Energy

The tops of 2011

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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CHERYL EDDY, GUARDIAN

 

TOP 10 METAL SHOWS OF 2011 (CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)

1. Feb. 2: Motörhead, Clutch, and Valient Thorr at Warfield

2. March 11: Weedeater, Zoroaster, Kvelertak, and Begotten at Thee Parkside

3. March 12: Slough Feg, Christian Mistress, and Witch Mountain at Hemlock

4. April 3: Saint Vitus, Red Fang, and Howl at Mezzanine

5. June 7: Orange Goblin and Gates of Slumber at Bottom of the Hill

6. Aug. 12: Eyehategod, Impaled, Laudanum, and Brainoil at Oakland Metro

7. Aug. 16: Pentagram at Mezzanine

8. Oct. 13: Enslaved at Slim’s

9. Nov. 3: Mastodon and Red Fang at Warfield

10. Nov. 19: Kyuss Lives! and Black Cobra at Regency Ballroom

 

JOSH CHEON, DARK ENTRIES RECORDS

 

TOP 10 NEW RELEASES OF 2011

1. Container, S/T LP (Spectrum Spools) 2. Staccato du Mal, Sin Destino (Weird Records) 3. Bronze, Copper (RVNG Intl.) 4. Grouper, Dream Loss/Alien Observer (Yellow Electric) 5. White Fence, Is Growing Faith (Woodist) 6. Belong, Common Era (Kranky) 7. Widowspeak, S/T LP (Captured Tracks) 8. Total Control, Henge Beat (Iron Lung) 9. Iceage, New Brigade (What’s Your Rupture?) 10. Brotman & Short, Heights (Cold Dick)

 

GEORGE CHEN, MUSICIAN AND WRITER

 

2011: MAN, MOST OF IT WAS SHITTY. BUT HERE WERE THE GOOD THINGS

1. Helm. Luke Younger from Birds of Delay, Halloween weekend in London. Best noise set I’ve seen in a while, it helped that there was a fan blowing his bangs out of his hoodie. He has an album called Cryptography out on Kye. 2. White Lung. Youngins from Vancouver B.C. playing sick, straight forward punk. Saw them in a bowling alley. 3. Village of Spaces’ Alchemy and Trust album. It took a village to put this out, or at least four labels working in conjunction. Dan Beckman’s (Uke of Spaces Corners) quiet folk masterpiece. 4. Divorce. A band from Glasgow that exists in kind of a cultural vacuum there, a bit like the early ’00s trapped in amber, but then cracked open and given adrenal supplements. They are coming to America in July 2012. 5. Trash Kit put out an album in 2010, but I only got to see them once in 2011. Sadly, they have broken up. Finger-picky jaunty punk with weird rhythms. 6. Andrew W.K. This was not particularly “good”, but distinct encapsulation of the zeitgeist. My band played a show with him at Dem Passwords. He didn’t actually watch us or anything, he showed up right before going on with an entourage. Fans started force-feeding him bananas, Redbull, and whiskey and it turned into a freakish spectacle. I took a nap during his set, came back in, and he was still going for like two and a half hours, driving his fans away. Respect, the modern Andy Kaufman. 7. This Invitation. Chen Santa Maria went on a California tour with Warren in April and it was sparsely attended, but perhaps we’re to blame for that. It’s nice to see one of your oldest friends get some recognition for their work, which Aquarius did by giving their stamp of approval to his three (!) double CDs. 8. Cacaw from Chicago, a few ex-Coughs peeps project. They are now broken up, but this summer they came through and it was a monstrous sludge engine. Dark and fierce. 9. Anika. Technically a 2010 release, but she played at the Independent in October. The lady herself has a passive stage presence, but the music of the whole group (members of Portishead and Beak>) is best described as “Nico fronting PiL” (someone at the LA Times can claim that one). 10. SF Comedy. I still feel like an outsider at all this, but holy shit, there’s good stuff going on right now. Perhaps it is a national, even international renaissance in comedy, but the energy and talent going on here feels as exciting to me as the music scene used to feel. I actually don’t want to name names although the free show at the Rite Spot is a good place to start. I also noticed that none of the music I put on this list has anything to do with the Bay Area. Sorry, music. I just listen to podcasts now.

 

 

JHAMEEL, MUSICIAN

 

TOP 10 SONGS FOR 2011

1. “Cruel” by St. Vincent 2. “Don’t Fuck with my Money” by Penguin Prison 3. “Holocene” by Bon Iver 4. “Bam Bam” by King Charles 5. “King of Diamonds” by Motopony 6. “Don’t Move” by Phantogram 7. “5 O’Clock” by T-Pain 8. “White Lie” by Jhameel 9. “Love U More” by Sunday Girl (RAC Mix) 10. “Imprint” by Amtrac

 

MARC RIBAK, TOTAL TRASH FEST

 

TOP 10 RECORDS I AM DIGGING DURING THANKSGIVING WEEK

1. The Fall, Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall (particularly the tape that includes singles)

2. The Spits, Kill the Cool (demos and rarities, LP on In the Red)

3. Reigning Sound, Time Bomb High School and Too Much Guitar (LPs on In The Red)

4. The Ronettes, Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes featuring Veronica, and Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift for You.

5. Devo, Workforce to the World (early live bootleg)

6. The Marvelettes, Greatest Hits (LP on TAMLA)

7. Coachwhips, Bangers Versus Fuckers (LP on Narnack)

8. South Bay Surfers, Battle of the Bands (LP on Norton)

9. Tav Falco and the Unaproachable Panther Burns, Panther Phobia (In the Red Records)

10. Jonathan Richman, Rockin’ and Romance (LP on Twin/Tone)

 

FRANCES CAPELL, GUARDIAN

 

TOP TEN SELF-RELEASED ALBUMS OF 2011

1. WU LYF, Go Tell Fire To The Mountain Recorded in an abandoned church, the full-length debut from British heavy pop quartet WU LYF was funded by membership fees for the band’s deviant fan club, the Lucifer Youth Foundation.

2. Death Grips, Ex Military The sinister debut mixtape from Sacramento’s Death Grips is an explosion of dark, twisted shout-rap and noisy, industrial beats.

3. Nick Diamonds, I Am An Attic Former Unicorn and current member of Islands and Mister Heavenly, Nick Diamonds (a.k.a. Nick Thorburn) released his understated, haunting solo album via Bandcamp.

4. Clams Casino, Instrumental Mixtape Clams Casino’s collection of swirling, synth-laden instrumentals crafted for the likes of Lil B and Soulja Boy reveals the genius of this visionary New Jersey producer.

5. Big K.R.I.T, Return of 4Eva Of all the exciting rap mixtapes released in 2011, Southern heavy-hitter Big K.R.I.T.’s Return of 4Eva is my favorite.

6. Frank Ocean, nostalgia, Ultra. This R&B pop gem presents Frank Ocean as, perhaps, the only member of the OFWGKTA family who proved worthy of the hype in 2011.

7. Fort Lean, Fort Lean (EP) Though it’s only 12 minutes long, Fort Lean’s infectious, summery debut EP is a promising glimpse of things to come for this indie five-piece from Brooklyn, NY.

8. Friendzone, Kuchibiru Network II I chose East Bay duo Friendzone’s Kuchibiru Network 2 over Main Attrakionz’s 808’s & Dark Grapes II, as it showcases Main Attrakionz at its best along with tasty selections from Oakland’s Shady Blaze and Finally Boys, Japanese producer Uyama Hiroto, and more.

9. Small Black, Moon Killer In addition to some of Small Black’s catchiest electronic pop songs to date (like the Nicki Minaj-sampling “Love’s Not Enough”), this mixtape features two appearances by Das Racist’s Himanshu Suri, and some inspired remixes from Star Slinger and Phone Tag.

10. The Weeknd, House of Balloons This is a no brainer. Canadian-Ethiopian R&B prodigy the Weeknd’s debut mixtape House of Balloons is the best album of the year, period. (Frances Capell)

 

LAURA GRAVANDER, DIRTY CUPCAKES

 

TOTALLY NEPOTISTIC LIST OF THE TOP TEN LIVE BANDS OF 2011

1. ELECTRO: This is the band of 8-year-old girls I mentored this summer as a volunteer at Bay Area Girls Rock Camp. After learning two chords from scratch, they wrote a droney, unintentionally avant-garde five-minute anti-bullying opus with a rap breakdown that blew my mind at their July showcase at the Oakland Metro. This is the future.

2. Uzi Rash: Swamp reptile Max Nordile and his band of trashy weirdos play music that is both grating and catchy, and deceptively complex. See them live and they will freak you out, and possibly hit you in the eye socket with an empty 40 oz. (it happened to me).

3. Shannon and the Clams: Seeing the Clams live feels like being magically reunited with your childhood dog — happy and nostalgic, a little bit sad. This metaphor is especially apt if you and your childhood dog loved to DANCE! 4. Younger Lovers: Killer guitar parts, dance-crazy beats, and singer-drummer-songwriter Brontez’s onstage bitching makes Younger Lovers’ shows unpredictable and exciting. Plus, their guitarist is super-cute!

5. King Lollipop: Elfin hillbilly plays bubblegum rockabilly (or something like that!) backed by six drummers who sound like a marching band meets drum circle, minus the lame.

6. Human Waste: Freaky spacesuited dystopian moog-punk from the Moon. Rumored to consist of members of Uzi Rash, Shannon and the Clams, and Dirty Cupcakes. More space waste to come in 2012.

7. Glitter Wizard: Intricate, impressive glam rock. And once, mid-song, I saw frontman Wendy Stonehenge light his hand on fire!

8. PIGS: This three-piece plays metal for people who love metal. Ripping it up soon in a scummy warehouse near you.

9. Knifey Spoony: Oakland punk rockers with impressive live show and unexpectedly melodic hooks. Singer-guitarist Steve Oriolo studied music in college but uses his powers for good (rock), not evil (anything that doesn’t rock).

10. Sweet Nothing: I’m a sucker for two-piece bands and girl drummers, and Ian and Melissa always rock my face off.

 

KUSH ARORA AND THE INGROOVES OFFICE STAFF

 

TOP 10 RELEASES OF 2011

1. Los Rakas, Chancletas Y Camisetas (Soy Raka Inc.) 2. Am and Shawn Lee, Celestial Electric (ESL Records) 3. People Under The Stairs, Highlighter (Piecelock 70 ) 4. Toddla T, Watch Me Dance (Ninja Tune) 5. Boris, New Album (Sargent House) 6. Kendrick Lamar, Section.80 (Top Dawg Entertainment/Section 80) 7. Youth Lagoon, The Year of Hibernation (Fat Possum) 8. Little Dragon, Ritual Union (Peacefrog Holdings Ltd) 9. Jay Rock, Follow Me Home (Strange Music) 10. Vybz Kartel, Colouring Book EP (Tad’s Records)

 

MARCO DE LA VEGA (@S4NTA_MU3RTE), 120 MINUTES

 

TOP 10 SUBSTANCES THAT HAVE INFLUENCED MUSIC IN 2011

1. Adderall: Not just because Bay-local comeup, Kreayshawn, spits bout slangin’ em (“gnarly, radical, on the block I’m magical… see me at your college campus baggie full of Adderalls”) or even because of Kendrick Lamar’s thoughtfully spaced out track “A.D.H.D.” but mostly because of its association with hyperactive, creative, and willfully scattered children. Odd Future blew up, Tyler the Creator dropped Goblin, A$AP Rocky put out one of the strongest releases of the year with LIVELOVEA$AP. All kinds of kids were spittin’ up mixtapes right outta high school and then signing multimillion dollar contracts.

2. DMT: Dimethyltryptamine is some fucked up shit, and I mean that in the most complementary way possible. A small glimpse behind the fabric of reality. There were a few releases this year that resemble and reflect this completely alien and confusing greater truth. Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica, James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual, and Laurel Halo’s flawless EP, Hour Logic (Hippos In Tanks).

3. Nitrous Oxide: whippets are back and that shit makes everything sound like you’re living in a vacuum cleaner. As much as I despise the hyperwobbly, fist pumpin’ sounds of brosteppers like Rusko, and (cringe) Skrillex, I can’t deny that that shit is selling cars; dubstep car commercials. Also, to be fair, real dubstep and what is often called post-dubstep is some amazing music and some of its less commercially viable/more critically acclaimed artists have put out some beautiful work. Zomby dropped Dedication this year on 4AD and that shit is sick. James Blake’s debut album is also impossibly good.

4. Pills: maybe it’s just the kids I roll with, but I assume that most sensitive, well thought, independent rock is made by people on pills (think old Brian Jonestown Massacre or Jesus and Mary Chain). The second I heard that track “Vomit” off of friends and local heroes Girls new album Father, Son, Holy Ghost, I had to raid my own medicine cabinet, take a couple Vicodin, and listen to a stack of records including that, Tamaryn, King Dude, Chelsea Wolfe, and Zola Jesus.’Bout as close to heaven as a guy like me can get.

5. Coke: coke always has and always will rule the dancefloor. It goes further than that though; coke rap is alive and well. Trap rap (rap about drug dealing) in general is continuing to run shit. And when you got Lex Luger droppin’ some of the illest beats around for songs that are 90 percent chorus, how can you go wrong? This is a very serious statement — the Ferrari Boyz (Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame) mixtape that came out about a week before that overhyped, tired, abomination that is Watch the Throne, has some of the best tracks this year.

6. K: club drugs in general are back, and nothing says party like as strong debilitating dissociative. I mentioned this album earlier when I was talking about DMT, but it’s good and weird enough that it needs to be mentioned twice. James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual.

7. Acid: my favorite substance. LSD is an extended barrage of overwhelming sensory input, particularly sight and sound, and should therefor be discussed in those terms. Sight: this year has been all about projections, lasers, and smoke — there are a lot of amazing producers playing live right now, and a dude with a laptop ain’t a show, so it’s important to add some flare. Sound: from mixtapes like White Ring’s tranced out Chaind and Nike7up’s crazy melted-pop gem 33:33 to Araabmuzik’s breathtakingly unfuckwithable album Electronic Dream, this has been the strongest showing dosed out music has had since the mid ’90s.

8. MDMA: like I was saying earlier, club drugs are huge right now. Best part about the ecstasy thing though is that we’re not talking pressies here, just pure crystalized love. You can hear it in the work of groups like Sleep 8 Over and (of course) Pure X. But I think it’s most evidenced by song’s like The Weeknd’s “High for This” and on Pictureplane’s brilliantly positive album Thee Physical (Lovepump United).

9. Weed: not that weed ever goes away, but it’s had a really strong year. Seems like everybody’s smoking blunts and flipping pounds these days. Wiz Khalifa, A$AP, Lil B, Lil Wayne, Miley fucking Cyrus. and of course Zip and a Double Cup himself, Juicy J., which brings us to our big winner…

10. Promethazine: Lean, purple drank, double cup, sizzurp — codeine cough syrup has a lot of names, and it’s been an important factor in rap, particularly Southern rap, for a very long time. But that influence is spreading. Bands like Salem have created whole new subgenres of music built off applying the late great DJ Screw’s production sensibilities as liberally as possible. New York Rappers like A$AP Rocky are singing the praises of Screw and Pimp C while repping Harlem and putting New York back on the map. I think 2012 is gonna be all about double cup dinner parties and art walks. Do yourself a favor, call your doctor and fake a cough, pop in Clams Casino’s Instrumental mixtape and/or LIVELOVEA$AP and chill for a bit.

Should Occupy pull back and reinvent itself?

Sasha Cuttler
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Should Occupy pull back and reinvent itself?

Maybe it’s time for the Occupy movement to simply take a bow, step off the national stage for now, and start planning its next big production. Because at this point, Occupy has been a smashing success – winning over its audiences and key critics, influencing the national debate – but it’s in danger of losing that luster if its lingers too long in its current form.

Consider the events of this week. When OccupySF’s long-standing encampment was finally removed by police and city workers, the general public barely noticed or reacted. Unlike during previous police raids, hundreds of supporters didn’t pour in to defend the camp and social media sites didn’t light up with messages of indignation and solidarity.

Why? Well it’s not because people don’t support the movement. Polls have consistently shown most people back Occupy, and even higher percentages support its basic message that the 99 percent are being screwed over by the 1 percent. Top political leaders at every level – Mayor Ed Lee, Gov. Jerry Brown, and President Barack Obama – made statements and speeches this week that echo the themes and ideas that Occupy has injected into the national dialogue.

But the tactic of occupation was only going to get us so far. It was a great way to start a conversation and demonstrate a broad discontent with this country’s inequities and plutocratic excess. Finally, the people have started to challenge those who are exploiting them, and it’s been particularly exciting to see young people fighting to reclaim their stolen futures.

That energy hasn’t dissipated, and it’s interesting to see it morphing into other campaigns, such as the recent takeovers of vacant foreclosed homes, the human rights march planned for tomorrow, and West Coast port shutdown scheduled for Monday. But I predict the crowds blockading the Port of Oakland will be a fraction of the size of the tens of thousands who took to the streets during the Oakland General Strike on Nov. 2.

Then, people were reacting to police violently crushing Occupy Oakland’s peaceful political assembly on Oct. 25, a galvanizing event, much like the raid on Occupy Wall Street and the abusive police tactics against occupiers on the UC Berkeley and UC Davis campuses. Each example showcased the police state’s willingness to use a heavy hand against peaceful protesters, demonstrating for a global audience what an important struggle this is and what we’re up against.

Yet it was hard to summon up much indignation over this week’s raid on OccupySF, even as protesters complained about being given just five minutes to get out and having their belonging seized and destroyed. Mayor Lee had been threatening the raid for weeks and had offered the group a free new home in the Mission – an offer they probably should have taken, one that would have allowed the group to declare victory and have a base of operations throughout the winter.

But unlike my cranky, “you kids get off my lawn” colleagues in the mainstream press, who have consistently derided the movement and valued anti-camping laws over the core constitutional right to peaceably assemble to petition for a redress of grievances, I think Occupy has been extremely important and effective. My desire is to see it evolve and continue.

Mayor Lee and other city officials have praised the goals and worldview of Occupy at every turn, even as they oppose the tactic of camping. As Police Chief Greg Suhr raided OccupySF, he told reporters that “part of the 99 percent removed part of the 99 percent to give the other part of 99 percent some relief,” tipping his hat to Occupy’s basic paradigm. Gov. Brown echoed Occupy’s economic inequity language in his call for higher taxes on the rich this week.

“I’m here in Kansas to reaffirm my deep conviction that we’re greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules. These aren’t Democratic values or Republican values. These aren’t 1 percent values or 99 percent values. They’re American values. And we have to reclaim them,” Obama said in his big speech this week, embracing the Occupy paradigm even as he tried to transcend it. But go back and read the whole speech and you’ll see that it would have fit right in during any Occupy General Assembly, with its regular calls to tax the rich, something this movement has given him the political cover to more forcefully advocate.

So the conversation has now begun, thanks largely to this movement. But, as most supporters of Occupy already know, our elected officials won’t simply enact the reforms we need on their own. They will need to be pushed and prodded relentlessly by a restive public, so the supporters of Occupy still have a lot of work to do.

How will they do that and what will it look like? I don’t know, but after watching these smart, creative, courageous, and committed young people and their supporters change the political dynamics of this country over the last three months, I’m anxious to see what they come up with and I stand read to chronicle and support the next phase, whatever it’s called and whenever it begins.

OccupySF retakes plaza to debate whether to keep it

Sasha Cuttler
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OccupySF retakes plaza to debate whether to keep it

OccupySF and its supporters defended Justin Herman Plaza last night (Wed/7) in a strong display of nonviolent action, demonstrating a commitment to the movement. But the unfolding events also showed the group is at a crossroads as it debates its next moves, and whether to continue trying to occupy the plaza after the group’s tent city was removed by police and city workers.

About 250 gathered for a rally at 5 pm at 101 Market Street, marching the half a block to Justin Herman Plaza an hour later. Since the plaza was cleared out that morning, it had been guarded on all sides by a line of police. But as they approached, improbably, the police line parted, letting protesters through.

The group began to hold a general assembly meeting, but after 20 minutes police issued an order to disperse. About 50 sat down in a show of civil disobedience while a couple hundred more surrounded the outskirts.

Clashes with police in the past have been characterized by tension and angry cries from protesters. This one was more peaceful. Protesters held their ground and refused to leave, but besides a few incidents in which police detained and shoved protesters, most supporters were restrained and calm.

At 8:50 pm, police suddenly began to clear out. Jubilant protesters rushed into the plaza, having won it once again. However, from the meeting that followed, it seemed clear that many are restless to put their energies into actions other than defending the plaza.

The meeting consisted of several announcements concerning upcoming actions, such as taking part in the local march in support of International Human Rights Day on Saturday and Monday’s West Coast port shutdown. Occupy groups from Anchorage to San Diego have pledged to shut down their cities’ ports on Dec. 12.

Representatives from Occupy Community College of San Francisco and Occupy SF State University, both of which have now created tent city occupations of their own, were also present. After announcements, the discussion turned to strategy. Many saw a great opportunity to pitch tents and try to take back Justin Herman Plaza. Numbers had dwindled somewhat, but there were at least 150 protesters still present for that discussion. Others argued that OccupySF had successfully shown they could retake the plaza and that they should try and avoid a police clash that night, and instead sleep at and near 101 Market Street, their other recently reclaimed protest site.

Many insisted that OccupySF would be strategically wise to allow their supporters to reserve their energy for upcoming marches and actions; nightly calls to defend camp, said one protester, were wearing many down. In the end it was clear that “OccupySF is a network of autonomous individuals. Some will stay in Justin Herman, some won’t—but we’re all in solidarity.”

All this discussion took place amid reports that police were massing in the garage underneath the nearby Hyatt Hotel and at the police tactical building on 16th and De Haro streets. Many believed that they were staging to come back and make arrests if protesters attempted to re-erect their tent city. During the meeting, protesters put up five tents, but by 11:20 pm, they had voluntarily taken down their tents.

The OccupySF general assembly consented last week to defend Justin Herman Plaza anytime it is threatened. Yet the events of the past few days, as well as the destruction of large Occupy sites throughout the country in the past weeks, many sense that strategy may now be shifting.

Gordon Mar, director of Bay Area Jobs With Justice and OccupySF supporter who risked arrest last night, told us, “There’s a lot of exciting ideas and debate about new directions, including reoccupying JHP, but also moving forward in different ways. Occupy our homes initiatives have taken off recently, as well as occupations on college campuses, different communities and neighborhoods. It’s a really exciting and hopeful moment.”

Shaw San Liu of the Chinese Progressive Alliance issued a public statement saying, “You can raid a camp, but you can’t raid a movement. The movement cannot be stopped. [The occupation] was just the tip of the iceberg.”

 

Stage Listings

Andrew Lam
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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. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

THEATER

ONGOING

Absolutely San Francisco Alcove Theater, 414 Mason, Ste 502, SF; (415) 992-8168, www.thealcovetheater.com. $32-50. Schedule varies, through Dec 29. Not Quite Opera Productions presents Anne Nygren Doherty’s musical about San Francisco, with five characters all portrayed by Mary Gibboney.

Cinderella Buriel Clay Theater, African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.african-americanshakes.org. $10-35. Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat/10, 3pm); Sun, 3pm. Through Dec 18. African-American Shakespeare Company opens its season with a re-telling of the fairy tale set in the bayous of Louisiana.

Dr. Strangelove: LIVE Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF; www.darkroomsf.com. $20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 17. Stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s classic cold war comedy.

*Fela! Curran Theatre, 445 Geary, SF; www.shnsf.com. $31-200. Wed/7-Sat/10, 8pm (also Wed/7 and Sat/10, 2pm); Sun/11, 2pm. Director-choreographer Bill T. Jones’s highly successful Off-Broadway to Broadway musical (with book by Jones and Jim Lewis; additional lyrics by Lewis; and additional music by Aaron Johnson and Jordan McLean) proves worth the hype. With a prodigious performance at the center of it all by Sahr Ngaujah (rotating in the title role with Adesola Osakalumi), this is less a biography than euphoric and vehement musical party, sermon, and political rally at once. At the same time, enough of the career and times of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (1938–1997) come through — amid a gorgeous video-enhanced street-art design scheme, and ecstatic live music and choreography deployed with contagious bravado — that there is no missing the contemporary relevance in the Nigerian Afrobeat legend and popular activist-outlaw who stood up for a devastated population against the Western imperialism and international corporate tyranny fronted by Nigeria’s oil-trading military regime. The only thing that would make this show better would be seeing it down at an Occupy encampment. (Avila)

The Golden Girls: The Christmas Episodes Victoria Theatre 2961 16th St, SF; www.trannyshack.com. $30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 23. Despite the unseasonably warm weather last week, it was beginning to feel a lot like Christmas, circa 1987, thanks to the return of four luminous drag queens and a little TV-to-stage holiday special that, after six years, can safely be called a San Francisco tradition. Heklina (Dorothy), Pollo Del Mar (Rose), Matthew Martin (Blanche), and Cookie Dough (Sophia) are the older ladies of Miami, delivering verbatim two episodes of the famed sitcom, each with a special gay yuletide theme — fleshed out by special guests Laurie Bushman (as Blanche’s gay kid brother Clayton) and Manuel Caneri (as thinly disguised lesbian Jean). (Opening night also saw special appearances by morning-radio personalities and emcees Fernando Ventura and Greg Sherrell.) Of course, a Word for Word production this isn’t. Knowing drag mischief and unflappable performances allow a certain welcome latitude in attitude, not to mention costuming, which is wonderful in that Pasadena estate sale way: a veritable bazaar of ’80s bizarre. (Avila)

*The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through Dec 18. This new autobiographical solo show by Don Reed, writer-performer of the fine and long-running East 14th, is another slice of the artist’s journey from 1970s Oakland ghetto to comedy-circuit respectability — here via a partial debate-scholarship to UCLA. The titular Los Angeles residency hotel was where Reed lived and worked for a time in the 1980s while attending university. It’s also a rich mine of memory and material for this physically protean and charismatic comic actor, who sails through two acts of often hilarious, sometimes touching vignettes loosely structured around his time on the hotel’s young wait staff, which catered to the needs of elderly patrons who might need conversation as much as breakfast. On opening night, the episodic narrative seemed to pass through several endings before settling on one whose tidy moral was delivered with too heavy a hand, but if the piece runs a little long, it’s only the last 20 minutes that noticeably meanders. And even with some awkward bumps along the way, it’s never a dull thing watching Reed work. (Avila)

Ladies in Waiting Exit Stage Left, 156 Eddy, SF; www.horrorunspeakable.com. $20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 17. No Nude Men Productions presents three one-acts by Alison Luterman, Claire Rice, and Hilde Susan Jaegtnes.

Language Rooms Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $20-28. Thurs/8-Sat/10, 8pm; Sun/11, 7pm. The immigrant experience has some familiar familial dynamics across the board. Parents, for instance, can easily discover their Americanized children becoming embarrassed by the older generation’s “foreign” ways. Allegiances potentially strain much further, however, when the immigrant story gets entwined with a little narrative called the “war on terror.” That’s the volatile mixture at the center of Yussef El Guindi’s Language Rooms, a somewhat uneven but ultimately worthwhile new play that leverages absurdist comedy to interrogate the perversion of basic human sympathies post-9/11. Seattle-based playwright El Guindi (whose other Bay Area productions include Back of the Throat and the hilarious Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes) well knows that the transformation of nightmare into bureaucratic routine is a reality sometimes best broached in a comic vein. (Avila)

The Last Five Years Boxcar Playhouse, 505 Natoma, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $20-35. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Dec 18. Poor Man’s Players performs Jason Robert Brown’s relationship drama as its inaugural production.

Mommy Queerest Bindlestiff Studio, 185 Sixth St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 17. Kat Evasco performs her autobiographical show about being the lesbian daughter of a lesbian mother.

Not Getting Any Younger Marsh San Francisco, Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 3pm. Extended through Dec 17. Marga Gomez is back at the Marsh, a couple of too-brief decades after inaugurating the theater’s new stage with her first solo show — an apt setting, in other words, for the writer-performer’s latest monologue, a reflection on the inevitable process of aging for a Latina lesbian comedian and artist who still hangs at Starbucks and can’t be trusted with the details of her own Wikipedia entry. If the thought of someone as perennially irreverent, insouciant, and appealingly immature as Gomez makes you depressed, the show is, strangely enough, the best antidote. (Avila)

*On the Air Pier 29 on the Embarcadero (at Battery), SF; (415) 438-2668, love.zinzanni.org. $117 and up (includes dinner). Showtimes vary, through Dec 31. Teatro ZinZanni’s final production at its longtime nest on Pier 29 is a nostalgia-infused banquet of bits structured around an old-time radio variety show, featuring headliners Geoff Hoyle (Geezer) and blues singer Duffy Bishop. If you haven’t seen juggling on the radio, for instance, it’s pretty awesome, especially with a performer like Bernard Hazens, whose footing atop a precarious tower of tubes and cubes is already cringingly extraordinary. But all the performers are dependably first-rate, including Andrea Conway’s comic chandelier lunacy, aerialist and enchanting space alien Elena Gatilova’s gorgeous “circeaux” act, graceful hand-balancer Christopher Phi, class-act tapper Wayne Doba, and radio MC Mat Plendl’s raucously tweeny hula-hooping. Add some sultry blues numbers by raunchy belter Bishop, Hoyle’s masterful characterizations (including some wonderful shtick-within-a-shtick as one-liner maestro “Red Bottoms”), a few classic commercials, and a healthy dose of audience participation and you start to feel nicely satiated and ready for a good cigar. Smoothly helmed by ZinZanni creative director Norm Langill, On the Air signals off-the-air for the popular dinner circus — until it can secure a new patch of local real estate for its antique spiegeltent — so tune in while you may. (Avila)

*Period of Adjustment SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter, SF; (415) 677-9596, www.sfplayhouse.org. $20-50. Tues-Thurs, 7pm (also Dec 21-22, 2pm); Fri-Sat, 9pm (also Sat, 3pm; no show Dec 24). Through Jan 14. A nervous young man with an unaccountable tremor, George Haverstick (a compellingly manic Patrick Alparone) has waited until his honeymoon to finally call on his old Korean War buddy, Ralph (a stout but tender Johnny Moreno) — only to drop his new bride, Isabel (the terrifically quick and sympathetic MacKenzie Meehan), at the doorstep and hurry away. As it happens, Ralph’s wife of five years, Dorothea (an appealing Maggie Mason), has just quit him and taken their young son with her, turning the family Christmas tree and its uncollected gifts into a forlorn monument to a broken home — which, incidentally, has a tremor of its own, having been built atop a vast cavern. Tennessee Williams calls his 1960 play “a serious comedy,” which is about right, since although things end on a warm and cozy note, the painful crises of two couples and the lost natures of two veterans — buried alive in two suburbs each called “High Point” — are the stuff of real distress. SF Playhouse artistic director Bill English gets moving but clear-eyed, unsentimental performances from his strong cast — bolstered by Jean Forsman and Joe Madero as Dorothea’s parents—whose principals do measured justice to the complex sexual and psychological tensions woven throughout. If not one of Williams’s great plays, this is an engaging and surprisingly memorable one just the same, with the playwright’s distinctive blend of the metaphorical and concrete. As a rare snowfall blankets this Memphis Christmas Eve, 1958, something dark and brooding lingers in the storybook cheer. (Avila)

A Tale of Two Genres SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter, SF; (415) 869-5384, www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Thurs-Sat and Dec 20-21, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm). Through Dec 21. Un-Scripted Theater Company presents an improvised musical inspired by Charles Dickens.

The Temperamentals New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; (415) 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Dec 18. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Jon Marans’ drama about gay rights during the McCarthy era.

Three Sisters Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; (415) 255-8207, www.42ndstmoon.org. $20-50. Wed, 7pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm (also Sat/10, 1pm); Sun, 3pm. Through Dec 18. 42nd Street Moon performs Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s World War I-set musical.

Totem Grand Chapiteau, AT&T Park, Parking Lot A, 74 Mission Rock, SF; cirquedusoleil.com/totem. $58-248.50. Tues-Sun, schedule varies. Extended through Dec 18. Cirque Du Soleil returns with its latest big-top production.

The Treasure of the Himawari Shrine: Another Mr. YooWho Adventure NOHspace, 2840 Mariposa, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $5-18. Fri-Sat, 7pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Dec 18. Master clown Moshe Cohen’s creation Mr. YooWho returns with a Japan-set adventure.

*Working for the Mouse Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $22. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 17. It might not come as a surprise to hear that even “the happiest place on earth” has a dark side, but hearing Trevor Allen describe it during this reprise of 2002’s Working for the Mouse will put a smile on your face as big as Mickey’s. With a burst of youthful energy, Allen bounds onto the tiny stage of Impact Theatre to confess his one-time aspiration to never grow up — a desire which made auditioning for the role of Peter Pan at Disneyland a sensible career move. But in order to break into the big time of “charactering,” one must pay some heavy, plush-covered dues. As Allen creeps up the costumed hierarchy one iconic cartoon figure at a time, he finds himself unwittingly enmeshed in a world full of backroom politics, union-busting, drug addled surfer dudes with peaches-and-cream complexions, sexual tension, showboating, job suspension, Make-A-Wish Foundation heartbreak, hash brownies, rabbit vomit, and accidental decapitation. Smoothly paced and astutely crafted, Mouse will either shatter your blissful ignorance or confirm your worst suspicions about the corporate Disney machine, but either way, it will probably make you treat any “Casual Seasonal Pageant Helpers” you see running around in their sweaty character suits with a whole lot more empathy. (Note: review from the show’s recent run at La Val’s Subterranean in Berkeley.) (Gluckstern)

Xanadu New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; (415) 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Previews Wed/7-Fri/9, 8pm. Opens Sat/10, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Jan 15. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs the retro roller-skating musical.

BAY AREA

*The Glass Menagerie Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; www.marintheatre.org. $34-55. Runs Tues, Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Dec 17, 2pm); Wed, 7:30pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Dec 18. Marin Theatre Company performs the Tennessee Williams classic.

God’s Plot Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. $18-27. Thurs, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm (starting Dec 15, also runs Wed, 7pm). Through Jan 15. Writer-director Mark Jackson’s historical drama, set in 1665 Virginia, closes out Shotgun Players’ 20th anniversary season.

Rambo: The Missing Years Cabaret at Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thurs/8-Fri/9, 7pm; Sat/10, 8:30pm. Howard “Hanoi Howie” Petrick presents his solo show about being an anti-war demonstrator — while also serving in the Army.

The Secret Garden TheatreWorks at Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield, Palo Alto; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $19-72. Tues-Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm; Dec 24, shows at 1 and 6pm); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Dec 31. TheatreWorks performs the Tony Award-winning musical adaptaion of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel.

The Soldier’s Tale Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $10-55. Tues, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Dec 18. It has all the hallmarks of greatness: puppetry, finely-honed chamber music, a noteworthy composer, a fresh translation, a prima ballerina, a note-worthy cast and crew, and an enviable collaboration with one of the consistently pitch-perfect directors in the Bay Area. Even so “The Soldier’s Tale,” at the Aurora Theatre, doesn’t quite feel like a fully-realized theatrical production, but rather an highly-ambitious workshop. The relatively straightforward storyline, narrated by L. Peter Callender—a soldier strikes an ill-fated Faustian bargain with the smooth-talking Devil, a gleefully wicked Joan Mankin—becomes bogged down in its staging, principally between the soldier, a four-foot tall puppet, and his mostly-puppeteer Muriel Maffre, a six-foot tall dancer. Not only does it become quickly apparent that Maffre’s puppeting skills, while earnest, don’t impart the vital spark of life into her shuffling charge, but she then abandons him to the  stage crew halfway through the show in order to portray the ailing daughter of the king. Her short but sweet, balletic interpretation of the role is definitely the evening’s highlight, and while it is commendable for her to also choose to serve in the role of puppeteer, it doesn’t quite transport the imagination. However, the Stravinsky score, inventively performed by a quartet of Earplay ensemble players, directed by Mary Chun, does. (Gluckstern) The Wild Bride Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Opens Wed/7, 8pm. Runs Tues, Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Thurs and Sat, 2pm; no matinees Thurs/8 or Dec 15); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm; no matinee Jan 1). Through Jan 1. Britain’s Kneehigh Theatre Company returns to Berkeley Rep with the American premiere of Emma Rice’s grown-up fairy tale.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun and Dec 26-30, 11am (no show Dec 25). Through Dec 31. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns with this kid-friendly, bubble-tastic comedy.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Cut the Crap! With Semi-Motivational Guru, Clam Lynch” Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF; www.darkroomsf.com. Dec 16, Jan 6, Jan 13, 10:30pm. $15. Get motivated with self-help-guru-satirizing comedian Clam Lynch.

“Dance-Along Nutcracker: Clara’s Magical Mystery Tour” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-ARTS, www.dancealongnutcracker.org. Sat, 7pm; Sun, 11am and 3pm. $16-50. The annual tradition returns, as the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band presents a tribute to the Summer of Love.

“The Dog Show” Z Space, 450 Florida, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Thurs-Sun, 8pm. $20. New performance work by Laura Arrington and Jesse Hewit/Strong Behavior.

Kunst-Stoff Kunst-Stoff Arts, One Grove, SF; www.kunst-stoff.org. Thurs-Sat, 8:30pm. $15. The contemporary dance company performs its home season, divided into three programs featuring guests and multiple premieres.

Mark Foehringer Dance Project | SF Children’s Creativity Museum, 221 Fourth St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Sat-Sun, 11am, 2pm, 4pm; Dec 20-23, 11am and 2pm. Through Dec 23. $20-35. The contemporary ballet company performs Mark Foehringer’s Nutcracker Sweets.

“The Nutcracker” Palace of Fine Arts Theater, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.cityboxoffice.com. Sat-Sun, 2pm (also Sat, 7). $20-35. City Ballet School, featuring performers ages 6-19, presents the holiday classic.

ODC/Dance Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.odcdance.org. Thurs-Fri, 11am; Sat, 1 and 4pm; Sun, 2pm. $15-45. The company presents the 25th

anniversary of KT Nelson’s The Velveteen Rabbit.

“Previously Secret Information” Stage Werx, 445 Valencia, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Sun, 7pm, $15. Joel Selvin, Will and Deb Durst, Sammy Obeid, and Joe Klocek tell true tales.

“The Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie: The Kidz Version” Brava Theater, 2781 24th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Sat, 2 and 6pm; Sun, 1 and 5pm. $15-17. The traditional ballet performed with a twist: Taiko drumming, hip-hop, trapeze artists, and more. Presented by Dance Brigade.

“Why Is the Fat One Always Angry” Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF; www.kellidunham.com. Sat, 10pm, $10-20. The genderqueer Brooklynite performs her solo comedy show.

The problem with the tax initiative

Andrew Lam
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EDITORIAL The Occupy movement — despite police abuse, official hostility and dismissive media — is changing the mainstream of discussion in American politics. For the first time in years, it’s actually possible to talk about raising taxes on the very wealthy. All the polls show strong, and growing, public sentiment in favor of economic equality. It’s a great opportunity to reform California’s tax system — but Gov. Jerry Brown seems unwilling to take advantage of what could be the most important moment in his political career.

At least five groups are preparing tax-reform measures for the November, 2012 ballot. One of them — the so-called Think Long proposal supported by billionaire Nicolas Berggruen and Google executive Eric Schmidt — is largely regressive. Much of the $10 billion it would raise would come from sales taxes on services, which amounts to a whopping new tax on the middle class. Another, known as the Clean Energy Jobs Act (also backed by a billionaire, hedge fund manager Tom Steyer) would force corporations to pay taxes based on sales in the state, which in and of itself isn’t a terrible idea. But that’s the beginning and end of the measure, and half of the $1 billion it would raise would be earmarked for (private sector) clean energy projects.

Then there are the income tax proposals. One, sponsored by a Los Angeles attorney named Molly Munger (whose father happens to be a billionaire investor) would raise almost everyone’s income taxes, although the wealthy would pay more; every penny of the $10 billion in new revenue would be earmarked for education. The Courage Campaign and the California Federation of Teachers want to raise taxes on incomes of more than $1 million, with the money also dedicated to education.

Then there’s the governor’s plan. Brown’s offering a mix of a half-cent sales-tax hike and higher income taxes to raise about $7.5 billion. Some major labor groups are already on board — as are some business groups, which would rather see a tax on consumers than higher taxes on big corporations and the wealthy. His plan may seem pragmatic — but it’s hardly progressive and won’t solve the state’s $13 billion budget shortfall for this year, much less restore funding to the services that have been cut in past budget battles.

All of the plans have problems. While we’re much more aligned with the Courage Campaign’s goal of taxing the rich, and we agree that education is a critical need, there are other critical needs in the state, too (affordable housing, health and social services, for example) and we’re not sure the education earmark makes sense. And most of them don’t go beyond personal income taxes, when taxes on big businesses are often scandalously low.

Brown ought to be taking the best of the various proposals, adding other ideas that have been put forward by Democrats in the Legislature, and producing a final product that would shift the state’s tax burden onto those who can most afford it. That means scrapping the sales tax and replacing it with steeper income tax increases on the highest earners and an oil-severance tax (which could alone bring in as much as $8 billion a year). Higher taxes on financial institutions ought to be part of the deal, too.

With the presidential election driving a high turnout in California, and public anger at the greed of the top one percent defining the electoral debate, it’s foolish to put forward a half-assed measure that doesn’t amount to real reform. Brown and his team need to make some major changes before a tax measure heads to the Nov. 2012 ballot.

Guardian editorial: The problem with the tax initiatives

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 The Occupy movement — despite police abuse, official hostility and dismissive media — is changing the mainstream of discussion in American politics. For the first time in years, it’s actually possible to talk about raising taxes on the very wealthy. All the polls show strong, and growing, public sentiment in favor of economic equality. It’s a great opportunity to reform California’s tax system — but Gov. Jerry Brown seems unwilling to take advantage of what could be the most important moment in his political career.

At least five groups are preparing tax-reform measures for the November, 2012 ballot. One of them — the so-called Think Long proposal supported by billionaire Nicolas Berggruen and Google executive Eric Schmidt — is largely regressive. Much of the $10 billion it would raise would come from sales taxes on services, which amounts to a whopping new tax on the middle class. Another, known as the Clean Energy Jobs Act (also backed by a billionaire, hedge fund manager Tom Steyer) would force corporations to pay taxes based on sales in the state, which in and of itself isn’t a terrible idea. But that’s the beginning and end of the measure, and half of the $1 billion it would raise would be earmarked for (private sector) clean energy projects.

Then there are the income tax proposals. One, sponsored by a Los Angeles attorney named Molly Munger (whose father happens to be a billionaire investor) would raise almost everyone’s income taxes, although the wealthy would pay more; every penny of the $10 billion in new revenue would be earmarked for education. The Courage Campaign and the California Federation of Teachers want to raise taxes on incomes of more than $1 million, with the money also dedicated to education.

Then there’s the governor’s plan. Brown’s offering a mix of a half-cent sales-tax hike and higher income taxes to raise about $7.5 billion. Some major labor groups are already on board — as are some business groups, which would rather see a tax on consumers than higher taxes on big corporations and the wealthy. His plan may seem pragmatic — but it’s hardly progressive and won’t solve the state’s $13 billion budget shortfall for this year, much less restore funding to the services that have been cut in past budget battles.

All of the plans have problems. While we’re much more aligned with the Courage Campaign’s goal of taxing the rich, and we agree that education is a critical need, there are other critical needs in the state, too (affordable housing, health and social services, for example) and we’re not sure the education earmark makes sense. And most of them don’t go beyond personal income taxes, when taxes on big businesses are often scandalously low.

Brown ought to be taking the best of the various proposals, adding other ideas that have been put forward by Democrats in the Legislature, and producing a final product that would shift the state’s tax burden onto those who can most afford it. That means scrapping he sales tax and replacing it with steeper income tax increases on the highest earners and an oil-severance tax (which could alone bring in as much as $8 billion a year). Higher taxes on financial institutions ought to be part of the deal, too.

With the presidential election driving a high turnout in California, and public anger at the greed of the top one percent defining the electoral debate, it’s foolish to put forward a half-assed measure that doesn’t amount to real reform. Brown and his team need to make some major changes before a tax measure heads to the Nov. 2012 ballot.

 

Live Shots: Iggy Pop at the Warfield

Tony Robles
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It had been a long wait to see Iggy Pop live (not like, Morrissey-long, but more like three months later than anticipated). When I spoke with Pop back in September, he was ecstatic to be out on the road again.

He was in France at the time, prepping in his hotel room before a big show – a concert he’d planned to follow up with an evening of wine and French television with his lady friend. We talked about cartoons, his image, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and American Idol.

He told me that on this tour, he’d be playing, “All of Raw Power, some of Fun House, some songs from the eponymous debut The Stooges, and some stuff that was too hot to handle, too raw for the times — stuff that came out on bootlegs in the ’70s like ‘Cock in My Pocket,’ ‘Open Up and Bleed,’ ‘Head on the Curve.’” So I was, understandably, equally ecstatic to see him live. Shortly thereafter, he broke his foot (after seeing him last night at the Warfield, I now realize how easily that could happen) and the tour was cut short.

Finally in San Francisco, on a windy  December evening, Pop tore the paint off the walls with the sheer enormity of his stage presence, pumping with rock’n’roll energy and yes, raw power. These were my favorite moments from the night:

10 great bits about Iggy Pop’s show at the Warfield (hint: the band plays the venue again Tuesday night):
1. Pop and Co. running out on stage and immediately launching into a frenzied “Raw Power.” No opening chit-chat, no fuss.
2. The quick-fire follow-up to that first song was ultimate punk anthem, “Search and Destroy.” Fist pumps.
3. Seeing guitarist James Williamson and saxophonist Steve Mackay a.k.a “Mr. Fun House” (as Pop described him) in the flesh.
4. Mike Watt’s cherry red bass, forever-entertaining facial expressions, and jerky movements.
5. Speaking of movement, Pop’s taut, brown leathered skin, and the noodling snake contortions he does with it.
6. Pop writhing “like a cat!” (as the couple behind me kept shouting), on top of one of the speakers, posing.
7. The band inviting “99 percenters” – and every one else – from the crowd on stage for one song, and Pop instructing them to “shake a little,” adding, “I would!”
8. The threatening, heart-pumping, supersexy guitar riff in “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
9. Pop stage-diving during “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
10. Pop stage-diving during “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and not breaking his foot.

Dick Meister: Six ways to heal the economy

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By Dick Meister

 Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

The AFL-CIO has come up with an ambitious six-point plan for healing our very sick economy – one of the best plans that have yet been suggested by anyone.

Point one calls for rebuilding the school, transportation and energy systems by spending at least $2.2 trillion to restore crumbling 20th century infrastructure. As the AFL-CIO says, it would be an investment that would put millions of people to work while laying the foundation for the nation’s long-term growth and competitiveness with other nations.

Point two is as direct: “Revive U.S. manufacturing and stop exporting good jobs overseas.”  That would involve, among many other steps, reforming and enforcing tax policies that are currently encouraging U.S. companies to have manufacturing done in other countries. And enhance Buy America standards, increase investment in job training and oppose free trade deals.

Point three: Provide federal help for hiring people to do at least part of the work that needs to be done nationwide. That could create millions of jobs in distressed communities, especially communities of color, where much of the work is badly needed. In doing so, pay competitive wages and do not replace existing jobs.

Point four: Help federal, state and local governments avoid more of the layoffs and cutbacks of public services that have been a major drag on the economy. Congress should make a commitment to not lay off any more federal employees. It should prevent more state and local layoffs by providing increased federal funding of Medicaid when unemployment is high and providing additional federal funds directly to communities “to save and create jobs and protect and restore public services.”

Point five: Extend unemployment benefits for at least a year to those whose benefit payout time has expired. “Our economy continues to suffer from a massive shortfall of consumer demand . . . the primary reason why businesses are not hiring.”

The AFL-CIO calls for combining the extension of benefits with providing relief to homeowners facing foreclosure. If banks lowered the principal balance on mortgages to current market value, the AFL-CIO calculates that “over $70 billion a year would be pumped back into the economy, millions of families would be able to stay in their homes and over one million jobs would be created.”

Point six: “Reform Wall Street so that it helps Main Street create jobs.” That would mean channeling capital into productive sectors of the economy – more lending to small businesses, for instance – and enacting a federal financial speculation tax to discourage harmful speculation and “make Wall Street pay to rebuild the economy it helped destroy.” The government should “enforce tough safeguards to stop the kind of cheating and massive fraud on Wall Street that precipitated the crisis of 2008.”

Many of those who did indeed cause the crisis are still in control, many still doing just what brought on the economic ailments that so deeply affect the country. It will take a lot to loosen their tight grip on the economy. But it can be done if we are wise enough to adopt reforms such as the AFL-CIO advocates.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

More backroom policy talks with the California Public Utilities Commission

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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On Dec. 8 and 9, high-ranking state government officials will attend a private conference with executives from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E), Chevron, AECOM, and other major energy industry players at Cavallo Point, a luxury resort in Marin County to talk about distributed generation, a decentralized system for renewable power. It’s a gathering of top governmental officials and industry leaders to talk about policy issues with far-reaching effects on California’s energy future, but members of the general public are not invited.

As officials pack their bags for the conference at the plush resort, California Sen. Leland Yee is preparing two separate pieces of legislation designed to promote transparency within the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and to make it harder for energy company executives to transition seamlessly into posts at the CPUC, the governing body that regulates utilities.

The conference is being organized by the California Foundation for the Environment and the Economy (CFEE), a nonprofit funded by investor-owned utilities and other corporations that wield tremendous influence in the Bay Area.

The Guardian spotlighted CFEE in an article about California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) President Michael Peevey, who regularly participates in educational travel excursions funded indirectly by the companies his commission oversees.

When CFEE spokesperson PJ Johnston was interviewed for that article, he justified CFEE events by saying, “The idea for us was that it made sense to have someplace where it was nonconfrontational to engage in policy, work-type discussions,” and added they’re “all about policy, on the 30,000-foot level.”

Peevey will be attending this conference, according to a list of participants posted on CFEE’s website. So will PUC commissioners Mark Ferron, Michael Florio, and Nancy Ryan. By press time, the CPUC had not returned calls seeking comment about why commissioners are participating.

More than a dozen California senators and assembly members are listed as conference participants, as are the director and deputy director of Gov. Jerry Brown’s Office of Planning and Research, Ken Alex and Wade Crowfoot. (Crowfoot previously served in former Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration as an environmental advisor. Newsom now serves at the state’s lieutenant governor.) Executives from Shell Energy North America, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, Southern California Edison, and other heavy hitters in the industry will attend the conference too.

The conference agenda features educational sessions on distributed generation and state renewable energy goals. Several environmental and consumer advocacy groups will be present as well.

Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network (TURN), a consumer advocacy group, also plans to attend. “Events like this give the utility industry and energy regulators an opportunity to have policy discussions and to influence policy decisions outside of the political process. It’s a privileged space,” Toney acknowledged. “We don’t think this is a good way to make policy.”

Yet he said advocacy groups like his own face a dilemma when deciding whether to participate in such events. “On one hand, we could decide we want to have nothing to do with it. But if TURN isn’t represented, then the view of ratepayers and consumers won’t be represented by anybody.” He stressed that while TURN attends daylong conferences hosted by CFEE in order to gain access and hopefully have a positive influence within that priveleged space, the group does not participate in travel excursions organized by the organization, which have drawn controversy in the past. “It’s kind of a judgment call,” he added.

Closed-door, backroom policy discussions aren’t the only CPUC transparency problem drawing scrutiny lately. Recent press reports have spotlighted instances of the CPUC denying public access to safety reports, a highly sensitive issue given the fatal pipeline explosion that destroyed a neighborhood in San Bruno last year.

On Nov. 29, Sen. Yee announced he would introduce legislation in early 2012 to subject the CPUC to the California Public Records Act, by stripping away provisions that allow the commission to block the release of information. It would place the body on the same footing as other state agencies with regards to information sharing.

“If you want anything out of the PUC, it takes an affirmative vote of the commission,” explained Adam Keigwin, Yee’s legislative aide. Secretary of State and former Assembly Member Debra Bowen initiated a similar push for transparency at the CPUC in 2006, but the effort did not go anywhere. On Nov. 30, Yee sent a letter to Peevey, the CPUC president, asking for the results of a study on transparency issues that the commission was supposed to undertake nearly six years ago when Bowen was pushing for the bill.

Keigwin added that Yee is also looking at legislation that would bar utility executives from serving on the PUC for a certain length of time, so as to prevent undue influence.

The She’s on Girls, Women’s Audio Mission, and soccer practice

Tony Robles
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The She’s on Girls, Women’s Audio Mission, and soccer practice

The She’s have opened for Girls, played with Thao with the Get Down Stay Down, and this month, released an infectious, surfy garage-pop debut album, Then It Starts To Feel Like Summer (the record release show is this Saturday at Bottom of the Hill).

Oh, and the band members – bassist Samantha Perez, vocalist Hannah Valente, guitarist Eva Treadway, and drummer Sinclair Riley – are all juniors in high school. But don’t diminish their talent by seeing She’s as a novelty, “young, all-girl band.” They’ve got the chops. I got the lowdown from the Bay Area quartet after school this week, discussing playing against stereotypes, life with punk parents, dream shows (hint: they’ve already played theirs), and kindergarten enemies.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: What were the first concerts you attended?
Hannah Valente: One of the first concerts we attended as a group was Blondie at the Fillmore. It was really inspiring to see a woman with such a powerful voice.
Samantha Perez: For me, I went to a lot of punk shows with my parents growing up because they were in the punk scene. It inspired me to begin playing music because I love the atmosphere and energy at shows.
SFBG: When did you start playing music and what influenced that?
Eva Treadway: We all grew up with music around us, both from our parents and also from growing up in SF. I was raised on a mix of old country blues records from my dad and Grateful Dead jams from my mom, which, come to think of it, is an interesting mix. As a kid I was crazy about the Beatles, and that was what really sparked my interest in picking up a guitar. I asked my parents for lessons and I had my first few lessons when I was about 10. When I started songwriting with the other members of the band, making music got really exciting for me again. Because we all come from different musical backgrounds – there was by no means Grateful Dead in Sami’s household growing up – but we also share really similar ideas and tastes in music.
Sinclair Riley: I started playing piano when I was about seven, then a few other classical instruments, but I didn’t start playing drums until the beginning of The She’s. My dad had a Beach Boys CD that he would always play in the car when he was driving, and I always liked driving with him so that I could listen to it because it was so much more interesting to me, I loved it so much more than anything I was playing on piano.
SP: I started playing guitar when I was seven years old. I was really resistant to play guitar, but my dad bought me a pink daisy-shaped one, so I got into it. As the years went on, I liked it more and more and then I started to sing in the San Francisco Girls Chorus, but I really wanted to start writing songs and start preforming.
HV: I was really influenced by my dad. He always seemed to be playing guitar around the house, so I just started singing with him. When I was like, three, I would sing with him while I took baths. I always liked music because it helped me connect to people. I’m shy, so it’s nice to have another way to communicate.
SFBG: How did you meet?
SP: We all met in kindergarten, and we were really close friends except me and Eva. We were enemies. In fifth grade we started playing music together and through that we became closer friends. It all started one day after soccer practice when Hannah said she had learned to play the Aly & AJ version of “Walking on Sunshine.” Eventually, the whole soccer team was in the band, but in the end it came down to just us four.
SFBG: Can you tell me a little about the process of making Then it Starts to Feel Like Summer?
SR: It was a pretty long yet satisfying process. About half the songs we already had written, and the others we wrote during the process of recording. It was so wonderful to get the opportunity to record at Women’s Audio Mission. It was really fun being in the studio and getting to take our time on this one. On this album we tried to capture the sound of what we play live. The ladies there are so nice and also taught us a bout the engineering aspect as well.
SFBG: What influences your sound? Who influences you personally?
HV: We are said to be a cross between the Ramones and the Ronettes, we really like the Beach Boys and other ’60s garage music. We’re always listening to new types of music, like ’60s country, local bands, and of course, pop.
ET: We’re influenced by going places and walking around San Francisco.
From listening to great songs, Lennon/McCartney of course, Brian Wilson, George Harrison, Phil Spector, even Britney Spears. Pretty much everything Christopher Owens from Girls writes I find inspiring.
SFBG: Where do you write music? Is it a group effort?
SR: Normally what happens is someone will bring in a guitar part or a melody or some part of a song, and we’ll all work together in our practice area (Hannah’s basement) to finalize the song – add lyrics, harmonies.
SFBG:  What’s been the most surreal experience thus far in the band? The weirdest?
HV: Hand’s down the most surreal show was playing with Girls at the Fillmore. Not only did we get to play with one of our favorite bands to listen to, but we also got to play on a stage where so many inspirational artists have performed.
SP: Playing at such a historic venue was unbelievable. The audience was great, the sound was great, the food backstage was great…it just really couldn’t have turned out any better. On the other hand, the weirdest experience we’ve had was probably when we were asked to play on TV on an early news broadcasting at like, 5 a.m.. We stayed the night in San Jose on a school night so that we could get to the studio at 3 a.m. and still be on time for school. However, we just happened to be there the same day that the San Bruno pipelines exploded, which meant our segment was canceled. It was a long, sleepy ride to school that morning, but at least we looked TV ready for all our peers!
SFBG. Who would play your dream show?
HV: Our first dream show would be to play with Girls, but then that actually happened. Then I would say to play with Magic Kids, but that also happened. After that, it would be the Morning Benders, but yes, that happened, too.
SP: Perhaps now our dream show would be with the early Beach Boys, once we build a time traveling machine, maybe that will be possible.
SFBG: Is it difficult working as an underage band in the San Francisco music scene?
EV: I think the most difficult part about being an underage musician (apart from sometimes not being allowed into to our own shows) is being treated as some sort of novelty act. It seems like a lot of times people feel that it is enough to describe our band as a “young all-girl band”, which really says nothing about our music. When people write reviews I wish they would remember that our age and gender are facts, and it doesn’t really go much deeper than that. It is true that being teenagers in the SF music scene is exciting for us. We’ve gotten to meet and even perform with some of our idols, and I know that that is something most teenagers don’t have the opportunity to do. I am proud of what we’ve done at this point in our lives, both as a band and as individuals and I feel fortunate to know what I am passionate about early on. The way I see it, it only leaves us time to grow.
SFBG: Is the She’s an intentionally all-female band?
SR: Not really, it just happened. We formed the band at that age when boys have cooties, and it’s been no boys ever since. We get treated differently since we’re a young all-girl teenage band though, and it’s made us stronger. We can go against the stereotype that girls and teenagers aren’t as capable as others.
SFBG: Do you consider yourselves feminists?
HV: We want women to be taken more seriously in the whole music industry. Every step of the way, our album was made by women. We hope to inspire other girls to get involved in this industry because women are way underrepresented.

The She’s
With Tijuana Panthers, Melted Toys
Sat/3, 10 p.m., $10
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com

OccupySF awaits police raid after rejecting city ultimatum

Sasha Cuttler
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OccupySF awaits police raid after rejecting city ultimatum

A police raid that could wipe out OccupySF, one of the country’s largest remaining Occupy camps, now seems imminent after the protest group rejected the city’s ultimatum to either voluntarily move to school district property at 1950 Mission Street or face forced eviction.

OccupySF received a written document laying out the terms of this potential agreement yesterday. After a long day of discussion, including a General Assembly meeting last night, OccupySF is refusing to sign the agreement, largely because of concerns about autonomy, as well as visibility and livability at the new site.

This marks the end of almost a week of talks with the city during which no raids were threatened on the camp. Now that OccupySF has rejected the ultimatum, police are expected to enter the camp and attempt to clear it out tonight or tomorrow night. That could destroy the longest continuous large Occupy encampment in the country. Protesters have been sleeping in public spaces in the Financial District under the name OccupySF since Sept. 17, enduring two previous police raids that only increased support for the group.

After last night’s General Assembly, a working group is meeting to form a defense plan in case of a raid, and it’s still unclear how the standoff will unfold.

The rejection of the offer comes after days of debate at the camp, including a session that took place after the city made clear the exact terms of their proposed contract yesterday afternoon. Around 3:30 p.m., OccupySF liaisons to the city handed out photocopies of a document entitled “Facility License Agreement: 1950 Mission Street.”

If signed, the agreement would have allowed the group to use the former school site until May 31, 2012. There were 17 expectations listed, including no animals or pets, no minors, “no sound/noise greater than 45dBA between 10:00pm and 7:00am,” “no panhandling or loitering,” and “no stoves, flammable liquids, wood storage or gases, open flames allowed on the site.”

What the city called an “agreement” and an “offer,” protesters saw as an ultimatum and, for some, a “veiled threat.” Katt Hobin, one of OccupySF’s key organizers, told the group, “We are operating under violent coercion. They are threatening violence if we don’t evacuate this space.”

Under the agreement, the city would have been the tenants, renting the space from the school board for $2500 per month. The space is a lot surrounded by a 15-foot chain link fence and has several portable buildings. Protesters would have had access to toilets, electricity, and indoor space at the site.

At the current camp at Justin Herman Plaza, which they renamed Bradley Manning Plaza, protesters debated how accepting the agreement would affect their branch of the Occupy movement in terms of autonomy, ability to expand and grow, inclusivity, and long-term viability.

Around 4 pm, hundreds paced camp, talking to each other about how to move forward. Some were interested in the possibility of a deal with the city but felt they could not accept the terms, especially prohibitions on minors and animals.

There seemed to be an understanding that the police would attempt to clear out the current camp in the coming days. Yet many seemed assured that the OccupySF network would stick together even after such a raid. One organizer invoked George Washington, saying, “He knew his army didn’t have to win battles, they just had to stick together. They would lose and they would retreat to a new place, but everyone would know that revolutionary army is still out there.”

Others saw the group’s place in revolutionary history differently. One protester reflected, “I think this is history being made right now. We can take the space and do so much with it. There are inside spaces for the sick and the elderly.”

Dozens of protesters had made up their minds to take the space. They waited with their belongings on the Steuart St and Don Chee Way corner of the plaza. “Jerry the Medic” Selness, who had been acting as OccupySF liaison to the city and speaking with Director of Public Works Mohammed Nuru, had relayed the message that DPW trucks would be coming to pick up those who wanted to move to the new site that afternoon.

One protester said that he and about 30 others had signed a symbolic petition stating that they wanted to accept the space. “We don’t need to sign it as OccupySF,” he said. “We’re Occupy Mission.”

Some had been waiting since the early morning. Around 5 pm, Selness got a call that no trucks would be coming that day because the city was awaiting the General Assembly’s response to its offer. About 100 people convened for the daily General Assembly at 6 pm. Around 9 pm, it was clear that OccupySF would not be signing the agreement as it stood.

The assembly did not object to any individuals or autonomous groups who might want to sign the document. They planned to write a response letter detailing their reasons for the rejection, the text of which will be discussed in a General Assembly tonight (Wed/30) at 6 pm.

Many came and went during the General Assembly, including dozens of people who were coming through OccupySF for the first time. Many organizers and supporters who had been there since the beginning but who not attended for days or weeks came back to discuss this issue, which many believed was important “for Occupy movements across the country.” Representatives from Occupy San Rafael, Occupy Santa Rosa, Occupy Berkeley, Occupy Oakland, Occupy USF, and Occupy Gainesville, FL spoke up, expressing solidarity, requesting support, and giving advice.

One homeless woman who had been living in the camp but had never spoken in GA expressed the opinion that to move would be to get out of the public eye and to concede to the city’s attempts to contain the movement, a much-expressed sentiment at the meeting. She cried, “You can’t move and live limited with their rules and regulations. You’re an eyesore, that’s why they want you to move. It’s political.”

Another woman agreed, declaring, “They can’t tell us how to protest or where to protest.”

Others cautioned against accepting the offer for different reasons. One man who spoke up at GA said that he was a teacher at Civic Center Secondary, formerly Phoenix Continuation School, the previous tenants of the offered space. He warned that the school had moved because of instability and health issues surrounding the flow of Mission Creek underground. Another worker familiar with the area recounted a tale of power-washing the sidewalk on the proposed site only to be confronted with “thousands of rats who poured up from the streets”; an OccupySF member who had surveyed the site earlier that day confirmed that the buildings had several holes in the walls, seeming to indicate a rat infestation.

One of the attendees, a young child, expressed the opinion that “we should stay strong and stay here,” amplified by the Peoples Mic. She also helped keep the meeting’s energy high and going in the right direction, showing aggressive “downward twinkle fingers” that signal disagreement at the proposed prohibition of minors on the site, and yelling “there are children present!” when adults used curse words in their impassioned statements.

Many agreed with Diamond Dave Whitaker, local celebrity in the poetry and radical communities and OccupySF organizer, when he stated: “OccupySF is citywide. We’re an autonomous entity as part of a worldwide network. We’re going to see a number of autonomous occupations arising.”

Whitaker mentioned a planned Occupy USF action to take place Dec. 1, as well as the small contingent that is currently “occupying” outside of Wells Fargo at 1 California Street, across from the former occupation site at 101 Market Street. That site is still blocked off by police barricades.

Occupy LA issued a similar rejection letter November 23, which might form the basis of OccupySF’s letter (Link: http://losangelesga.net/2011/11/assembly-authored-city-response/ ). That camp was raided and disbanded last night.

OccupySF plans to put out a formal response to the proposal and explanation of their decisions tonight.

Stage Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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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. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

THEATER

OPENING

Cinderella Buriel Clay Theater, African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.african-americanshakes.org. $10-35. Opens Fri/2, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat/3 and Dec 10, 3pm); Sun, 3pm. Through Dec 18. African-American Shakespeare Company opens its season with a re-telling of the fairy tale set in the bayous of Louisiana.

The Golden Girls: The Christmas Episodes Victoria Theatre 2961 16th St, SF; www.trannyshack.com. $30. Opens Thurs/1, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 23. Heklina, Cookie Dough, Matthew Martin, and Pollo Del Mar star in this drag-tastic holiday tribute to the classic sitcom.

Dr. Strangelove: LIVE Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF; www.darkroomsf.com. $20. Opens Thurs/1, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 17. Stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s classic cold war comedy.

Ladies in Waiting Exit Stage Left, 156 Eddy, SF; www.horrorunspeakable.com. $20. Opens Thurs/1, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 17. No Nude Men Productions presents three one-acts by Alison Luterman, Claire Rice, and Hilde Susan Jaegtnes.

The Last Five Years Boxcar Playhouse, 505 Natoma, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $20-35. Previews Fri/2, 8pm. Opens Sat/3, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Dec 18. Poor Man’s Players performs Jason Robert Brown’s relationship drama as its inaugural production.

Mommy Queerest Bindlestiff Studio, 185 Sixth St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $15-25. Opens Thurs/1, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 17. Kat Evasco performs her autobiographical show about being the lesbian daughter of a lesbian mother.

Three Sisters Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; (415) 255-8207, www.42ndstmoon.org. $20-50. Previews Wed/30, 7pm; Thurs/1-Fri/2, 8pm. Opens Sat/3, 6pm. Runs Wed, 7pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm (also Dec 10, 1pm); Sun, 3pm. Through Dec 18. 42nd Street Moon performs Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s World War I-set musical.

The Treasure of the Himawari Shrine: Another Mr. YooWho Adventure NOHspace, 2840 Mariposa, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $5-18. Previews Thurs/1, 7pm. Opens Fri/2, 7pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 7pm; Sun, 3pm. Through Dec 18. Master clown Moshe Cohen’s creation Mr. YooWho returns with a Japan-set adventure.

Xanadu New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; (415) 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Previews Fri/2-Sat/3 and Dec 7-9, 8pm; Sun/4, 2pm. Opens Dec 10, 8pm. Through Jan 15. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs the retro roller-skating musical.

BAY AREA

God’s Plot Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. $18-27. Previews Thurs/1, 7pm; Fri/2, 8pm. Opens Sat/3, 8pm. Runs Thurs, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm (starting Dec 15, also runs Wed, 7pm). Through Jan 15. Writer-director Mark Jackson’s historical drama, set in 1665 Virginia, closes out Shotgun Players’ 20th anniversary season.

The Secret Garden TheatreWorks at Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield, Palo Alto; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $19-72. Previews Wed/30, 7:30pm; Thurs/1-Fri/2, 8pm. Opens Sat/3, 2 and 8pm. Runs Tues-Wed, 7:30pm; Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm; Dec 24, shows at 1 and 6pm); Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Dec 31. TheatreWorks performs the Tony Award-winning musical adaptaion of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel.

The Wild Bride Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $14.50-73. Previews Fri/2-Sat/3 and Tues/6, 8pm; Sun/5, 7pm. Opens Wed/7, 8pm. Runs Tues, Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Thurs and Sat, 2pm; no matinees Dec 8 or 15); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm; no matinee Jan 1). Through Jan 1. Britain’s Kneehigh Theatre Company returns to Berkeley Rep with the American premiere of Emma Rice’s grown-up fairy tale.

ONGOING

Absolutely San Francisco Alcove Theater, 414 Mason, Ste 502, SF; (415) 992-8168, www.thealcovetheater.com. $32-50. Schedule varies, through Dec 29. Not Quite Opera Productions presents Anne Nygren Doherty’s musical about San Francisco, with five characters all portrayed by Mary Gibboney.

Annapurna Magic Theatre, Bldg D, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; (415) 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org. $20-60. Wed/30-Sat/3, 8pm (also Sat/3, 2:30pm); Sun/4, 2:30pm. Magic Theatre artistic director Loretta Greco helms this new two-hander by playwright Sharr White about a dying man named Ulysses (Rod Gnapp) who gets an unexpected visit by his ex-wife, Emma (Denise Cormier), who took their young son and left him some 20 years earlier when he was still an alcoholic. Ulysses, a once respected poet living a reclusive life in his trailer home (a cluttered stick-figure set by Andrew Boyce) in a tiny Colorado town, is now dry of drink and published verse — and normally naked too (at the moment Emma shows up he happens to be frying some sausages, so he’s got a little apron on as well as an oxygen tube for his dire emphysema). But he has continued to write unanswered letters to his son and composed over years an epic work comparing love to the alluring but deadly mountaintop that gives the play its title. For her part, Emma has left her second husband in another middle-of-the-night flight, but her reasons are a little different this time. We sense she never got over Ulysses either, but there’s a nagging urgency to her arrival too related to their now grown-up son, which is gradually revealed in the course of their sometimes too glib or forced interactions. There’s more than a whiff of Sam Shepard about this lonely cowboy poet and his estrangement, but the story is not nearly as compelling or suspenseful as a Shepard play, in part because characters and plot are not very believable and the story is bluntly sentimental to boot. (Avila)

*Fela! Curran Theatre, 445 Geary, SF; www.shnsf.com. $31-200. Wed-Sat, 8pm (also Wed and Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through Dec 11. Director-choreographer Bill T. Jones’s highly successful Off-Broadway to Broadway musical (with book by Jones and Jim Lewis; additional lyrics by Lewis; and additional music by Aaron Johnson and Jordan McLean) proves worth the hype. With a prodigious performance at the center of it all by Sahr Ngaujah (rotating in the title role with Adesola Osakalumi), this is less a biography than euphoric and vehement musical party, sermon, and political rally at once. At the same time, enough of the career and times of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (1938–1997) come through — amid a gorgeous video-enhanced street-art design scheme, and ecstatic live music and choreography deployed with contagious bravado — that there is no missing the contemporary relevance in the Nigerian Afrobeat legend and popular activist-outlaw who stood up for a devastated population against the Western imperialism and international corporate tyranny fronted by Nigeria’s oil-trading military regime. The only thing that would make this show better would be seeing it down at an Occupy encampment. (Avila)

*The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through Dec 18. This new autobiographical solo show by Don Reed, writer-performer of the fine and long-running East 14th, is another slice of the artist’s journey from 1970s Oakland ghetto to comedy-circuit respectability — here via a partial debate-scholarship to UCLA. The titular Los Angeles residency hotel was where Reed lived and worked for a time in the 1980s while attending university. It’s also a rich mine of memory and material for this physically protean and charismatic comic actor, who sails through two acts of often hilarious, sometimes touching vignettes loosely structured around his time on the hotel’s young wait staff, which catered to the needs of elderly patrons who might need conversation as much as breakfast. On opening night, the episodic narrative seemed to pass through several endings before settling on one whose tidy moral was delivered with too heavy a hand, but if the piece runs a little long, it’s only the last 20 minutes that noticeably meanders. And even with some awkward bumps along the way, it’s never a dull thing watching Reed work. (Avila)

Language Rooms Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $20-28. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through Dec 11. The immigrant experience has some familiar familial dynamics across the board. Parents, for instance, can easily discover their Americanized children becoming embarrassed by the older generation’s “foreign” ways. Allegiances potentially strain much further, however, when the immigrant story gets entwined with a little narrative called the “war on terror.” That’s the volatile mixture at the center of Yussef El Guindi’s Language Rooms, a somewhat uneven but ultimately worthwhile new play that leverages absurdist comedy to interrogate the perversion of basic human sympathies post-9/11. Seattle-based playwright El Guindi (whose other Bay Area productions include Back of the Throat and the hilarious Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes) well knows that the transformation of nightmare into bureaucratic routine is a reality sometimes best broached in a comic vein. (Avila)

Not Getting Any Younger Marsh San Francisco, Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 3pm. Extended through Dec 17. Marga Gomez is back at the Marsh, a couple of too-brief decades after inaugurating the theater’s new stage with her first solo show — an apt setting, in other words, for the writer-performer’s latest monologue, a reflection on the inevitable process of aging for a Latina lesbian comedian and artist who still hangs at Starbucks and can’t be trusted with the details of her own Wikipedia entry. If the thought of someone as perennially irreverent, insouciant, and appealingly immature as Gomez makes you depressed, the show is, strangely enough, the best antidote. (Avila)

*On the Air Pier 29 on the Embarcadero (at Battery), SF; (415) 438-2668, love.zinzanni.org. $117 and up (includes dinner). Showtimes vary, through Dec 31. Teatro ZinZanni’s final production at its longtime nest on Pier 29 is a nostalgia-infused banquet of bits structured around an old-time radio variety show, featuring headliners Geoff Hoyle (Geezer) and blues singer Duffy Bishop. If you haven’t seen juggling on the radio, for instance, it’s pretty awesome, especially with a performer like Bernard Hazens, whose footing atop a precarious tower of tubes and cubes is already cringingly extraordinary. But all the performers are dependably first-rate, including Andrea Conway’s comic chandelier lunacy, aerialist and enchanting space alien Elena Gatilova’s gorgeous “circeaux” act, graceful hand-balancer Christopher Phi, class-act tapper Wayne Doba, and radio MC Mat Plendl’s raucously tweeny hula-hooping. Add some sultry blues numbers by raunchy belter Bishop, Hoyle’s masterful characterizations (including some wonderful shtick-within-a-shtick as one-liner maestro “Red Bottoms”), a few classic commercials, and a healthy dose of audience participation and you start to feel nicely satiated and ready for a good cigar. Smoothly helmed by ZinZanni creative director Norm Langill, On the Air signals off-the-air for the popular dinner circus — until it can secure a new patch of local real estate for its antique spiegeltent — so tune in while you may. (Avila)

*Period of Adjustment SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter, SF; (415) 677-9596, www.sfplayhouse.org. $20-50. Tues-Thurs, 7pm (also Dec 21-22, 2pm); Fri-Sat, 9pm (also Sat, 3pm; no show Dec 24). Through Jan 14. A nervous young man with an unaccountable tremor, George Haverstick (a compellingly manic Patrick Alparone) has waited until his honeymoon to finally call on his old Korean War buddy, Ralph (a stout but tender Johnny Moreno) — only to drop his new bride, Isabel (the terrifically quick and sympathetic MacKenzie Meehan), at the doorstep and hurry away. As it happens, Ralph’s wife of five years, Dorothea (an appealing Maggie Mason), has just quit him and taken their young son with her, turning the family Christmas tree and its uncollected gifts into a forlorn monument to a broken home — which, incidentally, has a tremor of its own, having been built atop a vast cavern. Tennessee Williams calls his 1960 play “a serious comedy,” which is about right, since although things end on a warm and cozy note, the painful crises of two couples and the lost natures of two veterans — buried alive in two suburbs each called “High Point” — are the stuff of real distress. SF Playhouse artistic director Bill English gets moving but clear-eyed, unsentimental performances from his strong cast — bolstered by Jean Forsman and Joe Madero as Dorothea’s parents—whose principals do measured justice to the complex sexual and psychological tensions woven throughout. If not one of Williams’s great plays, this is an engaging and surprisingly memorable one just the same, with the playwright’s distinctive blend of the metaphorical and concrete. As a rare snowfall blankets this Memphis Christmas Eve, 1958, something dark and brooding lingers in the storybook cheer. (Avila)

Savage in Limbo Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; (415) 345-1287, www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed/30-Sat/3, 8pm. Actors Theatre of San Francisco performs John Patrick Shanley’s edgy comedy.

SexRev: The José Sarria Experience CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; (415) 552-4100, www.therhino.org. $10-25. Fri/2-Sat/3, 8pm (also Sat/3, 10:30pm); Sun/4, 3pm. Theatre Rhinoceros performs John Fisher’s musical celebration of America’s first queer activist — a hit for the company in 2010.

A Tale of Two Genres SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter, SF; (415) 869-5384, www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Thurs-Sat and Dec 20-21, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm). Through Dec 21. Un-Scripted Theater Company presents an improvised musical inspired by Charles Dickens.

The Temperamentals New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; (415) 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Dec 18. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Jon Marans’ drama about gay rights during the McCarthy era.

Totem Grand Chapiteau, AT&T Park, Parking Lot A, 74 Mission Rock, SF; cirquedusoleil.com/totem. $58-248.50. Tues-Sun, schedule varies. Extended through Dec 18. Cirque Du Soleil returns with its latest big-top production.

*Working for the Mouse Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $22. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Dec 17. It might not come as a surprise to hear that even “the happiest place on earth” has a dark side, but hearing Trevor Allen describe it during this reprise of 2002’s Working for the Mouse will put a smile on your face as big as Mickey’s. With a burst of youthful energy, Allen bounds onto the tiny stage of Impact Theatre to confess his one-time aspiration to never grow up — a desire which made auditioning for the role of Peter Pan at Disneyland a sensible career move. But in order to break into the big time of “charactering,” one must pay some heavy, plush-covered dues. As Allen creeps up the costumed hierarchy one iconic cartoon figure at a time, he finds himself unwittingly enmeshed in a world full of backroom politics, union-busting, drug addled surfer dudes with peaches-and-cream complexions, sexual tension, showboating, job suspension, Make-A-Wish Foundation heartbreak, hash brownies, rabbit vomit, and accidental decapitation. Smoothly paced and astutely crafted, Mouse will either shatter your blissful ignorance or confirm your worst suspicions about the corporate Disney machine, but either way, it will probably make you treat any “Casual Seasonal Pageant Helpers” you see running around in their sweaty character suits with a whole lot more empathy. (Note: review from the show’s recent run at La Val’s Subterranean in Berkeley.) (Gluckstern)

BAY AREA

Annie Berkeley Playhouse, Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College, Berk; (510) 845-8542, www.berkeleyplayhouse.org. $17-35. Thurs/1-Sat/3, 7pm; Sun/4, noon and 5pm. Berkeley Playhouse performs the classic musical.

Rambo: The Missing Years Cabaret at Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thurs-Fri, 7pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through Dec 10. Howard “Hanoi Howie” Petrick presents his solo show about being an anti-war demonstrator — while also serving in the Army.

The Soldier’s Tale Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $10-55. Tues, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Dec 18. Aurora Theatre presents a re-imagined version of Igor Stravinsky’s 1918 musical by Tom Ross and Muriel Maffre.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun and Dec 26-30, 11am (no show Dec 25). Through Dec 31. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns with this kid-friendly, bubble-tastic comedy.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Camino Real” Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; (415) 419-3584, www.cuttingball.com. Sun, 1pm. Free. Cutting Ball Theater’s “Hidden Classics Reading Series” takes on Tennessee Williams.

“Cut the Crap! With Semi-Motivational Guru, Clam Lynch” Dark Room, 2263 Mission, SF; www.darkroomsf.com. Fri/2, Dec 16, Jan 6, Jan 13, 10:30pm. $15. Get motivated with self-help-guru-satirizing comedian Clam Lynch.

“An Evening With Amy Sedaris” Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF; (415) 431-3611. Sun, 7:30. $100. One more reason to love Amy Sedaris: she’s performing to benefit the Roxie Theater.

“Help Is On the Way for the Holidays X” Marines Memorial Theatre, 600 Sutter, SF; (415) 273-1620, www.helpisontheway.org. Mon, 7:30pm. $40-100. AIDS benefit concert and gala with Mary Wilson, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Sally Struthers, and other stars.

Kunst-Stoff Kunst-Stoff Arts, One Grove, SF; www.kunst-stoff.org. Thurs-Sat, 8:30pm. Through Dec 10. $15. The contemporary dance company performs its home season, divided into three programs featuring guests and multiple premieres.

“Left Coast Leaning” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. $15. YBCA and Youth Speaks’ Living Word Project present this performance festival, featuring slam poet Rafael Casal, tap dancer Jason Samuels Smith, and others.

“Make Drag Not War 3” Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St, SF; www.veteranartists.org. Sun, 8pm. $5-20. Veteran Artists and Iraq Veterans Against the War present this benefit pairing drag queens with recent military veterans to tell their stories through drag performances.

Mark Foehringer Dance Project | SF Children’s Creativity Museum, 221 Fourth St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Sat-Sun, 11am, 2pm, 4pm; Dec 20-23, 11am and 2pm. Through Dec 23. $20-35. The contemporary ballet company performs Mark Foehringer’s Nutcracker Sweets.

ODC/Dance Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.odcdance.org. Thurs/1-Fri/2 and Dec 8-9, 11am; Sat/3 and Dec 10, 1 and 4pm; Sun/4 and Dec 11, 2pm. $15-45. The company presents the 25th anniversary of KT Nelson’s The Velveteen Rabbit.

“Picklewater Clown Cabaret Adult Xmas Pageant” Stage Werx, 446 Valencia, SF; www.picklewater.com. Mon, 7 and 9pm. $15. A variety show that celebrates all the winter holidays in one.

Printz Dance Project Z Space, Theater Artaud, 450 Florida, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Wed-Sat, 8pm. $22-25. The company performs its evening-length dance performance Hover Space. 2

 

How does it make you feel?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
How does it make you feel?

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Africa Hitech makes intoxicating music. Programmed polyrhythms snake over punchy bass lines. Synthetic chord progressions crescendo and fall, disrupted by surges of 808 kicks, constellations of snares, outbursts of electric energy.

All the while, an offbeat rhythm assaults the interweaving drum patterns, unsettling any steady flow that might have taken shape. This tension pulls the music forward, destining outwards, while the bass anchors the body, whether on the dance floor or just mesmerized inwardly, a head in the groove.

The sound builds in momentum, in suspense, but with subtle patience, producing a great gathering of intensity — which if you happen to hear on the right sound system — exceeds its limit, and disorients, overwhelms, destructs, rejuvenates. It’s the Dionysian rave rewired for our times.

“We grew up in that whole bass line culture in the UK with dub, reggae, soul, and everything that’s come about after it and around it,” says Steve Spacek, who together with Mark Pritchard makes the duo Africa Hitech. “We try to tap into that amazing feeling of the frequency in the club when everyone’s getting down together on one vibe, one of the best feelings imaginable.”

Seasoned producers-vocalists Spacek and Pritchard have pursued this utopian vision of sound in their latest project. In the past couple years, Africa Hitech has released three EPs, including this month’s Do U Really Wanna Fight on Warp, and dropped a brilliant record earlier this spring, 93 Million Miles. The songs navigate two topological poles: the cosmic and the streets. While “The Sound of Tomorrow” and “Light the Way” evoke otherworldliness, the ecstatic openness of galactic space channeled by the likes of George Clinton’s Mothership and Sun Ra’s Arkestra, “Blen” and “Gangslap” gurgle in the enclosed terrain of frenetic polypercussion and dread inducing low end. Their vocals wreak both havoc and bliss on language: soulful croons give away to disembodied vocoder chants; or, Spacek unleashes a growling patois, and sample cuts dissipate in mutilated mantras, reconfigured on a stuttering trigger pad: “Out/ Out/ Out/ Out in the streets/ Out in the streets/ They call it murrderrrrr.”

“We’re trying to preserve the Jamaican sound system in the music we make,” says Spacek. “There’s all these so-called different genres, but we just see them as all just one family. In the end they’re just different tempos and sensibilities of the same rhythm.”

That rhythm, the swing, carries traces of its past. Its body has been dispersed across the Atlantic: marked by violence, labor, hybridization, creative upheavals and reversals, restless paths of migration and commerce, moments of resistance and dreams of redemption. In these diasporic unfoldings, the swing has evolved, adapted, mutated. Those struck by the rhythm have both reinvented its prosthetic origins and conjured alternative prophecies, sometimes in folkloric traditions, sometimes in the margins, on the limits of popular music or in the neglected underbellies of familiar acoustic space. Recall the recent ancestry. Mystic purveyors of dub armed the bass line in a highly weaponized electronic form; techno rebels programmed the soul of the machine with analog drum machines, keyboards, and sequencers; hip-hop and jungle collagists digitized the beat through cut and paste sample techniques, effect, and manipulation. Today, footwork, dubstep, funky, and all their kin tap into the same alchemy, spread spontaneously through the planetary dissolution wrought by cyberspace. Africa Hitech picks up here.

For Spacek and Pritchard, sonic oscillations between the cosmic and street, inner and outer, traces of the past and hyper-tech future, collapse in the simple and pure feeling of the intoxicating bass line. “We’re not trying to make music that’s deep and meaningful. We’re trying to make music that feels good … the kind of feeling that you can’t escape, and you don’t want to, you get lost in it,” says Spacek, the words now rushing out. “The bass becomes so immense that it’s literally rattling your ribcage. Some call it spiritual. It resonates. It makes sense, intuitively. But there’s some kind of emotion in there that we don’t quite understand. To some degree, we don’t want to understand it, maybe we can’t. We just want to feel it.”

AFRICA HITECH

With Jonwayne, Kush Arora, DJ Dials

Thurs/1, 10 p.m.

Public Works

161 Erie, SF (415) 932-0955

www.publicsf.com

The food divide

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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4
The food divide

news@sfbg.com

Antonia Williams is part of a slow, quiet food revolution. After battling obesity for much of her adult life, the 26-year-old lifelong Bayview resident did some research. “I realized it had a lot to do with the food I consumed,” she told us. “As a result of growing up in the neighborhood, I suffer from obesity. I’m overweight because of the lack of options for good healthy food.”

“It’s what I grew up on, McDonald’s and a lot of fried food for dinner,” she recalls. “The grocery stores in the area were very limited in what they offered. I believe my parents weren’t as educated or aware” about health and nutrition.

Williams managed to escape this bad foods trap, change her personal diet, and now works as a “food guardian” for the nonprofit Southeast Food Access (SEFA), helping to bring more nutritious fare to the Bayview.

The complex of challenges Williams faced simply to eat well—the fast food all around her, the dearth of grocery stores, and lack of awareness—reflects the array of systemic barriers to good food that keep tens of thousands of San Franciscans in chronically poor health.

Under the weight of recession and double-digit unemployment, San Francisco’s chronic food divide has grown deeper and wider. From regions of the city like Bayview, Excelsior, and other Southeast neighborhoods, to seniors surviving on marginal fixed incomes, to the city’s swelling unemployed and underemployed who rely on food pantries, access to fresh food is a daily geographic and economic battle.

Roughly one in five San Franciscans each day has no reliable source of adequate sustenance and must scramble for food from soup kitchens, food pantries, or other “emergency” supplies that have become a structural part of the city’s food system, according to the San Francisco Food Bank.

Each month, more than 100,000 families rely on the Food Bank to help feed themselves — nearly double the amount from 2006. Economic recession has dramatically increased the number of city residents using food stamps (known as “CalFresh”) each month, rising from 29,008 in 2008 to 44,185 in 2010.

Yet even that rise belies a far deeper need: only 47 percent of those qualifying for CalFresh are actually accessing benefits, according to a data analysis by California Food Policy Advocates; at minimum, more than 40,000 additional city residents are entitled to get this help, and thus eat better.

Across the city, parallel economic and food divides compound one another, spelling serious trouble for people’s basic nutrition and health — in turn depleting their energy, cognition, and ability to do everything from succeeding in school to getting a job.

 

BEYOND GROCERY STORES

In Bayview, where poverty and unemployment run about double citywide averages, these geographic and economic food divides come to a head. District 10, encompassing Bayview/Hunters Point (BVHP), features some of the city’s most grocery-impoverished neighborhoods, and has the highest rates of CalFresh usage.

This confluence of lack and need—compounded by a prevalence of fast food and liquor stores over fresh food offerings—has inspired Antonia Williams and other residents to fight for better food in their neighborhoods.

As one of four paid Food Guardians for SEFA, Williams spends about 20 hours a week examining grocery store shelves in Bayview, talking with consumers and food retailers, and educating both about the need for more fresh non-processed foods.

One recent victory: armed with customer survey data, she convinced the Bayview Foods Co. to stock low-sodium tomato paste. Next on Williams’ food improvement list is getting more low-sodium products, less cholesterol, and more fiber on the shelves.

These may sound like small steps, but they’re part of a larger effort to get healthier food in Bayview, where chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease are rampant. “I think a lot of people just don’t know the link between the food we are eating and these chronic diseases,” says Williams.

The Bayview is among the city’s most food-deprived districts, with just 63 percent of residents living within a half-mile of a supermarket (in Excelsior, it’s 57 percent), compared with 84 percent citywide. That ratio improved somewhat with the arrival this August of Fresh & Easy supermarket on Third Street, but access to fresh produce remains limited — a situation that numerous studies show contributes greatly to chronic undernourishment and disease.

Indeed, statistics show Bayview area residents suffer by far the city’s “highest rates of everything negative,” as former district supervisor Sophie Maxwell puts it: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

Ironically, the Bayview’s Third Street is home to the city’s bustling produce warehouses, which rattle early every morning with trucks and crates full of fruits and vegetable, “but you have to go out of the district to get it,” says Maxwell, who helped spearhead a Food Security Task Force while in office. “I was very much aware of [the food access problem] because of what I had to do to get food myself.”

Much of Third Street remains a boulevard of liquor stores and fried and fast food. According to Tia Shimada of California Food Policy Advocates, “A lot of what we see instead of food deserts is food swamps, where the amount of healthy nutritious food available is overwhelmed by all the fast food and junk food.”

Despite a seemingly diverse landscape of food businesses, “There’s a saturation in neighborhoods with unhealthy choices,” SEFA’s Tracey Patterson argues. “When the cheapest choice in front of you is fatty comfort food and fast food, that’s what you get accustomed to eating. The easier options quickly become habit.”

Kenny Hill, a 23-year-old food guardian and Bayview resident, puts it like this: “What we have in our community, that’s what we eat.” But he says history and culture play a role, too. “We need to change the culture of what’s considered good…Growing up eating salad, people would say, ‘Why are you eating that? That’s white people’s food.'”

In other words, it takes more than getting a grocery store—which itself involved a nearly 20-year struggle for Bayview residents and leaders. “Food access is just one part of the issue. Even if you get a grocery store, that doesn’t solve the problem,” says Patterson, whose group, SEFA, espouses “three pillars” to fix the area’s food problems: more grocery stores; education and health literacy; and expanded urban agriculture. “None on their own is enough.”

 

HUNGER CROSSES LINES

Getting a job isn’t enough either, statistics show. A recent study by the USDA cited by the Food Security Task Force shows that 70 percent of families nationwide with “food insecure” children have at least one member working full-time. And in San Francisco, the task force found, “39 percent of the households that receive weekly groceries through the SF Food Bank include at least one working adult. Only 18 percent of clients are homeless.”

At least by federal definitions of poverty, food insecurity isn’t just for poor people anymore — particularly in San Francisco, where exorbitant housing and other costs compound people’s struggles to meet their food needs. “If you just look at the poverty level, you’re missing a lot of people who are struggling to make ends meet,” says Colleen Rivecca, advocacy coordinator with St. Anthony’s Foundation. “Hunger and health and housing are so interconnected.”

Indeed, while the Federal Poverty Level for a family of three is $18,310, cost-of-living research by the INSIGHT Center for Community Economic Development found that in San Francisco, this family would need almost $40,000 more than that to make ends meet.

Rivecca says the ongoing recession is simultaneously deepening the food divides and undermining efforts to address it. For instance, SSI recipients must make do with $77 a month less than they got in 2009, while California is the only state where SSI cannot be supplemented by food stamps.

According to the Food Security Task Force, San Francisco “has an inordinately high number of residents who are elderly, low-income and/or blind and disabled — over 47,000 residents receive SSI.” Many are homebound, socially isolated, and living in SRO units without kitchens, and no means of preparing their own food. So it’s no surprise that these same people, who need help the most, often get it the least.

Due to “misconceptions about what qualifies,” says CFPA’s Kerry Birnbach, only 5 percent of Californians eligible for Social Security participate in CalFresh. “Senior citizens are more isolated, and the more isolated you are, the less likely you are to know about it.” Birnbach says that leads to lower nutrition, less energy, and greater hospitalization rates. “It’s not having food on the table — choosing between food and medicine.”

A 2006 study by the San Francisco Department of Aging and Adult Services found that while the city’s elders “received approximately 12.2 million free meals through all of the programs in the City including food pantries, free dining rooms, and home delivered meals, the gap between the number of meals served and the number of meals needed was somewhere between 6 [million] and 9 million meals annually.”

 

BAND-AID FOOD SYSTEM

As television cameras made clear on Thanksgiving, there’s no shortage of food and meal giveaway programs, soup kitchens run by churches and nonprofits — a whole constellation of ad hoc benevolence spread across the city. But this kind of “emergency food assistance” has become a structural part of the city’s dietary landscape.

Another main ingredient in the city’s food infrastructure is seemingly cheap fast food, which for many poor people becomes the diet of first and last resort. Sup. Eric Mar recalls meeting with teenage mothers and hearing one parent speak about dumpster diving at McDonald’s for what she called “fancy dinner.”

“The cheapest possible food like McDonald’s is seen as a luxury,” says Mar, who last year passed legislation preventing fast food chains from selling kids meals with toys unless they improved their nutrition content. “Poor people rely on whatever’s out there, and when McDonald’s or Burger King sells cheap, it undercuts families’ efforts to get healthy.”

District 10 Sup. Malia Cohen sees the impacts of fast food and junk food every day in Bayview. “There is no infrastructure out there to de-program people” from long-standing fast food habits. “I don’t fault people for eating fast food, but I do want them to think twice and know they have a choice.”

So what is the choice, and how will the city address its deep food divides, which cut across geographic and demographic lines?

So far, it’s a patchwork project. As one step, the supervisors in April passed a new zoning ordinance designed to encourage more urban food production. In Bayview, Cohen says, “We’re looking at urban agriculture as something that’s viable” to feed low-income residents.

Despite the arrival of Fresh & Easy, BVHP remains a critical flashpoint for the food security fight. Markets for fresh produce are few and far between. In 2006 the Department of the Environment teamed with Girls 2000 and Literacy for Environmental Justice to create the Bayview Hunters’ Point Farmers Market, but for a variety of reasons, the customer base wasn’t sufficient for farmers to keep selling there, and the project stalled. Now there is talk of reviving a farmers market in the area.

But for larger, more structural change to take hold, Mar argues, the food gap “has to be a citywide goal and priority.” And, he notes, bigger forces — notably agribusiness lobbies and congressional agriculture committees — make local progress more difficult. “It’s hard because the Farm Bill allows these food companies and commodity groups to keep their prices lower, and small businesses and producers have a hard time keeping their prices low,” encouraging more fast food and obesity and other diet-related diseases.

 

GREEN GLIMMERS

On a chilly gray late afternoon the day before Thanksgiving, we met with Patterson, Williams, and two other food guardians at Bridgeview Community Garden on the corner of Newhall and Revere in Bayview. Perched on a small chunk of slope overlooking houses and freeway traffic, the plot offers a thriving little harvest of tomatoes, kale, leeks, basil, and other vegetables and herbs. It’s not a lot of food, but along with other nearby agriculture, such as Quesada Gardens and the larger Alemany Farm, it helps bolster residents’ weekly dose of fresh produce.

Equally important, it gives budding food activists like Antonia Williams and Kenny Hill reason to believe things can change. After yanking a healthy crop of leeks from the soil, fellow food guardian Jazz Vassar, 25, notes, “There are a lot of community organizations doing good work here. We have high hopes to change things.”

Even as they work to nourish a different food future, the food guardians are acutely aware of the jagged rocks and stubborn old roots that need to be cleared. Asked what the city should do about Bayview’s many-layered food struggles, Hill responds: “Realize there is a problem in Bayview, and allocate resources here. There are statistics that this is a food desert, there are high rates of crime—people have to wake up and see that people here have been disenfranchised.”

It’s not about having the city do it for them, says Hill. “Give us something to latch on to so we can help ourselves.”

Former Bay Guardian city editor Christopher D. Cook is the author of Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis.

About that “acrimonious fall”

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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86

Catch this. Mayor Ed Lee’s mayoral victory had nothing to do with millions of dollars in campaign contributions from private interests, a sophisticated get-out-the vote effort targeting Lee supporters, the advantage of incumbency, some funny business, or a calculated campaign strategy concentrating efforts on absentee ballots.

Instead, the fact that Lee triumphed over voters’ second pick, the significantly less well-funded progressive candidate Sup. John Avalos, is proof that the left in San Francisco has plummeted into a dark abyss. In fact, the progressive movement has descended so far into disarray and become so irrelevant that its condition warrants front page news.

That’s essentially the narrative that Benjamin Wachs and Joe Eskenazi of the San Francisco Weekly offer in their cover article, “Progressively Worse: The Tumultuous Rise and Acrimonious Fall of the City’s Left,” in which they refer to the Guardian as “the movement’s cajoling ward boss, kingmaker, and sounding board.” Gosh, I feel so goddamn important right now.

Once the blood pressure returned to normal, my initial reaction to this piece was that Wachs and Eskenazi seem to misunderstand who and what progressives actually are. They portray the city’s left as a caricature, a brash bunch of power mongers now on the losing end that can be easily summed up with pithy video game references, Happy Meal toy bans, and bikes.

Witness the contrast between the Weekly’s portrayal of progressives (helped along by former Newsomite Eric Jaye), and the portrait of the left the Guardian offers this week with an Op-Ed written by NTanya Lee — an actual progressive who volunteered for the Avalos for Mayor campaign.

Here’s the Weekly on the left:

“This is an eclectic group, one often bound not by mutual interests as much as mutual enmity — toward Brown, his successors, and the corporate interests of ‘downtown.’ As a result, progressive principles are often wildly inconsistent. Progressives favor more government control over people’s lives for their own good, as when they effectively banned McDonald’s Happy Meals. But sometimes progressives say the government needs to let people make their own choices … Progressives believe government should subsidize homeless people who choose to drink themselves to death, while forbidding parents from buying McNuggets because fast food is bad for us. … Without consistent principles, it’s easy to associate progressives with the craziest ideas to come out of City Hall, and the movement’s bad ideas are memorable. … Daly’s pledge to say ‘Fuck’ at every public meeting makes a killer Internet meme. Hey, let’s legalize prostitution and outlaw plastic bags!”

Here’s Lee on the left:

“The Avalos coalition was largely community forces: SF Rising’s base in working class Black, Latino, Filipino and Chinese communities; the Bike Coalition’s growing base of mostly white bike riders; affinity groups like Filipinos, Queers, Latinos and Arabs for Avalos; progressive Democrats; social networks of creative, young progressive activists affiliated with the League of Young Voters; and loyal families and neighborhood leaders from John’s own District 11. The campaign prioritized communicating to voters in four languages, and according to the Chinese press, John Avalos was the only non-Chinese candidate with a significant Chinese outreach program. There were stalwarts from progressive labor unions (most notably SEIU 1021 and USWW) who threw down — but overall, labor played it safe and invested resources in other guys. And then, in the great surprise development of the race, supporters of the new national occupy movement came to be a strong part of the Team Avalos base because the campaign was so well positioned to resonate with the call to take on the one percent.”

When it comes to takeaways from the November election, the Weekly’s conclusion is essentially opposite that of progressives. While many on the left see themselves as regaining momentum and building the power to rise even in the face of defeat by the established powers-that-be, the Weekly casts San Francisco’s left as deflated and out-of-touch.

Speaking of out-of-touch, the SF Weekly refers to San Francisco’s “increasingly imaginary working class.”  But in reality, 61 percent of students attending public schools in S.F. Unified School District qualify for free or reduced lunch, and a majority of San Franciscans cannot afford market-rate housing.

However, the Weekly is correct in pointing out that shifting demographics have dealt a blow to the progressive base.

“Between 2000 and 2010, the city grew older (every age group over 50 increased), wealthier (there are now 58 percent more households earning $125,000 or more), and more heavily Asian (up from around 30 to nearly 35 percent of the city’s population): exactly the groups progressives don’t win with. These voters don’t respond well to campaigns against developments or for city services, because they’re often living in those developments and don’t need city services.”

I take issue with the Asian part of that statement as a sweeping generalization, however, having witnessed the solid organizing work of the Chinese Progressive Association, for example.

The Weekly also says progressives and the Guardian never called out former Mayor Gavin Newsom for ripping off their best ideas. Oh, they didn’t?  That’s news to me.

The Weekly article implies that progressives got trounced by moderates because jobs are priority No. 1 for voters, and the left has no feasible economic plan — but at the same time, the article completely dismisses ideas that the Guardian has put forth, like creating a municipal bank, implementing Avalos’ Local Hire legislation, or taxing the rich.

Taxing the rich is precisely the kind of economic solution the international Occupy movement is clamoring for, and the concept has even attracted a few unlikely supporters, like billionaires Warren Buffet and Sean Parker, who is not some conservative a*hole by the way.

“The Guardian … stays on the progressive agenda because they put it there, along with taxing the rich, tapping downtown to subsidize Muni, and other measures … Proposing the same old solutions to every new problem turns policies into punch lines.”

Speaking of predictable, no profile authored by the Weekly mentioning the Guardian would be complete without some dig about public power. “The Guardian has been flogging public power since Tesla invented the alternating-current generator,” the S.F. Weekly squawks. Those clever reporters, turning policies into punch lines.

But wait, I thought the problem was that progressives couldn’t get it together on the job creation thing. Consider the CleanPower SF program, which has been strongly advocated for by progressive Sup. and Sheriff-elect Ross Mirkarimi (who it turns out is “not toxic,” according to the Weekly, since he was elected citywide and all). According to an analysis by the Local Clean Energy Alliance, CleanPowerSF will create 983 jobs — 4,357 jobs when indirect job creation is factored in — over the course of three years, assuming the 51 percent renewable energy target is met. Presented with this kind of information, the Weekly will only yawn and say, “Are we on that again?”

That being said, our friends’ article might actually have a pearl of wisdom or two buried somewhere in that nauseating sea of sarcasm. Everyone needs to engage in self-reflection. So right after you’re done throwing up, think about how to take advantage of the opportunity this article presents for a citywide dialogue about progressivism in San Francisco.

Psychic Dream Astrology: November 23-29

Andrew Lam
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0

Mercury goes retrograde on the 24th until December 14th. Communicate with care, people.

ARIES

March 21-April 19

Don’t make mountains out of molehills. Make sure the things that are freaking you out are happening now, and that you’re not projecting worst case scenarios onto things. Show courage and integrity in your dealings, as defensive behavior will only put others on the offense.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

Its time to wrap it up, Taurus. Look to the flow of inevitability your life is enacting and instead of resisting it, go with it. Participate in the things that are most troublesome to you- not so you can fix them, but so that you can better understand what is ending and why.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

The biggest priority that should be motivating you right now is freedom. You have got to change, and as a result your relationships are likely to need to change, too. Stay open to what your life offers you without running back to what you know, just ’cause it’s familiar.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

Anxiety can throw you off the scent you’re supposed to be tracking, pal. This week is a major time for developing your relationships to be a better reflection of what you want and need. Don’t psyche yourself out! Be the change you want to see in your familial dealings.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

Acting boldly and being courageous can look the same, but are quite different. This week, be brave enough to sit with the complexities of what you’re scared of. You’re on the verge of integrating a major shift; it’d be a shame to bring your old bravado with you.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

It’s totally worth it to risk the unknown as you try something new out this week. Don’t think in terms of “right” or “wrong”, just consider your different choices and their different consequences. Choose the path with the price you’re most willing to pay, Virgo.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

Just be honest, Libra. Not honest with sugar on top, or honest about these things but not those- be the straight up, direct and clear kind of honest! If you don’t know what you feel or think, just be upfront about that too. Take the risk to tell it true.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

Even though Mercury has started it’s Moonwalk through the stars, it’s still an excellent time to put your energy into setting goals and making solid plans to execute them. Forget what you know and try to figure things out anew. The only way to get new results is to act in a new way, and from a new place.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

This is the perfect moment for that unending optimism that your sign is reputed to have to shine through, Sag. Your thinking is dragging you down, so you need to find a way to see the potential inherent in your life’s troubles. If you look for opportunity you may just find it, pal.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

Things are going exactly as they are meant to be, Capricorn. Enjoy the good in your life, but don’t overdo it in some mad rush to cram all the goodness that you can get down your gullet at once. There’s more to come! Warn against spoiling yourself with the sweet stuff this week.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

Be honest with yourself about what isn’t working anymore in your relationships. Look into the pros and cons of your closest connections to make sure that you’re feeding the best of them and letting go of the rest. Have realistic expectations for best results.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

Make a list and check it twice, Pisces; not a Santa inspired list, but a boring old To-Do list! You need to stop fretting over your life and get organized instead. Be honest with yourself about what you’re capable of, and focus on one step at a time until you get where you need to be.

Jessica Lanyadoo has been a Psychic Dreamer for 17 years. Check out her website at www.lovelanyadoo.com or contact her for an astrology or intuitive reading at (415) 336-8354 or dreamyastrology@gmail.com

Our Weekly Picks: November 23-29

Andrew Lam
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0

WEDNESDAY 23

Immortal Technique

“So now that it’s proven, that a soldier of revolution/ Or head of an empire, disguised in a constitution/ Can not escape the retribution or manipulation/ Of the self-appointed rulers of the planet’s corporations.” So says Afro-Peruvian rapper Immortal Technique on new mixtape The Martyr (Viper Records). Born Felipe Coronel, Tech seizes every opportunity to eviscerate American class warfare and excoriate the United States government’s complicity. Tech’s angry sermons get a little lost in the first half of Martyr because of distracting riffs taken from the Beatles, Aerosmith, and The Goonies soundtrack, though there is a clever reworking of ABBA’s “Money, Money, Money” in reference to this generation’s “Rich Man’s World (1%).” Pure, undiluted Tech shines through on the mixtape’s second half. Swill with care. (Kevin Lee)

With Chino XL, Da Circle, DJ GI Joe

8 p.m., $32.50

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.thefillmore.com

 

MOM’s Family Funk’tion

Before you indulge in caloric binges, first endear yourself to the soulful 1960s sound that has always sounded sweeter during the holidays: Motown. No one knows and appreciates this more than the masterminds behind MOM (Motown on Mondays) who bring originals, remixes, and “close relatives” of Motown label songs to venues and events across San Francisco, including Madrone Art Bar, Public Works, SF Funk Fest, even the Treasure Island Music Festival. The first MOM’s Family Funk’tion goes down the night before the turkey funeral that is Thanksgiving at Brick & Mortar, with DJs Gordo, Timo, Phleck, and Matteo spinning the tracks that get the tail-feathers shaking. The crew from MOM promises to provide “toasty soul and fresh funk jams.” (Emily Savage)

10 p.m., $5

Brick & Mortar Music Hall

1710 Mission, SF

(415) 800-8782

www.brickandmortarmusic.com

 

tUnE-YarDs

Before her set at Pitchfork Music Festival last summer, we were all given tubes of neon yellow warpaint so we could emulate tUnE-YarDs’ Merrill Garbus. Though we may have resembled her, it was no use. We would never be as badass as the woman on stage looping ukulele, smashing drums, and wailing something fierce. With help from additional saxophonists and drummers, the playful jams of Garbus’ quirky hit album w h o k i l l (4AD) burst forth into the calculated cacophony that is tUnE-YarDs. (Frances Capell)

With Pat Jordache

8 p.m., $23

Regency Ballroom

1300 Van Ness, SF

(415) 673-5716

www.theregencyballroom.com

 

FRIDAY 25

“Sing-A-Long Sound of Music”

Chances are “Sing-A-Long Sound of Music,” the classic musical from 1964 with lyric subtitles so the whole theater can burst into song, is your mother’s dream come true — unless I am the only one who has watched their mom caper around the house, singing “My Favorite Things” (a possibility). It’s fortunate that “Sing-A-Long Sound of Music” should show the weekend after Thanksgiving. If mom’s in town, it’s your best bet. Additionally, the theater hands out goody bags, holds a pre-film concert featuring organist David Hegarty, as well as a costume contest. Your mom can dress up as Maria, of course, and you can dress as one of the Von Trapp children. Come on, do it for family. (James H. Miller)

7 p.m., $15

Castro Theater

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheater.com

 

Nadastrom

Are there a lot of orphans in the DJ community? Why are they active the weekend after Thanksgiving, when touring bands are presumably in food comas? Thankfully, there’s still down and dirty shows like this to sweat the gravy out, featuring a big lineup of international and SF DJs including Nadastrom, the progenitors of the bastard toddler of Dutch house and reggaeton: moombahton. Put on by Soundpieces, Camp?, and Irie Cartel, the proceeds of the event will benefit DJs Bogl and Benjammin Taylor, who lost their home in the fire above the Haight and Fillmore Walgreens a couple months back.(Ryan Prendiville)

With Truth (NZ), Stylust Beats (CAN), Lorne B (CAN), Tuffist (SP), Dnae Beats and more

10 p.m., $15 advance

103 Harriet, SF

(415) 431-1200

www.1015.com

 

“Velveteen Rabbit”

There is a lovely tradition in English children’s books that dresses issues around growing up with imagination and a gentle but firm hold on reality. Winnie the Pooh and Wind in the Willows are two of them. Marjorie Williams’ 1922 The Velveteen Rabbit is another. ODC/Dance’s KT Nelson, a young mother at the time, choreographed it 24 years ago. Today, it’s as fresh and imaginative as ever, with wonderfully colorful costumes, Benjamin Britten’s splendid score and Geoff Hoyle’s intimate narration. The two-person high Nana has just a touch of Victorian strictness about cleaning up the nursery but her efficiency is more than held in check by the toys who have minds of their own. Opening performance is Grandparents’ (20 percent off) and photo day (Rita Felciano)

Through Dec. 11, times vary, $15–$45

Novellus Theater

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

700 Howard, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

“Great Dickens Christmas Fair”

Do not discount the Dickens Fair’s potential for holiday weekend shenanigans. Opportunities for hijinx abound, and not just because the fair’s 800 performers — from dirty-overcoated “guvnah!” drunks to crinoline-encased ladies who tea — are encouraged to interact in character with passers-by (mess with them gently! They love it!) The fair fills the cavernous Cow Palace, and houses a corsetry with live models coordinated by local cinchers Dark Garden, an adventurer’s salon where you can share your rollicking tales of shot glass exploration with fantastically mustached gents — and yes, you can booze your face off. Four bars, people! Including an absinthery in an alley, where you can mix chemically-induced hallucinations in with your environment-induced ones. (Caitlin Donohue)

Through Dec. 18, $22–$25

Cow Palace

2600 Geneva, SF

1-800-510-1558

www.dickensfair.com

 

Boys Noize

Here’s a great way to shed those new extra turkey (or Tofurkey) pounds — waddle into the Mezzanine Saturday night in your most comfortable tight jeans and dance your ass off. Boys Noize throws down the kind of relentlessly squelchy music that might make pioneers of Detroit’s minimal techno scene wince. Noize, actually the moniker of German DJ Alex Ridha, has been busy as of late, pushing releases on his record label, BoysNoize Records and its digital offshoot BNR Trax. The label’s sounds range from acidy techno to sinister electro, with a sprinkle of wobbly dubstep and a dash of oddball, leftfield sounds — much like the label’s creator himself. (Lee)

10 p.m., $30

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com


SUNDAY 11/27

Jeffrey Luck Lucas and Nebulous Orchestra

The Mission District’s Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist is no ordinary church — sure, it holds regular worship services, but it is also highly progressive (vocally supportive of LGBT rights, for example), boasts a colorful mural on one of its exterior walls, and is staunchly community-oriented, welcoming the occasional secular event into its historic (circa 1910, after being rebuilt post-1906 quake) building. Tonight’s performance features Mission troubadour Jeffrey Luck Lucas, heading up an “orchestra” (pipe organ, oboes, clarinets, strings, and more) comprised of other local musicians. You can bet that the acoustics in the church — itself known for a strong music program — will render the experience even more amen-worthy. (Cheryl Eddy)

With Gloaming Boys

6 p.m., $8–$20 (no one turned away for lack of funds)

Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist

1661 15th St., SF

www.saintjohnsf.org


MONDAY 11/28

“You Are All Captains”

A beguiling and beautiful meta-fiction, You All Are Captains grew out of Oliver Laxe’s experience teaching film workshops to local kids in Tangiers. Everyone plays themselves in this reflexive movie, though Laxe casts himself as the fool — a presumptuous European director guiding students to his own ends. The disguise allows him to realize sly but substantive reflections upon the ontology and ethics of filming. It’s fitting that You All Are Captains is making its local premier in a classroom: a U.C. Berkeley student group flying under the banner of “Picturing Neo-Imperialism” has invited Laxe to present his debut in person more than a year after it won the FIPRESCI critics’ award at Cannes. (Max Goldberg)

7 p.m., free

UC Berkeley

Dwinelle B-4, Berk.

www.pnwg.wordpress.com/events


TUESDAY 11/29

Metal Mother

By some standards, Oakland’s Tara Tati came into music fairly late: she didn’t take up the piano seriously until she was 23. But you wouldn’t guess as much listening to her ethnic fusion project, Metal Mother. On the debut album Bonfire Diaries, the singer-songwriter builds up a bold and elemental sound. With its trudging percussion and distinctly dark temper, Metal Mother invokes ’80s goth rock, ethnic fusion bands like Dead Can Dance, and at times, world ambient soundscapes. And yet, at heart, Tati sounds like a pop artist in the same vein as Björk circa Homogenic, and that alone implies talent. (Miller)

With Horns of Happiness, Mortar and Pestle, Birdseye

8 p.m., $10

Cafe Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861- 5061

www.cafedunord.com

 

Retox

Is the Locust a joke? With its speedy deliver, high vocals, beepy attack synth, and masked personas, I never could quite decide. And yet, who cares? The energy level was always high, the shows always masterful absurdist romps. Justin Pearson and Gabe Serbian from the screamy ’90s-born Three One G act have now formed Retox — like Locust 2.0. Masks now off, and sounds a bit filled in (but really, just a smidge — its new album clocks in at 13 minutes total), it’s shinier, thicker, less jokey. It’s helter-skelter rock’n’roll, minus the screeching buzz-saw, the painful intro to “Boredom is Counter-Revolutionary” notwithstanding. The band is matched well with frantic experimental Japanese noise-punk act Melt-Banana. Anticipate high-energy, non-medical spasms. (Savage)

With Melt-Banana, Peace Creep

9 p.m., $14

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Stage Listings

Andrew Lam
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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. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

THEATER

ONGOING

Absolutely San Francisco Alcove Theater, 414 Mason, Ste 502, SF; (415) 992-8168, www.thealcovetheater.com. $32-50. Schedule varies, through Dec 29. Not Quite Opera Productions presents Anne Nygren Doherty’s musical about San Francisco, with five characters all portrayed by Mary Gibboney.

Annapurna Magic Theatre, Bldg D, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; (415) 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org. $20-60. Showtimes vary, through Dec 4. Magic Theatre artistic director Loretta Greco helms this new two-hander by playwright Sharr White about a dying man named Ulysses (Rod Gnapp) who gets an unexpected visit by his ex-wife, Emma (Denise Cormier), who took their young son and left him some 20 years earlier when he was still an alcoholic. Ulysses, a once respected poet living a reclusive life in his trailer home (a cluttered stick-figure set by Andrew Boyce) in a tiny Colorado town, is now dry of drink and published verse — and normally naked too (at the moment Emma shows up he happens to be frying some sausages, so he’s got a little apron on as well as an oxygen tube for his dire emphysema). But he has continued to write unanswered letters to his son and composed over years an epic work comparing love to the alluring but deadly mountaintop that gives the play its title. For her part, Emma has left her second husband in another middle-of-the-night flight, but her reasons are a little different this time. We sense she never got over Ulysses either, but there’s a nagging urgency to her arrival too related to their now grown-up son, which is gradually revealed in the course of their sometimes too glib or forced interactions. There’s more than a whiff of Sam Shepard about this lonely cowboy poet and his estrangement, but the story is not nearly as compelling or suspenseful as a Shepard play, in part because characters and plot are not very believable and the story is bluntly sentimental to boot. (Avila)

*Fela! Curran Theatre, 445 Geary, SF; www.shnsf.com. $31-200. Wed-Sat, 8pm (also Wed and Sat, 2pm; no show Thurs/24); Sun, 2pm (also Sun/27, 7:30pm). Through Dec 11. The life and music of Nigerian superstar Fela Kuti is captured in this show with choreography by Bill T. Jones.

*The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through Dec 18. This new autobiographical solo show by Don Reed, writer-performer of the fine and long-running East 14th, is another slice of the artist’s journey from 1970s Oakland ghetto to comedy-circuit respectability — here via a partial debate-scholarship to UCLA. The titular Los Angeles residency hotel was where Reed lived and worked for a time in the 1980s while attending university. It’s also a rich mine of memory and material for this physically protean and charismatic comic actor, who sails through two acts of often hilarious, sometimes touching vignettes loosely structured around his time on the hotel’s young wait staff, which catered to the needs of elderly patrons who might need conversation as much as breakfast. On opening night, the episodic narrative seemed to pass through several endings before settling on one whose tidy moral was delivered with too heavy a hand, but if the piece runs a little long, it’s only the last 20 minutes that noticeably meanders. And even with some awkward bumps along the way, it’s never a dull thing watching Reed work. (Avila)

Language Rooms Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $20-28. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (no show Thurs/24); Sun, 7pm. Extended through Dec 11. Golden Thread Productions and Asian American Theater Company present the West Coast premiere of Yussef El Guindi’s dark comedy.

Making Porn Box Car Theatre Studios, 125A Hyde, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $25-50. Fri/25-Sat/26, 9pm; Sun/27, 7pm. Ronnie Larsen brings back his crowd-pleasing comedy about the gay porn industry.

Not Getting Any Younger Marsh San Francisco, Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 3pm. Extended through Dec 17. Marga Gomez is back at the Marsh, a couple of too-brief decades after inaugurating the theater’s new stage with her first solo show — an apt setting, in other words, for the writer-performer’s latest monologue, a reflection on the inevitable process of aging for a Latina lesbian comedian and artist who still hangs at Starbucks and can’t be trusted with the details of her own Wikipedia entry. If the thought of someone as perennially irreverent, insouciant, and appealingly immature as Gomez makes you depressed, the show is, strangely enough, the best antidote. (Avila)

*On the Air Pier 29 on the Embarcadero (at Battery), SF; (415) 438-2668, love.zinzanni.org. $117 and up (includes dinner). Showtimes vary, through Dec 31. Teatro ZinZanni’s final production at its longtime nest on Pier 29 is a nostalgia-infused banquet of bits structured around an old-time radio variety show, featuring headliners Geoff Hoyle (Geezer) and blues singer Duffy Bishop. If you haven’t seen juggling on the radio, for instance, it’s pretty awesome, especially with a performer like Bernard Hazens, whose footing atop a precarious tower of tubes and cubes is already cringingly extraordinary. But all the performers are dependably first-rate, including Andrea Conway’s comic chandelier lunacy, aerialist and enchanting space alien Elena Gatilova’s gorgeous “circeaux” act, graceful hand-balancer Christopher Phi, class-act tapper Wayne Doba, and radio MC Mat Plendl’s raucously tweeny hula-hooping. Add some sultry blues numbers by raunchy belter Bishop, Hoyle’s masterful characterizations (including some wonderful shtick-within-a-shtick as one-liner maestro “Red Bottoms”), a few classic commercials, and a healthy dose of audience participation and you start to feel nicely satiated and ready for a good cigar. Smoothly helmed by ZinZanni creative director Norm Langill, On the Air signals off-the-air for the popular dinner circus — until it can secure a new patch of local real estate for its antique spiegeltent — so tune in while you may. (Avila)

*Pellas and Melisande Cutting Ball Theater, Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.cuttingball.com. $10-50. Fri/25-Sat/26, 8pm (also Sat/26, 2pm); Sun/27, 5pm. The Frog Prince, Rapunzel, the Swan Maiden: shimmering strands of each timeless tale twist through the melancholy tapestry of the Maurice Maeterlinck play Pelleas and Melisande, which opens Cutting Ball Theater’s 12th season. Receiving a lushly atmospheric treatment by director and translator Rob Melrose, this ill-fated Symbolist drama stars Joshua Schell and Caitlyn Louchard as the doomed lovers. Trapped in the claustrophobic environs of an isolated castle at the edge of a forbidding forest and equally trapped in an inadvertent love triangle with the hale and hearty elder prince Golaud (Derek Fischer), Pelleas’ brother and Melisande’s husband, the desperate, unconsummated passion that builds between the two youngsters rivals that of Romeo and Juliet’s, and leads to an ending even more tragic — lacking the bittersweet reconciliation of rival families that subverts the pure melodrama of the Shakespearean classic. Presented on a spare, wooden traverse stage (designed by Michael Locher), and accompanied by a smoothly-flowing score by Cliff Caruthers, the action is enhanced by Laura Arrington’s haunting choreography, a silent contortionism which grips each character as they try desperately to convey the conflicting emotions which grip them without benefit of dialogue. Though described by Melrose as a “fairy tale world for adults,” the dreamy gauze of Pelleas and Melisande peels away quickly enough to reveal a flinty and unsentimental heart. (Gluckstern)

Savage in Limbo Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush, SF; (415) 345-1287, www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm (no show Thurs/24). Through Dec 3. Actors Theatre of San Francisco performs John Patrick Shanley’s edgy comedy.

SexRev: The José Sarria Experience CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission, SF; (415) 552-4100, www.therhino.org. $10-25. Fri/25-Sat/26, 8pm (also Sat/26, 10:30pm); Sun/27, 3pm. Theatre Rhinoceros performs John Fisher’s musical celebration of America’s first queer activist — a hit for the company in 2010.

Shoot O’Malley Twice StageWerx, 446 Valencia, SF; www.viragotheatre.org. Fri/25-Sat/26, 8pm. Virago Theater Company performs Jon Brooks’ world-premiere existential comedy.

A Tale of Two Genres SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter, SF; (415) 869-5384, www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Thurs-Sat and Dec 20-21, 8pm (no show Thurs/24; additional shows Sat, 3pm). Through Dec 21. Un-Scripted Theater Company presents an improvised musical inspired by Charles Dickens.

The Temperamentals New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; (415) 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $25-45. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Dec 18. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs Jon Marans’ drama about gay rights during the McCarthy era.

Totem Grand Chapiteau, AT&T Park, Parking Lot A, 74 Mission Rock, SF; cirquedusoleil.com/totem. $58-248.50. Tues-Sun, schedule varies. Extended through Dec 18. Cirque Du Soleil returns with its latest big-top production.

Two Dead Clowns Box Car Theatre Studios, 125A Hyde, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Fri/25-Sat/26, 7pm. Ronnie Larsen’s new play explores the lives of Divine and John Wayne Gacy.

The Waiting Period MainStage, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-35. Fri/25, 8pm; Sat/26, 5pm. Brian Copeland (Not a Genuine Black Man) presents a workshop production of his new solo show.

*Working for the Mouse Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $22. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (no performances Thurs/24-Sat/26). Through Dec 17. It might not come as a surprise to hear that even “the happiest place on earth” has a dark side, but hearing Trevor Allen describe it during this reprise of 2002’s Working for the Mouse will put a smile on your face as big as Mickey’s. With a burst of youthful energy, Allen bounds onto the tiny stage of Impact Theatre to confess his one-time aspiration to never grow up — a desire which made auditioning for the role of Peter Pan at Disneyland a sensible career move. But in order to break into the big time of “charactering,” one must pay some heavy, plush-covered dues. As Allen creeps up the costumed hierarchy one iconic cartoon figure at a time, he finds himself unwittingly enmeshed in a world full of backroom politics, union-busting, drug addled surfer dudes with peaches-and-cream complexions, sexual tension, showboating, job suspension, Make-A-Wish Foundation heartbreak, hash brownies, rabbit vomit, and accidental decapitation. Smoothly paced and astutely crafted, Mouse will either shatter your blissful ignorance or confirm your worst suspicions about the corporate Disney machine, but either way, it will probably make you treat any “Casual Seasonal Pageant Helpers” you see running around in their sweaty character suits with a whole lot more empathy. (Note: review from the show’s recent run at La Val’s Subterranean in Berkeley.) (Gluckstern)

BAY AREA

Annie Berkeley Playhouse, Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, 2640 College, Berk; (510) 845-8542, www.berkeleyplayhouse.org. $17-35. Thurs-Sat, 7pm; Sun, noon and 5pm. Through Dec 4. Berkeley Playhouse performs the classic musical.

Rambo: The Missing Years Cabaret at Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Thurs-Fri, 7pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through Dec 10. Howard “Hanoi Howie” Petrick presents his solo show about being an anti-war demonstrator — while also serving in the Army.

Sam’s Enchanted Evening TheaterStage at Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri/25, 8pm; Sat/26, 8:30pm. The Residents wrote the script and did the musical arrangements for this musical, featuring singer Randy Rose and pianist Joshua Raoul Brody.

The Soldier’s Tale Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $10-55. Tues, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through Dec 18. Aurora Theatre presents a re-imagined version of Igor Stravinsky’s 1918 musical by Tom Ross and Muriel Maffre.

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 826-5750, www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Sun and Fri/25-Sat/26 and Dec 26-30, 11am (no show Dec 25). Through Dec 31. Louis “The Amazing Bubble Man” Pearl returns with this kid-friendly, bubble-tastic comedy.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

Russell Brand Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF; www.slimstickets.com. Tues, 8pm. $50-125. The bawdy comedian performs to benefit the David Lynch Foundation.

Carolina Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Sun, 6:15pm. $15-19. Spain comes to North Beach with footwork, song, castanets, hand-clapping, and guitar.

Mark Foehringer Dance Project | SF Children’s Creativity Museum, 221 Fourth St, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Sat-Sun, 11am, 2pm, 4pm (no 4pm show Sun/27); Dec 20-23, 11am and 2pm. Through Dec 23. $20-35. The contemporary ballet company performs Mark Foehringer’s Nutcracker Sweets.

ODC/Dance Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.odcdance.org. Fri/25-Sun/27, Dec 4, and 11, 2pm; Dec 1-2 and 8-9, 11am; Dec 3 and 10, 1 and 4pm; $15-45. The company presents the 25th anniversary of KT Nelson’s The Velveteen Rabbit.

“San Francisco Theater Pub” Café Royale, 800 Post, SF; (415) 641-6033. Mon, 7:30pm. Free. A new play by Brian Markey. 

 

Rare and juicy

Andrew Lam
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1
Rare and juicy

FILM Longtime San Francisco resident George Kuchar’s death this September was a reminder of how many had been influenced by his loveably eccentric movies, from famous early fans like Andy Warhol and John Waters to the hundreds of students who passed through his San Francisco Art Institute courses over the decades. Among the latter, for a long time his most famous protégé — at least locally — was Curt McDowell, who started out as a teacher’s pet, moved on to heavy petting with teacher, and remained close to Kuchar as both friend and collaborator until his own AIDS-related demise in 1987.

George Kuchar’s half-century-plus output was always joyfully accessible “avant-garde” cinema, its mixture of the personal and the purple drawing on the conventions of those Hollywood melodramas he and brother Mike (who’s taking over George’s teaching responsibilities at SFAI) grew up watching in the 1950s Bronx. His films’ popularity was perhaps most hindered by the simple fact that he only felt moved to direct something in the more marketable feature length form once — 1973’s The Devil’s Cleavage.

McDowell’s films, often heavily influenced by George Kuchar’s (even when the latter wasn’t operating as scenarist and actor on them), also had a wide streak of camp parody, a Warholian mini-constellation of “stars,” a vivid aesthetic, and impulse toward autobiography. They were much more aggressively sexual, and ambitious — during his much-too-short career he made no less than four features, two of which were porn in the graphic-content if not commercial sense. The hour-long Peed in the Wind (1972), the same year’s Lunch, and 1985’s very-long-in-the-making Sparkle’s Tavern are basically forgotten now, the last not screened in the Bay Area for at least a decade, the others possibly unseen since the 1970s.

Thundercrack! (1975) — an even more daft shot at “adult” cinema than the experimental-minded Lunch — is better known, having had at least the beginnings of a midnight movie cult following. But with all its baroque, still-singular The Old Dark House (1932) meets Tennessee Williams charms (there is surely no other porn flick remotely like it), why isn’t it now as well known as, say, Pink Flamingos (1972) or Eraserhead (1977)? Part of that doubtless has to do with the disarray McDowell’s body of work has been in, access-wise, for nearly 25 years now. Some of his films are distributed by (but seldom rented from) Canyon Cinema. Others are in storage, or presumed lost. Nothing is available on DVD, and any videotapes have long gone out of print. Whether this is due to strife, disorganization, or financial limitations among the guardians of his trust remains as murky as it was in the 1990s, when the last, brief issue of Thundercrack! and some shorts on VHS occurred.

Thus, it’s sadly rare to get a McDowell program even here in SF, where his memory should flourish rather than be slowly slipping from public awareness. Just such an occasion arrives this week at the Roxie — co-founded by his longtime creative and domestic partner, Robert Evans — as two shows spread over three days reprise some (relatively) familiar as well as barely-seen material.

The main attraction, as well as the scarcest, is 1980’s 55-minute Taboo (The Single and the LP), which will be shown on projected VHS due to a typical bad-luck hurdle: its original materials, plus those for other films, were sent to New York’s Museum of Modern Art years ago, only to go missing in transit.

While McDowell often echoed George Kuchar’s use of narrative more as an erratic reference point than a rule to follow, Taboo has an unusually abstract relation to story even by his standards, at least those of his longer works. Purportedly crafted over four years — his output slowed considerably after Evans had replaced the incredibly prolific Kuchar as boyfriend — it has buxom, blonde-bewigged sis Melinda McDowell, recently departed Thundercrack! mad diva Marion Eaton, and a glowering Kuchar as three parts of a tempestuous two-couple marital equation variously simmering with unmet desire and boiling over with orgiastic excess.

But it’s the fourth player who dominates the filmmaker’s attention. One of his numerous onscreen Joe Dallesandros, but evidently a source of particular longtime obsession, Fahed (a.k.a. David) Martha hailed from a Palestinian family that owned the grocery store next to the Roxie; his petite yet muscle-bound Sal Mineo-like appeal piqued McDowell, who didn’t mind the frequent presence of an equally young girlfriend. (In fact, he freely admitted “really getting turned on by straight men.”) Throughout Taboo‘s mix of the poetical and camp, the black and white camera salivates over this nearly-naked Adonis’ body and cocky attitude; in turn, he displays an exhibitionist zeal he probably didn’t know he had in him. A producer here and close friend, former Castro Theatre programmer and current San Francisco Silent Film Festival artistic director Anita Monga says McDowell “just saw the deep sexual beauty in everyone,” turning them on with the sheer voracity of his admiring gaze.

In one of the shorts the Roxie is showing in a separate program, 1972’s Confessions, McDowell interviews friends and lovers, asking them to describe his best and worst qualities. Perhaps straddling both, one confides “You’ve always had this energy, it’s like an explosion. I think when people see your films they have to understand, like, sex. It seems like you need so much more sex than other people.” A satyr-like omnivorous seduction and insatiability still sweats off many of his films as if through pores, most notoriously 1985’s Loads (a Dionysian compilation of guys he’d lured up to masturbate and service in his Mission studio).

McDowell was a happily self-corrupted transplant from the Heartland (with typical alliterative flair, Kuchar called him “curt, cute, controversial, and not celibate … poet of the plebeian and perverse”); he enjoyed shocking the staid society left behind — 1970’s A Visit to Indiana is his amusingly sulky chronicle of a most reluctant trip home.

Also on the Roxie bill are such examples of pure, impish silliness as 1972’s Siamese Twin Pin Heads, a short perhaps dated by a “look ma, we’re naked!” glee that looked a lot more rebellious back then. But 1973’s Boggy Depot is a homemade musical anticipating Thundercrack!‘s puppet theater-Gothic look. Its variously scheming and schemed-against protagonists trill their ridiculous operetta-style lyrics to found orchestral tracks. This is one McDowell film in which people keep their pants on, but these 17 sublime minutes are orgasmically pleasurable nonetheless.

“LOADS OF CURT MCDOWELL”

Sat/26-Sun/17, 1 p.m.; Mon/28, 10 p.m., $5-9.75

Roxie

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

 

Standing room only

Andrew Lam
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0
Standing room only

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE We go to dance performances to be entranced, or at least intrigued, by well-physicalized movement ideas. But it helps if choreographers work with collaborators who not only enhance basic concepts but also bring their own perspectives to the dance-making process. Two programs last weekend, Liss Fain Dance’s playfully evocative The False and True Are One and LEVYdance’s delicious ROMP, showed just how successful the result of that kind of cooperation can be. Interestingly, Liss Fain and Benjamin Levy also contributed to the recent trend of abandoning the proscenium theater — too expensive? Too hierarchical? Too restrictive? — in favor of “installations” in which audiences move around the performance space.

Choreographers seem to feel that nudging audiences out of their seats will engage them more actively because they can choose when they want to focus on something. Personally, I am not convinced that this process involves a viewer more intently. However, the format’s informality, its sense of being invited in, suggests a welcoming atmosphere that can make dance watching, at least for a time, a lot of fun.

Perhaps the greatest gain that the installation format offers is the closeness it offers between audience and dancers. To observe muscles stretching less than a foot away, to hear the breathing that accompanies a strenuous lift, and to see a tiny adjustment to balance and gravity that a dancer makes is a gift that a traditional theater cannot provide. What you loose in overall perspective is compensated for by the intimacy between observer and performer.

For that to happen, choreographers need designers who can create the appropriate environment. False and True‘s Matthew Antaky and ROMP‘s Jack Beuttler chose the square as a basic format. Both modulated the idea to support the choreography to excellent effect.

Antaky’s transparent fiberglass panels made for muted perspectives on the four squares within the bigger square that the dancers inhabited. The design looked a little like a board game and was airy enough to allow for a number of pathways for the dancers. Into the absolute center he placed a slightly raised podium — suggesting a private writing and thinking space — for narrator Nancy Shelby, whose reading of Lydia Davis’ musings set False and True‘s tone. Fain’s controlled yet free-flowing choreography for nine dancers — the uneven number was most refreshing given Antaky’s strict geometry — constantly shifted between all the available spaces and groupings. Dancers picked up and modified sequences in a game of unstated rules, but they also became part of the audience, watching their colleagues or listening intently to Shelby.

Beuttler’s square for the rambunctious ROMP at first suggested a town plaza in which people, i.e. the audience, had pulled chairs around into an informal café setting. In the latter part of the work, tables around the periphery reseated the audience banquet-style; they both framed a central performing area and then became the platform for a moving menu of passing delicacies as dancers slithered, cavorted, and leapt in close-up. The audience ate it up, laughing, talking, and taking pictures. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had tried tip the artists.

Levy’s fast-paced and exuberant choreography for himself, Mélodie Casta, and Scott Marlowe pulled in a group of nine auxiliary dancers — some of them still students — who raced and dove between the seated audience without a single misstep. Their energy was that of kids released at the end of the school year, but their discipline and exactitude was that of professionals. An intricately structured trio for Levy’s own dancers highlighted their eccentric individuality but gradually deepened into cheek-to-cheek slow dancing.

As for that audience participation that both choreographers wanted, Levy’s public lustily participated. But a funny thing happened during False and True. Despite the exhortation to move around, the audience mostly stood and sat. Seeing those dancers be so vigorous and intent and yet so quiet — Dan Wool’s score was a modicum of discreteness — cast a spell that you didn’t want to break.

The one percent on the waterfront

Andrew Lam
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10

EDITORIAL While Mayor Ed Lee struggles with the OccupySF encampment, another, very different group has its eyes on the city’s waterfront. On the edges of the ground where protesters are talking about the one percent of Americans that control the vast majority of the nation’s wealth, two major development projects aimed entirely at that very wealthy sliver are starting to move forward.

At 8 Washington and 75 Howard, developers want to build a total of 365 condominiums aimed at people with incomes that place them in the top sliver of the richest Americans. It will be a key test for the Ed Lee administration: Will he evict the Occupy protesters and allow the One Percent to claim choice property on the waterfront?

The 8 Washington project calls for 165 of what developer Simon Snellgrove says will be the most expensive condos ever built in San Francisco. The 12-story building, sitting on the edge of the Embarcadero, would include units selling for as much as $10 million, and even the low-end places would go for $2.5 million or more.

At 75 Howard, the Paramount Group and Morgan Stanley want to demolish a parking garage and erect a 284-foot tower with units that the San Francisco Business Times predicts would sell for at least $1,000 a square foot.

Just to be clear what we’re talking about here, a $2.5 million condo, according to real estate experts, would require that a buyer have $625,000 cash to put down and an income of more than $450,000 a year. Either that or millions in spare cash to plunk down.

That, needless to say, is not the majority of the working people in San Francisco.

There’s no conceivable planning or housing-policy rationale for either of these projects. They offer nothing that the city needs; there is absolutely no shortage of housing for people with that kind of income. In fact, allowing these two projects to proceed would directly violate the city’s own General Plan and every regional planning proposal for San Francisco’s housing mix. The General Plan states that some 60 percent of all the new housing built in San Francisco should be below market rate. Environmental sanity suggests that the city ought to be building housing for people who work here — high housing costs have driven thousands of local workers to live in the East Bay or further out, leading to long, energy-intensive commutes. And the more of this ultra-luxury housing the city builds, the more the housing balance gets disrupted — and the more rapidly San Francisco becomes a city of, by and for the One Percent.

The two projects have powerful support — among other things, Lee’s friend and ally Rose Pak is promoting 8 Washington, as is lobbyist Marcia Smolens. If Lee has any scrap of independence he’ll make it clear that both of these projects are dead on arrival.

Guardian editorial: The one per cent on the waterfront

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27
Guardian editorial: The one per cent on the waterfront

EDITORIAL While Mayor Ed Lee struggles with the OccupySF encampment, another, very different group has its eyes on the city’s waterfront. On the edges of the ground where protesters are talking about the one percent of Americans that control the vast majority of the nation’s wealth, two major development projects aimed entirely at that very wealthy sliver are starting to move forward.

At 8 Washington and 75 Howard, developers want to build a total of 365 condominiums aimed at people with incomes that place them in the top sliver of the richest Americans. It will be a key test for the Ed Lee administration: Will he evict the Occupy protesters and allow the One Percent to claim choice property on the waterfront?

The 8 Washington project calls for 165 of what developer Simon Snellgrove says will be the most expensive condos ever built in San Francisco. The 12-story building, sitting on the edge of the Embarcadero, would include units selling for as much as $10 million, and even the low-end places would go for $2.5 million or more.

At 75 Howard, the Paramount Group and Morgan Stanley want to demolish a parking garage and erect a 284-foot tower with units that the San Francisco Business Times predicts would sell for at least $1,000 a square foot.

Just to be clear what we’re talking about here, a $2.5 million condo, according to real estate experts, would require that a buyer have $625,000 cash to put down and an income of more than $450,000 a year. Either that or millions in spare cash to plunk down.

That, needless to say, is not the majority of the working people in San Francisco.

There’s no conceivable planning or housing-policy rationale for either of these projects. They offer nothing that the city needs; there is absolutely no shortage of housing for people with that kind of income. In fact, allowing these two projects to proceed would directly violate the city’s own General Plan and every regional planning proposal for San Francisco’s housing mix. The General Plan states that some 60 percent of all the new housing built in San Francisco should be below market rate. Environmental sanity suggests that the city ought to be building housing for people who work here — high housing costs have driven thousands of local workers to live in the East Bay or further out, leading to long, energy-intensive commutes. And the more of this ultra-luxury housing the city builds, the more the housing balance gets disrupted — and the more rapidly San Francisco becomes a city of, by and for the One Percent.

The two projects have powerful support — among other things, Lee’s friend and ally Rose Pak is promoting 8 Washington, as is lobbyist Marcia Smolens. If Lee has any scrap of independence,  he’ll make it clear that both of these projects are dead on arrival.

 

 

Occupy SF: Chron, Ex set the eviction stage

Zelda Bronstein
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29
Occupy SF: Chron, Ex set the eviction stage

The OccupySF camp is filthy. There’s violence, drugs and disease. Half the protesters are just drunken thugs who are there to party and make a mess. It’s a public-health hazard. Jeez, it looks like the message is lost and the place has to go.

That’s what the Chron and the Ex are saying — and it’s a perfect setup, a ready-made public excuse for Mayor Ed Lee to send the cops in with riot gear and an eviction notice. It could happen tonight, or tomorrow night.

Frankly, Lee needs the bad (for Occupy) press. The movement’s goals are popular in this city, and when he came very close to evicting the campers, with cops running around the city in buses, his popularity dropped. He saw what happened to Jean Quan in Oakland; her tear-gas assault on Occupy Oakland may have been the end of her political career.

But hey, it’s different now: The daily papers are proclaiming that the encampment isn’t about economic inequality any more. It’s devolved into an unruly mob that can’t be tolerated. Who can blame Lee for cleaning it up?

That also happens to be an utterly unfair characterization of what’s going on. Sure, there are homeless people in the camp, and yes, some of them have mental health issues. But OccupySF is talking about the 99 percent, some of whom have suffered greatly in this economy — and it’s no surprise that some of them part of the occupation. Yes, it’s a challenge, but it something that OccupySF is taking on. Oh, and by the way — the homeless people and people with mental health issues (that sometimes lead to violence) will still be on the streets of San Francisco is they evict the Occupy encampment. But they’ll be worse off than they are today.

Yael Chanoff just filed her report on what’s really going on at OccupySF:

At last night’s General Assembly, OccupySF organizer Philip Oje debriefed on that days meeting with Mayor Ed Lee, and participants in the 150-person meeting debated the best next steps. Several different viewpoints were discussed. Many were indignant about reorganizing camp to appease the city, saying that “I didn’t come her to comply with city ordinances that change every day. I came here to do what I think is right.”
Others believed believed that the camp should do everything possible to comply with the city in order to hopefully avoid a raid (and maintain credibility if one does occur.) It was generally acknowledged that the situation was a Catch-22: The camp could not comply with requirements such as maintaining four feet of space between tents without expanding past Justin Herman Plaza, but the city refused to allow any expansion to stand until their requirements were met. In general, those assembled agreed that regardless of the city’s difficult to follow guidelines, a clean-up would benefit the health and well-being of campers, and got to work.

This comes after a hard week of dealing with the frustrating realities of human interaction in a cramped space. The encampment has grown steadily since its start, and in recent weeks has been home to upwards of 300 people on a regular basis. Many campers would agree that in the past two weeks that tensions have built as high as they did. When Examiner Reporter Mike Aldax spent 24 hours at camp, it was during the peak of conflict.

Indeed, many at OccupySF are frustrated. There is a general feeling that there is not enough time in the day to maintain a safe and caring community that does not exclude anyone as well as progress with the political agenda that the movement stands for. However, there is also a basic agreement that those with addiction, mental illness, and other causes of suffering are affected directly by an unjust society in which a small percentage hoards vast majority of wealth while the masses struggle to afford food, shelter, health care and education; to attempt to exclude those who are in desperate situations, the most in need of emergency action to change our system and our lives, would be morally intolerable hypocrisy.

As famed radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen put it when he came to speak at the encampment November 12, “At the same time you’re building a resistance movement, you’re being put in the position of dealing with the needs of those who have been dispossessed and damaged by the system.”

It’s true: according to Connie Ford, a member of OPEIU Local 3 which represents many on the city’s Homeless Outreach Team, “The homeless come there because it’s safer than the shelters.”

This has caused difficulties in the past few weeks that the camp has been struggling to deal with. The solution is starting to come together. After physical fights began to become a major problem last week, the camp stepped up the process of enacting a culture of community policing. The night of November 15, when “Instigator Jimmy” was involved in an altercation during a general assembly, about 50 formed a mass between him and camp and slowly pushed him off the site, chanting “Whose park? Our park.” As one camper put it, “Jimmy’s individual will was extinguished by our collective will.” This is an experiment in radically non-violent coercion.

Since then, this tactic has been employed to greater and greater success. Last night, when one camper began to instigate conflict, it only took 10 or so others to cause him to leave in the same way, and hardly disrupted the peaceful mood at the site.

In addition, despite starting out completely unequipped to provide medical and mental health to the masses for free, OccupySF has set up a medical tent run by nurses from the National Nurses Association and several “emotional assistance” spaces, one of which has been facilitated by the Icarus Project and other groups with alternative approaches to mental health. According to an OccupySF press release today:
“Forty clergy, including bishops, have recently formed as ‘San Francisco Interfaith Allies of Occupy’ because we share the concerns of the ninety-nine percent,” said Rev. Carol Been of CLUE California, “and they have asked us for help because they were not prepared to handle homelessness, mental illness, people attracted for unseemly reasons not associated with the occupation. Resources have recently begun to be put into place.”

It seems that all of this grappling with difficult issues and hard work on the part of OccupySF has begun to pay off. Last night after General Assembly, campers worked to clear off the Bacci Ball courts as per the city’s request, take down tarps, and space out tents to the extent that they could without expanding past Justin Herman Plaza (renamed by some Bradley Manning Plaza.) Camp was clean and vastly quieter than it had been in previous days.

Around midnight, there were about 30 people awake, talking and playing mellow drums on the outskirts of camp while hundreds more slept in the approximately 180 tents. One man who had been sleeping there three weeks said, “There’s a new energy. After we cleaned, a lot of the riff-raff left.” With a grin he added “It looks like there’s still some, but they’ve been over there having some kind of profound conversation all night,” gesturing to the camp east side.

I pitched my tent about 10 feet from the “profound conversation” and drifted off easily, though I admittedly prefer a nice buzz of humanity while I sleep. I was, however, woken up around 6:00, when others began waking up and excitedly discussing the fact that the camp had made it through the night without a police raid.

It remains to be seen if the same will be said for tonight.

 

 

 

Holy Ghost! proves it’s worth the wait at Slim’s

Tony Robles
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0

I’d been worried about making it to the Holy Ghost ! show at Slim’s on time, so it was a relief to see the singer of Jessica 6, the opening band, standing outside Slim’s having a
smoke. Black hair, black heels, black mini skirt, black leather jacket: Nomi Ruiz is recognizable. I wished her luck and went inside to find out just how early I was.

DJ Eli Escobarwas spinning, but the place is basically dead. A few people up in the loft having food, a few more at the bar, but little life to the place. It turned out to be a decent wait, and as Escobar continued to spin a mix of house and contemporary dance rock, I became anxious. A few people trickled in, but not at a fast enough rate to fill the place quickly.

One person, at least, was very excited. I know he was excited because when I came into the club he was outside screaming “I’m so excited!” to no one in particular, and inside he was standing next to me screaming, once again, “I’m so excited!” He explained in slurred words how he’d been trying to see Holy Ghost! for the longest time, but just happened “to always be on the wrong coast.” 

Luckily, Jessica 6 hit the stage, and it seemed to help with the restless energy. And for the first time in the night, other people were shouting, most clearly “We love you, Nomi!” Perhaps best known as one of the prominent singers in Hercules and Love Affair, Ruiz is at the forefront in her new project. Whereas Hercules struck a delicate balance of conflicted emotions and often achieved a certain morose euphoria, Jessica 6 has a more straight-forward club sound. Opening with “In The Heat” from the debut LP See The Light, Nomi sang, “Don’t you feel the beat?” and began to work the crowd. Less campy, more pop, there’s still a lot of love-torn feelings, but the general focus seems to be on seizing the night.

When Jessica 6’s set ended, the excited/drunk guy approached the edge of the stage and doubled over, face down on the stage. A minute later I had to stop paying attention to that impending disaster, because the roadies were setting up the equipment. As the pièce de résistance, a black tarp was pulled away to reveal a massive, multicolored console of analog synthesizer. The stage lights went dark and the rainbow of panels on the front started to glow as Holy Ghost! took the stage, launching into “Static on the Wire,” from its 2010 EP of the same name.

Although Holy Ghost! is just two guys, Nick Millhiser and Alex Frankel, they enlisted a number of other musicians (including the drummer who played with Jessica 6) to bolster the live show, just as James Murphy did for live LCD Soundsystem performances. Frankel, sporting the second leather jacket of the night, was on vocal duties, while Millhiser was stationed on guitar behind a pair of floor toms. The bands took moves into familiar territory with “It’s Not Over,” not just because it’s one of its more recognizable songs, but because it has what I can only assume to be a deliberate lyrical reference to New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle.”

After the third song, “Say My Name,” I’d exhausted my photo op, and decided to make my way away from the stage. I had a friend inside the venue texting me for half an hour asking where I was. As soon as I started to move, I realized that I’d greatly underestimated the crowd. It was packed. Unfortunately, it also was a drunk crowd, not an E crowd, so hardly budging.

With a little more space, I took in the band again, and it’s was getting slower into “Slow Motion.” Among its tracks, it maybe does the least for the band, in part because it sounds a lot like a Chromeo song. Still, while Holy Ghost! isn’t always breaking new ground, it sticks to a formula that works. One of the best things about  LCD Soundsystem
shows was the way in which the band allowed James Murphy to basically do whatever he wanted. With Holy Ghost! (which, given its connection to DFA Records, seems an obvious hope to partially fill the LCD void), this was most noticeable with the big console in the back of the stage, and on a track like “Do It Again,” where the synth is even more prominent than on the record, allowing Millhiser and Frankel to add additional percussive accents on the toms or cowbells.

Holy Ghost! closed the night by playing “Jam for Jerry,” written in response to friend and drummer Jerry Fuchs’ sudden death from falling down an elevator shaft in 2009. The rare dance song that transcends the floor, it’s not just about dealing with one tragedy, but everything in life that ends before you’re ready. But like “It’s Not Over,” “I Know, I Hear” – which was played as an encore with Nomi Ruiz – refuses to accept this. When the band left the stage for good DJ Escobar took over once again, for those of us that weren’t quite ready to leave.

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