covered and a high point of his journalism career.
THOMAS PEELE
Contra Costa Times investigative reporter Thomas Peele has a long history of battling for public records access on behalf of both reporters and private citizens. Peele, who helps with projects for all the newspapers under the Bay Area News Group-East Bay ownership, helped ensure the recovery of thousands of e-mails from the Oakland mayoral tenure of Jerry Brown when he left office to become the state’s attorney general in 2006. Peele also helped conduct a statewide audit of Public Records Act compliance by law enforcement agencies with the nonprofit Californians Aware, which revealed glaring inconsistencies in how police across the state make information about their activity available to the public. And he’s been a major figure in helping the Chauncey Bailey Project pry out new information about Bailey’s murder last year and it’s connection to Your Black Muslim Bakery. He began his career in 1983 at a small weekly in Bridgehampton, N.Y., and moved from there in 1988 to the Ocean County Observer in New Jersey before joining the CCT in 2000.
ROLAND DE WOLK
KTVU-TV producer Roland De Wolk is leading the investigative team of photographer Tony Hedrick and video editor Ron Acker in a quest to get the names of drivers who regularly use FasTrak lanes but don’t pay anything. But to date, says De Volk, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission has been blocking his team’s quest.
De Wolk told the Guardian that his team filed a California Public Records request when the MTC wouldn’t provide information on the amount of money it was losing thanks to drivers who don’t pay tolls when they use FasTrak lanes.
"We asked MTC for specific numbers last summer and got little information. That makes a reporter’s antennae quiver," said De Wolk.
But when he and his team asked for the numbers of people obstructing their plates, the MTC started acting squirrelly, De Wolk said.
"Finally, after six to eight weeks of asking we got an answer: a photo of a car whose plate was blank," fumed De Wolk, whose team continues to push for the names of the 10 most frequent FasTrak violators.
Broadcast News Outlet
KGO-TV
When KGO-TV reporter Dan Noyes and producer Steve Fyffe asked Muni to turn over records of public complaints against its drivers, they were ready for some bureaucratic foot dragging. But they never expected the yearlong grudge match that followed. First, the union representing Muni drivers sued to keep the records sealed. Then Muni’s parent department, the Municipal Transportation Agency, made a backroom deal with the union and released a blizzard of confusing and heavily redacted paperwork that would have made the Pentagon blush.
"It was essentially a big document dump," Fyffe told us. "There was no way to tell one form from another or which driver was which."
Noyes and Fyffe convinced their bosses at KGO-TV to file a lawsuit for full access to the records. The station prevailed, after which Noyes and Fyffe received over 1,200 pages of public complaints about 25 drivers. Recently, the station went back to court after Muni refused to release surveillance tapes of the drivers. As in the previous case, the judge ruled that the public had a right to the materials and forced the transit agency to hand the tapes over.
Fyffe said he sees KGO’s legal successes as small victories in a much larger fight. "I hope in the future that this case will make Muni and other city departments more [responsive] to records requests … these kinds of incremental victories hopefully lead, little by little, to a more open government."
Print News Outlet
SACRAMENTO BEE
The Sacramento Bee operates in a city run by top-tier politicians and their spinmeisters, so the editors and reporters there have placed increasingly high value on using documents to support their stories.
"We’ve always used public records here. Being in a state capital, we’re a little more aware of the necessarily of that," managing editor Joyce Terhaar said. "You just need to be able to tell a story about what’s really happening."
Yet she said that in recent years, the Bee has made a concerted effort to hire public-records experts and to have them share their knowledge with the paper’s staff through regular workshops. And last year, those efforts paid off with a string of big, impactful investigative stories.
Among them was Andy Furillo’s look at how much the state was spending to fight inmate care lawsuits, Andrew McIntosh’s exposé on the lack of oversight for paramedics and emergency medical technicians, and stories by John Hill and Kevin Yamamura on misconduct by the state’s Board of Chiropractic Examiners.
In selecting the Bee, Society of Professional Journalists judges recognized these individual efforts as well as the Bee‘s "institutional support of reporters and their use of public records for numerous stories."
Community Media
THE BERKELEY DAILY PLANET
One of the only ways to uncover corporate wrongdoing is to dig through court records, and it’s the job of the press to report what it discovers, said Becky O’Malley, executive editor for the Berkeley Daily Planet. She was convinced that a prior court order violated the public’s constitutional rights to see court documents, so the small daily newspaper sued and won in a California appeals court last year, making public 15,000 pages of records from a class-action suit filed against Wal-Mart in 2001.
The documents included allegations that the company had denied rest breaks to its workers and deleted hours from paychecks. In the Planet‘s freedom of information suit, the appeals court judges agreed with the paper’s attorneys that the case could set a dangerous precedent where the public would have to prove its right to access court records. "It’s becoming more of a trend for judges to grant permanent seals on court records," said O’Malley. That’s unfortunate, she added, since "the only way the public finds out about bad things going on in society is through court records."
Special Citation Award
CHAUNCEY BAILEY PROJECT
After Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey was murdered last August, a large group of Bay Area media organizations formed a rare coalition to investigate his death and the activities of Your Black Muslim Bakery, a long-time East Bay institution believed by police to be involved in the killing. Since then, the group has produced several stories complete with audio, video, and photo presentations, the most recent of which is a series by retired Santa Rosa Press-Democrat reporter Mary Fricker detailing the sexual assault allegations made by young women once in the custody of Yusuf Bey Sr., founder of the bakery. Fricker received help from independent radio journalist Bob Butler, investigative reporter A.C. Thompson, and MediaNews staff writers Cecily Burt, Thomas Peele and Josh Richman. Other stories have reported allegations of real estate fraud against bakery associates, explored potential coconspirators in Bailey’s death, and examined the bakery’s ties to several prominent politicians. More about the project — the first of its kind since a group of journalists investigated the murder of Don Bolles more than 30 years ago in Arizona — can be found at chaunceybaileyproject.org, or at www.sfbg.com/news/chaunceybailey.
Public Official
MARK LENO
It was a staff member, Kathryn Dresslar, who told Assemblymember Mark Leno how horrible state agencies had become at complying with the California Public Records Act. Dresslar served on the board of Californians Aware, a group that advocates for open government, and she described to her boss how a 1986 audit by the organization had given every one of the 33 agencies in California government a failing grade.
Ryan McKee, then a high-school student and the son of CalAware board president Rich McKee, had visited each agency and asked for a few simple things. He wanted to see each agency’s guidelines for public access, and he requested some basic information, including the salary of the agency director. Agency after agency refused to follow the law.
So Leno introduced legislation that would have mandated that every agency post its access guidelines on the Web — and included stiff fines for agencies that violated the Public Records Act. "It put some teeth into the law," Leno told us. "And I got 120 of 120 members of the state Legislature to vote for it.
That wasn’t enough for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who vetoed the bill, saying it wasn’t needed. The governor insisted that he had already ordered state agencies to fix the problem.
"It was a great eye-opener for me, and showed me the resistance this administration has to allowing public access to state government," Leno said. "Without that access the public is at a great disadvantage."
It might be hard to believe, but in 1949 the University of California Regents, a bastion of higher education, rode the wave of anticommunist fervor and McCarthyism, forcing all UC employees to take a loyalty oath. The Board of Regents adopted the rule that UC administrators pushed forth: denounce communism and swear loyalty to the state, or face losing your job.
As could be expected, people resisted and 31 faculty, workers, and student employees lost their jobs. They appealed the case to the California Supreme Court and eventually were reinstated in 1952, but the controversy cast a pall over the UC’s reputation and divided campuses. With the help of a grant from UC President Emeritus David Gardner, archivists from UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and other researchers painstakingly compiled 3500 pages of text, many audio statements, and photos from four UC collections.
The online collection, which went live in December 2007, serves as primary source material for students and researchers who want to understand how UC administrators got embroiled in and came to terms with the McCarthy-era tensions that rocked the country.
Legal Counsel
RACHEL MATTEO-BOEHM
Electronic data is the new frontier for public-records law, and Rachel Matteo-Boehm, a lawyer with Holme, Roberts and Owen, last year won a key case preserving the public’s right to access to what some public agencies have tried to claim was proprietary data.
The county of Santa Clara produced a digital map showing property lines, assessors parcels and other key real-estate data, and that became the basis for a geographic information system tool. The GIS would allow users to plot everything from property taxes to street repairs, public investment, political party registration, school test scores and other trends. But Santa Clara wasn’t giving it out to the public: The database cost more than $100,000, which meant only big businesses could use it.
Boehm went to court on behalf of the California First Amendment Coalition to argue that the data was public, and must be made available without high charges. "As information begins to be collected in electronic form, and governments choose to put information in sophisticated electronic formats, you can run into real public-access problems," Boehn told us.
Boehm convinced a Santa Clara Superior Court judge that the data was indeed covered under the California Public Records Act. Now Santa Clara must make the map available to the public — and other counties with similar data, seeing the results of the suit, are following that rule.
The decision was a key one, Boehm said: "One day we’re going to wake up and all there will be is electronic records," she noted. And if governments can apply different rules to those documents, "you can kiss the Public Records Act goodbye."
Whistleblower
DAN COOKE
When Dan Cooke shared details of an alleged sewage spill on Alcatraz Island with the Guardian, the health of the national park — where he’d been working as an historical interpreter for over a decade — was foremost on his mind. But he lost his job after the story was published — apparently for taking a proactive role in noting details of the spill in the island’s log book and speaking candidly to the press about what he’d seen. Wanting nothing more than a return to his job leading educational tours of the island, he filed an administrative claim with the US Department of Labor against the Golden Gate National Park Conservancy and the National Park Service. And he called the Guardian. We reported his firing. The next time Cooke called, it was to happily report he was back on the job.
Citizen
SUPERBOLD (BERKELEYANS ORGANIZED FOR LIBRARY DEFENSE)
SuperBOLD has accomplished something entirely different from what it set out to do. Originally, the small group of devoted Berkeley public library users organized to oppose the installation of RFID tags in books. "In the process of going to library board of trustees meetings, we discovered they were vioutf8g the Brown Act," said Gene Bernardi, who heads SuperBOLD’s steering committee with Jane Welford, Jim Fisher, and Peter Warfield. They found, among other things, that certain documents were only made available to trustees and a lottery system was employed in selecting speakers during public comment. They took their complaints to the Berkeley city attorney and joined up with the First Amendment Project, which threatened a lawsuit. Things have changed, though it’s still not perfect — city council meetings only allow 10 speakers and the library trustees still play the lottery for public comment, but marginal improvements portend better days.
"Now you can speak more than once," said Bernardi. "Now you can speak on consent calendar and agenda items. So there are more opportunities to speak … if the Mayor [Tom Bates] remembers to call public comment."
Electronic Access
CARL MALAMUD, PUBLIC.RESOURCE.ORG
For years, web pioneer Carl Malamud has sought ways to use the Internet to connect average citizens with their government. His new Web site public.resource.org helps that cause by excavating buried public domain information and posting it online. Though still in its early stages, the site already allows users to tap into hard-to-find records from places like the Smithsonian, Congress, and the federal courts system.
Even though most government records are part of the public domain, fishing them out from the bureaucratic depths can be a daunting and expensive task, even for someone like Malamud. During a lecture at UC Berkeley last year, he related his recent difficulties in acquiring a simple database from the Library of Congress. Instead of turning over the materials, officials at the Library cited dubious copyright protections and presented Malamud with a bill for over $85,000 — all for access to supposedly public information.
Thanks to Malamud’s Web site, that database and millions of other documents are now available with the click of a mouse. Ultimately, Malamud hopes public.resource.org will help bring about an age of "Internet governance," in which every last byte of public data winds up online for all to see, free of charge.
THE SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA CHAPTER presents the 23RD ANNUAL JAMES MADISON FREEDOM OF INFORMATION AWARDS DINNER
MARCH 18, 2008
NEW DELHI RESTAURANT
160 ELLIS STREET
SAN FRANCISCO
No-host bar @ 5:30 p.m.
Dinner/Awards @ 6:30 p.m.
TICKETS:
$50 SPJ members & students
$70 General public
For more information, contact David Greene (dgreene@thefirstamendment.org)
What? You haven’t seen “Girls Rock! The Movie” yet? It’s a documentary about a rock n’ roll camp in Portland Oregon that teaches young girls how to overcome oppression, fight off attackers, and most importantly how to rock! I recently attended the film’s East Bay premier at The Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley with my girlfriend, Heather Duthie, who has been working with the film’s co-directors Arnie Johnson (a frequent Guardian contributor) and Shane King for the past six months. So there’s your full disclosure of my interest in the movie. But really: I never knew girls could be so awesome!
Two different bands played to a sold-out theater full of prepubescent girls and their super hip mothers or fathers. The girls entered the theater timid and meek, but after hearing The Kitties play a punk version of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” and watching Girls Rock! star, Palace, scream obscenities and punch people in the face, they were able to bang their heads and throw up the horns without a touch of bashfulness. Let’s hope and pray they stay the course. The last thing we need is another Britney, however punk rock she has become.
Arguably no modern film director made a better sustained entrance than Peter Bogdanovich, whose first four features were all triumphs. Targets (1968) was a chilling conceit that brought Hollywood pretend terror (Boris Karloff basically playing himself) against a modern real-world horror, the randomly mass-murdering sniper. That critical success led to a major studio deal to adapt (with then wife and collaborator Polly Platt) Larry McMurtry’s novel The Last Picture Show (1971), a melancholy black-and-white flashback to 1950s rural Texas. It won two Oscars, was nominated for five more, and served as a launching pad for actors including Jeff Bridges, Ellen Burstyn, and Cybill Shepherd. Next came What’s Up, Doc? (1972), a delightful, San Francisco–set nod to 1930s screwball comedies with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal. Its huge success was equaled by 1976’s Paper Moon, with O’Neal and daughter Tatum as a Depression-era confidence duo.
That’s a heady four hits in five years — and they’ll all be shown at the Castro Theatre in a tribute to the director presented by Midnites for Maniacs’ Jesse Hawthorne Ficks. Another four films will be seen in director’s cuts different from original theatrical versions. Further, Bogdanovich himself will be on hand at all but the earliest matinees. He’s a great raconteur who’s insightfully frank about the ups and downs of an eventually checkered career.
"Ups and downs" puts it mildly. While Bogdanovich started out on top, Hollywood relished kicking him with each downward step. But he’s still here — and especially visible recently, thanks to his role on The Sopranos as Lorraine Bracco’s shrink. Behind the camera too, he’s gotten love lately from the four-hour DVD documentary Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream (2007). Bogdanovich, who hasn’t directed a big-screen movie since 2001’s lamentably underseen The Cat’s Meow with Kirsten Dunst, hopes to soon start shooting an adaptation of Tracey Letts’s jet-black stage comedy Killer Joe — and he’s got other irons in the fire.
If it’s thus a fine moment to be Bogdanovich, there have been many not-so-great ones. Phoning recently from Los Angeles, he recalls that before the debut of Daisy Miller (1974), his first commercial failure, critic Judith Crist asked him, "Is it good? It better be … because they’re waiting for you." Catching major flack for that film was Shepherd, the model-turned-actress he left Platt for.
"Peter and Cybill" were inseparable, possibly obnoxious. They cohosted The Tonight Show for a week and were reportedly arch as hell. They occupied the inaugural cover of People, with the headline "Living Together Is Sexy." The director quotes Cary Grant (doing a perfect vocal imitation) advising, "Petah, please stop telling people you’re happy and in love!" Asked why, Grant said, "Because they aren’t happy and in love."
Even those who liked Daisy Miller went Attila on 1975’s At Long Last Love, a lavish tribute to ’30s musicals with Cole Porter songs recorded live by some actors who were trained singers (Madeleine Kahn) and others who weren’t (Shepherd, Burt Reynolds). It was meant to be charming. It got the most vitriolic reviews this side of Battlefield Earth. Bogdanovich now says, "We rushed and fucked it up. The first preview in San Jose was an unmitigated disaster. Then we recut and remixed, and it played quite well. But I made some calamitous changes after that, and didn’t preview it again before release. We were just killed. Later we made a different edit. When Jesse called me to say he was showing it, I said, ‘Why?’ ‘I like it.’ ‘Oh, you’re the one.’<0x2009>"
The Castro will screen that improved edit — which is charming. Although the title is still a pseudonym for "turkey," At Long Last Love has never been released on video or DVD. In a town where success usually excuses all egotism, Bogdanovich had still somehow crossed a line. His failures were blamed on sheer arrogance. "I got a lot of that," he says — though back then a purportedly imperious on-set demeanor and statements like "I’m not modest, I’m not humble, and the more success I have, the more critics will resent me" surely didn’t help. He’d had the temerity to befriend Hollywood legends including Grant, John Ford, and Orson Welles — who was practically a permanent houseguest. Who the hell did he think he was?
Cynics had already interpreted Bogdanovich’s hit homages to Hollywood’s past as evidence he didn’t have an original thought in his head. Then they gloated over his nonhits. Despite the star power of Reynolds and both O’Neals, Nickelodeon was a 1976 Christmas flop. (Forced to shoot in color, Bogdanovich says, "It’s another movie in black and white" — which is how he’ll show it at the Castro.)
Despite excellent reviews, 1979’s Paul Theroux adaptation Saint Jack didn’t find an audience. Ditto 1981’s They All Laughed, an enchanting, ensemble romantic comedy. It was (among other things) a valentine to his new love and protégée, erstwhile Playboy centerfold Dorothy Stratten — who shortly after filming ended was killed by the thuggish promoter-husband she’d tried to leave amicably. That murder-suicide was followed by more ugliness: a war of words between Bogdanovich and Hugh Hefner; "dramatization" of the tragedy in 1983’s Star 80 ("I begged Bob Fosse not to do it") and a TV movie; and distribution problems for They All Laughed that cost him millions. Sympathy soured when Bogdanovich became involved with Dorothy’s younger sister, Louise — who was all of six months older than his own daughter. (Nonetheless, their eventual marriage lasted 13 years.)
Bogdanovich had a left-field comeback in 1985’s Mask, with Eric Stoltz as Elephant Kid and Cher as biker-chick mom. But even that was marred by public sparring with both Cher and studio execs. The latter substituted Bob Seger tunes for Bruce Springsteen ones key to the story’s real-life inspiration. (The Castro’s "theatrical world premiere" cut restores all the Bruuuuce.) Whether good, bad, or indifferent, his subsequent ventures flopped. In an eerie echo of past events, 1993’s The Thing Called Love came out (barely) after star River Phoenix OD’d. Bogdanovich turned to directing TV episodes (including for The Sopranos) and cable movies. It wasn’t a comedown, he says. "The scripts were good … and I got to work with actors like Cicely Tyson, Sidney Poitier, and George Segal."
Bogdanovich also relit an acting career abandoned decades earlier. Having written essays about film history (notably for Esquire) before moving to Hollywood, he thinks his industry hater trail is partly due to perception of him as critic turned filmmaker. He considers the roughly 45 stage productions he acted in (and the 6 he directed) from age 15 to 24 as his real prior job.
Given all past tempests, Bogdanovich seems on good terms with his exes — Shepherd (in town with the play Curvy Widow) has promised to show up at the Castro late Friday for The Last Picture Show and At Long Last Love; Louise is flying in to talk about her late sister when They All Laughed shows on Sunday.
Is it painful for them to see Dorothy Stratten onscreen? "Yeah, especially now that [costar] John Ritter has died," he says. "But you know, when you see it with an audience, it’s OK — it takes the pain somewhat away. One of the peripheral tragedies [to Stratten’s death] was that the movie was never properly seen in its day. You couldn’t really look at it in the way it was meant to be enjoyed."
When I walked into the Berkeley Cinema screening of the Chicago 10, I didn’t know what to expect. I had only a vague idea of the infamous Chicago Seven trial and felt oddly out of place among the aging hippies: I fully was prepared for another boring lesson on why my generation sucks.
Instead I was met with an engaging movie that eschews traditional documentary filmmaking to capture the playful exuberance of the Yippie generation. Through animation and rare video footage, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin came to life with a message of resistance that transcended decades. I spoke to Brett Morgan, the film’s director, over the phone (for the first part of the interview go here):
SFBG: You mentioned that you were trying to really capture the energy of the Yippies. Do you see any of that energy in today’s anti-war movement?
Brett Morgan: The thing about the Yippies that I love is the sense of playfulness and the fun, and I think if you go to YouTube you can see viral videos from Obama Girl to a whole range of stuff that’s pretty illuminating and exciting. I think there are leaders who have the charisma that an Abbie Hoffman had that just aren’t getting the same media play.
CULT DVDS Nepotism is hardly absent from mainstream Hollywood. But off-grid exploitation and sexploitation flicks have oft been a family affair by low-budget necessity. Russ and Eve Meyer, Ray Dennis Steckler and Carolyn Brandt, and Ron and June Ormond are only the most stellar names amongst many who purveyed legendary cinematic trash from the sanctimony of holy matrimony.
By coincidence, two of three features in Shriek Show’s not-too-shabby new discount box set Grindhouse Psychos! illuminate comparatively obscure marital exploitation couples. Cop Killers is a 1972 hippie drug-deal meller featuring actors who’d later go on to produce and star in the classic softcore spoof Flesh Gordon (1974). It’s not bad, though nowhere as good as the packaging ("In front of them, cops. Behind them, dead cops!"). Making a punchier impression are early-’80s titles that kept it all in the family.
Actually, Roberta Findlay’s 1985 Tenement, a.k.a. Game of Survival, a.k.a. Slaughter in the South Bronx, was released several years after husband Michael died in a bizarre helicopter-decapitation accident. Together they’d done it all: a kidnapping-rape film with pre-fame Yoko Ono (1965’s Satan’s Bed); an infamous trilogy of ultrasleazy late-’60s "roughies" (1968’s The Curse of Her Flesh, etc.); the 1974 cannibalism-meets-Bigfoot schlock masterpiece Shriek of the Mutilated; porn films both gay (Michael, Angelo, and David) and straight (Funk in 3-D). They engineered 1976’s Snuff, which capitalized on urban legend by intercutting crude new fake-documentary "murder" footage into a 1971 Findlay film shot in Argentina called The Slaughter. That con made millions.
Widowed Roberta soldiered on variably as director, cinematographer, producer, and scenarist for another decade, often under masculine aliases. Her activities ran a short gamut from porn (Lifestyles of the Blonde and Dirty) to horror (1987’s Blood Sisters). Tenement was an exception — an urban thriller à la Death Wish 3 (1985), Class of 1984 (1982), or any other ’80s movie where the evil gang was mixed race, punk, and dedicated to exterminating decent society. Here, one such crew gets arrested for shooting up in a Bronx apartment building’s empty basement. Freed five seconds later, they exact revenge by trapping and killing residents one floor at a time. Natch, the tenants fight back.
Considered so violent in 1985 that it was given an X rating, Tenement survives as the kind of vigorously crass grade-Z exercise that gives vintage exploitation a good name. Findlay is bemused and delightful in her DVD-extra interview, recalling the shoot amongst real junkies and gangs like a retired teacher might remember naughty third graders.
Much less prolific than the Findlays were Joseph Ellison and Ellen Hammill-Ellison, creators of just two New Joisey B flicks. Their incongruous 1986 doo-wop musical, Joey, bombed. But six years earlier, Don’t Go in the House made the full drive-in and grindhouse rounds, achieving disreputable immortality as an oft-cited example of extreme horror misogyny. Emotionally scarred by a late mother who’d used the gas stovetop as a disciplinary tool, Norman Bates–like nebbish Donny (Dan Grimaldi, The Sopranos‘s Patsy Parisi) lures women to his creepy hilltop home, where he gets back at mommy by burning them to death.
The reason this movie became notorious is the first such death. It left a lingering icky stain on my brain — among many others — and is mighty disturbing still. Gentleman Donny offers a ride to a stranded flower-shop proprietress (Johanna Brushay), who’s given enough screen time to seem like a real person rather than slasher-flick cannon fodder. Knocked unconscious after an unsettling buildup, she wakes to find herself naked, suspended from ceiling to floor in a metal-walled room he’s assembled for his new pastime. Entering in a flame-retardant suit, he douses her with gasoline, then applies a blowtorch at length — the grisly result patently faked by FX superimposition but horrible nonetheless.
Nothing else in this flaming Psycho imitation is so vividly appalling. But that sequence alone places House firmly in the special category of overenthusiastically female-abusive films one can’t quite believe a woman actually helped produce, let alone cowrote.
Bay Area filmmakers Shane King and Arne Johnson totally know what you’re about to ask them, because it’s the question everyone springs right off the bat: What are a couple of dudes doing behind the camera of Girls Rock!, a film about an all-girls rock ‘n’ roll camp?
The answer is so meaningful that the pair don’t seem to mind sharing it (again). Once King and Johnson (friends since fifth grade) heard about Portland, Ore.’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, they were irretrievably inspired. In the process of scouting out documentary subjects, Johnson caught a talk by Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein. Someone asked her if she thought rock was dead, and in response she discussed her experiences teaching at the camp. "The idea that somebody of Carrie Brownstein’s stature would be stumbling around with a bunch of eight-year-olds, teaching them windmills, was just — well, I called Shane up [immediately]," he says.
Having grown up in Portland, where they recall "enthusiastically slam-dancing at L7 shows," King and Johnson felt particularly connected to the topic and eagerly moved forward — though wooing the camp proved difficult at first.
"The camp was, understandably, very skeptical [of us] and protective of the girls," King remembers. The duo shot footage of the camp’s after-school program, Girl’s Rock Institute, and interviewed teachers and young participants; the resulting short proved promising.
The bulk of Girls Rock! takes place in the summer of 2005, focusing on four campers as they practice instruments, form bands, write songs, and build confidence and social skills: teens Misty (a former meth addict) and Laura (a headbanger who worries about her appearance), and eight-year-olds Palace (a girly-girl with anger issues) and Amelia (a budding noise-rocker who has trouble sharing the spotlight). King and Johnson took care in choosing which girls to follow, though they knew they wanted first-time campers.
"We realized that [the camp] really had a huge impact on girls the first time they went," Johnson says. "One father described his daughter as ‘going supernova’ after the camp. So we knew that was going to be the most dramatic thing to show." King and Johnson traveled around the country, meeting 25 girls who were planning on attending camp for the first time.
"From talking to the camp staff, we knew that it was important to girls in ways that weren’t just about music," Johnson says. "Laura was the first person we interviewed, in Oklahoma. She was like, ‘I really love death metal, and I can’t find any boys who will let me be in a band.’ Suddenly we realized there was another metaphor happening, about the tension between our culture and these girls."
The themes of Girls Rock! are further illuminated by fellow Bay Area filmmaker Liz Canning’s animated collages. The sequences spell out what young girls are up against, with colorful graphics backdropping an array of sobering statistics, like "The number-one wish of teenage girls is to lose weight."
"People have told us, having seen the film, that it was upsetting to see those pieces, and that they wish we hadn’t included them — like, ‘Why not just celebrate the girls and leave all that stuff behind?’<0x2009>" Johnson says. "Our response is that we’re two liberal, feminist guys, and we didn’t know these things. How can we assume that everybody else is going to be able to see these girls’ struggles, and contextualize them?"
The filmmakers hope Girls Rock! will lead to camps springing up all over the country — as well as nudge grown-ups toward a new embrace of feminism. Most important, "The [campers] are cool, and loud, and angry, and funny, and sloppy — and yet nobody is saying they’re stupid or ugly," Johnson says. "[If there is] a girl in Indiana or somewhere who’s trying to form a rock band or do something that she thinks she can’t do, if she sees this film, she might think, ‘Wait a minute — why am I afraid of this?’ Then I’ll feel like we’ve done what we came to do."
Engaging, even experiential, Chicago 10 eschews a traditional documentary approach to capture the playful exuberance of the yippie generation. Through animation and rare video footage, producer-director Brett Morgen brings Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and their experiences of the infamous Chicago 7 trial to life, in turn allowing them to bring a message of resistance that transcends decades. I recently spoke with Morgen.
SFBGWhat inspired you to make this film?
BRETT MORGEN There was political inspiration and then there was filmic inspiration.
We conceived of the film around 2002, when the US had just invaded Afghanistan and they were talking about going into Iraq. It didn’t seem like there were that many people out protesting. Greg Carter, the producer, came to me and asked what I thought about making a film on the Chicago 7 because those guys were like rock stars, they totally inspired him when he was young.
I told him I grew up in the ’80s, with the weight of the ’60s on my shoulders. My generation was constantly being told that we’d never be as passionate or as vibrant or as impactful. So I said, "I don’t want to make a film with that holier-than-thou attitude. If we’re going to make a film about this period, ultimately to reintroduce it to generations of Americans who haven’t been exposed to this story, let’s do it in the language of the youth movement today."
The world doesn’t need another movie about ’68 scored by Buffalo Springfield and music that’s really the soundtrack to our parents’ lives. This [film] isn’t a history lesson; this isn’t a movie that’s even about ’68. It’s really a fable for all times: there’s a war, there’s opposition to a war, and there’s a government that’s trying to silence the opposition.
A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory is playing at the Roxie Film Center right now, giving people a sustained glimpse of the competitiveness and back-stabbing that went on during the Factory’s heyday. Paul Morrissey in particular does not come off well, though director (and Williams’ niece) Esther Robinson’s attempts at drawing connections between Andy Warhol and her uncle’s death remain vague. If a documentary about a likely suicide can have a bright side, then Walk does: Robinson uncovers and spotlights Williams’s heretofore obscure film work, which is very impressive – as attractive and arresting in its use of black-and-white contrast as anything that ever came out of the Factory, which was essentially the MGM of underground cinema.
Andy Warhol and Danny Williams
With A Walk into the Sea currently screening, the time seems right to present a colorful but by no means definitive short guide to other docs or features about characters or Superstars perhaps best-known for floating through the realm of Warhol’s Factory:
In the current glut of music biopics and documentaries, it seems any band or scene worth its salt in influence and innovation is fair game for the big screen. Chalk it up to corporate tie-ins or affordable filmmaking equipment, Behind the Music or DIY videozines, but chances are your favorite group will someday make it to a theater near you. Eschewing polished product for its annual film program, the Noise Pop festival spotlights several ragtag productions focused on left-of-the-dial music legends.
To begin with the cream of the crop, Chris Bagley and Kim Shively’s Wesley Willis’s Joy Rides balances a measured introduction with an intimate appreciation of the titular hero. The film will inevitably be compared to In the Realms of the Unreal (2004) and The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006) for its profile of an outsider artist and its clever animations of Willis’s colorful cityscapes, but Willis was simply too one of a kind for Joy Rides to be anything but. Willis’s music and art flowed directly from the outsize personality of the hulking Chicagoan, who was raised in the projects. Bagley and Shively evidently spent a lot of time filming Willis in the years before his 2003 death, and their movie is much the better for Willis’s constant jiving, affable head butts, and offhand bouts of inspired wordplay.
Not that all of Joy Rides goes down so easy. It’s wincingly uncomfortable to watch Willis, who was a diagnosed schizophrenic, knock himself upside the head while trying to "get the demons out," and some of the film’s talking heads veer dangerously close to "magical black man" territory. But there’s a discernible difference between transparency and exploitation, and Joy Rides decidedly sways toward the former. Bagley and Shively had Willis create the documentary’s credits sequences, which seems emblematic of a broader mutual appreciation. Given Willis’s prolificacy, it’s no surprise he would want a hand in the film: the next time I encounter creative restlessness, I’ll be sure to think of Willis’s maxim "The joyride keeps my ass busy."
Darby Crash was similarly driven during his brief life, but the punk vocalist’s ferocity is blunted by biopic clichés in the weirdly saccharine What We Do Is Secret. Rodger Grossman’s film follows the course of Crash’s five-year plan, which took him from high school dropout to rock ‘n’ roll suicide. The director catches some of the excitement of the Germs’ hopelessly abbreviated sets and lucks out in a nice performance by Bijou Phillips as bassist Lorna Doom, but his tendency toward sitcomish lighting and confessional monologues sinks the band’s fire in a morass of conventionality. The original Germs recently tapped Crash impersonator Shane West for a cash-in tour, proving that some legacies are never safe.
A pair of low-key documentaries cast a wider net in their hard-rock forays, with varying results. Such Hawks, Such Hounds profiles a few of the most vibrant interpreters of heavy music (Comets on Fire, Dead Meadow, Om) but without much purpose. Filmmaker John Srebalus floats between interviews with divergent bands without offering any of the categorizing insights or personal passion that made Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey (2006) such a hit.
Joe Losurdo and Christina Tillman’s documentary You Weren’t There, on the other hand, is a thrillingly exhaustive survey of early Chicago punk. Viewers may not be familiar with outfits like Strike Under and Silver Abuse, but the documentary’s detailed time line and great stock of interviews and primary documents thoroughly pinpoint that most elusive beast of rock music: the scene. Whether parsing overlapping band lineups, defunct venues, or long-out-of-print zines and records, You Weren’t There strays from the master narrative of punk, recovering a local history no less vibrant for staying below the radar.
The Jamie Kennedy vehicle Heckler chooses the route of takedown rather than appreciation, serving up a feature-length revenge act on critics — the title fudges the film’s true target. As strangely compelling as it is to watch the likes of Jewel and Henry Winkler spill their guts, Heckler is too indulgent of its interviewees’ bipolar bursts of insecurity and bullying to shape much of an, er, critique. This just in: bloggers take cheap shots at celebrities! Then again, no one likes a … you know how it goes.
Terence Davies is coming to town. For anyone who loves the cinema, this is news of paramount importance — and MGM-level musical magnitude. Davies is one of the greatest directors of the final quarter of the 20th century. He’s created at least two acknowledged classics, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The House of Mirth (2000), and I count his 1992 rendering of a movie-mad childhood, The Long Day Closes, as one of my all-time favorite films. In a single shot that passes across the floors of a family apartment, Davies captures the magic of nature mingling with artifice (a waterfall of raindrops, reflected from a window, passing over the leaf pattern of a carpet), then conveys the passage of time with a potency that never fails to bring a tear to my unsentimental eye.
Time, free-flowing through mental mazes of negative space that Manny Farber would have to admire, is at the center of Davies’s autobiographical work. He connects music with memory in a manner that yields greater returns each time one returns to his movies. At the Pacific Film Archive, he’ll appear at screenings of The Terence Davies Trilogy (1984), Distant Voices, The Long Day Closes, and The Neon Bible (1995) and lead an audience through a shot-by-shot discussion of Distant Voices. In anticipation of this visit, I recently spoke with him on the phone.
SFBGIt’s disheartening to read about the various funding problems you’ve been encountering over the past eight years.
TERENCE DAVIES We don’t have a cinema in this country — we just have an extension of television. You’ve got 25-year-olds who don’t know anything and think cinema started with [Quentin] Tarantino. We’re just little England. We’ve become virtually another state of America. In 20 years’ time, if we don’t watch it, we’ll be just like Hawaii, but without the decent weather.
SFBG Within British cinema, your films don’t fit into the contrasts that place David Lean–like literary adaptations or the documentary base of directors like Lindsay Anderson against more flamboyant directors such as Nicholas Roeg, Ken Russell, and Joseph Losey. You have elements of all of the above: your work is autobiographical and learned, but it has also has a flamboyance I relate to, though it isn’t outrageous.
TD I suppose my influences were very simple: the British comedies from the period when I was growing up and American melodramas and musicals. I remember being taken by my two older sisters to see Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing [1955] or All That Heaven Allows [1955] and going by myself to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers [1954] or ThePajama Game [1957] and any comedy that attracted Margaret Rutherford and Alastair Sim.
My films are an amalgam of those things and of the fact that I was brought up Catholic. I was very devout until I was 22. What a waste that was!
Also, I was influenced by classical music, particularly [Jean] Sibelius and [Dmitry] Shostakovich and my beloved [Anton] Bruckner. And poetry. [My family] got our first television in 1961, and about two years later, over the course of four nights, Alec Guinness read [T.S. Eliot’s] entire Four Quartets from memory.
SFBGYour current documentary project, Of Time and the City, is about your hometown of Liverpool. I came across an interview from the era of Distant Voices, Still Lives in which you talk about its utter transformation and deterioration. That interview dates from almost 20 years ago. Have the changes continued?
TD Yes, inevitably. At the time I left, Liverpool was very down at heel. I left it at its worst. It’s getting better now, but there’s still an awful lot to be done. The evocation of war that Humphrey Jennings did in Listen to Britain [1942] I’m trying to do for Liverpool. I wanted to try and capture what it was like when I was growing up. Even I was shocked at some of the footage of the slums, which were some of the worst in Europe. I grew up in one, and when you grow up in one you don’t realize it, because everyone else is in the same boat. But seeing footage of it now, it’s absolutely appalling. When you think that in 1953 this massive amount of money was spent on the coronation of the present queen, it’s just obscene. They get away with it — it’s quite extraordinary. I’m very much a republican; I’m not a monarchist. When you juxtapose the coronation with the footage that we’ve found, it’s shocking.
SFBG Solitude and rich sensory experience are qualities at the core of your movies. Those qualities take on specific aspects in cinema — your use of darkness in relation to light is connected to, and even a few times directly about, the experience of being in a dark movie theater.
TD You have to see the films in the cinema. It’s lovely to see, say, Letter from an Unknown Woman [1948] on the telly, but if you see it projected, it’s even more ravishing. The only way to see a film is in the cinema — nowhere else.
SFBG I first saw my favorite of your films, The Long Day Closes, at the Castro Theatre here in San Francisco.
TD The Castro is a beautiful theater. But I remember that when I was there, two men were walking down the aisle and one asked, "What did you see last night?" The other said he’d seen the [Terence Davies] Trilogy. The first asked, "What did you think?" And the other said, "Not very good."
SFBG There’s no accounting for taste.
TD Another man said to me, "These films make Ingmar Bergman look like Jerry Lewis," which I thought was a wonderful insult — practically a compliment. Isn’t that fabulous?
SONIC REDUCER "It’s 60 percent embarrassing and 40 percent hot. And the hotness is derived from how embarrassing it is. Or maybe that’s just me."
Talkin’ ’bout Valentine’s Day, the big VD, that bad case of lovin’ you, with a digest-to-impress din-din and a small but meaningful token of my esteem. Specifically, Club Neon organizer Jamie Guzzi, a.k.a. DJ Jamie Jams, is speaking of Club Neon’s fourth annual Valentine’s Underwear Party.
Yep, I know you know good times sans culottes have been happening for aeons — years, even — on a, ahem, more informal basis, way before Fuse TV’s Pants-Off Dance-Off. But guarens, it’ll be way sweeter and sexier at Club Neon: the first year at the Hush Hush, in 2003, "people were pretty tentative, and there were still lurkers," Guzzi says. "When you hear about these sorts of events, it’s more of a creepier crowd. When people first hear about it, they think it’s a Power Exchange or more Burning Man kind of thing — a lot of people you don’t want to see in underwear leering at each other. But this is a more indie crowd, and the kids are all cute and twee, and everyone shows up in American Apparel underwear." At least the clothing company’s soft tease is good for something more than selling terry cloth hot pants: vive le thunderwear as social equalizer!
"When you’ve got a couple hundred people in underwear, it’s pretty hard to front," Guzzi says, explaining that the idea emerged after he got frustrated with kids dressed to the nines vibing one another. The bonus: once stripped down at Club Neon’s key soiree, Guzzi claims, "you end up realizing that a lot of your friends are way cute. It shuffles the deck in terms of who’s attractive!"
And thank St. Valentine for dynamos like Guzzi. Sour grapes, bitter pills, badasses, bummed punks, gloomy goths, and hardcore realists have long realized all holidays have become co-opted as multimillion-dollar promotional vehicles to buy more, by playing off residual guilt, goodwill, or simply that overarching existential emptiness concerning life’s perpetual gerbil wheel. But what if you decide to suspend disbelief and descend into the commercialized maelstrom, mindfully participating in the recommended shopping, wining, and dining rituals? You’re accustomed to rocking outside the system, so what to do with your bad self when you need back in? Still no reservations? I’ve got a few ideas for every subculty cutie.
Indie Rock Ian Grub: fixed with a laid-back bike ride to Bernal Heights’ MaggieMudd for Mallow Out! vegan cones. Gift: an all-show pass to the Noise Pop or Mission Creek music fest or a steamy copy of the baby-making Juno soundtrack.
Hyphy Heather Grub: grind down on maple syrup–braised short ribs at the bupscale 1300 on Fillmore. Or for old times’ sake, snatch Sunday brunch at the latest Powell’s Place in Bayview (2246 Jerrold) now that gospel star Emmitt Powell has been forced to relocate. Gift: she voted for Barack Obama, but today she’ll swoon for Mac Dre’s Pill Clinton (Thizz Ent., 2007).
Metal Sven Grub: pick up a nice red wine and some stinky cheese for a Mountain View Cemetery picnic in Oakland — pretend you’re downing the fresh blood and putrid flesh of virgins. Gift: Santa Cruz combo Decrepit Birth’s Diminishing Between Worlds (Unique Leader) inspires … birth control.
Techno Cal Grub: nibble sour plum, shiso, and flaxseed sushi and other vegan Japanese delights at Medicine New-Shojin Eatstation. Gift: avert your eyes from the Versace boutique on your way outta the Crocker Galleria minimall, and here you go, the Field’s From Here We Go Sublime (Kompakt, 2007)
Country Kat Grub: fried rabbit — oh hell, we’re in former cow country, go for the porterhouse at the deliciously ’40s-western retro-authentic Hayward Ranch. Tip the blue-haired waitress well — she’s gotta have the patience of St. Val to deal with you two after your fourth Bloody Mary. Gift: seal the deal with Queen of the Coast (Bear Family, 2007), a four-CD box set of tunes by Bonnie Owens, who stole both Buck Owens’s and Merle Haggard’s hearts.
Jam Band Jessie Grub: grab your nut cream at Café Gratitude and chase each other around the table with wheatgrass shots. New game: if you don’t make me utter the goofy menu item names, I will be grateful. Gift: crash into the Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds: Live at Radio City Music Hall Blu-ray DVD (Sony, 2007).
So hurry up and give your favorite pop tot some love — or you just might find yourself without on VD.
CLUB NEON’S VALENTINE’S UNDERWEAR PARTY
With DJs Jamie Jams, Emdee, Little Melanie, and Aiadan
J’adore Dengue Fever’s new Venus on Earth (M80), and the band provides the perfect post-love-in aperitif with Sleepwalking Through the Mekong. The John Pirozzi documentary on the Los Angeles combo’s trip to Cambodia ended up involving more than anyone anticipated. "Every contact was, like, ‘Don’t worry about anything! Just show up! Everything will be great!’<0x2009>" tour mastermind and bassist Senon Williams explains. "We’d be, like, ‘Where are we playing?’ ‘I don’t know. Just show up!’ So we were all nervous going over there. We had all our instruments, but we needed amplifiers and PAs and a crowd to play to." Fortunately, Dengue Fever were quickly booked to appear on Cambodian Television Network, and a two-song turn mushroomed into 10 numbers and a two-hour appearance. "Instantly, we became famous across the country," Williams tells me, "because everyone watches TV there."
The last time I attended an opening at the ATA gallery I saw an enlightening documentary by Kami Chisholm, FtF: Female to Femme, which I almost missed entirely because the gallery entrance was so obscure, furthered by a dark velvet curtain hanging between the door and the packed auditorium.
But the current exhibit, Katie Bush’s provocative pixel exhibition of genital intercourse animation “Unremarkable People Having Sex,” was much easier to spot, as it was being displayed in the right window gallery amidst red velvet drapes and boas. The display was reminiscent of a Christmas-themed striptease gone awry, but who could notice as animated images of penis, vagina and intercourse flashed across the screen?
1. Downloading Nancy (US) As the movie unfolds, the self-destructive couple at the center of Johan Renck’s film enabled me to feel what they could not. I was hypnotized by Nancy‘s bitter, snowy sadness (emphasized by Christopher Doyle’s camera work); it forced me to sob and, at the same time, made me want to run toward the exit. In fact, dozens of people left during the press screening, and not in a casual way. Watching it twice in two days made it clear that knowing the plot would affect the experience. Just watch this film.
2. Momma’s Man(US) A man hides at his parents’ home to figure out his mid-midlife crisis while his wife and newborn child await his return. Filmed with director Azazel Jacobs’s real parents in their real home, this is a throwback to the great films that Sundance showcased in the early 1990s.
3. Funny Games U.S.(UK/US/France) For those who don’t understand why Austrian bad boy Michael Haneke remade his 1997 intellectual torture-porn classic shot for shot, blow for blow … well, how about the fact that Americans don’t like subtitles? For those who haven’t seen the original, prepare to be traumatized.
4. Paranormal Activity(US) A couple buy a video camera to record the unexplained occurrences happening in their house while they sleep, and I was holding my breath though most of the film’s subtle freakiness. Oren Peli’s chiller, which played at the Slamdance Film Festival and is about to screen at San Francisco IndieFest, is worthy of its comparisons to The Blair Witch Project.
5. Pariah(US) A young lesbian struggles with her identity at school, at the clubs, and at home in this short by Dee Rees, which presents the most honest 27 minutes you’ll see this year. Luckily, it’s going to be extended into a feature. Wendell Pierce (Bunk from The Wire) packs quite a punch as a confused father.
6. My Mother’s Garden(US) Cynthia Lester’s bare-all documentary (winner of the Slamdance Jury Honorable Mention) sensitively explores a mother’s hoarding disorder and her children’s difficult job of helping her understand her problem. Directed by the woman’s daughter, it conveys a similar familial love as Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation.
7. Because Washington Is Hollywood for Ugly People(US) With the best title of the fest, Ken Tin-Kin Hung’s hyperactive video game collage has meticulous designs of political figures fighting one another while inhabiting celebrity bodies. MC Paul Barman narrates this clusterfuck, bringing it to the level of downright genius. Also worth watching is Hung’s five-minute prepresidential election battle Gas Zappers.
8. Hamlet 2(US) Finally, a movie that made me laugh! This vehicle to help British comedian Steve Coogan make his United States crossover has him playing a Dudley Moore–esque high school teacher who decides to write and direct a sequel to Hamlet. Andrew Fleming’s satire was purchased for one of the highest prices in Sundance history ($10 million, by Focus Features), and its first and last half hours are some of the funniest things I’ve seen in years. Thank gawd, because all of those cynical films were starting to take their toll.
The Sundance Film Festival is like Los Angeles (in fact, for 10 days Park City, Utah, really is LA, plus snow). Each year you think it can’t possibly get any more congested and shallow, yet it does. This is largely the fault of umpteen opportunists (people who set up celebrity gifting lounges! Paris Hilton!) who show up to exploit the enormous and indiscriminate media spotlight.
But the festival must also share blame, its original "purity" having given way to a marketplace and red-carpet zone often barely distinguishable from the entertainment mainstream. This year found such personalities representing indie cred as U2, Robert De Niro, and Mary-Kate Olsen. Media attention invariably goes to the most high-profile films — for which folks like Josh Hartnett and Tom Hanks suffer pay cuts for art’s sake — which almost invariably disappoint. Ultimately unwanted and unloved this year were such big-noise entries as The Deal (William H. Macy, Meg Ryan, and LL Cool J … together at last!) and What Just Happened? (De Niro, Bruce Willis, Sean Penn), both soft satires of that kwazy industry.
There was the ongoing curse of the Sundance selection that plays like a moderately quirky cable flick, this time encompassing The Last Word (Winona Ryder and Wes Bentley), Smart People (Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker), The Year of Getting to Know Us (Jimmy Fallon and Lucy Liu), and so forth. There were literary adaptations (of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke and Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh), each easier to take if you hadn’t read the book; sophomore slumps (Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock’s Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?, aptly described in the Sundance catalog as "a Happy Meal of a documentary"); and the usual cases of festival acquisition fever likely to look less all that in the sobering light of theatrical release. Principal examples: American Teen, a heatedly bid on doc that smells as manipulated as an MTV reality show (in fact some MTV staff told me so), and Hamlet 2, which is Waiting for Guffman plus Dead Poets Society minus about 45 percent of the laughs that description would lead you to expect. Fifty-five percent ain’t bad, but is it worth Focus Feature’s $10 million?
Of course, there were plenty of good movies at Sundance. Nonfiction cinema is usually where the most quality is concentrated, this year being no exception. There was an astute appreciation of Hunter S. Thompson (Gonzo) and one of Derek Jarman. Anvil! The Story of Anvil paid fond tribute to a Spinal Tap–ish Canadian ’80s metal band that refuses to quit even though it probably ought to. On the "my movie, my self" tip, Christopher Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster was a funny, surprisingly sympathetic look at steroid use, while Londoner Chris Waitt’s A Complete History of My Sexual Failures made autohumiliation hilarious.
On the fiction front, there was less to get excited about — The Wackness was yet another teen-angst exercise, albeit a good one, with Ben Kingsley cast more or less as Dennis Hopper. Tuvalu director Veit Helmer’s Absurdistan is definitely the German Azerbaijani Lysistrata whimsy of the year. But only one film at the festival knocked my socks way off: Half Nelson makers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Sugar, about a Dominican Republic pitcher’s culture shock when drafted into the United States minor leagues. I don’t even like baseball — but this movie is the rare kind so enjoyably right that after a while you find yourself grinning like a fool from sheer pleasure.
In a multiplex in San Francisco (whose name I do not care to recall) there is at least one movie intent on bludgeoning viewers with a bombastic soundtrack, a mechanical approach to emotion, and a conclusion that is obvious before the story has begun.
In contrast, in a smaller theater, Albert Serra’s Honor of the Knights offers one of the best windows onto a current phenomenon that might be tagged somnambulant cinema.
Amid contemporary sensory overload, it’s unsurprising that somnambulant cinema – meditative and ambient, often set outdoors and yet never fully outside society – has begun to flower. Does the darkness of a movie theater have to be a site of sonic and visual assault? A recent spate of films, perhaps led by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Blissfully Yours (2002) and Tropical Malady (2004), has answered that question with a low-key rebuff, choosing quietude and nature instead, evoking contemplative wonder in the process. By revivifying a literary classic – Don Quixote de la Mancha – that through sheer proliferation has become a myth of modernity, Serra’s first feature announces itself as a worthy Spanish answer to Apichatpong’s Thai fables.
To be sure, what I’m calling somnambulant cinema might easily be tagged “boring art films” by detractors. Any style or subgenre contains failures and successes. But Serra’s movie succeeds – partly because of its lightness, a quality not found in the hordes of festival films that confuse slowness or idyll with turgidity. In following the progress – or lack thereof – of Don Quixote (Lluís Carbó) and Sancho Panza (Lluís Serrat), Honor of the Knights immerses viewers in hypnotic rhythms. Using only natural light and shooting primarily during the magic hours of dusk and dawn, Serra gives the moon one of its most gorgeous scenes since the time of Georges Méliès and constructs a symphony from the way an orchestra of insects varies in pitch depending on the time of day or night.
As embodied by Carbó, the Don Quixote of Honor of the Knights is disheveled, with the matted hair of a bear and rusty armor, and he careens convincingly from senility to spryness. One minute he’s muttering to his lumpen sidekick as if Sancho (who still has traces of disobedient boyhood on his face) were nothing more than an extension of himself; the next he’s taking a dip in a stream with renewed vigor – even swimming while wearing heavy boots. Transutf8g an almost 1,000-page work into a 90-minute film with only a few hundred words of dialogue, Serra has inspired more than one critic to claim he’s bringing Samuel Beckett to bear on Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra. But while this Don Quixote doesn’t seem to know where’s he’s going or even what time it is, after parrying phantoms with a sword and retreating from the wind, he leads Honor of the Knights to moments of offhand beauty and old joy.
Those last two words are no accident: juxtaposing various degrees of a fraternal bond against a varying but uncaring landscape, Honor of the Knights is closer to Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (2006) than it is to Gus Van Sant’s more overtly Beckett-like and aloof Gerry (2002). Comedy moves to the fore when the archaic Don Quixote urges Sancho to look up at the sky and cry, “God, you are the best,” but the character’s final musings on mortality hint that – within himself at least – he isn’t as lost as he might appear. “Chivalry is civilization,” he asserts, and with fealty the movie records his avoidance of all humanity besides Sancho. Serra’s movie ends on literal notes of melancholy, plucked and strummed on Ferrant Font’s solitary acoustic guitar.
When Don Quixote addresses the sky, Honor of the Knights takes on a simple grandeur not far from that found in Marcos Prado’s extraordinary, underseen 2004 documentary Estamira, a portrait of a sage madwoman who lives in an apocalyptic Rio de Janeiro landfill. In appearance, Carbó also somewhat resembles fellow journeyman traveler Vargas, the threatening protagonist of another recent somnambulant cinema work, Lisandro Alonso’s Los Muertos (2004). Much like Serra’s Apichatpong-influenced debut, the Argentine Alonso’s recent films reflect a conversation between filmmakers from different countries that is beginning to emerge from the somnambulant style. Just as Los Muertos shares traits with Apichatpong’s Blissfully Yours, Alonso’s more recent Fantasma (2006) resembles Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 Goodbye, Dragon Inn more than it does any recent work of new Argentine cinema.
By moving Tsai’s and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s updates of Michelangelo Antonioni’s slackness from urban settings to mountains and jungles, Apichatpong helped establish the tone, atmosphere, and characteristics of somnambulant cinema, which treats the screen of a movie theater as a wide-open rather than narratively enclosed site for conscious and unconscious dreaming. The most literal example of the form has to be Paz Encina’s 2006 Hamaca Paraguaya, which confronts the audience with an extended shot of a rural hammock, using this sight and the voice-over banter to represent Paraguay’s place in the world.
Certainly, the very idea of somnambulant cinema brings the prospect of loud snoring two seats away or two rows down, but amid the cavalcade of cell phone rudeness in movie theaters today, that possibility is more humorous than annoying. There is a difference between a slow film and a boring film, and Honor of the Knights is lively – it doesn’t require a prescreening blast of black coffee and sugar-free Red Bull (one veteran online critic’s diet before watching Pedro Costa’s literally awesome 2005 Colossal Youth).
What is the dark good for, if not dreaming?<\!s>2
HONOR OF THE KNIGHTS
Thurs/13 and Sat/15, 7:30 p.m.; Sun/16, 2 p.m.; $6-<\d>$8
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org
Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002) uncovers the beauty of Nintendo clouds. Go to our Pixel Vision blog this week (www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision) for an interview with Jacob Ciocci of Arcangel’s sometime collaborators Paper Rad and an interview with Arcangel that discusses his recent video and performance projects, such as The Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Glockenspiel Addendum.
2. PHIL COLLINS
Dünya dunlemiyor, the Istanbul, Turkey–set entry in Collins’s World Won’t Listen trilogy of Smiths karaoke videos, wowed those who saw it at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2006. The entire trilogy is now on display and garnering raves (including an Artforum essay that pinpoints the lustiness that breaks through even the most programmatic of Collins’s endeavors) at the Dallas Museum of Art. Here’s hoping we get to see it soon.
3. SARAH ENID
Based in San Francisco but often out in the world, Enid has a roving eye. She’s made comic horror short works (in 2005’s Lovelorn Domestic she’s a mute woman with a giant bird that pecks out her husband’s eyes) and more recently ventured into the realm of new age relaxation videos — 3-D ones, to boot. The results are as amazing as they are soothing.
4. DAVID ENOS
One of San Francisco’s best underground talents, Enos has used videotape to craft a number of hand-drawn and hand-spliced animated shorts. Music biography is one recurrent subject: Enos’s trademark deadpan charm adds magic to illustrated and condensed life stories of Jim Morrison (complete with writhing snakes), Dennis Wilson (with a cameo by Charlie Manson), and Leonard Cohen. Look for a Guardian profile of Enos — as well as one of his frequent collaborator Enid — later this year.
5. GEORGE KUCHAR
Ryan Trecartin (see Super Ego) would never have star-wiped himself into art world stardom if not for the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink video aesthetic of Kuchar, who has made hundreds of videos since he and his brother Mike helped create underground film. Based in San Francisco and a teacher at the SF Art Institute, Kuchar has taught or influenced every local video person on this list, and his movies continue to be as funny as anyone’s in this issue, and only slightly less energetic than Trecartin’s (maybe a good thing).
6. ANNE MCGUIRE
She’s channeled Judy Garland — in 1997’s tears-and-laughs cabaret spree I Am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong — and survived. She stalker-serenaded Joe DiMaggio when the slugger was still alive and walking through the Marina (in 1991’s Joe Dimaggio, 1, 2, 3). In addition to these potent short performance works, she’s also unleashed some gargantuan formal projects, such as a pair of features — 1992’s Strain Andromeda and 2007’s Adventure Poseidon The — that rearrange Hollywood films from back to front, treating each shot like a card in a deck.
7. PAPER RAD
You haven’t lived until you’ve been berated about CD-ROMs, DVD menus, and coolness by the cranky-voiced animated character at the beginning of Paper Rad’s 2006 DVD Trash Talking (Load). Turns out that rant is just the preamble to a gloriously anarchic explosion of primary colors and pop-cult iconography that has prompted a thousand commercialized graphic design rip-offs, none of them one-millionth as inspired. Paper Rad recently made mashup lively again with the Umbrella Zombie Datamosh Mistake (now on YouTube). Go to their Web site — www.paperrad.org — for visual pleasure seizures and to get a taste of their new 20-minute video, Problem Solvers.
Wolf crosses into the realm of full-length features with Wild Combination, his subtly poignant documentary portrait of late musician Arthur Russell, which has been accepted at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. But his 2003 short video Smalltown Boys was a standout at a recent Internet-vid group show at SF Camerawork, and his Web site (www.mattwolf.info) is a treasure trove of such clips, both found (he uncovers Ryan Phillippe’s time as the first gay teen on American soaps) and made by him (his 2004 Imitation of Imitation mimics the costume-jewelry waterfall from the credits of Douglas Sirk’s 1959 Imitation of Life).
This documentary film by Sam Wainwright Douglas and Paul Lovelace achieves the unbelievable feat of capturing Greenwich Village’s two most notorious folkies: Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel. In the wake of the Beats and the
dawn of the hippies, the Holy Modal Rounders destroyed what was then the relatively predictable boundaries of the folk genre. Discovered by most through the Easy Rider soundtrack (“If You Wanna Be A Bird”), they stand as the remnants of a generation who knew if Khrushchev and Kennedy would only drop LSD together, there would be world peace. If it’s hoop snake you’re after or you wanna make your own party, at the end of the day in the words of Rounder Harold Reisch, “once you get past the humiliation of it all, there’s some fun to be had.”
Fiddler Peter Stampfel and guitarist Steve Weber forge a bond based on a shared fascination with American roots music and psychedelia.
There’s a wonderful moment during the performance of "Bye Bye Blackbird" that opens the 1964 Chet Baker set preserved on a recent Jazz Icons DVD (Chet Baker Live in ’64 and ’79 [Reelin in the Years]). In the midst of the squarish piano player’s solo, the star trumpeter shuffles into the medium close-up frame, shucking a cigarette from his accompanist’s pack. Chiseled even when sporting a stuffy sweater, Baker takes a long drag and glides back to his place on the stage. The pianist plays on, but the camera operator tracks Baker, plainly in the clutch of a lonely lothario.
The cigarette break is more revealing of Baker’s largesse — his ineffable cool and the desire it produced — than any of his softly sustaining trumpet solos for the television program are. It also sheds some light on the side-winding portraiture that marks Bruce Weber’s adoring documentary Let’s Get Lost, filmed during the last months of Baker’s life in 1987 and now playing in a restored print at the Castro Theatre.
The first interview in Let’s Get Lost is with photographer William Claxton, an early admirer of Baker’s who waxes poetic about the revelation of shooting such a naturally photogenic subject. Weber, known for innumerable sleek Calvin Klein and Abercrombie and Fitch spreads, riffles through these striking stills in contact-sheet form, a neat solution to the persistent documentary problem of how to make archival photographs move. Twenty minutes pass before we begin to explore Baker’s music, and there are another 20 minutes after that before we meet his Oklahoma mother, our first whiff of personal history. Backward, it might seem, except for Baker’s being a cipher of his own iconography.
"He was trouble and he was beautiful," an interviewee muses early in Let’s Get Lost, and it might as well be the film’s byline. He was beautiful, possessing a ravaged, introspective glamour attractive to both men and women: writing about Baker’s underfed croon in his excellent liner notes for The Best of Chet Baker Sings (Blue Note, 1953), Will Friedwald notes, "His moony voice twangs like an Oakie [sic]-cum-valley person at times, but more often he achieves geographic — not to mention sexual — ambivalence." Though less remembered today than James Dean or Jack Kerouac, Baker had a comparable rogue appeal, his missing front tooth suggestive of wounded sensitivity, his shoulders bent under the unknowable weight of being himself.
Weber’s velvety black-and-white cinematography has never met a silhouette it didn’t like, and indeed, his documentary is first and foremost a tribute to Baker’s arch stylishness. Insofar as Josef von Sternberg, Leni Riefenstahl, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s idolatrous visions are often said to anticipate modern fashion imagery, Weber must rightly be considered their direct descendent: a fashion photographer turned filmmaker unapologetically devoted to surfaces. He is equally attentive to the silvery bleach of Santa Monica, the inky black swallowing various stage spotlights, and the shadows of heroin abuse running across Baker’s unbearably gaunt 57-year-old face — all shot in an amorous chiaroscuro evocative of the trumpeter’s West Coast cool musical phrasings, his constant drug nod, and the late-night languidness of his smoking and speech.
But, of course, Baker was trouble too, and this is where Let’s Get Lost can feel strained. Though clearly a labor of love, the film shrugs off conclusiveness as casually as one of Baker’s shopworn melodies might. For one thing, Weber isn’t much of an interviewer, asking the musician’s mother, "Did he disappoint you as a son?" and directing one of Baker’s ex-wives to "tell me something romantic." Still, with the recent documentary explosion prizing kinetic revelations at all costs, Weber’s patient accumulation is a virtue in itself. We hear several versions of a story about Baker getting his teeth knocked out, and although none of them paints a convincingly specific picture, we do get the overarching thrust of a sad decline.
Originally released the same year as Gus Van Sant’s similarly loving debut, Mala Noche, Let’s Get Lost gives the lie to the notion that every gaze is created equal. Weber may wrap the disillusionment of Baker’s life in the romanticism of the latter’s demeanor, but the director also gives the spiraling musician space for self-expression (including a couple of lovely, understated full performances) and, in an empathetic final scene, offers to buy him a methadone fix. The film is as recklessly lyrical as Baker was himself, and it’s in this way that — in spite of its shortcomings as biography — Let’s Get Lost has the spiritual heft of an ample epigraph. The ragged icon mumbles about the film’s production being "a dream," and the inevitable fade to black and memorial that follows seem exactly the type of void he’d like to walk into. *
Time is running out on attempts by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, State Sen. Carole Migden, and Assemblymember Mark Leno to secure greater affordable-housing levels from the University of California, which wants to build private residential units on its UC Berkeley Extension campus at 55 Laguna in San Francisco.
Since the school site closed more than three years ago, critics have questioned how the UC’s plan for the campus, which served a public use for more than 150 years, will benefit the community, while preservationists succeeded in getting the campus awarded historic landmark status.
But with the UC claiming "unrestricted power to take and hold real and personal property for the benefit of the university" in a public statement, the city’s regulatory power is limited. The San Francisco Planning Commission is scheduled to consider the project Jan. 17, including the demolition of Middle Hall Gymnasium, the oldest building on the campus, and Richardson Hall Annex. But local and state legislative officials are focused on trying to get more affordable housing at the site.
Although negotiations were still ongoing at Guardian press time, the UC’s plan was to demolish the two historically landmarked buildings on the 5.8-acre Hayes Valley campus and build 450 new housing units, 16 percent of them to be offered below market rates, about the minimum number under the city’s inclusionary-housing law.
"But we’re pushing hard at the bottom line," said Mirkarimi, who, along with Migden, Leno, the city’s Planning Department, the Mayor’s Office of Housing, and affordable-housing activists, has been meeting with developer A.F. Evans and Openhouse, a local nonprofit that intends to build an 80-unit, market-rate, LGBT-friendly, senior residential community on the site.
"And we are trying at a separate venue to appeal to the UC Regents to be more sensitive and cooperative in what their bottom line profitability level is," Mirkarimi, whose District 5 includes Hayes Valley, told the Guardian.
Mirkarimi said he’s in favor of preserving all five buildings at the site but that both the Planning Commission’s Landmark Advisory Committee and the Board of Supervisors have voted to preserve only three. "We are trying to be pragmatic yet clear as to what our objectives are in trying to make a complex deal that’s triangulated by UC Berkeley, A.F. Evans, and Openhouse, with UC as the big daddy in the room.
"UC can do almost what UC wants. But the city’s leverage comes from UC asking for housing to be built and requesting a zoning change at a site that has become a magnet for grime and crime," Mirkarimi said. "It would also be negligent for UC to let this site remain in its current condition.
Under state law, the UC is exempt from city and county zoning and building codes if it builds educational facilities or projects that are deemed to be in the public interest. But according to officials with the City Attorney’s Office, the UC is not exempt from such codes if it turns over its land for private development.
And then there’s the city’s claim that it never conveyed the title to Waller Street, which lies between Buchanan and Laguna streets and is essential to the project, giving opponents some leverage. The UC disputes the city’s claim, but Mirkarimi maintains that the Board of Supervisors’ control of the street "provides a contingency plan if we are not making progress. And either way, UC is going to have to pay for the right to Waller."
The UC’s 55 Laguna project manager Kevin Hufferd confirmed that he is having "ongoing discussions with state and city officials" but declined to comment further.
"Frustrating" is how queer affordable-housing activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca described the last-minute discussions about the 55 Laguna development plan. "A.F. Evans claims it won’t be making any money and that they can’t do any more," Mecca told the Guardian. He attended a Jan. 11 meeting with the company at which, he claims, the developers offered to increase affordability levels to 19.5 percent but Mirkarimi pushed for more.
"To his credit, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi keeps saying this is unacceptable," Avicolli Mecca said, also lauding the Mayor’s Office of Housing for trying to make Openhouse’s project "100 percent affordable."
Currently, Openhouse’s development includes no below-market-rate units, a situation Avicolli Mecca claims the MOH hopes to change "through bringing in subsidies."
"Obviously, we are not against queer senior housing," Avicolli Mecca said. "The issue is that this is a lousy deal. What are we getting? Nothing, but UC gains a lot of money. There’s a crazy need for affordable housing and no way to justify this plan."
Filmmaker Eliza Hemingway, whose documentary Uncommon Knowledge records how the UC shuttered 55 Laguna with no input from — and little concern for — staff, students, and the surrounding community, believes that people have lost sight of the public use issue.
"They are worn down by the struggle, by trying to find a compromise because the space is empty, but the question remains: why is a public campus being privately developed?" Hemingway told us. She mourns the loss of educational programs and spaces that benefited the community and the lack of transparency that has marred the UC’s plans.
"For there to have been such huge barriers to the public process over what is a huge amount of public land is unfortunate," Hemingway said.
Cynthia Servetnick of the Save the UC Berkeley Extension Laguna Street Campus told us her group is prepared to file a lawsuit under the California Environmental Quality Act if the project as currently proposed is approved.
"We’d rather see a project that has 40 percent affordable housing at 50 percent [area median income] than a lawsuit, but $38,000 a year [which would be the annual income requirement for seniors, the disabled, and people with AIDS to be able to afford one of Openhouse’s units] is too high," she said, noting that the proposed units are small but could go for $4,000 a month, rising to $7,000 monthly for those who need more services and staff.
Claiming that recognition of the campus as a historic landmark assists project sponsors in accessing preservation incentives, including federal tax credits, Servetnick said, "A.F. Evans has its [environmental impact report] complete and is clearing the way for 450 units, but they could do that and save all the historic buildings, thus having the same profitability but more affordability. It’s now or never. This is a new term for the mayor, we have a new city planning director, John Rahaim, and officials open to negotiating a win-win."
Migden was even more blunt. "Poor old queers need a place to retire too," she said. "Either Evans and the UC up the affordability level to 40 or 50 percent and guarantee that some of the senior LGBT units are subsidized, or the project dies."
As of press time, A.F. Evans, Openhouse, the SF Planning Department, and UC representatives had not returned the Guardian‘s calls.
Deferring to Mirkarimi to make an official announcement, Leno said, "I know that the meetings have been ongoing and that the issue of affordability is a priority, and I’m hopeful that we will have an agreement among all stakeholders shortly."
