Environment

Plans for SF clean energy program still underway, despite political opposition

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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27

San Francisco’s longstanding effort to develop a municipal renewable energy program has been stymied by politics, but Sup. London Breed has taken up the cause of advancing aspects of the plan that haven’t been obstructed.

At a Dec. 13 meeting of the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo), a committee comprised of members of the Board of Supervisors that has been working to develop CleanPowerSF for years, Breed called for putting out a Request for Proposals to develop a concrete plan for building out local renewable energy infrastructure. LAFCo adopted the motion. 

With plans for solar panel arrays or wind power facilities that would generate hundreds of megawatts of electricity for the municipal energy program, the build-out is a key aspect of the plan that could lead to job creation and stable electricity rates in the long term.

“Part of what I think is important in developing a plan is to make sure that if there are people who oppose it, that we have answers,” Breed said. “And we have clear answers, so that we’re communicating what the real, true accurate message is: There is real possibility for local jobs.”

Earlier this year, members of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, a body composed of mayoral appointees, refused to approve a not-to-exceed rate, effectively obstructing any forward progress on the green municipal power program. But some advocates who are thinking long-term have merely taken the setback as an opportunity to put some time and energy into crafting a well thought out plan that serves the interests of job seekers and environmentalists alike, which would ulimately be politically difficult to oppose.

The rate approval was a necessary step toward inking a contract with Shell Energy North America, the contractor selected by the SFPUC to procure renewable energy on the open market until a build-out gets off the ground.

Just before the commissioners made their decision, opponents of the plan who are affiliated with Pacific Gas & Electric Company – the utility giant that stands to lose customers if CleanPowerSF goes forward – plastered San Francisco residences with flyers denouncing the program and Shell’s involvement. The mailers were paid for by IBEW 1245, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union that represents PG&E employees.

Breed reflected on that messaging as an unfortunate setback. “It created, I think, the challenges that we’re facing getting this program moving forward,” she said. “We need a clear communication strategy. We need a clear understanding of the build-out.”

Eric Brooks, a longtime advocate of CleanPowerSF who has attended hundreds of meetings to help shape the plan on behalf of his nonprofit, Our City, said he was pleased with the latest direction LAFCo talks had taken. He recently penned an editorial for the Bay Guardian calling on LAFCo to take control of the program.

“This does not get around the political problem we have,” he said. “Politically, the program isn’t moving forward. On Aug. 13, from [the SFPUC’s] standpoint, they put the program on hold.” Nevertheless, “the idea is to work on all the other things, and get those things done.” Once there is a practical plan spelling out how the city will move forward with building out green renewable energy infrastructure, he said, it could serve to “show the building trade unions what’s possible.”

From what Brooks said and what was voiced at the meeting, it seems the political strategy of project proponents will be to bring on a consultant to hash out more tangible goals with regard to job creation, and then use those shovel-ready plans to bring trade unions on board. From there, Brooks hopes there may be more leverage to push for approval – or perhaps to pursue an alternative management structure that gets around the SFPUC, such as joining with another municipality to form a Joint Powers Authority that would oversee the program.

Sup. David Campos, who has been a key supporter of CleanPowerSF along with Sup. John Avalos, did voice some reservations about moving forward with the RFP. “We are here,” halted from moving forward, “even though we have a program that has been approved by the Board of Supervisors,” he pointed out. “How do we avoid going down the path of doing additional work, only to find ourselves in the same predicament?”

The political pressure against CleanPowerSF, fueled by groups associated with PG&E in political alignment with Mayor Ed Lee, is formidable. Nevertheless, advocates from environmental organizations such as 350.org, the Sierra Club and others have kept pushing for the program out of a conviction that it represents an opportunity to curb greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change at the local level.

“This is a very important move,” said June Brashares, a steering committee member of the Local Clean Energy Alliance. “A key piece of work that has not yet been done is the selection of actual sites all over the city for the installation of hundreds of megawatts of local clean energy projects that will make up CleanPowerSF.”

UPDATE: After we posted this, Breed returned a phone call from earlier in the day. She shared some thoughts about the program:

“I just think we’re overdue, to do it. The fact that we have five commissioners appointed, not necessarily elected, [blocking the program] disturbs me,” she said.

Asked why she’s supportive of CleanPowerSF, Breed said, “It’s not just about the choice. It’s also about the environment, and the future. There’s a lot of money in energy in general, and part of that money should go back to the local economy through those jobs.”

When we asked her about the strategy for advancing the program, she responded, “We want labor to be a partner on this. We want to make sure that it’s clear, and more importantly, we want it to be a strong proposal … My goal is to make it difficult for them to oppose it.”

Finally, questioned on whether she was worried about the political opposition, Breed responded, “I can’t do my job in fear that someone may oppose it. I have to do it based on what I think is truly right for the city of San Francisco.”

Alerts: December 18 – 24, 2013

Michael Redmond
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0

WEDNESDAY 18

AK Press holiday book sale AK Press warehouse, 674-A 23rd St, Oakl. 4-9pm, free. The AK Press is an anarchist and radical publisher and distributor. Everything in the AK Press warehouse will be 25 percent off, and there are hundreds of blowout $1–$5 books to choose from. Come enjoy snacks and beverages, and pick up some reading for the holidays.

 

We Are Staying: Rally against eviction The Revolution Cafe, 3248 22nd St, SF. noon, free. Join Eviction Free San Francisco and allies in the fight for housing justice in San Francisco for a rally in opposition to the displacement of seniors, artists, immigrants and workers from this vibrant, diverse, working-class Mission neighborhood and citywide.

 

THURSDAY 19

Film screening: The World According to Monsanto Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists’ Hall, 1924 Cedar, Berk. www.bfuu.com. 7-9pm, $5–$10 suggested donation but no one turned away. Come see a film about Monsanto’s use of genetic modification to radically alter our food supply. The movie will show the effect Monsanto has from America’s Heartland to countries around the world as well as how its practices hurt farmers, communities and the environment. Sponsored by the BFUU Social Justice Committee.

 

FRIDAY 20

Sonya Renee at Queer Open Mic night Modern Times Bookstore Collective, 2919 24th St, SF. 7-9pm, free. Performance poet, activist and transformational leader Sonya Renee is a national and international poetry slam champion, published author, and transformational leader. She has shared her work and activism across the globe, and is a founder and CEO of The Body is Not An Apology, a movement of over 23,000 members focused on radical self-love and body empowerment. She’ll be featured at Modern Times’ final monthly San Francisco Queer Open Mic event of the year, hosted by Baruch Porras-Hernandez and Blythe Baldwin. You can also sign up to do an open mic performance of your own.

Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club Holiday Happy Hour Party Beaux, 2344 Market, SF. www.milkclub.org. 6-9pm, free. RSVP required. Come celebrate at the Castro’s newest bar, Beaux, where you’re sure to be entertained with drag, DJs, a photo booth where you can sit on Santa’s lap, and amazing raffle prizes. Featuring drag performances by Persia, Anna Conda, and Tara Wrist, with music from GO BANG! (DJs Sergio and Steve Fabus), as well as raffle prizes.

SATURDAY 21

Berkeley Farmers Market holiday crafts fair 2151 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Berk. www.ecologycenter.org. 10am-4pm, free. The Berkeley Farmers’ Market 22nd annual Holiday Crafts Fair, a benefit for the Berkeley Ecology Center, features local craftspeople and artisans selling handcrafted gifts (ceramics, fine art, jewelry, cards, clothes, tote bags, body products, toys, and more). These locally made crafts are in addition to the usual bounty of California organic produce, hot lunch offerings, and live outdoor musical performances.

Fieldwork

Michael Redmond
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4
Fieldwork

marke@sfbg.com

After two more hours of hiking, we stop in a dry creek. One of the younger men enlists help pulling large cactus spines from one of his legs. We sit in a circle sharing food. The tastes link us to loved ones and Oaxaca…

After we have hiked again through blisters for many miles and I have shared all my ibuprofren with the others, we stop to rest. We fall asleep, using torn-open plastic trash bags as blankets. Our coyote leaves to talk to his contact on a nearby Native American reservation about giving us a ride past the second boarder checkpoint to Phoenix….

Suddenly, our guide runs back, speaking quickly in Triqui. Two Border Patrol agents — one black and one white — appear running through the trees, jump down in our creek bed, and point guns at us.

— Seth M. Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

According to the US Public Health Service, there are, on average, an estimated 3.5 million migrant farmworkers in the United States, the majority of whom are undocumented immigrants. At harvest season, most of them perform the backbreaking work of picking our fruits and vegetables for an average $12,500 annually; at other times, they share slum-like apartments or live out of cars looking for odd jobs — 68 percent of them wondering if they should return home to Mexico and risk another border crossing to the US when picking time rolls around again. Only 5 percent of migrant workers have health insurance, and what happens to the rest if they get injured or fall ill doing the work the rest of us won’t is an eye-opening American tragedy.

To many Americans, this cheap, legally and socially vulnerable population is a faceless brown mass in the fields somewhere, maybe receiving a noble thought at Cesar Chavez Day or inducing the occasional twinge of guilt in the produce aisle, if thought of at all. But a provocative, important new book by UC Berkeley Assistant Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology Seth M. Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (University of California Press), which is picking up awards and has been featured on mainstream news outlets, is helping to re-personalize migrant farmworkers and move their health care situation into the media spotlight.

As the US finally addresses the facts that it spends the most money on health care for the worst outcomes, that a huge chunk of its population has no health care at all (and is severely underpaid for its work), and that we’re dependent on undocumented immigrants to harvest our produce and keep food costs down, we’re only just starting to realize the irony in giving the people who devastate their bodies to provide our healthiest foods perhaps the lousiest health care deal of all.

 

COMPLEX VOICES

Part heart-pounding adventure tale, part deep ethnograhic study, part urgent plea for reform, Fresh Fruit starts off with Holmes embedded in an ill-fated group of border-crossers from the mountains of Oaxaca: he gets arrested, they get deported after a harrowing stay in a detention center. Holmes then writes about his 18 months spent picking fruit alongside hundreds of others at a large family-owned farm in Skagit Valley, Wash., living in a closet with a dozen farmworkers in a rundown apartment while they look for work on the off-season, returning to Mexico to spend time with workers and their families, and shadowing the medical professionals in the publicly and privately funded clinics that serve migrant populations. Throughout, Holmes saw people “give premature birth, develop injured knees and backs, suffer from extreme stress, experience symptoms of pesticide poisoning, and even have farm trucks run over and crush their legs,” as he told Farmworker Justice magazine.

Holmes, a medical doctor as well as a doctor of anthropology — the book resulted from his thesis work — brings an enlightening complexity to the issue of migrant workers. (Including the label “migrant worker” itself, which, he notes piercingly at the end of the book, has been ossified with classist and racial overtones. If this group of people were flying over every summer from Europe or Hong Kong to secure investments on Wall Street, they would be called “international businesspeople.”)

He’s especially concerned not just with the grueling minutae of trying to receive treatment for the aches and pains that come with stooping to pick strawberries 12 hours a day, struggling to meet ambitious quotas in order to get paid very little, but also the larger, physically devastating effects of the structural violence visited upon a whole population by neoliberal economic policies that continue to widen the global income gap and entrench the wealthy in power. His “participant observation” method of studying migrant farmworkers means he writes about his own experiences in the field, and he brings his sophisticated anthropological knowledge to bear on the way contemporary society ensures that migrant farmworkers stay on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, building on the work of Pierre Bordieu, Philippe Bourgois, and others who’ve studied power relationships and structural violence in terms of workers’ health.

But, although there are scholarly footnotes and personal interjections, Holmes avoids an icky “anthropological tourism” vibe by providing the workers themselves with room to tell their histories, talk about their bodies, and react to the way they’re treated. People like Abelino, who falls victim to a series of misunderstandings over his severely injured knee, or Crescencio, who suffers acute headaches whenever he’s called racist names or ordered around degradingly, but is labeled a potential domestic abuser by one caregiver and resorts to drinking up to 24 beers per night to soothe his pain. We also hear from Marcelina, who talks to a Skagit Valley community gathering about low wages and high quotas.

And Holmes lets the owners and operators on all levels of Skagit’s Tanaka Brothers Farm — a pseudonym to protect his sources — speak as well, about the need for cheap labor in an increasingly competitive global agribusiness environment, among other concerns. (One especially interesting tidbit: organic distributors pressured Tanaka Brothers Farms to sign a machine-pick contract, which relegates farmworkers to the pesticide-ridden fields, despite the growing market for organic produce.) The Japanese-descended Tanaka family is deeply embedded in the Skagit Valley community, with roots stretching back before the Japanese internment period. The farm has seen different waves of migrant workers from poor white to Asian to Mexican. The Valley community itself has a fascinating relationship with the migrant community, emerging from it while reacting to it, developing its own social hierarchy as each generation “graduates” from farmworker to resident.

 

ANOTHER GENERATION

A lot has changed from Chavez’s day. For one thing, the previous generation of field workers, mostly from Guadalajara and northern Mexico or from Central America, has gained a toehold on American society — like the Asian workers that preceded them, many Hispanic workers’ children, placed in American schools, have grown up, providing their parents with a path to citizenship or work visas that allow them access to better jobs.

Today, a lot of workers are not mestizo Mexican, but of indigenous Mixtec descent, from increasingly violent mountain villages of Oaxaca in southern Mexico like San Miguel and San Pedro. Bloody land disputes, ethnic tension, the collapse of the local agriculture market that was exacerbated by the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s and continued through the recent global recession, and the rowdy and malevolent presence of US-funded anti-drug military forces (strange since no major drug cartels operate there) have isolated this area, forcing its men, women, and children to look for work in America.

Triqui, not Spanish, is their native language — just one of the major hurdles when it comes to delivering healthcare to this population. Another hurdle comes with the specific cultural record of Triqui and general Mexican healthcare. Many Triqui workers rely on native healers, even in American farmworker camps, whose methods of consulting cards and drawing evil spirits from bodies using oils surely provide some psychosomatic respite. But reliance on native healers — out of a combination of tradition, availability, and fear of discovery or of health institutions in general — often prevents workers with deeper problems from receiving a wider range of appropriate treatments. Self-medication through alcohol is common (Holmes observed no drug use), and in one case a man named Bernardo took to the habit mashing his abdomen with soda bottles to ease a chronic stomache ache.

The migratory nature of these workers — and their shifting relationship to the law — all but insures disruptions in preventative and prescriptive care, lack of access to medications, frustratingly spotty medical records, and the inability to form a valuable personal bond with a trusted physician. But the major hurdle is that the system put in place by the government to serve migrant populations hasn’t been revisited since 1962, when a wave of media concern spotlighted the plight of migrant workers — most of whom, at that time, were white Oakies descended from the great Dustbowl diaspora of the ’30s and ’40s. The system has been only slightly adapted and enlarged since then, with dozens of clinics and organizations competing for limited grants, and nonprofits charging as little as they can (often still a steep fee on a farmworkers’ wage).

The picture Holmes paints of the clinics he visits and the doctors, nurses, and caseworkers he encounters is a mostly warm one — most health workers are hard-working and well-intentioned, stymied by cultural and linguistic differences, lack of funds and proper medical records, and racist attitudes from the surrounding communities. Some are prone to misinterpretation, and there are a couple outbursts of frustration that borders on stereotyping.

Still, most migrant worker health care providers are dedicated to their patients’ welfare. As one doctor, a mountaineer who serves the Tanaka Brothers Farm workers, put it: “It’s a very difficult problem. We have a bad situation where citizens cannot really afford health care. And the migrant workers, I truly believe they should have at least the same access as the others. I mean, this work that they are doing is something that nobody else is willing to do. That’s the truth. That’s probably the only reason why we are able to go to the supermarket and buy fruit for a fair price. So this is a group of people that really deserves our attention.”

That group will most likely be left out of the Affordable Care Act’s initial implementation, with possible implications for other, growing fields of migrant work, like software coding or childcare. Holmes’ book will hopefully inspire other investigations into this critical area of the nation’s health care gap — and concerted action to bridge it.

The Performant: Home is where the art is

Sue Vaughan
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1
The Performant: Home is where the art is

Valencia Street art space struggles to retain its physical and spiritual existence
 
Sometimes you stumble across places that just feel like home the instant you step across the threshold. Maybe not the kind of home where you lounge around in sweatpants binging on Dynamo Donuts and Netflix, but a home that offers comfort for the spirit, where creativity and intention reign. Curiosity shop, design showcase, and artist enclave, Viracocha at 998 Valencia Street has been one such home for many, from the poets who helped build its pallet-wood walls, to the neighborhood literati who donated to and borrowed from Ourshelves, the private lending library that until very recently occupied the back of the building, to the acoustic musicians and spoken-word artists who gathered in the basement to perform and to connect, to the visual artists whose work was treated as décor first and merchandise almost as an afterthought.

One part art installation, one part community outlet, and one part ostensible retail venture, the four year-old Viracocha feels far older, thanks perhaps in part to its proximity to the venerable Artists’ Television Access, or a lingering resonance from santería supply store Botanica Yoruba, which occupied the same space for many years. Stepping inside always feels like stepping through a cool, jazz-infused looking-glass into a parallel world where life is art and art is life, and all that other stuff doesn’t matter quite as much as you thought it did. Plus, typewriters.
 
But it’s a brave new Valencia Street, and in matters of merchantry (some of that “other stuff” we wish didn’t matter) it’s an increasingly challenging atmosphere in which to be experimenting with idiosyncratic business models. And as many creatives-turned-commercialists have discovered, sinking all of your energies into commerce can sap those same energies from creation, and balancing the two can be a constant struggle. So it wasn’t exactly a surprise when Viracocha announced that it was raising funds in order to reorganize in the new year, a reorganization that includes proprietor Jonathan Siegel passing the baton to an as-yet unnamed group of successors, and applications for permits to legalize the heretofore “secret” performance venue below the floorboards of the retail space. Not a surprise, but still a sad shock. We like our quirky empires to remain unchanged and unperturbed by the pressures of the outside world, even when clinging onto the “old ways” can mean driving them out of existence. It’s an often unspoken conundrum, but retaining loyalty is a delicate balance too.
 
It began as much an experiment as anything else. The idea of a space that put the art before the consumption of it had come to Siegel years before while he lived in New York working as an actor and in the construction industry. After moving to San Francisco in 2005 he became a known denominator on the poetry scene, including as the organizer for the Poetry Mission reading series at Dalva, and as a member of the erstwhile Collaborative Arts Insurgency. And when he signed a lease on the space in 2009, it was to members of the latter that he turned for assistance in building the space up from scratch, a modern-day barnraising where a vision of community was constructed along with each new wall. A community Siegel refers to as “an orphanage for the lost creative spirit inside all of us,” where practitioners of many mediums might find a place to commune, and where patrons of same might come to discover new artists and new-to-them treasures in a non-pressured, almost anti-commercial environment.
 
While the future of Viracocha is still uncertain and dependent in large part on what repairs and modifications are deemed necessary by the city (ADA-compliant elevator and restroom for starters, an expense Siegel claims is manageable) and what kind of entertainment venue permits the space is able to secure in the new year. But from Siegel’s POV, he’s leaving Viracocha’s future in capable hands (“the (people) coming onboard don’t want to see the energy of the space shift into something radically different”). As for his own future, he alludes to completion of not one but four books in the works, and a reconnection with his own creativity.

“It’s time for me to let go of many things in my world and rebuild from within,” he muses via email, a sentiment which seems to apply also to Viracocha, and its current state of rebirth, and pretty apropos both for a space named for the Incan god of creation, and for the modern-day visionary who named it.

 (Full disclosure: the author’s collaborative literary bike map is currently for sale at Viracocha.)

No poetry or magic in being a robot

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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85

I felt yesterday like I had been scooped after reading Jennifer Maerz’s post in the Bold Italic, which asked: Is Talking About High Rents So Often Crippling Our City?

She linked to the blog of “robotics genius” Kal Spelletich, who is a friend of mine. We’ve been getting into heated discussions on this very topic for months. Kal makes fantastical interactive machines that do things like spit fire, harness random mechanical motion to produce musical notes on a piano or a violin, or engulf you in an aromatic bundle of fennel, just for an instant. His creations are robots.

I spent a bit of time in his studio, a giant waterfront warehouse in the southeastern part of the city where strange, sharp-edged contraptions hang from the ceilings. I shared stories about the articles I was writing, increasingly on evictions and the dearth of affordable housing in San Francisco. But as we dissected the problem, Kal rejected what he saw as a narrative of desperation that has been formulated in response to the city’s affordable housing crisis.

He had his own rant, saying his community’s impulse to make art was being hindered by anxiety-producing discussions over loss of living space. These constant, embittered discussions were not only tiresome but toxic to creativity, he said, and distracting people from actually engaging in their life’s work.

But something about his argument irked me, since the idea that people should bow out gracefully and pursue their creative endeavors someplace else sounded akin to surrender, while the stories I gravitate toward feature individuals who find a way to dig in and stand their ground. And taken as a whole, the greater the exodus of artists and idealists from San Francisco, the more watered-down the city’s cultural soup starts to feel. We debated it endlessly.

Here’s how Kal phrased it on his blog. “We don’t hang and talk about the revolution or our exciting new piece we are working on any more. The wind has been taken out of our sails.  We react to the corporatists and capitalists, we are not proactive. Our dialogue has been taken from us. I feel like we have played right into their hands in more ways than one.”

He concluded it by saying, “The head fuck, stress and wasted energy. … There is nothing poetic or magic about it. And I do not see any answer for it in the Bay Area.”

I reflected on our discussions again when I read Mayor Ed Lee’s interview in the New York Times a couple weeks ago, in which Lee commented that “tech workers aren’t robots.” In a city bursting at the seams with makers and dreamers with high aspirations, those who possess coding skills are favored, since their work is perceived as having economic potential. Lee seemed very concerned with creating an environment in which they can thrive.

As the mayor told interviewer Willy Staley: “What I learned with tech companies is I gotta give people room to experiment, and also to make what might later on be a mistake. This is the attitude I want to build within San Francisco — give some time to the tech community. At the end of the day, tech workers are not robots: they feel, they think, they have values.”

That philosophy – the idea that people are people, and need room to breathe, experiment, maybe even maybe mess up – actually makes sense as a core value. The problem, as I see it, is that the economic reality of San Francisco makes it such that this recognition is extended exclusively to the tech set, while the same leeway is not granted to other kinds of makers, or to those pursuing a kind of success that can’t be defined strictly in financial terms. At the end of the day, all San Franciscans feel, think, and have values – but only some are receiving support for their work in the form of funding or policies that facilitate their success.

While one class is being encouraged to try, and forgiven when they fail, a different set – the creative or activist types who aren’t doing it for the money – are being sent the message that they must behave like tightrope walkers, or maybe robots, if they want to remain.

There are some signs of creative resistance – a community rallying together in memory of its heroes, some mischievous comic relief, here and there. By tapping into imagination instead of draining it all away with worry, this could prove to be the start of something.

From the ground up

Michael Redmond
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0
From the ground up

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Conceptual French choreographer Jérôme Bel thrives on conversation. Sometimes, he participates directly, as he did in Pichet Klunchun and Myself, in which he and Thai dancer Klunchun talked on stage. Performed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2009, the piece enchanted me with its daring theatricality and enraged me with its faux naïveté. Pichet was both sturdy like a rock and evanescent like a passing thought.

Bel has made it his task to ask questions and shake up concepts around performance. It’s the lingua franca in today’s academia, but Bel is an artist. After stripping away the hoopla around art making, what are we left with? What do we as an audience expect? What is a performer, both from our and his or her perspective? Is there room for virtuosity, or is that something to hide behind? Marcel Duchamp asked similar questions in the visual art realm 100 years ago; choreographer Pina Bausch engaged with them for most of her career.

Two performances during Stanford University’s current Festival Jérôme Bel opened a perspective on the way Bel deals with his dissecting knife — with utter skill, and yet also with a smile and an easy mind. Bel may not like creating steps for his performers because he wants to see the moving body stripped down to its laconic essence. Yet he is one hell of a choreographer.

As a backbone and a trajectory for his The Show Must Go On (presented at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium Nov. 13), Bel — actually, his assistants — chose 20 non-dancers, plus a few professionals to spice up the mix. They gave them a series of Bel-chosen popular music selections on which to develop movement material; the songs often skirted that tenuous line between sentiment and sentimental.

The dancers carried themselves anonymously, looking as they would if you were to encounter them on the street. But at the musical cue, they jumped into action with individualized physical responses. Yet the parameters were as tightly set as anything you might want to see on a ballet stage. These performers may have appeared untrained, but they had 55 hours of rehearsal to look as ordinary as they did.

Much of Show’s appeal arose from its simple, even simpleminded sense of humor of acting out song lyrics — normally, an absolute taboo in dance. For “Let the Sunshine In,” the stage lights came up; for “La Vie en Rose,” the audience was bathed in rose hues; during “Private Dancer,” the DJ jumped into the limelight. You could feel the audience gradually relax into the setup. (I fully expected some to join in on “Macarena.“) But they needed more time. When the volume of “The Sound of Silence” repeatedly dropped off, the audience’s humming filled in the gap; they had entered the performance. Toward the end, each dancer expressed a piece of individually chosen music, heard over a headset. In the back, a group belted out “We Are the World,” while downstage, French-born Muriel Maffre croaked out a hoarse “Born in the USA” and Jesselito Bie moaned “Oops … I Did It Again.” Perhaps most surprising was that for all its easy viewing and entertainment values, The Show Must Go On rode on an undercurrent of wistfulness and melancholy.

On Nov. 18, the festival moved to the beautifully appointed Bing Concert Hall. It was not a good decision. Sitting toward the front center, I had to strain to hear former Merce Cunningham dancer Cédric Andrieux’s contemplation on both the man and the dancer called Cédric Andrieux. After the performance, I spoke with other audience members and learned that they’d also had difficulty following the dancer. Cédric Andrieux is an intimate show; it belonged into a more supportive environment.

Performances exist in time, and Andrieux (with Bel?) controlled every last second of his: the way he made eye contact with us and paced his narration; the time he took to change clothes or reenact a painful modeling gig. His life, loves, and professional stories became part of him, whether he danced excerpts from Cunningham or contrasting ones by Trisha Brown. He complained about the tediousness of a Cunningham class, yet he looked gorgeous in the exercise. His regret about “not ever getting it right” — which eventually he admitted to having figured out — was contradicted by what he showed. Awkwardness and difficulties are as part of art as they are of life. I think most artists know that; Andrieux showed it. *

PICHET KLUNCHUN AND MYSELF (A FILM)

Mon/2, 7:30pm, $10-20

Bing Concert Hall

Stanford University, Palo Alto

live.standford.edu

THE THINGS I HAVE DONE WITH DANCE: A CONVERSATION WITH JÉRÔME BEL

Tue/3, 11am, free

Pigott Theatre, Memorial Hall

Stanford University, Palo Alto

events.stanford.edu

 

Pop shop

Michael Redmond
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0
Pop shop

arts@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overstimulated

Michael Redmond
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2
Overstimulated

Environmentalists who oppose fracking in California are concerned about more than possible groundwater contamination or other hazards that could directly result from the fossil fuel drilling practice. They also want to save the planet.

The Monterey Shale, a massive underground geological formation spanning a large swath of California, contains approximately 15 billion barrels of hard-to-get oil that could technically be extracted in massive fracking operations, Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity said during a Nov. 15 call with reporters.

All told, burning that quantity would eventually release six billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air. “That is a carbon bomb,” Siegel stated bluntly. Combined with methane that is released from the wells during the drilling operations, “a fracking boom in California could undo all the progress our state has made on greenhouse reductions,” she warned.

But for now, the debate on fracking in California is focused on newly drafted state regulations that would place controls on the practice for the first time. The proposed rules pertain to permitting and disclosure in the areas surrounding individual wells — yet they don’t contemplate the cumulative impact of fossil fuel combustion over time.

Fracking, formally known as hydraulic fracturing, is a technique used for extracting oil or natural gas. It involves injecting high-pressure fluids underground, often containing toxic chemicals, to break up bedrock in order to access the fossil fuel sources trapped within. The California Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) released a set of draft regulations Nov. 15 proposing new rules around what’s known as “well stimulation,” industry-speak for a type of drilling that includes fracking.

The new rules are slated to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2015. They’ll continue to be hashed out throughout next year, and DOGGR will accept public comment on the initial proposal until Jan. 14, 2014.

The regulations came about in response to Senate Bill 4, legislation enacted Sept. 30 after a statewide coalition of environmentalists launched a campaign to put a stop to fracking, which is already happening in some parts of California. Many groups within that coalition viewed the legislation as flawed, because it didn’t prohibit the practice outright.

“The only safe way forward for California is a halt to fracking in our state,” Siegel said.

Still, the draft regulations do seek to place new requirements on the oil and gas industry in an effort to protect public health where fracking occurs. According to DOGGR records, fracking is most common in Kern County.

“There are some good provisions in the regulations,” Bill Allayaud of the Environmental Working Group said in the briefing. “For the first time, all forms of well stimulation will require a permit from DOGGR. That’s a good thing.”

The rules will also require companies to conduct an analysis of groundwater and other wells nearby before proceeding with fracking operations, unlike before. The new regulations also establish a notification process to make nearby residents aware of new drilling operations.

Meanwhile, SB 4 calls for an environmental impact report and a study on the overall health and safety effects of fracking — but it’s unlikely that this study would result in a prohibition on the drilling practice, as environmentalists had initially called for.

“The Natural Resources Agency is currently developing the scope of the study and will begin the analysis in December 2013,” according to a fact sheet published by DOGGR.

“We don’t think we’ll be getting deep answers as to whether fracking and acidization and all forms of well stimulation are safe or not, for both protecting public health and the environment,” Allayaud said.

Meanwhile, he expressed concern that the public comment period for the initial set of proposed rules did not provide enough time for concerned Californians to respond, because people are being asked to weigh in over the course of the holiday season. The Environmental Working Group has requested an extension of that deadline, but it seems unlikely that DOGGR will grant one.

“The comment period was extended from the mandatory 45 days to 60 days for that reason,” California Department of Conservation Chief Deputy Director Jason Marshall said when asked whether the deadline extension would be granted in light of the holidays. “Additionally, we are anticipating an additional 45-day public comment period after the initial draft regulations are adjusted based on that initial public comment.”

Environmentalists also voiced the concern that while DOGGR plans to hold a series of public hearings on the proposed fracking regulations, none will be held in the Bay Area, despite its concentration of advocates who helped get the statewide opposition campaign off the ground.

“The law requires one public meeting, if requested. We are doing five, primarily in areas of the state where oil production is most common,” Marshall responded when asked why there weren’t any Bay Area meetings scheduled.

Asked whether any of the pending studies would take into account the six billion metric tons of CO2 that could potentially be released if the Monterey Shale were to be developed, Marshall seemed to suggest that the state was willing to go along with a regulated form of fracking even as it continues pursuing initiatives to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

“We still derive over 90 percent of our transportation fuels from hydrocarbons,” he wrote in an email. “With SB 4 and these regulations, California is acting now to ensure that extraction of those hydrocarbons happens in the safest way possible, even as we work to reduce our energy dependence on those hydrocarbons.”

Eternal spring

Michael Redmond
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0
Eternal spring

arts@sfbg.com

Chris Marker did not seem to see a hard distinction between cities and their people. The cat-loving leftist documentarian, whose distinctly poetic outlook we sadly lost last year, is probably best known for his experimental sci-fi short La Jetée (1962) and his ethnography-cum fictionalized-travel-memoir Sans Soleil (1983), film-school favorites both available through the Criterion Collection.

But his filmography goes much deeper than that, and often focuses on the inner life of human and political organisms. Restored and screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Le Joli Mai is a 1962 collaboration with cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, which traipses geographically and temporally around Paris in May ’62. Much of the movie consists of man-and-woman-on-the-street interviews, with an assortment of more settled chats in people’s homes or workplaces. Framed by a chimera of English and French narration, by Simone Signoret and Yves Montand respectively, the film gives its “biggest roles” to “free people, those who are able to question, to refuse, to undertake, to think, or simply to love.”

Marker investigates these free people’s attitudes toward their professions, their social lives, their home city, the housing problems of Paris, the Algerian War, and numerous other subjects close to their hearts. Some are passionately political, while others think it’s best to keep silent or ignore certain crises — a cross-section of political approaches that echoes throughout modern society, whether in Europe or the United States. Indeed, seeing this movie now with its specificity of time and place, it’s possible to imagine a not-too-different portrait of, say, 2012 Paris, or Los Angeles, or London.

During the mostly casual interviews, Lhomme’s camera wanders, never too committed to its initial subject to notice something more interesting in the background, or even just elsewhere on the subject’s person. Marker and Lhomme’s approach is almost never without levity — people’s opinions on the issues of the day are not to be mocked necessarily, but neither are they to be taken at face value. They’re all just people, and the texture of the film repeatedly reinforces that truth. In one segment, a talkative inventor loses the spotlight to a spider crawling on his suit. In another, as two engineering consultants debate in complex Marxist terms the future of labor, the film cuts away over and over to close-ups on the faces of housecats, serving as both commentary and comic relief for the heated discussion.

Marker and Lhomme strive to represent the true diversity and cultural fabric of ’62 Paris. Their subjects include poets, a painter, an inventor of automotive technology, a pair of teenage stock market assistants, an introverted single theater seamstress and cat-lover, a worker from Algeria, a student from Dahomey, a poor family finally granted more spacious housing, an ex-clergyman turned union militant, and on and on.

In the film’s final act, a montage of city symphony-esque time lapse shots of the city and a litany of statistics about life, death, and resources in the month of May gives way to a glimpse at Paris’ not-so-free inhabitants. Finally, Marker offers a reflective monologue (via Signoret) in a style that will be familiar to anyone who has seen Sans Soleil, and which also prefigures Werner Herzog’s sci-fi-tinged epilogue to his Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). Marker makes a literary text of the human face, offering his interpretations and looking for recurring themes among the wildly diverse denizens of Paris; he imagines how a “Martian just landed on the planet Earth” might read these human documents, and philosophizes about what plagues these haunted-looking faces.

His poetic extrapolation might frustrate some viewers, as it leaps beyond the boundaries of empirical detail to ponder the collective psyche of the people of Paris, but this is Marker’s true gift. He is an imaginative reader of the human face, mind, and heart as they operate in an urban environment, and his critique from 1962 is as valuable as ever today. *

 

LE JOLI MAI opens Fri/15 in Bay Area theaters.

Driving us crazy

Michael Redmond
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209
Driving us crazy

STREET FIGHT Parking reform is one of the most radically important elements of making San Francisco a more livable and equitable city.

In this geographically constrained city, parking consumes millions of square feet of space that could be used for housing, especially affordable housing in secondary units. Curbside parking in the public right of way impedes plans to make Muni more reliable for hundreds of thousands of transit riders. Parking in new housing and commercial developments generates more car trips on our already congested and polluted streets, slowing Muni further while bullying bicyclists and menacing pedestrians.

Fundamentally, parking is a privatization of the commons, whereby driveway curb cuts and on-street parking hog the public right-of-way in the name of private car storage. The greater public good — such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing public safety through bike lanes, wider sidewalks, public green spaces, and transit-first policies — is subsumed to narrow private interests. These are among the many reasons why, for over a decade, parking reform has been a key part of progressive transportation policy.

Yet lately, it has been disappointing to watch progressives, especially on the Board of Supervisors, retreat from that stance. In Potrero Hill and North Mission, a vitriolic reaction has slowed rollout of nationally acclaimed SF Park, which raises revenue for Muni and is a proven sustainable transportation tool. Yet there are murmurings that some progressive supervisors might seek an intervention and placate motorists who believe the public right-of-way is theirs.

On Polk Street, some loud merchants and residents went ballistic when the city and bicycle advocates proposed removing curbside parking to accommodate bicycles. The city, weary of Tea Party-like mobs, ran the other way, tail-between-legs. Progressive supervisors seem to have gone along with the cave-in.

Along Geary, planning for a desperately needed bus rapid transit project drags on. And on. And on. And on. The lollygagging includes bending over backward to placate some drivers who might be slightly inconvenienced by improvements for 50,000 daily bus riders.

One thing that is remarkably disturbing about this backpedaling is that, in an ostensibly progressive city by many measures (civil rights, tolerance, environmentalism), the counterattack is steeped in conservative ideology. That is, conservatives believe that government should require ample and cheap parking, whether in new housing or on the street. This conservative ideology, shared by many car drivers and merchants — and even by some self-professed progressives — is steeped in the idea people still need cars. This despite the evidence that cars are extremely destructive to our environment, socially inequitable, and only seem essential because of poor planning decisions, not human nature.

Progressive backpedaling has become more confusing with the recent debate over 8 Washington, defeated at the polls Nov. 5, and on the same day of a convoluted Board of Supervisors hearing on a proposed car-free housing development at 1050 Valencia. Both of these projects highlight the muddled inconsistency emerging among progressive supervisors.

Enough has been written about how 8 Washington was a symbolic battle for the soul of San Francisco. But during the campaigns, the lack of attention to parking was curious. Notably, progressive-leaning transportation organizations like the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, Walk SF, and Transform sat out the election despite the project’s excessive 327 underground parking spaces, which violated hard-fought progressive planning efforts to make the waterfront livable. The Council of Community Housing Organizations also sat it out, despite benefitting from the progressive parking policies that 8 Washington violated. It appears that despite their transit-first rhetoric, progressives made a tactical calculation to keep parking out of the campaign.

The progressive victory came with a Faustian bargain which involved ignoring parking. To ensure 8 Washington was defeated, conservative voters were folded into the opposition. Groups like Eastern Neighborhoods United Front (ENUF), the Coalition for San Francisco Neighborhoods, and the Republican Party came out against 8 Washington and yet, ironically, all are opponents of progressive parking reform.

Moving forward, whatever happens at the 8 Washington site must include progressive parking policies. Don’t expect this from the unimaginative leadership at the Port, which speciously demanded the excessive parking. Don’t expect it from the developer, who steadfastly insists that the rich must have parking. And don’t expect conservatives to latch on to a waterfront scheme that is both publicly accessible and genuinely transit-oriented. It is progressives who will need to muster political will for a zero-parking project at the waterfront and set the tone for consensus among the other factions in the waterfront debate.

Meanwhile on the same day 8 Washington went down, 1050 Valencia barely made it out of a tortuous Board of Supervisors hearing in which progressives seemed to be the antagonists. As the first car-free market-rate housing proposal on Valencia under progressive parking reforms, this 12-unit mixed use building seemed an obvious win for progressives. It would be a walkable, bicycle-friendly urban infill mixed-use project with on-site affordable housing, all of which the city needs more of.

Yet since 2010, when the project first went to the Planning Commission, conservative rhetoric has been deployed to stop the project. Significantly, the Liberty Hill Neighborhood Association objected to the transit-oriented characterization of the project. It claimed that the 14 Mission and 49 Mission/Van Ness are filthy, crime-ridden, and unreliable and so 1050 Valencia must have parking.

Unlike progressives, who also decry shortfalls with Muni but propose solutions, the Liberty Hill opponents offered only secession from public transit, insisting on driving in secure armored cocoons instead of addressing Muni reliability, and they also expect free or cheap parking in the public right of way.

You would think that progressives at the Board of Supervisors would see through this thinly veiled bigotry against the 14 and 49 buses. But instead, four self-professed progressive supervisors — John Avalos, David Campos, Jane Kim, and Eric Mar — voted against 1050 Valencia.

They may argue that they were more concerned about the neighboring Marsh Theater, which has concerns about construction noise (and also parking). The noise issue can be worked out, and why the progressive supervisors did not work this out in advance is a mystery. But if you watch the hearing closely, the Marsh basically opposed the development — period — and thus a modest car-free development that included affordable housing at an appropriate location. And so did four progressive supervisors. It’s baffling.

At the end of the day, 1050 Valencia moved forward, barely. But it can still be stopped at the upcoming Board of Appeals hearing. Meanwhile, it’s time for progressives to make a frontal response to the Muni-bashing coming out of Liberty Hill.

The SFMTA is offering a bold and ambitious proposal for these buses on Mission between 13th and Cesar Chavez. This includes a transit-only lane, restricting automobile traffic, rearranging loading zones, and removing curbside parking so that 46,000 daily 14 and 49 passengers have better reliability and less crowding.

This plan will make life easier for San Franciscans who rely on these buses, but will require progressive supervisors to openly and sincerely advocate for removal of on-street parking, to support SF Park, and push for car-free housing development in the Mission, rather than knee-jerk posturing for a few political points in future elections. Progressives, stop screwing around.

Street Fight is a monthly column by Jason Henderson, an urban geography professor at San Francisco State University.

The Performant: Games people play

Sue Vaughan
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1

Ask any gamer, or specialist in pedagogy, and they’ll say the same thing: games are as important to human development as any the rest of our skill-building activities. There’s evidence of game-playing in almost every culture dating all the way back to ancient Sumeria and Egypt. They also offer an entrance point into other cultures, whether by playing a familiar game like chess and seeing how it translates in an unfamiliar environment, or by learning a game representative of a particular place — Xiangqi (Chinese chess), say, or Ghanaian Oware.
 
But while some games have been around for literally thousands of years, other games seem to drop off the radar almost as quickly as they appear. What essential component gives games like Go, hide-and-go-seek, poker, Monopoly, and Super Mario Brothers such staying power over some of their, perhaps best forgotten peers? This is a question the game designers of San Francisco’s annual Come Out and Play Festival must ask themselves each year, as they present their latest inventions in the hopes of capturing the imaginations, and just maybe the funds, to bring their games to the public at large.

Since the festival itself is free, it’s always fun to drop by for a few hours to see what’s being played. Attending Saturday, myself and my buddy in game, P., stopped to peek at the Mime Boxing tournament, a rowdy free-for-all of imaginary walls and temporary alliances, and play a round of the tabletop Thrown Into Chaos, before assuming our roles as Prohibition-era booze smugglers in Rumrunners, a two hour-long treasure hunt and commodities exchange scenario.

Sent out into the world with a packet of money and a series of orders, we purchase “booze” from a pair of nattily dressed mobsters standing on the street corner, and then hurry to our first drop off point, in order to make more money, in order to buy more booze. We split up in order to make it more confusing for the “agents” who pop out of the shadows occasionally, clipboards in hand, and try to shake us down for the booze we fortunately never have on us when they ask, though one tries to run off with a $500 bill at one point which we protest vigorously.

We come in fifth out of 10 teams, thanks to a pair of particularly persistent agents who stake out one of the drop-off points for at least 20 minutes, forcing us to circle the same block again and again until they leave.
 
Transitioning into the hide-and-chase game Witness Protection Plan, we draw cards with our characters printed on them: Witness, Detective, Suicide Bomber, Assassin, Handler, Civilian, etc. The “Witness” hurries off to hide, and then the rest of the players spread out through the neighborhood to find them. One-third of the players have to find the witness and hide with them before any assassins or traitors find them first, and each round lasts just 10 minutes, which makes for a tenser, more physically demanding game than Rumrunners.

As far as involved and demanding goes, the centerpiece game of the festival, the annual Journey to the End of the Night can be both, an epic, miles-long scavenger hunt replete with checkpoints, chasers, safe zones, and an outdoor after-party in a unique setting (this year, Corona Heights Park). P. is “game” for it, but I’ve neglected to pre-register so I head off, but before I do we play a few rounds of Stranger Danger, an ice-breaker game clearly aimed for the teen-to-20-something demographic (sample question: “What color describes how horny you are right now?” Answer from stranger: “That’s an awkward question to ask me in front of my 13-year-old brother”).

Whoops, well, still a few bugs in that system, but keep it up friends. Someday you might come up with the next Twister! Now there’s a game with staying power.

Lit up

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Lit up

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE This past weekend, two dance companies showed premieres inspired by fiction writers. Alonzo King’s imagination was stirred by Irish author Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin) for Writing Ground, commissioned in 2010 by the Monte Carlo Ballet. For Jenny McAllister, it was mystery novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler, whom she has read and loved since she was a little girl.

In the work’s San Francisco premiere, King’s LINES Ballet dancers dived into Writing’s complexities with their accustomed passion and competence. It was gratifying to see new company member Robb Beresford, and apprentices Babatunji Johnson and Jeffrey Van Sciver, already comfortable with the stylistic demands of King’s intricate choreography.

Fierce presence is what King asks of his dancers. For Writing, he placed them into an environment of spiritual music from around the globe, which has moved beyond its historical sources into a quasi-mythic arena. Rarely has a King work — divided into small scenes, as is his habit — conveyed such a fluid sense of unity.

Of course, Writing was full of struggles, disrupted connections, broken lines, and extensions that curled in on themselves. Van Sciver, in a long brown skirt, periodically whipped across the stage like some preternatural force, perhaps generating, or perhaps destructive to, the duet between Kara Wilkes and Beresford. A trio for women in pointe shoes — which suggest defiance of gravity — had them groveling in a crouch. Yet Yujin Kim serenely stretched, apparently indifferent to the violent physical struggle between Meredith Webster and David Harvey. For all their volatility, Kim and similarly tall partner Courtney Henry created visual anchors on the stage.

Writing moved toward its climactic final scene with a clear trajectory, perhaps starting with Harvey and Johnson’s contentious duet that ended with them walking upstage like brothers. They were followed by Kim’s solo to the spiritual “Over my Head.” For the finale, a door opened upstage, and an anguished Wilkes squeezed in, manipulated and supported by four men. She struggled, collapsed, and resurged again and again. Perhaps something was trying to be born out of incredible pain. And yet what compassion these men brought to whatever needed to be done.

LINES also presented the world premiere of King’s Concerto for Two Violins in D-minor, set to Bach’s much-acclaimed score. It just might be this eminent dance maker’s most musically astute choreography to Western classical music. The work opened with Johnson stretching his limbs as if trying to expand space beyond the horizon. The choreography emphasized variations within symmetry, such as the trios that chased each other or peeling stacks of double lines. Webster, Wilkes, Harvey, and Michael Montgomery danced the middle section as a double duet in a beautiful synthesis of edginess and lyricism.

McAllister’s nicely timed and entertaining Being Raymond Chandler, a one-hour dance theater piece for her 13th Floor Dance Theater, looks at the mystery icon (David Silpa) struggling with writer’s block, ambition, a messy almost-marriage, and a love for the bottle. But he was also portrayed as a serious writer, separate from the hack image that sticks to him.

The choreography, mostly social dances from the 1940s, was not particularly original, but these sequences set up a relaxed counterpoint to the staccato dialogs that keep racing from one fictional disaster to the next. There were moments when Being dragged — perhaps drowning in language — but it picked up speed and closed with a flourish.

Ever heard of a novel’s characters coming to life? In this piece, Chandler’s did, fighting with the muddle-headed writer for a different identity and desperately trying to stay in the story (hopefully, in a major part). Yet they also pitched in, with disastrous results, rewriting what was clearly a mess. The whole thing might as well be a backstage look at a soap opera.

Patric Cashman wanted to die — again and again; Erin Mei-Ling Stuart was hilarious as both Chandler’s almost-wife and the seductress who, she insists, needs to be a brunette. The versatile Blane Ashby had so many roles — a noisy neighbor, a crook, a former husband — that I couldn’t keep them apart. The weakest character in this entertainment was Eric Garcia’s sleepy Philip Marlowe, who only came to life halfway through.

Good comedy has an ability to draw you in even as you stay at arm’s length. McAllister at her best — and she is good here — has that gift of playing with perspectives and focus, while keeping the audience off balance McAllister has also learned from Chandler: Out of all those misfiring plot twists, she pulled together a lickety-split mystery that took off like a rocket. *

 

ALONZO KING LINES BALLET

Wed/30-Thu/31, 7:30pm; Fri/1-Sat/2, 8pm; Sun/3, 5pm, $30-$65

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

700 Howard, SF

www.linesballet.org

13TH FLOOR DANCE THEATER

Sat/2-Sun/3, 8pm, $18-$23

ODC Dance Commons

351 Shotwell, SF

www.13thfloordance.org

Brown takes heat on fracking

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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106

On Thursday Oct. 17, more than fifty people gathered in front of the Parc 55 Wyndham Hotel in downtown San Francisco to protest Governor Jerry Brown’s reception of an environmental award. 

Every year, the BlueGreen Alliance hosts its Right Stuff Awards dinner to honor prominent individuals promoting a sustainable environment and economy. This year, they selected Governor Jerry Brown as a winner in the government category. The choice enraged environmentalists, who congregated where the awards dinner was being held to voice their indignation.

Brought together by several collaborating organizations, including Idle No More and Gathering Tribes, the protesters blocked the entrance to Parc 55 as they awaited the governor’s arrival. Bearing signs with messages such as “Jerry Brown is Not BLUE or GREEN,” they yelled to drivers who honked horns in support as they sailed past.

They were upset by Brown’s support for Senate Bill 4, which he signed into law in September. SB-4 is California’s first legislation regulating hydraulic fracturing, more commonly known as fracking, which involves shooting massive amounts of water and toxic chemicals deep into the earth to crack rock formations and release otherwise trapped oil and natural gas deposits.

Widely viewed as flawed legislation that is far from what environmentalists had in mind when they called for the practice to be regulated in California, the bill allows fracking permits to be approved as long as oil and gas companies publicly disclose which chemicals are used in the process. The legislation also requires groundwater and air quality monitoring before operations begin. Environmentalists fear that SB-4 will lead to a dramatic expansion of fracking in California, by allowing access to the state’s vast Monterey Shale deposit, estimated to hold 15.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

“This award from BlueGreen is a travesty,” declared protester Steve Ongerth, after a flash mob of young people danced to the song “Toxic” by Brittney Spears, dressed in shirts spelling out TOXIC while donning surgical masks.

In the past several years, Governor Brown has accepted at least $2.49 million in financial donations from oil and natural gas interests. Environmentalists point to these donations as an explanation of Brown’s refusal to impose a moratorium or an outright ban on fracking, despite pressure from a statewide coalition of organizations calling for such protective measures.

They also blame him for the changes made to SB-4 in the final week before the bill was voted on, which followed intense lobbying by oil and gas interests. The amendments substantially weakened restrictions on fracking by removing some of the bill’s tougher regulations and diluting language intended to ensure that new wells go through adequate environmental review.

“Jerry Brown has sold out the California public for his own self-serving interests. He made a deal with the devil,” said protester Pamela Zuppo of 350 Bay Area. “This is a fracking bill gone wrong. It is referred to as a regulation bill, but it is not. It is an institutionalization of fracking bill and it’s the destruction of our democracy.”

When he signed SB-4, Brown said it “establishes strong environmental protections and transparency requirements,” but added that he plans to seek additional changes next year to clarify the new requirements. So far, details remain sketchy on what areas of the bill will actually be addressed.

At the last minute, activists learned that Brown would not be attending the event to accept his award in person. When this was announced, the crowd of protesters let out a cheer.

But environmentalists who remain concerned about fracking are keeping the pressure on. On Saturday, Oct. 19, activists from 350.org, Food & Water Watch and the Center for Biological Diversity held a march and rally in downtown Oakland to call on Brown to ban fracking.

“Over the past year, Governor Brown has gone against the wishes and best interests of Californians — the majority of which oppose fracking — and has clearly stated his support for the dangerous drilling process, said Food & Water Watch Northern California Organizer Tia Lebherz.

“By doing this he is embarrassing himself and putting his legacy and our state’s future at risk.”

Best of the Bay 2013: BEST SCHOOL OF THRASH

Michael Redmond
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0
Best of the Bay 2013: BEST SCHOOL OF THRASH

Between competing coffee shops and obscured by the whirl of growing foot traffic on Divisadero Street sits an old Victorian, surrounded by a fence, upon which hangs a hand-painted sign. The SF Skate Club‘s mission says it all: “[The club] strives to provide a safe, positive, and fun environment for youth of diverse backgrounds to pursue their passion to skateboard.” Skate Club creators, skateboarder Shawn Connolly and educator Thuy Nguyen, are on their grind to use skateboarding as a medium of youth empowerment and community building, and their school is a hub of fast friendship and solid ollies. Summer, weekend, and after-school programs for kids of most ages are offered which teach the basics and tricks. The school also organizes mobile outings, and hosts drop-in visits from professionals. If its pupils’ enthusiasm is any indication, after just a few months it’s already on a roll.

635 Divisadero, SF. (415) 572-2065, www.sfskateclub.com

“You’ve got to be inside the action:” Paul Greengrass discusses filmmaking and ‘Captain Phillips’

Sue Vaughan
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“You’ve got to be inside the action:” Paul Greengrass discusses filmmaking and ‘Captain Phillips’

Paul Greengrass‘ latest action film, Captain Phillips, stars Tom Hanks as an American cargo-ship captain taken hostage by Somali pirates. This based-on-true-events tale also stars newcomer Barkhad Abdi as pirate leader Muse. It opens tomorrow — but today, read on for more intel from my recent interview with Greengrass when he stopped by San Francisco to promote the film.

(Note: this interview was conducted as part of a “roundtable” that featured other journalists.)

Paul Greengrass, who is known for his use of handheld camera (or “shaky cam”) in films like 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum, and 2006’s Flight 93, discusses handheld cameras, which leads into an overview of his own philosophy of filmmaking — and praise for Hanks’ towering lead performance.

“If you try and make films in an authentic way — if you’re on a ship, ships rock around. And they’re small spaces. If you’ve ever been on a lifeboat, Jesus Christ. I mean, it’s like the worst Disney ride you could possibly imagine. So how do you shoot on a lifeboat, and keep it steady? It’s impossible. It’s not like I’m sitting there, going like that [mimes shaking a camera]. In fact, all of the time, I’m saying, ‘Keep it steady!’

If you want to be in a real space, and you want the images that you’re capturing to authentically arise out of the environment you’re shooting in — so, if you’re running it’s going to feel like what it feels to run. If you’re in a lifeboat, it’s gonna feel like you’re [at sea]. It’s a fundamental tenant of cinematic simplicity. I think shaky-cam is ineffective when [filmmakers use it] when they don’t need to do it, and it’s just some kind of stylistic tic that in a general sense is meant to mean immediacy when it actually doesn’t. It’s like a fashion accessory. But actually you’re not developing moments. You’re not capturing detail. It’s just a jarring mess.

The faster-moving your sequence, the more intensely complicated and simultaneous your action is, the more imperative it is upon you as a director to render detail. Detail is what gives you acceleration. It’s when you are able to show an audience detail — it’s like hop scotching, when you’re moving from step to step to step, but sure-footedly, with each footfall landing on significant detail that each leads to the next, to the next, so you get a sense of acceleration and focus. Whereas that [mimes shaking a camera] gives you lack of focus, because it’s generalized. What is that motion? Who’s doing what? You’ve got to be inside the action and your filmmaking must unlock the inner dynamics in a way that’s clear.

That takes a number of things: an intense amount of planning, absolute attention to detail while you’re shooting, moment by moment, that you’ve got this moment and you’ve got this particular piece. It requires a supremely rigorous process of editing. And last, but most importantly, you’ve always got to [know that] what all this action, whatever it’s conveying is, it’s got to convey character. And the character’s got to involve your point of view.

That’s abstract, but what I mean is, when you’re a young filmmaker — unless you’re a genius, and there are some filmmakers who are just geniuses, though they’re few and far between — you want to be a craftsman. You want to learn your craft and develop a point of view, because point of view has to do with your experiences in life, and your sense of maturity, and the inner confidence that comes slowly. It’s hard-won. You’ve gotta say, ‘What is the song that only I can sing? What is the film that only I can make? Why is that? What is it that I want to say?’ Crucially, you have to find what it is that you don’t know, that the film is going to be an exploration of.

So if you take [Captain Phillips], for instance, you’ve got a very simple, unbelievably dramatic but stark, simple story. It takes place on the high seas on the far-flung edge of the global economy, which is what the shipping lanes are. Four desperate young men, armed to the teeth, attacking a US-flagged container ship, taking the captain and a bunch of his guys hostage on the bridge while the rest of the crew hide. They manage to take one of the kidnappers hostage themselves and they do an exchange, but the pirates double-cross them and take the captain. They make for Somalia, but before they get to Somalia, the US Navy intercepts them. That’s the story! It’s almost old-fashioned in its simplicity. Staggeringly stark.

What does it mean? I don’t know. But that’s why we made the film. If we render this with as much authenticity as we can, we’ll find out what it means. That’s your point of view. And all of that maelstrom of action in the film gets you to that final scene in the infirmary, because only then do you see the fragility of humanity. I think that’s the brilliance of Tom Hanks in this film, because he takes you on that journey every step of the way. And you end up in that little tiny room, and what you see is, and what you feel — I think you feel it with him, because it’s quite an emotional moment.

That’s what you couldn’t have found out [about Phillips’ story] from the news, because you’re looking at it from the outside. You could only find it by being in it. It’s what gives you a deep engagement with the character, and I think — and I’m being biased — it’s one of those great, great performances. Because this man of few words, working man — my father was a merchant marine, which is one of the reasons I made this film; I know what those guys are like — goes through this extraordinary experience, and the audience goes along with him.” 

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS opens Fri/11 in Bay Area theaters.

Jinkx Monsoon brings Little Edie to SF (and beyond)

Tony Robles
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Who would have thought a self-described theater nerd, narcoleptic comedy queen would win it all in Season 5 of RuPaul’s Drag Race? Anyone watching the season could have told you as much, especially after sweet, talented Seattle queen Jinkx Monsoon took on legendary Jackie O relative/documentary subject Little Edie Beale during the “Snatch Game” episode.

Her vivid, spot-on Little Edie drawl, mannerisms, and makeup made Monsoon a shoe-in for the episode winner at least, even though “Snatch Game” impressions usually lean heavily toward over-the-top pop star and actress imitations. 

That’s not to say Monsoon’s not an actress — she’s a star of theater, having performed in a handful of colorful productions including her own two-person play, The Vaudevillians. And she’ll bring those sharp acting chops and glamorous old-fashioned movie star style to the Peaches Christ arena this weekend with two shows and showings of the original Grey Gardens (1975) documentary.

I spoke with Monsoon from her hotel room in San Francisco about her lifelong love of Little Edie, RuPaul’s Drag Race drama, her underdog status, and that “water off a duck’s back” thing:

SFBG How’s the planning going for Return to Grey Gardens?

Jinkx Monsoon It’s wonderful. It’s a combination between your typical drag show and a theater show. I like bringing theater to drag and vice versa. And Peaches is so good at this formula, she had everything planned before I even got here, so it’s been really well-structured and it’s going super well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypK1MVEB7Dw

SFBG Can you tell me about what’s going to happen in the show? I know Peaches always does a different twist on things.

JM In the show, Peaches and I are playing ourselves 40 years from today. So the idea is that we got together on Oct. 12, 2013 and we’re going to do the Grey Gardens show and then he kind of just kept me there and we’ve stayed in the theater, doing the show for 40 years, even though people stopped coming. And we kind of degraded into the characters. We did the show so much that we became just like Big Edie and Little Edie. So the show’s set in the future as if we’ve been doing this for 40 years and have warped into the actual characters. So we have a Big Edie/Little Edie dynamic, even though we’re still Peaches Christ and Jinkx Monsoon.

SFBG Have you ever done a longer form portrayal of Little Edie before, beyond “The Snatch Game” episode of Rupaul’s Drag Race?

JM This will be the longest I’ve been in character of Little Edie. I’ve played her a lot in cabaret shows and variety shows and stuff where one of my acts that night will be a whole like, Little Edie portion of the show but I’ve always dreamed of doing Grey Gardens the musical, and this is the closest I’ve gotten so far, so I’m really, really excited.

SFBG Did you realize during the filming of Drag Race that your portrayal of Little Edie would be such a sensation when it aired?

JM Absolutely not. I knew the queens on the show who didn’t who Little Edie was, they were going to have to eat their words later. I knew that fans of the show were going to know who Little Edie was. I think it was the Drew Barrymore movie that kind of revitalized the Beale sensation. So I became more confident about doing it on the show.

But I had no idea that the response America would have. It was so far spanning. The YouTube videos of Grey Gardens online went up several thousand views, and the DVD sales of the documentary went up; I got added to her Wikipedia page!

I mean, Little Edie has been a huge inspiration and gay icon for me since I was like, 17. And never did I think I’d get to be so closely associated with her in this way. It’s really a huge honor. It’s a little surreal but it’s wonderful. [Laughs].

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VANq1NDFgrc

SFBG What was it about her that so captivated you?

JM I just love how eccentric she is. I love people who have created their own way of doing things. And it’s like, I think I can just appreciate the world she built for herself and her circumstances and constraints.

I first was introduced to Grey Gardens through the musical, being a musical theater nerd myself. And I didn’t know the back-story behind it. But the music really got to me and made me love the story right away. And then when I watched the documentary I realized it was 10 times deeper than I even understood. She reminds me so much of me.

When I watch her in the documentary, I feel like that’s exactly what I did my whole life. When I feel like a loner and when I was keeping it to myself — I mean I knew my whole life that I was gay but I knew at an early age that it “wasn’t normal” so I kept it to myself. But at an early age I would play dress up and wrap blankets around me and I was always putting on little shows for the video cameras. She just reminded me so much of the kind of person I’ve always been in my private life.

SFBG So she was one of the people who influenced the character of Jinkx Monsoon — who were some other inspirations?

JM I based Jinkx Monsoon a lot on my mother. The whole idea with Jinkx Monsoon is that she’s a middle aged single mother, failed actress, and she has a gay son and he takes her out to the gay bars and she’s every gay boy’s favorite party mom. So I based it off Stifler’s mom played by Jennifer Coolidge and Peggy Bundy and my favorite female comedians have had a huge influence on my comedy and performance style: Sarah Silverman, Maria Bamford, Lucille Ball, Madeline Kahn, Carol Burnett. So it’s a huge range of different inspirations and then of course, my personal life experience.

SFBG What made you want to try out for Drag Race?

JM I’d been a fan of Drag Race and watched every episode religiously with my friends. Everyone who knew me insisted on me auditioning and every year I said I didn’t want to do it because I didn’t think it was the kind of environment, competition for a drag queen like me, a high-concept character actor like myself. And then when I saw Sharon Needles go on [Season 4], I felt like the show was started to become more all-inclusive and that the audience was starting to respect a wider variety of drag and different interpretations of the art form. So that was the motivation to audition for Season 5.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddvWmdbGNN0

SFBG How much creative editing was there, or were you really the underdog all through filming?

JM I’ve just always been kind of the odd one out in a room full of drag queens…I learned drag in an all-ages gay nightclub when I was like, 15 to about 20. I participated in the shows and did a lot of work at this nightclub in Portland, Oregon. So I knew a lot about traditional drag but when I went to college I kind of changed my focus and made it much more theater-oriented and character-oriented.

And so I spent a lot of time working in burlesque and cabaret and I hadn’t worked with drag queens for a long time when I went on the show. So I think the underdog aspect comes more from the fact that I was just..I didn’t know all the same lingo, I didn’t know how to interact with a lot of those girls, and I’m just kind of eccentric myself. I think some of the girls were irritated that the person they thought was too kooky was succeeding on the show.

SFBG How does it feel then to come out on top after all that, when such a part of your identity has been as an outsider?

JM For me, the coolest thing about it, and what I’ve found talking to my audience on the road, is that it just goes to show that you can’t discredit someone just because you don’t understand them.

I feel like the judges were always getting my jokes and my sense of humor and the work I was doing even when my fellow competitors didn’t see it as a threat. When I decided to do Little Edie, a lot of those girls thought that was going to be what sent me home because I was portraying a character that wears a headscarf instead of a wig and doing all these eccentric things and they didn’t understand it. But I was confident that the judges and audience would. And that was kind of the theme for the whole series. And I think it was cool for the fan base to see someone who was so ridiculed turn the tables on everyone and take them by surprise.

SFBG Where did that “water off a duck’s back” phrase that you repeated so often during judging come from?

JM One of my best friends in Seattle, her name is Robbie Turner, she’s another performer. I was working a lot in cabaret and burlesque but then I’d also do a couple of drag and variety shows, and when I was having trouble with other drags queens giving me a hard time because I was the “new girl” on the scene in Seattle and they were getting upset.

A lot of drag queens were kind of mean to me in Seattle because they felt like I came out of nowhere and started working everywhere. But I’d been doing drag as long as any of them [in Portland]. And so my friend Robbie Turner was always like, “just let it be water off a duck’s back.”

I never really made it my mantra until I was on that [Drag Race] runway and after the first two times of being ridiculed by Michelle Visage from head to toe, I just started saying it to myself because I had to remind myself: these are opinions and the best way to get ahead in this competition is to take in the critiques and incorporate them into my work so that I’m constantly evolving and growing.

So “water off a duck’s back” was less about ignoring what they were saying, it was more about taking it in and letting anything that felt like a personal attack or purely negative or negative thoughts it would generate in my own head — the self-doubt and insecurity — to let that all go and just take what I can from all the notes.

Return to Grey Gardens
With Jinkx Monsoon, Peaches Christ, Mink Stole
Sat/12, 3 and 8pm, $25
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
www.castrotheatre.com

Peaches and Jinkx will then bring the show to Seattle’s Harvard Exit Theater on Oct. 17 as part of the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.

Survival mode

Michael Redmond
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Survival mode

cheryl@sfbg.com.

FILM Eye of the tiger, baby. The fight for survival is a dominant theme this season at the movies, with astronaut Sandra Bullock grappling for her life in Gravity; lone sailor Robert Redford piloting a leaky boat in All Is Lost; and Tom Hanks battling Somali pirates in Captain Phillips. (More on that film — directed with trademark urgency by Paul Greengrass — in a moment.)

No movie stars appear in The Summit, a documentary from Irish filmmaker Nick Ryan, but that doesn’t lessen its power. In fact, this tale of a staggeringly tragic mountaineering accident — in which 11 people perished in a 48-hour period atop K2, the second-highest peak in the world — might be the most terrifying of the bunch. Along with the expected historical context, talking heads, and some stunning aerial footage, The Summit crafts its tale using a seamless blend of re-enactments and archival footage shot during the deadly 2008 expedition. Editor Ben Stark picked up two awards at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, and you can see why — it’s difficult at times to pick out what’s real and what’s not.

“Only 18 percent of the footage is reconstructed. I actually did the calculation, because it was coming up a lot,” Ryan explained on a recent visit to San Francisco. In this era of obsessive self-documentation, it’s not surprising that many of the climbers happened to be carrying cameras. “I was always aware, though, that perhaps once things started to go bad, there wasn’t going to be much footage there. People were going to be too busy surviving, and filming was probably the last thing on their minds. As a director, the reconstructions were a very conscious choice — I knew how complex the story was. The best method would be to tie [its fragments] together with a strong narrative structure.”

Accompanying Ryan to SF was Pemba Gyalje Sherpa, a professional climber who was a hero amid the chaos in 2008. Though K2 claimed the life of his teammate and close friend, charismatic Irishman Ger McDonnell, he didn’t hesitate when Ryan asked him to participate in the film.

“The documentary allowed us to show the public what happened on the mountain,” Sherpa explained. “But the reconstructions did bring up some difficult feelings.”

The Summit has been compared to Kevin Macdonald’s 2003 Touching the Void — a documentary enhanced by re-enactments that’s also about a controversial climb. Ryan said he saw the movie when it came out, but he’s avoided other obvious touchstones, like Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, about the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. “You don’t want to be influenced. But though they’re substantially different, I was always envious of the simplicity of Touching the Void as a story. The Summit was the polar opposite of that, because of its complexity.”

The Summit also delves into the more metaphysical aspects of climbing, including “summit fever” — sharing the startling statistic that for every four people who attempt K2, one will die. “As a non-climber, I was fascinated by that,” Ryan said. “Why would anyone take worse odds than Russian roulette?”

Those who do must understand the sport’s unwritten rule of self-preservation. “Morality is skewed when you get above the [high-altitude] death zone. The morally right thing to do isn’t necessarily the actual right thing to do,” Ryan said. “If you climb these mountains, I think you have to realize that when things go wrong you can only rely on yourself. You can’t expect anyone to help you — when you’re stuck there, you might as well be stuck on the moon. Nobody is coming to help you.”

Fortunately for cargo ship captain Richard Phillips, the Gulf of Aden is neither K2 nor the moon. In 2009, Phillips was taken hostage by pirates who’d hijacked the Kenya-bound Maersk Alabama. His subsequent rescue by Navy SEALs came after a standoff that ended in the death of three pirates; a fourth, Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, surrendered and is serving a hefty term in federal prison.

A year later, Phillips penned a book about his ordeal, and Hollywood pounced. Hanks is perfectly cast as Phillips, an everyman who runs a tight ship but displays an admirable ability to improvise under pressure.

“He was essentially trying anything to shake them off his path. [The pirates] let him hold onto his radio, and he was able to communicate with everybody else on the ship that way,” Hanks said, in town to promote the film with Greengrass and co-star Barkhad Abdi. “[Phillips] had so much knowledge as a merchant mariner. Prior in his career, he’d been in a hurricane in the middle of the Pacific, in which he was helpless — so he’d experienced a different type of terror at sea. With [the pirates], he had somebody he could interact with. It was a different type of fear and anxiety.”

Abdi, cast from an open call among Minneapolis’ large Somali community, plays pirate leader Muse. Captain Phillips focuses mostly on Hanks’ character, but it takes the time to emphasize that piracy is one of few grim career options for Somali youths. The first-time actor, who left Somalia at a young age, brings nuance to what could’ve been a one-note villain.

“I relate to that character, because that could have been me,” he said. “I was lucky enough to have parents that took me to another country, where I could be a better person. But what if my parents had been killed? I don’t excuse [Muse’s] actions, but I understand his motives.”

With a résumé full of intelligent, doc-inspired thrillers (2006’s United 93, 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum), director Greengrass has mastered the art of fast-paced action filmmaking. He’s especially known for his use of handheld cameras, and Captain Phillips is no exception.

“Ships rock around. How do you shoot on a lifeboat and keep it steady? It’s impossible. You want the images that you’re capturing to authentically arise out of the environment that you’re shooting in,” Greengrass explained, with a caveat. “The faster-moving your sequence, and the more intensely complicated your action is, it [becomes] imperative to render detail. Detail is what gives you acceleration and focus. You’ve got to be inside the action, and your filmmaking must unlock the inner dynamics in a way that’s clear. With this film, you’ve got a very simple, unbelievably dramatic, stark story. If we render it as authentically as we can, we’ll find out what it means — which you couldn’t have found from the news, because you’re looking at it from the outside. You can only find out by being in it.” *

 

THE SUMMIT and CAPTAIN PHILLIPS open Fri/11 in Bay Area theaters.

Friends in the shadows

Michael Redmond
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Friends in the shadows

rebecca@sfbg.com, joe@sfbg.com

It’s a simple fact of life: Money buys influence. But in San Francisco, despite strict sunshine laws to illuminate donations to city agencies and gifts to the regulators from the regulated, money still circulates in the shadows when it flows through the coffers of “Friends” in high places.

Major real estate developers, city contractors, and large corporations often lend financial support to San Francisco city departments, to the tune of millions of dollars every year. But the money doesn’t just flow directly to city agencies, where it’s easily tracked by disclosure laws. Instead, it goes through private nonprofits that sometimes label themselves as “Friends Of…” these departments.

They include Friends of City Planning, Friends of the Library, a foundation formerly known as Friends of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Friends of SF Environment, and Friends of San Francisco Animal Care and Control.

The Friends pay for programs the departments supposedly cannot cover on their own. Bond money can build a skyscraper, but sometimes not fill it with furniture. Agencies are barred by law from funding an employee mixer or a conference trip, so departments turn to their Friends to fill in the gaps. Adding bells and whistles to city websites, holding lunchtime lectures, hiring a grant writer — or, in the case of the Department of Public Health, bolstering health services for vulnerable populations — these are all examples of what gets funded.

The extra help can clearly be a good thing, but the lack of transparency around who’s giving money raises questions — especially if it’s a business gunning for a major contract or a permit to build a high-rise.

City agencies receive outside funding from a wide variety of sources. Sometimes grants are made by the federal government, or a well-established philanthropic foundation — and according to city law, gifts of $10,000 or higher must be approved by the Board of Supervisors. But in the case of organizations like Friends, which are created specifically to assist city government agencies, the original funders aren’t always identifiable. And the collaboration is frequently much closer, with city staff members serving on Friends boards in a few cases.

the circle of donations to "friends of" foundations

Friends board members told the Guardian that their partnership with government helps bolster city agencies in a time of increasing austerity, in service of the public good. But do the special relationships these influential insiders hold with high-ranking city officials come into play when awarding a contract, issuing a permit, making a hiring decision, or determining whether a developer’s request for a rule exemption should be honored? Without more transparency, it’s tough to tell.

City disclosure rules state that any gift to a department must be prominently displayed on that department’s website, along with any financial interest the donor has involving the city. But Friends and other outside funders are under no obligation to share their supporters’ names, much less financial ties, when they distribute grants. Meanwhile, the disclosure rules that are on the books seem to be frequently ignored, misunderstood, or unenforced, our investigation discovered.

How are donors repaid for their support? Consider the controversy earlier this year around Pet Food Express, which won approval in June for another store in the Marina District despite opposition from four locally owned pet stores in the area that fear competing with a large national chain. Pet Food Express won the unlikely support of the city’s Small Business Commissioners, some of whom reversed their 2009 positions opposing the chain’s previous application.

SF Animal Care and Control Director Rebecca Katz personally lobbied the commission to support Pet Food Express, at least partially because the company has donated pet supplies valued at $50,000 to $70,000 per year to the department. That’s a lot of money for a cash-strapped city department, but a pittance compared to the profits of an expanding national chain.

It’s moments of clarity like those, when the public can easily trace the line from donations to political influence, that show why disclosure is so crucial. But those moments are few and far between when trying to trace the funders of private foundations and Friends organizations, where deals often happen in the dark.

 

WHEN DEVELOPERS ARE FRIENDS

At the Merchant Exchange Building in May, a crowd of high-profile real-estate developers mixed and mingled with city planners, commissioners, and even Mayor Ed Lee, wine glasses in hand. Sources told the Guardian that most of the planning staff was present, and not all were happy about having ribbons and name tags affixed to their shirts, as if they were being auctioned off.

With around 500 in attendance, the event was an annual fundraiser hosted by the Friends of San Francisco City Planning, a nonprofit organization that accepts contributions of up to $2,500 per individual to lend a helping hand to the Planning Department. This year’s event was titled “Incubator Startups, New Jobs for the Future,” hinting that the development community shares the mayor’s affinity for new tech startups and the droves of high-salaried IT professionals they’ve attracted to the city.

Some Friends of City Planning board members are major real-estate developers who routinely seek approval for major construction projects. Others are former planning commissioners, or have a background in community advocacy.

Amid widespread concern about displacement, gentrification, and the overall character of San Francisco’s built environment, no city department has greater influence than Planning. An individual’s interpretation of the Planning Code can carry tremendous weight; it’s a series of small decisions that shape a project’s profits and the look and feel of San Francisco’s future. And with cranes dotting the city’s skyline and market-rate construction catering to the wealthy while middle income residents get priced out, the amount of capital flowing through the development sector these days is astonishing.

In this dizzy climate, there might seem to be something askew about affluent developers and land-use attorneys rubbing elbows with city regulators, all eager to pass the hat for the Planning Department. Whiff of impropriety or no, the fundraiser appears to be totally legal.

“We aren’t violating the law — that I know,” Friends of City Planning Chair Dennis Antenore told the Guardian. “We’ve had legal advice on that for years.”

There is close collaboration between Friends of San Francisco City Planning and the Planning Department — a partnership so entrenched that it’s almost as if the nonprofit is an unofficial, private-sector branch of the agency.

“We are certainly thankful and appreciative,” Planning spokesperson Joanna Linsangan told the Guardian. “They’ve helped us for many, many years.” The additional funding is needed, she said, because “there isn’t a lot of wiggle room” in the departmental budget.

Each year, Planning Director John Rahaim submits a wish list to the Friends, outlining projects he wants funding for. This year, he requested $122,000 for a variety of initiatives, including training support to help planners assess proposals for formula retail (read: chain stores). That’s a hot-button issue lately, and one that shows how seemingly small decisions by planners can have big impacts.

When the department’s zoning administrator ruled that Jack Spade, a high-end clothing chain that opened up in the old Adobe Books location on 16th Street, wasn’t considered formula retail and therefore didn’t need a conditional use permit, neither widespread community outrage nor a majority vote by the Board of Appeals could reverse that flawed decision. It was a similar story with the Planning Commission’s Oct. 3 approval of the 555 Fulton mixed use project, where Planning Department support for exempting the grocery store for the area’s formula retail ban made it happen, to the delight of that developer.

Even though the planning director makes specific funding requests each year to the Friends and pitches the projects in person at their meetings — and the Friends publishes a list of the grants it awards to the department online — the Planning Department is not reporting those gifts to the Board of Supervisors.

“I confirm that the Planning Department did not receive any gifts,” Finance and IT Manager Keith DeMartini wrote in official gift reports submitted to the Board of Supervisors for the years 2011-12 and 2012-13. Those reports were sent to the board on Oct. 7 and Oct. 4, respectively, well after the July filing deadline and after the Guardian requested the missing reports.

The Friends typically funds two-thirds of the requests, said board member Alec Bash, totaling around $80,000 a year. In 2012, the Friends awarded a $25,000 grant to make the department’s new online permit-tracking system more user-friendly, making life a lot easier for developers.

When asked what safeguards are in place to prevent undue influence when the director is soliciting funding from a nonprofit partially controlled by developers, Linsangan responded, “those are two very separate things. One does not influence the other.”

She stated repeatedly that planners are not privy to information about individual contributors — but the fundraisers are organized by a board that includes identifiable developers, and anyone who attends can plainly see the donors in attendance. Nevertheless, Linsangan insisted that planners would not be swayed by this special relationship, saying, “That’s simply not the way we do things around here. We do things according to the Planning Code.”

But as the ruling on Jack Spade shows, as well as countless rulings by planners on whether a project is categorically exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act, interpreting the codes can involve considerable discretion.

The public can’t review a list of who wrote checks to the Friends of San Francisco City Planning for the May fundraiser. Since the organization waits a year between collecting the money and disbursing grants, donors stay shielded from required annual disclosures in tax filings.

But Antenore says the system was established with the public interest in mind. “We don’t reveal the contributors, because we don’t want anybody to have increased influence by a donation,” he insisted. Bash echoed this idea, saying the delay was to “allow for some breathing room.”

Unlike some of his fellow board members from the high-end development sector, Antenore has a history of being aligned with neighborhood interests on planning issues, helping author a 1986 ballot measure limiting downtown high-rise development. He emphasized that the developers on the Friends board are balanced out by more civic-minded individuals.

Still, developers who regularly submit permit applications for major construction projects sit on the Friends board. Among them are Larry Nibbi, a partial owner of Nibbi Bros.; Clark Manus, CEO of Heller Manus Architects; and Oz Erikson, CEO of the Emerald Fund development firm.

“We’re not making use of [the funding] in a way that benefits these people,” Antenore said. “I wouldn’t do this if I thought otherwise. I have been careful to maintain the integrity of this organization.” The money is meant to facilitate better planning, he added. “I don’t think there’s any conspiracy,” he said. “We’re not financing anything evil.”

Both the Planning Department and its Friends dismissed the idea that the donations could open the door to favoritism or undue influence. So why isn’t the department reporting gifts it receives from the Friends to the Board of Supervisors, or disclosing them on its website, as required by city law?

According to a 2008 City Attorney memo on reporting gifts to city departments, when an agency receives a gift of $100 or more, it “must report the gift in a public record and on the department’s website. The public disclosure must include the name of the donor(s) and the amount of the gift [and] a statement as to any financial interest the contributor has involving the city.”

John St. Croix, director of the San Francisco Ethics Commission, confirmed that’s the current standard, telling us, “The actual disclosure should be on the website of the department that received the gift.”

Linsangan said records of the gifts are indeed available — listed as “grants” in the department’s Annual Report. But while the 2011-12 report lists grants from sources such as the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency, there was no mention of Friends of City Planning.

The memo also says any gift of $10,000 and above must first be approved by a resolution of the Board of Supervisors. But last year, when the Friends provided $25,000 to upgrade the permit-tracking system, it wasn’t sanctioned by a board resolution. Asked why, Linsangan made it clear that she was not aware of any such requirement.

As is common, when it comes to adhering to disclosure laws, confusion abounds. And sometimes, only sometimes, politicos get caught.

 

READING UP ON DISCLOSURE LAWS

When the head of a city agency fails to report gifts totaling $130,000, how much do you think he is fined?

City Librarian Luis Herrera failed to report receiving that amount in gifts and he was fined exactly $600 by the California Fair Political Practices Commission on Sept. 19. Specifically, Herrera had to file a form 700 with the FPPC to state the gifts he received. From 2008-2010, the forms he turned in had the “no reportable interests” box checked.

The money was used in what he calls the City Librarian’s Fund, which is the money he keeps on hand to pay for office parties and giving honorariums to poets and speakers who perform at the library’s branches, money that wasn’t disclosed on the very forms designed for reporting it.

There are two stories of how the fine came about. Longtime library advocate James Chaffee said that it was the result of a complaint he filed with the FPPC in April, and indeed, he sought and obtained many public documents revealing the money trail. San Francisco Public Library spokesperson Michelle Jeffers disagreed, saying that the fine was the result of an ongoing conversation with the FPPC to figure how exactly to file the gifts appropriately.

“The law wasn’t clear around these forms and it wasn’t clear if he had to report them,” she told the Guardian. “For amending the reports you have to pay a $200 fine for every year it was proposed. We keep scrupulous records on every pizza party we have.”

When government officials receive “gift of cash or goods,” they must report them annually in statements of economic interest, known as a Form 700, to the city Controller’s Office. The form is kind of a running tally of who is receiving gifts from whom, a way for the public to track money’s influence in government.

The gifts came from the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, another nonprofit that bolsters city agency funding. Now Herrera has to list the $130,000 gifts from fiscal years 2008-09 and 2009-10 on his website.

What exactly does that accomplish? As it turns out, not a whole lot.

City Administrative Code 67.29-6 defines the reporting of gifts to city departments, and one of those requirements is to make a statement of “any financial interest the contributor has involving the city.” Now that Herrera lists the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library as donors on the department website, the statement of financial interest by the friends group is this: “none.”

There are myriad donors to the Friends of the SFPL, and the group doesn’t have to state the economic interests of its donors, or even mention who its donors are. The code requires gifts be reported to the controller, and the deputy city controller told us this doesn’t apply to the “friends of” organizations, or any nonprofit foundation arms of city departments.

“If gifts are made to a department, yes, they have to disclose, so people don’t get preferential interest in getting city contracts,” Deputy Controller Monique Zmuda told us. “I know it’s a fine line. The foundations don’t provide us with anything.”

Friends of the SFPL doesn’t provide money just for pizza parties. A breakdown of a funding request from the library to its Friends shows requests up to $750,000 to advertise the library on Muni and in newspapers, funding for permanent exhibits, and the City Librarian’s personal fund. That’s just the money it gives to the library. Other monies are spent directly on activities supporting the library.

As Jeffers pointed out to the Guardian, the money isn’t spent on “trips to Tahiti.” Friends of the SPL do good city works, from a neighborhood photo project in the Bayview branch library to providing books for children. But the question is: Who’s buying that goodwill and why?

The millions of dollars in donations made to the Friends of the SFPL don’t need to be approved by the Board of Supervisors, like gifts to departments do. They’re not checked for conflicts of interest or financial interest by any governmental body. Donors give and the Friends of SFPL spend freely, financial interest or not.

When our research for this story began, no financial statements were available of the Friends of the SFPL website. After a few days of inquiries, the most recent year’s financial statements from 2011-12 were posted to the website.

Ultimately, the San Francisco Public Library is one of the smaller city departments, with an annual budget that hovers around $86 million. The Department of Public Health is a much bigger beast, with a 2011-12 budget of around $1.5 billion.

One of its main foundations, the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation, is also one of the largest nonprofits that supplements city spending. In many ways, it could be described as the model of disclosure for city foundations, although its disclosures are not by law, but by choice.

 

FOUNDATION OF FRIENDS

The Department of Public Health relies on a few entities that fundraise on its behalf: the San Francisco Public Health Foundation, the Friends of Laguna Honda Hospital, and the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation.

“They’re private nonprofit entities that are separate from the department,” CFO Greg Wagner told us. “But their roles are to support the department in its efforts.” He cited examples such as sending its staff to conferences or hosting meetings, “things that we don’t have the budget for or don’t have the staff or resources.”

The lion’s share of the DPH’s gifts are funneled through the SFGHF. Unlike many of the assorted Friends groups or foundations that support city services, the SFGHF extensively reports the sources of its $5 million in donations. The donors include a veritable who’s who of San Francisco: the Giants, Sutter Health, Xerox, Pacific Union, and Kohl’s all donated between $1,000 and $10,000 in the past two years.

But the largest gifts to the SFGHF came from Kaiser Permanente, and its financial interests in the city run deep. Kaiser came into the city’s crosshairs in July, when the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution calling on Kaiser to disclose its pricing model after a sudden, unexplained increase in health care costs for city employees. Kaiser holds a $323 million city contract to provide health coverage, and supervisors took the healthcare giant to task for failing to produce data to back up its rate hikes.

In the meantime, Kaiser has also been a generous donor. It contributed $364,950 toward SFGHF and another $25,000 to SFPHF in fiscal year 2011-12.

The funding from Kaiser and a host of other contributors — which include Chevron, Intel, Genentech, Macy’s, Wells Fargo (another city contractor), and a pharmaceutical company called Vertex — does support needed programs. They include research into the health of marginalized communities, services through Project Homeless Connect, screening for HIV, and immunization shots for travelers.

But because DPH doesn’t count much of this support as “gifts” formally received by the city, it isn’t subject to prior approval by the Board of Supervisors, or posted on the department’s website along with the contributors’ financial interests. Major contributions are disclosed in a report to the Health Commission, something Wagner described as a voluntary gesture in response to commissioners’ requests.

“Most gifts to foundations are donations to a nonprofit and do not come through the city or DPH at all,” he noted.

This distance is maintained on paper despite close collaboration with the department. In the case of Project Homeless Connect, a program that holds a bimonthly event to aid the homeless, it supports programs headquartered in city facilities. Penny Eardley, executive director of SFPHF— which used to be called Friends of San Francisco Public Health — noted that her organization occasionally makes grants or seeks funding in response to department requests. And Deputy Director of Health Colleen Chawla is a foundation board member. It’s almost like these foundations are extensions of the department, except they’re not.

SFPHF also earns revenue as a city contractor. When DPH received a grant from the Centers for Disease Control, it contracted with SFPHF to manage subcontracts with about a dozen community-based organizations.

The web gets even more tangled. The president of SFPHF is Randy Wittorp — who’s also Director of Public Affairs for Kaiser Permanente’s San Francisco Service Area. It’s a similar story with SFGHF, whose board includes several General Hospital administrators, including CEO Susan Currin.

Former Health Commissioner James Illig said people shouldn’t worry, that hospital the staff would never direct foundation funds to pet projects or mishandle funds. “They maintain a separation and a firewall,” he said, for example noting, “Sue Currin is not directing funds to her own hospital.”

But he did admit that since SFGHF’s minutes are not public documents, that “raises a few concerns,” arguing the public should be able to inspect financial documents to decide if the foundations are directing funds lawfully to city departments.

Even when the public by law has a right to access financial records of a city department, rooting out corruption can be like pushing a boulder up a San Francisco hill.

 

FROM PATIENTS TO PARTIES

In 2010 and 2011, Laguna Honda Hospital administrators and staff used money from the hospital’s patient gift fund to throw a party. And then they spent it on airfare. And then they gave laser-engraved pedometers to the staff. All told, they spent nearly $350,000 meant for the dying and the infirm, nearly half of the total funds.

The incident was big, messy, and out in the public eye. It was an all-too-rare glimpse into the shady use of public funds by public officials. But when hospital staff members Dr. Derek Kerr and Dr. Maria Rivero blew the whistle on Laguna Honda’s misuse of patient funds in 2010, they were drummed out of their jobs.

Eventually litigation on behalf of the whistleblowers and their complaints of corruption were found to have merit.

Kerr’s vindication came at a meeting of the Health Commission in April 2013. In the packed City Hall meeting room, the public watched as Laguna Honda Executive Director Mivic Hirose read her apology to Kerr and Rivero aloud, even announcing a plaque in Kerr’s honor.

“The hospital will install the plaque in the South 3 Hospice,” she read, stiltedly, from a written statement, surrounded by microphones at the podium. “The plaque will say: In recognition of Derek Kerr MD of his contributions to the Laguna Honda’s hospice and palliative care program 1989-2010.”

Kerr received a settlement of $750,000 and something more important: His good name cleared.

But that conflict of interest was rooted out only after years of litigation that revealed the financial abuse through legal discovery of the department’s documents — documents that should’ve been public in the first place. ABC 7’s I-Team broke the story and did much of the reporting at the time, otherwise the entire affair may have been swept under the rug.

The misuse of funds was only brought to light with the revelation of public documents — revelations not possible with most Friends groups. The Laguna Honda Hospital Foundation has also had financial dealings with potential conflicts and a lack of transparency.

The now-defunct LHHF’s board chair, former City Attorney Louise Renne, made an interesting choice for her vice chair after she formed the nonprofit in 2003. Derek Parker was vice chair of the LHHF while simultaneously heading architecture firm Anshen-Allen, with a $585 million city contract to rebuild the hospital.

So he was not only rebuilding Laguna Honda under city contract, but soliciting and spending donations meant to supplement his project. Renne wrote to the Health Commission in December 2011 that LHHF’s purpose was to manage over $15 million in donations meant to furnish the hospital with beds, chairs, and other necessities. Eventually, then-Mayor Willie Brown found funding for the hospital, reducing the foundation’s role.

In a phone interview with the Guardian, Renne said the goals of the LHHF were only ever to furnish the newly christened hospital. “Our purpose was to fill the void, if you will, for what the city and its services could not do,” she said.

But in her letter, Renne advocated for LHHF to take an active role in fundraising for the hospital for years to come. “Today, the members of the Board of Directors of the Foundation continue to assist the hospital in various phases of its new projects and operations with projects approved by the City and/or the hospital administration,” she wrote to the Health Commission.

And Parker would have potentially managed millions of dollars flowing through donations for countless other hospital projects, while heading an architectural firm with contracts to build in San Francisco. We were unable to reach Parker for comment.

“I never saw Derek use his position as an architect or position for any political gain, I never saw it,” Renne told us. But no one else would see it either, because organizations like the now closed Laguna Honda Hospital Foundation operate without public oversight.

The Health Commission itself even noted this in its March 2012 meeting, the minutes describing then-commissioner James Illig as critiquing the foundation for not being open about its source of funding.

“Commissioner Illig thanks Ms. Renne and Mr. Parker for coming to the Commission,” the minutes read. “Because (LHHF) is a project of Community Initiatives, a fiscal sponsor for nonprofits, it is not possible to find basic financial information about the Foundation or its activities.”

Divided interests on hospital board

Due to a quirk of her foundation being under the “umbrella” of a separate entity, Community Initiatives, Illig was never able to even get the LHHF’s IRS forms, he told us. “We tried to get information and reports, and the Community Initiatives [Form] 990 was giant,” Illig said. “It didn’t separate anything out.”

Illig told us that it made sense to have Parker on the board because he is monied and well connected, making it easier to solicit donations. But insiders close to the board told us that Parker’s position may have made it easier to swing getting other contracts for his firm.

Parker got another city contract building the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital at Mission Bay, slated to open in 2015. No doubt his firm got the job partly due to his reputation as pioneering architecture that leads to healthy patient outcomes — but then again, the board he served on also approved donations to research at UCSF.

Laguna Honda Hospital Foundation may now be defunct, but it serves to illustrate the lack of controls and oversight of the foundations beyond even gift disclosure.

 

OFF THE BOOKS

It might be characterized as a web of influence, cronyism, or just the way business is done. But is there something improper about all of this?

Private funding often represents a needed boost that allows for important work to take place beyond what could happen under ordinary budgeting. At the same time, it smacks of privatization. While departments and funders point to lean times in the public sector to justify the need for this help, the funding continues to flow whether it’s a good year or a bad year for city government. And at the end of the day, the most glaring issue of all seems to be the lack of transparency.

Are city departments ever tempted to bend the rules to lend a little help to their Friends? As long as the funding is in the dark, the public has no way of knowing.

Ethics chief St. Croix told us his office lacks the resources to visit every city website and check up on whether departments are following the disclosure rules. “If someone brought it to my attention that a department received a gift and didn’t post it [on the website],” he said, “we would look into it.”

But if the watchdogs need watchdogs, citizens who can’t even review documents that should be publicly available, then these quasi-governmental functions and the people who fund them will remain in the shadows.  

Danielle Parenteau contributed to this report.  

ADDENDUM  

When city funders operate in the dark, one of the best ways to learn about corrupt influence, misuse of funds, and other transgressions is from whistleblowers. If you have a tip for us, send us snail mail at SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN, 225 Bush, 17th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94104. Or email us at news@sfbg.com. Just make sure not to use an email address provided by your workplace, which is less secure.

Quiet powerful

Michael Redmond
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1
Quiet powerful

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE Considering its name — Hush — it should have come as no surprise that Joe Goode’s latest look at the ultimate loneliness that infects us all, whether imposed or self-inflicted, is a very quiet piece. Being hushed is something we learn as babies, at the family table, in school, and at the movies. But more seriously, it becomes an essential tool for survival for those who may be perceived as “different.”

At barely an hour, Hush is another variation on a theme that has threaded itself through Goode’s works since the beginning. Unfortunately, unless you are a romantic or naïve, being on the outside happens to be a quintessential human condition. Goode approaches it from the particular perspective of a gay man. It’s his genius that he manages to frequently mine that driving concern for new and convincing theatrical expressions — a quality that distinguishes art from advocacy.

Hush feels like chamber music. It’s condensed, tight, and weaves a spell like a spider’s web. The tone is subdued, and there’s a film noir quality to Erik Flatmo’s set, with its half-empty bar. You can practically smell stale beer. Foley artist Sudhu Tewari’s brilliant sound effects suffuse this environment with a hyper-real vibe — somewhere between a comic strip and the proverbial nails on a chalkboard board.

While Goode doesn’t perform himself, you can hear him in the language for his characters, which is drawn from interviews with him (a practice he already used in last year’s When We Fall Apart). His own voice comes through most explicitly in Hush’s songs, some of whose lyrics were printed in the program. I do wish we had been given access to all of them.

But Hush can also feel like a musical in which dance stays subsidiary to other theatrical aspects. At its strongest, it takes over in ways that words cannot.

The piece focuses on two characters, portrayed by Melecio Estrella as a “sissy boy,” and Damara Vita Ganley, as a woman whose “body got touched on places I didn’t want to.” Neither of these creations accept victimhood. They refuse to be hushed. Both performers are accomplished actor-dancers who were a joy to watch every second they were on stage, and they happen to also be the company’s best singers. At first Estrella is hardly able to get a sound out in the bar’s open mic, but he learns quickly. Finally, he stands up to his bullying tormentors and spits out a lengthy scholarly disquisition on sexuality and asexuality that sounded like it was straight out of an academic paper. I have no idea whether this was science or imagination, but Estrella was magnificent in a feat of rhetoric that could not be ignored and ultimately empowered him.

Putting a rape scene on stage is probably the most daring thing Goode has done. I dreaded the prospect. On her way home — the road she follows looks like something out of The Wizard of Oz — Ganley drops her purse, stops to pick up a flower (a sentimental touch), and is attacked by three hooded individuals. In the choreography, performed in silence if I remember correctly, she gets lifted, pulled, yanked, and stretched for a considerable amount of time. In the end she picks up her purse and walks home, her heels clacking in the night. Later on, the laconic give-and-takes between her and Andrew Ward, who tries to help, beautifully suggests a relationship based on mutual respect.

Elsewhere, a gorgeous duet between Estrella and Felipe Barrueto-Cabello called up an increasingly passionate love affair. It started out with almost accidental touches and withdrawals — Barrueto-Cabello is a master of reticence — but gradually built into a tempestuous encounter when, the men having stripped off their undershirts, you couldn’t quite tell any more who was who.

If I have one regret about Hush is that the stories of the other characters were not more developed: Jessica Swanson as the driven career woman, Ward’s sympathetic bartender-listener, Alexander Zendzian’s vegetable lover, and Barrueto-Cabello’s moonstruck lover. The scene between the careerist Swanson and the pickle-making Zendzian — thank you, sound designer Tewari — sparkled with humor, but it just was too cartoonish to become emotionally resonant.

Hush ends with a rousing, operatic finale, a song-and-dance number in which the cast proclaimed its determination to be silenced no longer. No question that’s a welcome thought — but given the complexities of the issues involved, it also felt a little too much like Broadway. *

HUSH

Thu/3-Fri/4, 8pm; Sat/5, 7 and 9pm, $15-$70

Z Space

450 Florida, SF

www.joegoode.org

 

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