Employment

Immigration reform protest snarls downtown SF, 23 arrested

Sasha Cuttler
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28
Immigration reform protest snarls downtown SF, 23 arrested

Today [Fri/4] at 11am, the SF Bay Coalition for Immigrant Justice held a protest and rally to urge President Obama to halt all deportations and keep his promise of comprehensive immigration reform.The protest included a group of 23 people, some of which are undocumented immigrants, which took part in a peaceful act of civil disobedience.

All 23 protesters — 15 women and eight men — were arrested; cited for failure to diperse, failure to obey a traffic officer, and blocking an intersection; and booked at the police substation in the Tenderloin before being release, according to the San Francisco Police Department.

More than 30 SFPD officers flanked the march after activists, clergy, and community organizers gathered at One Post St. and made the short but spirited walk to 120 Montgomery St., a building that houses the San Francisco Immigration Court.

Video of two of the arrests. 

Rev. Debra Lee, a United Church of Christ pastor working with Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights, said, “We are here… because everyday we see people in our congregations who come to us because their family has been thrown into crisis by the federal government.”

Other clergy members who were arrested include Rev. Richard Smith of St. John Evangelist Episcopal Church, and Rabbi Mike Rothbaum, of Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice. “We work with with people of other faiths because part of the power of the coalition [is that] although we have different faiths, we come together around a common belief  that the migrant should be treated with dignity.” Lee told the Guardian.

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The protesters march downtown. Photo by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez.

Rothbaum delivered a powerful address standing atop a parked pickup truck. Rothbaum held up a black-and-white photo of members of his family being sworn in as US citizens. In the image was his aunt, a Polish Jew.  “I would like to remind President Obama that his father was a wandering man from Kenya,” he said. “That my aunt and his father are no different from the people being held in this building.”

All three clergy members were arrested for taking part in the act of civil disobedience. Others arrested include Akiko Aspillaga, a native born Filipina who came to the US at the age of 10 with a visa. But because of a mix of complications with the employment of her mother and misinformation, Aspillaga and her parents lost their visas. Nevertheless, Aspillaga is now a graduate student at San Francisco State University’s school of nursing. However, because she is undocumented, she cannot receive federal grants or loans and depends on scholarships, and her mother to pay for tuition.

Another was Reyna Maldonado, a City College of San Francisco student born in Mexico. “We are here to demand President Obama to stop deportations. There has already been 2 million deportations.” Maldonado had a picture of Alex Aldana, who is currently being held in a San Diego ICE detention center: “He is one of the people we are fighting for [in addition] to stopping separations of families.”

Even if both women are undocumented, face arrest, and a risk of being turned over to US immigration authorities, they felt the risks were worth it. “I feel like the moral imperative right now, with families being torn apart and all the pain our community… Everything is worth it,” Akiko told the Guardian, “There is a possibility of me being deported but we’re standing up for something we believe in.”

After all the speakers addressed the crowd of about 300 people, the group of 23 sat in a tight circle on a banner that read, “Deporter in Chief.” And parodied President Obama’s “Hope” campaign poster with a pair of handcuffed hands replacing the president’s picture.

Once the group of 23 blocked traffic on the intersection of Sutter and Montgomery, SFPD officers began moving people off the street and onto the sidewalks. Then, one by one, each member of the group had their hands zip-tied behind their back and loaded into one of three SFPD vans.

This protest was part of a national day of action in favor of immigration, and it precedes an even bigger mobilization tomorrow in San Jose. 

 

Photo Gallery

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Is Kink breaking up with SF?

Erica Hanna
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85
Is Kink breaking up with SF?

Tales of local porn-purveyor Kink.com’s demise were reported early yesterday by Uptown Almanac, whose story, “Freak Flag May Not Fly Forever Over Kink’s Castle,” sounded the alarm. 

“It seems to have become not a question of if, but when there will be no more porn in our beloved Porn Castle,” reporter Jackson West wrote. To the uninitiated, the Porn Castle to which West is referring is known as The Armory, a brick fortress with histroic designation on 14th Street and Mission where the ever-adventurous pornographers at Kink.com film their wonderful smut (a term we use as endearingly as possible).

The planning department document West posted posted to his article show Peter Acworth, founder and CEO of Kink.com, requested the city to convert the basement, “drill court,” second, and third floors of The Armory into office space. The document also shows a need for an environmental review before conversion. (Side note: Gee, wouldn’t you love to be the city worker who had to inspect The Armory? “Hell of a day at work today honey, I was so tied up. Well technically, this guy wearing clothespins was tied up.”) The planning department told the Bay Guardian we could inspect the documents for ourselves tomorrow, but were unable to supply them for viewing today.

So, is it true? Is Kink.com fleeing our quickly gentrifying city?

Not to ball-and-gag West’s reporting, but we went straight to Kink.com owner Peter Acworth, who told us Uptown Almanac’s article is “half-correct.”

Firstly, the conversion of the first floor drill court into office space was a long time in planning, multiple sources (including Acworth) confirmed for us. Kink.com intends to use the space for its community center, as well as to rent to outside vendors.

But Acworth did admit that conversion of the rest of The Armory into office space was a preliminary move to vacate The Armory — but that it’s a last-ditch move he hopes he won’t need to make.

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Peter Acworth and Princess Donna. Photo by Pat Mazzera.

“I would still think of Kink.com production moving out as a question of ‘if’ as opposed to ‘when,’” he wrote to us in an email. “This move represents an insurance policy.  If the various regulations that are being considered currently in Sacramento and by Cal-OSHA become law, we will likely have to move production out of California to Nevada.”

The regulations he’s referring to are a statewide version of the recent Los Angeles condom law, AB 1576, Introduced by Assemblymember Isadore Hall, III, (D- Los Angeles), as well as new Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards legally requiring porn actors wear protective goggles to protect their eyes from STDs that may be present in ejaculate.

Kink.com was fined $78,000 by CAL/OSHA earlier this year for workplace hazard violations, according to a report by SF Weekly. Kate Conger writes, “The majority of the fines were for allowing performers to work without using condoms, while a $3,710 portion of the total fine was for additional violations, including improperly placed power cords, an absence of first aid supplies, and missing health safety training materials.”

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation also told SF Weekly they filed violations because, they alleged, two actors contracted HIV in connection with their performances in Kink.com shoots. At the time, Kink.com spokespeople denied the claims had merit.

[Update 8:20pm: Shortly after this story was published, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation published a press release announcing the state bill to mandate condoms in pornography made progress today. From the release: “Assembly Bill 1576, Rep. Isadore Hall’s bill to require condoms in all adult films made in California cleared the Committee on Labor and Employment in the California Assembly in a 5 to 0 vote (with 1 absence & 1 abstention) today and now moves on to the Assembly Arts & Entertainment Committee.

“In the last year, at least two additional adult performers—Cameron Bay and Rod Daily—sadly became infected with HIV while working in the industry,” said Michael Weinstein, President of AIDS Healthcare Foundation. “AB 1576 expands and broadens worker protections for all California’s adult film workers on a statewide basis.”]

For Acworth, the passage of either of the statewide reforms in porn would be too prohibitive to do business in California. He’d then move the whole kinky company to Nevada, as many of his fellow pornographers have already done.

“We hope this never happens and that the new regulations are reasonable, but if it does happen over the coming years, we would like the option to rent out The Armory – or portions thereof – to other users.”

The planning review process takes 18-24 months, so in the short term, everyone can calm down. But for the long term, you’ll know Kink.com is ready to move by watching the progress of statewide porn reforms. If porn actors need to wear goggles in productions, it looks like we’ll say goodbye to Kink.com.

Below we’ve embedded the planning department filing from Acworth, obtained by Uptown Almanac.

Planning Department File on Kink.com by FitztheReporter

Billionaire helps poke holes in oil industry’s argument for drilling Monterey Shale

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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29
Billionaire helps poke holes in oil industry’s argument for drilling Monterey Shale

“We’ve been told that there’s a great oil boom on the immediate horizon,” billionaire investor and Pac Heights resident Tom Steyer noted at the start of a March 27 talk in Sacramento. 

But Steyer (who has pledged to spend $100 million on ad campaigns for the 2014 election to promote action on climate change) wasn’t there to trumpet the oil industry’s high expectations. Instead, he introduced panelists who dismissed the buzz on drilling the Monterey Shale as pie-in-the-sky hype.

Dr. David Hughes, a geoscientist with the Post Carbon Institute, and researcher Robert Collier had been invited to speak by Next Generation, a policy group focused on climate change that was co-founded by Steyer.

Last year, researchers from the University of Southern California released a study that wound up being cited time and again as the basis for the oil industry’s arguments in the context of a statewide debate on fracking ignited by environmentalists.

Partially funded by the Western States Petroleum Association, oil industry lobbyists, the USC report outlined a rosy economic outlook stemming from oil extraction in the Monterey Shale, a vast geologic formation touted as “a new, economy-spurring natural resource.”

The Monterey Shale spans 1,750 square miles, running beneath much of the San Joaquin Valley and into Southern California. Authors of a private-sector report produced by INTEK, referenced by the USC report, estimated that 15.4 billion barrels of oil could be extracted from the shale formation – mostly through nontraditional methods such as fracking or acidizing, a process that involves pumping acid underground.

But Hughes, the geoscientist, characterized this estimate as unrealistic. “The Monterey Shale certainly will produce more oil and gas, but likely only a very small fraction of what’s been reported in the INTEK report,” he said. “Projections are highly unlikely to be realized.” The Post Carbon Institute and Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy published their own report, Drilling California: A Reality Check on the Monterey Shale.

Also unlikely to be realized are the optimistic figures on job creation and economic activity, Collier noted.

California is the nation’s fourth largest oil producer, but its production has been on a steady decline for the past two decades. “So the hopes for the Monterey Shale come in the context of a gradual decline, and the hopes that California will echo the big boom of North Dakota and Texas,” he said.

The USC report contained sensational projections, predicting that 2.8 million net new jobs would be created statewide in sectors indirectly or directly associated with oil. The most optimistic scenario predicted 4.4 million net new jobs. The report also predicted that opening up the Monterey Shale for drilling would result in a 14 percent increase in per capita GDP, as well as  $24 billion in state and local tax revenues.

And as the debate about regulating fracking raged on, the findings in this study were “echoed by politicians of both parties,” Collier noted.

But prominent economists, tapped by Next Generation to analyze the study, said they could find no basis for certain claims.

Next Generation researchers turned to University of California economists Jerry Nickelsburg of UCLA, Jesse Rothstein of UC Berkeley and Olivier Deschênes of UC Santa Barbara. “They said: ‘We cannot see any justification for these incredible numbers,” Collier reported. “They seem too big to be believable.”

Instead, the economists believed the potential job creation was closer to 100,000 in total direct and indirect employment, he added. More information is presented in Next Generation’s report.

So arguments that the oil industry has been using in favor of opening up the Monterey Shale might be based on flimsy math. 

Steyer, at the close of the talk, put in a plug for focusing on clean-energy sector growth instead.

“When we sit here and talk about jobs, let’s remember that the clean energy jobs are most likely to solve our employment problems,” he said. “If we want a boom in energy production, then we have a boom in energy production. I think it’s clear, our future is in advanced energy.”

Glimmers of sunshine

Michael Redmond
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3
Glimmers of sunshine

rebecca@sfbg.com

For 29 years, San Francisco Bay Area journalists have gathered in mid-March — around the birthday of founding father and free-press advocate James Madison — to recognize reporters, attorneys, citizens, and others who fight to shake or keep information free.

The act of standing up to defend the principle of freedom of information can be rather unglamorous, sometimes leading to grueling lawsuits. It’s grown even more complicated with the rise of the Internet, the decline of traditional newspapers, and the dawn of an Information Age that delivers instantaneous material that is at once more slippery and abundant than ever.

And yet, the digital realm has opened up a whole new battlefield in the fight for open access to relevant information the public needs to know. This year, the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Freedom of Information Committee took the rare step of granting a posthumous Public Service James Madison Award to Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

As a leader in the digital rights movement, Swartz, who died at the age of 26 by taking his own life, was on the forefront of a movement that fought to uphold open access to information in the face of a corporate power grab that threatened to result in online censorship.

The fight against SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (the Protect Intellectual Property Act) in early 2012 marked just one of Swartz’s accomplishments as he fought for free and open access to information. Among his other contributions was RECAP, an online listing of court materials that allowed free access to documents held in the federal, paywall-protected court filing system called PACER.

To commemorate Swartz’s work, the Bay Guardian presents in this issue an illustrated history of his activism. While recipients of James Madison Awards have typically been individuals who took on government bureaucracies to wrest information out of the shadows and into the public eye, Swartz’s battle revolved around freeing information that is locked up by private interests, or protected by copyright.

“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world,” he wrote in a 2008 essay titled “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.” “We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.”

But first, here are a few updates on the fight for open access to information in San Francisco and beyond.

 

NO SHINING EXAMPLE

In 1999, San Francisco voters enacted a law to strengthen citizens’ access to government records and public meetings. To ensure that the open-access law was properly upheld, it also created a local body called the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force.

At each meeting, San Franciscans frustrated by their inability to get the information they sought from city bureaucracies appear before the board to air their grievances, in the hopes that the decisions to withhold documents will be reversed. Typically, citizens lodge around 100 complaints per year, according to task force clerk Victor Young.

But the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force has not been going at full speed for some time now. There’s a backlog of 62 cases, in part because the body could not legally meet for five months in 2012 because it did not have a member who was physically disabled, in accordance with the law establishing criteria for who can serve. (The previous member to meet the criteria, Bruce Wolfe, was denied reappointment. In an op-ed published in political blog Fog City Journal, task force member Rick Knee links this and the Board of Supervisors’ general foot-dragging on Sunshine with a political skirmish dating back to 2011, when the task force found the Board of Supervisors to be in violation of the Sunshine Ordinance.)

There have been two vacant seats on the task force for around two years, as well as two holdover members whose terms have technically expired. Applicants have sought out those seats, but the Board of Supervisors Rules Committee hasn’t gotten around to appointing new members; the most recent appointment was made in October of 2012, according to Alisa Miller, Rules Committee clerk.

Come April 27, meanwhile, all of the current task force members’ terms will expire. Miller said she expects the Board of Supervisors to revisit nominations before the end of April. There are a grand total of 10 applications for all 11 seats. Given all of this, plus a lawsuit revolving around the city’s refusal disclose how the City Attorney’s Office advises agencies on Sunshine Ordinance interpretations, San Francisco is going through some dark days for open government.

 

NAVIGATING FOIA

Anyone who’s ever tried to request public documents from government officials under the Freedom of Information Act knows that it feels more like a bureaucratic nightmare than a federal right. But a new project from the Center for Investigative Reporting is hoping to streamline the entire process into a (relatively) painless procedure.

FOIA Machine (foiamachine.org) is a website to request public documents at the federal, state, or local level, and is described by its creators as the “TurboTax for government records.”

“We wanted to make the FOIA experience better for journalists,” said Shane Shifflett, a data reporter at The Huffington Post who helped build the tool. “We built up a prototype and applied for grants. Then we put it on Kickstarter and it went crazy. That gave us a lot of confidence to see it through to the end.”

On Kickstarter, FOIA Machine raised over $53,000 from more than 2,000 backers, more than triple its goal.

FOIA Machine allows registered users to prepare requests, search a database of contacts, track the status of a request, and work with a community of fellow users.

Shifflett considers the community aspect to be the site’s strongest feature. “It’s crowdsourcing, so as people create requests, they can add contacts into the database. Now there will be a history of who worked with who, and it makes the process of figuring out where to send requests so much simpler.”

The site is still in development, and users who try to register promptly receive an email asking them to “stay tuned” for information in the coming weeks and months. Shifflett said that the group hopes for FOIA Machine to be up and running by June.

 

LEAK US YOUR DOCUMENTS

From time to time, sources have told us at the Bay Guardian that they would love to share sensitive information for news articles, but fear they would be retaliated against or even terminated from employment if they were to do so.

We have found a way around that.

Sources who wish to retain their anonymity while sharing information they believe the public has a right to know now have the option of using an encrypted submission system to anonymously send documents to our news team.

Created by Bay Area technologists in partnership with the San Francisco Bay Guardian, BayLeaks uses the latest cryptography software to protect the identities of our sources. This is a secure, anonymous way for concerned citizens to communicate with journalists to release information.

Our system uses SecureDrop, a whistleblowing platform managed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Tor, an online anonymity network that has gained the trust of Internet users around the world.

To learn more, visit sfbg.com/bayleaks-intro

 

MONEY IN POLITICS

It’s not really a secret that big money has a colossal influence on politics, but the groups and individuals that write those hefty checks to lawmakers often prefer to stay secret themselves. And while political donations aren’t illegal, most voters would like to know exactly who is funding a piece of legislation or a political campaign, and where that money is coming from.

Fortunately for us in California, we already have a resource to easily find that information.

“There’s a collective influence of money in our political system,” said Pamela Behrsin, spokesperson for MapLight, a nonpartisan research organization based in Berkeley that tracks the influence of money in politics. “Our founders said, ‘Look at all this money, and how this legislator voted on this bill. Do you think the money had any influence on how the legislator voted?'”

Through the website, users can also search by bill or proposition to find, for example, that big companies such as Philip Morris spent nearly $48 million to defeat Prop. 29, a proposed cigarette tax in California, on the June 2012 ballot. Supporters of the tax, such as the American Cancer Society and Lance Armstrong Foundation, could only muster a quarter of that amount.

“There’s a whole breadth of people wanting to understand the problem of money and politics,” Behrsin said. “This is one of the largest issues in our democracy right now. People are starting to stand up and say unless we get money out of our system, it’s going to be that much more difficult to fix.”

Bogus chain store study ignores small biz benefits

Michael Redmond
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10

OPINION

Earlier this month, San Francisco’s Office of Economic Analysis waded into the debate over whether the city should beef up its policy restricting the spread of chain stores. In a new study, the OEA concludes that the city’s regulations are harming the local economy and that adding additional restrictions would only do more damage. But this sweeping conclusion, hailed by proponents of formula retail, rests on a deeply flawed analysis. The study is riddled with data problems so significant as to nullify its conclusions.

San Francisco is the only city of any significant size where “formula” businesses, defined as retail stores or restaurants that have 10 or more outlets, must obtain a special permit to locate in a neighborhood business district. The law’s impact, in one sense at least, is readily apparent: Independent businesses account for about two-thirds of the retail square footage and market share in San Francisco, compared to only about one-quarter nationally. Although chains have been gaining ground in San Francisco, the city far outstrips New York, Chicago, and other major cities in the sheer numbers of homegrown grocers, bookstores, hardware stores, and other unique businesses that line its streets.

San Francisco’s policy has gaps, however, which have prompted a slew of recent proposals to amend the law. Members of the Board of Supervisors have proposed a variety of changes, such as extending the policy to cover more commercial districts (it only applies in neighborhood business districts) and broadening the definition of what counts as a formula business.

The OEA presents its study as an injection of hard economic data into this policy debate. There are three pieces to its analysis. Let’s take each in turn.

First, the OEA reports that chains provide more jobs than independent retailers do. It presents U.S. Census data showing that retailers with fewer than 10 outlets employ 3.2 workers per $1 million in sales, while chains (10 or more outlets) employ 4.3 people.

One major problem with this statistic is that the OEA includes car dealerships. Retail studies generally exclude the auto sector, because car dealers differ in fundamental ways from other retailers and car sales account for such a large chunk of consumer spending that they can skew one’s results. The OEA’s analysis is a classic example of this. Because the vast majority of car dealerships are independently owned and employ relatively few people per $1 million in sales, by including them, the OEA drags down the employment figure for local retailers overall.

If you take out car dealers, which are not subject to San Francisco’s formula business policy anyway, and also remove “non-store” retailers, a category that includes enterprises like heating oil dealers and mail order houses, a different picture emerges. Retailers with fewer than 10 outlets employ 5.3 people per $1 million in sales, compared to only 4.5 for those with 10 or more locations.

The actual difference is even a bit more than this, because chains handle their own distribution, employing people to work in warehouses, while independents typically rely on other businesses for this. And, of course, a portion of the jobs chain stores create are not local jobs; they are housed back at corporate headquarters. The OEA fails to mention either of these fairly obvious caveats.

The superior ability of non-formula businesses to create jobs is notably evident across many of the categories that generate most of the city’s formula business applications, including clothing, grocery, and casual dining. The only exception is drugstores, a category in which chains appear to be supporting more jobs. But even this may not be a true exception, since most independent pharmacies focus almost exclusively on medicine, while chain drugstores are hybrid convenience stores, employing people to ring up sales of cigarettes and greeting cards.

The second and third pieces of the OEA’s analysis are linked together. The study concedes that, compared to chains, independents circulate more of their revenue in the local area, creating additional economic activity and jobs. But, it contends, prices at chains are 17 percent lower; enough, according to the OEA’s math, to outweigh the economic benefits of this recirculation.

On the lighter side of this seesaw calculation sits the OEA’s estimate of how much money local retailers circulate in the city’s economy. This estimate is notably smaller than what other studies have found. When I asked Dan Houston, a principal with Civic Economics, why his firm’s studies show that independent businesses have a bigger impact, he pointed to two areas where his firm’s figures differ from the OEA’s. One is labor.

“We’re finding that local wages and operating income [at independent businesses] are much bigger, closer to 25 percent [of expenses] rather than the 15 percent the OEA finds,” said Houston.

The other is spending on inventory. Civic Economics has found that independent retailers and restaurants source some of their goods locally, whereas the OEA assumes that all of this spending leaves the area.

Sitting on the heavier side of the OEA’s seesaw is its conclusion that chains charge lower prices. As definitive as its 17 percent figure sounds and as pivotal as it is to the study’s math, it is a highly questionable number. It’s based on a limited sampling of prices in which large swaths of the retail sector, including apparel stores and restaurants, were excluded.

“I just hate to see a statistic like that being used when it is so limited in what was being measured,” said Matt Cunningham, another principal at Civic Economics.

It only takes a slight adjustment of these wobbly figures to produce the opposite conclusion: that formula businesses do more economic harm than good. All one has to do to tip the OEA’s seesaw in the other direction is to assume a slightly larger recirculation of revenue on the part of independents and a slightly lower price advantage on the part of chains. (Just dropping the price difference to 14 percent will do it.)

Perhaps the worst aspect of the OEA’s study is that it seems to float in space, untethered to what’s actually happening on the ground. Many of the chains that are clamoring to open in the city’s neighborhoods are high-end retailers whose products carry a price premium. Their arrival typically drives up commercial rents, making it harder for businesses that sell basic low-margin goods to survive.

Nor does the OEA attempt to situate its analysis in the context of several peer-reviewed studies that don’t just model the potential impacts of corporate consolidation, but actually track them. In a study published in Economic Development Quarterly, for example, economists Stephan Goetz and David Fleming report that counties that have a larger share of their economy in the hands of locally owned businesses have experienced higher median household income growth than places dominated by large corporations.

The OEA’s study will not be the city’s only analytical look at its formula business policy. The Planning Department has commissioned its own study, preliminary findings of which were released this week. Among other useful statistics, the draft notes that most formula business applications are approved and fully one-quarter of the retail space in the city’s neighborhoods is now occupied by chains, which suggests the permitting process is not as unfriendly to formula businesses as the law’s opponents contend.

Still, this figure is much smaller than in San Francisco’s more centralized commercial districts, which are not covered by the policy. Here, the chains’ share of the available square footage stands at 53 percent and growing.

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Stacy Mitchell is a senior researcher at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and author of Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses.

 

Constructing change

Michael Redmond
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2
Constructing change

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Two of the most deep-rooted national-character-defining American tropes are a) that we are a profoundly self-reliant people, and b) the Horatio Alger myth that anyone can go from “rags to riches” if they have a good heart and a tireless work ethic.

Despite their enduring popularity, neither has aged very well in terms of real-world application of late. Globalization has moved offshore many of the jobs and services that corporatization had already removed from the small businesses that sustained smaller communities. And the Horatio Alger myth? Please. It was a highly effective weapon of mass distraction 150 years ago, and it’s even more so now.

As the musical chairs of sustainable life in our society are steadily winnowed, hope continues to be pegged on education — where funding for music classes went away long ago, and probably chairs are next — because, really, what else is out there for most people? But public K-12 gets worse and worse, while higher education gets ever more expensive and less valuable. (Of course, without it you’re even more screwed.) Recent years’ legislated focus on test scores has helped make lower education grindingly tedious for most students at a time when they more desperately need to succeed at it than ever to have any chance at an adulthood that doesn’t pledge allegiance to Sam Walton (and food stamps). Even if there were money for it, who is interested in innovating (rather than just privatizing) public education?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9XZHmD-2f4

If You Build It is a documentary about two people who, in fact, are actively interested in just that: Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller are partners in Project H Design, which runs Studio H, a program that draws on their architecture and design training to train middle-to-high schoolers in those disciplines while hopefully bettering their personal futures and communities as a whole. They get a chance to put their ideals (and curriculum) into practice when they’re hired for a year by Chip Zullinger, the “visionary” new superintendent of schools in Bertie County, North Carolina’s poorest. It’s so badly off that the opening of a Domino’s Pizza in county seat Windsor represents a major boon to area employment. There’s “no reason to stay here” for local youth, no opportunity and little hope of any developing, making Bertie a perfect laboratory for H’s experiment in ground-up community self-improvement.

But this “design bootcamp” has barely begun when Zullinger is canned by the school board for unspecified “numerous disagreements,” and all his new projects are immediately shut down. In desperation, Pilloton and Miller offer to continue without salaries (foundation grants are in place to cover their basic equipment and materials), so they’re given the go-ahead. Why not? They’re a freebie, now.

The 10 junior class members who’ve signed up are a racial mix. Expecting “a class where we’d make little toys or somethin’,” they’re instead challenged to figure out the basic tenets of design themselves in a series of increasingly complex, locally relevant projects. The first is to create individual boards for “cornholing” — something that hereabouts does not mean what you’re thinking right now, being more a sort of beanbag-toss game — the next constructing idiosyncratic chicken coops. (This is taken seriously enough that chickens are kept in the shop studio in order to study their behaviors and preferences.) Finally, there’s a competition to design a downtown farmers market building — something the area badly needs, as there’s no outlet for local produce and the sole available supermarket’s monopoly allows it to price-gouge.

For the students — despite varying discipline, some admittedly due to the oppressively hot weather during actual market construction — Studio H is a complete win, empowering and inspiring, engaging like nothing else available at school. The completed market is, it seems, a triumph, generating new businesses and jobs even outside its own roof. Yet even after a successful second academic year, the school board again declines to budget salaries for Pilloton and Miller. Maybe, as the latter learned after building a “gift” house in Detroit that ended up abandoned and trashed, people simply can’t appreciate, feel a sense of ownership or responsibility toward something they’ve been given for free.

At least that’s the lesson suggested by Patrick Creadon’s documentary. But for a movie about a program that in turn is about rebuilding communities, If You Build It doesn’t really seem interested in this particular community. Of course we get the usual establishing shots indicating that, yes, this is a certifiable Hicksville. But we never hear from school board members, from Zullinger after he’s fired, or from parents aside from the grateful ones of Project H students. When we see kids passively digesting various curricula at computer monitors (even phys ed is partly online), we’re left to assume this is simply a matter of bad, even stupid adult judgment: Can’t they see these teenagers are dangerously unengaged?

On the other hand, maybe Bertie County simply doesn’t have money for more than a bare minimum of on-site teaching staff. Maybe the supe’s innovations didn’t fly with the board because they meant cutting other essential programs. Who knows? We don’t, because that kind of key info isn’t here. Nor, really, is much character insight — we see little of the students’ lives outside class, and the Studio H duo (partners personally as well as professionally) come off a bit colorlessly, because they’re not viewed very fully, either.

Despite these flaws, If You Build It nonetheless demonstrates how public education still has near-infinite potential to shape lives and whole communities for the better — at least if it pretty much does a full 180 from the direction it’s been headed in for some time. Pilloton and Miller are currently doing their thing at a charter school right here, in Berkeley. That’s great, but also somewhat disappointing, because it’s precisely places like Bertie County that need their like so much more critically, and are drastically less likely to get it. *

IF YOU BUILD IT opens Fri/28 in Bay Area theaters.

Introducing BayLeaks

Michael Redmond
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3
Introducing BayLeaks

rebecca@sfbg.com

From time to time, sources have told us at the Bay Guardian that they would love to share sensitive information for news articles, but fear they would be retaliated against or even terminated from employment if they were to do so.

We have found a way around that.

Sources who wish to retain their anonymity while sharing information they believe the public has a right to know now have the option of using an encrypted submission system to anonymously send documents to our news team.

Created by Bay Area technologists in partnership with the San Francisco Bay Guardian, BayLeaks uses the latest cryptography software to protect the identities of our sources. This is a secure, anonymous way for concerned citizens to communicate with journalists to release information.

“Politically, economically, and socially, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Bay Area is at a crossroads. We see BayLeaks as a critical first step in securing radical transparency in public discourse as the region charts its future,” said T.R. Hwang, a BayLeaks partner and deputy director of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance, a citizens’ alliance dedicated to enhancing the public sphere through technology.

Our system uses SecureDrop, a whistleblowing platform managed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Tor, an online anonymity network that has gained the trust of Internet users around the world.

The SecureDrop program originated with the late Aaron Swartz, who developed it in collaboration with Wired Editor Kevin Poulson. Swartz was an Internet activist and programmer known for hashing out inventive ways to fight corruption and promote transparency. He’s remembered, among other things, for cofounding Reddit, the online news site; and for founding Demand Progress, an online activism group known for its 2012 campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act.

To access BayLeaks once you have logged onto Tor, type this URL into the browser: l7rt5kabupal7eo7.onion.

Now SecureDrop is managed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in 2012 that is “dedicated to helping support and defend public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption, and law-breaking in government.”

To provide maximum security, BayLeaks is only accessible over the Tor anonymity network.

When connecting to Tor in order to submit documents through SecureDrop, the Freedom of the Press Foundation recommends first going to a public location, such as a library or a café, rather than using one’s home or work station where it would be easier for a third party to detect you as a Tor user.

The Tor Browser is as easy to use as other browsers. But once you have downloaded it, it masks the IP address of the computer you are working on by sending your requests through a set of computer relays to keep anyone from tracing communications back to you.

Using the Tor Browser allows you to access Tor Hidden Services like BayLeaks, which are only available over Tor and can be much more secure than ordinary websites. These hidden services have .onion Web addresses (the .com of the digital anonymity world). After you’ve submitted something to BayLeaks, journalists can use the SecureDrop system to communicate securely and anonymously with you. Once you’ve sent all documents to BayLeaks, the Freedom of the Press Foundation recommends deleting the Tor Browser Bundle, destroying any recorded copies of your codename (see “A Low Tech How-To”), and erasing or destroying any media (CD-ROMs, USB sticks) used to copy the leaked documents.

“As the old adage goes, ‘Sunlight is the best disinfectant,'” said J.D. Shutt, a BayLeaks partner and Special Initiatives director of the SF Committee of Vigilance. “We’re excited to provide a technologically robust means of bringing this basic rule of civics into the 21st century.”

England made him

Michael Redmond
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0
England made him

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Swinging London had a brief, faddish life in movies in terms of actual representation, far more fleeting than its influences on music or fashion. But the general cultural shift it signaled did bring some lasting changes to English cinema, notably a new kind of leading man — the period’s celebration of youth and dandyism made it OK for men onscreen to be coltish, vulnerable, androgynously attractive. The prime specimen was Michael York, unabashedly pretty and a bit of a toff — certainly no working-class rough like Angry Young Men Albert Finney or Michael Caine.

The Oxford grad joined Olivier’s National Theatre in 1965, getting cast in a production directed by Franco Zeffirelli, who then put him in his filmed hits The Taming of the Shrew (1967) and Romeo and Juliet (1968). But it wasn’t until 1972 that he was seen by everyone as the Christopher Isherwood figure in Bob Fosse’s exceptionally sharp Cabaret, the Broadway musical drawn from that author’s fictionalized memoir. Never mind that he (nor Liza Minnelli, for that matter) would never really be a box-office star; as a name, he was made.

York had a good run through the 1970s. He was D’Artagnan in Richard Lester’s Musketeer films (1973 and ’74), the titular tunic-wearer in 1976’s Logan’s Run, among the stars committing Murder on the Orient Express (1974), John the Baptist in Zeffirelli’s 1977 TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, and straight man in both The Last Remake of Beau Geste and the hardly-last Island of Dr. Moreau remake (both 1977).

But the favorite film he’s chosen for his in-person tribute this Saturday at SF’s Mostly British Film Festival is comparatively little-remembered. You could view 1973’s England Made Me as riding the coattails of Cabaret — after all, here he is again as another affable, genteel but cash-poor temporary English émigré to Germany just as the Weimer era is getting tramped by the stormtrooper boots of National Socialism. But the Graham Greene source material (first published in 1935) is strong stuff, intelligently handled by director and co-adaptor Peter Duffell.

York’s Tony Farrant is a pleasant, callow young failure, hopeless at any endeavor that might pay the bills. Having lost yet another job (this time in the Far East), he blows into Berlin to visit Kate (Hildegard Neil), the sister whose queasily inappropriate affections he’s oblivious enough not to have recognized as such, yet. She’s ensconced herself as mistress and second-in-command to Krogh (Peter Finch), international financial titan skating on thin ice amid Hitler’s increasingly nationalistic economic policies.

Once again in need of employment, Tony looks to get fixed up by big sis — in fact, his pleasing, sociable English manners could be quite useful to a man as brilliant yet uneasy with people as Krogh. Then again, his gabby naiveté could also jinx matters much bigger than he grasps. It’s inevitable in Greene’s universe that cruel fate should choose the least guilty party in a web of corrupt intrigue to fall upon, like an anvil from a rooftop.

The role could hardly fall more squarely in York’s comfort zone. Yet it would be a mistake to take the seeming ease with which he delivers Tony’s very easy personality as anything less than very deft work. No wonder it’s a personal favorite — you can sense his engagement in a hundred fresh, surprising, perfectly in-character touches.

After his Seventies peak, York remained busy. But his type began working against him — an ingenue’s worst enemy (even a male one’s) is the onslaught of age — and he didn’t transition as well as some peers to character roles. He slid down the ranks via such odd stints as a short run on Dynasty knockoff Knots Landing and playing Dario Argento’s Phantom of Death in 1988 (the director saving the word “opera” for a later movie). Eventually he was seldom used save to personify old-school Englishness as a joke or fossil, whether visibly (as Basil Exposition in the Austin Powers series) or as a voice actor (as a Transformer, in Star Wars and Batman cartoons, video games, audio books, etc.) In recent years he’s also written several well-received memoirs and lectured extensively on acting Shakespeare.

England Made Me is not the only older film in Mostly British this year, though it’s the only one that comes with a living star in person. No one will be resuscitating the recently decreased Peter O’Toole, memorialized with a screening of 1982’s My Favorite Year; nor will there be any thawing for Richard Burton as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, 1965’s faithfully bleak adaptation of John le Carré’s breakthrough novel. The latter film plays a “British noir night” with Stephen Frears’ bizarre and rather brilliant 1984 The Hit.

Otherwise the focus, as usual, is on new (or new-ish) films from the UK and beyond. Some have already played theatrically here, like Neil Jordan’s middling vampire opus Byzantium (2012), Beatles-related documentary Good Ol’ Freda (2013), and Michael Winterbottom’s biopic about the UK’s sultan of 1960s and ’70s smut, The Look of Love (2013).

Coming soon to theaters — sooner still if you catch them as part of the festival — are director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi’s excellent seriocomedy Le Week-End, as well as Mumbai-set The Lunchbox. Speaking of the colonies, outback thriller Mystery Road and kidnapping drama Last Dance represent Australia.

If you appreciated Will Forte’s turn in Nebraska (2013), it’s worth seeing Run & Jump, in which he’s equally effective as an American doctor whose emotions unfreeze while doing research in Ireland — also the setting for Stay, a drearier piece distinguished by Aidan Quinn’s fine take on the stereotypical Irish rascally charmer. What Richard Did is a quietly intriguing melodrama about middle-class teenagers shaken by the aftermath of a fight outside a house party. Farther down the socioeconomic scale, Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant offers a portrait of children involved in petty crimes that’s as potent as the best of Ken Loach or the Dardennes. *

MOSTLY BRITISH FILM FESTIVAL

Feb. 13-20

Vogue Theatre

3290 Sacramento, SF

www.mostlybritish.org

 

Fight for higher minimum wage resumes

Michael Redmond
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0

An event at the San Francisco Women’s Building on Feb. 6 marked the 10-year anniversary of San Francisco’s minimum wage ordinance, passed by voters in 2003 with Proposition L. The landmark initiative not only raised the minimum wage in San Francisco to $8.50 per hour, but stipulated that the amount would rise every year to reflect inflation. Thanks to Prop. L, San Francisco now boasts the highest minimum wage in the nation, at $10.74.

But in pricey San Francisco, it still isn’t enough.

“Who thinks living in San Francisco is really expensive?” asked one of the event organizers and staff member of the Chinese Progressive Association, Shaw San Liu. All hands in the room shot up before the Spanish and Mandarin translators even had a chance to repeat the question.

Raising the minimum wage in San Francisco has been a hot topic recently, and Mayor Ed Lee even endorsed a significant increase back in December. While a wage of $15 per hour has been floated, nothing has been set in stone.

In addition to celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the minimum wage ordinance, Thursday’s event was also the official launch of the Campaign for a Fair Economy, a push to support the city’s lowest-paid workers and close the ever-growing wealth gap.

Raising the minimum wage is only part of the campaign, and advocates are also fighting for accountability from large chain businesses, stricter enforcement of existing labor standards, and expanding access to jobs for disadvantaged workers.

“San Francisco has led the way for employment policies in the past,” said Kung Feng, lead organizer for Jobs With Justice, which is helping to lead the campaign. “We need to continue that.”

Despite San Francisco’s long legacy of championing workers’ rights, there is still a tough battle ahead. Currently, the minimum wage in the city automatically goes up every year to match inflation (on Jan. 1, 2014, it rose from $10.55 to $10.74). Any further increase requires voter approval.

While it seems a higher minimum wage does have strong support and has already been endorsed by major political figures, there’s still a powerful lobby against it from some businesses and restaurant associations.

Advocates for higher minimum wage celebrate past success and look ahead

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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56
Advocates for higher minimum wage celebrate past success and look ahead

Balloons, snacks, cake, live music, an open wine bar and nearly 100 guests marked a Thu/6 celebration at the Women’s Building in San Francisco’s Mission district. You might never guess a party this fun would be held to celebrate the birthday of a city ordinance.

February marks the 10-year anniversary of San Francisco’s minimum wage ordinance, passed by voters in 2003 with Proposition L. The landmark initiative not only raised the minimum wage in San Francisco to $8.50 per hour, but stipulated that the amount would rise every year to reflect inflation. Thanks to Prop. L, San Francisco now boasts the highest minimum wage in the nation, at $10.74.

But being the nation’s highest still isn’t enough.

“Who thinks living in San Francisco is really expensive?” asked one of the event organizers and staff member of the Chinese Progressive Association, Shaw San Liu. All hands in the room shot up before the Spanish and Mandarin translators even had a chance to repeat the question.

Raising the minimum wage in San Francisco has been a hot topic recently, and Mayor Ed Lee even endorsed a significant increase back in December. The number that keeps floating around is $15 per hour, but nothing has been set in stone.

In addition to celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the minimum wage ordinance, Thursday’s event was also the official launch of the Campaign for a Fair Economy, a push to support the city’s lowest-paid workers and close the ever-growing wealth gap.

Raising the minimum wage is only part of the campaign, and advocates are also fighting for accountability from large chain businesses, stricter enforcement of existing labor standards, and expanding access to jobs for disadvantaged workers.

“San Francisco has led the way for employment policies in the past,” said Kung Feng, lead organizer for Jobs With Justice, a group that fights for workers’ rights. “We need to continue that.”

To say that San Francisco is leading the way is no understatement. In addition to having the highest minimum wage in the country, SF was also the first place in the U.S. to mandate paid sick leave, and the Health Care Security Ordinance works to guarantee medical benefits for all workers in the city.

Despite San Francisco’s long legacy of championing workers’ rights, there is still a tough battle ahead. Currently, minimum wage in the city automatically goes up every year to match inflation (on Jan. 1, 2014, it rose from $10.55 to $10.74). Any further increase requires voter approval.

While it seems a higher minimum wage does have strong support and has already been endorsed by major political figures, there’s still a powerful lobby against it from some businesses and restaurant associations. Despite the upcoming battle, advocates seemed optimistic.

“Who in here can tell me the significance of the Year of the Horse?” Liu of CPA asked the audience, referring to the ongoing Lunar New Year. A small woman sitting in the front row excitedly responded, “Maa dou gung sing!”

“Success comes in the horse year,” Liu explained. “And this will be a year of success and accomplishments for workers rights in San Francisco.”

Rise of the machines

Michael Redmond
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3
Rise of the machines

joe@sfbg.com

CAREERS AND ED As digital gizmos invade our pockets and our lives, the fear of machines replacing human work is as pervasive as ever. But of course that fear isn’t unique to the computer age.

As far back as the 1800s folk legend John Henry competed against a great railroad-building machine, hammering holes for railroad tracks in dirt and rock with the power of his arms.

In that tall tale of flesh versus steel, man won against automaton, and time marched on. The industrial revolution’s tech advances put farmers out of jobs, industrial robots put American factory workers out of jobs, calculators put abacuses out of jobs. So what’s new this time around?

Apparently, it’s a matter of speed.

MIT professors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, authors of Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Digital Frontier Press) say our modern robots are becoming so advanced, so quickly, that we can’t retrain our workers fast enough to keep up.

“Now the pace is accelerating, it’s faster than ever before in history, as a consequence we’re not creating jobs at the pace we need to,” Brynjolfsson told 60 Minutes anchor Steve Kroft in a segment on robots in November.

The nation’s unemployment rate was 7 percent last November, the most recent number available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s not counting the millions of underemployed people in the United States, working low or minimum wage jobs that don’t pay the bills.

Those workers are slowly being replaced by machines, from bank tellers (ATMs) to the Golden Gate Bridge toll takers (“pay-by-plate” systems). San Francisco weathered the job loss well, at least on paper. As Mayor Ed Lee is quick to tout, the city’s unemployment rate was at a low of 5.3 percent in September last year.

Maybe that’s because we’re in the eye of the storm. The Bay Area tech boom is a robotics boom too, and even small startups could innovate, upending entire industries.

San Francisco-based Momentum Machines calls its upcoming burger maker the “next generation” of fast food. They don’t mean Captain Picard serving up beef patties; they do mean burger disruption.

Momentum Machines’ burger machine can do everything a human can do, faster. It makes 360 hamburgers per hour, medium rare, or well done (if you please). It slices tomatoes, doles out pickles, and throws everything on a bun. The company promises this will “democratize” fast food — because everything in tech must be itemized, democratized, and then evangelized.

The company said this will, in the words of its website, “free up” all the hamburger line cooks in the restaurant.

Perhaps more telling is this section of its website, tucked well down at the bottom of its page.

“We want to help the people who may transition to a new job as a result of our technology the best way we know how — education. Our goal is to offer discounted technical training to any former line cook of a restaurant that uses our device,” they wrote.

Momentum Machines declined to be interviewed, citing a busy upcoming project. (Double-cheeseburgers?)

We also reached out to Super Duper Burger, and a spokesperson straight-out laughed at the idea of a robot burger cook. But that doesn’t mean economic forces won’t push the machines to eventually take over.

If thousands of fast food workers were replaced by machines, what would their next jobs be?

If the MIT professors are right, the robot revolution will not be stopped. Like the Terminators, they keep coming, and John Connor won’t save us. But maybe we can find peace and coexist.

That’s what they do at Kink.com.

Deep inside the Mission District brick fortress known as the Armory, over 35 robotic porn stars sit on shelves, waiting. They’re the talent of the website Fucking Machines, started by the Bay Area’s fine purveyors of pornographical pleasure, Kink.com.

John Henry has nothing on a fucking machine named Fuckzilla, a “Johnny 5” (from the movie Short Circuit) look-alike whose arms operate as high-power vibrators. While two women mount his appendages and scream for their lives, a webcam mounted in his face gives viewers an up-close view of the action.

The actresses who use them were not available for interview. But the filmmakers say they go gaga over it.

“The directors ask the girls ‘why do you like machines more?’ They always say it’s because (the machines) don’t get tired,” Sam, a videographer at Kink.com told us.

The machines are powerful too. The Intruder MK II has a fucking speed up to 500 RPM and exerts a torque (twist strength) of 3 foot-pounds. “One of our highest counts was a woman who went through 58 orgasms in a four hour period,” Kink.com videographer Aaron Farmer said.

I asked the pornographers if they lost any porn star employees since gaining the high-stamina bots. Turns out it was a noob question: most talent are freelancers and contractors in the industry, unless they run their own website.

So the machines aren’t displacing any jobs there. But they did create some.

“I was hired for Fucking Machines,” Aaron Farmer, the five-year videographer and sometimes director at Kink.com told us. They even have a machine shop in the armory, which while used for other purposes, also helps maintain the nearly 40 Fucking Machines on site, and even builds new ones.

Somewhere along the way, Kink.com outsmarted us all, riding the wave of tech disruption that one day may affect us all. Let’s hope we’re ready.

 

New FCC boss coming to Oakland

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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0
New FCC boss coming to Oakland

On Thu/9, Voices for Internet Freedom, Free Press and the Center for Media Justice are hosting Tom Wheeler, the recently installed Federal Communications Commission chairman, for a town hall-style meeting about the state of communication policy, both in the Bay Area and nationally.

The event, which will be held in Nile Hall of Preservation Park, runs from 7-9pm and will feature a panel discussion, commentary from influential community members and remarks from Wheeler. There also will be a lengthy time slot reserved for public comments and questions. While the event has sold out, viewers can catch a live webstream here during the event.

“It’s going to be a fairly short event, but power packed,” said Malkia Cyril, founder and Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice. “We want to bring the frame of consciousness about the role of media and culture to the dialogue with the FCC, [because] that generally isn’t there.

“Generally, when it’s those kind of conversations they have, we are not the kind of people they’re talking to. And we want to make sure that the voices of folks that are usually in the margins of debate really get heard.”

Preceding the main event will be a smaller, more focused meeting between Wheeler and “a few leaders of social justice in the Bay Area,” according to Cyril. The purpose is to give local leaders a chance to share the types of conditions affecting their communities in a small group setting, she added.

But it will be during the main town hall meeting that Wheeler, who was officially named FCC Chairman on Nov. 4 of 2013, will face a litany of questions from Oakland-area community members.

The topics expected to be broached during the meeting range from broad — net-neutrality, ownership of broadband, corporate ownership of broadcast mediums — to specific — like the fact that, according to Cyril, “there are zero African-Americans who own a full power television station in this country.”

And they’ll also want to discuss the abject employment bridge between the FCC and big-money corporations. “Given the fact that previous FCC Chair, [Julius] Genachowski just got a huge Wall Street job, I think they’ll also raise questions about this revolving door at the FCC between companies and policy makers,” said Cyril, who was referring to Genachowski’s transition from FCC Chair to the Carlyle Group, which is (naturally) a global asset management firm.

“I think we see that as a critical issue right now, so that will probably come up.”

For more information about the event, or to be added to the waitlist, visit tinyurl.com/OaklandFCCMeet.

Reformer removed

Michael Redmond
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31

rebecca@sfbg.com

A San Francisco public health official, who’s earned national recognition in his field for launching progressive environmental health initiatives, announced his resignation in late December under bizarre circumstances.

Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, who served as director of environmental health, left his employer of 17 years after being subjected to a months-long internal investigation he described as baseless.

Once the Department of Public Health concluded its inquiry, Bhatia faced no charges of misconduct. He resigned after securing a settlement agreement, under which the city paid him $155,000.

In an open letter circulated to colleagues and reporters, Bhatia announced he was leaving and commented on an internal cultural shift he said had impeded his work, which examined the health consequences of air pollution, poor housing conditions, low-wage employment, and disparities in life expectancy by neighborhood, among other things.

“Unfortunately, changes in the Department’s organization and culture no longer support my pursuit of vigorous and community-oriented public health regulation and advocacy,” Bhatia wrote.

“I understand that the new leadership may not share my broad vision of environmental public health,” he went on, referencing a 2010 leadership transition in which Director Barbara Garcia took the reins from former department chief Mitch Katz. “Yet, it is deeply disconcerting that they chose to subject me to an aggressive and public investigation into groundless allegations.”

Colleen Chawla, deputy director of the health department, said she was prevented from commenting on Bhatia’s resignation or statement, because the issue constituted a personnel matter.

Bhatia spearheaded a series of innovative programs that went beyond the scope of conventional public health practices.

“Rajiv was doing pioneering work,” said Larry Adelman, co-director of documentary filmmaking company California Newsreel and producer of “Unnatural Causes,” a four-part PBS series on health inequity.

“He was concerned with closing the growing gap between health outcomes,” Adelman said, noting that the poor have a lower life expectancy on average than those with higher incomes. “I know other public health departments were looking to his work and trying to learn from him.”

Bob Prentice, who served as DPH deputy director until 1999, sounded a similar note, saying Bhatia’s environmental health work was based on the idea that “fundamental inequalities in life produce inequities in health.”

Bhatia’s departure is only the latest in a series of resignations submitted over the last year or so, causing some to question whether Garcia’s philosophy or management style triggered the departure of more than a half-dozen high-ranking health department staff members.

“Is this about a management culture that wants to suppress the kinds of things Rajiv has represented?” Prentice wondered.

The environmental health director first learned he was under investigation in June, when he returned after a vacation only to learn he’d been locked out of his office.

“They finished doing their investigation in August,” Bhatia explained in a recent phone interview. “I was removed from all roles. They refused to allow me to go back to my work.”

Instead, he says he was directed to work on “trivial special assignments” that had little to do with the goals of the Program on Health Equity and Sustainability, which he’d created.

Bhatia says he still has not been told exactly what city officials hoped to find when they initially placed him under investigation, or what the allegation was. But based on the questions they asked him, “it appears what they were investigating was a program … initiated by a mayor’s executive directive,” he said, referencing a food policy directive initiated under former Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Sources familiar with the situation told the Guardian the investigation started with a whistleblower complaint filed against Bhatia, which led department officials to try and determine whether there was a conflict of interest associated with his role as a nonprofit board director.

But Bhatia reacted strongly to this allegation, which was also alluded to in a San Francisco Chronicle article. “It’s just not true,” he said. “I’m not on the board of any nonprofit that receives any money from the city.”

Some high-ranking health department officials do work with nonprofit organizations that deal closely with the city. As the Bay Guardian previously reported (“Friends in the Shadows,” Oct. 8, 2013), Chawla is a board member of the San Francisco Public Health Foundation, which raises funds for DPH and functions as a city contractor. Sue Currin and Roland Pickens, CEO and COO of San Francisco General Hospital, respectively, serve on the board of the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation. The vast majority of private donations to the city’s safety-net hospital are collected through that nonprofit entity.

Bhatia sits on the board of Human Impact Partners, an Oakland-based nonprofit with 11 staff members dedicated to tackling health equity issues. “I was pretty careful to draw the line,” he said of that role.

“I think the real question is, for me, what facts did the city use to justify their actions? It seems arbitrary,” Bhatia said. “As far as I know, all of the work I was doing was part of the mayor’s agenda. This came out of nowhere, and it apparently has no basis.”

Last October, a group of his professional colleagues wrote to the health department to voice concern that his removal would cause key environmental health programs to fall by the wayside.

Among the initiatives he was moving forward was a Community Air Pollution Risk Reduction plan, which sought to establish new policies for alleviating respiratory problems associated with air pollution hotspots. Since concentrated air pollution occurs within some of the city’s priority residential development areas, that new set of proposed regulations would apply to new and existing real-estate development projects.

“The City began drafting the [risk reduction plan] in 2010 and was to have adopted a plan by 2012,” supporters wrote in an Oct. 1 letter. “We are puzzled by a recent City presentation on the timeline for the CRRP, which suggested that a plan was not yet drafted.”

Chawla said the plan continues to move forward. She also acknowledged that, in general, Bhatia “has really brought a lot of great ideas and work to the health department, and that is something I value and anticipate will continue.”

The air pollution risk reduction plan wasn’t the only place where Bhatia’s work overlapped with development and housing issues. Adelman described how Bhatia had conducted a health impact assessment, a formal study to determine the health outcome of a policy decision, on the potential health benefits of requiring developers to build onsite affordable housing units as part of new construction projects.

He was also engaged in an effort to improve the environmental health division’s code enforcement against housing hazards, such as mold and pests, and pushed for an open data initiative to make housing inspection records publicly available.

“We don’t really want to believe this is happening,” Paloma Pavel, president of Earth House Center and cofounder of Breakthrough Communities, said of the investigation against Bhatia and his subsequent departure. Patel and cofounder Carl Anthony, both former directors of the Ford Foundation, authored a book and created a nonprofit dedicated to advancing environmental justice and regional health equity.

“It’s a terrific loss for our region’s environmental health,” she said of Bhatia’s departure.

 

BART approves contract as tensions with its workers continue UPDATED

Sasha Cuttler
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7
BART approves contract as tensions with its workers continue UPDATED

The BART Board of Directors today approved a modified contract with its two biggest labor unions, an action that received faint praise and was followed up with implied threats from both sides, continuing one of the ugliest and most impactful Bay Area labor disputes in recent memory.

The four-year contract approved today resolves a dispute over a paid family leave provision that BART officials say was mistakenly included in the contract that the unions negotiated and approved in November following two strikes and two workers being killed by a train that was being used to train possible replacement drivers on Oct. 19.

Recent negotiations yielded a contract with seven new provisions favorable to workers, including a $500 per employee bonus if ridership rises in the next six months and more pension and flex time options, in exchange for eliminating six weeks of paid leave for family emergencies.

The new contract was approved on a 8-1, with new Director Zakhary Mallett the lone dissenting vote, continuing his staunchly anti-union stance. Newly elected President Joel Keller was quoted in a district statement put out afterward pledging to change the “process” to prevent future strikes.  

“The Bay Area has been put through far too much and we owe it to our riders and the public to make the needed reforms to our contract negotiations process so mistakes are avoided in the future. I will appoint a new Board committee to investigate the policies and practices of labor negotiations and will make recommendations to the Board and the General Manager on how we can improve the process,” Keller said.

But from labor’s perspective, the problem wasn’t the “process,” but the actions taken by the Board of Directors; General Manager Grace Crunican; and Thomas Hock, the union-busting labor negotiator they hired for $400,000 — and the decision by BART to practice bargaining table brinksmanship backed up by a fatally flawed proposal to run limited replacement service to try to break the second strike.

A statement by SEIU Local 1021 Executive Director Pete Castelli put out after the vote began, “Today’s Board vote incrementally restores the faith that the riders and workers have lost in the Board of Directors, but it’s not enough to fix the damage they’ve caused to our communities.”

It goes on the blame the district for the strikes and closes with a vague threat to target the four directors who are up for election this year: Keller, James Fang, Thomas Blalock, and Robert Raburn (whose reelection launch party last month was disrupted by union members).

“Today BART is less safe and less reliable because of the Directors’ reckless leadership,” Castelli said. “Something has to change in order for all of us to regain our confidence in BART, and it starts with having BART Directors who are committed to strengthening the transportation system we all rely on and who prioritize its workers’ and riders’ safety. We look forward to the opportunity to work with our communities and to elect Directors who are committed to improving service and safety to all who depend on BART.”

Asked whether the union was indeed threatening to get involved in those four elections this year, spokesperson Cecille Isidro told the Guardian, “You’re absolutely right, that’s exactly what we’re trying to project.”

Local 1021 Political Director Chris Daly took the threat a step further, singling out Mallett as by far the most caustic and anti-union director, saying the union is currently considering launching a recall campaign against Mallett, although that could be complicated by the fact that he represents pieces of three counties: San Francisco, Alameda, and Contra Costa.

“He is so out-of-touch with the region. When he was elected, people didn’t know what they were getting,” Daly said, noting that voters elected Mallett over longtime incumbent Lynette Sweet in 2012 mostly out of opposition to her and not support for him. The Bay Guardian and others who endorsed Mallett have been critical of Mallett’s erratic actions since then, which included trying to raise fares within San Francisco without required social equity studies before becoming the most dogmattic critic of BART’s employee unions.

Daly was also particularly critical of Keller, who he accused of using today’s vote “to roll out his reelection campaign” with an anti-worker tenor. Neither Keller nor Mallett immediately responded to Guardian requests for comment, but we’ll update this post if and when we hear from them [see UPDATE below].

Daly cited a litany of grievances that could be corrected by new blood on a board that has seen little changeover in the modern era, from hiring Crunican (who Daly called “a terrible hire”) and Hock to conflating the district’s capital and operating budgets during the current negotiations, trying to expand the system on the backs of workers using an aggressive media strategy.

“The experience of the last 8-10 months elevates the importance of these BART Board races,” Daly told us. “They spent about $1 million to basically malign their workers and improve their negotiating position on the contract.”

BART spokesperson Alicia Trost denied that the district has been hostile to it workers, telling the Guardian, “From the beginning, we negotiated in good faith and we always tried to strike a balance between investing in the employees and investing in the system.”

In addition to the unions targeting directors in this November’s election, the district is also awaiting a ruling from the National Transportation Safety Board on its responsibility for the Oct. 19 fatalities, as well as facing scrutiny from the California Legislature, particularly its Joint Legislative Audit Committee and the Assembly Committee on Labor and Employment, whose members criticized BART’s lax safety culture during a Nov. 7 hearing.

Assemblymember Phil Ting (D-SF) called that hearing and criticized BART officials there for failing to provide requested safety information, requiring them to submit that information in writing, which he says still wasn’t adequte. “It was very difficult to decipher,” Ting told the Guardian recently.

Once the Legislature comes back into session on Jan. 6, Ting said that, “We’ll have a clearer idea whether we need more hearings.”

Meanwhile, SEIU Local 1021 members are slated to vote on the latest BART contract on Jan. 13.

UPDATE 1/3: Keller got back to us and admitted that if the unions really target him for removal in a serious way, “they’ll probably be successful.” He was fatalistic about that possibility, repeatedly voicing acceptance of that prospect: “If I lose my seat over this, I lose my seat.”

And by “this,” Keller means the likelihood that he’ll push for prohibiting BART employees from going on strike, which he said is already the case with the country’s four largest systems — Boston, Chicago, New York City, and Washington DC — which have deemed transit an essential service.

“Large transit agencies do not allow their employees to strike,” Keller said, noting that the San Francisco City Charter also bans transit strikes, something he pointed out Daly didn’t alter during his tenure on the Board of Supervisors.

And Keller said he’s willing to risk his seat to make that change: “I feel my responsibility is to use my remaining time to break this dysfunction labor process.”

Keller also said that there were mistakes on both sides during BART’s labor impasse, including BART’s decision to train replacement drivers to offer service between Oakland and San Francisco during a strike. “Maybe the prospect of training replacement drivers was a mistake, and I’ll accept that responsibility,” Keller told us.

He explained the ill-fated decision by saying, “We were in a hardball environment,” which he said both sides contributed to.  

Proposal seeks to improve prospects for the formerly incarcerated

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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17

Questions concerning an individual’s criminal history have been banned from city agency employment applications in San Francisco since 2006. Now Sup. Jane Kim has proposed legislation to expand the reach of that policy into the private sector and affordable housing.

Introduced at the Board of Supervisors Tue/10, Kim’s legislation seeks to eliminate the bias of first impression that has long plagued the formerly incarcerated.

The Fair Chance ordinance builds upon existing city and state-level fair hiring policies, known as “ban the box” policies, already in place. It proposes to extend them to private businesses and affordable housing providers, as a way to remove “unnecessary barriers to stable housing and employment for individuals with conviction records,” according to a description of the legislation issued by Kim’s office.

“The most important thing to remember is that this is not a hiring mandate,” Kim explained in an interview. “We just want to create a process that’s based on merits.” She added, “We’ve also made it so you can only examine a persons arrest record for the last seven years in order to try to establish some sort of hiring standard.”

Existing “Ban the box” policies forbid employers in the public sector from asking prospective employees about prior criminal convictions in the early application process — essentially eliminating the polarizing “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” check box from online and paper employment applications. Instead, it requires those that would request a background check to at least meet the person in question first. 

And it is a popular theme: “ban the box” policies in some form can be found in 10 states and more than 50 cities nationwide. Gov. Jerry Brown signed California’s version into law back in October, while the city of Richmond established one of the most progressive “ban the box” policies in America, joining Seattle and Philadelphia as major metropolitan areas to have extended the ban into the private sector.

“Our office has been working on this since January, and we’ve spent lots of time talking to other states and municipalities about what has worked for them,” Kim said.

Under San Francisco’s current “ban the box” policy, individuals with prior felony convictions are permitted to withhold the potentially damning information only if they are applying for a position with the city.

But under the Fair Chance Ordinance, which is co-sponsored by Sup. Malia Cohen, that practice would be extended to all jobseekers looking for private-sector work, at establishments with staffs larger than 20 people, as well as applicants for public housing.

The Fair Chance Ordinance wouldn’t place an outright ban on criminal inquiries, just require employers to hold off on background checks until after the interview, theoretically allowing recently integrated individuals an opportunity to contextualize their past indiscretions.

The idea behind the ban is simple. In the age of impersonal Internet applications, prospective employees are often quickly assessed in a binary manner, separating candidates into categories of hire-able or not the instant their applications are submitted.

And in an ultra-competitive job market, checking a box that condemns your past can condemn your future. There have been myriad reports about folks whose applications have been thrown out the moment that checked box is detected, but under Fair Chance, prospective employees would have the opportunity to get in front of their past.

And that’s the idea. “We’re just trying to help people get a foot in the door,” Kim said. “And we’re just trying to get folks to apply. A lot of [formerly incarcerated individuals] won’t even apply for jobs, because of the ‘box.’”

Oakland fast food workers fight for $15

Michael Redmond
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2

It was a bad day for Big Macs, but a good day for workers.

Joining a nationwide day of action, a wave of over 100 protesters crowded into an Oakland McDonald’s on Jackson Street, urging fast food workers to join in the strike. Four employees participated, while others briefly joined the march outside.

Similar strikes were held in 100 cities nationwide, with workers in Detroit, New York City and more rallying to demand a livable wage of $15 an hour.

The national actions were led by labor unions, including Service Employees International Union, but locally it was led by men like Jose Martinez, a KFC worker who led a strike at that fast food establishment some time back. “It’s a movement for all fast food workers to come together and fight for our rights,” he said.

Oakland rapper, performer and music producer Boots Riley turned out in support of the fast food workers’ movement. “Fighting to raise wages of anyone helps everyone. A high tide raises all boats,” he told the Guardian. “You help make that profit, your labor is worth more than minimum wage.”

Inside, the fast food joint was bursting at the seams. “Markeisha! Markeisha! Markeisha!” the protesters screamed, bursting into cheers as the five-foot tall girl hobbled around the counter to join the strike. Markeisha, who did not want her last name used, said she tore her ACL a week ago tripping over one of her children’s toys. She can’t afford not to be at work though, and worked the register from a chair.

We asked if she was afraid to be on strike. “Afraid? Kind of,” she said. If she lost her job, “I wouldn’t have a way to pay my bills and support her family.” She felt it was an important thing to do, because she isn’t earning a living wage. After three years of employment, she’s finally making 50 cents more per hour because she’s training to be a shift manager, and can now expect an hourly wage of $8.50.

A statement on McDonald’s website noted, “Our owner-operators are committed to providing our employees with opportunities to succeed. We offer employees advancement opportunities, competitive pay and benefits.”

One worker the Bay Guardian interviewed described having to visit food banks to get enough food, despite working full time.

McDonald’s’ official statement also noted: “The events taking place are not strikes. Outside groups are traveling to McDonald’s and other outlets to stage rallies.” But four workers did join the Oakland McDonald’s protesters to participate in the nationwide strike, and together they poured into the adjoining parking lot, dancing and chanting.

The protest was organized as a coalition between a number of groups, including the ReFund & ReBuild Oakland Community-Labor Coalition, ACCE, EBASE, the East Bay Organizing Committee, UNITE-HERE Local 2850, OUR WALMART, SEIU 1021, and SEIU ULTCW.

UPDATE: Union organizer shouts down protesters as they block private Google shuttle

Erica Hanna
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228
UPDATE: Union organizer shouts down protesters as they block private Google shuttle

Protesters blocked a private Google shuttle on Valencia street today, decrying private shuttle’s use of public bus stops without paying fees or fines.

The group of 20 or so neon-yellow vested protesters called themselves the “San Francisco Displacement and Neighborhood Impact Agency.” The company doesn’t pay San Francisco a dime to use the Muni stops — fines that private auto drivers pay regularly.

UPDATE 3:58pm: Just how does a story go from breaking, to verification, to “holy shit it’s all over the internet now?” Here’s our interview with Fake Google Employee Max Alper, and our recount of how it all went down: http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2013/12/09/whyd-you-do-it-we-ask-fake-google-employee-max-bell-alper

UPDATE 12:32pm: Various tips have streamed in that this shout-out was staged. Protest organizer Leslie Dreyer talked to us on the phone and verified that this person’s identity was Max Bell Alper, a union organizer from Oakland. This person was not a Google employee, and Dreyer was not able to verify if Alper was there in the morning with the group of 20-30 protesters. The Guardian is attempting to contact Alper for comment. Dreyer said she, as an organizer, was unaware that the “performance” had been planned. We are following this as it develops.

UPDATE 1:06pm: Within an hour of our original post, the Guardian learned that Max Bell Alper, a union organizer with Unite Here Local 2850 was the man shouting down Google bus protesters earlier this morning. We asked Alper what motivated him to impersonate a Google employee.

“This is political theater to demonstrate what is happening to the city. It’s about more than just the bus. These are enormous corporations that are investing in this community. These companies, like Google, should be proud of where they’re from and invest in their communities,” he said.

When asked if he intentiionally intended to deceive media, he replied “People are talking all over the country about what’s happening in San Francisco (referring to evictions and displacement). That’s the debate we need to have here. The more we talk about it, the more we think about it, the more we’re going to see the tech companies need to contribute.”

 Alper said that he did not intend to engage in theater before going to the protest, but when there made the decision, “spontaneously,” to stage the argument. When he maintained his story that this was political theater, we again asked why he did not verify his name at the protest itself — and only after the story blew up in national and local media.

“This was improv political theater,” he said.

Original post follows:

The SFMTA has a pilot plan in the works to regulate private use of public bus stops.

Though the private shuttles were the crux of the day’s protest, the heart of the fight is over gentrification. As the tech revolution in SF leads to rising rents and longtime San Franciscans are being displaced.

In the video, a union organizer who hopped off the bus shouts down Erin McElroy, staging an argument with a protester who also heads the eviction mapping project. “How long have you lived in this city?” McElroy asked him. He shouted back “Why don’t you go to a city that can afford it? This is a city for the right people who can afford it. You can’t afford it? You can leave. I’m sorry, get a better job.”

“What kind of fucking city is this?” he shouted, and then walked off. He mentioned repeatedly that he couldn’t get to work because the bus was blocked, and did exit the bus (indicated he was a Google employee), but the Guardian (nor a nearby Al Jazeera reporter) could not verify his job title or name. If anyone has any tips as to the identity of this man, please contact us at news@sfbg.com. 

(UPDATE 12:12 PM — The Guardian amended the headline to reflect our story more accurately, that though this man exited the bus and claimed he was late for work, we have not yet verified his employment at Google)

We’ll have more on this story later in the day, for now, check out footage from the protest.)

Theater Listings: December 4 – 10, 2013

Michael Redmond
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0

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

THEATER

OPENING

Avenue Q New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Previews Fri/6-Sat/7 and Dec 13, 8pm; Sun/8, 2pm. Opens Dec 14, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Jan 12. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs the Tony-winning comedy.

A Christmas Carol Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-95. Opens Fri/6, 7pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 7pm (no evening shows Dec 24, 26, or 28; also Sat/7, Dec 11, 14, 21, 23, 2pm; Dec 24 and 26-28, 1pm; Dec 27 evening show at 5:30pm); Sun, 5:30pm (also Sun/8, Dec 15, and 22, 1pm). Through Dec 28. American Conservatory Theater mounts its annual production of the Dickens classic, with James Carpenter as Scrooge and Ken Ruta as Jacob Marley’s ghost.

Cinderella Buriel Clay Theater, African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, SF; www.african-americanskaes.org. $12.50-50. Opens Sat/7, 3pm. Runs Sat, 8pm (also Dec 21, 3pm); Sun, 3pm. Through Dec 22. African-American Shakespeare Company presents this fairy-tale production for the holidays.

The Golden Girls: The XMAS Episodes Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th, SF; www.trannyshack.com. $30. Opens Thu/5, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Dec 22. Inspired by the classic sitcom, Miami’s feisty seniors (portrayed by Heklina, Cookie Dough, Matthew Martin, and Pollo Del Mar) return to spread holiday cheer and cheesecake.

BAY AREA

Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $20-35. Previews Thu/5 and Dec 11-12, 7pm; Fri/6-Sat/7, 8pm; Sun/8, 5pm. Opens Dec 13, 8pm. Runs Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through Jan 11. Shotgun Players performs Anthony Neilson’s comic romp set in “a sensual Edwardian world of top hats, fantastical puppets, and flash powder.”

Little Women Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield, Palo Alto; www.theatreworks.org. $19-79. Previews Wed/4-Fri/6, 8pm. Opens Sat/7, 2 and 8pm. Runs Tue-Wed and Dec 30, 7:30pm (no shows Dec 24-25; Dec 31, show at 2pm only; no show Jan 1); Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat and Dec 26 and Jan 4, 2pm); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Jan 4. TheatreWorks performs the musical adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott tale.

Mame Hillbarn Theatre, 1285 East Hillsdale, Foster City; www.hillbarntheatre.org. $19-40. Previews Thu/5, 8pm. Opens Fri/6, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Dec 14 and 21, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through Dec 22. Hillbarn Theatre performs Jerry Herman’s classic musical.

ONGOING

Amaluna Big Top at AT&T Park, Third Street at Terry A. Francois Blvd, SF; www.cirquedusoliel.com. $50-175. Check website for schedule, including special holiday showtimes. Through Jan 12. Cirque de Soleil is back in town, this time bringing its Tempest-inspired Amaluna to the big top set up outside AT&T Park. Touted for being a celebration of “women [sic] power,” it seems initially odd that the design elements are so focused on the male peacock feather — all greens and blues and graceful, with curving “fronds” rising up from the stage. Jungle sounds chirp in the background as a bevy of Amazonian women in bejeweled headdresses and a mischievous lizard-man circulate the room until the show starts with the lovely abstraction of a floating red cloud of translucent fabric dancing in a single beam of light. The flimsy plotline is forgettable, a coming-of-age and courtship tale between the island’s young princess, Miranda (Iuliia Mykhailova) and a shipwrecked young Romeo (Evgeny Kurkin), though the parallel courtship between the two comic figures of Jeeves (Nathalie Claude) and Deeda (Shereen Hickman) provides a bit of levity and a novel use for footballs. The most realized character is probably Cali (Victor Kee), the half-lizard, whose prehensile tail and neon body paint give him an otherworldly allure, but it’s the aerialist goddesses and fierce embodiments of the storm that are most memorable from an acrobatic point-of-view, and Lara Jacobs’ unique balancing act from a meditative one. (Gluckstern)

Arlington Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, 2 Marina, Bldg D, Third Flr, SF; www.magictheatre.org. $20-60. Wed/4-Sat/7, 8pm (also Wed/4, 2:30pm); Sun/8, 2:30pm. Magic Theatre performs Victor Lodato and Polly Pen’s world-premiere musical.

The Barbary Coast Revue Stud Bar, 399 Ninth St, SF; eventbrite.com/org/4730361353. $10-40. Wed, 9pm. Through Dec 18. Blake Wiers’ new “live history musical experience” features Mark Twain as a tour guide through San Francisco’s wild past.

The Book of Mormon Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market, SF; www.shnsf.com. $60-120. Wed-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 1 and 6:30pm. Through Jan 19. When approaching the oeuvre of South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, it’s best to check your political correctness at the door. That’s certainly no less true of their 2011 Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, co-penned with Robert Lopez (of Avenue Q fame), despite the clean-scrubbed appearance of their fumbling albeit well-intentioned missionary protagonists. Sent to Uganda for two years, top mission pupil Elder Price (Nic Rouleau) and his clumsy but affable partner Elder Cunningham (A.J. Holmes) are faced with a village oppressed by a scenery-chewing warlord, a demoralized coterie of fellow missionaries who have yet to have a successful conversion, and their own fraught, odd-couple dynamic. Rouleau’s Price is an appropriate blend of smarm, charm, and secret self-doubt while Holmes excels in his portrayal of a perennial-loser-turned-prophet (his power ballad-esque solo in “Man Up” is one of the show’s best). Of their hosts, the wry Mafala (James Vincent Meredith) and his sweet but strong-willed daughter Nabulungi (Syesha Mercado) get the most stage time, but it’s the crude and caustic General (David Aron Damane) who grabs the most attention. The gleefully profane “Hasa Diga Eebowai,” a Forbidden Zone-style “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream”, and the deliriously blasphemous “Joseph Smith, American Moses,” round out the entertaining, and strangely informative, score. Though it’s (very) unlikely to convert you to the Church of Latter-Day Saints, there’s a good chance you’ll want to convert to the church of Parker and Stone, if you haven’t already. (Gluckstern)

BoomerAging: From LSD to OMG Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Tue, 8pm. Extended through Dec 17. Will Durst’s hit solo show looks at baby boomers grappling with life in the 21st century.

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $32-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess Golden Gate Theatre, One Taylor, SF; www.shnsf.com. $60-210. Wed/4-Sat/7, 8pm (also Sat/7, 2pm); Sun/8, 2pm. The Tony-winning Broadway revival launches its national tour in San Francisco.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch Boxcar Theatre, 505 Natoma, SF; www.boxcartheatre.org. $27-43. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. John Cameron Mitchell’s cult musical comes to life with director Nick A. Olivero’s ever-rotating cast.

Ideation Tides Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $10-20. Fri/6-Sat/7, 8pm (also Sat/7, 3pm). Next up in the San Francisco Playhouse “Sandbox Series” is this dark comedy from Aaron Loeb.

The Jewelry Box: A Genuine Christmas Story The Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $15-40. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Through Dec 28. Brian Copeland performs the world premiere of his new, holiday-themed work, an Oakland-set autobiographical tale that’s a prequel to his popular Not a Genuine Black Man.

My Beautiful Launderette New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Dec 22. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Andy Gram and Roger Parsley’s adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s award-winning screenplay.

The Oy of Sex Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $20-100. Thu-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through Jan 18. Comedian Alicia Dattner performs her solo show, based on her stories from her own life and love addiction.

Peter/Wendy Gough Street Playhouse, 1620 Gough, SF; www.custommade.org. $15-33. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Dec 15. J.M. Barrie’s familiar and much-revisited children’s story, about a boy who refuses to grow up, has always had its darker aspects, including the violent streak in its hero, forever-child Peter (Sam Bertken). Unfortunately, any underlying social or psychological complexity in the story — originally published in 1902 in The Little White Bird — is of no consequence in adapter-director Jeremy Bloom’s relentlessly cheerful and quickly monotonous retelling. The production, which narrates and acts out the story in somewhat condensed form, says it’s designed for adults of all ages and children over 12, but it seems pitched to an audience much younger still. Custom Made Theater’s lackluster staging does little to make the time go faster. There’s a mischievous energy in Bertken’s Peter and a bright intelligence in Anya Kazimierski’s Tinker Bell that together produce the play’s only emotional heat, but it’s fleeting. As Wendy, Elissa Beth Stebbins is generally solid but too mild to elicit much sympathy for her unrequited affections for Peter. Clad exclusively in striped jammies, the uneven ensemble (which also includes Terry Bamberger, Jessica Rudholm, Kim Saunders, and Jeunee Simon in multiple roles) rarely encourages focus on the finer points of character and plot, which anyway come with a soporific dose of trifling detail amid generally awkward physical choreography. Indeed, any “happy thoughts” one walks in with would risk vanishing entirely, were it not that the cast harvests them immediately and writes them down for future reference on the stage floor. (Avila)

Snoopy!!! Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.42ndstmoon.org. $25-75. Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm (family/student matinee Sat/7, 1pm); Sun, 3pm. Through Dec 15. 42nd Street Moon performs the sequel to You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

Urge For Going Z Below, 470 Florida, SF; www.goldenthread.org. $10-45. Thu/5-Sat/7, 8pm; Sun/8, 3pm. Jamila (Camila Betancourt Ascencio) is a bright student desperate to pass her college entrance examination — an unexceptional proposition in many places, but Jamila is a Palestinian raised in a Lebanese refugee camp. For her, even the right to take such an exam is in no way guaranteed and must be fought for. That Jamila’s struggles don’t end at the front door of her crowded home provides the basis for the drama in Mona Mansour’s 2011 play, Urge for Going, now receiving an uneven but sometimes moving West Coast premiere from Golden Thread (which last year produced The Letter, a short play co-written by Mansour, as part of its ReOrient Festival). Amid the makeshift walls, mismatched furniture, and exposed wiring of Kate Boyd’s evocative scenic design, Jamila lives with her austere father (Terry Lamb), a onetime literature scholar with a passion for Wordsworth; her supportive mother (Tara Blau); her father’s effusive loose-canon of a brother (Julian Lopez-Morillas); her mother’s brother (Munaf Alsafi); and her own big-hearted but haunted older brother (Wiley Naman Strasser), a once brilliant math student who suffered brain damage at the hands of a Lebanese soldier. But front and center is her father, whose barely cloaked disappointment and despair turn to recalcitrance and outright antagonism in the face of Jamila’s too-pointed desire to flee this hobbled world of exile for a wider world of possibilities. Directed by Evren Odcikin, the play’s sentimental naturalism (broken through at times by didactic direct address to the audience by the entire cast) makes what follows both too predictable and somewhat artificial. At the same time, Mansour carefully and revealingly couches her story in the political and existential limbo of multiple generations of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, deprived for over half a century of basic rights amid cramped poverty and deprivation. (Avila)

BAY AREA

A Bright New Boise Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $32-50. Wed/4-Sat/7, 8pm; Sun/8, 2 and 7pm. Faith can be a touchy subject among true believers and skeptics alike, and as long as the topic of religion is avoided (as it often is) you might not even know that your bus driver is Buddhist, or your checkout clerk born again. In Samuel D. Hunter’s A Bright New Boise, now playing at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre, the line blurs between public face and private faith, as mysterious stranger Will (Robert Parsons) rolls into Boise and takes up employment at the Hobby Lobby, ostensibly to reconnect to his long-lost, given-up-for-adoption son, Alex (Daniel Petzhold). But when Will is revealed to be a former member of a disgraced Evangelical sect from “up North,” his sudden reappearance in Alex’ life appears to be motivated not by a long-standing remorse, but by a recent unmooring. Under Tom Ross’ direction, the other characters — a foul-mouthed store manager (Gwen Loeb), a painfully shy stock clerk (Megan Trout), and a confrontational sales associate (Patrick Russell) — appear similarly unmoored, careening into each other like jittery, neurotic pinballs, with about as much consideration. Only Parsons’ Will appears calm and deliberate in his actions, until he startlingly demonstrates otherwise. It’s an abrupt end to both the play and Will’s charade of normalcy, and neither Hunter nor Ross seem to know how to build up to his eventual fall naturally, ultimately allowing him to be defined only by his fanaticism rather than his humanity. (Gluckstern)

Can You Dig It? Back Down East 14th — the 60s and Beyond Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through Dec 15. Don Reed’s new show offers more stories from his colorful upbringing in East Oakland in the 1960s and ’70s. More hilarious and heartfelt depictions of his exceptional parents, independent siblings, and his mostly African American but ethnically mixed working-class community — punctuated with period pop, Motown, and funk classics, to which Reed shimmies and spins with effortless grace. And of course there’s more too of the expert physical comedy and charm that made long-running hits of Reed’s last two solo shows, East 14th and The Kipling Hotel (both launched, like this newest, at the Marsh). Can You Dig It? reaches, for the most part, into the “early” early years, Reed’s grammar-school days, before the events depicted in East 14th or Kipling Hotel came to pass. But in nearly two hours of material, not all of it of equal value or impact, there’s inevitably some overlap and indeed some recycling. Reed, who also directs the show, may start whittling it down as the run continues. But, as is, there are at least 20 unnecessary minutes diluting the overall impact of the piece, which is thin on plot already — much more a series of often very enjoyable vignettes and some painful but largely unexplored observations, wrapped up at the end in a sentimental moral that, while sincere, feels rushed and inadequate. (Avila)

Harvey Barn Theatre, 30 Sir Francis Drake, Ross; www.rossvalleyplayers.com. $10-22. Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Dec 15. Ross Valley Players perform the Pulitzer-winning play by Mary Chase.

A Little Princess Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College, Berk; www.berkeleyplayhouse.org. $17-60. Thu/5-Fri/6, 7pm; Sat/7, 1 and 6pm; Sun/8, noon and 5pm. Berkeley Playhouse opens its sixth season with Brian Crawley and Andrew Lippa’s musical adaptation of the Frances Hodgson Burnett story.

110 in the Shade Douglas Morrison Theatre, 22311 N. Third St, Hayward; www.dmtonline.org. $10-29. Thu/5-Sat/7, 8pm (also Sat/7, 2pm); Sun/8, 2pm. Douglas Morrison Theatre performs N. Richard Nash’s romantic musical, adapted from his classic play The Rainmaker.

The Pianist of Willesden Lane Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-89. Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Thu/5 and Sat, 2pm; no shows Dec 24 or 31); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm; matinees only Dec 15, 22, and Jan 5; no show Dec 25). Extended through Jan 5. Mona Golabek stars in this solo performance inspired by her mother, a Jewish pianist whose dreams and life were threatened by the Nazi regime.

Troilus and Cressida La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk; www.impacttheatre.com. $10-25. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Dec 15. One of Shakespeare’s more difficult and under-produced plays, Troilus and Cressida does wax in popularity during protracted times of war, so it’s about the right time for Impact Theatre to tackle it. Set during the seventh year of the Trojan War, the players are all either soldiers or spoils of war, and both morale and morals are at a low ebb. So-called heroes hide in their tents, the fair Helen (Julie Kuwabara) is a callow bawd, and everyone just wants the war to be over. Troilus (Eric Kerr), a Trojan, and Cressida (Sarah Coykendall), a Greek, meet-cute thanks to the machinations of the flamboyant Pandarus (Shawn J. West), only to be quickly separated by circumstances beyond their control, and thrust abruptly to the sidelines of their own tragedy, their eventual betrayal of each other lost within the greater treacheries of the battlefield. It’s a problematic script, not least of all because the only truly moral character is the very innocent, very mad Cassandra (Akemi Okamura), whose prophecies are written off as mere ravings, subtly mirrored by the nihilistic fool, Thersites (Miyaka Cochrane), who delivers his frontline ravings as prophecies. Director Melissa Hillman makes some bold choices, however, including casting Lauren Spencer as the level-headed Ulysses, and father-son team Jon Nagel and Jonah McClellan as Aeneas and Antenor, turning the walk-on role of a pawn into a tragic symbol of war’s all too-human cost. (Gluckstern)

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Broadway Bingo” Feinstein’s at the Nikko, Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason, SF; www.feinsteinssf.com. Wed, 7-9pm. Ongoing. Free. Countess Katya Smirnoff-Skyy and Joe Wicht host this Broadway-flavored night of games and performance.

“Buddy Club Children’s Shows” Randall Museum Theater, 199 Museum Wy, SF; www.thebuddyclub.com. Sun, 11am-noon. $8. “The Bubble Lady!” performs.

“Comedy Bottle with Kurtis Matthews” Purple Onion at Kells, 530 Jackson, SF; www.purpleonionatkells.com. Fri/6-Sat/7, 7pm. $15. Stand-up comedy.

“Comedy Returns to El Rio!” 3158 Mission, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Mon/9, 8pm. $7-20. Stand-up with Marga Gomez, Sammy Obeid, Bob McIntyre, Kevin Young, and Lisa Geduldig.

CounterPULSE 1310 Mission, SF; www.counterpulse.org. Wed/4, 8pm: Risa Jaroslow’s NYC and the Bay: Dancers and Dances from Then and There and Here and Now, free. Fri/6-Sat/7, 8pm: Keith Hennessy, Hana Lee Erdman, and Jassem Hindi’s ALMOST, Enemy in the Figure, and These children singing in stones, $15-20. Dec 12-15, 8pm: Mica Sigourney, John Foster Cartwright, and Maryam Rostami’s Nicole Kidman is Fucking Gorgeous, $20.

“Dolores: The Temporary Life of a 220-Year-Old Bionic Woman” Stage Werx Theater, 446 Valencia, SF; www.stagewerx.org. Dec 10-11, 7:30pm. $15-20. On a bare floor, physical theater maker Carolina Duncan, as her Colombian grandmother, pops opens her cranium like a steamer trunk and retrieves the scrapbook of a boundless life. Here memory and imagination exist in equal measures, as Duncan traces key moments and fleeting images from an arc of days defined by family, romance, and at least one titanic battle between an Amazonian dinosaur and a new secret-agent boyfriend. Combining mime, scattered dialogue, physical comedy, and a live soundscape, this loving and whimsical homage comes gracefully delivered and almost always vividly expressed. All the while, Duncan (a graduate of SF’s Clown Conservatory and James Donlon and Leonard Pitt’s Flying Actor Studio) exudes an infectious enthusiasm for her subject, who proves as alive in a passing but concrete image of first childhood steps as she does in her final outing, a prolonged spacewalk into the familiar and unknown. Note: review from an earlier run of this show. (Avila)

“Encuentro de Canto Popular” Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; accionlatina.org/Encuentro2013. Sat/7, 7pm. $19. Music festival dedicated to the nuevo canción movement; this year’s theme, “Pasado y Futuro,” pays tribute to artists who have passed away, as well as artists on the rise.

“Fiesta Navidena” Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. Sat/7, Dec 15, 21-22, and 27-28, 6:15pm. $15-21. Carolina Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco performs a holiday show.

“Get Your Life Unity Mini Ball” Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; www.dancemission.com. Sat/7, 7pm. $10. Dancing, vogueing, and other aspects of ballroom culture take the stage.

“Glide Annual Holiday Festival: Celebrate50” War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF; www.glide.org. Wed/4, 7pm. $65-250. Maya Angelou, Judith Hill, Tom Johnston, and other luminaries lead this evening honoring Janice Mirikitani and Rev. Cecil Williams’ 50 years at Tenderloin community beacon Glide.

“Hand to Mouth Comedy” Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF; www.handtomouthcomedy.com. Fri/6, 10pm. $8. Comedians Kellan Erksine, Kelly Anneken, Jules Posner, and others join host Trevor Hill in presenting all-new material on one specific topic: “fantasy.”

“Hysterical Historical San Francisco, Holiday Edition” Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.sheltontheater.org. Sun, 7pm. Through Dec 29. $30-40. Comic Kurt Weitzman performs.

“I Eat People Like YOU For Breakfast!” Marsh, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. Wed/4, 7:30pm. $10-15. Comedian Steven Alan Green performs his solo show inspired by Jerry Lewis.

“The Jewish Nutcracker” Theater at Children’s Creativity Museum, 221 Fourth St, SF; www.jewishnutcracker.com. Fri/6-Sun/8, 2pm (also Fri/6-Sat/7, 6:30pm). $18-32. The Hanukkah story is interpreted via authentic cultural dance from Spain, India, China, Russia, and more.

“Mark Foehringer’s Nutcracker Sweets” Southside Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Sat/7-Sun/8, Dec 14-15, Dec 20-24, 11am and 2pm (also Dec 14-15 and Dec 21-22, 4pm). $18-28. Contemporary ballet company Mark Foehringer Dance Project SF performs its fifth annual production of this Nutcracker-inspired work aimed at families with young children.

“The Metrics of Intimacy” Garage, 715 Bryant, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Wed/4-Thu/5, 8pm. $10-20. Contemporary dance performers Hope Mohr and Christian Burns collaborate with visual designer David Szlasa.

“Mine” Joe Goode Annex, 401 Alabama, SF; www.rawdance.org. Fri/6-Sun/8 and Dec 11-15, 8pm. $21-25. RAWdance performs a world premiere by company founders Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein.

“Okeanos Intimate” Aquarium of the Bay, Pier 39, SF; www.capacitor.org. Sat, 8pm. $20-30 (free aquarium ticket with show ticket). Extended through Dec 28. Choreographer Jodi Lomask and her company, Capacitor, revive 2012’s Okeanos — a cirque-dance piece exploring the wonder and fragility of our innate connection to the world’s oceans — in a special “intimate” version designed for the mid-size theater at Pier 39’s Aquarium of the Bay. The show, developed in collaboration with scientists and engineers, comes preceded by a short talk by a guest expert — for a recent Saturday performance it was a down-to-earth and truly fascinating local ecological history lesson by the Bay Institute’s Marc Holmes. In addition to its Cirque du Soleil-like blend of quasi-representational modern dance and circus acrobatics — powered by a synth-heavy blend of atmospheric pop music — Okeanos makes use of some stunning underwater photography and an intermittent narrative that includes testimonials from the likes of marine biologist and filmmaker Dr. Tierney Thys. The performers, including contortionists, also interact with some original physical properties hanging from the flies — a swirling vortex and a spherical shell — as they wrap and warp their bodies in a kind of metamorphic homage to the capacity and resiliency of evolution, the varied ingenuity of all life forms. If the movement vocabulary can seem limited at times, and too derivative, the show also feels a little cramped on the Aquarium Theater stage, whose proscenium arrangement does the piece few favors aesthetically. Nevertheless, the family-oriented Okeanos Intimate spurs a conversation with the ocean that is nothing if not urgent. (Avila)

“One Man Band Extravaganza” Great Star Theater, 636 Jackson, SF; www.jordanbwilson.com. Sat/7, 8pm. $5. One-man bands, including Jordan B. Wilson, One Man Banjo, Shovelman, Slow Poisoner, and Cello Joe, perform.

“La Posarela” Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.sfcmc.org. Sun/8, 1 and 5pm. $7. Community Music Center presents a Mexican Christmas musical tailored to the Mission.

“Point Break Live!” DNA Lounge, 373 11th St, SF; www.dnalounge.com. Fri/6 and Jan 3, Feb 7, March 7, and April 4, 7:30 and 11pm. $25-50. Dude, Point Break Live! is like dropping into a monster wave, or holding up a bank, like, just a pure adrenaline rush, man. Ahem. Sorry, but I really can’t help but channel Keanu Reeves and his Johnny Utah character when thinking about the awesomely bad 1991 movie Point Break or its equally yummily cheesy stage adaptation. And if you do an even better Keanu impression than me — the trick is in the vacant stare and stoner drawl — then you can play his starring role amid a cast of solid actors, reading from cue cards from a hilarious production assistant in order to more closely approximate Keanu’s acting ability. This play is just so much fun, even better now at DNA Lounge than it was a couple years ago at CELLspace. But definitely buy the poncho pack and wear it, because the blood, spit, and surf spray really do make this a fully immersive experience. (Steven T. Jones)

“A Renaissance Christmas” St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal, 500 De Haro, SF; www.baychoralguild.org. Sat/7, 8pm. $5-25. Bay Choral Guild performs “familiar and unusual” Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany music.

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

“she’s near she’s now she’s nowhere” Margaret Jenkins’ Dance Lab, 301 Eighth St, Studio 200, SF; www.funschdance.org. Thu/5, 7pm. Free. Also Fri/6, 8pm and Sat/7, 2pm, free, Studio LP, ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; and Sun/8, 3pm, Feintech Studio, ODC Dance Commons, 351 Shotwell, SF. Christy Funsch’s trio/quintet “reveals the impact of a mover on spaces by playing with her presence and absence from them.”

“Shine! Our Brightest Holiday Show Ever!” War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF; www.sfgmc.org. Fri/6, 8pm. $25-75. The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus performs season favorites and “outrageous surprises.”

“Soul+Mates” Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.zspace.org. Wed/4-Sat/7, 8pm (also Sat/7, 2pm). $22-25. Printz Dance Project presents the world premiere of an immersive dance performance, photography exhibit, and short film exploring the concept of soul mates.

“The Velveteen Rabbit” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Lam Research Theater, 700 Howard, SF; www.odcdance.org. Thu/5-Fri/6 and Dec 12-13, 11am; Sat/7 and Dec 15, 1 and 4pm; Sun/8 and Dec 15, 2pm. $20-75. ODC/Dance performs its popular holiday show, directed with fresh perspective this year by ODC founder Brenda Way.

“Zambomba Gitana!” Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.bayareaflamenco.org. Fri/6, 8pm. $25-65. Also Sat/7, 8pm, $25-45, La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk; and Sun/8, 6pm, $25-45, Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320 Cedar, Santa Cruz. Traditional flamenco holiday celebration, with artists from Jerez de la Frontera, Spain.

BAY AREA

“Buddy Club Children’s Shows” JCC of the East Bay Theater, 1414 Walnut, Berk; www.thebuddyclub.com. Sun/8, 11am-noon. $8. Comedy improv with Kenn Adams Adventure Theater. Also Sun/8, 11am-12:30pm, $8, Kanbar Center for the Performing Arts Theater, 200 North San Pedro, San Rafael; www.thebuddyclub.com. The Juggling Genius, Daniel DaVinci, performs.

“Following the Wrong God Home” Osher Studio in the Arts Passage of Berkeley Central, 2055 Center, Berk; www.brownpapertickets.com. Sat/7 and Dec 16, 8pm; Sun/8, 5pm. $15-25. Company 212 presents a physical theater piece choreographed and directed by MaryBeth Cavanaugh that imagines six Shakespeare characters on alternate journeys beyond the plays they appear in.

“Noel, Noel” First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing, Berk; www.cityboxoffice.com. Fri/6, 8pm. $18-65. The San Francisco Girls Chorus performs “Carol of the Bells” and other holiday favorites.

“Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir 28th Annual Holiday Concert” Paramount Theatre, 2025 Broadway, Oakl; www.oigc.com. Sat/7, 7:30pm. $12-42. The choir performs its popular annual concert, led by director Terrance Kelly and featuring guests Tuck and Patti, and Imani Ya Watume Liturgical Dance Company.

“Once Upon a Christmas” Lesher Center for the Arts, Hoffman Theatre, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek; www.leshercenter.org. Fri/6-Sat/7, 7:30pm (Sat/7, 2pm). $20-25. Lareen Fender’s Ballet Joyeux performs.

“The Shout: Life’s True Stories” Grand Lake Coffee House, 440 Grand, Oakl; www.theshoutstorytelling.com. Mon/9, 7:30pm. $5-20. Live storytelling event featuring 10-minute true tales.

“XXmas: The Christmas Ballet, 2013 Edition” Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; www.smuinballet.org. Dec 11-14, 8pm (also Dec 14, 2pm); Dec 15, 2pm, $49-65. Also Dec 18-28, $24-64, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Lam Research Theater, 700 Howard, SF. Smuin Ballet’s annual holiday show boasts festive ballet, tap, and swing-dance numbers. *

 

Pop shop

Michael Redmond
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0
Pop shop

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE For an event with a reputation for wall-shaking energy, the first program of the 15th Annual San Francisco International Hip Hop DanceFest turned out to be an oddly muted experience. The mix of acts — which in the past has always opened new perspectives on an art that has moved from the street onto the stage (and even reality TV) — simply wasn’t potent enough. Also, with only one company from abroad, the evening just barely warranted its claim of being “international.”

But even though the program disappointed as a totality, it did include individual acts of quality. In an aesthetic that so often emphasizes virtuosic use of the torso and the legs, Struggle for Pleasure — from a sextet of dancers of the London-based Far From the Norm Company — captivated because of its gentle and controlled employment of the arms. They snaked, embraced, and coiled into tendrils, perhaps embodying the human spirit, maybe with a sense of longing. Performed to violins, the choreography, much of it presented as a group endeavor, dipped the dancers into a hypnotic state in which they froze or tried to break open. One of them readied himself for a sprint that never happened. Another exploded into a whirlwind. Struggle felt subdued, dreamlike, and yet true.

In their first appearance at this festival, New York’s Bones the Machine and DJ Aaron sent gasps through the audience with the decidedly uncommon Bonebreakkings. It was a truly astounding contortionist act in which they pretzled their arms into joint-crunching positions — accompanied by appropriate sound effects. Even though the act has been widely circulated thanks to America’s Got Talent, to see these two dancers live was a pleasure, though a somewhat chilly one.

Another excellent first-timer was the Embodiment Project, one of the Bay Area’s most fascinating hip-hop troupes, in part because of the way it collaborates with MoonCandy LiveHouse’s fine musicians who, once again, performed on stage. In the sinister Dare To Love, choreographer Nicole Klaymoon and Michelle “Mystique” Lukmani slithered in and out of d. Sabella Grimes’ slippery embrace, paying what looked like a heavy price. Grimes, a former member of Rennie Harris Puremovement, and an extraordinarily sinewy and seductive popper, finally snared himself vocalist Shamont Hussey. This was hot theater, over so fast you hardly knew what hit you.

Also fun to watch was the return of four members from FootworKINGz. These speed demons developed a virtuosic style of footwork, based on one that originated in Chicago as a response to house and juke music. In addition to delivering razor-sharp attacks at dizzying tempos, the quartet performed with wit and charm.

It is understandable that the fest wants to honor the Bay Area’s diverse hip-hop community, which offers training in dozens of local studios and schools. These are also places where many youngsters find a welcoming environment to develop skills and in which to express themselves, so there has always been place for them at the annual Hip Hop Fest. But this year’s selection short-changed the audience. Whatever the curating process, it needs to be improved. Openers Funk Beyond Control is one of the largest and most well-established Bay Area schools, but the group did not look as good as they had at previous festivals. The choreography looked tired and lacked care.

The premise for After Hours was intriguing enough. It took a popular dance trope — the doll that acquires life — and translated it into mannequins that take over a department store once it closes its doors. After opened with a sextet of women fighting over some hats on sale before being kicked out. Then the black-clad ensemble descended from its pedestal for elastic group dancing, some modestly intriguing solos, including the compulsory tot — here cast as the janitor. But the whole thing felt dutiful and uninspired. Also, not waiting for the traditional community bow at the end of the evening was disrespectful to fellow artists and the festival’s producer, Micaya.

Another first appearance, by the Great House of Dance, showcased a huge company from Sacramento. It was big but not great. Its group sequences seemed strung together willy-nilly, and went on for much too long. There was nothing that held this presentation together besides the good will by the performers — some who had real talent.

Illstyle & Peace Productions Ain’t No Party Like a Illstyle Party, sent individual performers into competent, sometimes athletically-impressive solos, but this was a thrown-together, clumsy, applause-milking endeavor, unworthy of a group that has done much better work. Why?

Also part of the festival were San Francisco’s well known and solidly performing SoulForce Dance Company, and Oakland’s spunky, in your face, all-women Mix’d Ingrdnts. *

BART’s safety culture slammed at Assembly hearing

Michael Redmond
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1

BART was slammed by legislators and its workers on Nov. 7 for refusing to make a key worker safety improvement demanded by state regulators since a 2008 fatality, instead choosing to aggressively defend the “simple approval” process that contributed to two more fatalities on Oct. 19, after which the district finally made the change.

The Assembly Committee on Labor and Employment had already planned the San Francisco hearing into why BART spent years appealing rulings by the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration before the recent tragedy, but that incident sharpened criticism of the district for valuing efficiency over safety.

“The culture of safety at BART must change,” said BART train operator Jesse Hunt, who gave dramatic testimony about the callous culture at BART that led to the Oct. 19 tragedy. “It’s not a single incident, it’s a pattern of disregard for safety.”

The hearing also delved into why BART had an uncertified trainee at the helm of the train that killed Christopher Sheppard and Laurence Daniels on Oct. 19, despite warnings by its unions that district preparations to run limited service during the strike would be unsafe (see “Tragedy follows strike,” Oct. 23).

“Simple approval” made employees doing work on the tracks responsible to avoid being hit by trains moving silently at up to 80mph. When BART exhausted its administrative appeals of Cal-OSHA’s rulings in June, it filed a lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court and continued to defend the practice, which its unions had long sought to end.

“BART challenged that citation and continues to do so to this day,” Chair Roger Hernandez (D-West Covina) said in his opening remarks, noting that it took two recent fatalities for BART to drop its stance. “I’m deeply troubled this decision wasn’t made much earlier.”

For BART, the hearing only went downhill from there as state regulators testified to the district’s litigious refusal to adopt important safety precautions, employees painted a picture of a district hostile to them and their safety concerns, and legislators chastised BART managers for not having reasonable answers to their questions.

In response, BART Assistant General Manager of Operations Paul Oversier denied the district undervalues safety and said that it defended the simple approval process because it had been used tens of thousand of times and, “We had a track record in mind of a procedure that was working well.”

Asked whether he continues to defend it after the Oct. 19 incident, Oversier said, “Irrespective of what our opinion might be, we suspended the simple approval process,” a decision that he said could disrupt service, increase costs, and “that may cause us to look at what our hours of operation are.”

The hearing was called by Assemblymember Phil Ting, D-SF, who said in his opening remarks, “I was very concerned to read many of the OSHA findings, that it found BART was in violation of California state law,” which prohibits employers from making workers responsible for their own safety in dangerous situations.

Later, Ting questioned BART Chief Safety Officer Jeff Lau about how many of OSHA’s safety violations it had taken steps to correct versus how many it continues to resist, a question Lau said that he couldn’t answer. “I’m extraordinarily disappointed in your response,” Ting told Lau, demanding that he prepare a detailed written response to the questions and submit it to the committee, which plans to revisit the issue once more details emerge from the NTSA investigation of the Oct. 19 incident.

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