Events Archives — Page 97 of 114 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Lethal force

January 5, 2009

Editors note: This story ran Dec. 12, 1992

The autumn air was crisp and clear in Hayward on the night the kid called Glasstop took a shotgun blast in the back of the head and died for the theft of a $60 radio.

It was just before 8 p.m., on Sunday, Nov. 15. The lights were on in the parking lot outside the Hayward BART station, where a six-car southbound train had arrived a few minutes earlier. About 50 passengers had gotten off, and some were still straggling into cars or waiting around for the next AC Transit bus.

Glasstop, a 19-year-old warehouse worker from Union City whose legal name was Jerrold Cornelius Hall, had ridden the train from Bayfair, one stop north, along with John Henry Owens, a 20-year-old unemployed custodian who lived in Oakland. The two young African American men were standing at the bus stop, not far from the station entrance, when Officer Fred Crabtree pulled into the parking lot in a BART police cruiser.

Crabtree was a white 16-year veteran of the transit police agency and a member of its elite Canine Corps. His partner was a highly trained German shepherd imported from a special obedience school in Germany. The dog trotted at Crabtree’s side as he approached Owens and Hall. The officer carried a loaded 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.

Crabtree was responding to a report of an armed robbery: Halfway between Bayfair and Hayward, a passenger had told the train operator that two black men had taken his Walkman personal stereo. The passenger said one of the robbers had a gun and described what they looked like; the trainman passed on the message, and the BART dispatcher passed it on again. Owens and Hall matched the third-hand description that came over Crabtree’s radio.

Within a matter of minutes, Hall was lying in a pool of his own blood, Owens was in handcuffs, and the parking lot was a mass of sirens and flashing red lights. Hall was pronounced dead shortly after midnight at Eden Hospital; Owens is still in the Alameda County jail. The police never turned up a gun.

And the man who reported the robbery disappeared without leaving his name.

That’s about all BART officials will say about the incident. They’ve clamped on a lid of secrecy that defies most normal local police procedures and violates the California Public Records Act. The San Francisco newspapers have almost entirely ignored the shooting, and there’s been little reaction from the East Bay community.

But an extensive Bay Guardian investigation has turned up a long list of troubling questions about the death of Jerrold Hall – and a long list of serious problems in an agency that has some of the most sweeping police powers in California, and some of the least civilian oversight.

Our investigation, based on a dozen interviews, a review of public records, and more than 50 pages of unreleased internal documents from the BART police and other local authorities, shows:

Officer Crabtree violated one of the most basic rules of modern law enforcement – and his own department’s written policy – when he fired a warning shot toward the suspect, potentially endangering the lives of passersby in the busy urban area. The nine .33-caliber pellets from that shotgun cartridge wound up in the side of a tree, about 4-1/2 feet above the ground.

BART’s own internal documents contradict the official claim that Hall was attacking or threatening Crabtree at the time of the shooting. Statements filed by several witnesses, and at least two BART police officers, suggest that Hall was more than 10 feet from the officer when the shots were fired, and was walking away. Medical records obtained by the Bay Guardian show that he was shot in the back of the head.

The shooting appears to violate nearly every modern police standard on the use of deadly force. In fact, the latest BART Police Operational Directive, dated July 22, 1987, states that guns may be fired only to prevent a suspect from killing or wounding another person, or to stop a suspected felon who is presumed to be armed and dangerous from fleeing and escaping arrest. But BART internal documents and other records obtained by the Bay Guardian provide little evidence to suggest that Hall fit either category.

Nevertheless, on Dec. 4, a BART Firearms Review Board, consisting entirely of BART police officers appointed by the chief, determined that the “use of lethal force in this instance was justified.” BART officials refuse to release the report or comment further on the findings.

The fact that Crabtree fired a gun to subdue Hall seems to undermine one of BART’s central reasons for the use of trained attack dogs. The dogs, BART officials say, are supposed to support officers in situations just like the one in question – to intimidate, and if necessary, pursue and immobilize a suspect when other backup isn’t available, and to attack immediately if an officer is under assault. Some law-enforcement experts, and many civil-rights advocates, question the use of dogs for that purpose – but all those contacted by the Bay Guardian agreed it was rather curious that Crabtree’s canine partner sat out this whole bloody incident.

Officer Crabtree is on administrative leave, with pay, pending the final outcome of an internal investigation. Owens is still facing robbery charges, despite the lack of a victim willing to testify against him. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for this week.

But the problems with the BART police go far beyond the arrest of John Owens and the death of Jerrold Hall. In fact, the Bay Guardian has learned:

BART’s Internal Affairs Division, which reviews citizen complaints against BART police officers, has investigated 162 cases in the past five years, 39 of them involving excessive use of force – and not a single charge was sustained. Law-enforcement observers say that’s an astonishing statistic, one that casts severe doubt on the department’s ability to control police abuse.

“I’ve never heard of any department with a rate of zero sustained complaints,” said John Crew, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Police Practices Project. “I can’t believe that none of those people had a single valid case.”

The BART Police Department has a written procedure for civilians filing complaints. A 1991 directive signed by Chief Harold Taylor states that every department employee should accept complaints by mail, by phone, or in person, and refer them to the watch commander or the Internal Affairs Division. But there’s nothing posted in any BART train or station to tell the public about the complaint process, no procedure for appealing a Police Department decision to a civilian review agency, and not much visible effort to inform BART employees about how to handle complaints.

The BART police use dogs for purposes inconsistent with many modern law-enforcement guidelines. Most local police agencies employ canines primarily to sniff out bombs and narcotics, or to search for dangerous suspects hidden in dark, confined areas. Berkeley has banned police dogs altogether. The BART police dogs are not trained to sniff out bombs or drugs, and are rarely involved in searches; the officers use the animals as standard backup, to intimidate and apprehend suspects in even fairly routine arrests.

The elected BART Board of Directors has demonstrated virtually no effective control over the BART police, and most board members don’t seem to know or care what their armed employees are doing with those badges, dogs, and guns.

None of the board members contacted by the Bay Guardian could even guess how many citizen complaints had been filed against the BART police since 1988, or what the outcome of the cases had been. None could explain the complaint procedure, or identify the person responsible for supervising internal investigations. Most didn’t know how the police chief was hired, or to whom he reported; some board members didn’t even know his name.

Several years ago, I asked Art Shartsis, a downtown lawyer who was then the BART Board president, if he knew who ran the BART police. His answer was unusually blunt, but entirely typical of the attitude board members show toward the force.

“I don’t know,” he told me. “I guess we must have a chief.”

A DAY AT THE MALL

Jerrold Hall was the son of Alameda Fire Department Captain Cornelius Hall, a retired Navy Reserve officer who lives with his wife, Rose and two other sons in a comfortable middle-class home in suburban Union City. Both of Jerrold’s brothers are in college, earning top grades; his aunt is the first black woman ever to serve on the Board of Trustees of Auburn University.

Jerrold, who graduated from high school in 1991 and was living with his parents, “had some problems, like a lot of kids these days,” his father told me. “But we hoped he’d outgrow them. He was a good kid, never into guns or killing or any of that sort of thing.”

On Sunday, Nov. 15, at about 2 in the afternoon, Hall met Owens at the Eastmont Mall in Oakland. According to a sworn statement Owens gave to the police, the two drank a few beers and part of a small bottle of E&J Brandy. Early in the evening, Hill invited Owens to his home, and they left the mall on an AC Transit bus to catch a BART train for Union City.

According to Owens and several other witnesses, Owens and Hill encountered a black man in his late 30s on board the train, and the man asked them if they wanted to buy one of the Walkmans he was carrying in a bag. When first questioned by police, at about 1:35 a.m., Owens said he declined the offer, went to another train car “where more girls were,” and met up with Hall again a few minutes later. At about 4:30 a.m., he made another statement, acknowledging that he was present when the friend he called “Glasstop” told the would-be salesman, “give me your Walkman.”

Several other witnesses on the train agreed that Hall had confronted the man, and walked away with a bag. None, including Owens, saw a gun.

However, the victim of what the BART police still call an “armed robbery” called the train operator on the intercom and said two men with a gun had stolen his Walkman. The operator, who never saw Hall or Owens, reported the incident, and it was relayed to BART police, who instructed the trainman to stop in Hayward, and, after a brief delay, to open the train doors. Hall and Owens left with about 50 others; according to the station attendant, they jumped the emergency gate and walked into the parking lot.

The police were able to find several eyewitnesses to the alleged robbery; however, other than Owens and Crabtree, who was the only police officer on the scene at the time, the internal report does not identify a single witness who actually saw the shooting.

An official Dec. 7 statement, written by BART Police Chief Harold Taylor at the request of the Bay Guardian and reviewed by BART’s legal department, notes that “witnesses disagreed as to the precise sequence of the next events.”

The internal BART police documents obtained by the Bay Guardian contain no formal statement or direct quotation from Crabtree; he apparently filed no written report. The reports were all prepared by other officers, who arrived at the scene after the shooting.

According to those reports, filed shortly after the incident, Crabtree approached Hall and Owens, who were standing near a bench in the parking lot’s bus-stop area, and ordered them to lie on the ground with their hands over their heads. Owens complied; Hall did not.

Hall, the reports state, “confronted and challenged Officer Crabtree, attempting to take Officer Crabtree’s shotgun from him at one point.” There is no mention of what the dog, who was trained to bite anyone who attacked Officer Crabtree, was doing at the time. BART officials refuse to elaborate, saying the incident is still under investigation.

However, one Bay Area dog trainer, who has trained police dogs, said it’s highly unlikely that a German shepherd of the sort imported by the BART police (see sidebar) would fail to respond in such a situation. “Dogs are very loyal and protective,” the trainer, who asked not to be identified, told the Bay Guardian. “These dogs are carefully bred and taught to attack anyone who physically endangers their human handler. Sometimes they overreact; they very rarely underreact.”

TO TAKE A LIFE

Owens told the police he “did not see the cop and Glasstop get into any physical fighting. They did not touch. They were just arguing.” After a few moments, Owens said, “Glasstop walked over to me and said we could go. So we started to walk away.”

Whatever the nature of the confrontation between Hall and Officer Crabtree, the police report and witness statements leave very little doubt that it ended with Hall walking away – and, as the internal police report states, “with Officer Crabtree retaining the shotgun.”

It’s also clear that some time, perhaps as much a minute or two, passed between the initial clash and the shooting – more than enough time for Hall and Owens to start walking away. During that period, the documents suggest, the passenger who had initially reported the robbery – and had not made any contact yet with police – suddenly ran out into the parking lot, pointed toward Hall and Owens and shouted, “That’s them.” Then the passenger fled.

Crabtree then ordered the two young men to halt again – and at that point, the statements get very fuzzy.

According to the official statement released Dec. 7 by BART, Crabtree “summoned his canine, but Hall resisted the dog.” A medical report filed by Alameda County emergency technicians who examined Hall after the shooting includes no mention of any dog bites or wounds of any sort other than those caused by the shotgun. A copy of the report, which has not been released, was obtained by the Bay Guardian.

Crabtree, the official BART statement continues, “fired a warning shot at a nearby tree. Hall continued to move toward the other suspect, and at one point turned and assumed a position which concealed his hands.”

The internal police report, however, states that Owens was the one who was “failing to keep his hands in view,” and who, in what the report described as “an effort to get rid of the evidence [Walkman],” put his hands into his pants pockets. At that point, the report states, Crabtree “used deadly force on suspect Hall.”

Owens said he responded immediately to the second command to halt, but that Hall kept walking away. When Owens heard the shots, he turned around, “and my partner was lying face down…. Then I heard all the cops coming with sirens.”

In fact, within a matter of minutes, at least three more BART police cars and a backup unit from the Hayward Police Department had arrived on the scene. Even if Hall, who by all accounts was walking, not running, had been attempting to “flee,” it’s unlikely he would have been able to get far.

And after an extensive search of the train, the tracks, the station, the parking lot, and everything else in the vicinity, the BART police acknowledge they were unable to find a gun.

Although the BART police initially insisted that Hall had been shot in the chest, and most of the news reports carried that statement unchallenged, even BART now admits that the shot struck the young man in the back of his head. His father, Cornelius Hall, never had any doubt.

“I’m a trained emergency medical technician,” he told the Bay Guardian. “I was in the hospital room when the nurse was washing down the body. I know what an entrance wound looks like, and my son was shot in the back.”

In Modern Police Firearms, a textbook on law-enforcement procedures, Professor Allen P. Bristow of California State University, Los Angeles, writes that deadly force should be used to stop a fleeing felon only when “he cannot be contained or captured” through other means. Further, Bristow notes, an officer considering deadly force should ask the following question:

“Is the crime this suspect is committing, or are the consequences of his possible escape, serious enough to justify my taking his life or endangering the lives of bystanders?”

The San Francisco Police Department guidelines on deadly force embody some of that same philosophy. “Officers shall exhaust all other reasonable means of apprehension and control before resorting to the use of firearms,” the Aug. 24, 1984, policy states. Officers are allowed to shoot at a dangerous, fleeing felony suspect “only after all other reasonable means of apprehension and control have been exhausted.”

San Francisco, like almost every other police agency in the Bay Area, and most in the country, strictly prohibits warning shots. So does BART: “Discharging of firearms [is] not allowable as a warning,” BART’s official weapons policy states.

The BART police are a bit more lenient than San Francisco on the use of deadly force to stop fleeing suspects. The officer must only believe that “the suspect is likely to continue to threaten death or serious bodily harm to another human being,” according to BART’s July 22, 1987, operational directive. Yet the directive also states that a firearm may not be used “when the officer has reason to believe … that the discharge may endanger the lives of passersby, or other persons not involved in the crime, and the officer’s life, or that of another person, is not in imminent danger.”

THE OPEN RANGE

Armed guards have patrolled BART trains and stations since the agency started running trains about 30 years ago. At first, they were simply known as “BART Security”; the officers had the authority to carry weapons and arrest suspects, but under state law, they weren’t members of a real police department. For the most part, that limited their authority to the confines of BART property.

In 1976, the state Legislature granted BART the authority to run a police department with jurisdiction and authority second only to the California Highway Patrol. BART officers now have full police powers, not only on their own turf, but in every one of the 58 California counties.

The department, headquartered near the Lake Merritt BART station, currently employs 151 sworn officers and nine dogs (see sidebar Page TK). An undisclosed number work undercover, in plain clothes, riding the trains and looking for crimes that range from fare evasion, “eating,” and “expectoration,” to assault, robbery, and rape. By far the most common crime, according to a BART police statistical breakdown for 1992, is “vagrancy”: 4,227 separate instances were reported by BART officers in the first 10 months of the year.

The BART Police Department has a $12 million annual budget, a fleet of patrol cars, and its own communications system. Officers earn salaries that Chief Taylor calls “competitive” with other departments in the Bay Area.

And at a time when California law-enforcement agencies are coming under increasingly strict civilian control, the BART police operate with nothing more than token oversight.

Chief Taylor reports to no commission, mayor, or city council. The department is administered by BART’s assistant general manager for public safety, who reports to the general manager, who reports to the board. BART spokesperson Michael Healy said the board plays no role in hiring or firing a chief, much less in disciplining police officers.

Former BART Board member Arlo Hale Smith said that in his term of office, the BART police chief rarely showed up for board meetings. “Even when we had something to discuss about the department – usually a labor-contract issue – the assistant general manager would come,” Smith explained.

Citizen complaints against the BART police are handled by the Internal Affairs Department, which is not a separate agency, as it is in many police departments, but a branch of the Detective Division, Taylor told the Bay Guardian.

That, some critics say, may explain why BART has the lowest possible rate of sustained complaints against its police officers. “There’s a very good reason for civilian agencies to handle complaints against the police,” said the ACLU’s John Crew. “People who have been abused by the police have a hard time trusting the same police department to do an honest investigation.”

Cornelius Hall, who is no stranger to government bureaucracy, said he ran into a stone wall when he tried to get some basic information about his son’s death from BART. “They wouldn’t even give me the police report,” he told the Bay Guardian. “The only way I can find out what happened to my son is to hire a lawyer and have it subpoenaed.”

Crew said he finds the situation “chilling.” He said he saw a “complete dearth” of civilian oversight in the BART administrative structure. “There’s no opportunity for meaningful public input, for hearings, for discussion of issues,” he continued.

“It’s not an acceptable situation. But under the circumstances, the members of the BART Board have an increased responsibility to ask questions and keep on top of their police department’s practices.”

In the case of Jerrold Hall, at least, that doesn’t seem to be happening. The shooting hasn’t been on the agenda for any board meeting since Nov. 15, and board members say they haven’t received any information about it from BART management.

And unlike Cornelius Hall, they haven’t even bothered to ask.

TO TELL THE TRUTH

The day after a BART police officer shot Jerrold Hall in the back of the head, transit agency spokesperson Mike Healy told reporters that Hall had been shot in the chest.

Not true.

Healy also told reporters that Hall had attacked Officer Fred Crabtree, and continued to attack him after Crabtree fired a warning shot.

Not true.

And Healy said that the warning shot was fired “over Hall’s head.”

Not true, either.

Healy freely referred to an alleged “armed robbery,” but he didn’t tell reporters that BART police had searched the entire area and never found a gun. He didn’t say that the alleged robbery victim had vanished without a trace, either.

So the public got a one-sided – and, as it turns out, largely inaccurate – picture of the incident. The press, taking Healy’s information at face value, portrayed Jerrold Hall as a violent, gun-wielding punk, shot in the act of attacking a cop.

“In some ways,” says Hall’s father, Cornelius, “that’s the saddest part of all.”

And while Healy finally put out a statement Dec. 7 acknowledging that some of his previous comments were in error, he did so only after a three-week barrage of questions from the Bay Guardian – and he never issued a word of apology to the Hall family.

It’s hard to blame Healy for the initial round of misinformation: In the heat of a bloody battle, the truth is often obscured. But Healy clearly knew, or could have known, within a few days after the incident that his official press statements had been wrong – that, for example, the medical reports showed Hall had been shot from behind. He could have called the reporters who were covering the story and let them know, or issued a new press release with updated information.

He could have tried to rescue some of what was left of the dead 19 year old’s personal reputation – and salvaged a bit of his own in the process. Instead, he fell back on the old BART strategy: When in doubt, stonewall. Then duck for cover, and hope it will all go away.

The BART Police Department may be the least-responsive law-enforcement agency I’ve seen since the discovery of the shredding machine in the White House basement. There is no press officer. The watch commanders, lieutenants, and captains refer all press calls to Chief Harold Taylor, who won’t come to the phone; his secretary refers the calls to the BART Public Affairs Office.

When I first called Healy Nov. 16 to ask about the shooting, he told me he hadn’t seen a police report, and didn’t know if one existed. He also said he didn’t know what the citizen complaint procedure was for the BART police, and had no idea if it was in writing. I filed a formal request for those and other records Nov. 17; under the Public Records Act, I had a legal right to a response within 10 days.

I let it slide to 15 days (holidays and all), then started calling Healy’s office. He was too busy to come to the phone at first, but after I harassed him for several hours, he told me that Chief Harold Taylor was handling my request, and that I should call him directly. Taylor wouldn’t come to the phone at all: He had an assistant tell me that Public Affairs was handling the request, and that I should call Mike Healy.

I spent another day trying again to reach Healy, who finally told me he wanted to set up an interview with Taylor – for Dec. 4, 17 days after I’d sent in a request for information most police agencies would probably have provided in less than an hour.

Chief Taylor showed up for the interview with a BART lawyer, who promised that the chief would fax me a statement of the facts of the shooting sometime later that afternoon. The brief, incomplete statement finally arrived three days later, around 3:30 p.m. Dec. 7, 21 days after my initial request. And BART officials still won’t release the full police report.

If I were a suspicious reporter, I’d wonder what they were trying to hide.

————

Deputy dog

In Philadelphia, the Inquirer revealed several years ago, police dogs attacked 358 people in the course of 33 months, leaving many of them scarred or maimed for life. In Los Angeles, the Times recently reported, the local K-9 Corps recorded more than a thousand bites in three years. In Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, trained German shepherds tore into a total of 375 legs, arms, and torsos in the course of their law-enforcement work.

In the past 10 years, canine corps scandals have tarnished the reputations of police departments all over the country and have cost taxpayers millions of dollars in lawsuits.

In Berkeley, however, police dogs have been banned since the early 1970s, when a City Council member named Ron Dellums responded to the brutal use of dogs against blacks in the South with a resolution abolishing the local canine corps. In San Francisco, dogs handle only a few very limited tasks.

But since 1990, the BART Police Canine Corps has been expanding into the sort of work that created such extensive problems in other American cities – a use for dogs that critics say has little justification.

“There are two basic rationales for using police dogs,” explained Richard Avenzino, director of the San Francisco SPCA, whose agency has worked with the local Police Department canine program. “One is for sniffing out explosives or narcotics. The other is for searches, mainly in enclosed spaces, where the dog’s sense of smell can aid in finding a hidden human suspect.

“But there’s also a perception that a snarling dog can intimidate people, which creates a lot more potential for trouble.”

The first BART Police canine corps dates back to the early 1970s. But the BART Board disbanded the program in 1975, after a police dog on a train in Philadelphia barked at BART Director John Glenn.

In 1990, Police Chief Harold Taylor restored four dogs to the force, saying they would be “a strong statement of police presence,” would deter violent crime, and could be used to help clear homeless people from trains and stations. In an interview last week, Taylor said the dogs, which now number nine, are used “to back up officers, in all their law-enforcement duties.”

The dogs, imported German shepherds, are bred and undergo Schützhund training at a special school in Germany, where they learn to attack on command. “The dogs only [understand] German,” explained Deputy Chief Kevin Sharp. “The officers learn to issue their commands in that language.”

Sharp said none of the BART dogs are trained to sniff out bombs or drugs and that they aren’t often needed for searches. In normal situations, he said, the dogs stay in the police car, with the window open, while the officer approaches a suspect. “They’re trained to jump out and attack without any command if they see that the officer is under assault,” he added.

ACLU Police Practices lawyer John Crew found that description alarming. “In other words,” he said, “we have dogs deciding on their own when to use what amounts to lethal force. That’s not a very good idea.”

Avenzino said the training methods used for such dogs “are, to put it mildly, controversial. A dog will do anything to please its owner; if you teach it to attack on command, it’s like loading a gun. In my opinion, it’s very dangerous.”

Jim Chanin, a Berkeley lawyer who has filed several lawsuits over attacks by police dogs, said he sees no good reason for BART to have a canine corps. “The problem is that these dogs are just trained to attack,” he explained. “You can’t use them to search for some kid lost in the BART tunnel.

“If there’s something the BART police do on a regular basis that requires the use of dogs, I certainly can’t see what it is.”

Chief Taylor told the Bay Guardian that dogs provide much less expensive backup than additional sworn officers. Berkeley Police Lt. Tom Grant said he agrees, to a point: “But then you have to pay out those big legal settlements if one of the dogs does something wrong.”

Super Ego: New Years blasts — pop, pop!

December 31, 2008

Here’s a very select blast of bubbly, DJ-driven New Years Eve parties. All events take place Wednesday, Dec. 31 — and those marked "late" go afterhours for your party-hopping pleasure.

Afrolicious

Feel a warm, wet vibe of the new with DJ Sabo of Sol Selectas, residents Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz, live percussionists, and hundreds of gyrating lovelies.

10 p.m., $20. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com

Bootie Pirate Party

Arrrr — it’s 2k9! Swing from the mashup club’s mizzenmast with Smash-Up Derby live and DJs Adrian and Mysterious D, Party Ben, Dada, and Earworm.

9 p.m.–late, $25 advance. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.bootiesf.com

Booty Call NYE

Drag mother Juanita More, playboy Joshua J., DJ Initials P.B., performer Hoku Mama Swamp, and star photographer Brandon — look smart! — bring all the hot boys together to pop a few corks.

8:30 p.m., Check Web site for price. The Bar, 456 Castro, SF. www.juanitamore.com

Eclectic Fever Masquerade

Shake your feathers and bhangra in the new with the NonStop Bhangra dance troupe, and then get global with Sila and the Afrofunk Experience, Daronda, and DJ Felina.

9 p.m.–late, $55. Gift Center Pavilion, 888 Brannan, SF. www.eclecticfever.com

Imagine

Spundae and Mixed Elements explode with local house heroes Kaskade, Trevor Simpson, and baLi — plus, a jungle room and "shiny confetti rain."

8 p.m., $60 advance. Ruby Skye, 420 Mason, SF. www.rubyskye.com

Love Unlimited

Almost every fab disco crew — Gemini Disco, DJ Bus Station John, Honey Soundsystem, Ferrari, Beat Electric — comes together for this all-night beat blast with DJ Cosmo Vitelli.

9 p.m., $15 advance. Paradise Lounge, 308 11th St., SF. www.myspace.com/honeysoundsystem

Reel leaders

December 31, 2008

MIDNITES FOR MANIACS CURATOR JESSE HAWTHORNE FICKS’ TOP TEN (AND THEN SOME):

1 Downloading Nancy (Johan Renck, USA) People were literally running out of the Sundance screening of this brutally honest exploration of a couple’s complacent relationship. Maria Bello and Rufus Sewell bare all, while Christopher Doyle’s camera traps them in the year’s coldest blue harshness.

2 Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, Spain/USA) After 2007’s Cassandra’s Dream, another tiny gem from the greatest living filmmaker.

3 Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, USA) Quiet and haunting, this follow-up to Reichardt’s wonderful Old Joy (2006) is a perfect antithesis to Sean Penn’s overly romanticized Into the Wild (2007).

4 Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, France) I cried throughout this unique family drama and immediately called my parents as soon as it was over. Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) is the closest thing I can think of.

5 JCVD. (Mabrouk El Mechri, Belgium/Luxembourg/France) Jean-Claude Van Damme is a genuine genre actor and this deconstructive meta-film lovingly proves it.

6 CJ7 (Stephen Chow, Hong Kong) Overlooked by adults and kids alike, this little Furby comedy is insanity at its most brilliant!

7 Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK) Leigh’s loving tribute to teachers is a dark and lonely place. En-Ra-Ha.

8 Redbelt (David Mamet, USA) Mamet does martial arts: the metaphors are limitless.

9 Funny Games (Michael Haneke (USA/France/UK/Austria/Germany/Italy) Mean, lean and totally gene!

10 Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, USA/Germany) Sly captures American destruction and cynicism in half the time as PT Anderson’s meandering There Will Be Blood (2007).

Favorite actor: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler (Darren Aronfsky, USA) Ignore Aronfsky’s overly sentimental tendencies and Rourke will blow your mind. Then go watch Tsui Hark’s Double Team (1998) for the ultimate ’90s rumble: Rourke vs. Van Damme!

Favorite actress: Emmanuelle Béart, Vinyan (Fabrice Du Welz, France/Belgium/UK) Wealthy white tourists will stop at nothing to colonize every corner of this planet. Watch Béart and husband Rufus Sewell (see Downloading Nancy) go absolutely nuts as they battle each other and creepy jungle kids in this hypnotic hybrid of The African Queen (1951) and Don’t Look Now (1973).

Favorite animated movie: Wall*E (Andrew Stanton, USA) This unofficial remake of Silent Running (1972) should win the Oscar for Best Picture.

Favorite mumblecore film: Baghead (Duplass Brothers, USA) The brothers continue to nail their jokes hilariously and earnestly.

Favorite trailer: The Class (Laurent Cantet, France) Tears well up every time I see the trailer for this Cannes Golden Palm winner (due in early 2009). Can’t wait.

MICHELLE DEVEREAUX’S "ANTIDOTES TO BROMANCE" LIST

Best pluck: Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

Worst pluck: Angelina Jolie, Changeling (Clint Eastwood, USA)

Best train wreck: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, USA)

Worst train wreck: Marianna Palka, Good Dick (Marianna Palka, USA)

Best tween vampiress: Lina Leandersson, Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Norway)

Worst teen vampire groupie: Kristen Stewart, Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, USA)

Worst mother in an awful movie: Julianne Moore, Savage Grace (Tom Kalin, Spain/USA/France)

Worst mother in a good movie: Debra Winger, Rachel Getting Married

Best outlaw: Anamaria Marinca, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania, 2007)

Worst outlaw: Angelina Jolie, Wanted (Timur Bekmambetov, USA/Germany)

Best Princess Diana impression: Keira Knightly, The Duchess (Saul Dibb, UK/France/Italy)

Better than a Princess Diana impression: Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, USA)

ERIK MORSE’S TOP TEN:

1 My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada)

2 Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

3 The long-awaited DVD release of Stranded in Canton (William Eggleston, USA, 1974)

4 The Man From London (Béla Tarr, France/Germany/Hungary)

5 Man on Wire (James Marsh, UK/USA)

6 Tell No One (Guillaume Canet, France)

7 The Bank Job (Roger Donaldson, UK)

8 Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia/France)

9 In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, UK/USA)

10 The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, USA)

HEIDI ATWAL’S TOP TEN:

1 Towelhead (Alan Ball, USA)

2 The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, USA)

3 Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA)

4 Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, UK/India)

5 Pineapple Express (David Gordon Green, USA)

6 Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, USA, 2007)

7 Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, USA)

8 Reprise (Joachim Trier, Norway, 2006)

9 Gomorra (Matteo Garrone, Italy)

10 Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, Spain/USA)

JIM FINN’S TOP 10 MOVIES LOVED AT 2008 FILM FESTIVALS AROUND PLANET EARTH

1 The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina)

2 Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina)

3 Lion’s Den (Pablo Trapero, Argentina)

4 Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, Italy)

5 On the Assassination of the President (Adam Keker, USA)

6 United Red Army (Koji Wakamatsu, Japan, 2007)

7 Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing, China, 2007)

8 Observando el Cielo (Jeanne Liotta, USA, 2007)

9 Brilliant Noise (Semiconductor, USA, 2006)

10 Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 1999)

Jim Finn’s films include The Juche Idea, La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo, and Interkosmos.

ROSS LIPMAN’S TOP 10

As I’m usually absorbed in restoration and production, my film viewing is erratic, and I’m hopelessly unable to keep up with all the films I’d like to see. Thus this list is not so much a critical 10 "best" list as it is a list of new works which, having somehow cut through the clutter and pulled me to the theater, struck me as excellent — each one in a unique way. I’ve allowed it to include "film events" of 2008, enabling notable restorations and experimental works to stand alongside conventional releases.

In alphabetical order:

Absurdistan (Veit Heimer, Germany/Azerbaijan)

Four Nights with Anna (Jerzy Skolimowki, Poland/France)

Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

Man on Wire (James Marsh, UK/USA)

Once Upon a Time in the West restoration (Sergio Leone, Italy/US, 1968)

The Orphanage (Juan Antonio Bayona, Mexico/Spain, 2007)

Quiet Chaos (Antonio Luigi Grimaldi, Italy/UK)

Song of Sparrows (Majid Majidi, Iran)

Think of Me First as a Person restoration (George Ingmire, USA, 1975)

Untitled film projector performance (Sandra Gibson, Luis Recoder, and Olivia Block, USA)

Ross Lipman’s recent film restorations include Killer of Sheep, The Exiles, and Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle.

MICHAEL ROBINSON’S TOP 10

1 Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany, 2007)

2 Body ÷ Mind + 7 = Spirit (Shana Moulton, USA, 2007)

3 Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

4 Origin of the Species, (Ben Rivers, UK)

5 La France, (Serge Bozon, France, 2007)

6 False Aging (Lewis Klahr, USA)

7 Paranoid Park and Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA, 2007 and 2008)

8 Lost, season four (Jack Bender and others, USA)

9 Singing Biscotts (Luther Price, USA)

10 The Fall (Tarsem Singh, India/UK/USA)

Michael Robinson’s films include Light Is Waiting and The General Returns From One Place to Another.

MATT WOLF’S TOP 10

1 Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA)

For the fake political ephemera; the meticulous reconstruction of Harvey’s camera shop; DP Harris Savides’ recurring visions of San Francisco; and Sean Penn’s queer, Jew-y affectation.

2 RR (James Benning, USA, 2007)

A hypnotic structural film about railroads and the romantic landscapes they traverse, devoid of signs from contemporary life.

3 The Order of Myths (Margaret Brown, USA)

A lovingly crafted documentary about Mardi Gras traditions and race in Mobile, Alabama.

4 Happy Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

For Sally Hawkins’ stellar performance as a recklessly childlike schoolteacher, who transforms into a fearless adult.

5 Maggie in Wonderland (Mark Hammarberg, Ester Martin Bergsmark, and Beatrice Maggie Andersson, Sweden)

Swedish documentary about an African immigrant, Maggie, which mixes her poignant video diary with savvy reenactments. A fertile cross between Lukas Moodysson and Spencer Nakasako.

6 Tearoom (William E. Jones, USA, 1962/2007)

An evocative resurrection of archival police footage from the 1960s of public sex crackdowns in the Midwest.

7 Derek (Isaac Julien, UK)

Tilda Swinton’s absorbing monologue about queer-punk filmmaker Derek Jarman thrusts his radical work into the present.

8 Reprise (Joachim Trier, Norway, 2006)

A bombastic film about the literary ambitions of a group of post-punk boys in Oslo.

9 Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, USA)

The sobering alternative to the pre-recession revelry of Sex and the City: The Movie.

10 A Mother’s Promise: Barack Obama Bio Film (David Guggenheim, USA)

Romantic Barack-oganda screened during the DNC.

Matt Wolf is the director of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell.

BARRY JENKINS’ TOP 10

1 Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore’eda, Japan)

Perfection.

2 Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, USA)

One of the most unbridled films ever funded by Hollywood coffers. Thank you, Sidney Kimmel.

3 Useless (Jia Zhangke, China, 2007)

Yerba Buena Center. You know, they show films there. And usually, they’re pretty fuckin’ crucial.

4 Flight of The Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, France, 2007)

A dream.

5 Phone Banking for Obama @ Four Barrel Coffee

Not cinema, but visual storytelling nonetheless: when Jeremy Tooker brought ironing boards and voter rolls into his glittering café for a few exemplary weeks, we glimpsed a version of San Francisco where shiny new things brought us together rather than separated us.

6 The Website Is Down: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude (Josh Weinberg, USA)

My favorite short of the year. Truly independent "cinema."

7 Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, Gemany/France/Israel/USA)

Animation is the ideal medium for the recollection of memories. This film proves it.

8 Che (Steven Soderbergh, Spain/France/USA)

Someday, we’ll look upon Soderbergh’s effort for the sum of its parts: RED.

9 Craig Baldwin interview with SF360 Movie Scene

The most exciting four minutes of local film-speak in all of ’08.

10 There Will Be Bud (P.O.T. Anderson, USA)

Old-school spoofing done right.

Barry Jenkins is the director of Medicine for Melancholy.

>>More Year in Film 2008

Orgone

December 30, 2008

PREVIEW Los Angeles’ Orgone chose its name well: if you have a couple hours to kill, you could do worse than riding the Wikipedia reference trail in the direction of Wilhelm Reich’s concept and its ambitious attempt to link observable events with libidinal energy. What the idea lacks in scientific standing, it makes up for in its ability to st(r)oke the imagination. Orgone’s abbreviated Afrobeat-soul-funk jams might even make a good alternate soundtrack to the orgy of styles, stories, and moods on display in Dušan Makavejev’s W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971). Even though Orgone has nine core members, there’s nothing flabby or random about the ensemble’s sound: Fela Kuti’s fusion of Ghanaian highlife and American funk sets the rules and agenda for the group on tracks like "It’s What You Do," and the playing is tight enough to put accusations of "genre exercise" to bed while brimming with the kind of coherence that might even make something as anarchic as W.R. make sense.

But even when dipping their toe in Afrobeat, Orgone’s overriding ambition clearly points to the soul/funk axis of Otis Redding and the Meters. Next to Antibalas’ jazzy flow, Orgone’s horns seem unable to content themselves with Afrobeat’s long-form, percoutf8g build, eager instead to burst out of the song’s frame. Romantic longing is the locus of this Angeleno nonet’s music, a point that’s unmistakable when vocalist Fanny Franklin steps up to the mic on tracks like "Who Knows Who." In submitting to its influences rather than vying for the romantic notion of the original artist, Orgone humbly hits all the pleasure points strewn across the genres the band venerates. It feels as bright and welcoming as it sounds.

ORGONE With DJ K-OS. Sat/3, 9:30 p.m., $15. Boom Boom Room, 1601 Fillmore, SF. (415) 673-8000, www.boomboomblues.com

Don’t look back

December 23, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Twelve months ago, as I sat down to write a year-end appraisal of 2007, I was still in awe of "© Murakami," the Takashi Murakami show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. It brilliantly captured the crass apex of global capitalism, mostly through celebrity-studded receptions and the appropriated — call it sculptural — form of a Louis Vuitton boutique. What a difference a year makes. At the close of 2008, the whole art world is watching as the highly regarded MOCA teeters precariously on a financial abyss, while Vuitton maven Marc Jacobs recently canceled his extravagantly performance-arty holiday party in the name of "recessionista" austerity.

Suddenly, commentaries on luxury goods seem so ’07, as evidenced by the critical response to a Chanel-sponsored, Zaha Hadid-designed quilted handbag exhibition that landed in Central Park this fall. "If devoting so much intellectual effort to such a dubious undertaking might have seemed indulgent a year ago, today it looks delusional," architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff opined in The New York Times. At this particular moment, it’s as difficult to summon up the flush feeling of the recent past as it is to contemplate a belt-tightening future.

To look forward is to confront anxious uncertainty. Optimists, however, anticipate a period in which art is tempered by a sense of hopefulness and focus rather than being driven by auction reports. Contemporary art will become more thoughtful, they predict. A good percentage of San Francisco art dealers jetted off to Miami for the recent spate of fairs, fingers crossed, expectations lowered. Word on the street said the outcome wasn’t as bad as expected, though sales were slow. Collectors actually had time to look and think about the art they were interested in, in contrast to automatically joining the grab-and-go sellers’ market of years past. Like everything else in our culture, the art world appears poised to embrace a more manageable scale. I wonder if this also means that art activities will become more homegrown.

This fall, the Bay Area saw a whole lot of contemporary art from China, with big shows at the Berkeley Art Museum ("Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art From the Sigg Collection") and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ("Half Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art") providing a welcome crash course in Far East art production. It seems unlikely, though, that either will have a lasting impact on community consciousness. Interest in Chinese art mirrors an American preoccupation with economic miracles. Numerous Western galleries opened Beijing outposts this year, positioning for anticipated new markets, but fantasies of financial success have been exposed as illusion — much like the sounds and images from Zhang Yimou’s over-the-top opening of Beijing Olympics.

The Bay Area museum scene was robust in the summer. Unsurprisingly, "Frida" gave SFMOMA a summer blockbuster, albeit one outsold by "Chihuly at the de Young." The latter presented a problematic expression of the tensions between art, craft, and design — Kenneth Baker’s slam review in the San Francisco Chronicle incited a welcome, if contentious, flurry of public online dialogue. The Contemporary Jewish Museum opened its new building in June with solid shows and events, making that institution a more prominent cultural resource (albeit one that still needs to prove itself through upcoming programming). There were lower budget alternative visions to be found. A plethora of apartment and hallway galleries popped up around town. "Kiki: The Proof is in the Pudding," Ratio 3’s summer show honoring a now-legendary mid-1990s gallery in the Mission, , generated a surprisingly broad buzz, thanks to its range of notable artists with SF roots.

And then there was "Bay Area Now 5," a show that people, unfortunately, weren’t really talking about. Ambitious in intent, this edition of the regional survey hoped to offer a spin on international biennials. It included artists who recently moved to the area from distant countries, some guest-curated shows-within-the-show, and off-site events. But the result felt unfocused. Its off-kilter array of bizarre inclusions — such as Edmundo de Marchena’s jaw-dropper of a sculpture, a jiggling prosthetic genital homage to SF’s history of sexual compulsion — failed to please artists (both in and out of the show), appease local galleries whose artists were not represented, or register with a public looking for the current pulse of San Francisco art. Challenges to the market-based art world and programs that avoid the usual suspects are welcome strategies. But in this case, the quality of individual projects was subsumed by the muddled institutional vision of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. What is the point of "Bay Area Now" again?

Perhaps the misfired attempt would be forgivable if it hadn’t been bracketed by equally undercooked exhibitions ("The Way That We Rhyme," "The Gatherers: Greening Our Urban Spheres," and the cryptic "transPop: Korea Vietnam Remix" — a show in dire need of contextualizing wall labels). YBCA has a new visual arts director, former San Diego Museum of Art curator Betti-Sue Hertz, who will take the helm in early 2009. She has her work cut out for her.

As resources become more precious, frugal ingenuity is likely to take precedence in local art offerings. To cut costs, museums will be having fewer exhibitions with longer runs (some extending beyond six months). These time frames offer opportunities for deeper scrutiny — or heavier bouts of boredom. Something like SFMOMA’s current "The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now," even if it doesn’t live up to its promised scope, reflects an interest in collaborative involvement and the appeal of low-rent materials — rubber bands, anyone? Audiences are enjoying themselves, maybe even making repeat visits.

Perhaps homespun critical fantasy is the order of the day. The Wattis Institute’s "The Wizard of Oz," for example, fused a ragtag collection of contemporary art and historical artifacts into an amber-hued vision of the crumbling American dream. I wish I’d been able to see the Jeff Koons sculpture installed in the Château de Versailles, a more extravagant example of a visually and conceptually pointed spectacle — Koons’ mash-up of European and American relics forms another kind of dreamy Oz. Click your heels three times and repeat after me: there’s no place like home.

GLEN HELFAND’S 2008 TOP 10

1. "Oranges and Sardines," Hammer Museum

Returning SFMOMA curator Gary Garrels’ current "conversations on abstract painting" exhibition in Los Angeles is one of the most satisfying, artist-friendly shows ever.

2. Philippe Vergne, lecture at San Francisco Art Institute

The recently-appointed director of the Dia Art Foundation offered incisive, inspirational, and witty takes on the melancholic state of the arts.

3. Speed Racer: The IMAX Experience (Andy and Larry Wachowski, USA, 2008)

This color-drenched amusement park ride of a movie lacks coherence and features the world’s most irritating child actor, but two-plus hours of nonstop electric rainbow CGI at IMAX scale turns eye-tickling into an endurance sport.

4. Seven Days in the Art World, by Sarah Thornton (Norton, 256 pages, $24.95)

As economies tank everywhere, there is no better time to get Thornton’s insider view of art fairs, auctions, art schools, and the like — it already seems like glam art history. Plus it’s great fodder for art opening chitchat.

5. Brendan Lott, at SF Art Commission Gallery and San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art

Lott’s paintings — farmed out to painting towns in China and based on appropriated culturally revealing Flickr images of American teens — provided a remarkably concise picture of globalization.

6. Fritz Haeg, lecture at SFMOMA

Though the notion of garden-as-participatory-eco-artwork is beginning to seem rote, Haeg, a key figure in this movement, convinced skeptics with his self-aware and pleasurable take on social sculpture.

7. You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (Dennis Dugan, USA, 2008)

Adam Sandler’s crude, sure, but in this under-appreciated lark he joyfully takes on Arab-Palestinian conflict, the joys of intergenerational sex, the mall-ization of Manhattan, and vintage Paul Mitchell unisex cuts.

8. Park Life and Electric Works

These two relatively new gallery-bookstore entities, Park Life in the Richmond District and Electric Works in SoMa, have made good art seem accessible — in the collector sense — to everyone. If you can’t afford the originals or prints (Electric Works makes ’em), then you can buy into the highly selective inventory of art books at either place.

9. Love Songs (Christophe Honoré, France 2007)

This down-tempo spin on Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961’s A Woman Is a Woman and Jacques Demy’s 1964 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg restored my faith in French cinema, not to mention musical melancholy.

10. "Josephine Taylor: Bomb Landscape," Catherine Clark Gallery

Taylor first made a splash with delicately rendered, almost wispy epics of extreme family dysfunction and abuse. Her latest show is startling in its visual darkness and more dreamlike but still frightening surrealistic imagery.

New Years Eve Parties 2008

December 17, 2008

Here’s some rockin’ bottle-pops for your 2k9 hello — followed by some all night dance affairs ….

BUTTHOLE SURFERS

One of the best parts of reading Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life (Little, Brown, 2001) is learning how psychotic the Butthole Surfers actually were. Whether filling an upside-down cymbal with lighter fluid and igniting and playing it or projecting scary-ass surgery footage onto huge smoke machine-generated clouds to terrorize the audience, the Buttholes clearly intended to have everyone walk away from shows with physical or mental wounds congruent to their own self-inflicted ones. By the time Electric Larryland (Capitol, 1996) gave them access to post-Nevermind commercial radio, the Butthole Surfers had transformed into a run-of-the-mill heavy rock unit, saving their perverseness for their lyrics.

But all’s you need to do is backtrack to Locust Abortion Technician (Touch and Go, 1987) to find the group’s secret reverence for classic rock juxtaposed with a not-so-secret love of tripping balls on tracks like the genuinely disturbing "22 Going on 23" and imagine that there was a time when the Butthole Surfers toured with a naked dancer named Ta-Da the Shit Lady but managed to devote enough energy to the whole "music" side of being a band to write something as enduring as the proto-grunge of "Human Cannonball." The group’s more recent output isn’t good, and it goes without saying that the ‘Urfers will never be able to equal the antics of their past. This one is a mixed bag, but I’m guessing that, while Gibby Haynes won’t be regaling us with tales of Chinese men with worms in their urethras, he won’t pull any cutesy "you are loved" Flaming Lips bullshit, either. (Brandon Bussolini)

With Negativland. Dec. 31, 9 p.m., $55. (Also with Fuckemos, Tues/30, 8 p.m., $35). Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 346-6000, www.livenation.com

GEORGE CLINTON AND PARLIAMENT FUNKADELIC

"Bow-wow-wow-yippee-yo-yippee-yeh." That was the "Atomic Dog" mantra back in the day when I worked at a mega-music store for minimum wage: it kept us tame, it soothed our frayed nerves, and it never failed to remind all concerned that there was a little dog in me, you, and everybody. Hell, if "Atomic Dog" mastermind George Clinton stopped with just Funkadelic’s Free Your Mind … and Your Ass Will Follow and Maggot Brain (both Westbound, 1970, 1971) many a fan boy and babe would have been satisfied to sing his praises forever more, but nooo, the musical groundbreaker and funk-rock-R&B OG of a dogfather has had more creative lives than a nuclear feline — a good and bad thing, I suppose, in terms of quality control.

Later, I would come to associate Clinton with a tale divulged by a colleague who was once allowed into the icon’s smokin’ sanctum sanctorum — namely a venue bathroom — to, ah, do an interview. This time, however, when the man brings Parliament-Funkadelic to the Warfield for New Year’s Eve, I’ll expect candidate Clinton — settling into his golden years, it appears, with the recent release of his covers album, George Clinton and His Gangsters of Love (Shanachie) — to tear the roof off with a super-stupid rendition of his prescient par-tay anthem "Paint the White House Black." (Kimberly Chun)

With the Greyboy Allstars. Dec. 31, 9 p.m., $79–$89. Warfield, 982 Market, SF. (415) 421-TIXS, www.goldenvoice.com

FANTÔMAS

For all those who don’t want to spend their New Year’s Eves puttin’ the lime in the coconut and twistin’ it all up, General Patton has got you covered. Patton and the melodicidal miscreants of avant-garde metal quartet Fantômas invade the Great American Music Hall on a mission to decimate eardrums and bring aural beasts to life. The San Francisco supergroup — which includes Buzz Osborne of the Melvins, Trevor Dunn, formerly of Mr. Bungle, and Dave Lomabardo of Slayer — formed in 1988, and is Patton’s longest-running project. The resume of the king of musical ADHD reads like an major-indie label discography, but the workaholic always finds time to confound and bludgeon with Fantômas.

The group’s beauty lies in its ravenous experimentation and intensity — and in Osborne’s Don King hair. Over the course of their four LPs, they’ve mix electronic glitches; nonsensical and horrifying utterings; Lombardo’s mind-boggling drum dexterity, which roves from blastbeats to technical jazz; and King Buzzo’s gigantic sludge riffs to create controlled chaos in its most primitive, powerful form. They’ve covered The Godfather (1972), worked with free-jazz sicko John Zorn, and, most of all, done whatever they fucking wanted to. As long as they keep doing that, we’ll keep listening. (Daniel N. Alvarez)

Fantômas’ "The Director’s Cut" with Tipsy and Zach Hill. Dec. 31, 8 p.m., $45. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750, www.gamh.com

Here’s a very select blast of bubbly, DJ-driven New Years Eve parties. (Check the Guardian for more as the date approaches.) All events take place Wednesday, Dec. 31 — and those marked "late" go afterhours for your party-hopping pleasure.

Afrolicious

Feel a warm, wet vibe of the new with DJ Sabo of Sol Selectas, residents Pleasuremaker and Señor Oz, live percussionists, and hundreds of gyrating lovelies.

10 p.m., $20. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. www.elbo.com

Bootie Pirate Party

Arrrr — it’s 2k9! Swing from the mashup club’s mizzenmast with Smash-Up Derby live and DJs Adrian and Mysterious D, Party Ben, Dada, and Earworm.

9 p.m.–late, $25 advance. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.bootiesf.com

Booty Call NYE

Drag mother Juanita More, playboy Joshua J., DJ Initials P.B., performer Hoku Mama Swamp, and star photographer Brandon — look smart! — bring all the hot boys together to pop a few corks.

8:30 p.m., Check Web site for price. The Bar, 456 Castro, SF. www.juanitamore.com

Eclectic Fever Masquerade

Shake your feathers and bhangra in the new with the NonStop Bhangra dance troupe, and then get global with Sila and the Afrofunk Experience, Daronda, and DJ Felina.

9 p.m.–late, $55. Gift Center Pavilion, 888 Brannan, SF. www.eclecticfever.com

Imagine

Spundae and Mixed Elements explode with local house heroes Kaskade, Trevor Simpson, and baLi — plus, a jungle room and "shiny confetti rain."

8 p.m., $60 advance. Ruby Skye, 420 Mason, SF. www.rubyskye.com

Love Unlimited

Almost every fab disco crew — Gemini Disco, DJ Bus Station John, Honey Soundsystem, Ferrari, Beat Electric — comes together for this all-night beat blast with DJ Cosmo Vitelli.

9 p.m., $15 advance. Paradise Lounge, 308 11th St., SF. www.myspace.com/honeysoundsystem

Midnight

Dancehall, reggae, and classic hip-hop go boom with Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest, Amp Live of Zion I live band Native Elements, Trackademicks, and Jah Warrior Shelter.

9 p.m.–late, $25 advance. Club Six, 60 Sixth St., SF. www.clubsix1.com

New Years’ Revolution

Banger, turbocrunk, and electro freaks unite under the sheer speaker-blowing awesomeness of Diplo, Jesse Rose, Ghislain Poirier, Plastician, and hundreds more.

9 p.m.–late, $55 advance. 1015 Folsom, SF. www.1015.com

Opel: Fire and Light

Wacky, burner-flavored breaks and bass from special guest DJs Lee Coombs and Blende, plus Mephisto Odyssey, Syd Gris + Aaron Jae, Jive, and more from the Opel crew.

9 p.m.–late, $25–<\d>$55. Mighty, 119 Utah, SF. www.opelproductions.com

Reveal

"Reveal your inner light" is the dress code at this glamorous Supperclub affair, with DJ love from Ellen Ferato, Liam Shy, and Michael Anthony — and tons of performers.

8 p.m.–late, $120. Supperclub, 657 Harrison, SF. www.supperclub.com

Sea of Dreams

The immense extravaganza is back, with a full live show by Thievery Corporation, beats whiz Bassnectar, circus stars The Mutaytor, and Brazilian soulsters Boca Do Rio.

9 p.m.–late, $79 advance. Concourse, 635 Eighth St., SF. www.blasthaus.com

Second Sunday NYE

The summer favorite lights up in winter with this special blowout, featuring Chi-Town house god DJ Derrick Carter, local legend DJ Dan, Jay Tripwire, and Sen-Sei.

8 p.m., $40 advance. Mission Rock Cafe, 817 Terry Francois Blvd., SF. www.2ndsunday.com

Temple NYE

Cryogenic fog! Whirling lasers! Sonic Enlightenment! "Optix stimuli!" Oh, and a host of rockin’ techno DJs like Paul Hemming, IQ!, and Ben Tom bring the party knowledge to Temple.

9 p.m., $80. Temple, 540 Howard, SF. www.templesf.com

Storyville NYE

Poleng Lounge shoots back to its past incarnation with a jazzy house and hip-hop extravaganza. DJs Lady Alma, Mark De Clive Lowe, and Daz-I-Kue take you there.

9 p.m., $25 advance. Poleng Lounge, 1751 Fulton, SF. www.polenglounge.com

Dick in a box

December 10, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

If the assassination of JFK was a defining, traumatic blow to American hopefulness, the Watergate scandal a decade later arguably created something worse: a deep collective cynicism that our politics could never escape corruption, or that the guilty would be truly punished even when caught red-handed. How much worse have we shrugged off since?

As the most secretive White House in modern memory pulls up stakes, there’s a fear that particular history may repeat itself. What if Bush blanket-pardons his cabinet, as Gerald Ford did for Richard Nixon, of any and all crimes not yet formally accused? In 1974, that move informed our great nation that at certain high levels, the concept of justice need not apply. In fact, it meant Dick. Nixon left the country in far better (shaky, but better) shape than W., but arguably suffered a greater popular backlash than Bush will. He never admitted any criminal wrongdoing, copping to vague "mistakes made" instead. He resigned to avoid impeachment, and the full airing of dirty laundry that would have required. Thus, the sweatiest president ever avoided total humiliation. But didn’t he owe us repentance?

The pardon and Nixon’s subsequent shrinking from public life left a majority feeling cheated. He owed us that pound of flesh — withholding it was intolerable arrogance. Adapted by Peter Morgan from his widely produced play, with the originating lead actors reprising their roles, Frost/Nixon dramatizes the moment when Tricky Dick did get called onto the public carpet to confess his sins. Which he did — well, sorta kinda. The disgraced prez (Frank Langella) is offered tempting scads of money to be interviewed on TV by an odd candidate for interrogator, the rather garish Brit chat show host David Frost (Michael Sheen) — a showbiz personality more akin to contemporaries the Galloping Gourmet and early Geraldo Rivera than, say, Walter Cronkite (or even Dick Cavett).

Nixon’s people (including Kevin Bacon as security chief) figure this presumably softball platform will provide opportunity to burnish his tarnished legacy as statesman. The team that womanizing, cheerfully shallow Frost assembles to prep for this American broadcast "comeback" worry that he lacks the depth of knowledge, experience, or backbone to pin subject to mat. All suspense here hinges on whether Frost can give his armchair opponent "the trial he never had." He’s seemingly outmatched: fallen yet not feebled, the ex-president proves a master of spin, evasion, and subterfuge.

George Clooney was reportedly eager to direct Frost/Nixon; he might’ve made something slyer and subtler than Ron Howard, who sometimes underlines performance nuances as if wielding a bullhorn and flashing neon sign. But it’s still the best movie he’s done, a nimble opening-up of a talky stage entity that only slightly exaggerates the import of real-life events. Langella makes one realize how seldom the most widely caricatured president in history has been portrayed as more than a collection of grotesque tics; Sheen is as expert here as he was playing Tony Blair in 2006’s The Queen. While its contemporary echoes aren’t overt, Frost/Nixon prods an important question: why do we demand even less accountability of our Commander-in-Chief now? What should have been lessons learned from Nixon instead begat heightened apathy, gullibility, and stupidity. As an electorate, we got the Commanders-in-Chief we deserved.

FROST/NIXON opens Fri/12 in San Francisco.

Cinematic repression

December 9, 2008

REVIEW Falling ill from scarlet fever on a mid-1950s Berlin street, strapping 15-year-old schoolboy Michael Berg (David Kross) experiences kindness from passerby Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) that he seeks to repay when he recovers some months later. The brusque, moody woman more than twice his age brushes him off, initially. But then they commence an affair in which she proves a very astute erotic tutor, though she resists the emotional connection he feels. A decade later, as a law student, he discovers Hanna’s secret while spectating a Nazi war crimes trial. Decades later still, grown-up Michael (Ralph Fiennes) recollects these events as they’ve weighed on his subsequent life. David Hare’s very sharp screenplay takes some liberties adapting Bernhard Schlink’s novel. But in general, the screenplay and director Stephen Daldry (2002’s The Hours, 2000’s Billy Elliot) do an exemplary job transutf8g a primarily interior-voice tome into cinematic terms. Like other recent successful films about emotional repression (2005’s Brokeback Mountain and the forthcoming Revolutionary Road, for instance), The Reader is most moving precisely in its rigorous restraint, directorial and performance-wise.

THE READER opens Fri/12 in San Francisco.

Cue the clowns

December 3, 2008

› steve@sfbg.com

The circus doesn’t come to San Francisco, but its performers do, sexy and talented dreamers who bring a creative energy that has transformed the city’s nightlife and counterculture. Spinning aerialists and dancing clowns now proliferate at clubs and parties, and their number has more than doubled in recent years.

They come from towns across the country — often via Burning Man, where they discover their inner performers, dying to burst out, and other kindred spirits — to a city with a rich circus tradition, which they tweak and twist into something new, a hybrid of the arts and punk sideshow weirdness. It’s the ever-evolving world of Indie Circus.

One of the biggest banners these performers now dance and play under is Bohemian Carnival, which draws together some of the city’s best indie circus acts, including Vau de Vire Society, the clown band Gooferman, and Fou Fou Ha, acts that fluidly mix with one another and the audience.

Last Saturday, as families across the country shopped and shared Thanksgiving leftovers, this extended family of performers rehearsed for that night’s Bohemian Carnival. Fou Fou Ha was in the Garage, a SoMa performance space, working on a new number celebrating beer with founder/choreographer Maya Culbertson, a.k.a. MamaFou, pushing for eight-count precision.

"Do it again," she tells her eight high-energy charges, who look alternatively sexy and zany even without the colorful and slightly grotesque clown costumes they don for shows. I watch from the wings as they drill through the number again and again, struck by how the improvised comedy at the song’s end changes every time, someone’s new shtick catching my eye and making me smile.

"That’s what we love the most, the improv element to it," Culbertson tells me. "We see how far you can take it and not break character."

As Fou Fou Ha wrapped up and headed home to get ready for the show, Gooferman and Vau de Vire were just starting to rehearse and set up over at the party venue, DNA Lounge. Reggie Ballard was up a tall ladder setting the rigging, the dancers stretched, Vau de Vire co-founder Mike Gaines attended to a multitude of details, and Gooferman frontmen Vegas and Boenobo the Klown played the fools.

"I feel like I’m on acid," Vegas said evenly, his long Mohawk standing tall.

"Are you?" Boenobo said, perhaps a little jealous.

"No, I wish," Vegas replied. "But that’s why it’s weird."

"Huh," Boenobo deadpanned. "Weird."

Fucking clowns. I decide to chat up a dancer, Rachel Strickland, the newest member of Vau de Vire, who stretched and unabashedly changed into her rehearsal clothes as she told me about why she moved here from North Carolina in July 2007.

"I waited a long time for this. I always knew I wanted to come to San Francisco and work on the stage, doing something in the line of Moulin Rouge, with the costumes and that kind of decadence and debauchery," Strickland said, oozing passion for her craft and the life she’s chosen, one she said has met her expectations. "I danced as much as I could my whole life and I have an overactive imagination, so it’s hard to shock me."

Not that Vau de Vire hasn’t tried. Shocking people out of their workaday selves is what the performers try to do, whether through vaudeville acts, dance routines, feats of skill, or just sheer sensual outlandishness. Vau de Vire choreographer Shannon Gaines (Mike’s wife of 19 years) also teaches at the local indie circus school Acrosports and, with beatboxer and performance artist Tim Barsky, directs its City Circus youth program, which combines hip hop and other urban art forms with circus.

Gaines has been a gymnast and dancer all her life, skills that she’s honed into circus performances she does through five different agencies, often doing corporate events "that involve wearing a few more clothes" and other more conventional performances.

"The other seems like work to me. But this," she said, a wry smile coming to her lips, "is like dessert. This is what excites me."

She’s not the only one. With their growing popularity, San Francisco’s indie circus freaks are juggling an increasingly busy schedule and developing even bigger plans for the new year, including a national tour and an extravaganza called Metropolus that would reinforce San Francisco’s reputation as the best Big Top in the country.

As Boenobo told me, "It’s a moment in time when there’s something big developing in San Francisco."

MIMES AND PICKLES

The circus arts are ancient, but San Francisco’s unique role in morphing and perpetuating them trace back to the 1970s when Make-a-Circus arrived here from Europe — where circus traditions are strong — and the local, organic Pickle Family Circus was born.

Wendy Parkman, now a board member at San Francisco Circus Center, the circus school she helped develop in conjunction with the Pickles and legendary performer Judy Finelli, worked for both circuses and described how they derived from San Francisco’s vibrant arts scene and its history of grassroots activism.

"It was just a wonderful, spontaneous bubble, a renaissance of circus activity," Parkman told the Guardian. "It was an outgrowth of the fabulous ’60s and the involvement of people with community and politics and art."

Parkman and many others trace the local lineage of a renaissance that came to be known as New Circus back to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which in 1959 started doing political theater that incorporated comedy (or more specifically, Commedia dell’Arte), music, farce, melodrama, and other aspects of clowning.

"It really started with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and it flourishes here because of the rich arts culture that we’ve always had here," Jeff Raz, a longtime performer with both original SF troupes who started the San Francisco Clown Conservatory and recently had the title role in Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo, told the Guardian.

"San Francisco felt like a place where things could happen that were socially and politically relevant," Parkman said. "Circus has always been a people’s art form. It’s a great way of getting a lot of people involved because it takes a lot of people to put on a show."

Perhaps even more relevant to the current indie circus resurgence, both Make-a-Circus and the Pickle Family Circus reached out to working class neighborhoods in San Francisco, where they would do parades and other events to entertain the people and generate interest in the circus.

"It was happy, healthy, and accessible to people of all ages, classes, and backgrounds," said Parkman said, who noted that things began to change in the 1980s as funding for the arts dried up and Pickle hit hard times.

"The Pickle Family Circus was a grassroots circus that was part of a real renaissance. Unfortunately, it didn’t go very far," Dominique Jando, a noted circus historian who has written five books on the circus and whose wife teaches trapeze at the Circus Center, told the Guardian.

Still, the Pickle legacy lives on in the Circus Center and Acrosports, making San Francisco and Montreal (birthplace of Cirque du Soleil, whose influence has also propelled the indie circus movement) the two major hubs of circus in North America. Unlike Europe, Russia, and China, where circus training is deeply rooted and often a family affair passed from generation to generation, Jando said, Americans don’t have a strong circus tradition.

"We are really the poor children of the circus world. There is not the same tradition of circus here that there is in Europe," said Jando, a native to France who now lives in San Francisco. "Learning circus is like ballet, and it’s not really in the American psyche to work and train for seven years for a job that offers modest pay."

Homegrown spectacles like Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus commercialized the circus and transformed it into the three-ring form that sacrificed intimacy and the emphasis on artistry and narrative flow. Traditionally in Europe, the clowns and music structured a circus performance, with the punctuation and interludes provided by the acrobats and other performers of the circus arts.

"It’s the superhuman and the supremely human, who are the clowns," is how Raz defines circus. "Clowns are becoming more central to the circus, the supremely human part, and that has a lot to do with our times."

Raz, Jando, and Parkman all pointed to the sterile excesses of the televised, digitized, Twittering, 24/7 world we live in as feeding the resurgence of circus. "It points to a demand by the audience to see something more down to earth and real," Jando said. "There is a need to go back to basics."

"It’s a response to the overly technological world we’re living in. People want to go back to what the human body can do and be in the same place as the performers," Parkman said. "One of the concepts of the Pickles was that it was drawing on the European model. I’d say what’s going on now in San Francisco is an offshoot of what the Pickles did."

Raz said the rise of Indie Circus and its influence on the local arts scene is consistent with his own experiences as an actor and clown. He used to keep two resumes, but performers today are often expected to be steeped in both disciplines, letting one inform the other and opening up new forms of creative expression.

"That melding that you’re looking at, from the club scene to Burning Man, is seeping into a lot of the world," Raz said. "Circus is very much a living art form."

Somehow," Jando said, "it has become a sort of counterculture on the West Coast."

INDIE, THE NEW NEW CIRCUS

Boenobo and Vegas haven’t done any real training to become clowns. They’re performers who use the clown shtick to build a fun and fantastical world off their solid musical base.

"There has to be whimsy. People take themselves so seriously," Boenobo said, noting that it was in response to the serious-minded Winter Music Conference in 2001 where he had the idea of having the members of his new band, Gooferman, dress as clowns. It was a lark, but it was fun and it stuck, and they’ve been clowns ever since.

"The clown thing floats my boat. It is a persona I really dig. And the band kicks ass. We’re all just super tight. The Bohemian Carnival is just a bunch of friends, like a family ejected out of different wombs," he said.

The band does kick ass. Setting aside the clown thing, their tunes are original and fun, evoking Oingo Boingo at its early best, particularly since the summer, when Boenobo and Vegas brought in a strong new rhythm section. But it’s the collaboration with Vau de Vire and the other groups that round out Bohemian Carnival and really bring it to life.

"People say it just blew my mind, and that is the immortality of it," Boenobo said. "It’s super-fucking gratifying, really. It’s just stupid."

They performed last month at the Hillbilly Hoedown inside a giant maze made of hay bales in Half Moon Bay, with the clowns and circus performers creating a fantastical new world for the partygoers. As Gooferman played, Shannon broke the rules and danced atop a hay bale wall behind the band, conveying pure danger and backwoods sex appeal.

"The Gooferman character is called Bruiser or Shenanigans," Shannon said of her performer alter egos. "She does the things that you’d get kicked out of a party for, but I can get away with it."

She considers herself more of a "fluffer" than a dancer, and while Gooferman plays, she gets the band and crowd charged up by pushing the limits of silliness and composure herself and seeing if they’ll follow. "So they’re thinking, wow, if she can do that, I can do all kinds of things."

Their world not only includes practitioners of circus arts (contortionists, aerialists, trapeze artists, clowns, and the like), but also the fashion scene (including outlandish local designers such as Anastasia), painters, sculptors, dancers, actors, fire artists, and DJs like Smoove who bring a certain zany flair to the dance parties.

"It’s hybridized. So it’s not just circus arts with some musical backing," Boenobo said. Instead, it creates a fun and whimsical scene that makes attendees feel like they’re part of something unusual, fun, and liberating. "Immersion is very important."

That’s why the Bohemian Carnival and its many offshoots try to break down the wall between the performers and the audience, who often show up in circus or Burning Man styles, further blurring the borders.

"When you break down that big third wall, there’s no pretense," Mike Gaines said. "It’s really about the party and the community."

Clowns circulate in the crowd, interacting with the audience while aerialists suddenly start performing on ropes or rings suspended over the dance floor. It draws the audience in, opens them up, makes them feel like they’re part of something.

"All of the sudden, people get to realize the dream of running away with the circus, but they get to leave it at the end of the night," Boenobo said with a wink, "which they generally like."

"The line of where circus starts and ends has been blurred," said kSea Flux (a.k.a. Kasey Porter), an indie circus performer who earlier this year started Big Top Magazine (www.bigtopmagazine.com) to chronicle the growing culture. "I love the old-school circus, but as with everything, it needs to be able to evolve to continue to grow."

When he joined the indie circus movement five years ago, performing with the Dresden Dolls, Flux said it transformed his life. He quit his corporate job and started developing his art and trying to make a living in the circus arts, including promoting the culture through the magazine.

"I found the circus and was completely filled with a new life," Flux said, noting that it was through his long involvement with Burning Man that he was exposed to the circus scene. "I think Burning Man gives a platform for it. People get stuck in their jobs and there’s this great week when you can let go and be what you want to be."

That’s also how the talented aerialist and hooper who calls herself Shredder got into this world, which she’s now explored in both the traditional circus and the indie variety, preferring the latter.

"I didn’t even know it was possible, but I just love it," said Shredder, who worked as a firefighter, EMT, and environmental educator before getting into performing through Burning Man, where Boenobo set up the Red Nose District in 2006 for all the many offshoots of the indie circus world that attend the event.

Shredder developed hula hoop and aerial routines, training hard to improve her skills and eventually was hired by the Cole Brothers Circus in 2006 to do aerial acrobatics and hooping. Founded in 1882, Cole is a full-blown circus in the Ringling Bros. tradition, with a ringleader, animals, and trained acrobats. Shredder toured 92 cities in 10 months until she felt the creativity and joy being snuffed out by the rote repetition of the performances.

"We did the exact same show everyday. It was like Groundhog Day but worse; same show, different parking lot," said Shredder, who later that Saturday night did a performance with more than a dozen hula hoops at once. "Then I heard about Vau de Vire through some fellow performers and I just heard they were doing really well and I wanted to be with a group like that … I was just so happy that they were willing to help me design my vision as an artist."

COMING TOGETHER

The Bohemian Carnival name and concept was actually an import from Fort Collins, Colo., where Mike and Shannon Gaines created the Vau de Vire Society as part of the performance and party space they operated there in a 100-year-old church that they purchased.

Mike’s background was in film; Shannon was a dancer; and the world they created for themselves was decidedly counterculture. So was their space, the Rose Window Experimental Theater and Art House, which they operated from 1997 to 2001 and lived in with 20 of their bohemian friends.

"It allowed us to really get to know ourselves. We had all day to just rig up any kind of performance we could imagine," she said. "If you had a crazy idea, you could just come on over at 3 a.m. and do it."

Their signature events were themed parties that would open with performances of about 30 minutes, usually combining music, dance, and performance art, followed by a dance party that was essentially an all-night rave. Initially the performances just drew off of the creativity of their friends, including those Shannon danced with. The themes were often risqué and sometimes included nudity.

The performances evolved over time, bringing in talent such as Angelo Moore of the band Fishbone, who is still a regular part of their crew. They were all attracted to the freaky side of performance art, which drew them toward sideshow, vaudeville, and circus themes and expanding what was technically possible. "We ended up getting a rigger in and just flying around the theater," Mike said.

In 2000, they did their first Bohemian Carnival event. "That’s when we started dabbling in the circus," Mike said.

While the events gained regional acclaim in newspapers and were supported by notables figures, including the town’s mayor, there was a backlash among local conservatives, including some who objected to how a traditional church was being used for raves by these bohemian freaks.

In 2001 they decided to search for a new home. "We looked around for the place that would be most accepting of what we were doing," Mike said.

San Francisco was known to be accepting of their kind, and there were groups here that were edging toward similar kinds of parties, including Infinite Kaos and Xeno (and its predecessor, Awd), as well as the band Idiot Flesh, not to mention the more serious circus being done at the Circus Center and Teatro Zinzanni.

"San Francisco, in this country, is a real hotbed for circus. So we were like, ‘Now we can bring in legitimate circus performers," Mike said. Shannon got a job teaching at Acrosports, allowing her to be immersed full-time in her art and to help grow her community.

Serendipitously, in August 2001, indie rocker Boenobo of the band Chub — a funky ska outfit whose members would wear different costumes to each of their performances — formed Gooferman, which wasn’t originally the clown band it is today: "The idea was you had to be in a costume and you had to be stoned." They morphed into a full-blown clown band, and began collaborating with circus performers.

"But it never coalesced until recently," Boenobo says.

That process probably began around Halloween 2004 at the Vegoose Festival in Las Vegas, when Vau de Vire Society was asked to fill eight hours’ worth of programming and turned to their San Francisco brethren for help, Mike said. They drove or flew about 100 people to the event.

It was also the year Boenobo staged the GoofBall in San Francisco, drawing together a variety of entertainment that helped change the nature of the traditional dance party. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also the year that reviled President George W. Bush won a second term and when longtime Burning Man artists staged their ill-fated revolt against the event (see "State of the art," 12/10/04).

"When people get too serious, they need this shit even more," Boenobo said of the increasingly irreverent, naughty, and participatory parties he was throwing.

Meanwhile Fou Fou Ha was developing its act. Culbertson and Raymond Meyer were waiting tables at Rose Pistola in 2000 and decided to put their big personalities to work for them, bringing in other performers such as Slim Avocado and setting up routines to perform at CellSpace and other venues.

"We’re sort of like the children of Cirque du Soleil in a way, but we wanted to give it an edge," Culbertson said. "It’s sort of like the second wave vaudeville … now with more of a rock edge."

Fou Fou Ha’s shows play off the dark and surreal kind of performance that is more European than American, a style Culbertson was exposed to while studying choreography during her Fulbright scholarship in Holland in the late 1990s. When she returned to the United States in 2000, "I wanted to form a [dance] company." But she wanted it to be fun. "People really like the idea of serious dance combined with comedy, where you can fall out of your pirouette," she said.

"We’re kind of like guerilla circus," Slim, a trained ballerina, said. "It’s a whole new movement. It’s like ’30s cabaret, but edgier."

Boenobo started the Red Nose District on the playa at Burning Man in 2006, drawing together his Bohemian Carnival friends, a local group of stilt- walkers known as Enhightned Beings of Leisure, installation artist Michael Christian’s crew from the East Bay, the Cirque Berserk folks from Los Angeles, and others from the growing circus world.

"It’s a safe environment to be and do what you want," Gaines said of Burning Man, noting how those breakthroughs on the playa then come back home to the city. And that ethos carries into Vau de Vire, which is truly a collective of like-minded friends, one that eschews hiring outside performers for their shows. "They’re all just part of it," he said.

What they’re all part of — Vau de Vire, Gooferman, Fou Fou Ha, and the rest of the Indie Circus folk — has begun to make a strong imprint on San Francisco nightlife and counterculture. From a performer’s perspective, Boenobo said, it feels good. "Our local family is super comfortable with one another," he said, something he’s never felt before after 25 years as a indie rocker. "It’s rare to not have a lot of ego to deal with, and it’s super rare with this kind of high-quality performance."

But they want more. As Flux said, "We want to take over the world."

WHAT’S NEXT

Slowly, the circus collective members are moving toward becoming full-time freaks. Already, Mike Gaines said most of the 12 to 15 regular Vau de Vire performers practice their art full-time, subsidizing their performances by being instructors in dance or the circus arts.

That’s not to say the parties, with their large number of performers, are lucrative. "With circus, you get a million more people on your guest list, so circus is complicated from a promoter’s perspective," Joegh Bullock of Anon Salon, which incorporates circus acts into its parties, including the upcoming Sea of Dream party New Year’s Eve. "But we love it and wouldn’t do a show without it."

To pay the bills, "we also do a lot of corporate gigs," Gaines says, not proudly. Fou Fou Ha does as well, including performing at the Westfield San Francisco Centre this holiday season. They’re all dying to take their show on the road, but that, too, takes money. "Sponsorship is the key if we’re going to tour with 60 people," said Mike, who’s been working hard on a deal and said he feels close.

Boenobo’s latest plan is Metropolus, a circus-style extravaganza he’s planning (along with Bullogh and Gaines) for next Halloween, hoping to ferry guests (using buses or perhaps even art cars from Burning Man) among several venues in town (such as Mighty, 1015, Temple, and DNA Lounge) and a huge circus tent he wants to erect in Golden Gate Park.

In addition to circus-style entertainment drawn from across the country, he wants to precede the Saturday night finale with three days and nights of workshops and smaller-scale performances. His goal is for Metropolus to because a signature event for San Francisco and the indie circus scene, the equivalent of the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas; the Winter Music Festival in Miami; or the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

The time seems right, with the current financial meltdown creating opportunities even as it makes funding their world domination plans difficult. "Each time you have a crisis like we’re having now, it’s a ripe time for circus," Jando said, noting that circus boomed during the Great Depression and after each of the two World Wars.

And after going through years of pure absurdity in Washington, DC, and on Wall Street, Raz said the clowns of the world — from Stephen Colbert’s conservative television character (who Raz says employs clown techniques in his comedy) to a singer named Boenobo — now have a special resonance with people. As he said, "One of the things clowns do is they live the folly large."

———–

CLOWN’S EYE VIEW

I’ve been following Indie Circus for years, intending to add it to the profiles of various Burning Man subcultures (see www.steventjones.com/burningman.html) that I’ve written for the Guardian, but my reporting on this story began in May. And at the suggestion of Gooferman frontman Boenobo the Klown, I decided to start from the inside and let him turn me into a clown.

As makeup artist Sharon Rose transformed me into a happy clown backstage at DNA Lounge, I asked Boenobo what I should do (besides interview people). We just needed to clown around, keep the drunks from crowding the performers, help clear the stage between acts — whatever needed doing. "We’re the scrubs," he told me, clown-to-clown.

As we spoke, the acrobats stretched, a corpse bride goofed off as she prepared for her aria, members of the Extra Action Marching Band started to slink in, clowns applied their makeup, and female performers occasionally came back from the stage and whipped off their tops.

When Gooferman went on, I still didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing, so I stood next to the stage, watched, and awkwardly tried to be a little goofy in my dancing. A tall, beautiful blond woman stood next to me, catching my eye. She was apparently alone, so after a couple songs, during a lull, I asked her, "So, do you like clowns?"

"I am a clown," she said with a grin.

"Really?" I said. "You don’t look like a clown."

"But I am," she said. "I even do clown porn."

She turned out to be 27-year-old porn star Hollie Stevens, who told me she "grew up as a clown" in the Midwest before moving to California and getting into porn seven years ago. She even starred in the film Clown Porn and still sometimes dons the red nose and face paint for her public appearances, usually just for her own amusement. Stevens once appeared on the Jerry Springer Show as a clown, even getting into the requisite fight on stage with a friend.

"Clowns, you either love them or you hate them," she said, and she loves them.

I asked why she was there and she said that she’d come to see Boenobo. They had talked but never met, and shared a sort of mutual admiration. It was a clown thing. Clowns … they get all the hot chicks.

While we talked, an acrobat worked the pole on the stage, followed by an aerialist performing above the dance floor, one scene woven seamlessly into the other. The clowns of Gooferman puttered around the stage, removing equipment to get ready for the next act, flirting with the girls, trying to scam more drink tickets, or simply entertaining others and themselves.

The life of a clown is rarely dull.

————

UPCOMING INDIE CIRCUS EVENTS

DEC. 5–6

Acrosports Winter Cabaret

639 Frederick, SF

8 p.m., $5–$15

www.citycircus.org

DEC. 12

Auditions for Acrosports’ City Circus

Call (415) 665-2276, ext. 103 for appointment

DEC. 12-14

Frolic: CircusDragBurlesque Festival

Featuring Fou Fou Ha, Anna Conda, and more

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

8 p.m., $100

www.counterpulse.org

1-800-838-3006

DEC. 20

Open House and Holiday Carnival

San Francisco Circus Center

755 Frederick, SF

10 a.m.–4 p.m., free

Pratfalls and Rising Stars

7 p.m., $12 adults, $8 children

San Francisco Circus Center

Tickets and info at www.circuscenter.org

DEC. 20

Storytime Festival, featuring Vau de Vire Society

4–7 p.m., "Tales of Enchantment," (G-rated show) 8–11 p.m., "Storytime for the Inner Child," (R-rated show)

$30–$50

Palace of Fine Arts

3301 Lyon, SF

www.storytimefestival.org

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>>More: Read Marke B.’s club review of Bohemian Carnival

Sleigh bells ring, are you drinking?

December 2, 2008

By Molly Freedenberg

Oh, it sure is party season. How do I know? The costumes and formalwear strewn across my floor, the open bottle of hangover-fighting Vitamin B on my nightstand, and the sense of anticipation I get just looking at the calendar. Now, I know San Francisco is a party town, and there’s really no season that isn’t chock full of events worth attending. So what makes this one special? Its my favorite party season. I love the rain and the cold. I love Christmas in all of the ways it’s taken seriously (Dickens Fair) and not so seriously (Santacon).

All Santa wants for Christmas is a mashup party! Bootie SF on Dec. 13 is the official post-Santacon event again this year.

Now, I have friends who would argue that party season officially started with Burning Man. But as far as I’m concerned, it started last Friday night with a fete at the Ambassador hosted by Hendrick’s gin (open bar! ouch.) and Nerve.com. Not only was this schizophrenically-themed 20s/30s/Edwardian/Victorian party was hosted in the perfect venue, and not only did almost every guest actually dress up (bonus points for the fact that I knew only a handful of the fedora-ed attendees), and not only were the cocktails so tasty that they pleased even this gin-skeptic, but the performances were fantastic.

Miss Kitten on the Keys, a regular at Hubba Hubba Revue, was the right combination of bubbly and bawdy. Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey took Acrobalancing and burlesque to a place that was both funny and sexy. The two stripping chanteuses dazzled with voices, costumes, and choreography. And I’m not sure what to say about the blonde bombshell who lost her clothes and gained a giant martini glass chair except that I’ve never seen such a professional burlesque dancer up close.

The lovely Trixxie Carr, pretty in purple (with some guy) at Bootie SF on Nov. 22, will make an apperance at the Lusty Lady Holidy Party on Dec.9. Photo by Tim Farris.

I barely sobered up in time to stop by the next night’s Bootie SF, an always fabulous party (which my dance troupe, the Cheese Puffs, happened to perform at) that featured an all-request set by live mashup band Smashup Derby. I’d be hard pressed to find a more generous, fun-loving crowd than Bootie, or more impressive and lovable hosts than Adrian, Mysterious D, and Trixxie Carr. Next up was the Black Rock Arts Foundation fundraiser at the Bentley Reserve, where we managed to miss all the entertainment but not the gorgeous setting and even more gorgeous crowd (plus, beds? how can you go wrong?). And Sunday saw the burner beourgeoisie headed to Supperclub (beds again! The weekend’s theme?) for the Five & Diamond anniversary party, a beautiful and celebratory affair featuring pretty clothes and even prettier people.

It took nearly ’til Thanksgiving to recover from all that beauty (OK, and booze), but I think I’m ready for what’s coming up in the next few weeks. If my health and hangover remedies cooperate, I’ll be attending a good portion of the following:

THURSDAY, DEC. 4

Visual Vaudeville & Built Burlesque
6pm, free
Brava Theater
2789 24th St., SF
pandorastrunk.com

Brava Theater and Pandora’s Trunk (the art/fashion collective on Lower Haight co-founded by designer Miranda Caroligne) take over the enormous and gorgeous vaudeville theater to fill it with music, burlesque, a narrative fashion presentation, and an indie craft and design show. Featured designers include Bad Unkl Sista, Miss Velvet Cream, Medium Reality, and Ghetto Goldilocks. Sure to be a good time, helped along by Patz & Hall wine and Lagunitas beer.

Pirate Cat Radio Benefit Debacle!
9pm, $7 donation to Pirate Cat Radio
Fat City
314 11th St., SF

I don’t know much about Pirate Cat Radio, but I do know about Hubba Hubba Revue – and if those crazy burlesqueteers are involved (which they are!), you know you’re in for a good time. The evening features live burlesque and performances by The Yes Go’s, Stigma 13, and October Allied.

Boot up

November 25, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Writing about Umberto D (1952), André Bazin located the intrepid beauty of Italian neorealism in its accumulation of small slivers: "The narrative unit is not the episode, the event, the sudden turn of events, or the character of its protagonists; it is the succession of concrete instants of life, no one of which can be said to be more important than another, for their ontological equality destroys drama at its very basis."

The sentence’s movement from careful observation to impassioned ethos is typical of Bazin’s noble endeavor to demonstrate the Italians’ modest profundity. The French critic was no proponent of formalism, but his composite sketch of neorealism — a mixed use of professional and amateur actors, location shooting, long takes, and a situational plotline — remains a given at Cannes.

Looking at the films in the Pacific Film Archive’s series "Moments of Truth," it’s easy enough to see why. Realism is often used as a cover to smuggle ideological biases into narrative, but a movie like Open City (1945) still draws a bracing connection between an economy of means and a strong moral imperative. Filmed in the rubble of Il Duce, the procession of dark apartment corridors and deserted streets submerge suspense into the act of witnessing. Neorealist orthodoxy aside, director Roberto Rossellini surely would have admitted that the truth is a lot more palatable when you have Anna Magnani in the leading role. Her death scene would seem to depart from neorealism in its wrenching montage (and burst of melodramatic strings), but it is Open City‘s most searing breach of moral injustice, around which the quieter scenes of resistance and despair organize their electric charge.

Among the PFA’s selection, I dote most on Il Posto (1961), an ethnography of adolescence that summons vast stores of quotidian melancholy from a backdrop of workaday drudgery. Whenever such a delicate work of neorealism threatens to buckle under the weight of critical piousness, we might look to the French New Wave filmmakers who identified with the Italians more for reasons of intellectual fecundity than partisan rigidity. Jean-Luc Godard and company liked the Hollywood pictures too, of course, but one senses their close affinity to the neorealists in their resourcefulness and flexibility. Instead of film as product, here was film as choice; pictures like Open City and Il Posto may have been branded with ideals of Truth and Reality, but the secret of their success rests in their sense of possibility. *

"Moments of Truth: Italian Cinema Classics"

Nov 29–Dec 21, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Story of the eye

November 25, 2008

> a&eletters@sfbg.com

In "Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible," SFMOMA associate curator of photography Corey Keller assembles an exciting encyclopedia of daguerreotypes, photographs, and X-rays to reconstruct and demonstrate the 19th century education of the eye. Separated into species of work (microscopy, telescopy, electricity and magnetism, motion studies, X-rays, and spiritualism) and sub-sectioned into various flora and fauna, "Brought to Light" has the distinct feel of a fin de siecle terrarium or medical amphitheatre — a suitable mise-en-scene for the subject matter.

By way of prologue, "Brought to Light" details the emergence of the improved optical technologies and positivist sciences — largely indebted to French theorist Auguste Comte — that set the stage for a "Copernican revolution" by the latter half of the 1800s. The resulting impact was first felt in the discipline of astronomy, when detailed images of the moon appeared to an astonished public courtesy of George Phillips Bond and Samuel Humphrey.

Though these lunar photographs proved unprecedented in capturing the collective imagination, the scientific community was quick to shift its classificatory gaze to the molecular universe. Early photomicrographers Alfred Donné and Auguste-Adolphe Bertsch experimented with new chemical exposures to produce startling images of diatoms, insects, and human cells. Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey ossified high-speed events through stop-action "chronotypes," thereby converting temporal mysteries — such as the arc of a cannonball, or the positioning of a racehorse’s legs in mid-stride — into a visual experience. By century’s end, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had successfully transmogrified the living human body into a ghostly apparition through his discovery of the X-ray.

So influential was technical culture upon the epistemological discourse of the period that the roving gaze of the scientist had insinuated itself into the collective perception of the laymen. As the astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen prophetically pronounced in 1877, the photography plate had supplanted human vision to become the "true retina." Always intriguing, "Brought to Light" tells the story of a moment in history when the rational world suddenly plunged into its subterranean counterpart, redefining the story of the eye. *

BROUGHT TO LIGHT: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE INVISIBLE, 1840-1900

Through Jan 4, 2009; $7-$12.50

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

After the bubble

November 25, 2008

› amanda@sfbg.com

Speculators will be able to sit on tracts of San Francisco land until the market improves. Development impact fees will be set too low to cover the costs of neighborhood improvements like parks, streets, and transit. Affordable housing development is intimately tied to a busted market rate-housing boom.

This is the future of the eastern South of Market, Potrero Hill, Central Waterfront, and Mission District neighborhoods as laid out in the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, a community rezoning effort that began in 2001 that now fills a binder thicker than a weightlifter’s bicep.

After more than 30 public hearings, the plan is approaching final approval by the Board of Supervisors. While some are lauding all the heavy lifting that’s been done to get it to this stage, there are still some noticeable shortcomings.

"The plan itself is despicably deficient in terms of affordable housing," housing activist Calvin Welch told the Guardian. That sentiment was echoed by spokespeople from the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition and the South of Market Community Action Network, who may join together in a legal challenge of the plan’s Environmental Impact Report for failing to properly consider socioeconomic impacts.

"There will be environmental impacts in terms of displacement, increased amounts of traffic and cars, increased levels of noise," said April Veneracion, SOMCAN’s organization director. "The Board of Supervisors could have addressed these inadequacies in the EIR with amendments."

Some last minute amendments were added that would audit the financing of projects and reduce land speculation — but due to a tricky legislative maneuver, even these concessions could be axed by a veto from Mayor Gavin Newsom.

The bulk of the plan rezones vast tracts of industrial land on the eastern flank of the city for housing, mixed urban use (including retail and commercial sites), and a light industrial category called "production, distribution, and repair" (PDR) that protects many of the working-class jobs remaining in San Francisco.

Building height limits will increase in some areas and remain at 40 feet in others. Between 7,000 and 10,000 new units of housing are anticipated, with affordable housing rates between 15 to 25 percent, depending on the location and project.

However, the one method of financing affordable housing — known as inclusionary housing, which requires market-rate developers to include a certain percentage of affordable units — is entirely linked to a now-waning economic boom. "Events have rendered it meaningless," said Welch. "The Eastern Neighborhoods Plan is a plan predicated on a red-hot real estate market. Planning has no ability to shift with the market and the market, since mid-September, has changed radically."

The Controller’s Office recently readjusted the city’s revenue projections, suggesting a $90 to $125 million budget shortfall in the current fiscal year, with 40 to 49 percent of that directly connected to flagging real estate transactions.

Yet housing in the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan remains primarily composed of market-rate units, fetching upward of $700,000 apiece, with "middle-income" units discounted to half that, and below-market-rate apartments still costing over $200,000 each. Development impact fees are set for $10 per square foot of construction — not enough to cover the proposed improvements that would make these industrial areas pleasant and safe for everyday residential living and working.

"In order to support the population that’s expected to move in, you need transit improvements, park improvements, street improvements," said Tony Kelly of the Potrero Boosters, a neighborhood group. "Less than half [of these] have been funded by the project."

He characterized the approved parts of the plan as "pretty weak." "They’re rezoning 500 acres of industrial land for housing — predominantly market-rate — right at a time when no one’s building market-rate housing," Kelly said. He also said the plan lacked many creative financing ideas. "When the area plans were presented to our neighborhood back in 2006, the Planning Department outlined all the things a neighborhood needs. There was a chart with 18 different ways to pay for it. How many are now in the plan? One."

Ways to ensure that developer fees are used well and land doesn’t sit fallow were introduced at the last minute. Amendments to the plan, made by Sup. Aaron Peskin, require audits of the neighborhood improvement fees and forcing developers to actually build rather than speculate — but they received a potentially fatal last-minute blow.

The Board’s first vote on the plan occurred during the Nov. 18 meeting and the bulk of the plan received unanimous support (minus Sup. Chris Daly, who is recused from voting because he owns property in the plan area).

But late in the game, a standoff arose between Peskin and Sup. Sean Elsbernd, who opposed blindly rubberstamping the last-minute amendments offered by Peskin during the previous night’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee hearing.

"We saw the actual language of this if you looked in your e-mail in the last two hours," Elsbernd said during the heat of the Board hearing. "I’d like a week to read the changes made by you last night."

The Board voted to continue the matter for a week, but then, at the end of that day’s business, Peskin rescinded the vote and forced the issue. As promised, Elsbernd severed the four Peskin amendments — a legislative tactic that allows one supervisor to slice out parts of legislation and place them into individual files for separate votes.

Peskin countered by severing another amendment, added by Sup. Gerardo Sandoval, which would have allowed special height increases for two lots on Mission Street, where the New Mission Theatre and the Giant Value store currently sit. Gus Murad, who owns the properties as well as the adjacent restaurant Medjool, has been lobbying to convert the properties to commercial and residential space.

The supervisors shot down the "spot zoning" amendment that would let future buildings on the two sites to be built higher than what’s currently allowed on Mission Street. MAC spokesperson Nick Pagoulatos later applauded the move: "It would have been a ridiculous exception to make and one that clearly favored one developer."

Despite Elsbernd’s move to sever the amendments, all four passed, but didn’t receive enough votes to block a veto from Newsom. Supervisors Carmen Chu and Michela Alioto-Pier voted with Elsbernd.

The mayor’s ability to line-item veto some key protections sought by neighborhood activists was at the heart of the move. "That’s absolutely right," Elsbernd told the Guardian, who added that although he hadn’t spoken with Newsom and didn’t know his intentions, "These are issues that absolutely concern me."

The amendments add "metering" and "use it or lose it" provisions to the plan. Metering is essentially an audit performed by the board every five years to ensure that collected developer impact fees are used properly. Peskin said that while they couldn’t meet all the requests of neighborhood groups and housing rights activists, "this was something that we could do that made good public policy sense."

Elsbernd told the Guardian he didn’t object to the concept of metering but would like oversight by the Controller’s Office. "Metering gives the Board of Supervisors full power and takes the executive out of the mix," he said of the plan as it stands now, adding that it should be viewed as a long-term protection. "This is not about Mayor Gavin Newsom. It’s about Mayor Mirkarimi or Mayor Peskin."

The "use it or lose it" requirements are designed to reduce speculation by mandating that a developer with a project that has received a green light from the Planning Department must procure a building permit within three years, after which they have one year to break ground. Currently, there’s no limit to the amount of time a developer can sit on a property, which becomes more valuable after receiving city approval.

Elsbernd said, "Three years is just not fair," but again, he said he thought there was a middle ground and would like to see project developers given opportunities to make cases for extensions. However, if the developer has one of those grandfathered projects that doesn’t have to meet the new, stricter inclusionary housing regulations or pay public benefits charges, they should "have to pay full fare, full affordability, full fees," said Elsbernd.

A second vote on the plan and its amendments is scheduled for the Nov. 25 Board meeting, after Guardian press deadline, but Elsbernd expressed optimism about a compromise as part of last-minute dealmaking. "I would say there’s a possibility, as colleagues realize the potential mayoral veto."

Still, Welch pointed out that resistance to a "use it or lose it" protection is proof that San Francisco’s real estate market is in no way immune to the economic crisis afflicting the rest of the country. "The assumption built into the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan was this robust growing market for condo development and I think the bubble has burst," said Welch. "If that isn’t the case, then why would developers care about a requirement that says you have to build in three years? The Mayor’s Office told me the phones were melting after Monday night’s amendments passed."

But Welch said one of the great ironies of a market-rate housing crash is that it makes nonprofit housing development even more competitive. "That’s why we pushed so hard for ‘use it or lose it.’ It forces developers to say to the city ‘we’ll do it,’ or ‘would you like to buy the site?’<0x2009>" He said the city should be poised to buy those sites in order to build affordable housing and suggested the city lobby Barack Obama’s administration for the funds to do it as part of the large infrastructure improvements planned by the president-elect.

"I think the way housing is financed is going to be totally transformed and the federal government is going to play a bigger role," said Welch. *

Let it reign

November 19, 2008

Fallout 3

(Bethesda Softworks/Zenimax Media; XBOX360, PS3, PC)

GAMER "War. War never changes." These words have introduced three Fallout games, intoned by narrator Ron Perlman as the camera pulls back to reveal a landscape devastated by nuclear bombardment. The world of Fallout is one steeped in retro-futurism, imagining a history in which the end of World War II was succeeded by rapid technological progress but complete cultural stagnation. In the 21st century, competition for resources leads to the Chinese invasion of Alaska, quickly countered by the American annexation of Canada. The question of who fires first is deliberately elided, but the human race soon witnesses the dawn of the apocalypse.

A small fraction of humanity weathers the mushroom cloud, eking out a living among the rubble. Still others are preserved within vast underground vaults. You begin life in Vault 101, literally emerging from the womb and triggering an inspired character creation sequence in which your father’s delivery room commentary on your sex, name, and future appearance is interrupted by menu screens that allow you to customize these qualities.

Emerging into the outside world, you are thrust into the vast and dangerous Capital Wasteland, which encompasses Washington, DC, and its environs. Bethesda Game Studios, having acquired the Fallout license from Interplay, has designed an enormous, incredibly detailed, and realistic landscape, filled with places to explore and characters to interact with. Danger and fun lurk in every bombed-out building.

The realism has its drawbacks. The first two Fallout games had graphics so simple that they allowed the player to fill in the gaps with his or her own imagination, and the fully realized world of Fallout 3 takes some getting used to if you’ve played the first two games. The series’ trademark dark humor is also somewhat diminished. Bethesda doesn’t have the knack for the pulpy, dystopian treatment of slavery, cannibalism, prostitution, and drug use that the previous installments did.

Gameplay is conducted in either the first or third person. The "V.A.T.S." targeting system is back in fine form, enabling you to aim at limbs and heads RPG-style and generally wreak havoc. It also can be played as a more traditional FPS, although this mode feels rubbery and inferior.

As much as it would have accorded with critical ethics, I have not played the game to completion. There is too much left to explore, to experiment with, before I set the events in motion that will conclude the main narrative. Despite my backwards-looking gripes, Fallout 3 is a masterwork of world creation, an apocalypse too good to leave, and a game almost too good to win.

‘Fight’ songs

November 19, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

On the night of Nov. 4, while President-elect Barack Obama was giving his victory speech in Chicago, Flobots were performing at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC.

"We ended up performing just after McCain gave his concession speech, and then we stopped when Obama gave his acceptance speech," remembers Jonny 5, the rap band’s lead vocalist, on the road to New Haven, Conn. He calls the moment "full of euphoric disbelief." Outside the club "there were people everywhere in the streets, giving each other hugs, and impromptu parades."

It wasn’t the first time Flobots’ career path had intertwined with that of the president-elect. In September, when the Democratic Party held its convention in the group’s hometown of Denver, they participated in several ancillary events, including a concert with Rage Against the Machine. "The entire event was planned to support the Iraq Veterans Against the War, who had a march immediately after the event," says Jonny 5. "So we used the stage to rally people."

Flobots’ rise from regional upstarts to modern-rock radio stalwarts mirrors Rage’s emergence more than 15 years ago. Just as Zack de la Rocha and company did with their fuzzy emo-punk, Jonny 5 — along with rapper Brer Rabbit — adds rhymes to an exotic mix of jazz horns, funky breaks, and hard-rock guitar. And the six-member crew are equally consumed with progressive politics. Each song on Fight with Tools (Universal Republic/Flobots Music, 2007), the outfit’s second album, overflows with righteous anger and activist fervor.

Flobots, “Handlebars”

"We want money for health care and public welfare! Free Mumia and Leonard Peltier!" Jonny 5 and Brer Rabbit offer on "Same Thing." "We say, ‘Yes,’ to grassroots organization, ‘No,’ to neoliberal organization! Bring the troops back to the USA and shut down Guantanamo Bay!"

"Handlebars," of course, was Flobots’ breakout moment. Much of Fight with Tools, which Flobots released independently last year, before Universal Republic signed them and reissued the album this spring, feels overwhelmed by earnest slogans. But on "Handlebars," Jonny 5 weaves a stream-of-consciousness allegory about American exceptionalism while the rest of the band build, like an orchestra, to a cacophonous conclusion.

Jonny 5 says his influences range from hip-hop collectives such as Project Blowed to organic music ensembles like Ozomatli. The unusual chart success of "Handlebars," which soared into the Billboard Top 40 last summer, helped Flobots sell more records than any of their inspirations.

"Personally, I had this obsession or insecurity about whether we were really hip-hop, and whether we were representing the hip-hop community correctly. I don’t know … I was hung up on it," Jonny 5 explains. "[Influential indie rapper] 2Mex was with us for four or five dates on the West Coast, and the minute we would mention any criticism we’d get, he’d say, ‘Fuck that, man. Keep expanding. That’s what hip-hop is.’<0x2009>"

FLOBOTS

Sun/23, 8 p.m., $27.50–<\d>$30

Warfield

982 Market, SF

www.goldenvoice.com

Where’s Harry?

November 18, 2008

History is written by the winners, the survivors — and sometimes the people who try the hardest. And while Milk hews pretty closely to reality, some of the people who lived through the story say a few key pieces are missing.

On the night Sup. Harvey Milk was assassinated, for example, a crowd gathered in the Castro for a march to City Hall. In the movie, the key protagonists — Cleve Jones and Anne Kronenberg — pull the spontaneous event together. Sup. Tom Ammiano, who was there, remembers it a bit differently.

"The whole thing started at Harry Britt’s house," Ammiano told us.

Britt, who was appointed as Milk’s successor on the board, "lived at 16th and Castro, and we were all gathered there on his steps" Ammiano said. "I asked what I could do, and he told me to run out and get some black ribbons. So I went to Cliff’s Hardware and bought out every black ribbon in the place.

"Harry was the focal point. It all started with him."

But Britt — one of Milk’s confidants and by any standard one of the most important gay politicians in the city’s history — isn’t mentioned in the movie.

There are, of course, plenty of events and people left out of what could only be, at best, a snapshot of history. Milk isn’t a documentary; it’s a feature film. Jones, who served as a script consultant, told us that "the hardest decision was what to cut…. There were a lot of people close to Harvey who didn’t make it."

It’s no secret that Jones and Britt are not close, and that the former supervisor has been out of the political limelight for years. He told me this week that he doesn’t want to talk about the film. ("I had the privilege to know Harvey myself, and I don’t want to see him through someone else’s eyes," he said.) But still, the absence of Britt, who picked up and carried Milk’s torch for many long years, is striking.

Ammiano, who loved the movie overall, agreed that it was odd not to see Britt depicted in any of the key scenes. "It’s funny when you live through history, when you were there, and then to see how it’s reported," he said. "History is written by he or she who tells it."

And while, to a certain extent, the movie feels like the Cleve Jones Show (and Jones happily told me he feels like he’s becoming "the most famous homosexual you know"), Ammiano credited Jones with pushing to make the film happen.

"Cleve wanted the story told, and for 15 years he’s been pushing it," Ammiano said. "It’s a huge personal accomplishment for him, and this is his reward."

Past, present, future

November 18, 2008

> johnny@sfbg.com

REVIEW As a programming move, the Roxie Theater’s decision to screen Rob Epstein’s classic 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk is both a no-brainer and a bit of casual brilliance. It’s a no-brainer because of Milk mania. It’s a little stroke of genius because this great documentary’s return, one week before the theatrical premiere of Gus Van Sant’s feature at the Castro, provides plentiful compare-and-contrast opportunities for all those wise enough to know that they need to see both. This isn’t the first time that the Roxie — which presented Tsai Ming-liang’s homage to movie theaters Goodbye, Dragon Inn during the Castro’s days of turmoil in 2004 — has chimed in like a smart kid brother.

Epstein’s movie is a classic partly because of its historical contents, but there’s a definite mastery to the way in which he assembles and presents that material — if today’s makers of stylized docs haven’t learned from his command, that command has at least influenced Van Sant. The Times of Harvey Milk doesn’t dig into day-to-day San Francisco politics with the same relish or perhaps even specificity of the Van Sant movie (which recalls Barbet Schroeder’s 1990 Reversal of Fortune in its affection for scenes of creative, energetic groupthink). But journeying through candlelight vigil and through riot, it remains the most dramatically powerful response to Harvey Milk. His life and death were the stuff of great drama as well as of history.

The time for The Times of Harvey Milk is now, once again: more than a number connects and separates Proposition 6 of Milk’s era with Proposition 8 today. Thanks to Epstein’s compassionate documentary eye, his talking heads are fully realized human characters, with a range of personalities: the fervor of Tom Ammiano, the gruff candor of union machinist Jim Elliot (who thought the police raids on gay bars were fine until he met Milk), the contemplative sadness and strength of Sally M. Gearhart. Other touches, such as Harvey Fierstein’s uncharacteristically stoic voice-over, are surprising. And Epstein doesn’t glorify or beatify Milk when presenting the relationship between Milk and Dan White — his look at their interactions shows the sharp, competitive edges of Milk’s humanism.

The 2004 anniversary edition of the Times of Harvey Milk DVD is a treasure trove of material providing greater insight into Dan White. But it’s important to revisit this movie outside of the isolated home box office. There are generations of people who, if they’ve seen it, have only seen The Times of Harvey Milk on video at home. Like the man at the core of its subject, Epstein’s documentary thrives in a public, theatrical setting. The events it collects and captures are still relevant to all the random people who will find themselves united by a decision to watch this movie in a cinema — people who will step outside of the Roxie into a city and a world not that different from the one where Harvey Milk died and lived, one that is demanding collective action, and his spirit, once again.

THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK

Opens Fri/21, $5–$10

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 431-3611

www.roxie.com

>>Back to the Milk Issue

Extra! The 8 cent martini at John’s Grill

November 13, 2008

In the breathless prose of press agent Lee Houskeeper (who operates as if he is in search of Walter Winchell and Herb Caen) comes the announcement of the 8 cent martini for the centennial celebration of John’s Grill. John’s is the home of Dashiell Hammett, the Hammett booth where he sat to eat his chops and baked potato, a Maltese Falcon museum, and a l50 pound lead bronze statue of the Maltese Falcon that Hammett made famous in his book and movie.

B3 note: there is a rumor of a two martini limit on the 8 cent martini but Lee will not verify.

San Francisco Expected To Come To a Halt Friday
Forget Saturday Newspaper And Other Vital Services
Not Since the 1906 Earthquake Has Our City Been More Threatened

Famed Newspaper & Cop Hangout To Pour 8 Cent Drinks To All Thirsty San Franciscans

San Francisco — The Centennial of Historic John’s Grill will be celebrated on November 13 and 14, 2008. On Thursday, November 13, the media are invited to cover a series of invitation-only events. The public will be invited to turn out and toast the beloved landmark restaurant on Friday, November 14. Vintage automobiles will arrive, and scores of colorfully costumed San Franciscans will disembark to the strains of Sousa bands and belly up to John’s bar for 8-cent Martini’s and free appetizers. Celebrity watchers will not be disappointed.

Historic John’s Grill was the one of the first restaurants to rebuild out of the rubble and ashes of San Francisco’s Great 1906 Earthquake & Fire.

Historic John’s Grill is the 27th “Literary Landmark” in the United States. Just off Union Square, John’s Grill was made famous internationally by Dashiell Hammett’s 1927 “Maltese Falcon” mystery novel (later a classic Humphrey Bogart movie): “Sam Spade went to John’s Grill, asked the waiter to hurry his order of chops, baked potato, sliced tomatoes and was smoking a cigarette with his coffee when…” was written by Hammett, who ate at John’s while working next door in the Flood Building as a Pinkerton agent.

Detectives, politicians, reporters and celebrities have been coming to John’s Grill for the past century. Their pictures adorn the walls above their tables and you never know whom you might see at John’s Grill. Be sure to visit the Grill’s Hammett museum located on the third floor and see the 150-pound lead filled bronze statue of the famous Maltese Falcon.

My call with Rose Aguilar

November 11, 2008

By Amanda Witherell

redhighways11.11.08.jpg

Local KALW “Your Call” radio show host Rose Aguilar has written a fascinating account of her six-month road trip through four “red” states interviewing people about their lives and asking them why they vote the way they do. The book, Red Highways, details her interviews and interactions she meets and reveals Aguilar as the kind of reporter who is drawn to apparent contradictions and keeps her microphone on way past the sound byte responses. She and her boyfriend, Ryan, attend a progressive church in Dallas and dine with a pro-war vegan; interview a Republican turned Democrat because of domestic violence in Mississippi; have a close encounter at a gun show in Oklahoma City; and talk with gay, Republican environmentalists in Montana.

The book was published just before the election and I gave her a call today to get her thoughts on Barack Obama’s win, hear some stories that were left out of the book, and talk about how the media could and should be reporting from the real American perspective.

We’ll be publishing a review of Red Highways in Wednesday’s paper, but in the meantime, Aguilar is reading tonight, November 11, at 7:30 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. You can find other author events here.

rose11.11.08.jpg

Here are some excerpts of my interview with her:

kino21

November 5, 2008

There is an Alfred Jarry quote at the top of kino21’s Web site: "It’s always those who can’t who try." Jarry’s pithy observation might seem like a backhanded compliment on what motivates the underdog, but it also nicely encapsulates the risk-taking and politically provocative sensibility that kino21 founders and organizers Irina Leimbacher and Konrad Steiner bring to their screenings. "We wanted people to see films as a community, to talk about them as you see them, rather than about them, privately," reflects Steiner over the phone. "It’s always hot and cold — it depends on the show. It’s hard to say if the goal is ever reached, but the point is that we have consistently been showing these films."

Leimbacher and Steiner joined forces in February 2007 to create a more moveable and multivalent forum for the kind of curatorial work they had been doing together at San Francisco Cinematheque from 2003-06, when Leimbacher was associate curator, and then artistic director, and Steiner was on the curatorial committee. Since their inaugural screening of Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys From Berlin/1971 (1980), a freewheeling personal investigation of the psychic and political fallout of violence, kino21 has presented films by canonical members of the avant-garde such as Chris Marker and Warren Sonbert. They’ve also expanded cinema through events such as the New Talkies or Neo-Benshi Cabaret, and their multimedia reinterpretation of Jarry’s The 10,000 Mile Bike Race.

While kino21’s array of events is certainly eclectic, Leimbacher and Steiner pay attention to the order of things when filling out their calendar: the question of how different screenings will resonate with or deflect off each other is always kept in mind. One example: Schindler’s Houses (2007), Heinz Emigholz’s meditative portrait of modernist architect Rudolf Schindler’s constructions, was screened on the heels of a double bill consisting of Kamal Aljafari’s The Roof (2006) and James T. Hong’s This Shall Be a Sign, which both investigate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by way of architecture and urban development.

Even when programming older work, such as last April’s screening of Bruce Baillie’s rarely-exhibited 1970 Quick Billy or Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1973), Leimbacher and Steiner aren’t, in Steiner’s words, "trying to recuperate or resuscitate someone’s reputation, but to show their continuity with the present moment." As he puts it: "To draw historical work back and make it relevant, rather than nostalgic — that’s what we hope to accomplish."

Kino21’s most ambitious and certainly timely project is the current five-part "How We Fight" series. Evoking Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series of World War II-era propaganda films for the United States, "How We Fight" presents international works that investigate the various ground truths of those doing the fighting. "We wanted to show films that looked at war, but not from some specific ideological or moral perspective," Leimbacher explains. "Instead [they] actually explore and visually convey the experience of what it means, in the short and long run, to be a soldier." From Joseph Strick’s historic interviews with My Lai veterans, to recent footage shot by soldiers and mercenaries on the frontlines of Iraq, to Stefano Savona’s controversial, diaristic portrait of Kurdish terrorists, the films in "How We Fight" demand an honest emotional as well as critical response.

A forum for this sort of critical engagement with aesthetics, in fact, is exactly what kino21 creates. "There’s an aspect of art where we use it to better our lives. But there’s another aspect where we use it to investigate our lives," Steiner says. "We try to do the latter."

www.kino21.org

Corporations do

November 4, 2008

› steve@sfbg.com

No amount of feel-good advertising can counter the perfect populist storm that has been brewing around Chevron, the giant Bay Area-based oil company that for the last month has spent $15 million plastering billboards and the airwaves with slick, heartwarming appeals to use less energy.

Few expect the greenwashing campaign to do much good in a political climate that has had everyone from Barack Obama to Sarah Palin bashing "Big Oil." And in the week leading up to an historic presidential election, Chevron was looking bigger and badder than ever.

The week began Oct. 27 with the start of a landmark human rights and corporate responsibility trial in federal court in San Francisco, in which Chevron stands accused of complicity with Nigeria’s authoritarian government in the torture, murder, and abuse of those protesting Chevron’s exploitation of the Niger Delta.

And the work week ended Oct. 31 with Chevron announcing record quarterly profits of $7.9 billion, more than double what the oil giant earned a year earlier, when the company’s $3.7 billion in profits triggered calls by Obama and other political figures to levy higher taxes on such windfalls.

That’s exactly what city officials in Richmond were trying to do this election with Proposition T, which would steeply increase the tax Chevron pays the city for its Richmond refinery. The measure would assess a tax based on the value of raw materials being processed, increasing to about $26.5 million per year, 440 times what it currently pays the city through a payroll tax. (Election results were expected after the Guardian‘s press deadline, so check www.sfbg.com for more.)

Jamie Court, executive director of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer rights and the author of Corporateering: How Corporate Power Steals Your Personal Freedom and What You Can Do About It (Penguin, 2003), said the combination of events creates a moment that makes significant reform possible.

"They make a very juicy target for people who want to show that oil companies do not share the values of the American people," Court said. "I think this trial could very well become a defining moment for how public opinion moves policymakers in Washington to real energy reform."

The case, Bowoto vs. Chevron, breaks new ground in seeking to hold an American corporation responsible in US courts for atrocities committed half the world away. The complaint, first filed in 1999, alleges that "the military, at the request of, and with the participation and complicity of Chevron, killed and injured people, destroyed churches, religious shrines, and water wells; burned down houses, killed livestock; and destroyed canoes and fishing equipment belonging to villagers" who were peacefully protesting Chevron’s pollution and destabilization of the region.

The trial, which is expected to continue until December, was brought under the little-used, 219-year-old Alien Tort Claims Act. Unocal faced a similar lawsuit for its alleged abuses in Myanmar and settled the case in 2004. But the Chevron case is the first of its kind to make it to trial.

Michael Watts, a geography professor who directs the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley, said the political momentum has been building against big oil companies for a long time and the combination of this case, record profits, and the election create an opportunity for reform.

"The case is very important for a lot of reasons in and of itself, even if there was nothing else going on in the industry," Watts told us. "This is a big, precedent-setting case."

Not only could Chevron be hurt financially by the verdict, but the precedent could affect multinational corporations of all kinds that do business with regimes around the world with poor human rights records. And it could fuel political efforts at home to rein in corporate bad behavior.

"If you’re running up these kinds of profits, why would you let a case like this go to trial in the first place?" Watts asked.

Chevron officials did not return calls for comment.

Chevron is also facing another landmark trial in Ecuador, where Texaco (which Chevron bought in 2001) is being sued for billions of dollars to compensate for widespread environmental degradation of sensitive rainforests from its oil extraction efforts there, a case in which US courts have refused Chevron’s requests to intervene.

Will this perfect storm lead to reform? That depends on the social movements and the political leadership that takes office in January.

Shift happens

November 4, 2008

› news@sfbg.com

Since the beginning of the presidential campaign, Americans have been bombarded with one big concept summed up in one little word: change.

It was Barack Obama’s slogan from day one and represented many people’s hope for the future, an idea that so appeals to beleaguered Americans that the Republicans eventually adopted it as well. Both parties recognized that the country would have to make big adjustments to salvage the economy, environment, schools, and health care system.

They each cited factors that point to the big changes that are coming — but they didn’t mention a huge one that has been bearing down on our species for nearly 5,200 years: the colossal transformation of solar system and our collective psyche that the ancient Mayans and their modern day supporters believe will take place Dec. 21, 2012, the day the Mayan calendar comes to an abrupt end.

Erick Gonzalez, founder and spiritual leader of Earth Peoples United, a nonprofit organization that works to bridge indigenous values with modern society, says the event will deeply disturb our minds and bodies here on earth. Nearly 300 people from around the world gathered Oct. 31-Nov. 2 during a 2012 conference at Fort Mason Center.

Some enthusiasts predict an apocalypse, while others foresee a shift in human awareness. Yet they all believe that big change is coming.

The Mayan calendar was developed by ancient astronomers who concluded that Dec. 21 was the sun’s birthday, noting that the winter solstice marked the beginning of the sun’s return from around the world.

Gonzalez, who has been studying Mayan culture for 33 years, says Dec. 21, 2012 will be a monumental birthday for our sun, when it will shift to the dead center of the Milky Way galaxy, on the galactic equator, for the first time.

The Mayans believed this was the precise spot where the sun — and all life — was created. Followers of the ancient theory claim the Milky Way will give birth to a new sun and a new galactic cycle on this day, marking the beginning of our world’s transformation.

"For the Maya, this is like the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve," said philosopher Roderick Marling, a Tantric yoga teacher who has spent the last 36 years researching yoga meditation and expanding consciousness, in addition to writing numerous papers on religion, mythology, history, and archeology. "The galactic clock will be set at zero point, and a new processional cycle will begin," he said.

As our planets shift overhead, believers say our awareness of the Earth, political issues, and each other will also change. Conference co-organizer Christian Voltaire says many of the changes in 2012 will be tangible, such as revising our current financial model or switching to alternative fuels. He points to former presidential candidate Ron Paul, who advocated for extreme change in monetary policy — abolishing the IRS and the Federal Reserve, for example — and Obama, who has pushed for transforming the economy with green jobs. "They’re at least conscious of the fact that something has to change," he says. "And, as we’ve been told by our prophesies, change is coming."

But skeptics have their doubts. Wouldn’t we be pushing for green energy anyway? And how could the shifting planets cause the financial meltdown — or even the actual meltdown of our polar ice caps? University of Florida anthropologist Susan Gillespie says the theory is a media myth and nothing more. Susan Milbrath, author of Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars and curator of Latin American art and archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, believes it’s unlikely the Mayans could have predicted such events.

Believers remain undeterred. Last Gasp Books employee and conference attendee Eliza Strack says her 2012 obsession started as an innocent topic of conversation many years ago. She believes alternate realms of existence and multiple dimensions of time could collide, allowing us to access our past, present, and future in one moment. "We spend a quarter of our lives in a dream state where alternate realities are playing themselves out," Strack says. Gonzalez backs her up, arguing that the alignment of the sun in 2012 will create a powerful magnetic force, and human protons and electronic will react to it.

Lifelong Mayan researcher John Major Jenkins, who has written several books on 2012, brings up the possibility of the sun inverting the earth’s magnetic fields. But according to Vincent H. Malmström, professor emeritus of geography at Dartmouth College, there’s no hard evidence to support Strack’s claim. Besides, how could a magnetic pull bring our dreamlike realities to life? Malmström writes in his paper The Astronomical Insignificance of Maya Date (www.dartmouth.edu/~izapa/M-32.pdf): "It would seem that Jenkins has advanced our understanding of the Maya from the sublime to the ridiculous."

Although we have four years before the astral shift, Voltaire says it’s crucial to hold 2012 conventions now. "The weekend before the election carries a vibration of anticipation of the future. We wanted to connect with that." The Southern Californian didn’t know much about the 2012 theory before last March, but he says he’s constantly alert and keeps a subtle ear out.

"I kept hearing the subject of 2012 in my consciousness — at events, on the radio, at yoga class," he says. "Everyone was talking about it." After making a few phone calls, he partnered with 2012 author and filmmaker Jay Weidner, a native Oregonian who has been studying the subject for nearly 20 years. Sponsored by Weidner’s company Sacred Mysteries Live, they organized their first convention in Hollywood in March 2008 and were blown away by the response.

Their conference last weekend was even bigger. With interactive panels and community circles, participants could share their ideas about 2012. Voltaire and Weidner say it represents something different for everyone: change, chaos — even beauty. In the midst of it all, the organizers premiered 2012-themed films and documentaries that filmmakers submitted along with an entry fee of — $20.12.

The conference also offered critical analyses of some related prophecies: the Mayans, Tibetan Buddhists, Incas, and the mysterious Cross of Hendaye. They lived in different times, and had different notions about the events that would take place around 2012. Conference organizers say Inca texts prophesized "a world turned upside-down" around that year, while Tibetan Buddhists predicted the mythical city of Shanballad would be constructed at the end of the current era.

Voltaire says the Cross of Hendaye — a 400-year-old monument in the coastal town of Hendaye, France — holds the key to the paradigm. The cross was first described in the 1926 book The Mystery of the Cathedrals, written by an alchemist named Fulcanelli. In 1995, before learning of the 2012 stories, Weidner was hooked on this book. He worked for years to decipher the messages behind the cross, deconstructing a Latin inscription carved into its top, and finally claims to have discovered its meaning: "It represents a world crisis that will end this time period.

There’s exactly one presidential term left before the end of this time period, which has witnessed everything from financial crises to homelessness to global warming. But will a new era end the problems of the current one? It’s hard to imagine how thousands of San Francisco’s poorest residents will acquire homes, or how our ozone layer will suddenly thicken.

After rifling through more books, Weidner says he discovered another secret behind the cross: that the Earth’s greatest changes will take place between 1992 and 2012. During that time so far, we’ve seen the birth the Internet, economic globalization and overextension, mass extinctions and global warming, terrorism and imperial hubris, exploding populations and rising discontent, and the end of the age of oil coming into sight. Then again, 20 years is a long time and life moves fast these days, with or without a mystical cross.

Nevertheless, since his supposed discoveries, Weidner has written two books and one film about the Cross of Hendaye’s secrets. In addition to a simpler belief that attributes a natural, geological pattern to these changes, three other prophecies predict some version of disaster or shift around 2012. Weidner admits this could be an incredible coincidence, but he thinks we should be aware of today’s experiences anyway. "There’s no doubt this is one of the most incredible time periods in human history."

While no one knows what will go down Dec. 21, 2012, Strack likes to put a positive spin on the brewing events. She wonders if 2013 will bring sweet-smelling city air, friendly neighbors, and tricycles for old folks to ride to the grocery store. After all, who believes that a shift in consciousness would be a bad thing?

Many followers even look forward to the date and equate it with the second coming of Christ, when they will be blessed with knowledge and euphoria. "Those are the happy thoughts," Strack says. "Yin-yang that shit and you find the darkest, most terrifying possibilities." She says she has had multiple apocalyptic dreams, leading her to ponder World War III, death, chaos, betrayal, and everything else that could hit the fan in 2012.

This sort of anxiety has led some people to use the term "doomsday" when describing the last day of the Mayan calendar. Although the theory has no solid academic backing, it is catching on. YouTube hosts countless videos of asteroids striking earth, tsunamis, tornados, and incidents of chaos linked to the date. Many devotees are preparing for hell on earth. But Voltaire says 2012 isn’t all about doom and gloom. "Our prophecies are about facing the facts and bringing up new ideas, acknowledging indigenous cultures of the past and present and truly listening to what they have to say, not brushing them off."

During our country’s time of change, we may not have heard many full-blown prophecies coming to pass, but we have all witnessed powerful people raising fresh ideas, such as rapidly shifting to new energy sources, developing international standards of human rights and controls on the use of force, and attacking poverty and disease worldwide. Like the 2012 followers, we’re listening and trying to remain open-minded.

If you chose to listen — to the prophecies or the new president — you might ask yourself how you’re supposed to prepare for the future. Voltaire says that "if you’re conscious of the changes, you’ll be able to roll with them, like if you’re in the ocean swimming with the tide. But if you’re unconscious and you suddenly wake up, it’ll be a lot harder to deal with."

Voltaire and Weidner say that our president will need to prepare too. They think that for him to be successful, he will have to address issues such as green energy and global warming brought forth at the 2012 conference.
Whether we’re believers or not, our country’s in for some big changes, whatever the solar alignment.

Political awakening: ‘Wake Yo Game Up’ finds San Quinn, Too $hort, Mistah FAB, and other rappers urging fans to vote

October 29, 2008

By Garrett Caples

I was talking to Beeda Weeda at a listening party for his latest disc Da Thizzness (SMC), when someone sat down at our table. “I want you to meet this man,” Beeda said, introducing me to Charles Johnson, executive director of the Town Business Network.

Founded two years ago as a nonprofit social-activist group to combat Oakland’s spiraling murder rate, TBN has lent its organizational might to a variety of causes, most recently voter registration within the ghetto hip-hop community. To this end, the group has just released its CD, Wake Yo Game Up, a pro-voting compilation including tracks by the likes of NEW Oakland (Mistah FAB, Beeda, and J-Stalin), San Quinn, and even Too $hort himself.

Largely given out at panel discussions and registration events in the hood, and also downloadable at www.wakeyogameup.org, the release aims to speak to the community in its own terms about the importance of casting a vote in these critical times. While voter registration is over for the upcoming election, TBN is still pushing the disc to help get out the vote, working to ensure that people who register actually get to the polls on Nov. 4.

Anniversary Issue: The money at home

October 22, 2008

"You need to shrink the distance between the people who visit the private economy and the people who run it."

David Morris. Institute for Local Self-Reliance

› tredmond@sfbg.com

Back in the early 1980s, when the word "sustainable" was barely a blip in the environmental vocabulary, the mayor of Saint Paul, Minn. brought in a consultant named David Morris to help him figure out how to revive the city’s economy.

Saint Paul was facing the same challenges as many other northern cities — old industry was dying, the downtown was decaying, and population was declining as more affluent residents moved to the suburbs. Mayor George Latimer didn’t want to do what some of the other cities were doing and beg companies to move into town: he wanted to see what could be done with the resources the city already had.

Morris, who now runs the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, started by contacting the US Patent Office and getting a list of everyone in Saint Paul with a recent patent. He eliminated corporations and universities and wound up with a list of a few hundred people — inventors, thinkers, folks who had come up with something new. About two dozen had created gizmos or technologies that solved a real problem. Most of the stuff was sitting in basements and in old notebooks.

"Latimer called them all together," Morris recalled, "and he said, ‘We believe in you, and we’re going to help you start a business and market your invention.’" The mayor helped the would-be entrepreneurs find the capital and support they could never have gotten by themselves from a private sector not terribly interested in small business start-up loans. He encouraged them to open companies and market their products. The results were remarkable — lots of new locally-owned companies, creation of good jobs, and the beginning of a revitalization plan that made Latimer a national figure.

That principle — look locally and use the resources you have — remains the heart of a sustainable local economy.

"A sustainable place can feed, power, and house its citizens with local resources," explained Michelle Long, executive director of Bellingham, Wash.-based Sustainable Connections. "You need to generate new innovations with local innovators."

The late urban thinker Jane Jacobs made that notion a centerpiece of her life’s work. Starting with The Economy of Cities in 1969 and later in Cities and the Wealth of Nations in 1964, Jacobs argued that urban economies are like ecosystems — they are healthiest when they are diverse, with many different niches, and they thrive when energy cycles through the system. The cities throughout history that have done best have been those that figured out how to replace imports with locally produced goods and services.

It’s not that complicated, really. A sustainable local economy, like a sustainable ecosystem, needs lots of players, needs the energy of the system — money — to stick around through numerous economic cycles, and needs to use local resources to grow.

An economy that doesn’t depend too heavily on any one sector will not only do better in good times but will be much hardier. As farmers know, a monocrop system not only needs far more sustenance (fertilizers, irrigation, etc.) but is far more vulnerable to catastrophic failure. Diverse local economies, with thousands of small businesses offering a wide range of goods and services, can survive bad times better than communities that depend on just a few big industries.

As the Guardian has shown through a series of studies we did years ago ("The end of the high-rise jobs myth," 10/23/85) — and which research done since then has proved — small, locally-owned businesses create the majority of new jobs in San Francisco. And money spent in small businesses circulates in the local economy; the proprietor of the local hardware store takes his or her revenue and spends it on shoes for the kids. The shoe store owner takes that money and buys groceries at the local market. Every dollar goes around several times; and each time, it adds economic benefit — what economists call the multiplier effect.

A dollar spent in a chain store leaves town within hours, wired to a central corporate headquarters where executives care nothing about San Francisco — save as a place to extract wealth from.

Jacobs was brilliant, but she had her libertarian leanings. She often argued that it was best for government to get out of the way and let economies grow organically. That may have made sense to someone who came of age fighting the old-fashioned redevelopment programs and top-down urban planning of the 1960s and ’70s. But the modern urban economy not only needs help from policymakers, but clear direction — particularly in unsettled times like these. As William Greider wrote in The Nation Oct. 20, "only government has the leverage to get the money moving again."

In fact, modern progressive economic thinkers say that the public sector has a huge, perhaps defining role to play in building a sustainable local economy.

"The city needs to emphasize the public over the private," Morris told me. A sustainable economy, he said, is "a society where the public commons grows and the private shrinks." Taking public programs and services and turning them over to private business — which is all the rage in the Mayor’s Office these days — is about the worst thing a community can do.

So what could City Hall do to create a more sustainable local economy? Start, Morris says, by reducing the need for money. "The things that are most valuable in a sustainable economy are those that are free," he said. That means keeping libraries open, making more public space accessible, offering free public events — and encouraging people to reuse even the basics. "There’s no need for most people to buy new clothes, especially for kids. Sustainability starts with people substituting free things for costly things."

That could mean, for example, city-run clothing exchanges (and toy exchanges and places where used construction materials could be traded). It also means leadership by example: Mayor Gavin Newsom isn’t as big on conspicuous consumption as his predecessor, Willie Brown, who bought new imported Italian suits by the rack. But he’s hardly been known for promoting a low-consumption lifestyle. "The mayor could announce, for example, that he is going to reduce his consumption of imported goods by 75 percent in the next year," Morris suggested, "and show everyone how he’s going to do it."

Then there’s distance — both physical and psychological. Obviously, reducing commutes and the need for long-distance shopping trips is a factor, but it’s not enough. "You need to shrink the distance between the people who visit the private economy and the people who run it," he said. The owners of businesses need to live in the community. They need to interact with their customers and neighbors, to see the local schools where their tax dollars go.

In Bellingham, Long’s group worked with local government on a large-scale marketing campaign with the slogan "think local, buy local, be local." Their effort involved an advertising campaign, a coupon book, and even a mascot. "We have a bee who goes around to events; it’s the Be-local Bee," she said. It’s more than just shopping; it’s about thinking about your community first.

The impact: more than 60 percent of Bellingham residents in a recent poll reported that they now think about finding local sources for their goods and services.

One key to all this, Doug Hammond, executive director of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, told us, is access to community capital. "If that’s not available, you never get out of the gate," he said.

BALLE, a seven-year old organization with headquarters in San Francisco, works with 20,000 members to promote small, locally-owned businesses and initiatives to sustain healthy economies — and healthy communities.

Community capital means "financing to support innovation," Long said, "from people who are willing to look at what we call living returns — something that works for the lender and for the borrower."

There are, Hammond notes, "almost no resources for locally-owned, independent businesses. It’s a disproportionately-tilted playing field."

Hammond, who took over as BALLE’s director this month, was startled to learn that San Francisco puts all its money — its payroll accounts, tax accounts, and so forth — in North Carolina-based Bank of America. That’s not a local bank. It’s not an institution that supports local businesses, and the money it makes doesn’t circulate in San Francisco.

Cities that want sustainable economies, he said, need "locally-owned common-good banks" that will invest in small loans to local businesses — and be willing to accept fair, but not excessive, returns. "If the city was willing to put some of its working money into that kind of a business, it would be a huge start," he told us. "That kind of thing is the low-hanging fruit."

The mayor has spent a lot of money on staff and programs that promote his image as environmentally conscious. But what he really needs, Hammond said, is a "local-first czar," someone at City Hall who has the mandate — and the authority — to promote a sustainable economy.

"There has to be a baseline for local procurement," he said. "How much of the city’s resources go back into the local community? What are the ways to make those resources community controlled again?"

San Francisco is a peninsula, but it isn’t an island. The city can’t operate entirely independent of the rest of the world. But at a time when global capital is in crisis, and fossil fuel use is threatening ecological catastrophe, and few people in Washington or Sacramento are offering true progressive solutions, San Francisco should be leading the way toward a model for a locally sustainable economy.

It’s not impossible. It’s not even that hard. It just takes political will.
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