Education

Warren Hellman: The rich are undertaxed

Zelda Bronstein
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31
Warren Hellman: The rich are undertaxed

I couldn’t reach financier Warren Hellman before I wrote my column in this week’s paper talking about the employee pension discussions. But he called me yesterday (Feb. 16) after he’d seen it, and I expected he’d give me some shit.


Wrong.


In fact, Hellman had only one problem with my analysis: “Your article is didn’t go far enough.” Turns out he thinks I was a bit too easy on the billionaires.


“When you compare upper-echelon tax rates [in America] to any developed country in the world,” Hellman said, “the rich pay very low taxes here. You’re article is exactly correct — the wealthy are undertaxed.” He told me that he’s stopped trying to amass more personal wealth (“it’s all going into a foundation”) because he realizes that he couldn’t possibly spend all the money he has “and all that happens if you leave it all to the next generation is that you spoil your kids.” 


Quite a statement coming from one of the city’s richest and most influential business leaders.


Of course, putting all the money in a foundation isn’t the only answer.   The only way to address the wealth gap, and the decline in social, education and infrastructure spending, to for the government to get more involved — and that means collecting more tax money from the people who can afford to pay it. Hellman told me that he’s not about to accept a reduction in his lifestyle — but we both agreed that he doesn’t have to. He could pay a lot more in taxes and still be really, really rich.


So we talked about my proposal, which goes like this:


I’ve got a suggestion for the pension reform negotiators. Why not talk a little about parity.


 Yes, pensions have to be fixed; let’s start at the top. Maybe nobody should have a pension of more than $100,000 a year; certainly, a former police chief shouldn’t get $250,000 a year for life. Maybe the highest-paid city employees should have to pay more into the pension system to protect the pensions of the people who make less. I could easily support progressive pension reform that would save the city money.


 I just think tax reform should also be part of the equation.


 Hellman wants $300 million in pension savings? Good — how about pairing it with $300 million in new taxes on the wealthy? How about big business and rich people give up something this time around, instead of all of the cuts falling on public employees and poor San Franciscans?


And Hellman, to his credit, didn’t disagree with the concept. His problem he said, was with the politics. “Taxes are the third rail of politics,” he said. “I’ve gotten my head handed to me three times now when I’ve supported tax increases.” 


But I still think there’s a way to move forward here. The city employee unions agree to some sort of pension reform, which starts with a pension cap and higher payments from higher earners (not with what amounts to a pay cut for lower-wage employees who have already taken pay cuts in the past few years). Then Hellman, Mayor Ed Lee and Sup. Sean Elsbernd agree to support a progressive tax measure that would bring in badly needed revenue for public services and education.


It’s possible that the tax measure would have to wait until Nov. 2012, when it would only require a 50 percent vote. Maybe both measures go on that ballot. And Hellman, Elsbernd and Lee use their clout with downtown to push the Chamber of Commerce and the Commitee on JOBS to at least stay neutral and cut off any big-money campaign against the tax measure. Then they all agree to help raise money and campaign to pass it. And labor agrees to work for both measures.


Hellman said he feared that “one would kill the other” and both measures might fail. But I believe the people of San Francisco are willing to support new taxes — progressive new taxes — if they don’t think the money’s going to waste. And pairing pension refrom with new taxes sends a strong message: We’re all sharing the pain. Particularly if Hellman, Elsbernd and Lee can sell the tax package part of the deal to the business community.


It’s worth a try. Because otherwise, we’re going to have another Prop. B battle, both sides are going to spend a ton of money, and nobody’s going to walk away happy.


“It’s worth thinking about,” Hellman told me. I hope so.

Lion dancer takes off his mask

Andrew Lam
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1

Another year and another ferocious super-natural lion symbolically rips and spits out heads of lettuce along the storefronts of Kearny Avenue. This is the lion dance, a highly visceral and visually unique performance that is a centerpiece in the city’s Southwest Airlines Chinese New Year parade, a 150-year old event that draws the participation of over 100 community groups. 

Although each performance is different, one thing stays the same: the lion dancers’ faces are never revealed and their identity stays behind the mask. We were lucky enough to speak with one veteran lion dancer about growing up with the parade and his time inside the lion.

Wilson Mah is a native San Franciscan. He teaches lion dancing at Loong Mah Sing See Wui, or the Dragon Horse Lion and Dragon Dance Association, a non-profit dedicated to teaching the lion dance to its 100 young members between the ages of four and 19. Mah’s organization is one of the main lion dance troupes in this year’s Chinese New Year parade.

In his own youth, Mah was afforded an education about Chinese culture that he spends his adulthood passing on. “When I grew up, it was very common for kids to go to Chinese school right after our public elementary school let out,” Mah says. “The school that I went to was inside of a Methodist church called Hip Wo, I got involved in the parades through my school and the church while I was growing up.”

Mah remembers being affected by the lion dancers at an early age. “I was a baby and I remember being held by my father and watching the lions. I was terrified! For me, that was no paper-mâché symbolic lion. That was a lion that had made its way through heaven and down through the portals to Victory Hall on Stockton Street.”

Mah maintains that it is this unmatched, supernatural quality about the lions which makes them part of a rich Chinese cultural heritage worth holding onto. “When you see that lion and you watch it perform, you see how visceral and tenacious it is. That, contrasted with the idea that they bring good luck, is very powerful. I’m a fourth generation American and I can’t think of anything else equivalent to that.”

Nowadays, Mah uses the strength and tenacity of the lion to empower the youth in his group, encouraging them to manifest the best qualities of the lion both in and out of his class. Mah’s teaching experience dates way back. After dodging the Vietnam War, he set out to do community-based work and helped to establish The Kearny Street Workshop, a historic Asian American arts organization in SoMa. The road that eventually led Mah to teach the lion dance continued smoothly until the early ‘90s, when Mah and his family struggled after their house suffered significant damage from a fire. Mah decided to make something out of the rough situation. “While I was waiting for my house to be rebuilt I wanted to do something constructive.”

He’s been teaching the lion dance ever since. Although the group performs the lion dance at special events and celebrations throughout the year, he says the Chinese New Year Parade is an important opportunity for his dancers to showcase their hard work and cultural pride to the rest of the city. “We do it for the San Francisco community at large,” Mah says. “I still have cultural sensitivities, I’ve gone through racial intolerance growing up. I think it’s important to show the public the beauty of Chinese arts and culture. We want to bring a lot of these things to a positive light.”

 

SF Chinese New Year Parade

Sat/19, 5:30 p.m., free

Starts at Second Street and Market, SF

(415) 986-1370

www.chineseparade.com

 

 

Crazy like a Mission homeboy

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Crazy like a Mission homeboy

caitlin@sfbg.com

LIT Benjamin Bac Sierra, San Francisco City College English composition and literature professor and author of Barrio Bushido, an ode to Mission District vato locos, picks me up in his cherry red-and-black 1972 Chevy Monte Carlo low rider. As an academic who started selling weed in the Army Street projects when he was 10, Bac Sierra is well aware that he has an attention-getting car. As it turns out, it nicely represents his world view.

“I’m not supposed to be driving a Monte Carlo. I’m not supposed to be talking to you like this,” he tells me, his conversation inflected with casual swear words and a rhythm like that of an evangelist preacher, or maybe just a man who feels what comes out of his mouth. “A lot of people go into education and think they have to choose: am I going to be square or am I going to be how I used to be? But you can be intellectual and homeboy-homegirl at the same time.”

Barrio Bushido, Bac Sierra’s first novel, follows the story of three young men who ricochet from romance to brutal gang beatings, PCP leños, larceny, and neglect. Lobo, Santo, and Toro’s world has made them wild gangsters. Author Maxine Hong Kingston has compared Bac Sierra’s prose to that other chronicler of the underground man in uncertain times, Dostoyevsky. Although it hardly glorifies the protagonists, an honor and a beautiful-crazy logic to their deeds does emerge. Bac Sierra holds that the impulsiveness, that locura, needn’t be forgotten when someone leaves the street hustling lifestyle.

“I want to make a line between being a homeboy and the negativity. Craziness is a power — you can’t learn that in a book,” he reflects. We drive by his brother’s old house on Treat and 21st streets — Bac Sierra hears that a PayPal executive lives there now. After Bac Sierra’s father died, his brother, charismatic and clever, brought him up — until his brother wound up in jail and died young.

When Bac Sierra was 17, years after he had dropped out high school and begun dealing angel dust, he had a choice. He could continue his lifestyle, possibly ending up dead or in jail, or “retreat” into the Marines, which represented an honorable discharge, as it were, from the barrio.

Bac Sierra’s experience in the Marines followed the same lines as Toro’s, his headstrong and loyal Barrio Bushido character — to a point. Both of them cleaned up and were promoted to squad leader because of their sheer “craziness.” And both saw serious front line action during the Gulf War. Bac Sierra manned a machine gun as part of the first wave of Marines to land in Kuwait City in 1991. He also began writing in the military, letters home that he would revise “maybe 10 times — I wanted to be heard.” Although he doesn’t specifically recommend military service to young people, he recognizes the value of the discipline learned in the armed forces. “A lot of homeboys don’t do shit,” he says flatly.

After serving, he retained his strong ties to the Mission and his family there. Before his brother died, he was the one who motivated Bac Sierra to get his college degree, not to stop at his master’s in creative writing from UC Berkeley, but to continue on to law school. “Hood logic,” Bac Sierra calls it, the idea that a degree in a concrete field was far better than one writing. Although he hated every day of law school, he can now appreciate the experience and the knowledge it brought him.

He pulls the Monte Carlo over to speak with an older man on the corner across the street from his brother’s old house. “Yo escribí un libro, señor, en honor de mi hermano,” he calls out the window, inviting the man to his upcoming book release party at Mission Cultural Center. Many of his friends from the old neighborhood (he now lives in Richmond, where he is raising two of his four children, Margarita, nine, and Benny, six) are Barrio Bushido‘s biggest supporters. I ask him if it makes him sad, how much the neighborhood has changed since when he grew up. “This is the world. Economics knows no friends.”

I recognize the last line from Barrio Bushido. Its characters speak with an urgent poetry, moving through scenes influenced by Dostoyevsky and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with Gabriel Garcia Márquez-like magical realism. Bac Sierra wants the book to be taught in schools and has set a goal of having it adopted into 50 class sections by next semester.

Other things he hopes for: first, that readers be taken on a journey. “It doesn’t have to be stuffy. I want them to be amazed with the language.” Second, he wants the book to show that life is full of choices. “Start living here in this world,” as he puts it.

His last hope is for a “homeboy resurgence” in the Mission, the neighborhood that was once the center of Latino culture in Northern California. Thursday’s party at the Mission Cultural Center is a start. Bac Sierra is planning a low-rider show, Aztec dancers, a reading, and live music for the event — the positive parts of homeboy culture, like Bac Sierra himself. “I’m fucking straight homeboy,” he says. “I am very efficient. I am always inventing things.” 

BARRIO BUSHIDO BOOK PARTY

Thurs/17 7 p.m., free

Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts

2868 Mission, SF

(415) 643-5001

www.missionculturalcenter.org

Leno forces GOP hand

Zelda Bronstein
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5
Leno forces GOP hand

For whatever tactical reason (or other inexplicable Jerry Brown rationale), the governor has refused to tell Californians what he would cut if he can’t get his tax extensions approved. And the Republicans refuse to say what they would cut instead of letting the taxes continue.


So Sen. Mark Leno did it for them. Leno asked the Legislative Analyst to explain what $13 billion in budget cuts — the “no-new-taxes” budget the GOP wants — might look like.


It’s really, really scary.


For starters, take $4.5 billion away from K-12 education. That means the end to class-size limits for K-3. It’s a huge deal: The Gray Davis measure that limited those classes to 20 students probably did more than anything in decades to save public education in California. You want 40 kids in a kindergarten class with one teacher? You think any of them will be learning to read? Oh, and the state could save $700 million by delaying kindergarten for kids; guess who that impacts? Those kids are going to spend more time in pre-school which either (a) is subsidized by the taxpayers or (b) comes out of the hides of working parents.


Oh, and we’d eliminate food stamps for noncitizens. So people won’t be able to feed their kids. You think crime might become more of a problem? But wait: No room in the prisons.


Then we put college out of the financial reach of middle-class kids and expect to build a 21st century economy. And that’s just the beginning.


Leno deserves thanks for putting this list out; it ought to be in the ballot handbook along with the proposal to continue (not RAISE, just continue) some taxes. And we should all be asking every Republican in Sacramento: Is this what you want? If not, give us an alternative. 


 

Appetite: 1 Bourbon, 1 Scotch, 1 Beer

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Appetite: 1 Bourbon, 1 Scotch, 1 Beer

We San Franciscans are lucky to have a place like the Boothby Center for the Beverage Arts. Debuting last year at SF Cocktail Week as home base for the Barbary Coast Conservancy of the American Cocktail, this year sees the launch of Boothby classes, tastings and events on all things drink.

Naturally, there’s cocktails and spirits heavily represented. But there’s also going to be coffee classes from many of our local favorites on everything from brewing to roasting. There will also be tea and wine seminars, and founder H. Joseph Ehrmann’s Mixology 101 series (with three levels of advancement) for budding and experienced bartenders. 

Price ranges will vary but at this week’s cognac class, a mere $20 provided over an hour and a half of cognac education from New York experts, a side-by-side sampling of four cognacs, and three well-made cocktails from classics to modern inventions. The room was a mix of bartending industry folk and curious tasters, all with a hunger to learn (and imbibe).

Watch for Boothby Center parties during big drink weeks like a whisky-themed event around Whiskies of the World next month. This week clear your calender on Saturday night for 1 Bourbon, 1 Scotch, 1 Beer, a special SF Beer Week tasting where you’ll sample 15 beers and 15 whiskies (from rye to white dog) for the mere sake of discovering their complimenting flavors. Oh, and because they taste good.

1 Bourbon, 1 Scotch, 1 Beer
Sat/19, 6:30-9:30pm
$45 ticket
1161 Mission Street, Suite 120
bourbonscotchbeer-eorg.eventbrite.com 
www.sfcocktailweek.com

–Subscribe to Virgina’s twice monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot: www.theperfectspotsf.com

Artistic boot camp looking for recruits

Andrew Lam
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0

With an average body mass index of 24.8 (measured in 2008), SF rates as the second skinniest city in the United States. Work it out people – all those bikes, parks, and beaches paying off, or at least putting us out ahead in America’s race against obesity. But next to nearly every one of our yoga studios and muscle gyms is an art gallery. It’s fair to say that art appreciation is as ingrained in San Francisco culture as athletic mastery – but where does one go to buff up one’s rock hard appreciation of digital art film and radical myth iconography? Enter Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ new program, “YBCA: YOU”, currently accepting applications (this means you) for a free program that’ll have you doing heavy lifting of the city’s creative offerings in no time.

Your coach: Laurel Butler, an education and engagement specialist. From March 3 through November 30, Butler will act as an arts-focused personal trainer for up to 100 participants in the YOU program, crunching through a highly personalized, dynamic arts education curriculum. Her trainees will enjoy free admission to all YBCA performances, films, exhibitions and community engagement events, and are encouraged to use the all-access pass as they would a gym membership – minus the on-site showers and grunting, one imagines.

“Ultimately, we want more people having better and deeper experiences with art,” says Joël Tan, YBCA’s director of community engagement. “This pilot is about an actual live human guide connecting with individuals and small groups to experience arts and cultural events that are custom-tailored to their aspirations, desires, and educational goals. Tan invites “anyone looking to build their aesthetic muscles to register, whether they want to learn a few pointers for their next cocktail party or attend all the openings in town and just need the motivation to do it.”

You can register for YOU’s March 3rd orientation by e-mailing lbutler@ybca.org by February 28. See more details about the hows, whys, and wherefores of who is eligible at the website below. And don’t forget about us when you’re the next Taschen, mmkay? 

 

“YBCA: YOU”

Registration open through Mon/28, 5 p.m.

First orientation: March 3, 6-8 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission St, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org 

 

The Free University of San Francisco kicks off teaching — to a lot of white people

Andrew Lam
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71

“A piece of blank paper means anything you want can happen,” SF beat poet laureate Diane Di Prima was imparting a rare free lecture on shamanic poetry, the marquee event of this weekend’s popular first Free University of San Francisco teach-in at Viracocha. She had a packed the antique store-community center’s first floor showroom, encouraging in regards to the FUSF collective’s run at making free education available to all. But if the Free University wants to teach the world, why are the vast majority of its students – let’s not parse words here – white?

“Diversity outreach, that is absolutely one of our top priorities,” says FUSF organizer Alan Kaufman when the point was brought up in a phone interview with the Guardian yesterday. “We’re one of the most racially polarized cities, even in the progressive community. It’s something that needs to be explored and discussed.” Kaufman said that as the collective that runs the university moves forward, FUSF is actively working to involve minority community members – especially undocumented immigrants, one of SF’s populations who surely are among the least-served by the town’s would-be progressive creative institutions. 

It does seem like FUSF has the capacity to be a source of radical academia and community in the city. This weekend’s teach-in (which continues through tonight, Tues/8) attracted capacity crowds to many of its popular hour-and-a-half long courses: Di Prima’s “19th Century Visionary Poetry,” Kaufman’s “Jack Kerouac, Thelonius Monk and Jackson Pollack,” and David Cobb’s “Abolishing Corporate Personhood to Create Authentic Democracy” among them. Though FUSF’s plan for six to eight week classes in the future and another teach-in may be a stretch to replace the value of an actual university degree for students, the success of its initial weekend course schedule does say that some people in the city are ready to rethink the way we view teaching. After all, as Kaufman reminded us, the cost of a four year degree at Stanford is now pegged at a quarter of a million dollars. “That can’t last.” 

But if it’s going to be SF’s new center of alternative, cost-free education, FUSF has to appeal to more than just the aging hippies and earnest intellectual young people who attended this weekend’s teach-in. 

How? Well, that’s the question, really – one that many creative institutions in San Francisco have yet to resolve, if they’ve tackled it at all. “We’re going to need to come up with new answers because the new answers are not working.” Kaufman mentioned that he is particularly impressed by the way SF’s queer community has celebrated its diversity.

“I feel like there are reasons why different groups don’t get involved in the beginning of these things.” Writer Maisha Johnson is one of the only African Americans who has been involved with the Free University planning meetings since she heard about its first get-togethers through her involvement in literary events like Quiet Lightening. “For me, living in San Francisco, it’s hard to find out where the black community gathers. A lot of the time, the assumption is you go to Oakland for acitivities with people of color.” 

“If you’re looking at organizational power in San Francisco, it usually runs along lines of whiteness, maleness, and straightness. The only way to break down those social divisions is for people that don’t feel like they’re that similar to collaborate,” says Mumbles, a spoken word poet who is helping to organize an artist resource center called Merchants of Reality. 

Mumbles says that the goal of Merchants of Reality – which plans to operate out of SoMa’s Anon Gallery and Climate Theater — will be “to help artists commercialize themselves so that others don’t do it for them.” Its a pragmatic mission, one that will even involve what Mumbles refers to as the “realty community” in order to help artists find studio space in the abandoned buildings that dot the SF landscape. The center will also include darkroom facilities, digital video setup, screen-printing equipment, help finding studio space, and a possible performance venue, all for use by artists who normally don’t have the opportunity to use professional-grade equipment and materials, presumably many non-white artists and performers. 

Kaufman and Mumbles think that Merchants of Reality and the Free University can benefit from each other. “Space sharing is one way community can be developed,” says Kaufman, who told us the two groups are looking at ways to overlap each others’ missions in the hope of broadening the community of both organizations. 

Of course, its about more than organizational partners. “It requires more of an explicit effort to reach out to other communities,” says Johnson who will be a part of FUSF’s outreach committee and, adding that she’s heartened by the university’s chances to diversify itself. “Right now it’s really open to people to come in and work on their own vision.” Kaufman agreed that expanding FUSF’s audience means working towards a curriculum that everyone finds useful and illuminating, incorporating classes and promotional materials in different languages, and connecting those typically excluded from professorships in the United States teaching positions. “There’s whole areas of education that others might know about that we might not consider,” he said.

“I believe our university will become famous among universities – come to be known as the ‘Zorro’ of universities,” said Kaufman in an address to the university community. (Printed copies of his four addresses were available by the class sign-in sheets at this weekend’s teach-in.) High hopes — but if the school is meant to make a real difference in progressive education, it’ll have to find a way to bring its message to everyone.  

 

Free University of San Francisco’s first teach-in

(Started Feb. 5)

Tues/8 classes:

6-7:50 p.m.: “Critical Thinking (Introduction to Logic)”

w/ Jordan Bohall and Elena Granik

8-10 p.m.: “Introduction to Nietzsche”

w/ Evan Karp and Andrew Paul Nelson

Viracocha

998 Valencia, SF

fusf.wordpress.com


 

Dick Meister: Black Porters Led the Way

Maria Poblet
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0

Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century.


February is Black History Month, a good time to honor the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, one of the most important yet too often overlooked leaders in the long struggle for racial equality.

The union, the first to be founded by African Americans, was involved deeply in political as well as economic activity. It joined with the NAACP to serve as the major political vehicle of African Americans from the late 1930s through the 1950s.

Together, the two organizations led the drives in those years against racial discrimination in employment, housing, education and other areas, and in doing so, laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The need for a porters’ union was painfully obvious. Porters commonly worked 12 or more hours a day on the Pullman Company’s sleeping car coaches for less than $100 a month. And out of that, they had to pay for their meals, uniforms, even the polish they used to shine passengers’ shoes. They got no fringe benefits, although they could ride the trains for half-fare on their days off – providing they were among the very few with the time and money to do so. And providing they didn’t ride a Pullman coach.

In order to meet their basic living expenses, porters had to draw on the equally meager earnings of their wives, who were almost invariably employed as domestics.
 
It was a marginal and humiliating experience for porters. They were rightly proud of their work, a pride that showed in their smiling, dignified bearing. But porters knew that no matter how well they performed, they would never be promoted to higher-paying conductors’ jobs. Those jobs were reserved for white men.

Porters knew most of all that their white passengers and white employers controlled everything. It was they alone who decided what the porters must do and what they’d get for doing it.

When a passenger pulled the bell cord, porters were to answer swiftly and cheerfully. Just do what the passengers asked – or demanded. Shine their shoes, fetch them drinks, make their beds, empty their cuspidors. And more. No questions, no complaints, no protests. No rights. Nothing better epitomized the vast distance between black and white in American society.

Hundreds of porters who challenged the status quo by daring to engage in union activity or other concerted action were fired. But finally, the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt granted workers, black and white, the legal right to unionize. And finally, in 1937, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters won a union contract from Pullman.

The contract was signed exactly 12 years after union president and founder A. Philip Randolph had called the union’s first organizing meeting in New York City. It was a long arduous struggle, but it brought the porters out of poverty. It won them pay at least equal to that of unionized workers in many other fields , a standard workweek, and full range of fringe benefits. Most important, porters won the right to continue to bargain collectively with Pullman on those and other vital matters.

Union President Randolph and Vice President C.L. Dellums, who succeeded Randolph in 1968, led the drive that pressured President Roosevelt into several important actions against discrimination, including the creation of a Fair Employment Practices Commission in housing as well as employment. FDR agreed to set up the commission – a model for several state commissions – and take other anti-discrimination steps only after Randolph and Dellums threatened to lead a march on Washington by more than 100,000 black workers  and others who were demanding federal action against discrimination.

Dellums and Randolph struggled as hard against discrimination inside the labor movement, particularly against the practice of unions setting up segregated locals, one for white members, one for black members.

Randolph, elected in 1957 as the AFL-CIO’s first African-American vice president, long was known as the civil rights conscience of the labor movement, often prodding federation President George Meany and other conservative AFL-CIO leaders to take stands against racial discrimination.

The sleeping car coaches that once were the height of travel luxury have long since disappeared, and there are very few sleeping car porters in this era of less-than-luxurious train travel. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is gone, too. But before the union disappeared, it had reached goals as important as any ever sought by an American union – or by any other organization anywhere.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.

California is an even richer state

Zelda Bronstein
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15
California is an even richer state

Jerry Brown pointed out in his State of the State address that California is a rich state; I’m not sure Jerry saw the latest from Vanity Fair, but I think his estimates of increased personal income might be a bit low. VF loves to dig into the lives (and fortunes) of Hollywood types, and the latest list of the highest-paid people in the film industry is interesting.


James Cameron made $257 million last year. Guess what? He lives in Malibu. That’s Malibu, California. Guess what? If we raised his taxes a little he’d still live in Malibu. In fact, he wouldn’t even notice.


Johnny Depp made $100 million, but he lives in France these days. But Steven Spielberg, who made $80 million without even working, lives in Los Angeles. So does Christopher Nolan $71.5 million) and Leo DeCaprio ($62 million). Kristen Stewart ($28.5 million lives in L.A. too, though I hear she wants to move to Australia; income taxes there are higher than the U.S., though, so she won’t be fleeing the taxman.


Got that? Four people, $477.5 million, last year alone. Yes, my friends, we can afford public education. 

California is a rich state

Zelda Bronstein
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9
California is a rich state

My favorite part of the State of the State speech (full text here) was a bit of perspective that almost everyone has ignored. It went like this:


We are still a very rich society. In two years alone, Californians will have added more than $100 billion to their personal income. Yet, our State’s credit rating is the lowest of the 50 states, unemployment is higher than the national average and some journalists are calling California a “failed state.”


In two years, Californians will have added more than $100 billion to their personal income. And given that 20 percent of all income eanred in the U.S. goes to the top 1 percent of Americans. $20 billion of that new income will go to the very richest Californians. More than 60 percent of all income earned goes to the richest 20 percent, which would mean $60 billion in income to people who are already richer than four of five Californians.


Brown gets this, clearly. And he’s no fool; I think he can do simple math. Which would lead you to conclude that an increase in the state income tax for the top brackets could bring in a huge chunk of change — without harming the economic recovery. (And don’t give me that trickle down shit; facts are facts, and the top 1 percent of income earners are far less likely to spend their marginal dollar, creating jobs. They sock it away, creating wealth for future generations.)


I know the idea of talking about higher income taxes is political death, but when we talk about frugality and tightening our belts, let’s remember: California is still a very rich state. We can afford things like public education. Even the governor says so.

Our Weekly Picks: February 2-8

Andrew Lam
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0

WEDNESDAY 2

MUSIC

Billy and Dolly

Have you noticed? Like clockwork, the buds on the ornamental plum trees are starting to power pop their thin pink petals, making sidewalks more poetic all across the city. Ephemeral yet impressive, the changing season awakens melodies of Billy and Dolly, the local singing and songwriting duo formerly of the Monolith. The guy-girl combo is backed by the Tell-Tale Hearts, a sonic unity of 20 Minute Loop’s rockin’ guitar-bass team and the Monolith’s drummer. The harmonies are deliciously poppy and achingly bittersweet, reminiscent of Elliott Smith, were he not so chronically bummed and had a lovely lady voice as a complement. Beware: between the trees and the tunes, it’s all so pretty, it just might hurt your heart. (Kat Renz)

With Tristen and the Corner Laughers

8 p.m., $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

 

MUSIC

Hymn For Her

You think living in a studio apartment with two roommates is cozy? Well, think again. ‘Cause you’ve got nothing on Lucy Tight and Wayne Waxing, of Americana duo Hymn For Her that live, record, and tour in their 16-foot, 1961 Bambi Airstream trailer — along with a baby and dog. And they somehow manage to fit a three-stringed, broom-handle cigar box, banjo, dobro, bass drum, hi-hat, and harp in there, too. In true Hymn For Her fashion, its newest release, the cleverly spelled Lucy and Wayne and the Amairican Stream, was recorded at various campgrounds and friends’ driveways while on tour. Better catch them before they pack up Bambi and hit the road. (Jen Verzosa)

With Tippy Canoe

Wed/2, 7 p.m., free

Mama Buzz Café

2138 Telegraph, Oakl.

(510) 465-4073

www.mamabuzzcafe.com

With That Ghost

Thurs/3, 9 p.m., call for price

Amnesia

853 Valencia, SF

(415) 970-0012

www.amnesiathebar.com

Sun/6, 9 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

www.hemlocktavern.com

 

THURSDAY 3

DANCE

Jess Curtis/Gravity

Jess Curtis/Gravity is a company that lives up to, and defies, the connotations in that noun attached to the name of its artistic director. Choreographer-performer Curtis and his eclectic collaborators display an alternately cool and passionate, always irreverent intelligence, wholly immersed in the unfathomable ocean of the human body. They’re the Jacques Cousteaus of this deep: its champions and endlessly curious, enthralled students. For audiences, that means a good time, a weird time, a heavy-breathing and emotionally up-heaving time, and a time to question things we thought we knew. The company’s latest voyage, Dances for Non/Fictional Bodies, is a sprawling work whose central event — a subjectivity-shifting convergence of “nontraditional” dancer-bodies — sets sail this weekend. (Robert Avila)

Thurs/3–Sat/6, 8 p.m., $25

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

MUSIC

Ozzy Osbourne

Though he’s backed by a new lead guitarist (Greek virtuoso Gus G.) and brandishing a new album, Ozzy Osbourne isn’t likely to conquer much new territory on his 2011 Scream tour. Nor does anyone want him to. The Prince of Fucking Darkness is still revered by a healthy portion of the headbanging public, a polity that will undoubtedly spend the show demanding a hearty helping of songs from his ant-snorting, dove-decapitating, “Crazy Train”-riding salad days. Whatever your opinion on the world’s most incomprehensible celebrity, his charisma can still get an arena rocking. Whether that’s because of — or in spite of — his infallible propensity for mooning the audience, no one can say. But as the Blizzard of Ozz would no doubt put it: “who fucking cares?” (Ben Richardson)

With Slash featuring Myles Kennedy

7:30 p.m., $44–$92

H.P. Pavilion

525 West Santa Clara, San Jose

(408) 287-7070

www.hppsj.com

 

FRIDAY 4

EVENT

“San Francisco Bike Party February 2011 Ride: Love Your Bike”

It’s prettiest much the buzziest thing on SF bikes since American-made handlebar beer can — uh, cup — holders: the SF Bike Party, spawned from the San Jose Bike Party and a member of the same family as the East Bay Bike Party. Sources say the mass bike ride, which makes complete stops for traffic lights and the occasional drink-and-mingle sidewalk party, marks a logical evolution for the city bike activism. Despite what the comments on SF Gate say, cycles in the city are no longer the purview of a handful of iron-calved fixie followers — there’s room for a little softness among the two-wheeled, which explains this month’s V-Day-ready ride theme: “love your bike.” A map of the route will be available on the group’s website closer to push-off. (Caitlin Donohue)

7:30 p.m., free

www.sfbikeparty.wordpress.com

 

MUSIC

Madlib

Titles are de rigueur in hip-hop. O.D.B. once attended a debutante ball that ended before his introduction finished. (His date was devastated.) Otis Jackson Jr., best known as Madlib and other variations (Madvillain with fellow schizo MF Doom, Jaylib with late sobriquet champion J Dilla) has racked up numerous names over the last two decades. For Madlib, the aliases are appropriate given the diverse projects he tackles as DJ, producer, MC, and uber stoner (expect at least a contact high.) His latest release, Madlib Medicine Show, is a gargantuan monthly series of 12 albums that attempt to fill in the blanks on your understanding of hip-hop. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Robot Koch, Change the Beat, and more

10 p.m., $15

103 Harriet, SF

(415) 431-1200

www.1015.com

 

DANCE

“Rotunda Dance Series: Leung’s White Crane Chinese Lion Dancing”

Just a day after Chinese new year begins, the blaring drums, clashing cymbals, soaring lions, and dancing dragons of Leung’s White Crane Chinese Lion Dancing appear in San Francisco City Hall, bringing the colorful ancient tradition to the free lunchtime Rotunda Dance Series, copresented by Dancers’ Group and World Arts West. The three Leung brothers — Kuen, Kwan and Allen — moved to SF in the 1970s, carrying the Lion Dancing teachings of their master Kwong Boon Fu from Hong Kong. Performing internationally and teaching in Chinatown for more than 35 years, they are treasured for their larger-than-life performances in the city’s Chinese New Year Parade. (Julie Potter)

Noon, free

San Francisco City Hall

One Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF

(415) 720-8830

www.dancersgroup.org

 

SATURDAY 5

EVENT

“Free University of San Francisco Teach-in”

An idea this crazy just might work! Sick of the gouge-y tuition hikes in our public and private education systems, a band of merry SF radicals have decided to launch an ambitious campaign to free learnin’. After a surprisingly light number of planning meetings, this is the first of the Free University’s offerings: a weekend of classes to inspire and hopefully serve as a community-builder for those who think our current university system is broken. On the lectern: beat poet Diane di Prima on 19th century visionary poetry, revolutionary poet Bobby Coleman on SF labor history, classes on criminal procedure, paganism, Kerouac, and more. (Donohue)

Sat/5, 9:30 a.m.–4 p.m.;

Sun/6, 9 a.m.–4 p.m., free

Viracocha

998 Valencia, SF

www.fusf.wordpress.com

 

SUNDAY 6

FILM

Every Man for Himself

Forever the enfant terrible of cinema, Jean-Luc Godard is skipping the lifetime achievement lineup at this year’s Oscars. This has stirred up a predictably dumb controversy in the American press over bullshit claims that Godard is anti-Semitic. Never mind the philistines — we’re still awaiting a local screening of the maestro’s 2010 Film Socialism. In the meantime, a 35mm restoration of 1980’s Every Man for Himself at the Red Vic does nicely. Godard called this lyrical examination of art and commerce intertwined his second first film, and its formal ingenuities and philosophical knots remain refreshing. Support the Red Vic by ponying up for extra popcorn! (Max Goldberg)

Sun/6–Mon/7, 7:15 and 9:15 p.m.

Also Sun/6, 2 and 4 p.m., $6–$9

Red Vic Movie House

1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

www.redvicmoviehouse.com

 

MONDAY 7

EVENT

“Replikaaa Silent Happening: A Multimedia Performance Art Event”

Sometimes you just don’t have much to say. Or perhaps your ears are ringing from all those noisy bars. To exercise the other senses visit this chic silent cocktail party where guests practice the art of nonverbal communication, watching and connecting without words. The unusual and participatory social experience presented by Al’Myra Communications includes a preview screening of Tayeb Al-Hafez’s silent film Replikaaa, a mysterious and futuristic work about five DNA and organ traffickers, to be followed by local artist performances. Reserve a free ticket online and then shut your mouth. Whether you wink, gesticulate, or show some funky dance moves is up to you. Chatty Cathys discouraged. (Potter)

7 p.m., free

Z Space

450 Florida, SF

(415) 891-9544

www.replikaaathemovie.com

 

TUESDAY 8

MUSIC

Sebadoh

In the vein of Guided By Voices and Pavement, Sebadoh has been dubbed “the quintessential indie rock band of the 1990s” — and like that decade’s flannel-shirt trend, they’re back. After getting the heave-ho in 1988 as bassist of alt-rock band Dinosaur Jr. (he rejoined in 2005), multi-instrumentalist Lou Barlow focused on the DIY project he had started with Eric Gaffney. Sebadoh soon became infamous for its bipolar swings from lo-fi, touchy-feely folk to experimental noise rock. With the addition of bassist Jason Loewenstein, the three-piece became a hit among the hip. Eventually Gaffney jumped ship (he rejoined in 2007) and was replaced by drummer Bob Fay. This lineup recorded the band’s most accessible albums, 1994’s Bakesale and 1996’s Harmacy, both of which are being re-released by Sub Pop Records this year and are the reason for the current tour. (Verzosa)

With Quasi

7 p.m., $20

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.gamh.com

 

FILM

The Ipcress File

Move over, Christopher Walken: there’s a new star du jour for celebrity imitation freaks. You can’t help but try your hand at Michael Caine’s Cockney accent after watching the hilarious clip from the BBC show The Trip of comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon engaging in a rousing round of dueling Caine-jos. (Search “This is how Michael Caine speaks” on YouTube. You’re welcome.) Polish your early-period Caine impersonation by checking out a rare screening of 1965 secret-agent thriller The Ipcress File, which showcases the legendary actor in his first starring role. The film plays as part of four nights of highlights from the “Mostly British Film Festival,” with other entries hailing from New Zealand and Australia. (Cheryl Eddy)

7 p.m., $10.25

Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center

1118 Fourth St., San Rafael

(415) 454-1222

www.cafilm.org

 

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“I guess I just want other people to solve the Rubik’s cube”

Andrew Lam
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0

This much was clear. A conference room full of middle and high schoolers had been assembled and were now working out math problems. On a Sunday. To someone who wept through stats homework, it seemed like a game of Clue, who done this? At the lectern, a man shared formulas one might find useful in attempting a rapid solution of the Rubik’s cube. A series of x’s and y’s to the nth power flashed before the hushed underage audience.

Were these kids really into what was going on, or was this some well-orchestrated parent plot to shut down a perfectly good weekend? It was Mom in the living room with the bribes and threats about not getting into college! But board game detective I was not. This became apparent when the young man in a hoody sitting on my left picked up a cube offhandedly. Without fanfare, his hands began to blur. He lined up the colors in well under a minute and set the cube back down. Welcome to last weekend’s Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival, where math, it appeared, was not just a problem to be solved.

“If you want to put it in basketball terms.” Festival co-organizer Joshua Zucker is explaining to me the difference between kids doing math “exercises,” which he says comprise the majority of schoolwork these days, and “problem solving.” Please, I encourage him, put it in basketball terms. “Exercises are like dribbling down an empty court. Problem solving, that’s like dribbling down a court with a defender on you. Computers do exercises – we want kids to learn how to think.” To further illustrate his point, he proposes I perform a simple mental game involving twisting my wrists together. Blinded by my fear of math, I fail miserably, and he patiently reiterates what I must do to free myself.

Round tables fill the Pauley Ballroom in UC Berkeley’s Martin Luther King, Jr. student union, at which are seated young students, math professionals, and various UC Berkeley faculty. They do not appear to be worried a whit by the prospect of the boxes and equations before them. Each table houses a few kinds of math challenges: here, kids are constructing a massive fractal cube made from folded bits of paper. There, scholars puzzle over math “magic” tricks and geometry formulas, aided by a female NASA scientist. There’s no clear stop and start time – participants circulate around the room at their own pace, parents in tow or mercifully mingling in the seating area at the room’s fringes.

The festival’s format is constructed to encourage kids to think about why we do math — and we’re not talking about that scholarship to Cal here but instead that little thing about how math helps us figure out the world around us (which I concede, if grudgingly). Accordingly, an instruction sheet written by Zucker greets table leaders at the event’s entrance cautioning them that “you’re welcome to encourage group work when you see good opportunities, or encourage individual work, but don’t encourage too strongly: mostly let the kids decide whether they want to work on their own or with their neighbors.” This looseness is a deliberate departure from the other form of extra-curricular activity for the numbers set (ha!): the math competition, and has much to do with the festival’s namesake, female math pioneer and UC Berkeley professor Julia Robinson, who tackled complex theories in the days before people were fully keen on the concept of female mathematicians.

“We think the non-contest atmosphere is more conducive to girls,” says Zucker, who used to teach math at the girls-only Castilleja School in Palo Alto, comparing the festival’s roughly 60-40 boy-girl ratio with the typical 70-30 that one sees at the higher-pressure math contests. Girls, the assumption goes, aren’t into parading their smarts all over the place.

It’s a theory that’s borne out by what I witness at the festival. For the most part, the boys are quick to acknowledge when they perform a particularly astute calculation. The girls seem more content to listen and work through equations on their own steam, though it must be said that a few are far from retiring. 

California College Preparatory Academy ninth grader Breanna Alleyne drags family friend Aaron Johnson over to the table where I sit, puzzling with the mathemagic tricks. The two plow their way through problems along with the help of Eleanor Long, a San Francisco charter school math teacher who came to observe at the festival but wound up working though problems with the students at her table – a kneejerk reaction, it would seem, of a committed educator encountering the academically earnest. 

“We’ve developed a tradition around the event,” says Breanna’s mom Fatima Alleyne, who I catch up with at her welcome table post, where she is checking in festival attendees. Breanna, I note, approaches the subject lightheartedly at the problem-solving tables, and Fatima, a materials scientist at UC Berkeley who works with resonated devices, says their three years of attendance at the festival has to do with framing math in a light that she feels is missing from traditional classrooms these days. “I don’t think you have to have a developed appreciation of math to really enjoy it in this setting. I just want her to see math in a different way than how she gets it in school.”

I ask Alleyne about how times have changed between her years coming up in school and those of Breanna’s. She remembers her scientific curiosity being sparked by her participation in science fairs and other “enrichment activities” outside of school hours. Alleyne just doesn’t see those same diverse opportunities for learning these days. “The activities that encouraged you to participate in math and science – they’re just no longer in existence.”

This relative dearth in chances outside the classroom to connect with like-minded scholars may be one reason why some kids at Julia Robinson clearly benefit from being around the old pros that help out at the festival. Take sixth grader Kyle Asano, who watched the Rubik’s cube lecture sitting on the other side of Scott Okamura, the Rubik’s whiz who had shocked me in the first place and who turned out to be a freshman at Cal who helps facilitate a free speedcubing course. I ask Okamura why he spends his precious free hours away from his math major instructing others in the art of square. “I guess I just want other people to know how to solve the Rubik’s cube,” he smiles. 

Asano, who estimates his best cube-solving time at a minute and 18 seconds, tells us that he, along with a few school friends at Cupertino Middle School, is really into the cubes. “The center cube decides which color the side’s going to be,” he gracefully informs us before pumping Okamura for more info on his particular cube-solving techniques. Later I spot the two at another table, whizzing through 3-D puzzles that would stump an unseasoned hand (mine). Proof in the Pythagorean, it would seem, that the Julia Robinson Festival does indeed provide a thought provoking math experience – in or out of the box.

Photo, above right: Scott Okamura and Kyle Asano, math aficionados squared. Photo by Caitlin Donohue

 

Medi-Cal and cell phones: The ugly truth

Zelda Bronstein
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3
Medi-Cal and cell phones: The ugly truth

There’s a chilling comment from political consultant Dan Schnur in the Los Angeles Times. In a fascinating story by Tony York, Schnur talks about the difference between image and reality in California’s budget wars:


“Cut $1 billion out of Medi-Cal and most voters won’t notice. Take away some cellphones and make legislators sit on a picnic bench, and they pay attention,” he said.


Yep: Jerry Brown is saving the state a few million dollars by cutting cell phones for state workers and replacing a fancy conference table in his office with a cheap one. And that’s gotten a lot of press — as Jerry, the old master, knew that it would. We still live in a state, and a nation, where symbolism matters more than substance.


Republicans still get away with saying that the governor needs to cut state employee pay and benefits — although you could fire (that is, cut all pay and benefits) for every one of the state’s 240,000 employees and you wouldn’t be close to balancing the budget. (What nobody says is that the majority of state spending in California goes for local programs — what legislator wants to call on the governor to cut funding for his or her district? Not even the Republicans do that.) Little cuts like Brown’s mean nothing, and are easily wiped up by the daily, unpredictable ebb and flow of tax receipts.


And yet, Brown has to send a message that he’s being frugal, so he gets rid of his conference table (did he sell it? For how much?) And it works.


And, of course, nobody ever talks about how much the state wastes in corporate tax breaks; it’s much easier to take away some Caltrans worker’s phone.


I wish Brown could really tell the truth in his State of the State speech — that the stuff people get agitated about is chump change, that a huge cut to Medi-Cal means people dying (but not today, and you can’t prove the link, and poor people die all the time and the press never notices), that cuts to education mean more poverty (and crime, and public expense) in the future, that we’ve already cut (or pupt off with gimmicks) about $30 billion in spending, and that the state has a serious revenue problem.


But he knows he can’t do that. People won’t vote for his tax plan unless he looks like he’s somehow punishing state workers and flagellating himself. Good thing the Jesuits trained him.


 

GOP is wrong: Most Californians want taxes

Zelda Bronstein
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50
GOP is wrong: Most Californians want taxes

The Public Policy Institute of California generally has some of the most reliable polls in the state. It’s not a partisan group or part of anyone’s campaign, and the questions tend to be framed in a fair manner. So I take the results of the PPIC polls as a decent indicator of where the state is going.


And where it’s going right now could not be more clear: A vast majority of Californians in the latest PPIC poll want to see a June ballot measure to address the state budget, and they support higher taxes, particularly to save education. And 60 percent think the state should raise taxes on corporations.


It’s going to be tricky: Gov. Brown will need two Republicans in each house to go along if he wants to get a tax measure on the ballot. And the GOP is holding out for changes in the state pension system, which is a complex issue and will be hard to nail down in the short time that remains before the Legislature would have to vote on a June ballot measure. But Brown has the support of the public — even the support of most Republican voters — so it’s possible.


“I’m crossing my fingers,” Assembly member Tom Ammiano told me. “But I think we can get there.”

Century-old smut hits the Red Vic

Andrew Lam
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0
Century-old smut hits the Red Vic

Sex education, y’all. Despite the fact that today’s parents outsource math lessons to Blue’s Clues, play time to iPhones, and secret homosexual programming to Gabba Gabba Hey!, the continuing furor over sex education in schools just refuses to quit talking, finish its drink, and go home. But, as a reclaimed 1900s reel of French brothel movies showing at the Red Vic Movie House this weekend (Fri/28 – Mon/31) proves, sex ed has always been around – it just used to happen in whorehouses.

The Good Old Naughty Days is a 69 (ha! Really!)-minute collection of silent shorts that were found in a well-to-do French family’s attic nearly a century after they were filmed. Most likely, according to the film’s producer Michel Reilhac, they were shot by conventional film crews on their day off. They’re low-budget affairs whose most salient expense was the fees of the prostitutes who starred in them — men and women whose bodies are un-siliconed and unaware of the histrionic boinking that would some day pass for erotic film. The movies were co-opted by brothels, who would play them in their waiting rooms as young gentleman killed time before their whoring. 

Which was, of course, where young cats learned about sex back in those days. When they showed up as virgins to the bordello, berets and handlebar mustaches a-twitchin’, these were the films to at least prevent them from shouting “qu’est-ce que c’est!” when their lady of the evening shuffled off her chemise (or their gentleman of the night his breeches, lest we forget). There’s gay and lesbian couplings, even priests and nuns — these last having a good time with candles.

Judging from The Good Old Naughty Days, them last century folk even got down in ways that we cultured cyborgs might find a wee bit mutt-like – apparently there’s a scene with a pooch unconcerned with which species recieves his Rover. In an interview with the UK Guardian (our namesake, holler), Reilhac says a few women took offense at this inter-mammal consorting at an early screening, to which he had this to offer: “thank God I took out the duck scene.”

But do not mourn the loss of this duck scene, San Francisco. Go out and be ever so naughty at the Red Vic – the two and four p.m. showings on Saturday and Sunday might make for a tasty post-brunch educational session. Just remember there is no sex-for-money waiting for you by the popcorn machine. Just wooden bowls, probably.

 

The Good Old Naughty Days

Fri/28 – Mon/31 7:15 and 9:15 p.m. (also Sat/29 – Sun/30 2 and 4 p.m.), $8

Red Vic Movie House

1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

www.redvicmoviehouse.com

 

Hot sexy events January 26 – February 1

Andrew Lam
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0
Hot sexy events January 26 – February 1

Glory be OneTaste. This SF-based company is devoted to the singular pursuit of female pleasure, offering lessons in their “slow sex” technique, detailed re-programming of one’s touch-stroke-lick that all but guarantees that at-times elusive female orgasm. Believe it. Fitness-business guru-crazy Tim Ferriss describes a class with OneTaste in his new book The 4-Hour Body as being highly informative and bewilderingly hands-on. He also likens the female genitalia to an Imperial Guard from Star Wars, but that is besides the point (kind of). At any rate, OneTaste is conducting a one-off course at the Polk Street Good Vibrations this week on discovering your deepest desires (Mon/31), making it but one of the can’t-miss sex events on offer out there in pervertlandia. Enjoy, kids!


Bare Chest Calendar semi-finals

For 28 years, iron-chested menfolk have bravely paraded their bulging pectorals about for a good cause – the Bare Chest Calendar, which raises money for the AIDS Emergency Fund and Positive Resources Center. You can nobly help in the effort, just attend the semi-final and final rounds of the contest that will determine next year’s calendar boys and cheer your ass off. By the looks of the contenders, that shouldn’t be too difficult.

Thurs/27 9:30 p.m., 

Powerhouse

1347 Folsom, SF

www.barechest.org


Transgender HIV/STI testing 

Sure, it happens every week, but that’s no reason not to give St. James’ Infirmary a shout-out over their excellent, sensitive testing and trans-hormone-knowledgeable services that are available each Thursday afternoon. With all the scary cuts in the area as of late (see event Sun/30), it’s good to know that there are still safe, friendly places to go to stay healthy, happy, and sexy.

Thurs/27 1 – 4 p.m., free

St. James’ Infirmary

1372 Mission, SF

(415) 554-9634

www.stjamesinfirmary.org

email sjimedical@yahoo.com for appointment


Boots

Chaps is putting the call out for boot pigs, so oink oink Wilbur – grease up your city Stompers and cruise to Folsom Street. There’s nothing sexier for a leatherman than the threat of getting crushed under the stampede of hairy-chested hotties that will be thrusting out their steel toes for a buff by bootblack Miss V. The Stompers gang hosts and who’s that behind the bar? The sexy David, that’s who.

Sat/29 9 p.m. – 2 a.m., free

Chaps 

1225 Folsom, SF

(415) 255-2427

www.chapsbarsanfrancisco.com


Hotties 4 H0m0 Health Care: A Fundraiser for Lyon-Martin Health Services 

Not cool. There’s not enough clinics in this city-state-universe that cater to queer women and transgendered folk, and one of the finest, Lyon-Martin Health Services, is facing closure due to serious financial problems. How much do they need to keep their doors open? Try $250,000 – which sounds like a lot, but given all the hullabaloo the community is raising to keep the place afloat, it’s totally doable. Here’s one way to support the clinic: shaking your ass to DJ Bootie Klap and wriggling in time to performances by burlesque star Dottie Lux and friends. (Here’s some other ways, too!)

Sun/30 7-10 p.m., $5-20 sliding scale

El Rio 

3158 Mission, SF

(415) 282-3325

Facebook: Hotties for H0m0 Health Care


Eclipse

Hey ladies, Ms. Cat (leather community stalwart and 2010 Ms. Leather runner-up) is celebrating her birthday and she needs  you to reel back that hand and give her a good day-of-birth spanking. The Citadel’s female-only BDSM party, Eclipse, is back in action, which means you should pack up your toys, friends, or just come solo and open to this dungeon time-party time. 

Sat/29 8 p.m. – 1 a.m., $25 members only

SF Citadel

1277 Mission, SF

(415) 626-2746

www.sfcitadel.org


The Depths of Desire 

Secret longings are all well and good, as long as the longers themselves know what they are. Local sex education group OneTaste (famed for the dissection of the female orgasm) breaks down what one can do to get at one’s deepest longings and sassiest salaciousness.  

Mon/31 6 – 8 p.m., $20-25

Good Vibrations 

1620 Polk, SF

(415) 345-0500

www.goodvibes.com

 

Obama can’t “win” the future

Zelda Bronstein
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5
Obama can’t “win” the future

 


Most of the pundits in the center, like the New York Times, liked Obama’s State of the Union Speech. And for good reason: It was a centrist, cautious speech that promised lower corporate taxes, conservative education policy, lots of money for the military and cuts for everyone else. Two things, thought, that stood out for me:


1. Obama still believes in government. He made it very clear that he thinks the public sector has an important role to play, not just in regulation but in spurring and stimulating economic growth. He’s going about it all wrong, but he did remind people that government — the public sector — won the space race, gave birth to the internet, built the interstate highway system and in the process created tens of millions of jobs. The GOP is already going batshit about it; they got the message.


2. The crux of the speech, the “Sputnik Moment,” was this line: “To win the future, we’ll have to take on challenges that have been decades in the making.” Win the future. In fact, over and over, all night, we heard about “winning the future.”


But since when was the future a war, something to be fought with an enemy? To “win” the space race we had to “beat” the Soviets, which we did (ha ha, we got to the moon first). To “win” the future, do we have to beat someone else? The Russians aren’t up for winning much of anything these days, but Obama seems concerned about competing with China; do the Chinese have to “lose” the future for us to “win?”


It wasn’t a random choice of words. The White House speechwriters take this stuff very seriously. “Winning the future” is a catchphrase that the Obama administration wants to be attached to. And it’s a bad one.


The future of the planet can’t be about winning. When you look at the serious crisis facing the world — climate change that’s going to transform agriculture, put the homes of hundreds of millions of people under water and alter the way every single human being lives — beating China isn’t really relevant. Thomas Friedman says the world is flat, and he’s got a point — if Obama were able to articulate a message of cooperation, of seeking peace and working together with other nations, it would have been a remarkable speech.


Instead: Winning the future. What a loser.


 


 

Haute pot

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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9
Haute pot

steve@sfbg.com

CANNABIS Marijuana edibles have come a long way in a short time.

Just a few years ago, the norm was still brownies of uncertain dosage that tasted like eating weed, right down to the occasional stem or lump of leaf, served in a wax paper envelope. But now the foodies have gotten into the game, producing a huge variety of tasty treats that are incredibly delicious even before the munchies kick in.

San Francisco could be on the verge of a culinary revolution that would parallel those being experienced in the realms of boutique eateries, gourmet coffee, and high-end street food vendors — except for the fact that makers of cannabis edibles still reside in a legal limbo.

As long as they’re operating under the umbrella of a cannabis collective, getting marijuana from its growers and selling through its dispensaries, then the weed bakers are in compliance with state law. But they’re still illegal under federal law, and even California law doesn’t allow them to operate independently as wholesalers, making it difficult to scale up operations and do more than just break even financially.

Judging from the skittishness of some of San Francisco’s top edibles producers — who didn’t want to be identified by their real names and were wary of letting us know too much about their operations — they perform this labor of love under a cloud of understandable paranoia.

“Unfortunately, secrecy is a rule we have to live by, day in and day out,” said the founder of Auntie Dolores, who we’ll call Jay. She makes a line of popular, strong, and yummy products that include pretzels, chili lime peanuts, caramel corn, and cookies of all kinds.

Yet the legal threats haven’t stopped producers from professionalizing the edibles industry — in terms of quality control, packaging, consistency, and innovation — and drawing on foodie sensibilities and their own culinary training to develop creative new products that effectively mask or subtly incorporate that bitter cannabis taste.

“We’re all about masking the flavor of the cannabis because I really don’t like the flavor that much,” Jay said of products that are stronger than most but somehow without a hint of weed in them. “People here have a high standard. It’s their medicine and their food, and we have a lot of foodies who are really into our products.”

Choco-Potamus is an example of this new generation of edibles, combining gourmet chocolate-making with the finest strains of cannabis, using only the best buds rather than the leaves and other plant matter that have often gone into edibles. Mrs. Hippo, the pseudonym of the chief baker, has worked for a national company in the food industry for about a decade, mostly doing branding, and it shows in this eye-catching product.

“I’m kind of a foodie. We have friends who roast whole pigs and brew their own beer, that kind of thing,” she said. “Really good high-grade marijuana has some really great flavor qualities, particularly when combined with cocoa. I really want the patients to enjoy the flavor, not just the feeling.”

 

EAT YOUR MEDICINE

Steve DeAngelo, founder of Oakland’s Harborside Health Center, one of the Bay Area’s biggest dispensaries, said edibles have been increasingly popular, particularly among older users, patients with medical conditions that make smoking problematic, or those who prefer the longer body highs of eating it.

“Our sales of edibles has trended steadily upward since we opened,” DeAngelo said, noting that last year the club sold $1.2 million in edibles, about 5.5 percent of total sales, compared to $306,000 (3.2 percent) after they opened in 2006. “As an absolute amount, we’ve seen the amount of edibles quadruple in the last four and a half years. As percentage of sales, we’ve seen it double.”

He said the main difference between eating and smoking marijuana is duration and onset. Smoking it brings on the high within minutes and it usually last for less than two hours, whereas eating it takes about 45 minutes for the effects to kick in, but they can then last for six to eight hours.

“There are different forms for different symptoms,” he said, noting that edibles are perfect for someone with insomnia or other symptoms that disturb normal sleep patterns, while someone who needs marijuana in the morning can smoke or vaporize it and have the effects mostly gone by the time they go to work.

“When you eat it, it goes through your limbic system, so it hits your brain differently,” said Jay of Auntie Dolores, saying that she and many others prefer the subtle differences in the high they get from eating cannabis. Others who prefer edibles are those looking to just take the edge off without being too stoned. “A lot of the people who like the edibles are moms. They don’t want to smell like pot or be too high,” Mrs. Hippo said.

She noted that her chocolates are not as strong as many of the edibles out there, with each candy bar containing two doses. “It’s a personal preference for how I want the bars to taste,” she said, although she has been working on making a stronger version as well, which many dispensaries and their customers prefer.

But Mr. and Mrs. Hippo say they think taste is becoming as important as strength, calling it an emerging area of the market. “I have a dream that there could be just an edibles dispensary,” Mr. Hippo said, envisioning a pot club with the look and feel of a high-end bakery.

For now, demand for edibles is still driven by “potency and packaging,” says SPARC founder Erich Pearson. “I think people eat food to eat food and enjoy. They don’t eat to get high.” Yet as long as they’re getting high in this competitive marijuana marketplace, the edibles makers have been making better and better tasting products.

Jade Miller makes 12 flavors of cannabis-infused drinks under the Sweet Relief label, with spiced apple cider being her top seller. She draws other training at New York City’s Institute for Culinary Education to make some of the best-tasting drinks on the market.

“I got into it because I needed alternative pain relief when I had whooping cough and a torn shoulder muscle,” Miller told us.

She was injured while on a cooking job with Whole Foods Catering in September 2006. She hated the opiates that she was prescribed for her shoulder pain, preferring marijuana. But when she contracted whooping cough, she couldn’t smoke pot anymore without painful coughing, so she got into making edibles.

At the time, many of the pot-laced foods out there weren’t very good or professionally made. “Some edibles were inedible,” she said. “I became a one-woman campaign against brownies.”

 

QUALITY CONTROL

With a background in homeopathy and appreciation for marijuana, Jay started making edibles 10 years ago, informally helping two aunts battling cancer. But in the last couple of years she’s honed her recipes, improved her packaging, and transformed her Auntie Dolores snacks into some of the best on the market, available in several local dispensaries, such as Medithrive, SPARC, Bernal Heights Dispensary, and Shambhala.

“I just knew I could make stronger and better-tasting stuff,” she said. “The demand from the patients is really high for great products.”

Horror stories abound about users who overdosed on edibles and ended up being incapacitated all day or night, but that’s mostly been a problem of dosage, which modern technology has helped overcome. Choco-Potamus and other makers routinely send their batches to a lab for testing.

“The idea is we can be helping an edibles producer or a tincture maker quantify the cannabis in the product,” said Anna Ray Grabstein, CEO of Steep Hill Laboratory in Oakland, which tests cannabis and related products for strength and purity. “They’re able to use that information to create consistency in their recipes.”

It’s been difficult to meet the rising demand given the current legal framework.

“Yes, we would love to scale up. I’d love it if more people had access to our product. We’d love to sell it outside of California,” Jay said. “But it’s tricky because there’s so many gray areas,”

Larry Kessler is the program manager for the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Medical Cannabis Dispensary Inspection Program, which reviews the procedures of edibles makers and requires those who work with one than one dispensary to get a certified food handler license from the state.

“We just want to make sure they know what they’re doing,” Kessler told us.

San Francisco has some unique rules, banning edibles that require refrigeration or other special handling, granting exceptions on a case-by-case basis. Unlike Oakland and some other jurisdictions, San Francisco also requires edibles to be in opaque packaging. “It was to get rid of the visual appeal to children,” he explains.

All the edible makers say they can live with those local rules, and they praise San Francisco as a model county for medical marijuana regulation. The problem is that state law doesn’t allow them to be independent businesses.

“It’s against state law. There’s no wholesaling allowed, and that’s a big issue around edibles,” Kessler said. “It’s a complicated issue.”

All the edibles makers in this story say they are barely getting by financially, and all have other jobs to support themselves. Jay says she’s thought about giving up many times, but she’s been motivated by stories they’re heard from customers about the almost miraculous curative properties of their products, particularly from patients with cancer and other serious illnesses.

“I get an e-mail like this and then it’s back to the kitchen,” Jay said, referring to a letter from a customer who credits her with saving his life. “There are so many positive properties it has. There’s really no other plant like it.”

Getting free

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Getting free

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal have been held captive in Evin Prison in Tehran for more than 540 days, and their friends and supporters in the Bay Area have been mounting an extraordinary campaign pushing for their release.

On July 31, 2009, Bauer and Fattal were hiking with Sarah Shourd, who is Bauer’s fiancée, through green mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan. The three UC Berkeley graduates had traveled from Damascus for a recreational visit. They were wandering nearby Ahmed Awa, a popular tourist destination where hundreds of people had flocked to camp, to visit a waterfall and enjoy the peace and quiet of the mountains.

They say they didn’t realize how close they were to Iran, which has no diplomatic ties to the United States.

Shourd told the Guardian she’s not sure whether they accidentally traversed the Iranian border, because it was unmarked. “We had no intention of being anywhere near Iran,” she said. “And if we were, we’re very sorry.”

Iranian officials surrounded them, speaking in Farsi, which they couldn’t understand. They were arrested on suspicion of spying and taken into custody. Before being taken to prison, one phoned a friend, Shon MeckFessel — who had been traveling with them but opted not to go on the hike because he wasn’t feeling well — to alert him that something had gone wrong. That would be the last communication any of them would have with close friends or family members for months.

Shourd was finally released on bail Sept. 14, 2010 on humanitarian grounds after spending 410 days in solitary confinement. She was reunited with family and friends — but Bauer and Fattal have remained in detainment ever since.

Since returning to the United States, Shourd has thrown her energy into advocating for their release — and she’s not alone. “Everyone in the family has been working tirelessly for all 18 months,” she said, “which is far, far longer than we ever imagined in our worst nightmares.”

 

FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM

While Shourd was still in prison, her mother, Nora, gave up her home and job to move in with Bauer’s mother, Cindy Hickey, and work for their release full-time. Fattal’s older brother, Alex, suspended his graduate studies at Harvard to dedicate himself to the campaign. His mother, Laura Fattal, stopped working to devote herself to the campaign.

“That’s just family alone,” Shourd noted. “If you start to look to how many people have contributed to our campaign and how many ways, it just blows your mind.” Soon after her release, Shourd put out a call for people to hang banners proclaiming the innocence of Bauer and Fattal and calling for their release. In response, nearly 60 banners were unfurled in 25 different countries.

Shourd has made countless media appearances since her release, and even put out an MP3 of a song she composed while in solitary confinement, which can be downloaded as a way to support the Free the Hikers campaign. Their story has drawn the interest of prominent figures. On Jan. 19, Noam Chomsky released a video offering to testify on their behalf if a trial is held, saying Bauer and Fattal “have dedicated themselves to advocating for social and environmental justice in Africa and elsewhere, and they truly embody the spirit of humanitarianism.”

Others who have publicly defended the trio include President Barack Obama, who issued a statement in July saying none of the hikers ever worked for the U.S. government, addressing Iranian accusations that they were there to commit espionage. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu have called for their release. A documentary has been produced about their plight, and a second one is in the works.

In San Francisco, artists and musicians have responded in droves to a call for support. An art auction that will benefit the campaign is planned for Jan. 29, featuring the work of more than 80 artists, plus live musical performances. As a nod toward Bauer’s work in photojournalism, the event will emphasize photography, and notables such as Mimi Chakrova, Taj Forer, Roberto Bear Guerra, Ken Light, the LUCEO Photo Collective, Susan Meiselas, Lianne Milton, Mark Murrmann, Alec Soth, and others have donated work. Among the artists who donated pieces are Marianne Bland, Mark Brecke, Teresa Camozzi, Andreina Davila, Eric Drooker, and former Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez.

In early February, a music benefit will be held at the Bottom of the Hill to benefit the campaign. Titled “They Sing These Songs In Prison,” the event will feature performances of The Nightwatchman — that’s Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine — plus Jolie Holland, accordionist Jason Webley, and Ryan Harvey & Lia Rose.

“The funding is to support the campaign to free Shane and Josh, and it goes to a wide array of needs that we have, like translation into Farsi, travel for media, and meeting with some various embassies and governments that are involved in advocating for Shane and Josh’s release,” Shourd explained. “Also, some of the money will probably go toward legal fees, and website fees, and materials for the campaign from flyers to business cards to t-shirts.”

 

WHO ARE THE HIKERS?

The campaign to advocate for their release has been tagged Free the Hikers, but the identities of the three young people (Bauer and Fattal are both 28, Shourd is 32) go much deeper than that. They’re social-justice advocates, antiwar activists, writers, environmentalists, travelers, and creative thinkers with deep ties to the Bay Area.

Shourd, who lives in Oakland, was teaching English to Iraqi refugees when she was in Syria, as well as practicing some journalism. Fattal, who taught at Aprovecho — an education center in Oregon focused on sustainability and permaculture — had been traveling to India, South Africa, and other places through the International Honors Program to lead workshops on health and sustainable technology before visiting his friends in Syria.

“Josh is an environmentalist, he’s a teacher, he’s an incredible, incredible, generous and selfless man,” Shourd said. “As soon as you meet him, you feel what an extraordinary and unique human being he is. I was friends with him for years before he came to visit us in Damascus, and he decided to travel with us to Northern Iraq to Iraqi Kurdistan to learn about Kurdish culture, to see another diverse aspect of the Middle East.”

Bauer wrote for publications such as The Nation, Mother Jones, and the Christian Science Monitor. A photojournalist who has won multiple awards and had his work published internationally, Bauer has documented everything from tenant conditions in San Francisco SROs to conflict-ridden regions in Africa and the Middle East. Bauer also wrote an article for the Guardian about an Oakland residence that is famous among East Bay anarchists (See “Hellarity burns,” May 27, 2008).

“Shane has an incredible passion for pursuing truth and complicating our ideas about other parts of the world, about conflicts around the world and at home,” Shourd noted. She added that many of his stories serve to highlight “some of the very specific ways that the U.S. presence in Iraq has taken a toll on innocent people.”

Before their ill-fated excursion, Shourd said she’d heard from multiple westerners and her Arabic tutor that Iraqi Kurdistan was a safe and enjoyable place to visit. “It’s often referred to as ‘the other Iraq’ because it’s a semiautonomous region designated as a no-fly zone by the U.S. government,” she explained. “It’s actually a part of the Middle East that has a very positive fingerprint from the U.S. government because they helped protect the Kurdish people from Saddam Hussein. So Northern Iraq is not a dangerous place for Americans or westerners to go, and no American has ever been killed in Northern Iraq, which is just phenomenal after a decade of war and occupation.”

She said Bauer, Fattal, and MeckFessel were all enthusiastic about the trip, and after researching it online, the four felt they had enough information to travel there. “We ordered a special Lonely Planet guide of Northern Iraq, and a friend of ours who went a month before we did borrowed it and lost it, so we didn’t have the Lonely Planet guide,” she noted. “But we still felt we had enough information about it to travel there and really believed we had nothing to fear.”

 

SOLITARY

Shourd credits her fiancé and her friend with helping her through “every minute of prison,” even though she was alone in her cell for 23 hours a day. At first she wasn’t allowed to see them at all, but after some time had passed, guards allowed her to visit with them in an outdoor courtyard for 30 minutes a day. Later, that brief time together was increased to an hour.

“There’s no way I could have maintained hope and maintained my own sanity and the strength that it took to get through every day of isolation and depravity and uncertainty and fear,” she said. “The emotional strength that that took, and the discipline that it took, really Shane and Josh and I all created together in the little time that we had, through the unconditional support and love we had for each other.”

Since they didn’t speak Farsi and the guards spoke very little English, it was difficult to communicate basic needs, and Shourd described the experience as being surrounded by hostility.

“Whenever I just started to slip away mentally, Shane and Josh would bring me back, and the knowledge that they were going to be there for me was the only thing that got me through 410 days of solitary confinement,” she said. The three thought up activities to give themselves something to look forward to, like marking time with small courtyard celebrations and special food they saved to share together or discussing topics in an organized format. “We had almost like a curriculum that we followed of study, and sort of intellectual exploration,” she explained.

They were only allowed to have pens for one month — that was the easiest month, Shourd said. But the rest of the time, even though they weren’t permitted to write things down, they were allowed to read. “Books were our lifeline. We read the same books in concert, we took turns reading books and passed them back and forth when we saw each other in the courtyard. And we would memorize dates and memorize poetry and recite poetry to each other and test each other on dates,” Shourd said.

“Josh would give me math problems to do in my head because he knew I was trying to get better with algebra. We had a dictionary that we passed back and forth, and we would make stories from words in the dictionary and tell each other these really intricate fantastical stories that we came up with. Anything to keep your mind busy.”

Beginning in her second month in prison, Shourd also passed the time by composing songs. A month went by before she was able to share the first one with Bauer and Fattal, but when she did finally sing it for them, they learned the words and sang it with her. “When we were together in the outdoor courtyard, they would just tell me to sing louder,” Shourd said. “I know they’re singing those songs now.”

The intellectual drills, storytelling, math problems, and singing weren’t merely a remedy for boredom. “You have to really keep your mind strong and busy so that you don’t get sort of swallowed up by the abyss of fear and loneliness that encroaches on you day by day in that kind of situation,” she said.

 

LOOKING AHEAD

Despite the time, energy, and effort spent on the campaign to free all three, no one can say for sure just when Bauer and Fattal will finally be reunited with family and friends. In November, Iranian authorities said that a trial previously scheduled for that month had been postponed, but the Free the Hikers campaign is calling for them to be released without a trial.

“They don’t deserve to be there one minute longer than I was, and they never deserved to be there in the first place,” Shourd said. “They should be shown the same kind of humanitarianism that they have put into action in their lives, through their work.”

Amnesty International is among many of the groups that have called for the Iranian government to release the two young men. “One year after their arrest, the Iranian authorities’ failure to charge them with illegal entry into Iran or more serious charges, such as espionage, has fueled speculation that the Iranian authorities are holding them as a bargaining chip,” notes a statement released July 2010 by Amnesty International, an international human rights organization.

Meanwhile, Shourd has been contemplating what her experience would have been like if the U.S. and Iran actually maintained diplomatic ties, and she published an opinion piece on CNN International calling for greater communication between the governments.

“I think it’s their responsibility to their people to do that, and I think it’s a tragedy that there’s been 30 years of practically no relationship between Iran and the U.S.,” Shourd said. “It’s a tragedy for countless Iranian Americans in this country who have a hard time visiting their relatives in Iran, sending them money, even just getting information about them or visiting their homeland.”

She began her opinion piece by recounting the time that a prison guard brought her freshly picked roses, an uncommon gesture of kindness during her incarceration. “In the worst of circumstances, the most extraordinary acts of human kindness emerge,” she told the Guardian. “They were rare. The vast majority of my experience was empty and desolate. But the times that the guards were kind to me … will stay with me for the rest of my life.” *

ART AUCTION TO FREE ALL THREE

Saturday, Jan. 29, 7 p.m.

SomArts Cultural Center

934 Brannan, SF

Musical performances by The Ferocious Few, Devon McClive and Sons, Grant Hazard and Lorin Station

www.artforssj.tumblr.com/#about

THEY SING THESE SONGS IN PRISON

Featuring The Nighwatchman, Jolie Holland, Jason Webley, Ryan Harvey & Lia Rose

Thursday, Feb. 10, 8:30 p.m., $12–$18

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17 St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com

To learn more, visit www.freethehikers.org, www.freeourfriends.eu

Rep Clock

Andrew Lam
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0

Schedules are for Wed/26–Tues/1 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6-10. Broken Windows, Open Doors (Karewicz), Thurs, 8. “ATA Art and Action FUNraiser,” with live music by Grass Widow, an art auction, and more, Sat, 5.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-20. “Noir City 9:” •The Woman on the Beach (Renoir, 1947), Wed, 7:30, and Beware My Lovely (Horner, 1952), Wed, 9; •The Two Mrs. Carrolls (Godfrey, 1947), Thurs, 7:30, and My Name is Julia Ross (Lewis, 1945), Thurs, 9:30; •Crashout (Foster, 1955), Fri, 7:30, and Loophole (Schuster, 1954), Fri, 9:30; •Blind Alley (Vidor, 1939), Sat, 1, 4:30, and Secret Beyond the Door (Lang, 1948), Sat, 2:30; •The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (Siodmak, 1945), Sat, 7:30, and So Evil My Love (Allen, 1948), Sat, 9:15; •Angel Face (Preminger, 1952), Sun, 1, 5, 9, and The Hunted (Bernhard, 1948), Sun, 3, 7. For complete program information, visit www.noircity.com. “SF Sketchfest Great Collaborators Series: Airplane! Tribute to Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker,” Mon, 7; “SF Sketchfest Comedy Writing Award:” Broadcast News (Brooks, 1987), with James L. Brooks in person, Tues, 7. For more info on these events (tickets, $25), visit www.sfsketchfest.com.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-10.25. The Illusionist (Chomet, 2010), Wed-Thurs, call for times. August to June (Valens and Valens, 2010), Thurs, 7. Filmmakers Amy and Tom Valens in person. Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today (Schulberg, 1948/2010), Jan 28-Feb 3, call for times.

EXPLORATORIUM McBean Theater, 3601 Lyon, SF; www.asifa-sf.org. Free. “Open Screening for Animators,” Fri, 7:30.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100, rsvp@milibrary.org. $10. “CinemaLit Film Series: New Year’s Revolutions:” Sade (Jacquot, 2000), Fri, 6.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “Film 50: History of Cinema: Fantasy Films and Realms of Enchantment:” The Thief of Baghdad (Powell, Berger, and Whelan, 1940), Wed, 3:10. Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film (Chodorov, 2010), Wed, 7:30. “African Film Festival 2011:” One Small Step (Vaughan-Richards, 2010) with “Me Broni Ba” (Owusu, 2008), Thurs, 7; Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (Ocelot and Galup, 2005), Sat, 4:30. “Suspicion: The Films of Claude Chabrol and Alfred Hitchcock:” Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock, 1951), Fri, 7; Les Cousins (Chabrol, 1959), Fri, 9; Le Boucher (Chabrol, 1970), Sat, 8:20. “World Cinema Foundation:” Touki Bouki (Djop-Mambéty, 1973), Sat, 6:30. “Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area:” “Punk, Attitudinal: Film and Video, 1977-1987,” Sun, 5:30.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994. $6-10; www.redvicmoviehouse.com. Tiny Furniture (Dunham, 2010), Wed-Thurs, 7:15, 9:25 (also Wed, 2). “The Good Old Naughty Days,” vintage porn from the early 1900s, Fri-Sun, 7:15, 9:15 (also Sat-Sun, 2, 4). The Room (Wiseau, 2003), Sat, midnight. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (Pennebaker, 1973), Feb 1-3, 7:15, 9:15 (also Feb 2, 2).

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. Two in the Wave (Laurent, 2009), Wed-Thurs, 7, 9. “Bringing Up Léaud: The Antoine Doinel Cycle:” Love on the Run (Truffaut, 1979), Wed, 6:45, 8:45. “By, For, and About George Kuchar,” film series, Fri, 7; Sat, 6:45; Sun, 4. Bad Blood: A Cautionary Tale (Ness), Mon, call for time. “SF Film Society Education presents: Herzog in Focus,” Mon, 7. Educational program; visit www.sffs.org for additional info. Lemmy (Olliver and Orshoski, 2010), Feb 1-2, call for times.

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY 100 Larkin, SF; www.sfpl.org. Free. A Sea Change: Imagine a World Without Fish (Ettinger, 2009), Wed, 6; Sat, 2.

VIZ CINEMA New People, 1746 Post, SF; www.vizcinema.com. $10-12. Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance (Anno, 2011), Wed-Thurs, 5, 7:15.

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. “Volume 14: Middle East,” nine videos focusing on the Middle East compiled by ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art, Jan 13-March 27 (gallery hours Thurs-Sat, noon-8; Sun, noon-6). “British Television Advertising Awards 2010,” Thurs-Sun, 2, 4, 6 (also Thurs-Sat, 8).

Editor’s Notes

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
Editor’s Notes

Tredmond@sfbg.com

I talk to the Unitarians sometimes. I’m not much for church myself, but the Unitarians are pretty mellow. My neighbor, who grew up Unitarian, tells me that Unitarians “believe in one God … at most.” There’s even an atheist caucus at the Unitarian Church on Franklin Street. That works for me.

So a couple of times a year, they invite me to come and talk to their discussion forum Sunday morning, before services, and I always go — sweet, wonderful people who are about as liberal as religious people get, and they actually listen to me and ask intelligent questions.

So I was there two weeks ago talking about the year ahead in local politics, and after I went on far too long complaining about a city and a society that don’t want the wealthy to pay taxes, a woman walked up to the mic and made a really interesting point.

When you get your property tax bill in San Francisco, she said, there’s a little box you can check to make a voluntary contribution to the arts. Why, she asked, is there nothing about contributing to the public schools?

It’s not an academic point. In most states, local property taxes support local schools. In California, Proposition 13 forced the state to take on that responsibility. Now the state’s broke, and education has taken huge cuts. And even if San Francisco wanted to put more local money into the schools, the local budget has no extra room, either.

But almost everyone who owns property in San Francisco is getting a great deal from Prop. 13. My brother owns a house in upstate New York that cost about $100,000 — and his property taxes are higher than mine, and my house in San Francisco cost a good bit more than that. Warren Buffet complained about it to former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger; Buffet’s place in Southern California has lower taxes than his home in Omaha — and the tax bills don’t exactly reflect the comparative assessed values.

Now, I’m not into charity. I mean, I’m fine with charity, and people should be generous and all that, but when it comes to essential public services, charity won’t cut it. Rich people should pay taxes, and elected representatives should decide how to prioritize where the money is spent.

But here we are in San Francisco, with all these wealthy people not paying fair taxes on their property and Prop. 13 seemingly set in stone. So maybe we could start a campaign. It’s not hard to figure out how much you’re getting away with under Prop. 13. Take the actual value of your house (come on, you know what the place down the street just sold for); multiply it by the current tax rate (it’s on the invoice); and subtract the amount of your bill. Yeah, you’re saving a lot of money. Some of you are saving a whole lot of money.

Then the tax collector can put a box on the property tax bill that lets you make a voluntary contribution to the public schools that reflects some of that savings. Just some, a little bit. If we all did it, we’d make a huge difference.

Kim remains mum during Pledge of Allegiance

Sasha Cuttler
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70
Kim remains mum during Pledge of Allegiance

As the old progressive majority on the Board of Supervisors dissolves into uncertain new political dynamics, everyone has been looking for signs of what’s to come, large and small. Do the new committee assignments mean the moderates will have more power? Have identify politics moved to the forefront? If the new marching order is “getting things done,” what kinds of things will get done?

It feels a bit like the end of an era after 10 years of progressives running the show, but there are small signs that progressivism under the dome isn’t dead yet. Here’s one: on Saturday, when the new Board of Supervisors was sworn in, new Sup. Jane Kim stood for the Pledge of Allegiance but remained mum, not saying a word.

When I asked her about it later, Kim said that she doesn’t believe in the pledge and has never said it throughout her tenure on the Board of Education. Her predecessor Chris Daly, as well as Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, generally say the pledge but pointedly drop the words “under God” from it, with Daly sometimes being quite loud and pronounced in his modified lyrics.

There’s no legal requirement for the Board of Supervisors to pledge allegiance to a flag, and there are many political jurisdictions that don’t say it. So, is dropping the pledge from the board agenda one of those things that the new board would like to get done? Don’t bet on it. But personally, it did make my heart go pitter-pat to watch Kim’s lips remain still as her colleagues aligned themselves with a piece of cloth.

And at this point, I plan to savor the small things.

Faces of debt

Andrew Lam
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0
Faces of debt

caitlin@sfbg.com

CAREERS AND ED In this weeks’ issue, Rebecca Bowe examines rising tuition and its effect on this generation of Californian students. Here, we profile three scholars that are dealing with very real repercussions from their student debt load.

 

BEN GLEASON, 31

Mills College, teaching credential

Oberlin College, American literature major

Total debt: $25,000

Ben Gleason remembers the day that he applied for his $10,000 student loan from Citibank to finance his teaching credential tuition. “I got it done online within a half hour. I didn’t have to talk to anybody or write an essay — easy money with severe consequences.” The consequences of such a serious financial decision — sans the aid of any counseling from either his school or bank? Gleason’s eventual decision to leave classroom teaching.

It’s not an uncommon story for this generation of teaching school graduates, in a state where teaching salaries are hardly keeping pace with rising tuition. Gleason started working as an ESL teacher in Richmond’s underfunded West Contra Costa Unified School District right after graduating from Mills College. His student loans were overwhelming — a problem that was exacerbated when he took a trip to Guatemala to work and improve his ability to communicate with his Spanish-speaking pupils. To remain afloat financially, Gleason applied for a forbearance on his loans and was surprised to return home after two years to a loan that had gone up by 25 percent due to interest. “I was really, really screwed,” he recalls.

Gleason didn’t feel like there was any way he could go back to his teaching salary, so to support his new wife (the two met in Guatemala) and daughter, he decided to start his own business with the help of an old boss — a private firm that helps reeducate state government workers on sustainability issues.

That means one less qualified teacher for low-income Californian children. And Gleason still has 15 to 20 years left of debt payments. “I wish that there was a more systemic way to solve this problem,” says the former public educator.

 

ANNE MOSTAD-JENSEN, 28

Santa Clara University, law degree

College of St. Catherine St. Paul, library sciences

Concordia University St. Paul, international studies and history major

Total debt (estimated at graduation): $120,000

Anne Mostad-Jensen and her twin sister grew up in a small Minnesota town. They attended the same college, Concordia St. Paul, where they both majored in history and international studies. After that, they went on to College of St. Catherine (also in St. Paul) to get their master’s degrees in library science. But then their paths diverged. Her sister traveled to Denmark in pursuit of her Danish citizenship — their father is Danish — and was able to complete her master’s in a country where the government pays for most of its citizens’ educations. Mostad-Jensen remained in Minnesota, to continue on in the American university system.

What kind of difference has the move made in these women’s lives? Try $65,000 of student debt. That’s because Mostad-Jensen’s sister, even after completing her master’s and attending one of the Icelandic languages programs she’s currently applying for, will only owe roughly $55,000 worth of loans — all from her time at American schools. Mostad-Jensen, who is now attending law school at Santa Clara University, will owe $120,000 by the time she graduates. “I’ve never had any consumer debt, but I’ve always told myself not to pass up educational opportunities just because I didn’t have the cash on hand,” she says.

Mostad-Jensen wants to work at the intersection of international copyright and technology law, possibly in a law library, a specialty career that benefits from degrees in multiple areas of study. She counts herself lucky that homeownership and a family aren’t her immediate goals. “Having a family — I just don’t understand how people do it with debt these days.” Her Midwestern community values come to the fore when she talks about the U.S. government’s inability to provide Americans with affordable education. “Isn’t the government an extension of the community? Europeans, the lack of stress they have by not having to pay out of pocket for health care and education — I mean they can actually live their lives.”

 

RAMON QUINTERO, 32

UC Berkeley, geography major

Total debt: $25,000

Ramon Quintero is a UC Berkeley student activist, but he wasn’t always radicalized around debt issues. “I didn’t come to Berkeley because of its activist reputation. I became an activist because of my situation,” he says. Quintero could no longer pay for his student housing and wound up living in his 1979 Toyota truck with camper shell on the streets of Berkeley, sending his baby daughter home to live with her grandmother.

Quintero came to Berkeley via Southern California, where his family landed after immigrating from Sinaloa, Mexico, when he was 11. He attended community college to get his core credits before coming to Berkeley, where rapidly rising tuition fees are putting a strain on the student community. Although he is a legal resident, Quintero was especially concerned about the effect that the rising cost of education was having on undocumented students.

And, of course, on his leaky camper shell roof. He sprang into action, driving a truck that he calls Santa Rita, to all nine UC campuses, encouraging fellow students to paint art on it that spoke to their concerns for the future of public education. Quintero was arrested twice for his roles in campus protests and he and Santa Rita were profiled in The New York Times and several California newspapers. Suddenly, the university found space for him in student housing.

“I saw the hypocrisy in the system,” says Quintero, who has fulfilled all his UC coursework for graduation but has convinced a professor to hold credit for one of his courses for another semester so he could go on a research fellowship to Madrid. The fellowship, he says, is crucial for his application to grad schools — another step toward fulfilling life goals he doesn’t think would be possible if he has to begin assuming the burden of his student debt. 

 

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