Drugs

The Village Voice, Ashton Kutcher and prostitution ads

Zelda Bronstein
-
13
The Village Voice, Ashton Kutcher and prostitution ads

There’s some fascinating back and forth in media circles about the Village Voice, its chain (which includes SF Weekly), Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, prostitution, and layoffs and budget cuts as the nation’s oldest alternative weekly.

It’s all so juicy I don’t know where to begin. Perhaps with the SF Weekly’s cover story this week, which also ran in the Voice and most of the chain’s other papers.

The story takes Kutcher and Moore to task for launching a campaign against child prostitution using bogus numbers.
For the record: I have no reason to doubt the Voice’s conclusions here. I have no problem with adult ads (which the Guardian also takes). And frankly, I have no problem with prostitution, which, like gambling and drugs, ought to be legalized, regulated and taxed.

And the Voice was scrupulous about disclosing that it has a financial interest in this issue. How much of an interest? Well, a lot. In fact, according to the New York Observer, the prostitution ads could well be floating the financially troubled chain:

Backpage, which is a fraction of the size of Craigslist, is the only popular classifieds site left willing to host the paid escort and body-rub ads that are often thinly veiled fronts for prostitution. In the month after Craigslist closed its erotic services sections under pressure from Congress and state attorneys general, Backpage enjoyed a half-million-visitor bump in traffic, according to Quantcast, and became the No. 1 publisher of escort ads on the Internet. The Aim Group, a media consulting firm, estimated that in January, Backpage brought in $2.1 million in revenue from erotic services ads alone.

That would be about $24 million a year — and the Observer notes that VVM desperately needed the cash:

For more than two decades, Village Voice Media executive editor Mike Lacey employed a simple, often devastatingly successful strategy for gaining control of the country’s alternative weekly business: acquire the local paper, cut editorial costs (lay off critics, reporters and, reportedly, entire fact-checking departments), pump the paper full of nationally syndicated content and splash an occasional local investigative piece on the cover. It was working like a charm until 2004, when the San Francisco Bay-Guardian sued VVM’s SF Weekly for manipulating ad prices in an attempt to drive the rival paper out of business. According to court transcripts, Mr. Lacey told the staff on his first day as owner of SF Weekly that this was precisely his intention.

Despite facing legendary antitrust lawyers in a state notorious for its aversion to monopolistic practices, Mr. Lacey spent years appealing the court’s award of $16 million, which grew to $21 million with interest, until the California Supreme Court threw out VVM’s petition. During the proceedings, the company revealed that it owed creditors $80 million and claimed it could not afford to pay the award. Lawyers for the Bay-Guardian threatened to force bankruptcy.

In January 2011, VVM and SF Weekly settled the issue privately. Though the terms of the agreement were not disclosed, between the settlement and what one attorney familiar with the case said were legal fees of at least $5 million to fight the case, VVM was likely left with an eight-figure hole burned in its pocket.

Since last spring, the company’s efforts to patch that hole up have included the unthinkable (laying off legendary Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett in January); the surprising (selling off Kansas City Pitch to Tennessee publisher South Comm, Inc., in mid-March); and the long overdue: shutting down an experiment with a pair of sex blogs that were never publicly launched despite being published for nearly a year.

(For the record: The Guardian and VVM have agreed not to discuss the terms of the settlement.)

Mike Lacey, the executive editor of Village Voice Media, shot back with a letter to the Observer featuring his typical wild-ass metaphors and flowery prose:

In fact, in just the past few months Backpage.com has spent millions of dollars policing content to attempt, for example, to keep underage kids out of adult listings. Despite Trench’s professed lack of knowledge, which we do not doubt for a second, anyone looking at Backpage will notice the absence of nudity-merely one of thousands of changes over the past year.

Damn — no more nudity on Backpage. Then Lacey goes on to describe what he found at the Voice when he took it over:

We found a Voice “library” where an individual sat with scissors and clipped out articles from other publications for filing. The age of the Internet stopped at the library’s doors. Town cars arrived to ferry one late working chap to Westchester County. While we kept critics at Cannes, Toronto, and Sundance, we equivocated on sending them to Rotterdam. The Voice was the only alternative newspaper in the country that thought its reporters needed to have their facts checked in addition to being edited, copyedited, and proofread. I disagreed. (Though I do not wish to presume that the Observer might not benefit from such staffing.)

Actually, it was a little more than that. There were a number of longtime Voice staffers — mostly with politically left views — who earned, by alternative press standards, fairly high salaries. They’ve been shoved out the door. Nat Hentoff, James Ridgeway, Wayne Barrett … all gone. They were, in some ways, the soul of the old Voice — scrappy, unafraid to be progressives (and to care about political causes) and interested in social change. That didn’t fit with Lacey’s world view.

But it gets better: The Voice and Kutcher are now in a tweet war — and all of this is going to bring more attention to Backpage and the sex ads — which, again, don’t bother me, but do bother a lot of stuck-up law-enforcement types, who will now have even more reason to go after VVM. At the Observer notes:

As Backpage grows in popularity, more news stories have emerged suggesting that the kinds of abuses that led lawmakers to demand Craigslist shutter its erotic-services section are increasingly occurring on the site. In September a former child prostitute sued VVM for knowingly publishing advertisements of her, and later that month 21 attorneys general called on the company to follow Craigslist’s lead and ban escort ads. VVM declined, but offered to continue cooperating with law enforcement officials on cases originating on the site.

I’m not sure all this publicity is exactly what Lacey had in mind.

 

Noodle gnar: We got your SF air guitar championship photos right here

Maria Poblet
-
0

Attention, pre-adults: there is a place for you, a place where a laissez faire attitude and zero musical talent will not only get you by, but get you laid. Ladies and gentleman, welcome to San Francisco, the American hotbed of would-be air guitar heroes.

No, champions. No, gods. In fact, such is the level of air guitar talent in the Bay Area that the organizers of the U.S. Air Guitar Championships decided to hold not one, but two regional competitions last weekend at the Independent.

Authentic nerds (minus the “ironically cool” schtick) took the opportunity to trade their tighty-whities for more creative duds and rise to the heavens.They came, they shredded — they melted the ears off a boozed-up crowd that heartily welcomed beer, candy, rubber animals, and body parts thrown at their heads, not to mention catapaulting, oversized bodies. What would a rock show be without stage diving? 

On night one (Fri/24), the “master of airimonies” was Bjorn Turoque, the dark horse 2003 winner of the World Air Guitar Championships in Finland (a victory documented in the film Air Guitar Nation). Judges were Hot Lixx Hulihan — two time SF winner and one time national winner — as well as Onion A.V. Club’s Mark Hawthorne and some other dude that everyone hated. In true rock and roll spirit, the crowd expressed their disgust for any unfair scoring by hurling random objects at the judges.

On night two (Sat/25), Hot Lixx mastered the airimonies, while judge Turoque was joined by nemesis and legend C Diddy (co-star in the aforementioned documentary, first ever U.S. champion, and a world champion himself) and Dr. Frank of Mr. T Experience, who is also the author of King Dork. The crowd showed much more love and respect for this bunch and kept their fist-pumping hands to themselves.

Participants on each night’s lineup battled imaginary axes in two rounds: air noodling to a minute-long song of one’s own choosing, and a surprise song from the judges. The judges scored the performances on a scale from four to six, looking for technical skill, stage presence, and something called “airiness” — the unexplainable something that “you’ll know when you see.” In the end, the winners with the highest combined score on each night — Shred Nugent and seasoned champ Cold Steel Renegade — represented San Francisco in Chicago’s national throwdown. 

The winner from night one, Shred Nugent (a.k.a. Airy and the Hendersons, get it?), shows excitement for his high score. All photos by Jackie Andrews

Cold Steel Renegade, now a two-time SF champ, emerged victorious on the following night to join Nugent in Chicago

While more performance art than concert, the night involved all of the elements of a good rock show: a rowdy crowd, lights, fog, and energetic “musicians.”  Along with rock ‘n’ roll comes baggage — sex, drugs, booze, hurling television sets out windows, trashing hotel rooms. And while none of the contestants got super creative, a few did pulled out some of those stops.

Toward the end of his performance, this contestant pulled tall boys out of his pockets and sprayed onlookers with the froth. His score was dinged for playing something other than air guitar. 

Creepy fake cocaine moment No. 1: Singar the Goat Demon and his “groupie” snort lines of the faux blow and then prance around the bag in a strange pagan-like ritual. 

Creepy fake cocaine moment No. 2: The Six String General snorted lines of the spurious nose-candy off this young ladies bum before whacking her from behind. 

An otherwise unmemorable performance became noteworthy with a freakishly high jump into the crowd to a perfectly timed confetti explosion. 

Opting for Marilyn Manson shock, posing pretty for the camera. 

And so it was — the San Francisco leg of the U.S. Air Guitar Championships came and went, blowing minds and leaving a huge mess. We hear that our SF contenders did well in Chicago, but unfortunately neither are going to Finland for the World Air Guitar Championships. Next year!

Rock on with you

Andrew Lam
-
0
Rock on with you

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Oh, Michael. So much has happened in these two years since you’ve been gone. I left my man and got my heart broken by another, chipped my front tooth, had to pay all my taxes up front, and manually upgraded my ass into the kind of shape that gives a woman like me a certain pride. Things have been rough; things have been good. And 90 percent of the good shit, including the fruits of all that ass-pumping, I achieved together with you. Keep on with the force, don’t stop. No, I’ll never stop getting enough of you.

Speaking of you, my darling, well, for you things have stayed exactly the same. Crazy-ass La Toya is still on TV, running her mouth about murder conspiracies, and the headlines are still a sordid “Jacko the Mysterious Nutter” mess. Every book written about you is still rude, invasive, and tabloidy, and the family, friends, and fans who claim to have cared for you the most still refuse to lovingly embrace you for who you were: an incomparable genius, the world’s greatest superstar, who, BTW, was totally gay.

Fuck everybody else and their delusional ways. After all this time, I’ve come to see: I am the only one who ever got you.

Memories of you, especially the ones honored on the anniversary eve of your death, should be as celebratory and joyous as the world’s greatest dance party — complete with fog machines, chemical inhalants, and unicorns. But all everyone wants to talk about is the drama. Little boys this, plastic surgery that. They actually think you did your face-up weird because you wanted to be a white Diana Ross with a superbutch Marlboro Man chin. That you hated yourself so severely you had to become someone you were not. But I know the truth: you built that distracting construction zone around your sacred temple to claim your private space. Only behind a strap-on nose and reptilian fake white skin could the real you stretch out and relax, connect with your spirit, make some art, do all your drugs. Who could blame you — and who’s to judge you? — for needing a tangible shield between yourself and all the stupid bitches who could not deal?

But as you receded further into this private space, your shield got thicker and you started to piss everybody off. Because it was awfully, horribly amorally sissy of you to want to look like a woman. A real man takes the face he is born with. In other words: you lied to us, motherfucker. You sang about loving women, rubbed your silky load on their thighs, even married all those hags. You grabbed your cock onstage and put on like vagina was cool.

Why was everyone so dumb and gay-blind in the first place? Because at the height of your Thriller fame in the 80s, no one was gay, not even those old warhorses George Michael and Boy George. But when it turned out that they, too, had lied to us — leading us on with all that maddening, un-Christian ambiguity — the real men had to take them out back and have a little talk. George and Boy — where are they today? Ruined.

No one forgives a liar. But maybe you were trying to tell us the truth, just no one was paying attention:

If they say, why, why?

Tell ’em that it’s human nature

Why, why, does he do me that way?

I like livin’ this way

I like lovin’ this way …

I listened to you, dear friend. I heard what you said about Billie Jean, that wacked-out club trash who said that you, rare orchid of the disco, would be “the one, who will dance, on the floor, in the round” — whether you were feeling it or not. She didn’t say anything about fucking! Not only that, you told us over and over — 10 times in less than five minutes, in fact — that, “Billie Jean is not [your] lover.” And I believed you. Everybody else was being a fool.

And so they had to tear you down, proving that total, brutal, violent annihilation of character is even more delicious when the victim is rich and black.

I always tell people the same high-minded thing: don’t read a single book; watch the movie instead. By that I mean 2009’s This Is It, of course, with its amazing rehearsal footage shot right before your death. If anyone has any questions or misgiving about who you were, this movie will correct it. All the drama and the Jacko the Freak-o bullshit fades away for once, revealing a musician of astonishing skill and professionalism. Not only do you hit every note on your own with your pure, naked voice, you also dance like a 20-year-old at the height of his game. To all those who scoff at my insistence that you were a genius: fuck you in the heart and prance on to hell.

But it wasn’t just your artistry that made me cry in This Is It — it was your extreme, almost over-the-top graciousness as well. I was stunned by the level of gentleness and respect you showed every single member of your crew — from the dancers to the musicians, the lighting guys to the PAs. You surely didn’t have to be so kind. Equally revealing was how your crew responded — unable to contain their awe and ecstatic delight, they were just plain thrilled to work with a compassionate legend like you. To them, you were the embodiment of love, humility, and respect. And if the people who worked so intimately with you before your death knew this, why can’t everybody else?

Bright on

Andrew Lam
-
1
Bright on

culture@sfbg.com

QUEER Heady, hilarious, heartbreaking: Big Sex Little Death explores legendary sex writer, educator, and instigator Susie Bright’s coming of age from the 1960s to the present. Bright’s memoir focuses on her involvement with The Red Tide, a radical high school newspaper in Los Angeles in the 1970s, and her subsequent membership in a socialist sect that sends her halfway across the country. Her union organizing stint lasts until the Party leadership expels her for “joining or leading a cult of personality.” Personality is certainly one of Bright’s strong points, so perhaps we should be grateful for this particular falling out. It eventually leads to Bright’s role in founding the first lesbian porn magazine, On Our Backs, in San Francisco in 1981, as well as her pioneering work as a fiery spokesperson for free speech and sexual liberation. I spoke with her over the phone about sex and memory and writing.

SFBG You do such a great job of talking about your sexual coming of age as a teenager: describing your sluttiness without shame, your curiosity about bodies and pleasure and the intricacies of sexual positioning.

Susie Bright I think it’s because I wrote my memoir like a storyteller, like a poet — not a polemicist. I wasn’t ashamed; it never occurred to me. Margaret Mead would have found my little teenage tribe to be quite poignant.

SFBG There’s a tendency for many sex-positive spokespeople to glamorize even the most annoying, mundane, or gross sexual experiences as somehow — well — positive. Sometimes this sex-positive rhetoric ends up making those of us who don’t always succeed at having a wonderful sex life feel like failures …

SB I think bad sex — obnoxious, absurd, BIG FAIL sex — is funny, nostalgic, and more endearing as you grow older. It also goes hand in hand with adventurous, rapturous, mind-blowing sex. You actually know the difference. You’ve spanned the spectrum, you’ve lived. The big bummer with American sex right now is the unrelenting banality and flat-out scarcity.

SFBG The most striking part of Big Sex Little Death for me is the way you describe betrayal in the social and political realms you choose to inhabit — places that initially give you so much hope. Like when you helped to start On Our Backs, the first lesbian porn magazine, in the early ’80s. Feminist bookstores refused to carry it, claiming that you were aiding the patriarchy.

SB It was more than that. The whole mainstream feminist movement was calling for our heads. Or, as Barbara Grier of Naiad Press put it, “Everyone I know thinks y’all should be assassinated.”

It’s been a part of every civil rights and social justice movement that I’ve been a part of. We know it — we talk about how the powers that be would prefer to let the weak fight among themselves. We see how divide-and-conquer tactics are so effective, but it’s very hard to resist.

What kills me is the blindness, even years after the fact. Sometimes it’s comical. I got a letter from an ambitious writer the other day who told me that in the ’80s she fought the sex-positive On Our Backs types tooth and nail, no tactic too dirty. “We” were pimping the patriarchy and she was on point to take us down. She asked me if I found it amusing that she’s now in a submissive relationship with a man — no! Then she asked me if I would blurb her new book.

Someone asked me on this tour if I ever got an apology, and I was startled. No, not for the bombings or the death threats or the bannings or the locked doors or the bizarre libels and slanders. No way.

SFBG When the feminist movement refused to support you, you found several surprising allies. Among them were John Preston, at the time the editor of the gay leather magazine Drummer; cult filmmaker Russ Meyer of Faster Pussycat fame; and even the Mitchell brothers of that legendary exploitative straight strip club on O’Farrell Street.

SB Well, those were strange bedfellows, eh? They were all mavericks, iconoclasts, outlaws, film buffs, and we shared that in common. Aside from public librarians and ACLU lead attorneys, these guys were probably the most eloquent defenders of the First Amendment you ever met.

SFBG On Our Backs was started by two strippers who worked at various clubs in the Tenderloin and North Beach. One of the most heartbreaking chapters in Big Sex Little Death is where you show us how so many strippers worked to support their lovers financially, male and female, and then ended up strung out on drugs, homeless, or dead after their lovers used and abused them.

SB “Legalize it,” as Peter Tosh said. That is why these tragedies happen — because sex work is criminalized.

SFBG In your preface, you say, “I’m more preoccupied with people dying than with people coming.” And so of course you want to prevent these unnecessary deaths. Toward the end of the book, you also mention the deaths of friends, lovers, and confidantes to AIDS — but only briefly. It’s as if it’s still too painful to talk about.

SB The main deaths I talk about are my parents’, where I could fit more of the puzzle together; then John Preston, as a small example of what went on in early ’80s plague life; and the dykes I first knew at On Our Backs, some of who died too young. I am angry and too ragged to write about it all yet — I don’t have the distance from it. The last memorial I attended this past fall was [for] one of my greatest inspirations, a total ball-of-fire who ate a Fentanyl patch, choked to death on her vomit, and left a suicide note.

It was the exact one-year anniversary of the death of her father, a Southern fundamentalist preacher who beat and raped her as a child. She left him at 15 to come to California and made her way as one of the first generation of out dyke strippers and punk rockers. My redheaded friend was a leader of a local NA chapter by the time she was 20. What happened to her, all these years later, breaks the heart of everyone who knew her. She was a wonderful, wonderful, caring, radical feminist creative dyke who wanted to be a superhero who would vanquish all the abusers. It’s not fair.

SFBG Fairness is one of the central issues of the book — who lives and who dies, which cultures disappear and which remain. At the end of the book, you talk about deciding to give birth to a child, Aretha, and raising her. I’ll admit I got a bit worried that you would suddenly talk about this trajectory in a way that erased your sexual and political history, the histories of people like the friend you just mentioned.

SB My daughter has a trajectory of her own, now!

SFBG But somehow you’re able to talk about your love for Aretha while making it clear that child rearing certainly isn’t for everyone, and still articulating an anti-assimilationist queer world view focused on sexual liberation and radical politics.

SB I’m just drawn that way.

SFBG Why do you think gay assimilationists emphasize marriage, military inclusion, and child-rearing as the only choices for respectable queers, narrowing the options for everyone and rejecting sexual liberation as something dangerous from the past?

SB They’re squares — what can I say? They’ve always been around. Square used to be a synonym for straight. We’re constantly caught in the middle on this, the boho bunch. Of course we want civil rights for all, duh. I defend anyone’s right to let the state be their pimp, to fight the wars, be the cannon fodder, acquire family assets like a stamp-collecting hobby. Bully for you. But as Peggy Lee said, “Is that all there is?” Christ, I hope not.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is most recently the author of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly.

 

On the hook

Andrew Lam
-
4
On the hook

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Unique Roberts squared back her shoulders and recalled what it was like when she first moved to San Francisco from East Oakland more than a decade ago. A tall, 33-year-old African American transgender woman with piercing eyes and a charming smile despite gaps of missing teeth, Roberts said she performed as a showgirl at clubs like Harvey’s and the Pendulum in the Castro. In those exciting days, “I fell in love with this boy, and he was an addict,” she explained. “I thought that if I did it, it would keep our relationship together.”

She recalled how awful her boyfriend felt when he found out she was using, telling her, “You don’t know what you’re doing to yourself.” He departed for Texas several years later, but addiction stuck with her as a way of life.

She says she’s tried to kick the habit, but it’s wrapped up in a battle against depression stemming from the loss of loved ones. Roberts was wearing one of the bright orange sweatshirts issued to inmates at San Francisco County Jail. She landed there after being arrested in April for allegedly selling a tiny rock of crack, weighing just 9/100s of a gram, to an undercover narcotics officer. According to the police report, the cop offered her $20 for it — but based on National Drug Intelligence Center street-value estimates, that amount is only worth about $2.50.

Roberts may go by the first name Unique, but her lawyer Tal Klement, who works for the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, is fond of saying her case is hardly unique at all. She was one of several people arrested in the Tenderloin that day after interacting with the same plainclothes officer.

It was part of a coordinated sweep known as a buy-bust, a common practice under which an officer may pose as a homeless person, a clueless outsider, or a dope-sick fiend to lure people into selling crack, pills, meth, heroin, or marijuana. Once a transaction is made, a team of officers awaiting the signal immediately closes in and arrests the seller.

As of June 20, there were at least 109 open buy-bust cases in San Francisco. Based on defendants’ rap sheets, 92 percent had prior drug-use histories, according to a tally conducted by the Public Defender’s Office.

The officers posing as buyers — who often earn overtime — use street lingo, know which drugs can be obtained at which intersections, and sometimes offer higher prices than the accepted street value. Attorney Anne Irwin, also a public defender, is critical of the practice, saying it’s an expensive tactic that’s makes for easy arrests — because the money is irresistible to addicts who think they’re getting an opportunity to convert a personal stash into more drugs.

In a lean budget year, “they’re cutting social services left and right, and these are the very services that could help the addicts get off the street,” Irwin noted. She’s skeptical that the strategy stems the flow of substantial quantities of drugs.

Police Chief Greg Suhr, who said he participated in buy-busts for years as a narcotics officer, credits the tactic for helping to eradicate a rampant open-air drug market on Third Street in the Bayview, and says it can help prevent drug-related violence.

Klement, however, condemns it as a “war on crumbs,” saying it ensnares far more addicts than serious dealers and often ends up unnecessarily pinning felony convictions onto low-level offenders.

 

NUMBERS GAME

Buy-busts usually involve around eight officers, according to an average calculated by the Public Defender’s Office based on open cases, but have involved as many as 14 and as few as three. There’s the decoy buyer, who sometimes dresses in grimy sweatpants, goes without shaving, or dirties his face to look like a street addict in desperate need of a fix. There’s a “close cover” officer who follows the decoy, plus an arrest team that is also sometimes in plainclothes. Beforehand, officers will photocopy cash — usually $20 bills — to document the serial numbers so that the same marked city funds can be used as evidence once recovered from arrestees. Busts can happen within minutes of one another, and a single shift may net five or six arrests.

Irwin says the people snared aren’t typical drug dealers — certainly not big-time players. But they’re charged as dealers — and in many cases wind up branded as felons, with severe legal penalties such as multiyear prison sentences.

While the police department is able to show on paper that it’s brought hundreds of drug dealers into custody — and the district attorney can point to a boost in the conviction rate thanks to the program’s efficiency — Irwin says the amounts being peddled are tiny.

“In traditional narcotics operations, they cultivated snitches, used surveillance, and obtained search warrants” to go after major dealers, Irwin said. With buy-busts, “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Everyone agrees that we need cops on the streets to help keep us safe … But do we want to be paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for this?”

Sharon Woo, chief assistant of operations for the San Francisco District Attorney, told the Guardian that “we charge based on the conduct of the individual.” Woo went on to say that the DA tried to “exercise appropriate discretion” on a case-by-case basis when individuals are selling to support an addiction or due to being in dire financial straits.

Sometimes individuals are ushered into alternative programs such as drug court or a Back on Track program for first-time offenders, Woo said. And while the DA typically includes charges that make defendants ineligible for probation under state law if they have prior convictions for selling crack-cocaine — a discretionary practice that has drawn criticism from public defenders — Woo observed that “it doesn’t mean that’s how cases resolve.”

Police forces in nearly every major metropolitan area practice buy-busts, said Frank Zimring, a law professor at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law specializing in criminal justice issues. Yet he described the practice as costly and noted that paying overtime for it “makes what would ordinarily be a very expensive operation into a more expensive operation.”

Cost estimates for the entire program are tough to pin down. It costs $130 per day to house each prisoner in the county jail, amounting to more than $14,000 per day if all of the defendants with pending cases are in custody. If an average of eight officers per bust were paid $60 an hour each to spend six hours conducting a buy-bust, the current caseload represents more than $300,000 in officer pay — a conservative estimate — and that’s before lawyers in the offices of the public defender and district attorney are paid to prosecute and defend the suspects in court.

But no matter how you add it up, it’s a lot of money.

Suhr told the Guardian that apprehending street-level offenders occasionally leads officers to bigger fish. “Sometimes you get a low-level person, or a buyer if you will … if that same person would say, ‘But I know this guy and he has guns and he’s a big dealer and whatever.’ That is a good way to get to those bigger people.”

“We’ve never seen that happen in practice,” Klement countered.

One of Irwin’s clients, a homeless man, was charged with selling narcotics after he scraped out the contents of his pipe to sell 1/1,000th of a gram of crack to an undercover officer for $20. In a rare twist, the case was ultimately settled on a misdemeanor possession of narcotics.

Inspector Robert Doss, who served as the decoy in that case, has earned substantial amounts of overtime while going undercover to buy drugs, according to a court transcript. In 2009 Doss earned $35,488 in combined overtime and “other pay,” which includes time spent testifying in court, according to a San Francisco Chronicle database of municipal salaries.

 

ON THE STREET, OFF THE STREET

The Tenderloin is frequently targeted for buy-busts, with 65 percent of open cases as of June 13 having taken place in that neighborhood. The Haight ranked second, with nearly 12 percent of cases, and the Mission followed with 10 percent. Shortly after District Attorney George Gascón was sworn into his prior post as police chief in 2009, he announced a concerted effort to clean up the Tenderloin, and Klement maintains he’s seen a surge in cases stemming from buy-busts there ever since.

Drug dealing in the Tenderloin often makes the news as a source of frustration to merchants and residents. “You try and explain to the people of San Francisco that it’s okay for people to have open-air drug markets right in front of their stores,” Suhr said.

Yet Klement maintains that what is essentially a quality-of-life crime should not be treated as a felony. “There’s a lot of pressure from people who are invested in businesses [in the Tenderloin] who would love to see that neighborhood become the next Hayes Valley,” he said. “But what they don’t realize is that people are paying with prison for that agenda.”

Once someone has been labeled a drug dealer in the eyes of the law, he said, it becomes more difficult for them to access drug treatment — not to mention get a job, qualify for a student loan, or find housing.

Roberts’ case nearly went to trial. If convicted, she could have been sent to prison for a minimum of three and a maximum of 17 years due to extra penalties from prior convictions. On the eve of the trial, however, the case was settled on a possession charge for a year in jail, a rare outcome. Klement was hoping to have her placed in a treatment program.

Asked if she knew of others swept up in undercover operations, Roberts gave a wry chuckle and gestured to the jail corridor behind her, indicating that nearly everyone there had been taken down in similar fashion. Klement noted that the targets of the buy-busts are almost exclusively people of color, saying, “You walk into the holding cell and you think you’re in Alabama or Mississippi, not San Francisco.”

In an editorial on the subject that he wrote a couple years ago, Klement noted that by contrast, predominantly white middle class people with a fondness for illegal drugs are rarely targeted because they aren’t the ones selling drugs on the street. “The hard truth is that the police ignore most of the middle class drug use and dealing occurring out of private homes in every neighborhood or other public venues in the city — bars, nightclubs, concert halls. More drugs are being transported to Burning Man as we speak than will probably be seized during Gascón’s entire crackdown.”

For Klement, it’s just another symptom of a broken system. “A lot of these people are repeat players because we don’t have the right interventions at the right time,” he said. “We don’t understand addiction.”

 

SFBG Radio: The drug war and kids

Zelda Bronstein
-
10
SFBG Radio: The drug war and kids

It’s fine to belive that drugs ought to be legal — but how do you talk to your kids about it? Johnny and Tim have a lively discussion after the break.

KidsNDrugs by endorsements2010

Film Listings

Maria Poblet
-
0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Peter Galvin, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide. Due to the Memorial Day holiday, theater information was incomplete at presstime.

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD

The eighth Another Hole in the Head Film Festival runs June 2-17 at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., SF. For tickets ($11) and complete schedule, visit www.sfindie.com.

OPENING

*Blank City “No one was doing what they were trained to do” — key to the explosion in Super-8 movie-making in late ’70s and mid-’80s New York City, according to John Lurie, star of 1984’s Stranger Than Paradise. Filling in the blanks of a burnt-out city-turned-artistic playground, musicians like Lurie and Jim Jarmusch made films, and artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Richard Kern plopped themselves in front of the camera or behind it. Those grainy artifacts were populated by performers oozing with character and charisma, à la Steve Buscemi and Debbie Harry, while combos that ran the generational gamut, from Patti Smith to the Contortions to Sonic Youth, provided the soundtracks as well as the vivid onstage visuals. French filmmaker Celine Danhier does the noble work of trying to encapsulate and couple the disparate No Wave and Transgressive cinemas under the umbrella of shared geography — the squatter-friendly, pre-Times Square-cleanup New York — though organizationally and conceptually Blank City has a tough time surmounting flaws like choppy chronology and uneven allotments of screen time. The No Wave years get short shrift — you’re yearning to see more of the actual films. Should these two movements be paired in the first place — and where does the wildly successful 1983 hip-hop document Wild Style fall (and why isn’t the same year’s Style Wars included)? Danhier fails to make convincing connections, though the snippets of interviews with provocateurs like Amos Poe and Lydia Lunch almost make up for it (who knew, say, that late Dreamlander Cookie Mueller was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s dealer, as John Waters gossips?), and snippets of movies such as the vibrant Downtown 81 (1981) transmit the scene’s energy — loud, clear, and cacophonous. (1:35) (Chun)

*Dumbstruck Don’t get it twisted and splintered, Charlie McCarthy: this almost-earnest doc devoted to one of the world’s geekiest forms of entertainment, ventriloquism, knows its subject comes cloaked in cheese and then some. But despite a slightly clunky, by-the-book structure — writer-director Mark Goffman (The West Wing, Law & Order: SVU) never quite takes the potentially loaded material beyond its certain safe, linear confines — Dumbstruck surprises with its profiles of the very eccentric people who are driven to spiel through dummies. Kim, a former Miss Ohio beauty queen, is trying to rise above kiddie shows and hit the coveted cruise circuit, as her mother wrings her hands at home, worrying that her daughter will never stop playing with dolls and start popping out some real children. Wilma has hit rock bottom, ostracized by her family because of her love of ventriloquism and on the verge of eviction, and Terry has made it to the top after years of struggle, winning America’s Got Talent and ultimately a $100 million contract at a Vegas Casino. Goffman obviously put in the hours with his subjects — you just wish he had dug deeper into the interior life of his ventriloquists: why does Kim, who resembles a human Barbie doll, feel compelled to perform through her grotesque floozy puppet, and why did the waifish tween Dylan choose the smooth-talking black doll as his counterpart? I’ll be waiting for answers in the Waiting for Guffman-style feature that just might come in Dumbstruck‘s wake. (1:24) (Chun)

Empire of Silver Love, not money, is at the core of Empire of Silver — that’s the M.O. of a Shanxi banking family’s libertine third son, or “Third Master” (Aaron Kwok) in this epic tug-of-war between Confucian duty and free will. The Third Master pines for his true love, his stepmother (Hao Lei), yet change is going off all around the star-crossed couple in China at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, and the youthful scion ends up pouring his passion into the family business, attempting to tread his own path, apart from his Machiavellian father (Tielin Zhang). Much like her protagonist, however, director (and Stanford alum) Christina Yao seems more besotted with romance than finance, bathing those scenes with the love light and sensual hues reminiscent of Zhang Yimou’s early movies. Though Yao handles the widescreen crowd scenes with aplomb, her chosen focus on money, rather than honey, leaches the action of its emotional charge. It doesn’t help that, on the heels of the Great Recession, it’s unlikely that anyone buys the idea of a financial industry with ironclad integrity — or gives a flying yuan about the lives of bankers. (1:52) (Chun)

Mia and the Migoo A young girl fights to protect the planet in this traditionally-animated French import. (1:32)

The Tree of Life See “The Importance of Being Self-Important.” (2:18)

X-Men: First Class Matthew Vaughn (2010’s Kick-Ass) helms this reboot of the comic-book series, with a new cast headed up by James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and January Jones. (2:20)

ONGOING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hangover Part II What do you do with a problematic mess like Hangover Part II? I was a fan of The Hangover (2009), as well as director-cowriter Todd Phillips’ 1994 GG Allin doc, Hated, so I was rooting for II, this time set in the East’s Sin City of Bangkok, while simultaneously dreading the inevitable Asian/”ching-chang-chong” jokes. Would this would-be hit sequel be funnier if they packed in more of those? Doubtful. The problem is that most of II‘s so-called humor, Asian or no, falls completely flat — and any gross-out yuks regarding wicked, wicked Bangkok are fairly old hat at this point, long after Shocking Asia (1976) and innumerable episodes of No Reservations and other extreme travel offerings. This Hangover around, mild-ish dentist Stu (Ed Helms) is heading to the altar with Lauren (The Real World: San Diego‘s Jamie Chung), with buds Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Doug (Justin Bartha) in tow. Alan (Zach Galifianakis) has completely broken with reality — he’s the pity invite who somehow ropes in the gangster wild-card Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong). Blackouts, natch, and not-very-funny high jinks ensue, with Jeong, surprisingly, pulling small sections of II out of the crapper. Phillips obviously specializes in men-behaving-badly, but II‘s most recent character tweaks, turning Phil into an arrogant, delusional creep and Alan into an arrogant, delusional kook, seem beside the point. Because almost none of the jokes work, and that includes the tired jabs at tranny strippers because we all know how supposedly straight white guys get hella grossed out by brown chicks with dicks. Lame. (1:42) (Chun)

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

Hobo With a Shotgun Hobo With a Shotgun began as a $150 faux-trailer short that got considerable exposure online and off. The resulting long-form debut for director Jason Eisener and scenarist John Davies is doubtless the zenith in Halifax, Nova Scotia-shot retro ‘ploitation splatter comedies to date. Which tells you nothing, of course. But it is pretty good — not great — insofar as spoofy gross-out nods to yesteryear’s exploitation cinema go. Better than Machete (2010), a whole lot better than the likes of Zombie Strippers! (2008) or 95 percent of what Troma puts out. Grizzled Rutger Hauer stars as the titular character who rides rails into an equally nameless berg nicknamed “Fuck Town” because it’s so plagued by drugs ‘n’ thugz. The hoodlums are led by crime kingpin “The Drake” (Brian Downey) and goon sons (Gregory Smith, Nick Bateman) whose violent perversities are Caligula-licious. With corrupt police force in pocket, they’re free to terrorize the populace via acts of degradation and violence pushed over the bad-taste top and then some. When Hauer’s hobo rescues a prostitute (Molly Dunsworth) from this clan’s clutches, he trips his own mental wire from peaceably detached transient to pawnshop-armed streetsweeper of scum, à la 1980s vintage vigilante cheese. Hobo With a Shotgun faithfully apes exploitation conventions, from its lurid widescreen Technicolor hues to a score combining overproduced 1970s funky soundtrack kitsch with ’80s direct-to-video synth pulsing. Throughout, Hauer maintains a straight face. Maybe a tad more so than necessary — this movie could have used the wilder streak crazy-coot comedic streak shown by Jeff Bridges in last year’s True Grit or Kurt Russell in 2007’s Grindhouse. (1:26) Lumiere. (Harvey)

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

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

Kung Fu Panda 2 The affable affirmations of 2008’s Kung Fu Panda take a back seat to relentlessly elaborate, gag-filled action sequences in this DreamWorks Animation sequel, which ought to satisfy kids but not entertain their parents as much as its predecessor. Po (voiced by Jack Black), the overeating panda and ordained Dragon Warrior of the title, joins forces with a cavalcade of other sparring wildlife to battle Lord Shen (Gary Oldman), a petulant peacock whose arsenal of cannons threatens to overwhelm kung fu. But Shen is also part of Po’s hazy past, so the panda’s quest to save China is also a quest for self-fulfillment and “inner peace.” There’s less character development in this installment, though the growing friendship between Po and the “hardcore” Tigress (Angelina Jolie) is occasionally touching. The 3-D visuals are rarely more than a gimmick, save for a series of eye-catching flashbacks in the style of cel-shaded animation. (1:30) (Sam Stander)

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

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

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

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

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

Rio (1:32)

Something Borrowed (1:53)

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

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

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

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

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

 

Last train to Fuck Town

Maria Poblet
-
0
Last train to Fuck Town

arts@sfbg.com

The course of an acting career can vividly illustrate the randomness of fate. Rutger Hauer spent some years in Dutch experimental theater of the 1960s — after pulling off that best way to terminate one’s military service, faking mental illness — then became a local heartthrob as a medieval knight in a hit TV series at that decade’s end.

He spent the 1970s primarily starring in Dutch movies, notably the striking early films of Paul Verhoeven — well before Showgirls (1995), Starship Troopers (1997), or even 1987’s RoboCop (the director wanted Hauer for the lead, but was overruled by the studio). In the 1980s, Hauer played the memorable villains of Blade Runner (1982), The Hitcher (1986), and 1981’s Nighthawks (inducing tough investigative cop Sylvester Stallone to don drag at the end to catch him), between runs at being an action hero and theoretically loftier assignments around the globe.

Then he settled into a multilingual journeyman’s potluck of low-budget genre features, TV projects, small parts in mainstream films (2005’s Sin City and Batman Begins), Guinness commercials, and a Kylie Minogue video. Apparently 67-year-old Dutch actors in Los Angeles can’t be choosy.

Then again, sometimes better opportunities might choose them. At Sundance this January, Hauer played lead roles in two diametrically opposed movies. One was as the 16th-century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder in Polish director Lech Majewski’s extraordinary The Mill and the Cross (recently at the San Francisco International Film Festival), which brings one of that painter’s most epic canvases to cinematic life and will hopefully open on U.S. art house screens later this year. The other was Hobo With a Shotgun. Guess which one is opening theatrically here already.

Hobo began as a $150 faux-trailer short that got considerable exposure online and off. The resulting long-form debut for director Jason Eisener and scenarist John Davies is doubtless the zenith in Halifax, Nova Scotia-shot retro ‘ploitation splatter comedies to date. Which tells you nothing, of course. But it is pretty good — not great — insofar as spoofy gross-out nods to yesteryear’s exploitation cinema go. Better than Machete (2010), a whole lot better than the likes of Zombie Strippers! (2008) or 95 percent of what Troma puts out.

Grizzled Hauer stars as the titular character who rides rails into an equally nameless berg nicknamed “Fuck Town” because it’s so plagued by drugs ‘n’ thugz. The hoodlums are led by crime kingpin “The Drake” (Brian Downey) and goon sons (Gregory Smith, Nick Bateman) whose violent perversities are Caligula-licious. With corrupt police force in pocket, they’re free to terrorize the populace via acts of degradation and violence pushed over the bad-taste top and then some.

When Hauer’s hobo rescues a prostitute (Molly Dunsworth) from this clan’s clutches, he trips his own mental wire from peaceably detached transient to pawnshop-armed streetsweeper of scum, à la 1980s vintage vigilante cheese like 1982’s Class of 1984 (Perry King vs. evil high school “punks”), 1985’s Death Wish 3 (Charles Bronson vs. evil gang “punks”), and 1984’s Savage Streets (Linda Blair versus … figure it out).

Hobo With a Shotgun faithfully apes exploitation conventions, from its lurid widescreen Technicolor hues to a score combining overproduced 1970s funky soundtrack kitsch with ’80s direct-to-video synth pulsing. (Complete with a closing-credits rock song that channels Pat Benatar.) Its ludicrously over-the-top violence is kinda funny, but also nastier than need be.

Throughout, Hauer maintains a straight face. Maybe a tad more so than necessary — this movie could have used the wilder streak crazy-coot comedic streak shown by Jeff Bridges in last year’s True Grit or Kurt Russell in 2007’s Grindhouse.

Game Rutger Hauer retains his blue-eyed charisma and clearly relishes playing the gentle (when not lethal) giant in this artificially baroque scenario. He’s also an actor long on the world stage still seeking a role in a worthy film (or play) that may define him for posterity. He’s obviously got the talent — but at this point, would he take it? Would it even be offered? Did he take Hobo With a Shotgun because it seemed funny, or because it was the best he could get? 

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

Last train to Fuck Town: Rutger Hauer rides again in “Hobo With a Shotgun”

Sue Vaughan
-
0
Last train to Fuck Town: Rutger Hauer rides again in “Hobo With a Shotgun”

The course of an acting career can vividly illustrate the randomness of fate. Rutger Hauer spent some years in Dutch experimental theater of the 1960s — after pulling off that best way to terminate one’s military service, faking mental illness — then became a local heartthrob as a medieval knight in a hit TV series at that decade’s end.

He spent the 1970s primarily starring in Dutch movies, notably the striking early films of Paul Verhoeven — well before Showgirls (1995), Starship Troopers (1997), or even 1987’s RoboCop (the director wanted Hauer for the lead, but was overruled by the studio). In the 1980s, Hauer played the memorable villains of Blade Runner (1982), The Hitcher (1986), and 1981’s Nighthawks (inducing tough investigative cop Sylvester Stallone to don drag at the end to catch him), between runs at being an action hero and theoretically loftier assignments around the globe.

Then he settled into a multilingual journeyman’s potluck of low-budget genre features, TV projects, small parts in mainstream films (2005’s Sin City and Batman Begins), Guinness commercials, and a Kylie Minogue video. Apparently 67-year-old Dutch actors in Los Angeles can’t be choosy.

Then again, sometimes better opportunities might choose them. At Sundance this January, Hauer played lead roles in two diametrically opposed movies. One was as the 16th-century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder in Polish director Lech Majewski’s extraordinary The Mill and the Cross (recently at the San Francisco International Film Festival), which brings one of that painter’s most epic canvases to cinematic life and will hopefully open on U.S. art house screens later this year. The other was Hobo With a Shotgun. Guess which one is opening theatrically here already.

Hobo began as a $150 faux-trailer short that got considerable exposure online and off. The resulting long-form debut for director Jason Eisener and scenarist John Davies is doubtless the zenith in Halifax, Nova Scotia-shot retro ’ploitation splatter comedies to date. Which tells you nothing, of course. But it is pretty good — not great — insofar as spoofy gross-out nods to yesteryear’s exploitation cinema go. Better than Machete (2010), a whole lot better than the likes of Zombie Strippers! (2008) or 95 percent of what Troma puts out.

Grizzled Hauer stars as the titular character who rides rails into an equally nameless berg nicknamed “Fuck Town” because it’s so plagued by drugs ’n’ thugz. The hoodlums are led by crime kingpin “The Drake” (Brian Downey) and goon sons (Gregory Smith, Nick Bateman) whose violent perversities are Caligula-licious. With corrupt police force in pocket, they’re free to terrorize the populace via acts of degradation and violence pushed over the bad-taste top and then some.
When Hauer’s hobo rescues a prostitute (Molly Dunsworth) from this clan’s clutches, he trips his own mental wire from peaceably detached transient to pawnshop-armed streetsweeper of scum, à la 1980s vintage vigilante cheese like 1982’s Class of 1984 (Perry King vs. evil high school “punks”), 1985’s Death Wish 3 (Charles Bronson vs. evil gang “punks”), and 1984’s Savage Streets (Linda Blair versus … figure it out).

Hobo With a Shotgun faithfully apes exploitation conventions, from its lurid widescreen Technicolor hues to a score combining overproduced 1970s funky soundtrack kitsch with ’80s direct-to-video synth pulsing. (Complete with a closing-credits rock song that channels Pat Benatar.) Its ludicrously over-the-top violence is kinda funny, but also nastier than need be. Throughout, Hauer maintains a straight face. Maybe a tad more so than necessary — this movie could have used the wilder streak crazy-coot comedic streak shown by Jeff Bridges in last year’s True Grit or Kurt Russell in 2007’s Grindhouse.

Game Hauer retains his blue-eyed charisma and clearly relishes playing the gentle (when not lethal) giant in this artificially baroque scenario. He’s also an actor long on the world stage still seeking a role in a worthy film (or play) that may define him for posterity. He’s obviously got the talent — but at this point, would he take it? Would it even be offered? Did he take Hobo With a Shotgun because it seemed funny, or because it was the best he could get?

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters.

 

The death drug dealers

Maria Poblet
-
0
The death drug dealers

tredmond@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Arizona to kill prisoner with illegal drugs

Zelda Bronstein
-
14
Arizona to kill prisoner with illegal drugs

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


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


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


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


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


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


 

Perception of lost integrity costs police

Mary Magee
-
1
Perception of lost integrity costs police

Reporting by Sarah Phelan. Photograhy by Luke Thomas.

At the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office’s May 18 Justice Summit, the ethics of law enforcement were a central topic. And not surprisingly, the latest incidents of alleged police conduct in which SFPD officers are caught on surveillance video, which the Public Defender’s Office released, as they apparently steal personal property from suspects whose homes in the Julian Hotel they searched for drugs under possibly illegal circumstances, were on everyone’s minds, along with the crime lab and Henry Hotel scandals.

Asked if District Attorney George Gascón, who was Chief of Police until January, is considering a special prosecutor to look into these latest incidents, Sharon Woo, the D.A.’s Chief Assistant of Operations, said the D.A. looks into each case as it comes in. “We are trying to enhance the videos that came in from the Public Defender’s Office,” Woo said in a pre-summit interview. “Some are not as clear as we’d like.”

Earlier this year, when Gascón first became aware of the allegations against officers at the Henry Hotel, he directed the D.A.’s office to open an investigation into the officers and their alleged conduct. The move got David Onek, who is running against Gascón in the D.A.’s race, urging Gascón to turn the investigation over to an independent prosecutor.

But for a week, Gascón maintained that there was no conflict, and when he did finally announce that he was turning the investigation over to the to the U.S. Attorney’s Office – he claimed it was about “resources”. “New information has come to light that indicates it is better to turn over this investigation to the FBI,” Gascón said. “I have spoken to the U.S. Attorney, Melinda Haag, and she has agreed to take over the full investigation. We will of course cooperate fully with the FBI, and provide whatever assistance they need from us.”

At the time, Onek noted that Gascón’s decision was correct step. But he criticized Gascón for not making it his policy to recuse himself from any investigations that relate to his own tenure as chief. And Alameda Assistant D.A. Sharmin Bock, who recently sprung into the D.A.’ race, described Gascón’s situation on this matter as being “between a rock and a hard place.”

But yesterday, Woo noted that while it’s true that Gascón was SFPD Chief when many of the recent misconduct scandals occurred, Mayor Gavin Newsom had already appointed him D.A. when the Julian Hotel incidents occurred in February.

And Peter Herley, former chief of the Tiburon Police Department, told the Guardian that there “is always the Attorney General” to refer cases if D.A.’s feel conflicted. “George Gascón is a very upstanding individual who has also worked for the Los Angeles Police Department and was Chief of Meza, Arizona, and has done a good job in every place he’s been,” Herley said during a pre-summit interview. “So, if he sees a conflict arise, he’d probably recuse himself. It’s the public perception that’s key, that’s paramount.”

During the summit’s panel on ethics, retired San Francisco Superior Court judge Lee Baxter grilled panelists with incisive questions—as befits any self-respecting judge, retired or otherwise–on whether police misconduct is the product of a departmental culture. Noting that there had been a seemingly non-stop string of alleged police misconduct scandals in the Bay Area from drug thefts, dirty D.U.I cases, stolen drugs and setting up a brothel, Baxter observed, “If I saw a movie that included all those things, I’d think that this is not realistic.”

And there was a perhaps surprising amount of stated consensus about what needs to happen next from panelists Woo, Herley, defense attorney Stuart Hanlon, newly sworn-in SFPD Chief Greg Suhr, Anne Irwin, an attorney at the Public Defender’s Office, and John Burris, an Oakland-based civil rights attorney who is renowned for representing plaintiffs in police brutality cases.

Baxter asked the panelists why abuse of power happens, and whether, when we see media accounts of alleged police misconduct, we see the most extreme cases.

Hanlon kicked off by referring to the case of Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, a former high ranking member of the Black Panther Party, who was tried and convicted of the kidnap and murder of Caroline Olsen in 1972, and spent 27 years in prison, eight in solitary confinement, until 1997 when his conviction was vacated on the grounds that the prosecution concealed evidence that might have exonerated him. In particular, the government had not disclosed that a key witness against Pratt, Julius Butler, was an informant for both the FBI and the LAPD. Pratt eventually received $4.5 million as settlement for false imprisonment—the city of L.A. paid $2.75 million, the U.S. Department of Justice paid $1.75 million.

“We learned that law enforcement officers had hidden evidence, let people commit perjury, and destroyed evidence to convict someone who was innocent, “ Hanlon recalled, noting how when he first worked on the case, folks wondered if Pratt’s claim of innocence was simply part of a big conspiracy theory. “But it was not, it was men and women who thought the ends justified the means” Hanlon said, noting that the “bad apples” theory is typically trotted out during investigations into alleged police misconduct. “But officers see people who they think are bad people, and they feel they must whatever it takes,” Hanlon continued. “Primarily, most law enforcement people are good, but sometimes you get good cops lying to protect bad cops. It’s a dilemma, this concept of ‘what we do we need to do, this ‘us versus them’ concept.”

Hanlon claimed that officers don’t think citizens who live in SROs (single room occupancy hotels) have the same rights as folks in Pacific Heights.
“They think it’s OK to break down doors because these are drug dealers,” he said. And he noted that the recent string of back-to-back scandals are unusual in their proximity but are not unusual, generally speaking. “I’m not an apologist for (Chief) Suhr or the D.A., but I’ve seen these problems forever, and without trust law enforcement doesn’t work,” Hanlon concluded.

Next, Baxter put Suhr in the hot seat by asking him what to do about the “ends justify the means concept”. At which point Suhr, who has been Chief for less than two weeks, observed that the summit, which was packed to the gills with defense and civil rights attorneys, was “a bit of an away game for me, but it’s O.K., I can handle it.” He noted that only 1 in 11 applicants make it through the SFPD Police Academy, where folks undergo 1,100 hours of training, including sessions on abuse of power and responsibilities. “But if something is proven, it’s my intention not to have those officers in the SFPD any more,” Suhr said.

Retired Tiburon Chief Pete Herley revealed that during his decades-long police career, he blew the whistle when three officers nearly beat a gay man to death. “I suffered the consequences for many years,” he said. “It’s very lonely getting death threats, it’s very lonely when you don’t get the backing of fellow officers.”

Herley claimed times have changed a lot. “Change starts in the Academy and the selection of officers, and you have no other law enforcement officers that get more scrutiny, background checks m psychological checks and an 18-month probation period,” he said.

He noted that police chiefs inherit a departmental culture, whether they come into the post from the inside or the outside of the department. And that while the number of officers involved in misconduct is small, “it makes good press.” 

“I really feel one needs to be more loyal to integrity than to people,” Herley continued, noting that his parents were Holocaust survivors, and that his father was aghast when he decided to become a police officer. “But I had certain values and I don’t expect anything less from other people. I expect that every department has something in their rules and regulations that directs their officers that if they see misconduct, it’ll be stopped and the action will be reported immediately to the Chief.

Baxter asked Woo what the D.A. should do, if there is a problem.“All we are is our integrity, our ability to communicate and put forth evidence to juries “ Woo observed, noting that she has been on the frontlines as allegations about the crime lab, the Henri Hotel, and now potential theft, surfaced. “We find ourselves very reactive,” Woo observed, noting that if officers are not being truthful, the D.A.’s office has to look at all the cases they were involved in. “So it really impacts public safety and how all of us view the criminal justice system,” Woo said, noting that officers involved in the Henri Hotel allegations taken off the street.“But we have no interest in prosecuting individuals if it’s not based on solid evidence,” Woo said.

She recommended proactive steps like getting involved in Police Academy training on the law, and what officers can and cannot do, and giving officers tools to make good decisions and arrests, so there is integrity in the system. “If there isn’t, we all lose, not just the criminal justice system, but the entire community,” Woo observed, noting that as SFPD Chief, “Gascón instituted lots of policies to make sure people are doing an appropriate level of review.”

Baxter asked Anne Irwin, an attorney in the Public Defender’s Office, about their office’s role in bringing abuse of power to the attention of the public. “The Public Defender has a unique and natural role as a messenger,” Irwin replied. “We have more meaningful interaction with the victims of police misconduct than anyone else in the criminal justice system. We get into the intimate details of their lives, we develop a relationship of trust, so they confide their stories about police misconduct. And those stories are commonplace.”

Irwin noted that these stories include a disrespect for the Fourth Amendment, perjury and theft. “When you hear those stories over and over, there’s a ring of truth, a consistency,” Irwin said, noting that this is not the first time officers have been captured on camera. “We didn’t say, let’s amass a bunch of evidence. We just basically did our job. Residents told us what someone said in a report is not what happened, so we got videos from Dec. 23 and Jan. 5, and lo and behold, every word was true, two for two.”

Irwin noted that there are many good officers in the SFPD, but questioned whether a culture develops in certain departments, including the plain-clothes units, that allows misconduct to happen. “Without the videos officers would not have had to answer for their conduct,” she observed.

Baxter asked Suhr what it is about the culture that makes some cops go rogue. “Did they work there too long, were the temptations too much?” she asked.

Suhr replied that he worked in narcotics for a long time, and recovered $1.4 million in cash from an apartment in the Western Addition. “I never took a dime, and I am confident that the officers I worked with were of the highest caliber,” he said. “To paint a 2,000-person organization with a broad brush is unfair,” he added. “In the legal profession, every once in a while, you see ugly stories there too.”

Burris, who filed a $25 million wrongful death claim against BART on behalf of Oscar Grant’s family, noted that he has been involved in about 1,000 police misconduct cases in the Bay Area. “A culture exists about how you treat minority communities, “ he said, noting that he had represented black and brown clients for over 20 years. “A culture where you beat people and nothing is done, and you get away with it.”

Burris believes the problem lies in how policies are imposed, as he claimed that when officers join departments they are told to forget what they were taught in the Academy.“This is what you do on the streets,” he said.

Baxter observed that she has seen movies about the code of silence and wondered if it actually exists in police departments. “I don’t think so generally,” Suhr said. “There’s peer pressure to be sure. A regular citizen has a right not to self incriminate, and in the Police Department you can say that, but you are immediately sent to Internal Affairs, where you are told, tell me what happened or you are fired. So, today, the light is shining on us 100 percent of the time.”

Herley noted that his concern lay with situations in which officers see something, but don’t say anything. “I never thought I’d sit here and agree with every word John Burris says, but it starts at the top, and has to be enforced throughout the organization.”

Herley said the two best tools to prevent indiscretions and ensure responsibility are tape recorders and video cameras. “There’s certification of exactly what happened.” As for questions of how much it would cost to outfit officers with this recording equipment, Herley said, “ What is the cost of a lawsuit, the cost the perception of a loss of integrity to a department?”

DEA investigates illegal import of death drugs

Zelda Bronstein
-
1
DEA investigates illegal import of death drugs

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Police officers accused of theft in videotaped incidents

Sasha Cuttler
-
4

In the two such incidents exposed in less than a week by the San Francisco Public Defenders Office, San Francisco Police officers have been caught on surveillance videotape appearing to steal personal property from suspects whose homes were searched for drugs, searches that were also likely to be considered illegal.
“We’re very concerned that these officers are still active, still on the streets, and still testifying in court,” Public Defender Jeff Adachi said during a press conference today, later adding, “We have a pattern of illegal searches and seizures that are occurring.” He called the undocumented property nabs “thefts” and raised doubts about whether officers were actually given permission by the suspects to enter the rooms, as they claimed in their reports.
During Adachi’s press conference, Police Chief Greg Suhr – who was shown the latest video footage on Friday – issued a statement saying the charges were being investigated and the officers involved were being taken off plainclothed duty pending the outcome.
Two officers, Ronaldo Vargas and Richard Guerrero, were involved in both of the videotaped incidents that Adachi released in the last week. In the latest — from a Feb. 25 incident involving 65-year-old Jesus Reyes in which he was stopped in a van and police then searched his apartment at the Julian Hotel, where officers say they found a small amount of methamphetamines – the pair can be seen entering empty-handed and leaving with bags that Reyes says contained his video camera and his nephew’s laptop computer. Neither item was booked into evidence and they remain missing.
In the earlier incident, the officers were accused of stealing a duffel bag during a Dec. 30 raid on a room at the Jefferson Hotel. Adachi has also released four other videotaped police raids in recent months that all seem to show officer misconduct and false statements in their subsequent police reports. And the recent spate of revelations follows a scandal last year in which police and prosecutors withheld information on officer misconduct from the Public Defenders Office and other defense attorneys, despite legal requirements that they share that information. Judges have now dismissed hundreds of criminal cases because of the misconduct by police and prosecutors, and Adachi said the FBI is also investigating the pattern of behavior by SFPD officers.
The drug charges against Reyes were dropped when Guerrero failed to show at the hearing despite being subpoenaed by defense attorneys. But Guerrero was actually on the stand yesterday testifying as a prosecution witness in an unrelated case, raising question about why the DA’s office and SFPD would allow the testimony of someone whose credibility has now been called into serious question.
Reyes said it was his first arrest and that he has no criminal background, but Adachi said that a couple years ago, Vargas was disciplined by the Police Commission after slashing a suspect’s face with a broken pipe.

ACLU, Guardian sue over secret death drugs

Zelda Bronstein
-
1
ACLU, Guardian sue over secret death drugs

The ACLU and the Bay Guardian have filed a federal lawsuit demanding the release of secret documents related to the scramble in California and other states to secure lethal-injection drugs for executions. And we’ve asked the court to issue a preliminary injunction ordering the Drug Enforcement Administration to release the documents quickly.


Both Arizona and Nebraska have recently scheduled executions — and apparently they plan to use drugs that were not obtained in the United States, may have been imported illegally and may not meet American medical standards.


Here’s the ACLU’s statement:


“The DEA has already acknowledged that the public has an urgent need to view records regarding states’ efforts to import execution drugs and the role of federal officials in that process,” said Linda Lye, staff attorney with the ACLU-NC. “We are dismayed that for nearly four months DEA has not released a single document.  The public has a right to these records before imported drugs that may have been illegally acquired are used to execute another inmate.”


Here’s the background:


On January 4, 2011, the ACLU-NC and The Guardian submitted FOIA requests to three federal agencies seeking records related to the federal government’s role in assisting – or failing to oversee – efforts by states to acquire controlled substances from outside the United States to carry out executions. The requests, submitted to the DEA, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), sought documents that would reveal whether state officials violated any laws in the states’ scramble to acquire execution drugs and the role of federal agents in the process.


The ACLU-NC and The Guardian sought these records after public records disclosed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) revealed that California prison officials engaged in a worldwide “secret mission” to acquire sodium thiopental, a controlled substance used in California’s execution process that is no longer legally available in the U.S. The records from the CDCR and other state prisons eventually revealed that six states imported sodium thiopental from Dream Pharma, a drug distributor that operates out of the back of a driving school in the United Kingdom. Records also revealed that two other states imported a controlled substance purporting to be sodium thiopental from an Indian Company that states publicly it is not authorized to import drugs into the U.S.


The DEA granted the ACLU-NC and The Guardian expedited processing of the FOIA request submitted in January. In so doing, the DEA acknowledged that the records relate to an issue of significant public importance and that the public had an urgent need for the information contained in the records. Yet, for nearly four months, the DEA failed to produce any records and failed to even provide a timeline for when records would be produced.


In the interim, based on questions surrounding the drug’s legality, the DEA has taken possession of the sodium thiopental imported from Dream Pharma from five states. This includes Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina, which imported the controlled substance directly from the United Kingdom. DEA also took possession of drugs from and Kentucky and Alabama, which acquired the illegal drug from other states. Only Arizona, California, and Arkansas continue to maintain possession of drugs imported from Dream Pharma, while Nebraska and South Dakota continue to possess drugs imported from India.


I’ll keep you posted.

This place

Andrew Lam
-
0
This place

arts@sfbg.com

LIT Begun in part as a series of maps accompanying public lectures, Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (University of California Press, 167 pages, $24.95) is a remarkable act of gathering, one that presents myriad versions and visions of San Francisco and its surrounding areas that can inform a reader’s experience.

Infinite City was recently selected by the Northern California Independent Booksellers as one of its 2011 winners. Duality is a fundamental aspect of the book’s breadth and depth and sense of sharply critical appreciation — structurally, Solnit pairs distinct maps with corresponding chapter-length essays. In keeping with that characteristic, and also with the book’s group spirit (though admittedly on a much smaller and less intensive scale), I asked different Guardian contributors to share appraisals of one, or in most cases two, of the 22 sections. The result provides just a hint of what can be found within Infinite City. (Johnny Ray Huston)

MAP 3. “Cinema City: Muybridge Inventing Movies, Hitchcock Making Vertigo“

The map for this chapter tracks the San Francisco life of Eadweard (sic) Muybridge, alongside landmarks from Alfred Hitchcock’s Bay Area masterpiece Vertigo. In “The Eyes of the Gods,” Solnit, who won the National Book Critics Circle award for her 2003 Muybridge bio River of Shadows, writes of the 19th century artist’s breakthrough high-speed photography, “It was as though the ice of frozen photographic time had broken free into a river of images.”

Many such rivers flowed all over this fair city when Vertigo premiered at the Stage Door Theatre at 420 Mason St. on May 9, 1958. Alas, only 10 of the more than 60 single-screen venues extant that year, all demarcated on Shizue Seigel’s fine map, are still functioning. Solnit rightly describes the shift to watching films on various digital delivery mechanisms as leaving contemporary culture with a “curious imagistic poverty.” As she concisely describes watching Milk and Once Upon a Time in the West on the Castro Theatre’s giant screen, we’re reminded that there is no comparison between enjoying cinema in such a grand setting and staring at a laptop. The great 20th century memoirist and observer Quentin Crisp wrote, “We ought to visit a cinema as we would go to a church. Those of us who wait for films to be made available for television are as deeply suspicious as lost souls who claim to be religious but who boast that they never go to church.”

That applies to you too, Netflix subscribers! The Roxie, Castro, Red Vic, Clay, and a small number of other houses of worship are still in business, so what are you waiting for? (Ben Terrall)

MAP 4. “Right Wing of the Dove: The Bay Area as Conservative/Military Brain Trust”

In “The Sinews of War are Boundless Money and the Brains of War Are in the Bay Area,” Solnit argues that antiwar, green, and left Bay Area hotspots are well known and don’t need to be charted again — unlike military contractors and assorted other forces of reaction in the region.

Solnit notes that many military bases that used to operate in the Bay Area are closed, “but the research, development, and profiteering continue as a dense tangle of civilian and military work, technological innovation, economic muscle, and political maneuvering for both economic and ideological purposes.”

Among the hard-right compounds providing counterevidence for that demonstration chestnut “the people united will never be defeated”: Lawrence Livermore National Labs (birthplace of Star Wars — the Reagan era money pit, not the George Lucas movie); Lockheed Martin, world’s largest “defense” contractor; the Hoover Institution, Stanford’s reactionary think tank; and Northrop Grumman, missile component designer. It’s useful to have so many of them in one place, if queasy-making.

On the lower left of the map sits Sandow Birk’s beautifully warped code of arms, which features the Cicero quote (Nervi belli pecunia infinita) that Solnit cites in her chapter title, under a half eagle/half dove, a rifle-toting soldier, and a scythe-clutching skeleton. It should be on the door of every U.S. military recruiting center. (Terrall)

MAP 6. “Monarchs and Queens: Butterfly Habits and Queer Public Spaces”

“How thoroughly the lexical landscape of gay history is invested with [a] paradigm of emergence,” notes poet Aaron Shurin in “Full Spectrum,” the chapter accompanying Infinite City‘s sixth map. Like one of the dazzlingly-named butterfly species rendered by Mona Caron on the map, Shurin flits gracefully between memoir and historiography as he tracks San Francisco’s ongoing evolution as a locus for queer emergence.

From North Beach to Polk Gulch, from Folsom to Castro, LGBT folk — be they American painted ladies, Satyr angel wings, or Mission blues — have continually migrated to and within the city to shed their cocoons and show their true colors. Local faux-queen Fauxnique traced this metamorphosis at the 2003 Miss Trannyshack Pageant when she climatically emerged as a regal butterfly to Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” (apropos to Shurin’s royalty motif, she won the crown). So too did the late Age of Aquarius painter Chuck Arnett, who often nestled butterfly imagery into his portraits of SoMa’s leather demimonde, and whose murals once adorned some of the many now-extinct bars also denoted by Ben Pease’s cartography. Only more than half a dozen of these “wildlife sanctuaries,” in Shurin’s parlance, have survived, with the Eagle Tavern’s announced closure marking another loss of habitat. Queers, though, are if anything adaptive, and my hope is that the future fluttering tribes of San Francisco will keep alighting on new ground to unfurl their wings. (Matt Sussman)

MAP 7. “Poison/Palate: The Bay Area in Your Body”

“Food is part of the Bay Area you hear about nowadays, exquisite upscale food at famous restaurants and gourmet markets. But it’s so boring we couldn’t stay focused on it in this map.” These refreshing, if rarely uttered words come two-thirds of the way through the chapter that accompanies the “Poison/Palate” map, Rebecca Solnit’s “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Gourmet.”

The phony Tuscany of Napa and the once-orchard-filled, now-EPA-Superfund-site-speckled Silicon Valley are wisely singled out for derision, a convenient duality in both geography and culture and the perfect framework on which to hang a critique of the local culinary community’s smug, myopic self-indulgence, by raising the not-so-elite-specters in Bay Area food history (the It’s It, the Popsicle, the Hangtown Fry, the Rice-a-Roni), and reintroducing the politics of food into the conversation, in the form of the chemical tonnage used to produce wine grapes, food giveaways at community gardens, Diet for a Small Planet, and Black Panther breakfast programs for school-kids. The sprawling topic is almost given too short a shrift, threatening to leap its mutant-mermaid-bedecked map.

Better is the 18th chapter, “How to Get From Ethiopia to Ocean Beach.” Solnit begins by loosely charting the ingredients that go into your cuppa joe: the water from Hetch Hetchy, the milk from West Marin, the coffee that courses through the port of Oakland, and, impishly, the leavings that flow toward the Southeast Water Pollution Control Plant. All that’s missing from the equation is the sugar that I need to make the darkest, brandy-and-cherry-tinged brew palatable. SF’s cafe culture is also deservedly lionized — though some might want to hurl china due to the exclusions on the accompanying map: why, for instance, call out Blue Danube Coffee House and not the grungier, more Chinese-populated Java Source? (Kimberly Chun)

MAP 8. “Shipyards and Sounds: The Black Bay Area since World War II”

Though author Joshua Jelly-Schapiro opens this chapter, subtitled “High Tide, Low Ebb,” with an eloquent invocation of Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” — penned in Sausalito, by the way — it was the slight mention of Lowell Fulson’s “San Francisco Blues” that most resonated with me. “Ohh, San Francisco,” the lyric goes, “Please make room for me.” The facts presented in “Shipyards and Sounds” record The City’s answer as a genteel and progressive “No nigger.”

Beginning at the start of WWII, when Southern blacks migrated to the Bay Area to build ships in Hunters Point, Jelly-Schapiro points out that the main areas of wartime shipbuilding (Richmond, Hunters Point, Marin City) are “places that today remain centers of black population and of black poverty.” Indicating, to me, that little has changed since the 1940s in some significant ways. Don’t get mad at me, I didn’t say it. Jelly-Schapiro did.

Jelly-Schapiro also shows how terms like “redevelopment” displaced black Fillmore District residents to housing projects they’d been banned from during the war and land-grab euphemisms like “urban renewal” decimated black neighborhoods such as West Oakland. Electoral laws mandating that the SF Board of Supervisors be elected by citywide contests and not by district allowed a city that desegregated its schools and transit system in the 1860s to remain progressive and very, very white.

Jelly-Schapiro’s conclusion contains a critique of Bay Area celebrations when “Negro president” Barack Obama was elected in 2008. What he won’t say is covered in Shizue Seigel’s map. A sidebar shows the dwindling soul of a city, while the headers cover the founding of the Black Panthers and Sylvester’s solo debut at Bimbo’s. (D. Scot Miller)

MAP 9. “Fillmore: Promenading the Boulevard of Gone”

After the damned disheartening facts presented in the previous chapter, it’s both merciful and hopeful that “Little Pieces of Many Wars” — though just as rage-inducing — establishes some kind of equilibrium.

Gent Sturgeon’s incredible Rorschach-inspired artwork opens a thoroughly-researched piece on Fillmore Street and its many incarnations. Mary Ellen Pleasant’s abolitionist work and her eucalyptus trees — which still stand on the corners of Bush and Octavia streets — are a starting point for a leisurely stroll with Solnit, who runs the voodoo down, “The war between the states left its traces here,” she says, “as did the Second World War, and the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the stale and ancient war of racism, and the various forms of freelance violence.”

She remembers San Francisco as an abolitionist headquarters, and Fillmore Street as the first place Allen Ginsberg read “Howl.” Recalling the Fillmore’s rich heritage of jazz, poetry, and art, Solnit takes it even further, adding, “The wealthy sometimes claim to bring civilization to rough neighborhoods, but the Upper Fillmore neighborhood that was so culturally rich when it was the property of poor people in the 1950s is smoothed over in significance now.”

The tragedy of Japanese internment, and the cross-cultural exchange that was demolished by it and redevelopment loom like white sheets over the city to this day. But Solnit closes with an optimistic sense of resurgence, even though Nickie’s has gone Irish.

Ben Pease’s cartography shows the cross-currents of culture of yesterday’s Fillmore Street, but not much else. That’s not a complaint, really. (Miller)

 MAP 13. “The Mission: North of Home, South of Safe”

Two 2009 shootings on 24th Street pop out, in blood red, on the map accompanying Adriana Camarena’s “The Geography of the Unseen,” in much the same way that the spate of shooting deaths the previous year marked my brief time spent living in the Mission. In ’08, I lived in a Victorian flat at Treat and 23rd, distinguished by the fact that it was a favorite hang for the teenaged homies — its steps were slightly tucked back off the street, ideal when it came to hiding out, smoking dope, and snacking out — until my landlords installed a fence, ostensibly to keep the steps free of spit.

We were on the same block as an appliance-loaded junkyard; the last stop of an ancient Mission industrial railroad; and the Parque Niños Unidos, with its swampy, grassy corner, so often cordoned off to keep the tots from wading in the mud, its circling ice cream carts and its de facto refreshment stand, El Gallo Giro taco truck; and the community garden, where the feral kittens tumbled and hid and fresh produce was given away free every Sunday afternoon.

The Parque likely was the last thing 18-year-old poet Jorge Hurtado saw when he was shot and killed on our corner at 1 a.m. that year. I remember waking up that night to what sounded like a cannon boom, only the first of a slew that sweltering, ominous summer — Mark Guardado, president of the SF chapter of the Hells Angels, was killed a little over a week later, down Treat, in front of Dirty Thieves. The tension was thick and gooey in the air — who was next? The beauty of Shizue Seigel’s Mission map lies in how intimate it is, how it’s threaded around the shaggy-dog snatches of yarns Camarena catches among the day laborers waiting at Cesar Chavez and Bayshore, from the long litany of splintered families, time spent in the refuge of gangs at 24th and Shotwell, and then, in Frank Pena’s case, lives cut sadly short farther up 24th at Potrero. The included stories, rarely straying beyond the tellers’ voices and the facts they choose to reveal, stay with you — even if her sources’ internal lives remain, as the chapter’s subtitle goes, “the Geography of the Unseen.” (Chun)


NORTHERN CALIFORNIA INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS 2011 BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDS

 

FICTION

 

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, stories, Yiyun Li (Random House, 240 pages, $25)

Nonfiction

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Mary Roach (W.W. Norton and Company, 336 pages, $15.95)

Honorable Mention: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1, (University of California, 760 pages, $34.95)

 

POETRY

Come On All You Ghosts, Matthew Zapruder (Copper Canyon, 96 pages, $16)

Food Writing

My Calabria: Rustic Family Cooking from Italy’s Undiscovered South, Rosetta Costantino, Janet Fletcher, and Shelley Lindgren (W.W. Norton and Company, 416 pages, $35)

Children’s Picture Book

The Quiet Book, Deborah Underwood and Renata Liwska (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 32 pages, $12.95)

Honorable mention: Zero, Kathryn Otoshi (KO Kids, 32 pages, $17.95)

 

TEEN LIT

The Sky is Everywhere, Jandy Nelson (Dial, 288 pages, $17.99)

Honorable mention: The Mockingbirds, Daisy Whitney (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 352 pages, $16.99)

 

REGIONAL TITLE

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, Rebecca Solnit (University of California, 167 pages, $24.95)

Honorable mention: A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California, Laura Cunningham (Heyday, 352 pages, $50)

 

What to watch, part two

Andrew Lam
-
0
What to watch, part two

WEDS/27

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (Marie Losier, U.S., 2011) Once dubbed “the wickedest man in the world”, shock artist and cofounder of seminal industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has softened somewhat with time. Her plunge into pandrogyny, an ongoing artistic and personal process embarked upon with the late Jacqueline “Lady Jaye” Breyer P-Orridge, is an attempt to create a perfectly balanced body, incorporating the characteristics of both. As artists, the two were committed to documenting their process, but as marriage partners, much of their footage is sweetly innocuous home video footage: Genesis cooking in the kitchen decked out in a little black dress, Lady Jaye setting out napkins at a backyard bar-b-que or helping to dig through Genesis’ archives of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle “ephemera,” the two wrapped in bandages after getting matching nose jobs. “I just want to be remembered as one of the great love affairs of all time,” Jaye tells Genesis. This whimsical documentary by Marie Losier will go a long way toward making that wish a reality. Wed/27, 9:15 p.m., and May 5, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Nicole Gluckstern)

 

THURS/28

Love in a Puff (Pang Ho-cheung, Hong Kong, 2010) In 2007 the global crackdown on smoking made its way to Hong Kong, where the smoking ordinance effectively banned the practice in all indoor areas. This has lead to the explosion of “hot pot packs,” where smokers from varying walks of life come together in solidarity to grab their drags in the streets. That’s the milieu of Love in a Puff, an utterly charming, endearingly funny rom-com from Hong Kong filmmaker Pang Ho-cheung. When Cherie, a pretty Sephora sales clerk and asthmatic with a magenta-hued bob, meets Jimmy, a blandly handsome 20-something advertising exec, over Capri Slims and Lucky Strikes, what follows is a thoroughly modern and tentative courtship waged through dozens of text messages, a dash of karaoke, and a chaste encounter in a Hong Kong “love hotel.” Throw in some haunted car trunks, rogue foreign pubes in bracelets, all night-smoke runs to beat brutal tax increases, and a dry-ice-in-the toilet fetish (“It’s like taking a dump in heaven!” exclaims Jimmy) and you get a thoroughly quirky but never overly cute take on modern romance, one that never blows smoke when it comes to navigating the messy realities of love. Thurs/28, 8:45 p.m., and Sat/30, 1:15 p.m., Kabuki. (Michelle Devereaux)

 

SAT/30

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (Göran Hugo Olsson, Sweden/U.S.) Cinematic crate-diggers have plenty to celebrate, checking the results of The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975. Swedish documentarian Göran Hugo Olsson had heard whispers for years that Swedish television archives possessed more archival footage of the Black Panthers than anyone in the states — while poring through film for a doc on Philly soul, he discovered the rumors were dead-on. With this lyrical film, coproduced by the Bay Area’s Danny Glover, Olsson has assembled an elegant snapshot of black activists and urban life in America, relying on the vivid, startlingly crisp images of figures such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton at their peak, while staying true to the wide-open, refreshingly nonjudgmental lens of the Swedish camera crews. Questlove of the Roots and Om’Mas Keith provide the haunting score for the film, beautifully historicized with shots of Oakland in the 1960s and Harlem in the ’70s. It’s made indelible thanks to footage of proto-Panther school kids singing songs about grabbing their guns, and an unforgettable interview with a fiery Angela Davis talking about the uses of violence, from behind bars and from the place of personally knowing the girls who died in the infamous Birmingham, Ala., church bombing of 1963. Sat/30, 9 p.m., Kabuki, and Tues/3, 6 p.m., New People. (Kimberly Chun)

 

SUN/1

Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz, France/U.S./Iran/Lebanon) Thirteen (2003) goes to Tehran? The world of sex, drugs, and underground nightclubs in Iran provides the backdrop for writer-director Maryam Keshavarz’s lusty, dreamy take on the passionate teenagers behind the hijabs. Risking jail and worse are the sassy, privileged Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and the beautiful, orphaned Shireen (Sarah Kazemy), who, much like young women anywhere, just want to be free — to swim, sing, dance, test boundaries, lose, and then find themselves. The difference here is that they’re under constant, unnerving surveillance, in a country where more than 70 percent of the population is younger than 30. Nevertheless, within their mansion walls and without, beneath graffitied walls and undulating at intoxicating house parties, the two girls begin to fall in love with each other, as Atafeh’s handsome, albeit creepy older brother Mehran (Palo Alto-bred Reza Sixo Safai) gazes on. The onetime musical talent’s back from rehab, has returned to the mosque with all the zeal of the prodigal, and has hooked up with the Morality Police that enforces the nation’s cultural laws. Filmed underground in Beirut, with layers that permit both pleasure and protest (wait for the hilarious moment when 2008’s Milk is dubbed in Farsi), Circumstance viscerally transmits the realities and fantasies of Iranian young women on the verge. Sun/1, 6 p.m., and Tues/3, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki. (Chun)

The Salesman (Sébastien Pilote, Canada) Indefatigably optimistic on the outside, small-town Quebec car salesman Marcel (Gilbert Sicotte) refuses to slow down, let alone retire — perhaps from fear that grief over his wife’s death would fill any hours left empty, though he’s far too composed to let that show. He has his daughter (Nathalie Cavezzali) and grandson (Jeremy Tessier) to dote on, and his customers to endlessly fuss over and reassure. But there are few customers these days because the local factory workers are on strike, their plant in danger of being shuttered. Sébastien Pilote’s quiet drama carefully accumulates everyday details toward a full understanding of Marcel and his milieu, the stability of both eventually threatened by factors that not even his formidable powers of denial can overcome. It’s the kind of movie so small and unassuming you’re caught completely unaware when it delivers a gut-punch. Sun/1, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/3, 8:50 p.m., PFA; and May 5, 2 p.m., Kabuki. (Dennis Harvey)

13 Assassins Before you accuse Japan’s bad boy director Takashi Miike of going all prestige-y by making a Kurasawa-esque samurai pic, consider that his 13 Assassins is actually a remake of what was originally dismissed by many as a Seven Samurai knockoff, the late Eiichi Kudo’s 1963 film of the same name. Koji Yakusho stars as Shinzaemon Shimada, an aging ronin convinced to come out of the proverbial retirement to assassinate a psychotically brutal lord (Goro Inagaki) with a penchant for raping, killing, and wreaking general havoc. Shinzaemon assembles a ragtag team of warriors with varying levels of experience, and the requisite carnage ensues. Featuring solid performances and an impressively choreographed climax, this well-told tale nevertheless feels disappointing stale. The idea of the iconoclastic Miike reinventing the samurai genre is an intriguing one. But while the film at times gnashes the provocative pulp that most Miike devotees have come to crave, it admittedly elicits a measure of old-fashioned respectability that the genre, by default, seems to command like a master ordering his knightly charge. It certainly beheads all its targets, but with something of a shrug of its shoulders. Sun/1, 8:30 p.m., Castro. (Devereaux)

 

MON/2

Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, Canada/France, 2010) When tightly wound émigré Nawal (Luba Azabal) dies, she leaves behind adult twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) — and leaves them documents that only compound their feelings of grief and anger, suggesting that what little they thought they knew about their background might have been a lie. While resentful Simon at first stays home in Montreal, Jeanne travels to fictive “Fuad” (a stand-in for source-material playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s native Lebanon), playing detective to piece together decades later the truth of why their mother fled her homeland at the height of its long, brutal civil war. Alternating between present-day and flashback sequences, this latest by Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (2000’s Maelstrom) achieves an urgent sweep punctuated by moments of shocking violence. Resembling The Kite Runner in some respects as a portrait of the civilian victimization excused by war, it also resembles that work in arguably piling on more traumatic incidences and revelations than one story can bear — though so much here has great impact that a sense of over-contrivance toward the very end only slightly mars the whole. Mon/2, 6:30 p.m., and May 5, 8 p.m., Kabuki. (Harvey)

 

TUES/3

Tabloid (Errol Morris, U.S., 2010) Taking a break from loftier subjects, Errol Morris’ latest documentary simply finds a whopper of a story and lets the principal participant tell her side of it — one we gradually realize may be very far from the real truth. In 1978 former Miss Wyoming Joyce McKinney flew to England, where the Mormon boy she’d grown infatuated with had been posted for missionary work by his church. What ensued became a U.K. tabloid sensation, as the glamorous, not at all publicity-shy Yankee attracted accusations of kidnapping, imprisonment, attempted rape, and more. Her victim of love, one Kirk Anderson, is not heard from here — presumably he’s been trying to live down an embarrassing life chapter ever since. But we do hear from others who shed considerable light on the now middle-aged McKinney’s continued protestations that it was all just one big misunderstanding. Most important, we hear from the lady herself — and she is colorful, unflappable, unapologetic, and quite possibly stone-cold nuts. Tues/3, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki, and May 5, 2:45 p.m., New People. (Harvey)

THE 54TH ANNUAL SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL runs through May 5. Venues are the Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Castro, 429 Castro, SF; New People, 1746 Post, SF; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third, SF; and Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, SF. For tickets (most shows $13) and complete schedule visit www.sffs.org>.

Beyond 420

Andrew Lam
-
0
Beyond 420

steve@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY When the clock or the calendar hits 420 — and particularly at that magical moment of 4:20 p.m. on April 20 — the air of Northern California fills with the fragrant smell of green buds being set ablaze. But this year, some longtime cannabis advocates are trying to focus the public’s attention on images other than stoners getting high.

“I hope the house of hemp will replace the six-foot-long burning joint as the symbol of 420,” says Steve DeAngelo, executive director of Harborside Health Center, an Oakland cannabis collective, and one of the organizers of an April 23 festival in Richmond dubbed Deep Green that offers an expanded view of cannabis culture.

In addition to big musical acts, guest speakers, and vendors covering just about every aspect of the cannabis industry, the event will feature a house made almost entirely of industrial hemp. That exhibit and many others will highlight the myriad environmental and economic benefits of legalizing hemp, as California Sen. Mark Leno has been trying to do for years, with his latest effort, SB676, The California Industrial Hemp Farming Act, clearing the Senate Agriculture Committee on a 5–1 vote April 5.

Public opinion polls show overwhelming support for ending the war on drugs, particularly as it pertains to socially benign substances like industrial hemp, a strain of cannabis that doesn’t share the psychoactive qualities of its intoxicating sister plants. Yet DeAngelo said that after 40 years of advocating for legalization, he’s learned to be patient because “unfortunately, our politicians are lagging behind public opinion.”

In San Francisco and many other cities, marijuana dispensaries have become a legitimate and important part of the business community (see “Marijuana goes mainstream,” 1/27/10), spawning offshoots like the edibles industry that provide more safe and effective ways of ingesting marijuana (see “Haute pot,” 1/25/11).

But the proof that the medical marijuana is about more than just getting people high also continues to grow, from the endless touching tales of cancer, AIDS, and other patients who have been saved from suffering by this wonder weed to the lengths that the industry is going to cultivate cannabidiol (CBD), a compound found in marijuana that doesn’t get people high but offers many other benefits, including acting as an antidepressant and antiinflammatory medicine.

CBD and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive compound in marijuana, generally have an inverse relationship in cannabis plants, so the efforts by generations’ worth of pot cultivators to breed strains with higher THC content have almost completely bred the CBD out of the plants. “In the underground markets, it didn’t have any value,” DeAngelo said.

When Harborside Health Center first started laboratory-testing marijuana many years ago, DeAngelo said that of 2,000 strains tested, only nine had “appreciable quantities of CBD.” In addition to efforts by Harborside and the San Francisco Patient and Resource Center (SPARC) to work with growers on bringing back CBD-heavy strains, modern scientific techniques are allowing CBD to be extracted from the strains that do exist.

“It’s not psychoactive, but let me tell you, it is mood-altering,” says Albert Coles, founder of CBD Sciences in Stinson Beach. “A lot of people, when they smoke pot go inward, but that often isn’t good for social interactions.”

His company makes laboratory-tested cannabis tinctures called Alta California that have been increasingly popular in San Francisco, offering three different varieties: high THC/low CBD, low THC/high CBD, and a 50-50 mix. “It’s good for creative thinking because it just clears out all the noise,” Coles said of CBD.

But even when talking about THC, many in the industry dispute the criticism that most marijuana use is merely recreational drug use. Vapor Room founder Martin Olive has said most pot use isn’t strictly medical or recreational, but a third category he calls “therapeutic,” people who smoke pot to help cope with the stress of modern life.

DeAngelo agrees, although he puts it slightly differently: “The vast majority of cannabis users use it for the purpose of wellness.” 

DEEP GREEN FESTIVAL Saturday, April 23. Performances by The Coup, Heavyweight Dub Champion, and more; speakers include pot cultivation columnist Ed Rosenthal, Steve DeAngelo, and business owner David Bronner. $20 advance/$30 door ($20 for bicyclists and carpoolers, $100 VIP).

Craneway Pavilion, 1414 Harbour Way South, Richmond. www.deepgreenfest.com

 

We who are not as others

Andrew Lam
-
0
We who are not as others

arts@sfbg.com

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL By coincidence there were two Bigfoot movies at the Sundance Film Festival this year, and both are also playing this year’s SFIFF. One was long and serious: Christopher Munch’s Letters from the Big Man, a fantasy drama eco-parable in which a Forest Service water analyst scouting remote parklands acquires a very hairy stalker — though he means well. The other was only five minutes and not remotely serious: Sasquatch Birth Journal 2 (it’s unclear whether there was ever a first), which provided hidden-camera proof of the species’ existence, caught in a state of universal discomfort.

That was the latest dose of absurdism from Zellner Bros., who weren’t strangers to Sundance (they’ve had other shorts and the 2008 feature Goliath premiere there), but remain little-known to all but a small coterie of fans outside their home base of Austin, Texas. That situation will be somewhat rectified with “From A to Zellner,” which brings the brothers to SF for a program of short works.

Considering that they’ve been making films for at least 15 years (and home movies before that), Nathan and David Zellner are something of a mystery pair. Their website bio reveals that “they were born in Greely, Colorado” — and nothing else. (It does, however, provide photographic evidence of them wearing matching, flared-pant crimson jumpsuits somewhere around third grade, and a video where they sing the theme to 1984’s The Neverending Story with tone-deaf bravado.)

Elsewhere David has said he “typically tackles more of the writing-directing, and Nathan more of the editing and producing. That said, it all overlaps.” They’ve occasionally acted in friends’ movies, including ones by mumblecore biggies Andrew Bujalski and the Duplass brothers, plus 2000’s epically great, virtually unknown underground Road Warrior–Smokey and the Bandit collision Radio Free Steve. That aside, far be it from us to further spoil the enigma by requesting an interview.

At their best, the Zellners are like Beckett meets Upright Citizens Brigade, or something like that. Existential rudderlessness almost invariably slaps already hapless protagonists in the face like a wet trout, amid distressed circumstances of deadpan ridiculousness.

Sometimes the humor is overly juvenile or the joke just doesn’t stretch far enough. But their commitment to strange ideas — abetted by considerable flexibility as comic actors inhabiting different characters, accents, mustaches — is more often refreshing, distinctive, and delightful.

Shorts that might show up Sunday, April 24 include Redemptitude (2006), a Australian priest-vs.-angry-wheelchair-bound paintballer confrontation that upends sagas of inspirational forgiveness; the next year’s Aftermath on Meadowlark Lane, a hilariously inappropriate debate (just after a possibly fatal car crash) on the circumcision question; 2004’s The Virile Man, in which husband and father Gary (David) literally calls from the closet to whisper sexual-identity fears to an astrology hotline. Then there’s 2005’s Foxy and the Weight of the World, in which David’s Irish ne’er-do-well Hamish, poisoned by a “vengeful rival,” pours out bitterly self-pitying wisdoms to a beloved pet that would clearly rather be anywhere else than clutched in his dying arms.

The Zellners have made three features to date, all relatively obscure but fairly easy to find on Amazon and such. The aforementioned Goliath is about a rather pathetic recent divorcee (David) distraught when his beloved cat vanishes — something he irrationally blames on the way more pathetic local registered sex offender (Nathan). The brothers are excellent but their material just doesn’t have the weight to float its darker tonal shifts.

Better sustained is 2001’s Frontier, based on an alleged surrealist novel (by “Mulnar Typeschtat”), in which military personnel from civil war-torn Bubovia (David with Wiley Wiggins) canoe to a remote island where they try to enslave the locals (Nathan) and fit in with the Sasquatch-y creature populace. The entire script is spoken in subtitled “Bubovian,” delivered with surprising naturalism.

But the Zellners’ best feature might still be their first. Plastic Utopia (1997) — dust off your old VCR if you want to see it — is an uneven but sometimes deliriously inspired alternative-universe purgatory as viewed by failed mime James (David), whose whining at unappreciative spectators has him in trouble with the Mime Union. His utter inability to succeed (a would-be romance with a novice nun being another obvious dead-end) contrasts with the rebel yell of housemate Frank (Nathan), who drinks, drugs, fucks, lies, steals, and even murders sans consequence. Subsidiary characters like Corduroy Boy, Golden White Boy (both highly memorable), Buster Tuffstuff, and Jogger Joe (Wiggins again) add to the surreal hilarity.

Someday the Zellners are going to hit (fairly) big. But for now it’s obvious they enjoy hitting small, for their own amusement as well as any outsiders who’ve peeked into the tent. It’s indulgently weekend-camping musky in there, but private-joke-funny, too.

FROM A TO ZELLNER

Sun/24, 9:45 p.m., $13

Sundance Kabuki

1881 Post, SF

www.sffs.org

 

Hey Nikki! Sixx heads to SF to sign his new book, “This Is Gonna Hurt”

Sue Vaughan
-
0
Hey Nikki! Sixx heads to SF to sign his new book, “This Is Gonna Hurt”

Known not only for his fiery stage presence and key songwriting contributions as bassist for Mötley Crüe, Nikki Sixx gained a notorious reputation for his off-stage antics as well, particularly his legendary appetite for drugs and debauchery. Sober now for several years, Sixx detailed many of these early escapades and horrors in his 2007 book The Heroin Diaries.

He returns — just in time before a major summer tour featuring Mötley Crüe, Poison, and the New York Dolls, which hits San Francisco June 15 — with the follow up, This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography and Life Through The Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx (William Morrow), a look at his post-addiction life that finds him a successful author, radio host, and of course, still rocking the stage as a member of the Crüe and Sixx: A.M.

The new book, which Sixx signs tonight (Thurs/14) at Book Passage in the Ferry Building, is a strikingly designed collection of attention grabbing and thought-provoking photos and essays, a body of work that covers a wide variety of subjects. When he came up with his first draft of the project, Sixx says that it wound up being 500 pages long — his passions for the book and subjects inspiring a flurry of writing that he eventually streamlined into the 200 page tome that was released earlier this week.

“I had this body of work from the last ten years as a photographer, and once I started talking about photography, it was really like peeling an onion; I started looking at a lot of social issues, a lot of issues of my own, where I came from, where I’m at and where I’m going,” says Sixx.

“It took a lot of trimming down and finding that thread — when I write I kind of just do this stream of consciousness writing, I’m really influenced by Beat Generation writers. I can really get lost in words, and sometimes that’s hard for a reader to follow, so it really took an editor to help me figure out the best way to deliver the message.”

That main message, which Sixx touches on throughout the book, is that he hopes to show people a different way of looking at life, that where mainstream society sees freaks and deformities, he sees through to the inner beauty.

Some of the images he captured while travelling the world on tour with Mötley Crüe; there are pictures of the band included, but the collection mainly focuses on his adventures offstage: exploring brothels in Germany, drug-infested alleys in Vancouver, gothic churches in St. Petersburg, Russia. Several images featured in the book were shot in his private photography studio, with models running the gamut from women who could be called obese to men with a variety of birth defects to a double amputee.

“For me, it’s all about seeing something and going for it, I wanted to push myself to the next level as a photographer,” says Sixx, who says that after working with the models, he often felt that they were the type of person that he — and others — should aspire to be.

In one passage of the book, he relates a story of visiting San Francisco a few years ago; while walking down by the waterfront and piers, he was approached by a large, African American homeless man, who said, “Hey Tattoo Man…you have any money?”

Sixx replied, “I’ll do you a favor if you do me one…don’t judge me by the color of my skin, ok?”

The man apologized, Sixx smiled and told him “It’s ok, happens all the time.”

The man’s response: “Yeah, me too.”

“That fit with what the overall message of This Is Gonna Hurt is all about, it really is in a nutshell what we do to each other as people, and this man who has been judged is whole life is judging another man. And I’m guilty of it too, it’s something I have to work on,” says Sixx.

With several book signings in the near future, the release of the book’s companion CD from Sixx: A.M., the summer Mötley Crüe tour, his radio show and new clothing line, Sixx certainly has his plate full; he admits to being a workaholic in the book, but it clearly brings him satisfaction and inspiration.

“I’m just so excited to get out there and see what kind of reaction that it raises in people,” says Sixx, who hopes that the book will inspire his fans to do something creative and fulfilling in their own lives. “Music will always be there, along with other creative outlets, whether its clothing design, or photography, or writing. For me, creativity is something anybody can do at any age — not have, do. Some people say, ‘Well I’m not a creative person’ — that’s not true. If you want to be creative you can be, you can pick up a guitar or a pen or whatever, and it’s sort of like being a magician — you just make stuff appear, it can come out of thin air. It’s amazing.”

Thurs/14
6 p.m., purchase of book ($29.99) is required for admission.
Book Passage
1 Ferry Building, SF
(415) 835-1020
www.bookpassage.com

Our Weekly Picks: April 13-19, 2011

Maria Poblet
-
0

THURSDAY

APRIL 14

MUSIC

 

Two Door Cinema Club

Featured as a “You Oughta Know” artist on VH1, Northern Ireland’s Two Door Cinema Club is an indie electropop trio comprised of Alex Trimble (lead vocals/guitar), Sam Halliday (vocals/guitar), and Kevin Baird (bass/vocals). (What of the drummer, you ask? Sometimes human, sometimes a computer.) The band’s Tourist History recently picked up the 2010 Choice Music Prize for Irish album of the year, suggesting its making good on the promise shown by opening for indie rock greats like Foals, Phoenix, and Delphic. If you’re one of the working schmucks who can’t take the time off for Coachella, catch Two Door Cinema Club before it goes to Indio. (Jen Verzosa)

With Globes and Work Drugs

8 p.m., $20

Fillmore

1850 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.livenation.com

EVENT

 

“Charles Phoenix Retro Slide Show”

Oddball Americana guru Charles Phoenix has explored and celebrated the best in kitschy, cool, kooky artifacts and history for many years now, having written several books on mid-20th century deep-fried pop culture, fashion, lifestyles, and more. The author of tomes such as Southern California In The ’50s and Americana The Beautiful brings his hilarious slide show and talk to the city, set to roast the imagery found in some of the thousands of vintage Kodachrome slides has collected at flea markets over the years. Be sure to keep an eye out for some familiar places and things — Phoenix has promised to include a bevy of vintage San Francisco slides for this entertaining ode to the odd and unique. (Sean McCourt)

8 p.m., $25

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

PERFORMANCE

 

Our Daily Bread

Carb load on this: in a collaboration between Amara Tabor-Smith’s Deep Waters Dance Theater, director Ellen Sebastian Chang, and visual artist Lauren Elder, Our Daily Bread delves into the folklore and stories surrounding food traditions. The socially conscious hybrid theater experience draws from a family gumbo tradition, examining how industrialized agriculture, fast food culture, and our global food crisis affect current food practices. In addition, CounterPulse resident artist Tabor-Smith also considers who is missing from the sustainable food movement. With red beans and rice on the mind, expect to fill your plate with individual food legacies and questions regarding your own relationship to food. You are what you eat. (Julie Potter)

Thurs/14–Sun/17, 8 p.m., $18–$22

CounterPulse

1310 Mission, SF

(415) 626-2060

www.counterpulse.org

EVENT

 

Nikki Sixx

Known not only for his fiery stage presence and key songwriting contributions as bassist for Mötley Crüe, Nikki Sixx also gained a notorious reputation for his off-stage antics, particularly his legendary appetite for drugs and debauchery. Sober now for several years, Sixx detailed many of these early escapades and horrors in his 2007 book The Heroin Diaries. He returns — just before a major summer tour, which includes a June stop in SF — with the follow-up, This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography, and Life through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx, a look at his post-addiction life that finds him a successful author, radio host, and of course, still rocking the stage with the Crüe. (McCourt)

6 p.m., $29.99 (includes book)

Book Passage

One Ferry Building, SF

(415) 835-1020

www.bookpassage.com

FRIDAY

APRIL 15

DANCE

 

Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet

The longer I watch Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet, the more this choreographer manages to surprise me. What intrigues is not so much his language — intricate, idiosyncratic, and demanding — or even the way he uses it on his dancers. But there is a vision, a philosophy behind his work, that we get glimpses of in every new piece. That’s what good dance is supposed to do. King also goes out of his way to find collaborators who can envelop his choreography in the mantle of new contexts. Of course, it helps that these other-than-dance contributions, in particular, are often spectacular on their own. But to get Mickey Hart, who actually is philosophically pretty close to King, create a score for Lines Ballet is a coup even for a choreographer with a growing international reputation. Architect Christopher Haas, who worked on the de Young Museum, created the set. (Rita Felciano)

Through April 24

Fri.–Sat., 8 p.m.; April 20–21, 7:30 p.m.;

April 24, 5 p.m., $25–$65

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Novellus Theater

700 Howard, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.linesballet.org

MUSIC

 

The Residents

Hang on to your eyeballs, San Francisco’s most enigmatic art-rock collective the Residents will storm the stage at Bimbo’s in support of its for-no-particular-reason, ghost-story themed “Traveling Light” tour. The calculatedly anonymous group (currently a trio), as well known for its elaborately costumed stage personae and mixed-media presentations as for its deconstructed lyrics and dystopian musical baditude, is fast approaching its fourth decade. But don’t expect a set stuffed merely with humdrum nostalgia. Actually, don’t expecting any particular thing, because defying expectations is what the Residents do best. Word is the group will be recording the proceedings in three (possibly four ) dimensions, so wearing your very best top hat to the show might not be a bad idea. (Nicole Gluckstern)

Fri/15–Sat/16, 9 p.m., $30

Bimbo’s

1025 Columbus, SF

(415) 474-0365

www.bimbos365club.com

PERFORMANCE

 

Zaccho Dance Theatre

With a title — The Monkey and the Devil — taken from racial slurs, Joanna Haigood’s dance theater performance installation, performed by Zaccho Dance Theatre, addresses lingering contemporary racism, rooted in the lasting effects of America’s slave trade. Even in the age of Obama, the performance acknowledges how Americans grapple with the residue of slavery and reunite a split house. Surrounded by two massive, rotating set pieces designed by visual artist Charles Trapolin, audience members are free to navigate the continuously running performance installation in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum. A post-performance discussion follows Friday’s installment. Don’t miss this immersive, compelling work. (Potter)

Fri/15, 8–10 p.m.;

Sat/16-Sun/17, 12-2 p.m. and 3–5 p.m., free

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-5210

www.ybca.org

SATURDAY

APRIL 16

EVENT

 

“How-to Homestead: 11 in 11 Tour”

You can go on tour without ever leaving your city. That’s the idealistic message of How-to Homestead’s “11 in 11 Tour,” a yearlong barnstorming series with dates planned for each of San Francisco’s districts. Spearheaded by Melinda Stone, a University of San Francisco professor equally knowledgeable in matters of celluloid and soil, How-to Homestead’s homebrew of entertainment and education draws on alternative cinema, practical workshops, and live music to create a distinctly flavorful commons. The fourth “11 in 11” program takes place at the historic Bayview Opera House and features a “Chickens in the City” workshop and contra dance call, in addition to the usual potluck dinner and film treats. With spring in the air, it should be an especially lively installment. (Max Goldberg)

4–10:30 p.m., $5 suggested donation

Bayview Opera House

4705 Third St., SF

www.howtohomestead.org

DANCE

 

ODC Dance Jam

At first the ODC Dance Jam consisted of half a dozen cute kids showing their prowess on an ODC/Dance opening night. Today ODC’s youth program is much too big for such capers, and the tables have been turned. This year the professional company will make an appearance — with Brenda Way’s John Somebody — at ODC Dance Jam’s own concert, “Make the Road by Walking.” Taking classes five times in addition to rehearsing, the 14-member troupe, ages 13-18, may not call itself pre-professional, but its dancers surely are on the way. KT Nelson, Kimi Okada, Bliss Kohlmeyer-Dowman, Greg Dawson, and Kim Epifano, about as professional a group as any, created choreography for them. (Felciano)

Sat/16, 8 p.m.; Sun/17, 4 and 7 p.m., $12

ODC Dance Commons

351 Shotwell, SF

(415) 863-9830

www.brownpapertickets.com/event/166923

SUNDAY

APRIL 17

MUSIC

 

Foxtails Brigade

(((folkYeah!))) and Antenna Farm Records host a release party in honor of San Francisco duo Foxtails Brigade’s full-length debut, The Bread and the Bait. On its surface, The Bread and the Bait is as delicate as lace — the album art depicts a ladylike tea party in progress. But look closer (why are two of the women blindfolded? And why is one clutching a knife?) and listen closely: there’s an underlying darkness cloaked in those ethereal vocals set against simple cello and violin melodies. Join in the celebration with musical performances by ‘Tails and Rachel Fannan of Sleepy Sun, plus comedy by Brent Weinbach and Moeshe Kasher, and a fashion show featuring designs by Verriers and Sako, Lecon de Vetement, and Zoe Hong. (Verzosa)

With Rachel Fannan

8 p.m., $15

Swedish American Music Hall

2174 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.swedishamericanhall.com MUSIC

 

Wire

On a recent trip to New York City, I won tickets to watch Wire from the “Band Bench” on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Arriving at 30 Rock, I found a few other awkward music nerds who refused to take off their jackets looking forward to the performance. In a bit of TV magic, they filled out the 30 or so “hardcore fans” with tourists eager for a glimpse of Fallon guest Keanu Reeves. It could just be the standard practice, but it’s also typical of the U.K. band’s U.S. reception, remaining relatively unknown despite being perpetual critical darlings and inspiring alternative rock bands throughout a career spanning from the release of 1977’s influential punk album, Pink Flag, to their most recent, Red Barked Tree. (Ryan Prendiville) With Lumerians and DJ Callum McGowan

8 p.m., $21

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slims-sf.com 

The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

Music Listings

Maria Poblet
-
0

Music listings are compiled by Cheryl Eddy. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 13

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Broken Social Scene, Gord Downie Warfield. 8pm, $27.

Francis and the Lights, Oh Land, Sunday Ghost Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $15.

Girls in Trouble, Jascha vs. Jascha Viracocha, 998 Valencia, SF; www.viracochasf.com. 8pm, $5-10.

Hammerlock, Scheisse Minnelli, Seven Crowns, Lecherous Gaze Thee Parkside. 8pm, $6.

Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, Those Darlins Independent. 8pm, $18.

Lightning Bolt, Tits, High Castle Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $12.

Majesty, Sweet Chariot, Tarantula Tango Knockout. 9pm, $6.

Curtis Peoples, Keaton Simons, Whitney Nichols Hotel Utah. 8pm, $10.

Porch, Bone Dweller Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Rural Alberta Advantage, Lord Huron, Birdmonster Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $14.

Chelsea TK and the Tzigane Society, Parlour Suite, Starfish in the Clouds, Uni and Her Ukelele, DJ Neil Martinson Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

Yacht, Bobby Birdman Bimbo’s 365 Club. 8pm, $20.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Cosmo Alleycats Le Colonial, 20 Cosmo, SF; www.lecolonialsf.com. 7pm.

Dink Dink Dink, Gaucho, Michael Abraham Amnesia. 7pm, free.

Jazz All-Stars Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:30pm, free.

Ben Marcato and the Mondo Combo Top of the Mark. 7:30pm, $10.

New Rite Spot All-Stars Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

Rudy Simone 50 Mason Social House, 50 Mason, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 9pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro, SF; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita Moore hosts this dance party, featuring DJ Robot Hustle.

Buena Onda Little Baobab, 3388 19th St., SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $3. Soul, funk, swing, and rare grooves with residents Dr. Musco and DJB.

Cannonball Beauty Bar. 10pm, free. Rock, indie, and nu-disco with DJ White Mike.

Jam Fresh Wednesdays Vessel, 85 Campton, SF; (415) 433-8585. 9:30pm, free. With DJs Slick D, Chris Clouse, Rich Era, Don Lynch, and more spinning top40, mashups, hip hop, and remixes.

Mary-Go-Round Lookout, 3600 16th St, SF; (415) 431-0306. 10pm, $5. A weekly drag show with hosts Cookie Dough, Pollo Del Mar, and Suppositori Spelling.

Mod vs. Rocker Make-Out Room. 10pm, free. DJs all night spinning 60s pop; come at 7:30 p.m. (cover $7) for a live concert with Bond Girl and 10 ft. 5.

No Room For Squares Som., 2925 16th St, SF; (415) 558-8521. 6-10pm, free. DJ Afrodite Shake spins jazz for happy hour.

Obey the Kitty Vessel. 10pm, $10. With a Ladytron DJ set.

Respect Wednesdays End Up. 10pm, $5. Rotating DJs Daddy Rolo, Young Fyah, Irie Dole, I-Vier, Sake One, Serg, and more spinning reggae, dancehall, roots, lovers rock, and mash ups.

Strutter El Rio. 9pm, $3. DeeJay Andre spins electro, booty bass, hip-hop, and more for lesbians and friends.

Synchronize Il Pirata, 2007 16th St, SF; (415) 626-2626. 10pm, free. Psychedelic dance music with DJs Helios, Gatto Matto, Psy Lotus, Intergalactoid, and guests.

“When I Was a Youth: Big Up Magazine Issue Release” Mezzanine. 9pm, $10. With Breakage, Goth Trad, and a screening of the documentary Bassweight.

THURSDAY 14

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Cults, Magic Kids, White Arrows Independent. 8pm, $13.

Cute Lepers, Re-Volts, Complaints, Lydia and the Projects Thee Parkside. 9pm, $10.

Delorean, Water Borders Slim’s. 9pm, $21.

“Eddie Dane Memorial” DNA Lounge. 9pm, $5 suggested donation. With Hi-Rhythm Hustlers and burlesque performances.

Ellie Goulding, Knocks Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $13.

Joy Formidable, Lonely Forest Bottom of the Hill. 8:30pm, $12.

Lake, AgesandAges, Michael Beach Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $8.

Little Mercury, Exit Wonderland, Curly El Rio. 8pm, $5.

Vonda Shephard Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $25.

Tomihara, My Second Surprise, Haberdasher Red Devil Lounge. 8pm, $6.

Two Door Cinema Club, Globes, Work Drugs Fillmore. 8pm, $20.

Matt Wertz, Ben Rector Swedish American Hall (upstairs from Café Du Nord). 8pm, $15.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Zach Hash Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:30pm, free.

Organsm featuring Jim Gunderson and “Tender” Tim Shea Bollyhood Café. 6:30-9pm, free.

Ken Sealy Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

SF Jazz Hotplate Series Amnesia. 9pm.

Scott Sier Café Royale, 800 Post, SF; (415) 641-6033. 8pm, free.

Stompy Jones Top of the Mark. 7:30pm, $10.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Meredith Axelrod 50 Mason Social House, 50 Mason, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 9pm, free.

Bay Island Ramblers Atlas Café. 8-10pm, free.

Amy Obienski Mama Art Café, 4754 Mission, SF; www.mamasf.com. 8pm, free.

Yeye Suárez Red Poppy Art House. 7pm, $12-15.

“Twang! Honky Tonk” Fiddler’s Green, 1330 Columbus, SF; www.twanghonkytonk.com. 5pm.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $5. DJs Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz spin Afrobeat, tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

CakeMIX SF Wish, 1539 Folsom, SF; www.wishsf.com. 10pm, free. DJ Carey Kopp spinning funk, soul, and hip hop.

Caribbean Connection Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $3. DJ Stevie B and guests spin reggae, soca, zouk, reggaetón, and more.

Culture Corner Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; www.kokococktails.com. 10pm, free. Roots reggae, dub, rocksteady, and classic dancehall with DJ Tomas, Yusuke, Vinnie Esparza, and Basshaka and ILWF.

Drop the Pressure Underground SF. 6-10pm, free. Electro, house, and datafunk highlight this weekly happy hour.

Electric Feel Lookout, 2600 16th St, SF; www.fringesf.com. 9pm, $2. Indie music video dance party with subOctave and Blondie K.

80s Night Cat Club. 9pm, $6 (free before 9:30pm). Two dance floors bumpin’ with the best of 80s mainstream and underground with Dangerous Dan, Skip, Low Life, and guests. This week’s theme is Duran Duran; come dressed as a member of the band and get in free before 11pm.

Guilty Pleasures Gestalt, 3159 16th St, SF; (415) 560-0137. 9:30pm, free. DJ TophZilla, Rob Metal, DJ Stef, and Disco-D spin punk, metal, electro-funk, and 80s.

Jivin’ Dirty Disco Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 8pm, free. With DJs spinning disco, funk, and classics.

Kissing Booth Make-Out Room. 9pm, free. DJs Jory, Commodore 69, and more spinning indie dance, disco, 80’s, and electro.

Mestiza Bollywood Café, 3376 19th St, SF; (415) 970-0362. 10pm, free. Showcasing progressive Latin and global beats with DJ Juan Data.

Motion Sickness Vertigo, 1160 Polk, SF; (415) 674-1278. 10pm, free. Genre-bending dance party with DJs Sneaky P, Public Frenemy, and D_Ro Cyclist.

1984 Mighty. 9pm, $2. The long-running New Wave and 80s party has a new venue, featuring video DJs Mark Andrus, Don Lynch, and celebrity guests.

Peaches Skylark, 10pm, free. With an all female DJ line up featuring Deeandroid, Lady Fingaz, That Girl, and Umami spinning hip hop.

Thursday Special Tralala Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 5pm, free. Downtempo, hip-hop, and freestyle beats by Dr. Musco and Unbroken Circle MCs.

FRIDAY 15

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Blank Tapes, Little Wings, Kacey Johansing, Rad Cloud Great American Music Hall. 8:30pm, $13.

Burmese, CCR Headcleaner, Crib Death Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $7.

“Cheerleader Graduation Party” Rickshaw Stop. 8pm, $10. With Cock-Ts, Devil-Ettes, Boner Jams, and Six Million Dollar Band.

Entrance Band, Rachel Fannan, Nick Waterhouse, Allah Las, DJ Selections by KC Bull Slim’s. 9pm, $13.

Gr’ups, Swann Danger, Street Eaters, Hounds and Harlots Thee Parkside. 9pm, $8.

Katdelic, DJ K-Os Boom Boom Room. 9:30pm, $15.

Naked Fiction Amnesia. 7pm.

Night Call, Purple Rhinestone Eagle, Bad Dream El Rio. 9pm, $5.

Nodzzz, Art Museums, Gun Outfit Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $10.

Residents Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $30.

Raphael Saadiq, Quadron Regency Ballroom. 9pm, $39.50-49.50.

Scissor Sisters, Oh Land Warfield. 9pm, $37.

Upsets 50 Mason Social House, 50 Mason, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 9pm, free.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Emily Anne Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 9pm, free.

“B3 Bash” Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 8pm, $25-60. With Dr. Lonnie Smith and Barbara Dennerlein Trio.

Black Market Jazz Orchestra Top of the Mark. 9pm, $10.

Chelle! and friends Red Poppy Art House. 8pm, $12-15.

Melees, Ken Sealy Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

Maceo Parker Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $20-30.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Deke Dickerson, B-Stars, Golddigger Elbo Room. 9pm, $13.

Amjad Ali Khan Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.ciis.edu/publicprograms. 8pm, $25-100.

Amy Obienski Velo Rouge Café, 798 Arguello, SF; www.velorougecafe.com. 7pm, free.

Pine Box Boys, Hubba Hubba Revue, Possum and Lester Café Du Nord. 9:30pm, $14.

Shakulintang Rancho Parnassus, 505 Minna, SF; www.ranchoparnassus.com. 8pm, $10-15.

DANCE CLUBS

Afro Bao Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs including Stepwise, Steve, Claude, Santero, and Elembe.

Chase and Status, 2cents, Lukeino, Kuze DNA Lounge. 10pm, $20.

DJ Momentum Medjool, 2522 Mission, SF; www.medjoolsf.com. 10:30pm, $10.

DJ What’s His Fuck Riptide. 9pm, free. Old-school punk and other gems.

Dirty Rotten Dance Party Madrone Art Bar. 9pm, $5. With DJs Morale, Kap10 Harris, and Shane King spinning electro, bootybass, crunk, swampy breaks, hyphy, rap, and party classics.

Exhale, Fridays Project One Gallery, 251 Rhode Island, SF; (415) 465-2129. 5pm, $5. Happy hour with art, fine food, and music with Vin Sol, King Most, DJ Centipede, and Shane King.

Fubar Fridays Butter, 354 11th St., SF; (415) 863-5964. 6pm, $5. With DJs spinning retro mashup remixes.

Good Life Fridays Apartment 24, 440 Broadway, SF; (415) 989-3434. 10pm, $10. With DJ Brian spinning hip hop, mashups, and top 40.

Mary Anne Hobbs 1015 Folsom. 10pm, $15. With Joy Orbison, Kode9, Lorn, Gonja Sufi, and more.

Hot Chocolate Milk. 9pm, $5. With DJs Big Fat Frog, Chardmo, DuseRock, and more spinning old and new school funk.

Radioactivity 222 Hyde, SF; (415) 440-0222. 6pm. Synth sounds of the cold war era.

Rockabilly Fridays Jay N Bee Club, 2736 20th St, SF; (415) 824-4190. 9pm, free. With DJs Rockin’ Raul, Oakie Oran, Sergio Iglesias, and Tanoa “Samoa Boy” spinning 50s and 60s Doo Wop, Rockabilly, Bop, Jive, and more.

Some Thing Stud. 10pm, $7. VivvyAnne Forevermore, Glamamore, and DJ Down-E give you fierce drag shows and afterhours dancing.

Vintage Orson, 508 Fourth St, SF; (415) 777-1508. 5:30-11pm, free. DJ TophOne and guest spin jazzy beats for cocktalians.

SATURDAY 16

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

All Time Low, Yellowcard, Hey Monday, Summer Set Warfield. 7pm, $27.

Arrival, Luvplanet, Relay Company Showroom, 1000 Van Ness, SF; (415) 346-5597. 8:30pm, $12-15.

Crazy Alligators Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 9pm, free.

Forrest Day, Bayonics, Ghost and the City Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $14.

Druglords of the Avenues, Fracas, Street Justice Bender’s, 806 S. Van Ness, SF; www.bendersbar.com. 9:30pm, $5.

Duran Duran Fillmore. 9pm, $57.50.

Full on Flyhead, Lavish Green, Ben Benkert Band, Scholar and the Melting Pot Slim’s. 9pm, $14.

Heavy Liquid, Tempermentals Thee Parkside. 3pm, free.

Maserati, Kenseth Thibideau, Glaciers Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $10.

OONA, Super Adventure Club, Dogcatcher Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $10.

Orgone, Quinn Deveaux and the Blue Beat Review Independent. 9pm, $16.

Residents Bimbo’s 365 Club. 9pm, $30.

Stymie and the Pimp Jones Love Orchestra Café Du Nord. 9pm, $15-25.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Billy White Quintet West Red Poppy Art House. 8pm, $12-20.

JP and the Rhythm Chasers, Petunia and the Vipers Verdi Club, 2424 Mariposa, SF; www.oldtimey.net. 8pm, $15.

Maceo Parker Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $30.

Proverb Trio with Dafnis Prieto, Kokyai, and Jason Lindner Swedish American Hall (upstairs from Café Du Nord). 8pm, $30.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Culann’s Hounds, Lucia Comnes St. Cyprian’s Church, 2097 Turk, SF; www.noevalleymusicseries.com. 8pm, $20.

Octomutt, Lily Taylor Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm.

Craig Ventresco and Meredith Axelrod Atlas Café. 4pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Afro Bao Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; (415) 643-3558. 10pm, $5. Afro and world music with rotating DJs including Stepwise, Steve, Claude, Santero, and Elembe.

Cock Fight Underground SF. 9pm, $7. Gay locker room antics galore with electro-spinning DJ Earworm, MyKill, and Dcnstrct.

Bootie SF: Bootiechella DNA Lounge. 9pm, $8-15. Coachella artists get mashed up by Adrian and Mysterious D, and more.

DJ Nik Medjool, 2522 Mission, SF; www.medjoolsf.com. 10:30pm, $10.

Fringe Madrone Art Bar. 9pm, $5. Indie music video dance party with DJ Blondie K and subOctave bringing the best of Coachella to SF.

Full House Gravity, 3505 Scott, SF; (415) 776-1928. 9pm, $10. With DJs Roost Uno and Pony P spinning dirty hip hop.

HYP Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 10pm, free. Gay and lesbian hip-hop party, featuring DJs spinning the newest in the top 40s hip hop and hyphy.

Prince vs. Michael Madrone Art Bar. 8pm, $5. With DJs Dave Paul and Jeff Harris battling it out on the turntables with album cuts, remixes, rare tracks, and classics.

Saturday Night Soul Party Elbo Room. 10pm, $10. Sixties soul with DJs Lucky, Phengren Oswald, and Paul Paul.

Spirit Fingers Sessions 330 Ritch. 9pm, free. With DJ Morse Code and live guest performances.

SUNDAY 17

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

“Bands for the Rising Sun: Benefit for Japan Tsumani Quake Relief” Maggie McGarry’s, 1353 Grant, SF; bandsfortherisingsun@gmail.com. 2-9pm, donations accepted. With Dyno Cats, Deepest Purple, Project Gojira, and more.

“Battle of the Bands” DNA Lounge. 5:30pm, $12. With Glorious Birds, Style Like Revelators, and more.

Black Wizard Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Foxtails Brigade, Rachel Fannan Swedish American Hall (upstairs from Café Du Nord). 8pm, $15.

Hauschka, Magik*Magik Orchestra Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $18.

Goh Nakamura, Come Gather Round Us, Yea-Ming Café Du Nord. 8pm, $10.

Vostok-Zapad Rickshaw Stop. 7pm, $25.

Wire Slim’s. 9pm, $21.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

“Bruno’s/Wayne Niethold Tribute” Public Works, 161 Erie, SF; www.publicsf.com. 4-10pm, $15-50. With DJ Chase Gowdy, Todd Sickafoose Group, Graham Connah’s Sour Note Seven, Scott Amendola Quartet, and more.

Jennifer Bryce and Josh Workman Bliss Bar, 4026 24th St., SF; www.blissbarsf.com. 4:30pm, $10.

Jazz jam 50 Mason Social House, 50 Mason, SF; www.50masonsocialhouse.com. 9pm, free.

Ellis Marsalis Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF; www.sfjazz.org. 7pm, $25-65.

Tom Lander Duo Medjool, 2522 Mission, SF; www.medjoolsf.com. 6-9pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Andy y Callao El Rio. 4-8pm, $8.

Family Folk Explosion Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:30pm, free.

Silver Threads, Kitchen Fire Thee Parkside. 4pm, free.

Venezuelan Music Project Yoshi’s San Francisco. 7pm, $16.

DANCE CLUBS

Batcave Cat Club. 10pm, $5. Death rock, goth, and post-punk with Steeplerot Necromos and c_death.

Call In Sick Skylark. 9pm, free. DJs Animal and I Will spin danceable hip-hop.

Chocolate Sundays Beauty Bar. 9pm. With DJs 4AM and Automatic Transmission, plus a drunken spelling bee.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. Dub, roots, and classic dancehall with DJ Sep, Vinnie Esparza, and guest DJ Ripley.

Gloss Sundays Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 7pm. With DJ Hawthorne spinning house, funk, soul, retro, and disco.

Honey Soundsystem Paradise Lounge. 8pm-2am. “Dance floor for dancers – sound system for lovers.” Got that?

La Pachanga Blue Macaw, 2565 Mission, SF; www.thebluemacawsf.com. 6pm, $10. Salsa dance party with live Afro-Cuban salsa bands.

MONDAY 18

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

!!! Independent. 9pm, $20.

New Pornographers, Menomena Regency Ballroom. 8pm, $32.

One Way Station, Califia, Songs for Snakes Elbo Room. 9pm.

Spiral Bombs, Narooma, Hazel’s Wart El Rio. 7pm, $5.

Tame Impala, Yuck Fillmore. 8pm, $20.

DANCE CLUBS

Death Guild DNA Lounge. 9:30pm, $3-5. Gothic, industrial, and synthpop with Joe Radio, Decay, and Melting Girl.

Krazy Mondays Beauty Bar. 10pm, free. With DJs Ant-1, $ir-Tipp, Ruby Red I, Lo, and Gelo spinning hip hop.

M.O.M. Madrone Art Bar. 6pm, free. With DJ Gordo Cabeza and guests playing all Motown every Monday.

Network Mondays Azul Lounge, One Tillman Pl, SF; www.inhousetalent.com. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop, R&B, and spoken word open mic, plus featured performers.

Sausage Party Rosamunde Sausage Grill, 2832 Mission, SF; (415) 970-9015. 6:30-9:30pm, free. DJ Dandy Dixon spins vintage rock, R&B, global beats, funk, and disco at this happy hour sausage-shack gig.

Skylarking Skylark. 10pm, free. With resident DJs I & I Vibration, Beatnok, and Mr. Lucky and weekly guest DJs.

TUESDAY 19

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Marcia Ball Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $20.

“Beyond the Music Label Series” Boom Boom Room. 6-9pm, free. With Blind Willies.

Grooming the Crow, Scott Gagner El Rio. 7pm, free.

Janet Jackson Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, 99 Grove, SF; www.ticketmaster.com. 8pm, $49.50-149.50.

Pains of Being Pure at Heart Amoeba, 1855 Haight, SF; www.amoeba.com. 6pm, free.

Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Twin Shadow, Catwalk Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $17.

Rubber O Cement, Dental Work, Shortwave Surfers, Terror Apart Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Bomba Estéreo, Bayonics Independent. 8pm, $18.

Lumanation, Dubtown Dread John Colins, 138 Minna, SF; www.johncolins.com. 9pm, $5.

Sue Quigley Café Royale, 800 Post, SF; (415) 641-6033. 8pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Boomtown Little Baobab, 3388 19th St, SF; www.bissapbaobab.com. 9pm, free. DJ Mundi spins roots, ragga, dancehall, and more.

Brazilian Wax Elbo Room. 9pm, $7. Forro and samba with Razteria, DJ Carioca, and DJ P-Shot.

Eclectic Company Skylark, 9pm, free. DJs Tones and Jaybee spin old school hip hop, bass, dub, glitch, and electro.

Share the Love Trigger, 2344 Market, SF; (415) 551-CLUB. 5pm, free. With DJ Pam Hubbuck spinning house.

 

alt.sex.column: Positive too negative?

Andrew Lam
-
0
alt.sex.column: Positive too negative?

Dear Andrea:

I’m having a problem with my girlfriend. “Grace” is the hottest girl I’ve ever dated, but things aren’t going so well. She is possessive and gets mad at me for wanting to do anything she doesn’t want to (like going hiking or anything outdoors), and wants to know where I am every second, and who I talked to, and was she pretty, etc., etc. We used to have great sex, but lately I can’t come no matter what she does. It used to be just looking at her could practically make me come. Can this be fixed?

Love,

Not My Dream Girl After All?

Dear Not:

While not news, dissatisfaction can be — indeed, often is — partner-specific. But you two were doing fine before you, well … before you got to know each other. Oops!

Did you notice how in your description of “Grace” herself, and of your relationship, you never once mention being crazy about her? Hot for her, sure But love her, cherish her, want to spend your life with her … like her? Did I miss the part where you said any of those things? No? Then why are we bothering with this? You don’t like her. Frankly, she doesn’t sound all that likable. Go find a mirror and practice saying this: “I’m sorry, “Grace.” It isn’t working out. It’s not you, it’s me.” And then run like hell. She sounds like she might be an ashtray-thrower. And you don’t have a pet bunny, do you?

I’m not wrong about this, am I? We can talk therapy. You guys could go to couples counseling and try to tease out what’s making her feel so insecure, and what, short of never doing anything without her and never talking to anyone not preapproved by her, you could do to assuage it. You could learn some techniques for deescalating your disagreements before they get to DEFCON 1, and you could … yeah, no. You could, but why bother, since do I need to remind you? You don’t like her.

Frankly, I find extreme possessiveness extremely creepy. And even if you’d mentioned anything like affection here, I’d probably be urging you to get out. It’s not like she’s likely any fonder of you than you are of her. You’d think it would be obvious that desire to possess and control cancels out love, but seeing how the model for romantic love on TV and in the movies often goes: “meet cute, then stalk relentlessly until the object of your obsession is broken enough to give in,” clearly it is not.

So we have established that being hot does not actually qualify a person to be your, or anyone else’s partner — any more than having a lot of money does, or having great connections, or the good drugs, or even being perfect on paper and approved of by one’s mother. If you don’t really care about her, or she for you, she is not for you. For once — seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever said this before — your dick is smarter.

Love,

Andrea

 

1...121314...30Page 13 of 30

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org