Green Archives — Page 6 of 120 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Progressives challenge mayor’s abuse of authority

Erica Hanna

May 28, 2014

EDITORIAL Mayor Ed Lee has repeatedly overstepped his authority on behalf of the entrenched political and economic interests who put him into office, and we’re happy to see Sup. John Avalos and his progressive allies on the Board of Supervisors starting to push back and restore a more honest and equitable balance of power at City Hall.

There was no excuse for Lee and his political appointees on the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to sabotage a decade of work creating the CleanPowerSF program, the only mechanism the city has for creating the renewable energy projects we need to meet our climate change goals.

This was a program created by a veto-proof majority on the Board of Supervisors, the body that the City Charter gives the authority to create such programs on behalf of the people who elect them, then the SFPUC used a vote that should have been a procedural formality to block it (see “Power struggle,” 9/17/13).

Lee refused to work with the supervisors to address his stated concerns — most of which have already been addressed by now anyway, from the program’s cost to the involvement of Shell Energy North America, which is now out — draining the CleanPowerSF funding and providing more evidence that this ruse was really all about protecting PG&E from competition.

So Avalos and other progressives of the Budget & Finance Committee last week rejected the SFPUC budget, forcing Lee and allies to now bargain in good faith. That’s the kind of realpolitik in service of progressive values that we’ve been missing at City Hall in recent years, the willingness to get tough with the grinning mayor who disingenuously talks about civility while his operatives stab their opponents in the back.

Avalos is also sponsoring a fall ballot measure that would let voters fill vacancies on the Board of Supervisors, rather than letting the mayor, who heads the executive branch, stack the legislative branch of government in his favor. We should have done that a decade ago after Gavin Newsom executed his infamous “triple play” to gain another ally on the board, and it’s especially relevant now that two supervisors are running against either other for the Assembly.

Avalos isn’t stressing the balance of powers argument for his Let’s Elect our Elected Officials Act of 2014, which would call a special election to fill vacancies in all the locally elected positions if the next election was more than year away (both the Board of Education and City College Board of Trustees would appoint interim members). It even gives up the supervisors’ power to appoint a new mayor (with the board president serving the interim, as is now the law). San Francisco isn’t a dictatorship, as much as that might please Lee’s business community allies. The people and our district-elected supervisors need to have a stronger voice in how this city is being run, so we at the Bay Guardian are happy to see a few new green shoots of democracy springing up at City Hall.

Memorial Day: Remembering the good old days in Rock Rapids, Iowa, circa 1940s to 1950s

May 25, 2014

Bruce B. Brugmann

(Reprinted and updated by popular demand)

When I was growing up in my hometown of Rock Rapids, Iowa, a farming community of 2,800 in the northwest corner of the state, Memorial Day was the official start of summer.

We headed off to YMCA camp at Camp Foster on West Okiboji Lake and Boy Scout camp at Lake Shetek in southwestern Minnesota. The less fortunate were trundled off to Bible School at the Methodist Church.

As I remember it, Memorial Day always seemed to be a glorious sunny day and full of action for Rock Rapids. The high school band in black and white uniform would march down Main Street under the baton of the local high school band teacher (in my day, Jim White.) A parade would feature floats carrying our town’s veterans of the First and Second World wars, young men I knew who suddenly were wearing their old uniforms. And there was for many years a veteran of the Spanish American War named Jess Callahan prominently displayed in a convertible. Lots of flags would be flying and the Rex Strait American Legion Post and Veterans of Foreign Wars would be out in force. We never really knew who Rex Strait was, except that he was said to be the first Rock Rapids boy to die in World War I and the post was named after him.

After the parade, we would make our way to our picture post card cemetery, atop a knoll just south of town overlooking the lush green of the trees and the fields along the lazy Rock River.A local dignitary would give a blazing patriotic speech. A color guard of veterans would move the flags into position and then at the command fire their rifles off toward the river. I remember this was the first time I ever saw a color guard in action, with a sergeant who moved his men with rifles into position with strange “hut, hut, hut” commands.

After the ceremony, everyone would go to the graves of their family and friends and people they knew and look at the flowers that would be sitting in bouquets and little pots by the headstones. The cemetery was and is a beautiful spot and many of us who are natives have parents, friends, and relatives buried here. It is one of the wonderful things that connects us to the town, no matter where we end up.

And so this year I got my annual telephone call from Dorothy Bosch, at the Flower Village florist in Rock Rapids, reminding me about the flowers I always place on Memorial Day on the graves of my relatives in the Brugmann plot. I always get a kick out of doing business with Flower Village because it once was in the Brugmann Drugstore building on Main Street that had housed our family drug store. (“C.C. Brugmann and Son, where drugs and gold are fairly sold, since 1902.”) Flower Village later moved across the street to the building that once housed the Bernstein Department store and is now known as Home-ology. Dorothy always fills me in on the latest Rock Rapids news, which is particularly important this year because I will be back in Rock Rapids in June for Heritage Days, the annual celebraton for the town and county and the alumni for high school reunions Last year was my 60th reunion of the dream class of 1953, a class of 32 with 16 girls and 16 boys.

I always ask Dorothy to get the most colorful flowers of the season and she then sees that they are displayed near the headstones in the Brugmann plot a couple of days ahead of Memorial Day. This year, I called Pauline Knobloch to pick up the flowers and put them in her garden. Pauline and I go back to 1947, when she was a young clerk, just in from Lester, in the store. I started clerking at age 12 that year, selling stamps and peanuts in the front of the store. Pauline and I worked together all my school years and she continued on until my dad sold the store in the late 1970s. Pauline at 92 is still going strong, as they say in Rock Rapids.

Ours is an unusual plot, because it holds the graves of my four grandparents, my parents, my aunt and uncle and someday my wife and I. My grandfather C.C.Brugmann and my father C.B.Brugmann spent their entire working lives in Brugmann’s drugstore, which my grandfather started in l902. My father (and my mother Bonnie) came into the store shortly after the depression.
My grandfather A. R. Rice (and his wife Allie) was an eloquent Congregational minister who had parishes throughout Iowa in Waverly, Eldora, Parkersburg, and Rowan. He retired in Clarion. My aunt Mary was my father’s sister and her husband was her Rock Rapids high school classmate, Clarence Schmidt. He was a veterinarian and a reserve army officer who was called up immediately after Pearl Harbor and ordered to report to Camp Dodge in Des Moines within 48 hours. He did and served in Calcutta, India, as an inspector of meat that was flown over the hump to supply the Chinese forces under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek in Kunming.

Through the years, Elmer “Shinny” Sheneberger, the police chief when I was in school, would say to me, “Well, Bruce, you and I have to get along. We’ll be spending lots of time together someday.” I never knew what he meant until one day, visiting the Brugmann plot, I noticed that the Sheneberger family plot was next to the Brugmann plot. Every Memorial Day, Shinny took pictures in color of the flowers on the Brugmann and Sheneberger family graves and would send them to me in San Francisco. I would send on them on to my sister Brenda in Sun City, Arizona, and the families of the three Schmidt boys John in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and Conrad and Robert in Worthington, Minnesota. Well, Shinny died three years ago and alas I no longer get his annual batch of pictures. But he was right. We will be together for a long, long time.

Every year the rep from our American Legion Post puts a small American flag on the grave of every person buried in the cemetery who served in the Armed Forces. Chip Berg, who was three years ahead of me in school, performed this chore every year. My uncle gets one. And, Chip assured me, I will get one someday. I earned it, I am happy to report, as an unhappy ROTC soldier for two years at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (1953-55), as a cold war veteran (1958-60), as an advanced infantryman at Ft. Carson, Colorado, as a survivor of two weeks of miserable winter bivouac in the foothills of the Rockies, and as bureau chief of the Korea Bureau of Stars and Stripes (carrying my favorite byline: SP5 Bruce B. Brugmann, S and S Korea bureau, Yongdongpo, Korea.) I am proud of the flag already. B3, who never forgets how lucky he is to come from the best small town in the country.

P.S.1: As the years went by, I became more curious about how my uncle Schmitty, as he was known, could leave his three young boys and his veterinary practice in nearby Worthington, Minnesota, and get to Camp Dodge so fast and serve throughout the entire war. I asked him lots of questions. How, for example, did he handle his veterinary practice? Simple, he said, “my partner just said let’s split our salaries. You give me half of what you make in the Army and I’ll give you half of what I make in veterinary practice.” And that’s what they did and that’s how the veterinary practice kept going throughout the war. Schmitty returned to a healthy practice, retired in the 1960s, and turned it over to his second son Conrad.

P.S.2: Confession: I was not drafted. I enlisted in the federal reserve in the summer of 1958, which amounted to the same thing. Two years of active duty, two years of active reserve, and two years of inactive reserve. I did this maneuver so that I could formally say that I beat Elmer Wohlers. Elmer was the local draft board chief who had spent a little time in World War I, “the big one,” as he would say. The word around town was that he never got out of Camp Dodge in Des Moines but you would never know it by his rhetoric. He had a bit of black humor about his job and we had a running skirmish for years.

Whenever he would see me on the street in Rock Rapids, he would say, ” Bruce, I’m going to get you, I’m going to get you.” And I would reply, “No, no, Elmer, you’ll never get me.” I think he was particularly annoyed when I escaped his grasp and went off for a year to graduate school at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. I would send him cards through the years, from an ATO fraternity party at the University of Nebraska, or from my hangout bar in New York City (the West End Bar, across from the Columbia Journalism building.) I would write in effect, but with elegant variations, “Elmer, having a wonderful time. Keep up the good work. Wish you were here.” When I was in town and we would spar on the street, I would invite Elmer over to the Sportsmen’s Club for a martini, but he always refused, most testily.

And so I joined the federal reserve and ended up with the initials FR instead of US on my dog tags that hung around my neck for two years. I was officially FR17507818 and rose from lowly recruit in the 60th infantry at Ft Carson, Colorado, to the lofty position of E-5 and bureau chief of the Korea edition of Stars and Stripes bureau. But my big accomplishment was that Elmer didn’t get me. I still feel good about beating Elmer at his own game.

P.S. 3 Here’s how things work in Rock Rapids. One year, in sending my annual Memorial Day drill in an email note to Rock Rapids alumni of my era, I recounted the Shinny anecdote and placed the Brugmann and Sheneberger plots in the southeastern corner of the cemetery. I promptly got an email note back from Joanne Schubert Vogel (class of ’49). She wrote that she had sent my note to her brother Dale Schubert in Rock Rapids (class of ’55, who was a halfback when I was a quarterback on the celebrated Rock Rapids Lions football team. Dale called her and said that I had made an error and that the Brugmann and Sheneberger plots were in the southwestern corner of the cemetery, not in the southeast corner. Amazing. He was right and I was wrong. Joanne softened the blow by saying she was sure that this was the first error I had ever made.

(Bruce B. Brugmann, or B3 as he signs his emails and blogs, writes and edits the Bruce Blog on the Guardian website at SFBG.com He is the editor at large of the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the editor and co-founder and co-publisher of the Bay Guardian with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012, now retired. He can be contacted atBruce@sfbg.com [1].)

Rock Rapids Lyon County Reporter

Source URL: http://www.sfbg.com/bruce/2013/05/26/memorial-day-remembering-good-old-days-rock-rapids-iowa-circa-1940s-1950s

Links:
[1] mailto:Bruce@sfbg.com

Film Listings: May 21 – 27, 2014

Michael Redmond

May 20, 2014

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Sara Maria Vizcarrondo. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case Less of an introduction to the dissident Chinese artist than Alison Klayman’s 2012 Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, this doc from Andreas Johnsen is more of a fly-on-the-wall affair, following Ai in the months following his arrest and detention for “tax evasion.” The double-entendre title refers to Ai’s company (Fake Design) as well as the trumped-up case against him, clearly intended to punish him for challenging authority. Though he’s on house arrest, he’s allowed to visit art studios and take walks (under constant surveillance); though he’s technically not allowed to talk to foreign journalists, they are certainly eager to chat with him, and we see him cautiously working around that rule. At one point, a reporter asks him why he doesn’t simply move out of China and live somewhere with more freedom. His fiery reply — that he’d be “dead already” if he didn’t express himself — speaks volumes, and suggests that despite his weary appearance here, he’s more determined than ever before. Of related interest: his just-announced exhibit of works on imprisonment, @Large, scheduled to open Sept. 27 on Alcatraz. (1:29) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Blended Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore reunite for their third rom-com; this one’s about single parents who fall in love while on vacation with their respective kids. (1:57) Presidio.

Breastmilk Our bodies, ourselves — and our babies and breastmilk — and the thick, rich membrane of biological and cultural complications latched to breastfeeding today all play into director-producer Dana Ben-Ari’s fascinating doc Breastmilk. Though the act of breastfeeding may sound like the most natural thing in the world, many parents encounter a thicket of challenges when choosing to do it, whether it’s due to low milk production or tongue-tied babies, not to mention the judgments and stresses that occur along the way. Showing everything from the intimate first moments of a newborn learning how to latch on to beautifully close-up images of breasts being pumped, Ben-Ari follows diverse crew of moms — privileged, blue-collar, same-sex, and bohemian — many before birth and post-breastfeeding, as well as academics and experts, while unpacking an enthralling set of issues like the guilt around using formula rather than breastmilk; the embarrassment of breastfeeding in public sans “hooter hider” for the male viewer; the insecurities women feel about milk production; the boundaries between maternity and sexuality; and the politics of women of color offering their breastmilk to privileged white adopters. Kudos, too, to Ben-Ari for gratifyingly going, even briefly, toward the idea of the “monstrous,” “leaky” female body; lactation porn; and the “phallic potential” of the breast. (1:31) Roxie. (Chun)

Chinese Puzzle Chinese Puzzle is the airy kind of nothing American studios don’t seem capable of making any more: a relatively harmless, ingratiating hang with a rather varied cast of characters running afoul of one another in bottom-line benign ways (save a beating early on). The film concludes Cédric Klapisch’s trilogy, started in 2002’s study-abroad romp L’auberge Espagnole and continued in 2005’s early adulthood crisis Russian Dolls. The final film is just as weightless, and enjoyable to watch, as the preceding pair, and they form a kind of lazy man’s analog to Richard Linklater’s sublime Before films. This is a world of coincidence framed as realism — but if you go to the movies for a laugh, for a diversion, and for a quick getaway to a carefree daydream of what life might be for the shiftless and curiously monied (what’s work?), this might be the kind of date movie you want, maybe even need. (1:57) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Ryland Walker Knight)

Fed Up Katie Couric narrates, produces, and brings celebrity heft to Stephanie Soechtig’s well-crafted expose on the alarmingly powerful food industry — specifically, revealing how “nutritional standards” put forth by the government over the past 30 years have actually caused the nation’s current obesity epidemic. Fed Up‘s straightforward combination of simple facts (80 percent of food items have added sugar); talking-head experts (Bill Clinton, UCSF’s Dr. Robert Lustig); historical fact-finding (including a segment that convincingly compares today’s food industry to the tobacco industry of yore); and profiles of dangerously overweight teens (all of whom are trying, and failing, to lose weight) adds up to a film that is poised to have An Inconvenient Truth-style impact on viewers — and will hopefullyopen enough eyes to make waves beyond movie theaters. (1:32) California, Embarcadero. (Eddy)

Ida The bomb drops within the first ten minutes: after being gently forced to reconnect with her only living relative before taking her vows, novice nun Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) learns that her name is actually Ida, and that she’s Jewish. Her mother’s sister, Wanda (Agneta Kulesza) — a Communist Party judge haunted by a turbulent past she copes with via heavy drinking, among other vices — also crisply relays that Ida’s parents were killed during the Nazi occupation, and after some hesitation agrees to accompany the sheltered young woman to find out how they died, and where their bodies were buried. Drawing great depth from understated storytelling and gorgeous, black-and-white cinematography, Pawel Pawilowski’s well-crafted drama offers a bleak if realistic (and never melodramatic) look at 1960s Poland, with two polar-opposite characters coming to form a bond as their layers of painful loss rise to the surface. (1:20) Albany, Clay, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

The Immigrant The latest from James Gray (2007’s We Own the Night) follows a Polish immigrant (Marion Cotillard) who treads uncertain waters after arriving in 1920s NYC. Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner co-star. (2:00) Piedmont.

Words and Pictures Words and Pictures is about as bifurcated as its title, while spinning off a central beef that Hepburn and Tracey might have wrapped their madcap bickering ways around at one time. Which is more powerful: language or images, poetry or painting? The age-old debate starts to feel a little creaky by Words’ close, but you can see and hear why the conceit drew such acting thoroughbreds as Juliette Binoche and Clive Owen, playing two passionate, paint-hurling, bottle-foisting artistic types on either side of a divide overseen by Australian director Fred Schepisi (1987’s Roxanne). Owen’s Jack Marcus is an alcoholic, onetime lit-star of an English teacher whose creatively constipated bad boy routine is starting to wear thin when Binoche’s painter Dina Delsanto arrives at his prep school on the pretext of teaching an honors art class. In actuality, she’s taking time away from the NY art scene to figure out a new way to paint while grappling with rheumatoid arthritis. Sparks fly between the two hard-headed combatants, along with punches delivered by some smartly scripted sparring, as they get the students hot and bothered by their debate concerning words vs. pictures. The master-class lessons learned by watching Binoche work, jaw firmly set and intelligent eyes darting as she maps out her next composition, while Owen falls apart, Hemingway-style, are offset by a facile, cozy ending that feels test-audience driven. (1:51) Shattuck. (Chun)

X-Men: Days of Future Past Versions of X-Men young and old time-travel to join forces and save the world. (2:10) Marina.

ONGOING

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 The best thing about The Amazing Spider-Man 2 — the sequel to the 2012 reboot that nobody really wanted in the first place — is the achingly cute chemistry between real-life couple Andrew Garfield (Peter Parker/Spider-Man) and Emma Stone (Gwen Stacy, whose fate is no spoiler to anyone who is familiar with the Spider-Man canon). Can’t deny it; those two are adorbs. But since Spider-Man is supposed to be an action movie, not a romantic comedy, it spends most of its time setting up foes for the webslinger (Jamie Foxx as a nerd zapped into the power-mad Electro; Dane DeHaan as bratty rich kid Harry Osborn), as well as rehashing the mysterious deaths of Peter’s parents, and underlining for approximately the zillionth time the disconnect between the media’s perception of Spider-Man (he’s a menace! He interferes with police work!) and the ecstatic love the people of New York have for the guy — understandable, since he’s in the business of saving their butts on a regular basis. This isn’t a crappy movie by any means; it’s entertaining enough, and the 3D swooping-between-skyscrapers FX have gotten quite dazzling. But there’s still a heavy air of “This again?” that hangs over the whole thing. Doesn’t Marvel have enough dough from the Avengers movies to let Spidey take an extended vacation? (2:20) Balboa, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Belle The child of a British naval officer and a Caribbean slave, Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is deposited on the doorstep — well, the estate grounds — of her father’s relatives in 1769 England after her mother dies. Soon she’s entirely orphaned, which makes her a wealthy heiress and aristocratic title holder at the same time that she is something less than human in the eyes of her adopted society. For Belle is black (or more properly, mixed-race), and thus a useless curiosity at best as a well-bred noblewoman of the “wrong” racial makeup. Based on a murky actual historical chapter, Amma Asante’s film is that rare sumptuous costume drama which actually has something on its mind beyond romance and royalty. Not least among its pleasures are a fine supporting cast including Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, Penelope Wilton, and Emily Watson. (1:45) Albany, Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Captain America: The Winter Soldier Marvel’s most wholesome hero returns in this latest film in the Avengers series, and while it doesn’t deviate from the expected formula (it’s not a spoiler to say that yes, the world is saved yet again), it manages to incorporate a surprisingly timely plot about the dangers of government surveillance. Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), hunkiest 95-year-old ever, is still figuring out his place in the 21st century after his post-World War II deep freeze. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has him running random rescue missions with the help of Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), but SHIELD is working on a top-secret project that will allow it to predict crimes before they occur. It isn’t long before Cap’s distrust of the weapon — he may be old-fashioned, but he ain’t stupid — uncovers a sinister plot led by a familiar enemy, with Steve’s former BFF Bucky doing its bidding as the science-experiment-turned-assassin Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan). Anthony Mackie, Robert Redford, and series regular Cobie Smulders are fine in supporting roles, and Johansson finally gets more to do than punch and pose, but the likable Evans ably carries the movie — he may not have the charisma of Robert Downey Jr., but he brings wit and depth to a role that would otherwise be defined mainly by biceps and CG-heavy fights. Oh, and you know the drill by now: superfans will want to stick around for two additional scenes tucked into the end credits. (2:16) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

Chef Not to take anything away from the superhero crew, but Chef feels like the closest thing to a labor of love from writer, director, and star Jon Favreau in many a day. As a director, he may have been making doughnuts — fun-filled and teeming with CGI eye candy, but doughnuts nevertheless — when it came to effects-driven blockbusters like 2008’s Iron Man, but this well-meaning play for the heart, by way of the stomach, shows you where Favreau’s head is really at. Chef revolves around Carl Casper (Favreau), a onetime food star, now reduced to serving up predictable crowd-pleasers at the behest of his restaurant’s overbearing owner (Dustin Huffman). It takes the barbs of an influential critic (Oliver Platt) — and an ensuing Twitter war — to set Carl off and send him away on his own, at the coaxing of his glam ex Inez (Sofia Vergara). Hooked up with a dilapidated food truck and former kitchen staffer Martin (John Leguizamo), and aided by ably Tweeting son Percy (Emjay Anthony), Carl ties his dreams — and lost passion — to the classic Cuban sandwich. The ensuing road trip from Miami to LA, and Carl’s journey toward self and a renewed relationship with his son, is a fun (if, in the end, a bit too speedily sketched) vault through the joys of eating your way through America’s new culinary heartland. Amid the volley of sign-of-the-times social-media swinging and cameos by the uncostumed Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, and the like, Favreau’s main dish is that a family that eats, cooks, and runs a business together, stays together — child labor laws or no. (1:55) Metreon, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Divergent Based on the blockbuster dystopian-future YA novel by Veronica Roth (the first in a trilogy), Divergent is set in a future city-state version of Chicago in which society is divided into five character-based, color-coded factions: Erudite, Amity, Candor, Abnegation, and Dauntless. Like her peers, Beatrice Prior (Shailene Woodley), the film’s Abnegation-born teenage heroine, must choose a permanent faction — with the help of a standardized aptitude test that forgoes penciling in bubbles in favor of virtual reality psychic manipulation. When the test fails to triangulate her sole innate personality trait, she learns that she belongs to a secret, endangered sixth category: Divergent, an astonishing set of people who are not only capable of, say, acts of selflessness but can also produce intelligent thought, or manifest bravery in the face of danger. Forced to hide her aberrant nature in a society whose leaders (Kate Winslet) are prone to statements like “The future belongs to those who know where they belong,” and seemingly bored among Abnegation’s hive of gray cardigan-wearing worker bees, Beatrice chooses Dauntless, a dashing gang of black-clad, alterna-rock music video extras who jump on and off moving trains and live in a warehouse-chic compound whose dining hall recalls the patio at Zeitgeist. Fittingly, a surly, tattooed young man named Four (Theo James) leads Beatrice, now Tris, and her fellow initiates through a harsh proving regimen that, if they fail, will cast them into an impoverished underclass. Director Neil Burger (2006’s The Illusionist, 2011’s Limitless) and the behemoth marketing force behind Divergent are clearly hoping to stir up the kind of madness stoked by the Twilight and Hunger Games series, but while there are bones a-plenty to pick with those franchises, Divergent may have them beat for pure daffiness of premise and diameter of plot holes — and that’s after screenwriters Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor’s major suturing of the source material’s lacunae. The daffiness doesn’t translate into imaginative world-building, and while a couple of scenes convey the visceral thrills of life in Dauntless, the tension between Tris and Four is awkwardly ratcheted up, and the film’s shift into a mode of crisis is equally jolting without generating much heat. (2:20) Metreon. (Rapoport)

Documented Jose Antonio Vargas’ grandparents — who raised him in Mountain View after he was smuggled into America at age 12 from the Philippines — expected him to grow up, blend in, and live a perfectly ordinary life in his new country. But Vargas was a smart kid who grew into an exceptionally intelligent young adult. He pursued a journalism career that earned him coveted reporting gigs for the Washington Post and CNN, among other outlets, as well as a Pulitzer Prize. He’s also gay, a fact that complicated his family’s hopes for a traditional wedding (and subsequent green card). In 2011, weary of guarding a secret he’d shared with only a few close friends, Vargas penned a powerful essay for the New York Times Magazine, revealing “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.” Documented, his film with co-director Ann Lupo, chronicles the months before and after Vargas “outed” himself. It’s a highly personal story, especially when the film crew travels to Manila to interview Vargas’ mother. Their geographical separation has become an emotional estrangement so complex she weeps when he refuses to add her on Facebook. But Documented also taps Vargas’ Define American media campaign to broaden its message, interviewing undocumented youths affected by the DREAM Act and sharing in their joy when the bill — providing permanent residency to young, educated immigrants of “good moral character” — finally goes into effect. Unfortunately for Vargas, he’s too old to benefit from the legislation, and though he feels relief at having come clean, he’s still unable to make any traction in his quest for citizenship. (At one point, he actually calls INS to see if anyone’s planning to clamp down, as if finally getting “caught” would be preferable to living in extended limbo.) The only closure of sorts comes when Vargas reconnects with his mother via Skype, but there’s an undercurrent of helplessness to their computer-screen reunion that makes Documented‘s themes feel especially raw and urgent. (1:29) Roxie. (Eddy)

The Double Simon (Jesse Eisenberg) is a lowly clerk who gets nothing but indifference and scorn both at work and in his pitiful private life. Things slip even more insidiously beyond his control with the arrival of James (Eisenberg again), his exact doppelgänger — though no one else seems to notice that — and a climber as ruthlessly efficient as Simon is hapless. Not only does he steal his look-alike’s ideas in a rapid rise to the top, he seems to take great pleasure in kicking Simon further downward. Applying a Kafkaesque gloss to Dostoyevsky’s novella, with stylistic hat-tips to the Coens and Terry Gilliam, Richard Ayoade’s second feature is very different from his prior Submarine (2010) in all ways but one: It, too, is both overwhelmed and rendered fascinating by an excess of high directorial “style” whose self-consciousness infuses every frame and puts quote marks around every emotion. As a result, The Double is a striking objet d’art you’ll either love or hate — or enjoy aesthetically while being annoyed by its sacrifice of depth for a showoff surface. (1:33) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Draft Day (2:00) SF Center.

Fading Gigolo Ah, the charm of a well-aged, seasoned perv &ldots; nope, we don’t dare touch the Woody Allen/Dylan Farrow abuse allegations — though those recent headlines flit around the edges of this generally benevolent, almost strangely innocuous charmer, written by and directed John Turturro, who also stars as the curiously blank-faced tabula rasa of a title character. The delights of Mrs. Robinsons have been rhapsodized on film, through the lens of worshipful younger men — less so, their male counterparts, as viewed by other hetero men. The danger of bromance surging into the homoerotic is likely too dire for most, yet somehow bookstore boss Murray (Allen) sees the mysterious, submerged sex appeal in his loyal employee Fioravante (Turturro) and taps him to get involved in a ménage à trois with a society dermatologist (Sharon Stone). The soft-spoken Fioravante turns out to be a smash in the sack with the doc, transforming the opportunistic Murray into a wildly successful pimp as his employee takes on the audacious Selima (Sofia Vergara) and the prim Jewish Orthodox widow Avigal (Vanessa Paradis). The latter character seems to have come straight from another place and time — much like this film, which turns Brooklyn into a something resembling a leaf-strewn European village and recalls odes to revolutionary sexuality in the ’60s. The movie’s lightly absurd comedy is embedded in the fact that Turturro writes himself into the role of the seducer, the pleaser, while wrapped in the skin of pleasant if everyday-looking Joe, although Paradis, a revelation as a deeply repressed devout mother slowly awakening to her body, points to more serious pleasures, lingering below the surface of all of us. (1:30) Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Finding Vivian Maier Much like In the Realms of the Unreal, the 2004 doc about Henry Darger, Finding Vivian Maier explores the lonely life of a gifted artist whose talents were discovered posthumously. In this case, however, the filmmaker — John Maloof, who co-directs with Charlie Siskel — is responsible for Maier’s rise to fame. A practiced flea-market hunter, he picked up a carton of negatives at a 2007 auction; they turned out to be striking examples of early street photography. He was so taken with the work (snapped by a woman so obscure she was un-Google-able) that he began posting images online. Unexpectedly, they became a viral sensation, and Maloof became determined to learn more about the camerawoman. Turns out Vivian Maier was a career nanny in the Chicago area, with plenty of former employers to share their memories. She was an intensely private person who some remembered as delightfully adventurous and others remembered as eccentric, mentally unstable, or even cruel; she was a hoarder who was distrustful of men, and she spoke with a maybe-fake French accent. And she was obsessed with taking photographs that she never showed to anyone; the hundreds of thousands now in Maloof’s collection (along with 8mm and 16mm films) offer the only insight into her creative mind. “She had a great eye, a sense of humor, and a sense of tragedy,” remarks acclaimed photographer Mary Ellen Mark. “But there’s a piece of the puzzle missing.” The film’s central question — why was Maier so secretive about her hobby? — may never be answered. But as the film also suggests, that mystery adds another layer of fascination to her keenly observed photos. (1:23) Shattuck. (Eddy)

The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden Extensive archival footage and home movies (plus one short, narrative film) enhance this absorbing doc from San Francisco-based Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller (2005’s Ballets Russes). It tells the tale of a double murder that occurred in the early 1930s on Floreana — the most remote of the already scarcely-populated Galapagos Islands. A top-notch cast (Cate Blanchett, Diane Kruger, Connie Nielsen, Josh Radnour) gives voice to the letters and diary entries of the players in this stranger-than-fiction story, which involved an array of Europeans who’d moved away from civilization in search of utopian simplicity — most intriguingly, a maybe-fake Baroness and her two young lovers — and realized too late that paradise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Goldfine and Geller add further detail to the historic drama by visiting the present-day Galapagos, speaking with residents about the lingering mystery and offering a glimpse of what life on the isolated islands is like today. (2:00) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Eddy)

God’s Pocket The dreary directorial debut of Mad Men star (and occasional episode director) John Slattery begins with a funeral, and it’s not long before we realize the deceased, Leon (Caleb Landry Jones), will be grieved only by his mother (Christina Hendricks). Most of this bleak tale takes place in flashback — racist, jacked-up Leon’s workplace accident (actually a well-deserved blow to the head, wielded by a fellow laborer he’d been threatening) occurs while his boozy-schlub stepfather Mickey (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in one of his final roles) is boosting a refrigerated truck for use in his meat business. When his wife demands an investigation into Leon’s death, Mickey dutifully, if reluctantly, asks some of his ne’er-do-well associates to poke around; one thing leads to another, more blood is shed, and the stolen truck is repurposed for toting around a certain albatross of a human corpse. Set in 1978 and named for the fictional working-class Philly neighborhood that provides its backdrop, God’s Pocket (based on the novel by Pete Dexter, whose other adapted works include The Paperboy and Paris Trout) falls quite short of delivering narrative satisfaction; even its stellar cast (which also includes John Turturro, Eddie Marsan, and Richard Jenkins — the latter as a washed-up journalist who improbably seduces Hendricks’ character) can’t elevate characters that are thinly drawn and murkily motivated. (1:28) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

Godzilla Bearing the weight of a 1998 American debut so stinky that devotees of the Japanese original dubbed it “GINO” (for “Godzilla in Name Only”), the King of the Monsters returns for a do-over that smells more like generic summer entertainment than anything else. We begin in 1999, when a pair of scientists (Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins) discover a giant skeleton of sorts in the Philippines — just as a deadly accident (or was it?) devastates a Japanese nuclear power plant. Fifteen years later, the scientists are still on the trail of Whatever That Was, while guilty power-plant survivor Bryan Cranston has become a greasy-haired conspiracy theorist, much to the annoyance of his San Francisco-based Navy officer son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). The humans in Gareth Edwards’ film don’t actually matter much; aside from Cranston and to a much lesser extent Watanabe, none of the characters are interesting or memorable, and the plot — which has Big G lumbering after a pair of “Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms” who decide to incubate their eggs in downtown SF — is also a low-stakes affair. (If you believe for a second that Taylor-Johnson’s doe-eyed wife and son won’t survive the monster attack, I have a busted-up Golden Gate Bridge to sell you.) But the monster design is plenty satisfying, and really, it’s just fine that Godzilla — who wrinkles his snout in annoyance at those pesky MUTOs — is this film’s one and only charismatic presence; dude’s going on a 70-year career at this point. (2:03) Four Star, Marina, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Grand Budapest Hotel Is this the first Wes Anderson movie to feature a shootout? It’s definitely the first Anderson flick to include a severed head. That’s not to say The Grand Budapest Hotel, “inspired by” the works of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, represents too much of a shift for the director — his intricate approach to art direction is still very much in place, as are the deadpan line deliveries and a cast stuffed with Anderson regulars. But there’s a slightly more serious vibe here, a welcome change from 2012’s tooth-achingly twee Moonrise Kingdom. Thank Ralph Fiennes’ performance as liberally perfumed concierge extraordinaire M. Gustave, which mixes a shot of melancholy into the whimsy, and newcomer Tony Revolori as Zero, his loyal lobby boy, who provides gravitas despite only being a teenager. (Being played by F. Murray Abraham as an older adult probably helps in that department.) Hotel‘s early 20th century Europe setting proves an ideal canvas for Anderson’s love of detail — the titular creation rivals Stanley Kubrick’s rendering of the Overlook Hotel — and his supporting cast, as always, looks to be enjoying the hell out of being a part of Anderson’s universe, with Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, and Adrien Brody having particularly oversized fun. Is this the best Wes Anderson movie since 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums? Yes. (1:40) California, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Heaven is for Real (1:40) 1000 Van Ness.

Ilo Ilo Set in 1997 Singapore at the onset of the country’s recession, Ilo Ilo focuses on one family, who could be any family: father Teck (Chen Tianwen), who’s been let go from his sales position and is working various hourly jobs, hoping his wife doesn’t find out; pregnant Hwee Leng (a dynamic Yeo Yann Yann), a secretary who’s been the “bad cop” in the relationship so long she’s kind of grown into the role; and bratty Jiale (Koh Jia Ler), a 10-year-old terror who disobeys at home and gets into fights at school. Into this swirl of domestic tension comes Teresa (Angeli Bayani), a housekeeper-nanny who’s left her own family behind in the Philippines in search of a better way of life. It’s hell at first — “Auntie Terry” is no Mary Poppins, but she has the patience of a saint, putting up with Jiale’s antics and Hwee Leng’s ice-queen routine. Slowly, however, she builds a rapport with her young charge, but since Ilo Ilo is firmly interested in realism, there’s no quick fix to the problems that lie beneath the family strife, despite the kid’s obsession with lottery numbers. A remarkably assured debut film from 29-year-old director Anthony Chen, Ilo Ilo picked up the Camera D’Or at Cannes, in addition to multiple other fest prizes. The accolades are well-earned — rarely has a film so effectively and subtly captured the day-to-day frustrations of middle-class financial uncertainty. (1:40) Four Star. (Eddy)

Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return (1:28) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

Locke This virtual solo show stars Tom Hardy as Ivan Locke, a 40-ish construction manager driving to London on the eve of “the biggest cement pour” ever attempted in Europe. But he’s driving away from that, to the shrill indignation of superiors who expect his reliable on-site supervision, and the increasingly drunken panic of the flunky (voice of Andrew Scott) he’s deputized to take his place. The reason for this unprecedented dereliction of responsibility is that Ivan is committed to another responsibility, to “take care of my fuckup.” As we gradually realize during his 85-minute drive, that means showing up for the premature birth of the baby he’s sired by a fragile, rather hysterical-sounding woman (Olivia Colman) in the brief sole detour from marital infidelity he’s ever taken. Doing so may well end his career, as well as his long-standing marriage to the mother of his sons. But our protagonist is determined at any cost not to become his own late father (with whom he has imaginary conversations), a wastrel who never made good on his obligations to family or anyone else. Shot repeatedly in real time with multiple cameras over 12 nights, then assembled from 16 full-length takes, Steven Knight’s Locke is a striking experiment that never quite escapes an air of theatrical stunt. In retrospect you realize most of its tension derives not from the core emotional crises, but from narrative red herrings — primarily our terror that anyone multitasking this recklessly behind the wheel is an accident waiting to happen. But the chameleonic Hardy, playing a rather square, middle-class, essentially humorless type unlike any he’s done before, makes this effortfully “decent” man so compelling you can’t look away. If there’s anything this actor can’t do, he hasn’t tried it yet. (1:35) California, Metreon. (Harvey)

The Lunchbox Ila (Nimrat Kaur) is a self-possessed housewife and a great cook, whose husband confuses her for another piece of furniture. She tries to arouse his affections with elaborate lunches she makes and sends through the city’s lunchbox delivery service. Like marriage in India, lunchbox delivery has a failure rate of zero, which is what makes aberrations seem like magical occurrences. So when widow Saajan (Irrfan Khan) receives her adoring food, he humbly receives the magical lunches like a revival of the senses. Once Ila realizes her lunchbox is feeding the wrong man she writes a note and Saajan replies — tersely, like a man who hasn’t held a conversation in a decade — and the impossible circumstances lend their exchanges a romance that challenges her emotional fidelity and his retreat from society. She confides her husband is cheating. He confides his sympathy for men of lower castes. It’s a May/December affair if it’s an affair at all — but the chemistry we expect the actors to have in the same room is what fuels our urge to see it; that’s a rare and haunting dynamic. Newcomer Kaur is perfect as Ila, a beauty unmarked by her rigorous distaff; her soft features and exhausted expression lend a richness to the troubles she can’t share with her similarly stoic mother (Lillete Dubey). Everyone is sacrificing something and poverty seeps into every crack, every life, without exception — their inner lives are their richness. (1:44) Shattuck. (Vizcarrondo)

Million Dollar Arm Jon Hamm has it bad — that dark-around-the-edges Mad Men afterglow can’t help but follow him everywhere, even into the arms of Disney in this solid Cinderella-story baseball tale (possibly the best headlining gig he’s had outside SCDP). Hamm’s J.B. Bernstein would certainly have something to hash over with Don Draper: both are down-on-their-luck charmers with the cracks in their facades clearly showing, yet nonetheless intent on doing it their way. J.B. is striking out when it comes to recruiting talent for his new, rapidly sinking sports agency, when he comes up with a genius idea while he and fellow agent Aash (Aasif Mandvi) are watching random sports at the latter’s home: Why not tap into one of the world’s greatest unexploited baseball markets by staging a talent search for an Indian cricket player with Major League pitching potential? Canvassing the country with the help of sleepy scout Ray (Alan Arkin) and baseball-enthusiast translator Amit (Pitobash), J.B. finds his arms ultimately attached to village truck driver Dinesh (Madhur Mittal) and contorting track-and-field thrower Rinku (Suraj Sharma of 2012’s Life of Pi). But how to turn raw talent into professional careers in just months? And moreover, how can the would-be golden boys overcome cultural barriers that a fly ball couldn’t surmount? It’s a tryout for all concerned — including an MLB that’s still striving to expand its reach in Asia, and Hamm, who can be so good as Draper that he’s in increasing danger of being typecast. In the Disney mold, at least, his character achieves fairly happy results. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Vogue. (Chun)

Neighbors It’s a mystery why Neighbor‘s marketing teams are intent on creating some kind of social media battle between this comedy’s family and frat: The college boys are clearly outclassed when it comes to uninhibited physical comedy daring, thanks to Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne. They play young parents Kelly and Mac, who are still basking in their new craftsman home and settled state, trying to figure out sex in front — or is it behind? — baby, and how to get to the rave before bedtime, when a frat, led by oft-shirtless hottie Teddy (Zac Efron) and pal Pete (Dave Franco), moves into the house next door. How do you ask them to “keep it down” yet still be cool? The pretzels Mac and Kelly wrap themselves into, in order to still hang with the kids, are about as hilarious as the inevitable battles that break out over the hearts and minds of college administrators (Lisa Kudrow), pals (the hilarious Ike Barinholtz), and wannabe brothers like the loyal Assjuice (Craig Roberts). Still, despite some memorable gags, Neighbors feels like a bit of a squandered opportunity as one fidgets through many of the frat house scenes. Part of the problem is, why would Kelly, Mac, or anyone want to be in good with such an uninteresting group of Greeks? (1:37) Four Star, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Noah Darren Aronofsky’s Biblical epic begins with a brief recap of prior Genesis events — creation is detailed a bit more in clever fashion later on — leading up to mankind’s messing up such that God wants to wipe the slate clean and start over. That means getting Noah (Russell Crowe), wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly), and their three sons and one adopted daughter (Emma Watson) to build an ark that can save them and two of every animal species from the imminent slate-wiping Great Flood. (The rest of humanity, having sinned too much, can just feed the fishes.) They get some help from fallen angels turned into Ray Harryhausen-type giant rock creatures voiced by Nick Nolte and others. There’s an admirable brute force and some startling imagery to this uneven, somber, Iceland-shot tale “inspired” by the Good Book (which, needless to say, has endured more than its share of revisions over the centuries). Purists may quibble over some choices, including the device of turning minor Biblical figure Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone) into a royal-stowaway villain, and political conservatives have already squawked a bit over Aronofsky’s not-so-subtle message of eco-consciousness, with Noah being bade to “replenish the Earth” that man has hitherto rendered barren. But for the most part this is a respectable, forceful interpretation that should stir useful discussion amongst believers and non believers alike. Its biggest problem is that after the impressively harrowing flood itself, we’re trapped on the ark dealing with the lesser crises of a pregnancy, a discontented middle son (Logan Lerman), and that stowaway’s plotting — ponderous intrigues that might have been leavened if the director had allowed us to hang out with the animals a little, rather than sedating the whole menagerie for the entire voyage. (2:07) SF Center. (Harvey)

Only Lovers Left Alive Jim Jarmusch has subverted genre films before — you don’t have to dig deep to find fierce defenders of 1995 Western Dead Man — but his latest, Only Lovers Left Alive, is poised to be his biggest commercial hit to date. That’s not merely because it’s a vampire film, though this concession to trendiness will certainly work in its favor, as will the casting of high-profile Avengers (2012) star Tom Hiddleston. But this is still a Jarmusch vampire movie, and though it may be more accessible than some of the director’s more existential entries, it’s still wonderfully weird, witty, and — natch — drenched in cool. The opening credits deploy a gothic, blood red font across a night sky — a winking nod to the aesthetics of Hammer classics like Horror of Dracula (1958). Then, the camera begins to rotate, filming a record as it plays, and symbolizing the eternal life of the two figures who’ve entered the frame: gloomy Adam (Hiddleston, rocking a bedhead version of Loki’s dark ‘do), who lurks in a crumbling Detroit mansion, and exuberant Eve (Tilda Swinton, so pale she seems to glow), who dwells amid piles of books in Tangier. These two live apart, partially due to the hassle of traveling when one can’t be in the sun (red-eye flights are a must). Yet they remain entangled in spirit, a phenomenon referenced amid much talk of what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” and when at last they reunite, it’s glorious. Unlike those old Hammer films, there’s no stake-wielding Van Helsing type pursuing these creatures of the night; if there’s a villain, it’s actual and emotional vampire Ava (Mia Wasikowska), Eve’s bad-penny sibling, who swoops in for a most unwelcome visit. But Only Lovers Left Alive‘s biggest antagonist is simply the outside world, with its epidemics of dull minds and blood-borne diseases. The delight Jarmusch takes in tweaking the vampire mythos is just as enjoyable as his interest in exploring the agony, ecstasy, and uneventful lulls of immortality. (2:03) Opera Plaza, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Other Woman Cameron Diaz gets top billing — and the title role — in The Other Woman, but Leslie Mann is the real stealth weapon here: the other comedian who bravely dares to go into unseemly crazy-bitch, scatological-Bridesmaids territory, with shrill histrionics, whining, and shrieks hitting registers that threaten to make most men’s heads explode. Coming on like Lucille Ball on crystal, Mann teeters out in the limb in kitten heels — and your enjoyment of The Other Woman depends on whether you love that balancing act or loathe it. Diaz and Mann’s reluctant-then-mutual girl crush is at the heart of this proudly chick flick directed by Nick Cassavetes, who tends to beat his own indie path apart from his involvement in one of the biggest lady draws of all time, The Notebook (2004). The chick magnet and cause for so much chaos is Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a sketchy entrepreneur who skims wife Kate’s (Mann) business ideas and toys with power-bitch lawyer Carly (Diaz), as well as his other other woman, perfect-10 Amber (Kate Upton). Coster-Waldau throws himself into the hysteria, as if it were the sole lifeline out of dour King’s Landing, but this is the Mann and Diaz Show, with a smarter-than-average screenplay by Melissa Stack and revenge served up like a self-righteous side dish at a Real Housewives buffet line. And just to show you how far we haven’t come, like those benighted housewives, those assembled aren’t so feminist that they won’t stoop to deliver a bitchy joke at the expense of Upton’s character. (1:49) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Chun)

Palo Alto Adapted from the 2010 short story collection by James Franco, first-time director Gia Coppola’s depressive, aimless tale of disaffected youth tracks the ennuis and misadventures of a handful of Palo Alto teenagers: shy, inexperienced April (Emma Roberts), teetering on the edge of an affair with her soccer coach (Franco); naively promiscuous Emily (Zoe Levin); budding head case Fred (Nat Wolff); and his friend Teddy (Jack Kilmer, son of Val, who plays April’s out-to-lunch stepfather), who ambivalently participates in Fred’s mayhem while pining after April. Adult supervision is nearly Peanuts-level sparse — in other Peninsula households, helicopter parents may be fine-tuning the lives of their children down to the last extracurricular; here, the stoned, distracted elders who occasionally wander in front of the camera are more like flaky, absentee roommates. Meanwhile, their young charges fill the empty hours with copious amounts of alcohol consumption, random property destruction, and a round or two of social crucifixion. The protagonists and their cohorts form a fairly distasteful tableau of privileged, floundering adolescence, eliciting an emotional response in which uneasy concern occasionally overcomes bemused disgust. But the individual stories are virtually weightless, and the characters’ lack of investment in anything, even their own problems, makes it difficult to care too much about their fates. (1:38) California, Embarcadero, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Rio 2 (1:41) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness.

Transcendence Darn those high-tech romantics, hiding out and planning global takeover in their shadowy Berkeley Craftsmen and hippie-dippie leafy grottos. That’s one not-so-great notion emanating from this timely thriller, helmed by a first-time director (and veteran cinematographer) Wally Pfister and writer Jack Paglen. In line with the dreamy, brainy idealism of its protagonists — and the fully loaded promises of artificial intelligence — Transcendence starts with a grand idea teeming with torn-from-the-tech-headlines relevancy, only to spiral off course, seemingly far out of the control of its makers. Ray Kurzweil-like scientist Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is in the midst of refining his work on artificial intelligence when Luddite terrorists shoot him, using a bullet coated with radioactive material, after a lecture on the UC Berkeley campus. That tragedy allows Will and devoted wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) a chance to put his ideas into action and to attempt to preserve that beautiful mind, with the help of friend and kindred researcher Max (Paul Bettany). Yet once his intelligence gets online, out to a Burning Man-like tabula rasa desert, and in the cloud, quite literally, there apparently are no limits in sight. Transcendence‘s stoppers, however, are all too human, including technical flubs that betray its newbie filmmaker’s limitations; script slip-ups that, for instance, highlight a rather dated fear of “Y2K”; and a narrative that ends up reading a bit too much like a technophobic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (1:59) SF Center. (Chun)

Under the Skin At the moment, Scarlett Johansson is playing a superhero in the world’s top blockbuster. Her concurrent role in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin — the tale of an alien who comes to earth to capture men, but goes rogue once her curiosity about the human world gets the better of her — could not be more different in story or scope. Her character’s camouflage (dark wig, thickly-applied lipstick) was carefully calibrated to make her unrecognizable, since Glazer (2000’s Sexy Beast) filmed the alien’s “pick-up” scenes — in which Johansson’s unnamed character cruises around Glasgow in a nondescript van, prowling for prey — using hidden cameras and real people who had no idea they were interacting with a movie star. The film takes liberties with its source material (Michel Farber’s novel), with “feeding” scenes that are far more abstract than as written in the book, allowing for one of the film’s most striking visual motifs. After the alien seduces a victim, he’s lured into what looks like a run-down house. The setting changes into a dark room that seems to represent an otherworldly void, with composer Mica Levi’s spine-tingling score exponentially enhancing the dread. What happens next? It’s never fully explained, but it doesn’t need to be. When the alien begins to mistakenly believe that her fleshy, temporary form is her own, she abandons her predatory quest — but her ill-advised exploration of humanity leads her into another dark place. A chilling, visceral climax caps one of the most innovative sci-fi movies in recent memory. (1:47) SF Center. (Eddy) *

It’s all reel

Michael Redmond

May 20, 2014

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM As far as Hollywood is concerned, it’s already been summer for weeks, with superheroes (Captain America and Spider-Man have had their turns; X-Men: Days of Future Past opens Fri/23) and monsters (Godzilla) looking mighty comfortable atop the box office. But the season is just getting started, screen fiends, and there’s plenty more — maybe too many more, if you’re operating on a limited popcorn budget — ahead. Read on for a highly opinionated, by-no-means-comprehensive guide; as always, dates are subject to change. (And keep reading for a list of local film festivals, too, since the healthiest diet is always a balanced one.)

The first post-Memorial Day weekend unveils Angelina Jolie (dem cheekbones!) as Sleeping Beauty’s worst nightmare in Maleficent, probably the biggest Disney casting coup since Johnny Depp sailed to the Caribbean. First-time helmer Robert Stromberg has a pair of Oscars for his art-direction work on Avatar (2009) and Alice in Wonderland (2010); if this dark fantasy clicks with audiences, expect a raft of live-action films starring Disney’s ever-growing stable of villains (fingers crossed for Ursula the Sea Witch next).

If fairy tales aren’t your thing, add thriller Cold in July to your calendar (like Maleficent, it’s out May 30). It’s the latest from genre man Jim Mickle (2013’s We Are What We Are), with his highest-profile cast to date. Dexter‘s Michael C. Hall, rocking a mullet, plays a small-town Texan whose unremarkable life goes into pulpy overdrive after he kills a burglar, angering the man’s ex-con father (Sam Shepard). But nothing is what it seems in this twisty tale, which also features Don Johnson and a synth score — both stellar enhancements to the film’s late-1980s aesthetic.

Moving into June, sci-fi thriller Edge of Tomorrow has Tom Cruise saving the world — just another day on the job for the suspiciously ageless star, though he apparently lives the same day over and over here. Look for director Doug Liman (multiple Bourne movies) and co-stars like Emily Blunt and Game of Thrones‘ Noah Taylor to add some depth — though, OK, this’ll probably still be a one-man show. Never change, Tom. Elsewhere June 6, erstwhile Divergent ass-kicker Shailene Woodley aims to prove she’s not just the poor man’s Jennifer Lawrence with young-adult weepie The Fault in Our Stars.

June 13, undercover cops Schmidt and Jenko — played by the likable team of Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum — return for more jokes (and winks, because they’re in on the joke too, you guys!) in 22 Jump Street. Far less comedic, and far more brain-melting, is sci-fi drama The Signal, which starts off like a typical road-trip movie, then switches gears a few times before slam-banging into weirdness so out-there it’s almost (almost) a spoiler to note that Laurence “Morpheus” Fishburne plays a key role.

The following week (June 20), Aussie filmmaker David Michôd — whose gritty 2010 Animal Kingdom became an insta-classic of the crime genre, and launched the stateside careers of Jackie Weaver and Joel Edgerton — reunites with Kingdom star Guy Pearce for The Rover, the outback-set tale of a man seeking revenge on a gang of car thieves. In an intriguing casting choice, former vampire Robert Pattinson co-stars as a wounded baddie forced along for the ride.

Next up, June 27 unleashes Transformers: Age of Extinction. Memo to the world: Until we all agree to stop seeing these movies, Michael Bay and company will keep grinding ’em out. At least this one is LaBeouf-less.

Ahead of the long Fourth of July weekend, July 2 unleashes saucy comedy Tammy, which stars Melissa McCarthy (she also co-wrote the script) and Susan Sarandon as a road-tripping granddaughter and grandmother. Or, you could check out Eric Bana as an NYPD detective who teams up with a priest (Edgar “Carlos the Jackal” Ramírez, recently cast in the Swayze role in the highly unnecessary Point Break remake) in Deliver Us From Evil; despite sharing a title with Amy Berg’s harrowing 2006 doc about pedophiles in the Catholic Church, it’s about demonic possession — but is still probably less frightening than the Berg film, to be honest.

July 11, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood has a gimmicky premise — filmed over 12 years, it charts the coming-of-age of a child, and his relationship with his parents (played by Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette) — but also glowing reviews from its film festival stints. And, just when you thought it was safe to go back to the banana aisle, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes arrives, laying further waste to a San Francisco that already took a beating in the first film, not to mention losing most of its downtown to Godzilla and friends just a week ago. Andy Serkis returns as chimp king Caesar. Also: Roman Polanski’s latest, Venus in Fur — based on the David Ives play, and starring Polanski’s wife, Emmanuelle Seigner — arrives on our shores after picking up a César award for the director in France.

Andy and Lana Wachowski’s latest eye candy-laden epic action fantasy, Jupiter Ascending, is about an ordinary human (Mila Kunis) who turns out to be Neo the One, er, royalty from another planet. Based on production stills, this film also features Channing Tatum flying through the air shooting guns and stuff. July 18 also brings The Purge: Anarchy, sequel to last year’s sleeper hit about a near-future America that allows a crime spree free-for-all one night per year. The follow-up lacks Lena Heady — but it does have Michael K. “Omar” Williams, and the characters actually leave the house this time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w0KAHhKECg

Then, on July 25, choose your hero: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson sporting a hat made out of a lion’s head (and, apparently, beard made out of yak hair) in Hercules, or those dancin’ kids of Las Vegas-set Step Up All In. (For those keeping score, this is the fifth Step Up film.) Plus, there’s Woody Allen’s 1920s-set Magic in the Moonlight, starring Emma Stone as a psychic and Colin Firth as the skeptic who falls for her. Sounds kinda twee, and Allen’s private life remains controversial, but that cast, which also includes Marcia Gay Harden and Jackie Weaver, is all kinds of dynamite.

August begins with a bang — Marvel’s hotly-anticipated Guardians of the Galaxy, which just about broke the Internet when its first trailer rolled out in February, is out on the first — before meandering a bit. Taking a break from her own Marvel duties, Scarlett Johansson (so great in Under the Skin) plays a different kind of superhuman in Luc Besson’s Lucy, while the live action-CG mash-up I’m not sure anyone was really begging for, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, also takes a bow (both Aug. 8).

As the summer winds down, Phillip Noyce (2002’s The Quiet American) strays onto YA turf with an adaptation of Lois Lowry’s The Giver, with Jeff “The Dude” Bridges playing the title role, and Brenton Thwaits (who also stars in The Signal, above) as his protégé. Also out Aug. 15, The Expendables 3 adds Harrison Ford, Antonio Banderas, and Wesley Snipes (!!) to its cast o’ aging action hunks. Don’t you worry, Nic Cage — there’s still room for you in the inevitable part four. And don’t miss The Trip to Italy, which re-teams British comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for a foodie road trip that will make you guffaw (at the impressions) and drool (over the plates of pasta).

Labor Day looms as Robert Rodriguez brings Frank Miller’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, which looks to be as visually stunning as its 2005 predecessor, if not much friendlier to the female perspective; a sports drama inspired by Concord’s own De La Salle High School football team, When the Game Stands Tall; and yet another YA adaptation, If I Stay, starring Chloë Grace Moretz, who is one of the more dynamic teen actors of late, and may make this girlfriend-in-a-coma tale livelier than it sounds. *

ESCAPE THE MULTIPLEX: SUMMER FESTIVALS

San Francisco Green Film Festival (May 29-June 4; www.sfgreenfilmfest.org) Doc-heavy fest of films from 21 countries that explore environmental issues and themes.

San Francisco Silent Film Festival (May 29-June 1; www.silentfilm.org) Exquisitely curated and rock-concert-popular showcase of films from cinema’s earliest days, plus live accompaniment and special guests.

SF DocFest (June 5-19; www.sfindie.com) The San Francisco Independent Film Festival’s doc-tastic offshoot consistently offers a strong slate of true-life tales.

New Filipino Cinema (June 11-15; www.ybca.org) Documentaries, narratives, shorts, and experimental films direct from the Philippines’ burgeoning film scene.

Queer Women of Color Film Festival (June 14-16; www.qwocmap.org) Five shorts programs highlight 55 works, with a focus this year on queer culture in Southeast Asian, North African, Middle Eastern, and other Muslim communities.

Martin Scorsese Presents Masterpieces of Polish Cinema (June 14-Aug 23, bampfa.berkeley.edu) Rare and important works by Andrzej Wajda, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Wojciech Has, and others — and since Uncle Marty’s in charge, expect glorious digital restorations across the board.

Frameline (June 19-29; www.frameline.org) The oldest and largest fest of its kind, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival has been programming the best in queer cinema for 38 years.

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (July 24-Aug 10; www.sfjff.org) Also the oldest and largest fest of its kind, the SFJFF presents year-round programming, though this fest, now in its 34th year, is its centerpiece event.

Renting isn’t sharing

Michael Redmond

May 20, 2014

steve@sfbg.com

Last week’s two-day Share conference in San Francisco came at an auspicious moment for companies that define themselves as part of the new “sharing economy,” which ranges from peer-to-peer services and products brokered online to various cooperative ventures designed to minimize resource consumption.

Most of these growing companies are part of San Francisco’s technology industry, using web-based interfaces to conduct their economic transactions. And some have been making local enemies and headlines recently by disrupting key aspects of urban life, from Airbnb impacting the housing and hotel markets to Lyft and Uber upending the taxi industry.

In fact, the biggest battle brewing at City Hall these days is over widely watched legislation by Board of Supervisors President David Chiu to regulate and legalize the short-term rentals facilitated by Airbnb and similar companies. And state agencies based in San Francisco are now working on regulations that would affect Lyft and its ilk.

So we decided to listen in as disciples of the sharing economy talked among themselves about the challenges and opportunities facing what they call the “new economy,” one that is at an important crossroads that will determine whether the interests of communities or capital guide its evolution.

CHIU DECLARES WAR

When Chiu took the stage at the Share conference, he was joining a sharing economy community that, he said he would probably be a part of today if he hadn’t gone into public service, citing his own experience with tech startups before running for supervisor.

“I believe we are becoming the capital of the sharing economy,” Chiu said, citing examples of San Francisco’s “ethos of sharing” that include the Summer of Love, Burning Man, and the fact that “we are a community that wants to foster trust among strangers to build what I think is one of the most amazing cities in the entire world. But we’re also a city that is expensive. The rent is too damn high.”

Chiu spoke proudly of San Francisco’s environmentalism and his own legislative contributions to that legacy. And he said “we are a city of innovation,” lauding the technology industry. “We understand that keeping up with the Joneses may not be the way to go,” he said. “In fact, sharing with the Joneses, I think, is the better path.”

In Chiu’s formulation, the sharing economy is the synthesis of all of these values and goals. By using computers and smartphones to facilitate the sharing of goods and services, we use less stuff and consume fewer resources, in the process opening up economic opportunities for more people.

He sounded like the most enthusiastic of sharing economy true believers, but with a couple of caveats, acknowledging how those “pesky taxes” on most of these economic transactions go unpaid, and how Airbnb and similar companies have removed apartments from the housing market for local residents.

“Shareable housing has both helped and exacerbated our housing crisis,” Chiu said, describing how he spent more than a year working on legislation that would regulate and legalize short-term housing rentals in San Francisco, where they are now considered illegal “hotel conversions” (see “Into thin air,” 8/6/13, and dozens of other Guardian stories and blog posts on the issue).

Chiu’s legislation would require Airbnb hosts to register with the city, rent out only their primary residence, and occupy that space for at least 275 days per year (which Chiu has said limits Airbnb hosts to just 90 rental nights per year, although critics dispute that interpretation).

“I thought this was a reasonable solution, but two weeks later there was a major press conference attacking it,” Chiu told Share attendees, referring to the coalition of landlord, neighborhood, labor, and affordable housing groups that have come out against the legislation, calling it a blanket rezoning of residential property around the city, pledging an initiative campaign challenging it.

“In part, this is politics. I’m in the midst of a race for the state Assembly this year, my opponent has supporters who have been protesting the Twitter headquarters, throwing rocks at Google commuter shuttles, vomiting on Yahoo buses, referring to tech workers as not real San Franciscans,” Chiu said.

Then Chiu ramped up his rhetoric, equating progressive concerns about the tax breaks and special treatment that Chiu, Mayor Ed Lee, and others have extended to tech companies in San Francisco with a war on the sharing economy and the forced deportation of its workers.

“They are calling for war on you, even though they don’t realize that what you are doing is helping to make sure we’re addressing our income inequality, we’re empowering everyday people by building community and using technology,” Chiu said. “All of you need to get involved in the political debate. You’re busy trying to change the world, but status quo interests are actively trying to ship you to Menlo Park, Oakland, and San Jose.”

In the end, Chiu did urge those starting up companies to “think early about how your paradigm meshes with existing laws and regulations,” but that tepid call for civic responsibility and good corporate citizenship did little to dull his feeding of techie exceptionalism, fearmongering, or appeals to vaguely libertarian values.

AIRBNB’S BOOSTERS

The pep rally atmosphere of the session got pumped up even more by Airbnb’s Douglas Atkin and venture capitalist Ron Conway, both of whom had nothing but glowing praise for the burgeoning industry and its customers, offering none of the caveats put forth by Chiu or the speaker who followed him, White House staffer Greg Nelson, who talked about the challenging access, equity, and regulatory issues facing the industry.

“We at Airbnb and PEERS think the sharing economy is a jolly good thing,” Atkin said in a charming British accent, presenting the sharing economy as an unstoppable and uniformly positive force that is replacing “the old economy, the last economy.”

As an advertising executive in that old economy, “I was the devil,” Atkin said. Now playing the role of savior, he spoke with an evangelical flair as he flashed Airbnb slides and videos, telling the crowd “there’s been a decentralization of wealth, control, and power” because “you can’t do this new economy without creating community.”

It was easy to forget that Atkin represents a company that Wall Street analysts have valued at $10 billion, despite having a business model that is illegal in many cities, causing some hosts to be evicted and others to evict their tenants, while the company and its investors move quickly to cash out with an initial public stock offering.

Among those who would profit handsomely from that IPO is Conway, a billionaire who already got far richer late last year from being “an early investor in Twitter,” as he described himself to the crowd after being introduced as someone who “has really led the way of connecting the tech industry to the public sector.”

Indeed, Conway spoke proudly of funding the politicians who pushed the package of tax breaks for Twitter and other technology companies that followed it into the mid-Market area, most notably Mayor Ed Lee, the biggest beneficiary of Conway’s largesse among San Francisco politicians.

Conway speaks the language of the technology sector that he’s been sponsoring with angel investments since the early days of the last technology boom, making seemingly common sense appeals that hide his conservative ideology, just as he switched his political party registration from Republican to decline-to-state when he became active in San Francisco politics (see “The Plutocrat,” 11/27/12).

But for the careful listener familiar with San Francisco political history, there were some intriguing revelations in his address that were probably lost on the average techie in attendance that morning.

For example, Conway talked about his role following up his advocacy for the Twitter tax break with behind-the-scenes work helping to craft the business tax reform measure in 2012 — which the Controller’s Office analysis found just happened to give the technology companies that Conway was invested in a substantial tax cut.

“Now all the companies enjoy this,” Conway said in reference to Twitter’s tax break, “because Prop. B was passed a year and half ago.”

He also then admitted that Airbnb owes its phenomenal growth to the widespread economic desperation triggered by the financial collapse of 2008 and an economic recovery that still hasn’t reached the average citizen struggling to cover their housing costs.

“Airbnb, for example, would not be here today if there wasn’t an economic crisis and a recession in 2008 in New York, where people had to decide to rent out a room in their house or I get foreclosed on my mortgage. It was that basic. Airbnb wouldn’t be here today if people all over New York didn’t save their mortgages and start using this product. And then by word of mouth it spread around the world because it is so convenient and so practical,” Conway said.

Conway is conservative on financial issues, but more moderate on social issues, and he talked about his advocacy work on gun control and immigration reform. Yet even on those issues, where it is almost exclusively Republicans who are blocking the changes Conway says he wants, he turns the gridlock into an anti-government argument.

“We need term limits in Congress,” the former Republican said, citing a standard conservative trope that got a big applause from the Share conference crowd.

Finally, he elevated the current struggles in San Francisco over the sharing economy into key battles that will shape the future of the new economy.

“This [Airbnb] legislation that David Chiu has proposed, which in the next few months will go to the Board of Supervisors is crucial legislation the whole country will watch,” Conway said, calling for everyone in the crowd to get involved and lobby their supervisors. “David Chiu needs help. This would not pass if it went to a vote today, it wouldn’t come close to passing. So we have to change this. We want to do on the local level what we have to do on the national level: Organize and conquer!”

ACCESS AND EQUITY

After Conway came an intriguing panel discussion about equity and environmental issues with Nikki Silvestri of Green for All, Vien Truong with the Greenlining Institute, and Adam Werbach, the former Sierra Club executive director who started the stuff-sharing company Yertle.

It was moderated by GreenBiz.com editor Joel Makower, who cited information from the previous day’s sessions about how it’s mostly middle class white people who use the sharing economy. “The reality is it’s not that inclusive,” he said, and all his guests agreed and talked about the need to broaden its benefits.

“How do you marry the economy with people?” Truong said as she discussed that challenge. And it’s an urgent need, as Werbach said while answering a question about how the sharing economy could help bring about a new kind of environmentalism aimed at producing and consuming less stuff.

“What’s wrong with the old environmentalism is we’re not achieving our mission. Climate change is what’s wrong with the old environmentalism,” he said.

Werbach cited the goal of replacing about a quarter of the things we now buy with shared goods, even though Amazon and other companies have made it easier than ever to have new products shipped around the world: “It is cheaper, faster, and easier to get something new than to get something used from right next door.”

But Silvestri said the limited participation in the sharing economy makes it difficult to see it as the solution yet, calling for the sharing economy to address access and equity issues, something that marginalized groups would respond to if it was based on true values of sharing.

“Coming from my own background, African Americans had to share because white people wasn’t giving us nothing,” she said. By that same measure, she also said that low-income people feel wary of being taken advantage of by sharing companies and customers: “When you’re in survival mode, you’re wary of people taking from you.”

That’s one reason why Silvestri said that black communities are slower to adopt sharing with strangers, whether it be their homes or cars, something that could be overcome with more personalized outreach: “If I look you in the eye, you might not come take my shit.”

She said that for all the talk at the conference about “community,” the community of strangers that makes up the sharing economy isn’t a true community, something that needs to change to realize the lofty goals that many espouse.

“The sharing economy is new enough that if we figure out this problem early then all of us can actually participate,” Silvestri said.

Werbach agreed, saying the sharing economy has great potential, but only if it makes the right moves now. “This is the beginning of a movement, but the people aren’t here yet,” he said. “We’re at the very beginning of this story.”

He defines the struggle of the moment as one between human and economic values, hoping the sharing economy’s customers will determine its values: “There is an interesting wild west movement now. We need people to do the recruiting so Wall Street doesn’t do the recruiting.”

STRAIGHT TALK

The closing plenary session at Share illustrated the divergent attitudes and goals that mark the sharing economy, in which some members feel a collective responsibility to meet important societal goals, while others seem more interested in just making money and mouthing the rhetoric of sharing.

New York University economics professor Arun Sandararajan, who runs the Collaborative Economy Project that studies and promotes the sharing economy, said it has the potential to develop in ways that will either exacerbate or reduce the income inequality that has become such a growing public policy concern.

Sandararajan expressed hopes that the sharing economy could increase the economic growth rate and lower the wealth gap by broadening access to capital and opportunities for entrepreneurship. But he also argued that the sharing economy has the potential to change the terms of the debate by giving more people access to goods and services than their incomes might otherwise allow.

“We have to go beyond measuring inequality in terms of income and wealth,” he said, offering a conception likely to appeal to the wealthy, but probably not those struggling to get by, even if they were able to get more hand-me-downs through Yerdle or odd jobs through TaskRabbit.

Others on the panel illustrated the dichotomy between do-gooders and profit-seekers more clearly, showing how broadly those in the sharing economy are trying to define it these days.

Jose Quinonez runs the nonprofit Mission Asset Fund, a nonprofit on Valencia Street that assists with peer-to-peer microlending, an amazing program that seemed to have little in common with the investor-backed companies that dominated the agenda. “I didn’t know I was part of the sharing economy until today,” he told the crowd.

In an earlier session, Quinonez called out the self-congratulatory tone by some boosters. “As we talk about the word inclusive it’s very easy to forget the people not invited to the party…We have to make sure we’re not making an exclusive sharing economy.”

Next came Denise Cheng, an academic who has been studying the sharing economy for the MIT Center for Civic Media, and she had perhaps the most poignant and insightful answer to the question the conference posed about what will best catalyze the sharing economy.

“Straight talk will catalyze the sharing economy,” Cheng said.

She discussed how the broad label of the sharing economy gets claimed by everyone from small idealists who truly want to promote the idea of sharing to self-interested corporations who use the label for political cover and really mean “renting.”

“When we say sharing economy, we actually mean a lot of things,” she said. “Companies that adopt the sharing economy label are not necessarily adopting the values of the sharing economy.”

Compounding that deception is the fact that companies like Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb are profiting from business models that are often illegal on the local level, but doing little to help drivers or hosts who get in trouble with local authorities: “When someone has to answer on the local level, it’s the providers who are on the front line.”

There was a very different tone and message that came from the subsequent guests to join the panel, who shamelessly promoted their companies and didn’t seem to take heed of Cheng’s call for straight talk.

“Sharing cars is how we can catalyze the sharing economy,” Jessica Scorpio, wearing a T-shirt of the car-sharing company she helped found, Getaround. She called car-sharing “a gateway drug to the sharing economy,” noting that car-sharing customers often go on to use other sharing economy products and services.

“Sharing cars is transforming the fundamentals of our transportation system,” Scorpio said, claiming that each shared car takes up to 32 cars off the road, a figure that doesn’t square with the body of peer-reviewed research on the subject, which places the actual number at nine to 13 cars.

Hyperbole and exaggeration are common among the biggest boosters of sharing economy companies, as are the sins of omission and misdirection — all of which are perhaps what prompted Chang’s “straight talk” prescription.

Sunil Paul, co-founder and CEO of the ridesharing company Sidecar, gave a long and detailed presentation on the supposedly ambiguous definition of “commercial transactions,” calling for what he called a “safe harbor” for sharing activities, without once mentioning the word that he was actually talking about and dancing around: taxes.

“There are certain activities that should be beyond the commercial reach of government,” Paul said, describing his clients who drive customers around the city like taxi drivers less than full time. “We need a safe harbor for sharing that protects these activities from being considered commercial.”

Paul said that Sidecar and other sharing economy companies have “blurred the line between what is personal and what is commercial,” comparing the activities his company facilitates to carpooling and arguing that people should be able to cover the annual cost of driving, say around $10,000, without it being considered a commercial activity (i.e. a taxable transaction).

“As long as you don’t make a profit from it, it’s not a commercial transaction,” Paul said, redefining the very concept of commercial.

And remember, this is a company that is already having a profound impact on the regulated taxi industry — of which Sandararajan said, “I think the taxi service as we know it will largely cease to exist in a few years” — just as other sharing economy companies steal market share from other industries, as Airbnb is doing to the hotel industry, also while avoiding taxes on those transactions.

FROM TALK TO ACTION

“One of the things we like to do in the sharing economy is talk about the sharing economy — a lot!” Jesse Biroscak, an Airbnb host and founder of BayShare, said during a session at Share entitled “Shareable Cities: From Concept to Action.”

It was the first thing I heard upon arriving at the conference, but I already knew it was true after covering this movement over the last couple years, a point that was emphasized strongly by the excited evangelism that I heard again and again over the next 24 hours.

But for all the talk that those in the so-called sharing economy do about the sharing economy, there is often a deliberate vagueness to it that tries to mask its many contradictions and paradoxes.

Its biggest proponents are anxious to go big — defined by a strange mix of idealism (for environmentalism, libertarianism, economic and social equity, and an odd and often contradictory assortment of other goals) and the desire to cash in on the new gold rush — before the opportunities slip away (thanks to competitors, government regulators, or an economic downturn).

“I’m tired of talking about it, I want to do things,” said Biroscak, a regular Airbnb host from San Francisco, without ever really defining the things he wants to do.

BayShare also seems to have a vagueness of purpose, defining itself on its slick website as “an organization whose mission is to make the Bay Area the best place on the planet for sharing. As this movement grows, BayShare will explore how city stakeholders and the sharing community can work together to help the Sharing Economy flourish in the Bay Area to benefit the city, businesses, and communities. The organization looks to be a resource for the Mayor’s Working Group on the Sharing Economy.”

But that working group, which Mayor Ed Lee announced when Treasurer Jose Cisneros was holding hearings two years ago to determine whether Airbnb and other companies should pay the city’s transient occupancy tax, never actually convened. It was simply a stall tactic that evaporated after Cisneros ruled that the tax was indeed owed.

Still, BayShare lists many of the biggest sharing economy companies among its “members,” including Airbnb, RelayRides, Lyft, Yerdle, Vayable, City Car Share, Suppershare, and Get My Boat. Biroscak described the advocacy work that he and BayShare do, work that he urged all of the attendees to get involved with, so that public agencies understand and support this growing economic sector.

“This is called lobbying, and that’s okay. Lobbying is not a dirty word,” Biroscak told the crowd.

Lobbying may not be a dirty word, but it is a regulated activity in San Francisco and other cities, and neither Biroscak nor BayShare are registered lobbyists with the San Francisco Ethics Commission, which they should be if they are indeed lobbying.

Biroscak even boasted of a partnership with the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management that BayShare secured last year on behalf of its member companies to provide their services to local residents in the event of an emergency.

“The sharing economy was born here, and partnering with BayShare, we are committed to ensuring that San Francisco supports this emerging sector’s success and nurturing even greater civic involvement,” Mayor Ed Lee said last June in a press release announcing the partnership, while Chiu said, “I’m confident that BayShare will improve the communication between this emerging sector and local government as ‘collaborative consumption’ evolves and grows in San Francisco.”

But when we reached Biroscak by phone, he said that BayShare doesn’t really have any agreements with the city, and that it doesn’t actually represent its “member” companies or get any money from them. And he said BayShare “definitely does not consider itself a lobbying organization,” instead defining it more vaguely as “a convener and facilitator.”

But as a self-styled spokesperson for the movement — “I try to speak for the San Francisco sharing economy as an industry,” he said at the conference — Biroscak issued a call to action to a crowd that mostly seemed to be puttering on their electronic devices and only half paying attention: “We need to stand up for what we want, but we want to do it in a coordinated way.”

Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez contributed to this report.

Guardian Intelligence: May 21 – 27, 2014

Michael Redmond

May 20, 2014

P>Because nothing screams “invest in healthcare” like an aging Sammy Hagar: The former Van Halen rocker teamed up with Metallica’s James Hetfield, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, Train’s Pat Monahan, Nancy Wilson of Heart, and other rock ‘n roll veterans for a special one-time acoustic show at The Fillmore May 15, benefiting the Pediatric Cancer program at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital — what organizers were calling the first annual “Acoustic-4-A-Cure” show. That’s a lot of oversized egos for one stage, but hey, we can’t knock rockin’ for a good cause.

HAIL THE TRAIL

Celebrate the 25th anniversary of the San Francisco Bay Trail — still a work in progress, with 60 percent of the “ring around the Bay” having been completed — Sat/24, at a re-dedication of the Rosie the Riveter World War II National Historic Park visitor center in Richmond. The center houses exhibits dedicated to civilian efforts on the home front during World War II, embodied by the iconic female factory worker. The festive ceremony will be a vintage-themed affair, complete with WWII-era big band jazz, swing dancing, and a costume contest. And in a nod to our current century, the event will also unveil the first Bay Trail smartphone app. Let the summer hiking season begin! www.baytrail.org

PROP. 13 PRESSURE

Public policy group Evolve California sent out a survey to California candidates for public office, and discovered that a full 80 percent support reforming Prop. 13. The nearly four-decades-old law bases property taxes on purchase price, not current market value, and is often blamed for lost revenues that could go toward, say, rescuing California’s public education system from the dregs. The vast majority of hopefuls running for federal, state, and local office said they’d support reassessing commercial properties at market value, as long as small businesses, homeowners, and renters remain protected.

GUTS OF THE CITY

A daylong conference Sat/31 will expose curious participants to some of the lesser-known aspects of city life: The design and planning of public transit, water systems, wireless networks, and other kinds of urban infrastructure. MacroCity, to be held at the Brava Theater on 24th Street in the Mission, will feature talks on everything from San Francisco’s modern military ruins, to the city’s transportation history, to water systems feeding San Francisco. Visit themacrocity.com for more.

BISON: “YAWN”

One Bay to Breakers participant apparently heard the call of the wild, as the poncho-clad man was caught on video jumping into the Golden Gate Park bison paddock. Two officers arrested him in short order, and the SFPD Richmond station tweeted afterwards, “The bison seemed unimpressed.”

PORN DISCRIMINATION

San Francisco based porn star Eden Alexander was rushed to an emergency room after a near-fatal reaction to a common prescription drug. But when she tried using crowd-funding site Giveforward to cover the cost of her treatment, she was told by its payment operators, WePay, that her fundraiser would be cancelled because its terms state “you will not accept payments … in connection with pornographic items.” Alexander only sought funding for her medical costs.

MISSION: RUMBA

Dust off your feather headdress — it’s time yet again for Carnaval (Fri/23-Sun/25) when Harrison between 16th and 24th streets becomes one giant celebration of the music, dance, food, and art of Latin America. This year’s theme is “La Rumba de la Copa Mundial,” or a Celebration of the World Cup, which starts June 12 in Brazil. Sure, there’ll be plenty of drunken revelry, but this is also a great showcase of the deep-rooted Latino arts scene that’s holding on here, determinedly, even as the Mission changes: Look for the Arte Expo, featuring works from the Mexican Museum, Mission Cultural Center, Galleria de la Raza, Accion Latina, BRAVA, and Precita Eyes. The parade’s on Sun/25; see www.carnavalsanfrancisco.org to plan your route.

WANGIN’ IT

Insanely talented Chinese pianist Yuja Wang drops in on our SF Symphony once a year to tickle the ivories and steal a few hearts. Seriously: Her annual appearance here has become an event as eagerly anticipated as the return of the swallows to Capistrano or a sweet, light beating at the Folsom Street Fair. This time around (Thu/22-Sun/25, www.sfsymphony.org) she’ll be taking on Prokofiev’s magical, romping Piano Concerto No. 1 and Litolff’s whirling scherzo from Concerto Symphonique — a double treat for music lovers.

MEAT US SOON

We had doubts about 4505 Meats moving into the old Brother-in-Law BBQ #2 space on Divisadero — that hood moved upscale long ago, but a fancy BBQ in that particular space had the potential to be more sacrilegious than celebratory. Well, at least one local outlet is smitten: SFist has been drooling over 4505’s $18 “Big Mac” — “two beef patties lovingly caressing a block of fried macaroni and cheese” — and “famed bacon-studded hot dogs wrapped in macaroni and cheese and then deep fried.” We’ll let you know how all that goes down, once we can afford it!

KUSF’s axe-man, Father Privett, stepping down

Erica Hanna

May 16, 2014

KUSF’s axe-man, Father Privett, stepping down

The University of San Francisco president who sold off beloved community radio station KUSF in 2011 is stepping down in August, the university recently announced. Father Stephen Privett is known by elected officials and higher-education folks as a strong, stalwart 14-year leader of San Francisco’s oldest university. But to local artists and music lovers, Privett was and will always be the axe-man of KUSF.

And no, we don’t mean he shredded on the guitar.

KUSF continues to rock on as San Francisco Community Radio, but in 2011 its spot on the terrestial dial was sold and closed.

The day it went down, KUSF radio’s employees and volunteers were unexpectedly tossed out of their studio, the locks were changed, and they learned then and there that the station was sold. The signal went dark, radios went silent. The USF-hosted radio station long broadcasted renegade tunes on 90.3 FM, with programming in a variety of languages few other stations replicated.

Privett brought the hatchet down on the beloved radio station, silently. The backroom deal to sell KUSF’s spot on the dial to a Southern California classic music radio station was brewed largely in the dark, with only two KUSF employees told before the day the station was shuttered. Both were silenced under non-disclosure agreements, according to news reports at the time.

In his farewell interview with USF’s campus magazine, Privett touched on his controversial decision.

“KUSF was originally student run and operated, and a valuable learning laboratory. It morphed over time into a community enterprise where only 10 percent of the workers were USF students, while USF remained 100 percent responsible for its operation and costs.

Our mission is to educate in the Jesuit Catholic tradition, not to provide opportunities largely for non-students. I am obligated to spend tuition dollars to support student learning, and that’s how the proceeds were used: to fund scholarships and academic programs.

USF continues to offer students solid learning opportunities at KUSF.org, which is entirely student-staffed and streamed live on the Internet.”

It’s safe to say former KUSF DJs and volunteers aren’t sad to see him go.

“Sadly, a black cloud continues to linger over Father Privett’s legacy, due to his shady and dishonest actions in killing one of the largest and most vital community radio stations in San Francisco,” former KUSF Music Director (and DJ) Irwin Swirnoff told the Guardian. “With all the drastic changes the city has gone through since the sale of the station, the loss of KUSF is extra devastating as the need for a spot on the terrestrial dial for artists, activists, musicians, and underrepresented communities.”

Privett has led San Francisco’s oldest university for 14 years, and this will be his last semester presiding over the Jesuit institution. This weekend, May 16-17, Privett will send off a graduating USF class for the last time. Meanwhile, the fate of the former KUSF-in-Exile, now SFCR, is still in limbo.

The staff and volunteers of KUSF filed an appeal of the sale of the station with the Federal Communications Commission back in 2012, former KUSF DJ Damin Esper told the Guardian. The appeal has neither been ruled on nor dismissed.

SFCR also filed with the FCC for a new spot on the dial, 102.5 FM. The frequency is known as Low Power FM, which has a variable broadcast strength. On its blog, SFCR says the broadcast range of 102.5 FM is as of yet unclear.

But what is clear is that no matter what his accomplishments at USF, Privett will long be remembered in San Francisco as the man who shut down KUSF.

“The station was gutted and demolished; dorms now stand in its place,” former DJ Andre Torrez told the Guardian. “He did what he felt he had to do in order to make his instant millions. Our vast vinyl library was handed over to the Prometheus archive, with no option for the Save KUSF volunteer/ activist group, which still broadcasts online only, to purchase or access the collection.”

“We were major. We had Nirvana, The Ramones, Metallica, Iggy, Green Day, and more recently Ty Segall all as live in-studio guests when they were emerging artists or on the brink of breaking through. Father Privett probably wasn’t fully aware of how important KUSF was, but we certainly would have let him know how we felt had he cared or asked.”

“He has been instrumental in killing community terrestrial radio in San Francisco,” Torrez said, “and for that, he should be ashamed.”

Le Video

Michael Redmond

May 13, 2014

cheryl@sfbg.com

In March, Bay Area cinephiles were seized with alarm when Inner Sunset stalwart Le Video interrupted its usually upbeat Facebook feed with sad news: Due to financial hardship, the store — famed for its massive, meticulously curated film collection — would be forced to close in April after 34 years in business.

The announcement went viral, and a scrambling for wallets ensued; a subsequent Indiegogo campaign has raised over $44,000 so far. On April 15, Le Video announced it would be moving into the mezzanine of its Ninth Avenue space, with beloved local bookstore Green Apple taking over the downstairs area (it opens Aug. 1).

Catherine Tchen prefers to be called Le Video’s founder — in the earliest days of home video, it began as a single shelf in her photography supply store — rather than its owner. “It’s more like Le Video owns me,” she chuckles. “People think if you own a business, you’re making money, but Le Video has not been run as a for-profit entity for years. I haven’t had a paycheck in 14 years.”

The store’s name reflects Tchen’s Parisian roots, though the lifelong movie fan admits, “It should have been La Video! In French, video is feminine.” The misspelling was done so that customers would know it wasn’t a purveyor of exclusively Spanish-language films — and also because it evoked Le Car, a type of Renault popular at the time. “Then everybody knew it had to do with something French! Because it had me, and a lot of French movies, too.”

Le Video still carries beaucoup French and other foreign films among its 100,000-ish titles, but it also has a huge array of other genres: spaghetti westerns, documentaries, classic Hollywood, experimental works, LGBT films, rarities … the list goes on. The depth of the collection, Tchen says, is thanks to Le Video’s dedicated staff (“walking movie encyclopedias,” she calls them), including manager Mark Bowen, who fleshed out the shop’s legendary horror and cult sections. “The collection is a representation of different people who, through the years, have worked at the store, or are still working at the store,” she says.

Tchen, who lives in Washington — she owns the building that houses Le Video but sold her SF house 14 years ago, in part to keep the business going— is committed to keeping the collection intact, as well as “the tradition of the brick and mortar video store and the role it plays in film discovery, education, and social interaction,” per the Indiegogo campaign. The current financial crisis is a perfect storm of complications, including the overall decline of the rental biz. Bringing in Green Apple as a co-tenant will help, as will the Indiegogo funds.

“I was deeply touched,” she says of the reaction. “We have a core of people who really value what we do and understand that this is not about money.”

But the clock is still ticking for Le Video. “We need to raise twice as much to give people what they want,” Tchen says. More funds are needed for remodeling costs, a revamped website, and materials to display DVD covers for browsing in the store, among other expenses.

“When all the headlines came out, ‘Le Video Saved!’, I knew people would say, ‘Oh, it’s out of the woods! We don’t need to do anything anymore,'” she says. “We are saved. But it’s bare-bones, and it’s still a big challenge.”

1231 Ninth Ave, SF

(415) 566-3606

www.levideo.com

SF en fuego

Michael Redmond

May 13, 2014

culture@sfbg.com

ANOTHER WEEK, MORE OPENINGS!

TABLEHOPPER Just when you thought you already had enough options of new places to check out, you get hit with more. Yup, this month is bonkers, and could very well be setting a record for the most openings in a month. Let’s do this.

Due to open this week is Outerlands (4001 Judah, SF; www.outerlandssf.com), with a newly expanded space (owners Lana Porcello and Dave Muller took over the Chinese restaurant next door and knocked the wall down) and a new chef (Greg Kuzia-Carmel). There will be 20 more seats, and a big bonus is the new bar area, with 10 bar seats and some high-top bistro tables, perfect for those moments when you just want to slip in for a cocktail, or even a full meal. You’ll notice the expanded kitchen with a cool architectural feature above it (it looks like a white wave). The cocktail list will be more extensive, with Chris O’Brien as the new bar manager and some consultation from Kevin Dowell, who is the bar manager at Foreign Cinema — look for some initial cocktail pop-up nights to start as they ramp things up. Other additions: Brunch will now be served Saturday and Sunday, and during the week 8–10am, there will be an edited brunch service. It’s enough to make someone plot a morning beach walk, with breakfast before (or after!). Outerlands plans to start with lunch this week (10am–3pm), but check its website before heading over — weekend brunch will be kicking in too, and then dinner service and bar bites soon thereafter.

Now for a couple of SF classics that have been redone and zhooshed. First up, the Big 4 (1075 California, SF; www.big4restaurant.com) has reopened, and fortunately not tooooo much has been changed inside. Ty is still shaking cocktails at the bar and telling jokes, the white tablecloths and leather banquettes in British racing green remain, and guests will still hear the grand piano playing. So what’s new? Well, the snazzy carpet for one. A big change is longtime chef Gloria Ciccarone-Nehls has departed, and the menu from the new chef, Kevin Scott, will be launching May 23 (there’s just an interim menu for now). Some of his dishes will include previous menu staples but with new twists.

There’s also a new cocktail menu with some additions. You can come by for breakfast and dinner daily (6:30–10:30am and 5:30–10pm) and there’s talk of lunch service returning too!

Another SF icon that got a big redo is Schroeder’s (240 Front, SF; www.schroederssf.com), the 120-year-old downtown German beer hall, with new owners and quite a new look too (although the Herman Richter murals remain in place). While it’s definitely a beer hall, the space has a sense of modernity as well (blond wood, Tolix metal chairs, and check out the illuminated glass shelving with beer steins). You can order cocktails from bar director Claire Jane Hunter at the original rosewood bar, cicerone Rich Higgins is behind the quality beer selection (15 on tap), and the wine list is from Mauro Cirilli of Press Club — yeah, people who know what they’re doing. Prost to all of it. Chef Manfred Wrembel (Plum, Incanto) is doing a Cali spin on German dishes (like spätzle with corn, tomato, and ricotta), with some meaty entrées (yes, there’s wiener schnitzel) and the bar menu features a dry-aged cheeseburger.

You like to play mini golf, drink beer, and eat deep-dish pizza, all without leaving the comfort of the Mission? Well, you’re in luck, because Urban Putt (1096 South Van Ness, SF; www.urbanputt.com) is now open (in a former mortuary, how vewy cweepy!). There’s a 14-hole course (complete with a Transamerica building — and you thought I was going to say Transylvania building), a restaurant and bar upstairs (just beer and wine for now), and even the kiddies can come play during the day (until 8pm); $12 adults, $8 kids, first-come, first-served. *

Marcia Gagliardi is the founder of the weekly tablehopper e-column; subscribe for more at www.tablehopper.com. Get her app: Tablehopper’s Top Late-Night Eats. On Twitter: @tablehopper.

Events: May 14 – 20, 2014

Michael Redmond

May 13, 2014

Listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Selector.

WEDNESDAY 14

“Carry It Forward: Celebrate the Children of Resistance” Berkeley City College, 2050 Center, Berk; www.mecaforpeace.org. 7pm, $10-20. The Middle East Children’s Alliance hosts this benefit screening of a 2013 performance (featuring Angela Davis, Eve Ensler, and others) marking the 60th anniversary of the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

Rayya Elias Book Passage, 1 Ferry Building, SF; www.bookpassage.com. 6pm, free. The author reads from Harley Loco: A Memoir of Hard Living, Hair, and Post-Punk, from the Middle East to the Lower East Side.

Museum of Craft and Design curator tour of current exhibitions Museum of Craft and Design, 2569 Third St, SF; www.sfmcd.org. Noon-1pm, free with admission ($6-8). Curator Marc D’Estout leads a lunchtime walk through the museum’s current exhibits.

“The Wandering Moon” Tenderloin National Forest, 511 Ellis, SF; www.radarproductions.org. 8pm, $5-10. Michelle Tea hosts this Radar Productions reading with Juliana Delgado Lopera, Erin Peterson, K.M. Soehnlein, Ben McCoy, and Gem Top.

THURSDAY 15

California College of the Arts presents the 2014 MFA Thesis Exhibition CCA San Francisco, 111 Eighth St, SF; gradthesis.cca.edu. 6-10pm, free. Exhibit on display through May 24. Fifty MFA students in CCA’s Graduate Program in Fine Arts showcase their works, in forms that include sculptures, paintings, video shorts, wiki platforms, and more.

“DIY Nightlife” California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.calacademy.org. 6-10pm, $12. Do-it-yourself is the theme, so Maker Faire artists display their wares; the Computer and Technology Resource Center turns recycled e-waste into usable machines; the Crucible and the Green Art Workshop curate creative activities; and more.

“Quick Draw SF” F8 Gallery/Bar, 1192 Folsom, SF; www.paintpenscollective.com. 6-9pm, free. Live-drawing event featuring over 10 artists creating and selling brand-new works.

Gabrielle Selz City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus, SF; www.citylights.com. 7pm, free. The author discusses her new book Unstill Life: A Daughter’s Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction.

Harriet Elinor Smith Mechanics’ Institute, 57 Post, SF; www.milibrary.org. 6pm, $15. The Mark Twain Project editor discusses The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2: The Complete and Authoritative Edition.

FRIDAY 16

“La Cocina: The Culinary Treasures of Rosa Covarrubias” Mexican Museum, Fort Mason Center, Bldg D, SF; www.mexicanmuseum.org. Noon-4pm, free. Exhibit on display through Jan. 18, 2015. Folk art pottery, paintings, vintage cooking utensils, and other objects from the collection of Rosa and Miguel Covarrubias.

SATURDAY 17

“Free Guided Walking Tour: Introduction to West Oakland Galleries” Meet at Transmission Gallery, 770 W. Grand, Oakl; www.oaklandartmurmur.org. 2-4pm, free. Visit galleries in West Oakland and get to know their curators. The event also includes a poetry reading at Transmission Gallery.

El Tecolote benefit Cesar’s Latin Palace, 826 26th St, SF; www.accionlatina.org. 9:30pm, $10. Cesar’s Latin All-Stars present a benefit dance concert to support bilingual newspaper El Tecolote.

“Yoga in the City” Marina Green, SF; sf.wanderlustfestival.com. 12:30pm, free. Multiple free outdoor yoga classes are offered throughout the day, with live music, healthy food samplings, and more.

SUNDAY 18

“34th Annual Celebration of Old Roses” El Cerrito Community Center, 7007 Moeser Ln, El Cerrito; www.celebrationofoldroses.org. 11am-3:30pm, free. A 100-foot display of rare and heritage roses, plus hundreds of rose-themed products for sale, display tables, activities for kids, and more.

MONDAY 19

Alysia Abbott Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF; www.booksmith.com. 7:30pm, free. The author reads from Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father.

Breanne Fahs in conversation with Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz Modern Times Bookstore, 2919 24th St, SF; www.moderntimesbookstore.com. 7-9pm, free. The authors discuss their writings on radical women, with a focus on Fahs’ Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol).

Russell Simmons Book Passage, 1 Ferry Building, SF; www.bookpassage.com. 5pm, free. The Def Jam Recordings founder and meditation enthusiast signs copies of In Success Through Stillness.

TUESDAY 20

David Helvarg Bay Model Visitor Center, 2100 Bridgeway, Sausalito; www.acs-sfbay.org. 7pm, $5. The environmental journalist and activist discusses The Golden Shore: California’s Love Affair with the Sea.

Howard Norman City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus, SF; www.citylights.com. 7pm, free. The author reads from Next Life Might Be Kinder. *

Stony lonesome

Michael Redmond

May 13, 2014

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Prison should be the most natural setting for film noir, as that’s where most of the genre’s protagonists are headed (if they don’t get bumped off first), and where many of them have already been. But it’s had spotty representation onscreen, with time served either skipped over in the narrative (how many pulp fictions start with a hard-luck protagonist just getting out of long-term for what’s sure to be short-term freedom?), or dominating entirely.

This spring’s edition of “I Wake Up Dreaming,” the recurrent Roxie noir showcase programmed by Elliot Lavine, has a number of notable titles dealing with the claustrophobic consequences of crime-not-paying. What’s even more notable this time around is the cross-pollination with Lavine’s other Roxie perennial, the series of Hollywood “pre-Codes” made in an approximately five-year window between the advent of “talkies” and the 1934 arrival of more rigidly enforced, censorious industry standards toward potentially objectionable content. Their peaks separated by about 15 years, pre-Codes and noirs shared a taste for hard-boiled dialogue and seamy situations, so their programmatic overlapping here feels right.

Two of the strongest entries here were released at least a decade before the arrival of anything that might legitimately be labeled noir. Daintily titled Ladies They Talk About (1933) is a rip-roaring original Women in Prison exploiter, with the inimitable Barbara Stanwyck as a moll who sashays into the hoosegow after enabling a bank stick-up. Getting two-to-five in San Quentin’s women’s ward, which here is like the world’s saltiest sorority, she quickly identifies her allies and enemies while spurning the visits of a childhood pal turned crusading DA (Preston Foster) — when she’d ratted on herself to prove “I’m on the level now” to him, he had the noive to actually charge her with the crime. That bum!

Another enduring star who came in with the sound era, Edward G. Robinson, gets all of Two Seconds (1932) to recall what got him to the electric chair — though that translates into a still-trim 67 minutes’ screen time in Mervyn LeRoy’s drama. The first half is a gem of snappy patter as the headliner and a terrific Foster play construction-worker roommates — Robinson the penny-pinching plodder, Foster the one always ready to blow his paycheck on booze, broads, and the horses. Yet it’s the former who’s taken for a chump’s ride by dancehall girl Vivienne Osborne, whose personality goes from Jekyll to Hyde the moment she’s manipulated him into an unholy matrimony. You can guess what happens — she’s already murder just to live with. As a none-too-bright lug who can’t get a break, Robinson gets a serious acting workout here, even if the climactic pre-execution Big Speech smacks overmuch of writing for Oscar’s sake.

Several rarities that verge on horror come from before and after the semi-official, immediately post-World War II noir era. Miracles for Sale (1939) was the final feature for director Tod Browning of Lon Chaney Sr. and Freaks (1932) fame. It stars Robert Young as a professional “magic” debunker investigating murders connected to an alleged witchcraft circle. Even so, this slick comedy thriller provides scant outlet for Browning’s love of the macabre.

Even less frequently revived are three early 1960s chillers: Erstwhile Incredible Shrinking Man Grant Williams plays a psychiatric patient and serial killer in The Couch (1962), Robert Bloch’s first screenplay after Hitchcock adapted his novel Psycho. The Hypnotic Eye (1960) has tall, dark, and handsome Jacques Bergerac (who married Dorothy Malone and Ginger Rogers) as a hypnotist whose prettier subjects tend to grotesquely disfigure themselves. Two on a Guillotine (1965) is a sub-William Castle gothic with the punishingly perky duo of Connie Stevens and Dean Jones having to spend an inheritance-earning week in the inevitable haunted house. They’re all terrible, but have a certain creaky charm.

Holding up very well indeed is 1949’s The Window, a rare genuine independent production of the era to achieve major recognition. As opening on-screen text announces, it’s the story of the boy who cried wolf — updated to a modern NYC tenement, where little Bobby Driscoll is testing the patience of his parents and playmates with his constant fabrications. Thus nobody believes him, of course, when he witnesses a real murder. Once his homicidal neighbors catch wind of him, our grade-school protagonist becomes prey himself. Criminal child endangerment was far from a typical story element in those days, and with its still-tense chase finale amid crumbling condemned buildings, The Window presented such a novelty that it won a (rather generous) special Oscar for Driscoll, who was usually seen in the more wholesome environs of Disney films like Song of the South (1946) and Treasure Island (1950). Yet soon after, adolescent acne would kill his acting career. Ironically echoing this famous role, the by-then heroin-addicted ex-con was found dead in an abandoned 1968 NYC tenement at age 31, his body found by playing children.

Other “Dreaming” highlights include a glossy 1947 double bill showcasing talented Warner Brothers star Ann Sheridan, the better being The Unfaithful, though Nora Prentiss has the virtue of being partly shot in SF. As sleepers go, though, two vintage “Bs” may rep the series’ best discoveries. Perhaps the program’s least likely inclusion is Angels in Disguise (1948), a later entry among the Bowery Boys’ nearly 100 juvenile hijinks. This one is a spoof of tough urban crime dramas, and a surprisingly good one, complete with shadow-heavy noir imagery and hard-boiled voiceover narration. As ever, the scene stealer is rubber-faced beanpole Huntz Hall.

From 1957, Death in Small Doses (“The picture that crosses the forbidden territory … of THRILL PILLS!”) rips the lid off amphetamine abuse among long-distance truckers, with future Mission: Impossible and Airplane! (1980) star Peter Graves as an undercover federal investigator. What makes it unmissable, however, is the supporting turn by none other than Chuck Connors (1979’s Tourist Trap, 1973’s Soylent Green) as perpetually hopped-up boarding-house hepcat “Mink.” If scene-stealing were a crime, Hall might get life without parole, but Connors would merit the chair. *

“I WAKE UP DREAMING 2014”

May 16-26

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St, SF

www.roxie.com

Home brew

Michael Redmond

May 13, 2014

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Jose Antonio Vargas’ grandparents — who raised him in Mountain View after he was smuggled into America at age 12 from the Philippines — expected him to grow up, blend in, and live a perfectly ordinary life in his new country. He’d work a “menial job,” as both of them had, and eventually legalize his immigration status by marrying an American woman.

Thing is, Vargas was a smart kid who grew into an exceptionally intelligent young adult. He pursued a journalism career that earned him coveted reporting gigs for the Washington Post and CNN, among other outlets, as well as a Pulitzer Prize. He’s also gay, and while marriage equality laws are thankfully evolving, that fact complicated his family’s hopes for a traditional wedding (and subsequent green card). In 2011, weary of guarding a secret he’d shared with only a few close friends, the 30-year-old Vargas penned a powerful essay for the New York Times Magazine, revealing “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.”

Documented, his film with co-director Ann Lupo, chronicles the months before and after Vargas “outed” himself. It’s a highly personal story, especially when the film crew travels to Manila to interview Vargas’ mother. Their geographical separation (she can’t get a visa to see her son in the US, nor can he leave the country to visit her) has become an emotional estrangement so complex she weeps when he refuses to add her on Facebook. But Documented also taps Vargas’ Define American media campaign to broaden its message, interviewing undocumented youths affected by the DREAM Act and sharing in their joy when the bill — providing permanent residency to young, educated immigrants of “good moral character” — finally goes into effect.

Unfortunately for Vargas, who continues to push back in high-profile ways even after he’s declared his status (particularly poignant: scenes at a Mitt Romney rally, where a grandmotherly type asks him, “Why don’t you just become legal?”, as if it’s as simple as buying a car or getting a haircut), he’s too old to benefit from the DREAM legislation. He’s a “walking uncomfortable conversation,” as he calls himself in a lecture excerpted throughout the film; though he feels relief at having come clean, he’s still unable to make any traction in his citizenship quest. At one point, he phones INS (“Deportation. How can I help you?”) to see if anyone’s planning to clamp down, as if finally getting “caught” would be preferable to living in extended limbo. The only closure of sorts comes when Vargas reconnects with his mother via Skype, but there’s an undercurrent of helplessness to their computer-screen reunion that makes Documented‘s themes feel especially raw and urgent.

MOUNTAIN VIEWS

Back for its second year, the Himalayan Film Festival unspools over two days, starting Fri/16 in SF with Christoph Schwaiger’s Kamlahari. The rest of the fest, including Kesang Tseten’s Who Will Be a Gurkha, takes place Sat/17 as part of Berkeley’s weekend-long Himalayan Fair.

Kamlahari is a social-justice doc that would be right at home in the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Filmmaker Schwaiger travels to Nepal’s Teraï region to investigate families that sell their daughters to work in wealthier households, an old tradition that persists despite the fact that child labor is now illegal. The girls are treated cruelly by their “landladies” and are deprived of education and medical care; if and when they’re allowed to return home, their home life may be no less abusive, and their relationships with the family members who pressed them into servitude are strained.

The film’s charismatic center is Urmila Chaudari, a kamlahari from ages six to 17. “My story is one of many stories,” she says, but she’s actually quite extraordinary: After pursuing her education, she became an advocate for girls in Nepal, rescuing them from bondage and working with NGOs to set up safe places for them to live and “find a way back to childhood.” Urmila’s dignified mien and mastery of English makes her an ideal spokesperson, and we follow her as she visits a human-rights conference in Norway and the UN in New York. “It is a first victory for us that everyone is hearing our story,” she says.

Boys in Nepal may be in less danger of becoming household slaves, but their options are also limited. Some dream of joining a special British Army unit, the Brigade of the Gurkhas, established in 1815 and praised for its heroism (and general badassery) in both World Wars. (These days, gurkhas fight in places like Afghanistan, for pay that well exceeds anything offered by the Indian or Nepalese armies.) If the title of Nepalese director Tseten’s film, Who Will be a Gurhka, reminds you of a reality-show competition, that’s not far off, since the film follows the grueling selection (lots of intense physical training, but brain power is also tested) as thousands of wannabes are winnowed to hundreds, then to just under 200.

Gurkha archives provide Tseten with black-and-white footage showing eerily identical selection camps held in decades past, but at just 75 minutes the director misses the chance to go deeper — more history and context, perhaps via interviews with current or retired gurkhas, would add some welcome perspective. Who Will be a Gurkha would also benefit from engaging with, rather than simply observing, its subjects. None of the boys are singled out enough for us to root for them; we learn about their motivations mostly via nervously-blurted answers during interviews with the selection committee, and their personal lives during random conversation snippets, leaving the viewer without focal points amid the film’s sea of hopeful young faces. *

DOCUMENTED opens Thu/15 at the Roxie and Fri/16 in Bay Area theaters.

HIMALAYAN FILM FESTIVAL

Fri/16-Sat/17, $10-$20 (festival pass, $40)

Ninth Street Independent Film Center

145 Ninth St, Suite 250, SF

Himalayan Fair Grounds

Live Oak Theater

1301 Shattuck, Berk www.himalayanfilmfest.com

Alerts: May 14 – 20, 2014

Michael Redmond

May 13, 2014

WEDNESDAY 14

Growing Green Awards

Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk. www.nrdc.org. 6-9pm, $30/$20 for students. Author and advocate Anna Lappe serves as master of ceremonies for this year’s multimedia awards ceremony, celebrating leaders in sustainable food and agriculture. Presented by the Berkeley Food Institute and Natural Resources Defense Council. Food and wine reception follows.

THURSDAY 15

Global Day of Action Against Fast Food Industry

Downtown Oakland. sandra.eboc@gmail.com. 11am, free. Join fast food workers and allies from 36 countries and 150 U.S. cities for a day of action to call attention to some of the worst corporate behavior and income inequality. The first action will be in East Oakland at 6am and the second will be downtown at 11 am.

Community Forum on Proposed Development for 16th and Mission Plaza

Victoria Theater, 2961 16th St., SF. www.plaza16.org. 6-8pm, free. The proposed housing development near Mission and 16th Sts. will be too expensive and too big, shadowing Marshall Elementary School for five months of the year. Learn more about how this project will negatively impact neighborhood residents, community organizations, and mom and pop businesses. Be part of a community-based effort where the needs of people come before the needs of multimillion-dollar profits.

Fundraiser to support farming veterans

Goldman Theater, David Brower Center, 2150 Allston Way, Berk. 5:30-7:30pm, $100. Show your support and celebrate the accomplishments of the Farmer Veteran Coalition, portrayed in the award-winning documentary Ground Operations: Battlefields to Farmfields. Meet the veterans in the film who are part of a new generation of sustainable farmers, ranchers and artisan food producers.The evening will feature veteran-produced, farm-fresh tapas, beverages (wine, beer and mead!), as well as stories told by vets-turned-farmers. Meet the filmmakers, and watch the film, documenting how vets with post-traumatic stress disorder have found peace through sustainable agriculture.

Stored power

Michael Redmond

May 13, 2014

rebecca@sfbg.com

BASED ON EARTH

For this second installment of our environmental news column, we’re looking at climate change from wildly different perspectives. We’ll explore whether local green-tech manufacturing firms can help wean California off fossil fuels, highlight some key data from the National Climate Assessment, and hear from an Amazonian shaman who’s fed up with white people making a mess of the planet and his home territory.

STASHING ELECTRONS

A new green technology sector in the Bay Area could help find the missing puzzle piece needed to establish a sustainable clean-energy mix for the state’s future.

Californians continue to rely on a majority of electricity sources that are environmentally unfriendly: natural gas, nuclear power, and even coal. Generating electricity by burning fossil fuels contributes to air pollution, consumes vast quantities of freshwater, and releases greenhouse-gas emissions, exacerbating global climate change.

But this is all starting to change. Since California requires utilities to convert one-third of their energy mix to renewable sources by 2020, there’s incentive for investment in carbon-free alternatives, such as wind and solar. Meanwhile, procurement decisions at the California Public Utilities Commission have pushed utilities to purchase more renewable power.

“Solar is succeeding beyond people’s expectations around the world,” because pricing has come down, said Julie Blunden, a consultant and energy-sector expert who formerly served as vice president at SunPower. “California set itself up to say, ‘we’re for changes to our power sector.'”

But renewables have an inherent problem — the power they produce can’t always be tapped just when it’s needed. Without some way to store the electricity generated by a wind or solar array, to be kept on hand for when demand hits a peak, wind and solar are unreliable for primary energy generation because they’re subject to fluctuations in wind and natural light. This is where energy storage comes in.

Throughout the Bay Area, companies specializing in battery manufacturing are starting to gain traction, with 11 regional battery manufacturers enrolling in CalCharge, an accelerator program for energy storage created with help from the U.S. Department of Energy and the California Clean Energy Fund.

CalCharge gives regional energy-storage companies access to national laboratories such as Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, facilities described by DOE renewables expert David Danielson as “science and engineering powerhouses at the forefront of clean energy innovation.”

One of the first grid-scale energy storage firms to join CalCharge is EnerVault, a flow battery manufacturer that’s working on a major installation in Turlock that will be co-located with a tracking solar system and an electric irrigation pump.

“The little dark secret about solar is that it’s intermittent,” explained Tom Steipen, CEO of Primus Power, a flow battery manufacturing firm based in Hayward that recently joined CalCharge.

On cloudy days, solar arrays won’t produce as much power. Wind presents similar challenges: “Wind in North America is stronger at night — but we don’t need it at night, we need it in the afternoon. So anything you can do to de-couple the instantaneous supply from demand is good for the environment, good for the economy, and that’s what energy storage does. … I like to describe it as a warehouse of electrons.”

Primus makes energy pods — an array of batteries that stand about six feet tall, placed in two rows within a shipping container — fed by renewable power arrays and tied in with the grid.

The pods can be stacked in Lego-like fashion, enabling more energy storage. They are then positioned beside a second shipping container, outfitted with equipment to convert stored DC power to AC power that can be sent over transmission lines.

Primus Power plans to make one of its first energy pod shipments to Miramar, the site of a marine base near San Diego where the movie Top Gun was filmed. The base is powered with its own contained micro-grid, but it was impacted by brownouts a couple years ago. With this project, Primus faces a test for its energy pods, which are estimated to last up to 20 years: Can the flow batteries, in combination with solar, produce reliable electricity for three full days?

If the pods can supply a smooth power supply, Primus wins — but more importantly, it will be a vote of confidence for carbon-free energy sources as significant sources of electricity generation.

“MONEY WON’T SAVE THE WORLD”

Davi Kopenawa is sometimes called the “Dalai Lama of the Rainforest.” He’s a shaman, activist, and spokesperson for his Yanomami tribe, the largest relatively isolated tribe in South America, which lives according to traditional indigenous ways in territory located within the Brazilian Amazon.

After years of battling the Brazilian government, Kopenawa and his people won a successful campaign for demarcation of the Yanomami territory in 1992. He co-wrote a book, The Falling Sky, with French anthropologist Bruce Albert, recently published by the Harvard University Press.

Today, the Yanomami are facing new pressures. Mining speculators are encroaching into their indigenous territory, causing fears of displacement, environmental destruction, and disease. In the past, exposure to disease brought dire consequences, resulting in widespread fatalities.

Kopenawa recently made a rare visit to San Francisco, giving talks at the Presidio Trust, UC Berkeley, and City Lights Books — and we got the chance to interview him while he was here.

Speaking via translation provided by Fiona Watson, research director of the human rights organization Survival International, Kopenawa talked about the Yanomami’s looming worries of environmental destruction and displacement that could be ushered in by mining companies.

“People are returning, invading it again, and repeating exactly what happened 20 years ago,” he told us. “These people are mainly gold miners who are looking for the riches of the Earth … They’re looking for oil, diamonds, and other precious materials, which is what white people want.”

He travels in part to seek support from the international community. “The majority of Yanomami have never left their land — they haven’t come out like I have,” he said. “So they don’t really see at close quarters how we are fighting against the politicians. However, the Yanomami and I, we continue to fight.”

Kopenawa had a lot to say about climate change and what has been done so far to address it: “All of you, the governments, the white people, need to listen to us, if you want to control the rich people who are always there … seeking raw materials from the earth, cutting down the forests, destroying the rivers.”

Indigenous leaders have spoken out internationally on the issue of climate change, he added, but the message has fallen on deaf ears. “They had the big UN climate meeting in Copenhagen,” he said. “But that didn’t result in anything. They only wasted money. They made us think that the city people would resolve things, but they couldn’t. The problem is the governments don’t listen. … The problem really is about capitalism, that’s at the root of the problem.”

Kopenawa’s perspective as a shaman in an indigenous culture is radically different from the world of government and politics, and he shakes his head at what he sees as utter complacency when it comes to implementing meaningful change.

“They’re only interested in the Internet, in paper, building more roads, stripping out the riches of the earth, destroying the trees,” he said. “We are different. We see the dangers, and we see that they are getting nearer. The cities are growing, the population is growing, and so the pollution is growing. There’s a lot of money in the world…But money won’t save the world.”

He advocates a new way of thinking about human progress.

“People have to stop thinking about ‘progress,’ which is pulling out the riches of the earth, and negotiating and doing business and having money all the time,” he said. “This is the error of the city people. I’ve tried to tell the city people, you need to minimize this problem of the climate, or else it will stop raining. And it will keep getting hotter.”

MORE WILDFIRES, LESS WATER

The Obama Administration unveiled the third National Climate Assessment on May 6, a hefty document detailing climate change impacts facing every region of the U.S.

Unsurprisingly, California’s own climate-related woes stem from water scarcity. Here are some details:

More money needed for drinking water. “Climate change will increase the cost of maintaining and improving drinking water infrastructure [estimated at $4.6 billion annually as things stand], because expanded wastewater treatment and desalinating water for drinking are among the key strategies for supplementing water supplies.”

Market impacts on delicious agricultural products. “California produces about 95 percent of U.S. apricots, almonds, artichokes, figs, kiwis, raisins, olives, cling peaches, dried plums, persimmons, pistachios, olives, and walnuts, in addition to other high-value crops. Drought and extreme weather affect the market value of fruits and vegetables more than other crops because they have high water content.”

More wildfires. “Numerous fire models project more wildfire as climate change continues. Models project … up to a 74 percent increase in burned area in California, with northern California potentially experiencing a doubling under a high emissions scenario toward the end of the century.”

Based on Earth is a monthly column by Guardian News Editor Rebecca Bowe.

Toyota work methods applied at General Hospital

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

May 7, 2014

Toyota work methods applied at General Hospital

San Francisco’s Department of Public Health has a $1.3 million contract with Seattle-based Rona Consulting Group to implement the Toyota Management System, a workflow methodology based on the auto-manufacturing model, at San Francisco General Hospital.

This new model, which aims for greater workflow efficiency, is being implemented just as healthcare staffers raise concerns that staffing levels at SFGH are dangerously low.

“Nurses often work through their breaks, and they stay after their shifts to get charting done,” said David Fleming, a registered nurse who has been at SFGH for 25 years. “I think nurses are getting the job done – but they’re at the edge.”

A group of healthcare workers spoke out at the May 7 Budget & Finance Committee meeting, during which supervisors discussed the DPH budget. Public employee union SEIU 1021, which represents healthcare workers, is in the midst of contract negotiations but Fleming said they had been grappling with reduced staffing for awhile.

According to a contract request to the Health Commission sent anonymously to the Bay Guardian, DPH entered into a 24-month contract with Rona totaling just over $1.3 million, for the purpose of implementing the Toyota Management System methodology as part of the transition to the new SFGH acute care facility, scheduled to open in December 2015.

The Bay Guardian received a copy of the contract request via BayLeaks, which uses encryption software known as SecureDrop to enable sources to anonymously submit documents.

The $1.3 million came from “General Funds (Rebuild Funds)”, according to the contract request. In 2008, voters approved Prop. A, funding the $887.4 million General Hospital rebuild through general obligation bonds. Use of the voter-approved, taxpayer-supported funds is restricted to hospital construction under a state law that limits the use of bond money to specified purposes.

However, Iman Nazeeri-Simmons, chief operating officer at DPH, said funding for the Rona contract came from a “hospital rebuild transition budget,” which she said provides for needs beyond construction costs.

Specialized consulting to educate hospital staff in the ways of the Toyota Management System doesn’t come cheap. A single meeting between the consultant and “key leaders” to “discuss needs and develop operational project plans” cost $25,225, the document showed. A one-day “visioning session” facilitated by the contractor was priced at $16,814. Five-day workshops fetch Rona $42,032 each. Based on estimates included in the contract request, the consulting firm would earn the equivalent of $4,707 per day.

The $1.3 million consulting contract was awarded even as unions remind city officials of staffing cuts during the economic downturn in 2008 that still have not been restored.

Here’s some video testimony from hospital staffer Heather Bollinger regarding how tough things can get at the General Hospital’s trauma center. “We do have staffing issues, and they do affect patient safety,” she said in public comment to the Health Commission on April 15.

Nato Green, who is representing nurses as a negotiator on behalf of public employee union SEIU 1021, described the staffing levels at SFGH as “unsafe and unsustainable.” There are currently 90 vacancies for nurses that haven’t been filled, he said. That’s a 14 percent vacancy rate, Green noted — typically substituted with traveling nurses, temps, and overtime labor.

Nazeeri-Simmons said the consulting was necessary for the transition to the new SFGH facility, for “doing it in the best way, and understanding there’s a completely different physical environment over there.” Rona is a pioneer in healthcare performance improvement, she said, and they are “leading us in very interactive workflow designs that are simulation-based,” geared toward “maximizing value and driving out waste.”

But does “driving out waste” translate to staffing cuts? “It certainly hasn’t happened here,” Nazeeri-Simmons responded when asked about that. Instead, the consultants have helped management to “right-size services to meet the demand,” she said, noting that wait times in urgent care had been significantly reduced as a result. Decisions such as using a portable X-Ray machine that eliminated the need for patients to walk ten minutes across the hospital grounds had dramatically reduced wait times, she added.

“We need to make sure the staff are working to the highest of their capability,” she added.

Heidi Gehris-Butenschoen, a spokesperson for Rona, said the goal of transforming work practices under the Toyota Management System is to improve patient care. Asked whether the consulting tends to affect staffing levels, Gehris-Butenschoen said, “That’s really up to the hospital. It’s definitely in our workshop not something we focus on. The Toyota system is not about cutting heads at all.”

SFGH has been working with Rona since July 2012. One of the company partners was formerly the CEO of Productivity, Inc., which advised “large-scale transformations for Fortune 100 companies,” according to the contract request. The workflow methodology is rooted in Lean principles, integrating a “just in time” staffing concept that’s been applied in corporate settings such as Walmart.

The Health Commission approved the $1.3 million contract at its Dec. 17, 2013 meeting as part of the consent calendar, which is summarily approved by a single vote.

Fleming, the RN, was skeptical of how much the Lean system had actually accomplished. They had literally “rearranged the furniture” since the program was implemented, he said, and observers had silently monitored staffers’ activities.

“When we work with anyone, we go out to the gemba, and we observe,” Rona’s Gehris-Butenschoen explained, noting that gemba refers to “the place where work happens.” The observations help hospitals identify where waste can be reduced, she added, such as moving a supply cabinet if time is being taken up by crossing the room to get to it.

But Fleming said he wasn’t convinced that applying a corporate efficiency method, borrowed from manufacturing, would provide the greatest benefit in a healthcare setting.

“We are not taking care of cars on an assembly line,” he said. “When it comes to another human being’s body, I don’t know that faster is necessarily better.”

Carmageddon cometh

Michael Redmond

May 7, 2014

news@sfbg.com

STREET FIGHT

San Francisco — already overwhelmed with private automobiles — faces a grim future of gridlock unless there is a radical change in how we think about city streets, parking, and regional transportation.

The facts are clear. Every day there are 1.7 million private car trips to, from, or within the city, according to the city’s transportation plan. Coupled with almost 10,000 vehicles registered per square mile, San Francisco today has one of the densest concentrations of cars on the planet, more than any peer city in the United States. In the business-as-usual scenario, the streets are forecast to absorb another half-million car trips. By 2040 there will be 2.2 million car trips on the exact same street grid we have today.

This is madness and it is dysfunctional for everyone. If you think Muni is unreliable now, it will be useless in 2040 as it stalls in the morass of 2.2 million car trips jammed onto city streets. Pedestrian injuries and deaths will rise with another 160 cars hitting pedestrians annually, simply due to oversaturation of automobiles. Cyclists might be able to weave around the stalled traffic, but it will be an ugly scene that fouls the air. Motorists will be stuck in their own gridlock, evermore impatient, distracted, honking, lurching through blocked intersections, sneaking through yellow lights, blocking crosswalks, double parking, and irritated with fellow drivers and everyone around. No one will be happy

This does not have to be. The city’s transportation agency hopes to reduce car trips from 1.7 to 1.6 million by 2018, a modest goal but barely holding the line. Reducing existing car trips by 100,000 while also adding thousands upon thousands of housing units and jobs, most coming with more parking, will quickly undo this humble ambition. The city can do more and the data shows us that there are many opportunities.

Consider that 68 percent of car trips within San Francisco are less than three miles. That’s 650,000 car trips per day that are generally pretty short — with a bicycle it’s less than a half-hour ride on relatively even terrain. If the city were able to get half of those car trips to switch to bicycle trips, it would be well on its way to averting carmageddon.

A more ambitious goal, increasing cycling to 20 percent of all trips, is the official city policy adopted by the Board of Supervisors. That’s 500,000-600,000 trips by bicycle every day, most of which can take place within that three-mile range, especially if cleverly arranged “wiggles” (level routes circumventing steeper hills) are laid out on the most logical corridors. But to carry that many cyclists, real space has to be allocated for them.

Out at San Francisco State University, where I teach a new Bicycle Geographies course that aims to increase cycling to the campus, there is tremendous opportunity to shift these kinds of short trips to bicycling. For students, faculty, and staff, bicycling is compatible with rapid transit, particularly for the “last mile” segments, such as between BART and SF State.

Bicycling is also a way to relieve local bus and light rail transit crowding — the 28 bus line on 19th Avenue, for example, is often jam packed and the city has only modest goals to improve that key line. Unlike transit or highways, bicycles do not require costly, long-term capital investment or operating funds and so can be deployed much more quickly.

It will be decades and cost hundreds of millions to improve the M-line, only now in the planning phase. We can lay down cycletracks much more quickly. Bicycling is also among the most equitable forms of urban transportation because it is affordable and accessible to almost everyone. This is obviously relevant to working-class students at SF State.

SF State has a memorandum of understanding with the city that obliges the university to reduce drive-alone automobile trips to campus, and the campus will not build any more car parking. With 4 percent of commute trips to SF State by bicycle (and only 2 percent among faculty) there is potential to increase the mode-share of bicycling as a path to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and auto trips.

The spatial proximity to Daly City and Balboa Park BART stations, as well as the Excelsior and Sunset, all under three miles from campus, means that the bicycle is well-suited to be a substitute for many short-range automobile trips and help the campus meet its goals. Yet what my students have found this semester is that it is all but impossible to bike safely to and from SF State, and the southwestern quadrant of San Francisco is largely left out of current bicycle planning in the city.

Taking multiple bicycle field trips over the past few months, we surveyed the opportunities for making safe routes to campus and envisioned what it would take to increase cycling to 20 percent of trips to and from SF State. Starting with the Balboa Park station, which is next to a deplorable tangle of freeway ramps, we ask what it would look like if fully-separated cycletracks were built on Geneva or Ocean avenues. These could connect City College and the Excelsior, and by way of a westward and southward jog, to a bicycle boulevard on Holloway Avenue, enabling a safe and convenient, 1.7-mile, 15-minute bike ride to SF State. Expanding the nascent Bay Area Bike Share to connect SF State and Balboa Park BART would create even more opportunity for cycling.

To the south of SF State, Daly City BART is a 1.4-mile, 10-minute bike ride that is daunting and poorly signed. It could be made safe and inviting with bicycle boulevards on streets parallel to traffic-clogged 19th Avenue and Junipero Serra. Borrowing from signature bicycle and pedestrian bridges in Pleasant Hill and Berkeley, perhaps there is an opportunity to build a bridge across Brotherhood Way toward the BART station, leveling an otherwise steep climb that discourages cycling.

To the north of campus, describing the designated 20th Avenue bicycle route as “a bit of a challenge” is an understatement. Cyclists must thread a cluttered shopping mall parking lot and overbuilt wide streets, and then confront a median blockading the way across Sloat Boulevard. While the megaproject to improve the M-line could include a cycletrack on this stretch of 19th Avenue, we should not wait a generation to increase cycling between SF State and the Sunset. The 20th Avenue route can be made welcoming now, with a fully-separated cycletrack and fixes on the Sloat intersection.

SF State, probably one of the most diverse campuses in the nation, has highly motivated students seeking real solutions to the huge problems society faces. The students are coming of age under extreme pressure of economic inequity and ecological duress, but they also see ways out of the mess created by the wasteful car culture and its linkages to ecological and social problems. They want to act now, and unlike past generations, they are shunning driving and many of them desire to reside in livable cities that offer choices for how they get around.

But what we have found this semester is that the campus is extremely isolated, difficult to access by bicycle, and walled-off by car sewers. Older, uninviting bicycle lanes are fragmented, disjointed, and seem to be an afterthought. With imagination, ingenuity, and political will, this can be remedied with bicycle improvements that cost far less than adding more car lanes and parking to the campus or surrounding area. And this would go much further at improving quality of life for neighbors who now have to put up with campus-generated traffic. Keeping the status quo, which means even more car trips but within the same space, is a dead end.

TRANSBAY DREAMS

Speaking of dead ends, San Francisco seems to specialize in dead-end train projects. The Central Subway, which is experiencing cost overruns and possible mismanagement, is one of these dead ends. There is no current option to have trains exiting to Geary or onto Columbus and possibly running on Lombard into the Marina, and that is a shame. Having the subway exit to the surface is probably the only way to make this project worthwhile.

There’s another dead end train project at the Transbay Terminal in downtown San Francisco. Yet unlike the Central Subway quagmire, I am impressed with the scale and possibilities for the Transbay Terminal project and there is opportunity to fix this dead end. Going back to the city’s business-as-usual traffic forecast, in 2040 car trips into the city from the Bay Bridge would increase 18 percent, and by 21 percent from San Mateo County. Aside from scratching my head wondering where exactly all of these cars are supposed to go, we simply need to stop this onslaught before the city becomes too dumb to move.

BART cannot solve it alone, as it will probably approach half a million riders per day by 2016, placing many downtown stations at or near capacity. BART also does not run all the way down the peninsula. Sometimes there are back-of-the envelope proposals to build a second BART tunnel under the bay, but this idea should be weighed against another idea. Rather than build a second BART tunnel to Oakland, how about a joint Amtrak California/Caltrain tunnel under the bay, and creating a true Grand Central Station of the West at Transbay? Let’s punch through the dead end currently planned for the east end of the Transbay Terminal “train box” and truly connect Northern California by rail.

This does not need to be high-speed rail, but rather the conventional, off-the-shelf electric rail already planned for Caltrain, of the variety that operates in the Northeastern US and much of Europe — efficient, high capacity trains that can travel 100-120 mile per hour comfortably and safely. In conjunction with a new transbay rail tunnel, the Capitol Corridor should be electrified and right of way captured from the freight railroads. One could take an electrified “baby bullet” from San Jose, through San Francisco, and continue to the East Bay and Sacramento. As Caltrain is electrified to the south, let’s also electrify the Altamonte Commuter Express trains, bring them across a rebuilt Dumbarton Bridge, and run high-frequency rail service into the new Transbay Terminal.

Understanding that this will take time to build, in the short term the Bay Bridge should be reconfigured to have bus-only lanes (and a bicycle lane on the bottom deck of the west span) and a greatly expanded AC Transit service that can relieve the looming BART crowding to the East Bay.

How to pay for these transbay dreams? A transbay rail project could get funding from Amtrak and other federal sources, requiring our congressional delegation to work for it. The state gasoline tax or eventual carbon taxes, and revenue from tolling Bay Area freeways, should be in the mix. The 101 and 280 should be tolled as well as the Caldecott Tunnel and I-80 in the East Bay, with revenue directed at electric rail in the long term and regional buses short term. And while people are talking about reforming Proposition 13 to end the artificially low property taxes on commercial land, let’s remember that transit — whether Muni, BART, or Caltrain — brings massive value to commercial property owners. They should be realistically expecting to pay in. In short, there are possibilities and ways to do this.

Here’s one small additional idea for raising seed money: In the wake of the Google bus controversy, the SFCTA, SFMTA, SF Planning Department, and City Attorney’s Office should assemble a crack team of California Environmental Quality Act experts and send them (on Caltrain and bike share!) down to comment on every large-scale suburban office project proposed in Silicon Valley. For example, Mountain View, where Google has its campus, is effectively displacing part of its transportation and housing responsibility to San Francisco.

As part of the CEQA mitigation for these suburban office projects, San Francisco ought to be demanding that Google/ Mountain View contribute to paying for the Transbay Terminal and electrifying Caltrain (a separate fund would be directed to affordable housing as mitigation for displacement). This is a similar line of reasoning to the May 1 lawsuit against the Google bus pilot, but it draws in those responsible for the poor planning in suburban sprawl. Regardless, the city ought to take a look at a CEQA mitigation angle for addressing the impacts these suburban decisions are having on the city.

PRAYING FOR ENLIGHTENMENT

One last point about transit finance: I sure hope Mayor Ed Lee, his political advisors, and all those religious ministers who complained about paying for metered parking on Sundays (see “Politics over policy,” April 22) have a plan to advocate for the November ballot proposals to help finance Muni.

They sold out sustainable transit advocates, their biggest ally on the November ballot initiatives, and have offered no rational explanation for their strategy, just an emotional hunch that somehow some people can’t cope with Sunday metering, and that making it free again will convince them to support increased public transit funding.

I imagine there is a well-thought-out campaign strategy, whereby every Sunday between now and November, the mayor is visiting all the churches in the city, and cajoling the ministers to use their pulpits to enthusiastically preach the merits of increasing the vehicle license fee (as well as approving a related general obligation bond).

After all, the VLF is a progressive tax — the more expensive your car, the more you pay. The older and cheaper your car, the less you pay. And bringing in $73 million annually would contribute to making God’s green earth cleaner, and help transport God’s children safely to work and on their errands. Praise the Lord and free parking on Sunday! Amen.

Street Fight is a monthly column by Jason Henderson, a geography professor at SF State and the author of Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco.

Alerts: May 7 – 13, 2014

Michael Redmond

May 6, 2014

THURSDAY 8

12th Annual Human Rights Awards

Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF. www.humanrightsaward.org. 6-8:30pm, $115. Each year, the Human Rights Awards honors the inspiring individuals and organizations who create radical change and real democracy. This year, we are honoring the 50 year anniversary of the Freedom Schools, anti-GMO activist María Estela Barco Huerta, and the Cuban Five, Cuban intelligence agents arrested in the United States while infiltrating anti-Castro organizations openly plotting attacks against the Cuban people. The evening will feature dining, dancing, and a presentation of the awards.

Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education

Modern Times Bookstore, 2919 24th St., SF. www.moderntimesbookstore.com. 7-9pm, free. For some Latinas, college, where they are vastly underrepresented, is the first time they are immersed in American culture outside their homes—and where the values of two cultures often clash. Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education is an anthology exploring this experience. This event will feature four Bay Area based contributors to anthology — Blanca Torres, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Erika Martinez and Yalitza Ferreras. Join us to hear more about the anthology and a discussion.

FRIDAY 9

Dirty Energy, Clean Solutions: Climate Conference 2014

Unitarian Universalist Church, 1187 Franklin, SF. www.350bayarea.org. 7-9:30pm, $30 or $23 for students. Friday night will be the kick-off event for a three day interactive conference that will feature activists and leading scientists addressing technical and political climate topics in the Bay Area and beyond. Topics to be addressed include fracking, fossil fuels, and clean energy solutions, plus workshops and training sessions on how to live green. Expert scientists and activists will present cutting-edge information that will significantly raise our effectiveness as climate activists.

SATURDAY 10

Public Update and Open House on Ocean Beach Projects

County Fair Building, 1199 9th Ave., SF. www.spur.org. 9am-12pm, free. The Ocean Beach Master Plan, a vision for San Francisco’s western coast, recommends ways to improve coastal access, restore ecological function and protect critical infrastructure in the face of chronic erosion and sea level rise. Three projects — addressing coastal management, transportation, and open space — are currently underway to carry those recommendations forward. The project teams will be on hand to discuss their work and get your ideas and feedback.

TUESDAY 13

Examining Racial Equity in SF Education

California Historical Society, 678 Mission, SF. brownvboardat60.eventbrite.com. 5-8pm, free. Join the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, the University of San Francisco School of Education and Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth for a conversation honoring the 60th Anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education court decision. The event will focus on the continuing legacy of Brown v. Board of Education and the successes and continued challenges of achieving racial equity in the San Francisco schools. The evening will include historical context, student reflections, and an interactive panel discussion.

Cycling to City Hall

Michael Redmond

May 6, 2014

steve@sfbg.com

When the first Bike to Work Day was held in San Francisco 20 years ago, cyclists had little support in City Hall. But on May 8, almost every one of the city’s top political leaders will take part in Bike to Work Day, pledging their support to an increasingly popular and important transportation option.

In fact, Bike to Work Day has become such an anticipated event in San Francisco that city officials and cycling advocates in recent years have used it as the deadline to unveil the latest high-profile bike project to demonstrate the city’s commitment to cycling.

This year, it’s the new contraflow bike lanes on lower Polk Street, an important connection from Market Street to City Hall that helps cyclists avoid dangerous, car-centric Van Ness Avenue or Larkin Street — without having to illegally cut up the one-way section of Polk.

When that $2.5 million bike and pedestrian project — with its attractive landscaping, pedestrian bulb-outs, pretty green lanes, and trio of special bike-only signal lights — was officially opened on May 2, bike activists kept circling the new lanes as if they were doing victory laps.

“I cannot think of a better way to kick off Bike Month in the Bay Area and the 20th anniversary of Bike to Work Day, coming up May 8, than to celebrate what I think is the most beautiful, functional, well-designed, and what is probably going to be the best used piece of bike infrastructure in our city,” San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Director Leah Shahum said at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

She and the others who spoke at the event praised the city officials who moved quickly to complete this project, calling it a testament to the growing political will to make streets safer and more welcoming for cyclists.

“I will be honest, we put a lot of pressure on to get this done by Bike to Work Day,” Shahum said. “We really wanted to make sure you all and the folks throughout this city could, this year, for the first time in San Francisco’s history, make a safe and comfortable and direct link from Market Street…to City Hall.”

Building high-profile, separated cycletracks to the steps of City Hall seems to symbolically mark the arrival of cyclists into the political mainstream.

TIMES HAVE CHANGED

Twenty years ago, California Bicycle Coalition Director Dave Snyder was the head of SFBC, and he was able to persuade only one member of the Board of Supervisors to participate in that first Bike to Work Day.

“I should give a shout-out to Tom Ammiano because he was the first supervisor to care enough to ride on Bike to Work Day, back when the Board of Supervisors didn’t really care about cycling,” Snyder told us. “These days, it’s not uncommon for supervisors to ride for transportation, but back then none did.”

Shahum remembers it as well, back before the SFBC was one of the city’s largest member-based political advocacy organizations.

“Twenty years ago, Bike to Work Day was a fun but sort of lonely event,” Shahum told us, noting how the number of cyclists on the road has exploded in recent years. “Riding on a regular Thursday during rush hour feels like Bike to Work Day used to feel 20 years ago.”

But both Snyder and Shahum said the universal statements of support for cycling that emanate from City Hall these days are only half the battle.

“It’s a good idea to promote bicycling as a mainstream activity, and we won that battle,” Snyder said. “Now, we have to get them to put their money where their mouth is.”

With cycling projects receiving less than 1 percent of the city’s transportation funding, and city officials so far unwilling to pay for the projects that would allow the city to meet its official goal of 20 percent of all vehicle trips being by bike by the year 2020, Snyder said, “We haven’t accomplished that second goal yet.”

“We hear them all talk about investing money in bike infrastructure,” Shahum told us, “but now the decision makers need to do it.”

A report released in December by the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office shows that San Francisco spends less per capita on bike infrastructure, at just over $9 annually, than other bike-friendly US cities such as Portland, Minneapolis, and Seattle. And it found the city would need to spend about $580 million to reach its official goal of 20 percent bike mode-share by 2020.

Even meeting the SFMTA’s more moderate Strategic Plan Scenario — which aims to reach 8-10 percent mode-share by 2018 by creating 12 miles of new bike lanes and upgrading 50 existing miles and 50 intersections — would require $191 million. That’s $142 million more than the SFMTA now has budgeted for the work.

FUNDING PITCH

At the May 2 event on Polk Street, city officials used the new project to call on voters to approve a pair of transportation funding measure proposed by Mayor Ed Lee for the November ballot — an increase in the vehicle license fee and a $500 million general obligation bond — which the Board of Supervisors will consider later this month.

“Do you guys like what you see here?” SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin told the crowd, eliciting a rousing response. “Would you like to see more of this kind of work all over San Francisco?”

Then Reiskin connected that goal to the fall ballot measures, the lion’s share of which will go to Muni improvements.

“With the funds we have, there’s only so much of this we can do and we know the need is so great to make biking and walking a safer and more attractive means of getting around the city. If we want to do more of this, we’re going to need more support in November,” Reiskin said.

The city has make significant progress on new bike infrastructure in recent years, after a legal challenge of the city’s Bicycle Plan stalled projects for four years. Ben Jose, a spokesperson for the SFMTA, told us the Polk project is the 52nd of 60 bike improvement projects from the Bike Plan.

“And those that are left are signature projects like this one,” Jose said at the event, referring to high-profile bike lanes along Bayshore and Masonic boulevards, on upper Polk Street, and along Second Street that are among the bike projects now in the pipeline. But the city hasn’t yet devoted the resources to completing the city’s bike network.

“We want to do more projects like this with money from the fall ballot measure,” Rachel Gordon, a spokesperson for the Department of Public Works, told us. “We don’t have enough money in our general fund to do these projects and we hear loud and clear the streets need to be safer for bicyclists and pedestrians.”

LITTLE PROJECT, BIG GAIN

The new bikes lanes on Polk are only a few blocks, but it is those kinds of small but critical connections that determine whether cycling in the city is safe or scary.

“I want to know that I can bike safety going north and south on Polk Street, which is why I strongly, strongly support our protected bike lanes on Polk Street, so this is super exciting. As a beginning cyclist, these are the kinds of routes I need to see to get out of my car and onto a bike, so I’m really excited this is the direction our city is moving in,” Sup. Jane Kim said at the event.

Reiskin noted how awkward and unsafe it has been to get from Market Street to City Hall or up Polk Street: “Physically, it’s a pretty small project, but it’s so critically important for those of us who do get around by bike.”

Cyclist Shannon Dodge also spoke at the event, describing her previously awkward commute to work from the Mission District to Russian Hill: “It might look like a tiny stretch of bike lanes to most people, but to me and lots of other people it will make a huge difference. It means we can turn now directly onto Polk Street and we can do it safely.”

She also compared cycling in San Francisco today to the days just before Bike to Work Day began.

“Twenty-one years ago this month, I moved to San Francisco from the East Coast. I came in a van with three friends, so I didn’t bring a lot of possessions. But I did bring my bike and I’ve been biking in San Francisco ever since,” Dodge said.

Back then, in her younger days, she didn’t mind battling for space on the streets of San Francisco.

“When I first moved here, just out of college, safety was not that important to me. I kind of enjoyed the adrenaline rush of being out on a bike in traffic,” she said. “But now I’m a mom. I have a 3-year-old son, and my husband and I bike our son to and from his preschool everyday. And on the weekends we explore the city, which usually means he’s on one of our two bikes. Pretty soon, he’ll be riding his own bike out on San Francisco streets. So safety is incredibly important to me, as it is to all families.”

Events: April 30 – May 6, 2014

Michael Redmond

April 29, 2014

Listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Selector.

WEDNESDAY 30

“Saving the California Condor” Zimmer Auditorium, Oakland Zoo, 9777 Golf Links Rd, Oakl; www.oaklandzoo.org. 6:30-9:30pm, $12-20. Oakland Zoo’s Conservation Speaker Series presents biologist Joe Burnett of the Ventana Wildlife Society and Oakland Zoo veterinarian Dr. Andrea Goodnight.

THURSDAY 1

“Eating Cultures” SOMArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan, SF; www.aawaa.net. Opening reception, 6-9pm. Free. Exhibit runs Tue-Fri, noon-7pm; Sat, noon-5pm. Through May 30. As part of the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center’s United States of Asian America Festival, the Asian American Women Artists Association presents a juried art exhibition featuring work inspired by food and food traditions.

“Jackpot NightLife” California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse, SF; www.calacademy.org. 6-10pm, $12. 21 and over. NightLife studies the statistics of luck, with visual FX wizards from Tippett Studio (Cosmos), Rat Pack-era tunes by DJ Tanoa, casino games, and more.

Ben Ross Green Arcade, 1680 Market, SF; www.thegreenarcade.com. 7pm, free. The author discusses Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism.

FRIDAY 2

“Artwear” de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden, SF; www.famsf.org. 9:30am-8:30pm. Also Sat/3, 9:30am-4:30pm. Free. Shop wearable art by 16 local textile and jewelry artisans and designers.

Jo Becker Book Passage, 1 Ferry Building, SF; www.bookpassage.com. 12:30pm, free. The Pulitzer-winning journalist reads from Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality.

SATURDAY 3

“Bikes to Books Rides Again!” Meet at Jack London Alley, near South Park and Second St, SF; www.burritojustice.com. 12:45pm, free. Burrito Justice and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition host this seven-mile bike tour celebrating the literary history of San Francisco. Tips from the organizers: “Bring bikes with gears, snacks, and enthusiasm.”

“California Bookstore Day” Various locations; www.cabookstoreday.com. Nearly 100 bookstores across the state participate in this celebration with parties, author readings, in-store events, and exclusive day-of merch. Check website for local events.

“A La Carte and Art” Castro between Church and Evelyn, Mtn View; www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm. Free. Through Sun/4. This two-day festival features live music, a juried arts and crafts show, a classic car show, a farmers market, and more.

“Pegapalooza” Pegasus Downtown, 2349 Shattuck, Berk; Pegasus Oakland, 5560 College, Oakl; and Pegasus on Solano, 1855 Solano, Berk; www.pegasusbookstore.com. May 3-10. The bookstore marks its 45th anniversary with a full slate of festivities; tonight’s kick-off, in honor of California Bookstore Day, is a conversation between Dave Eggers and Malcolm Margolin at the Shattuck location (7:30pm, free).

Jenni Pulos Book Passage, 1 Ferry Building, SF; www.bookpassage.com. 11am, free. The Bravo star (Flipping Out) reads from her new memoir-advice tome, Grin and Bear It.

Shipyard Artists Spring Open Studios Hunters Point Shipyard, Innes at Donahue, SF; Islais Creek Studios, 1 Rankin, SF; www.shipyardartists.com/sos. 11am-6pm. Also Sat/4. Free. More than 125 artists participate in this 25th anniversary open studios event.

SUNDAY 4

“Poetry Unbound #4” Art House Gallery, 2905 Shattuck, Berk; berkeleyarthouse.wordpress.com. 5:15pm, $5. Readings by Deborah Fruchey, Blanca Torres, and Carol Hogan, followed by an open mic.

Urban Air Market Hayes Valley Octavia and Hayes, SF; www.urbanairmarket.com. 11am-6pm, free. Sustainable shopping (clothing, jewelry, home décor, body products, etc.) covers Hayes Valley at this open-air event.

MONDAY 5

“Cinco de Mayo at Habitot Children’s Museum” Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge, Berk; www.habitot.org. 9:30am-12:30pm, $8-10. Celebrate Mexican culture with special craft projects.

“The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter” Morrison Planetarium, California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse, SF; www.calacademy.org. 7:30pm, $8-12. University of Michigan physics professor Katherine Freese discusses the hunt for dark matter.

“Reclaiming Cinco de Mayo” San Francisco Living Wage Coalition, 2940 16th St, SF; www.livingwage-sf.org. 6-10pm, $5-25. Independent art and literature gala benefiting the SF Living Wage Coalition and its sister organization, Las Hormigas, in Ciudad Juarez.

TUESDAY 6

“An Evening with Benjamin Jealous and Belva Davis” Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. 7pm, $20-25. The former NAACP president and the pioneering journalist meet for an onstage conversation.

“Israel’s 66th Independence Day” Justin Herman Plaza, Embarcadero at Market, SF; www.sfjcsf.org. Noon-1:30pm, free. With live Israeli music, falafel vendors, community leaders, and more. *

Sir Pete

Michael Redmond

April 29, 2014

marke@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO “People shouldn’t actually call me sir,” Pete Tong says over the phone, that legendary radio voice of his immediately springing 21 glorious years of BBC Radio 1 Essential Mixes up in my mind. “I was recently awarded an MBE, which is a big honor, being recognized as a distinguished individual in the UK. I’m pretty sure it’s the first time someone from the electronic dance community’s gotten it. But it’s not a knighthood. I didn’t have to kneel before Her Majesty or anything.”

“Of course,” he adds, “if someone wants to call me ‘sir,’ I won’t discourage them.”

Two or three generations of dance music fans who grew up on his show might bow to that suggestion. Pete, who recently relocated to Los Angeles from London (“Why? Well, I’m speaking with you poolside”), and for the record can charm the pants off a telephone pole, is in a unique, possibly historic position right now. He’s a globally recognized and respected DJ and dance music advocate who can effortlessly straddle the pop-chart popular and the heady underground. And he’s arriving in America with a new nationally syndicated radio show (hear it here on KYLD, Sundays 11pm-midnight), just as our dance community seems the most divided it’s ever been.

“I look at the differences between the pop EDM scene and the more underground scene and I see opportunity. I’m a glass-half-full kind of person. But it’s already been five years since David Guetta had that big hit and people like Deadmaus and Skrillex began to break. Now’s when we start seeing if they’ve paved the way for ambitious acts with a different sound, like Disclosure and Rudimental, to break through on that scale. It’s very exciting. Maybe I’m optimistic, but I see a second wave breaking that can include the best of both worlds.”

That’s a refreshing viewpoint, and his recently announced All Gone to Sea cruise (www.allgonetosea.com), which somewhat disorientingly mixes the likes of Calvin Harris, Scuba, Steve Angello, and Jackmaster in its lineup, bears out his rosy outlook. As for his DJ sets, however — like the one Fri/2 at Public Works — he still lands firmly on the underground side: Check out his gorgeous April Mixmag Lab mix for a taste of what he brings to our shores.

“I absolutely love San Francisco. The history, especially when it comes to music, demands respect. You can’t dumb anything down when it comes to SF, there’s such a cultural heritage. Not that I won’t play banging tunes. But you like to think a bit on your feet, don’t you?”

Pete Tong with Tim Green, Fri/2, 9:30pm-3:30am, $15–$25 advance. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com

ALL OF THE ABOVE

Your chance to check out wee, chic new club Mercer with some solid future bass and uptempo soul from DJ Bluz, King Most, Freddy Anzures, and Marky.

Fri/2, 9pm, $10. Mercer, 250 Rhode Island, SF. www.mercer-sf.com

MOVEMENT PRE-PARTY

Before everyone slips down the glowing rabbit hole formerly known as the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, the As You Like It crew is lubing it up with ace techno players DVS1, John Osborne, and Keith Kamp.

Fri/2, 9pm-4am, $15 advance. Monarch, 101 Sixth St, SF. www.monarchsf.com

CHROME CANYON

If you tell me there is this incredible synth nerd recreating the beautifully mad ’70s sci-fi filmscapes of composers like Vangelis and Tangerine Dream, but dance-y, I will scream, “Where?!” and you will say, “At the monthly Push the Feeling party, duh.”

Sat/3, 9pm, $6. Underground SF, 424 Haight, SF. www.facebook.com/pushthefeeling

M. O. M. FIVE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY

Motown on Mondays started out as a lark at Madrone Lounge — and now it’s spread its weekly magic to cities all over the country. Big ups to DJs Gordo Cabeza, Timoteo Gigante, and crew, blowing up this special bash with the Con Brio and Brass Magic bands.

Sat/3, 730pm doors, 8pm show, $20. The Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

PANTHA DU PRINCE

Sheer organic audio wizardry from this “sonic house” pioneer, breaking dance music down to its atomic parts and rearranging them, via unexpected live instruments, into gorgeous prisms.

Sat/2, 9pm, $18. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

Two views of the waterfront

Michael Redmond

April 29, 2014

rebecca@sfbg.com

The Golden State Warriors’ announcement that its planned 18,000-seat basketball arena would be moved off the San Francisco waterfront was fresh in everyone’s mind when former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos visited the Bay Guardian office on April 23, and he was electrified by the win.

“I resent anyone suggesting that this is not a genuine people-powered victory — again,” Agnos said. “Because that’s what it was, bottom line.”

The former mayor has traveled up and down the city in recent months promoting Proposition B, an initiative on the June 3 ballot that may well have cleared the Warriors Arena from its proposed waterfront perch at Piers 30-32 had the team not announced that it would be taking that step independently.

If it passes, Prop. B will require voter approval for any development project along city-owned waterfront property that exceeds height limits set by the Waterfront Land Use Plan approved in 1997. Such a rule would have squarely targeted the Warriors’ proposal.

The sports arena had been slated for a 13-acre parcel a stone’s throw from the Bay Bridge that is now a parking lot, where it would have hovered above the water like a floating spacecraft. Across the street, at a site known as Seawall Lot 330, the Warriors had proposed installing shops, parking, a condo tower, and a hotel.

Agnos and the backers of Prop. B hadn’t anticipated the Warriors’ announcement that its waterfront venue would be moved to private property, a 12-acre lot in Mission Bay purchased from tech giant Salesforce.com.

“We thought, because people at the top of this city’s government told us so, they would prevail,” Agnos said of Mayor Ed Lee and others championing the waterfront arena. “They didn’t.”

Agnos and his allies say it was the prospect of voters having to sign off on a proposal that was hatched behind closed doors that caused the Warriors to choose a more appropriate location.

“We helped them go to a different place where we now support what they’re doing — because it makes more sense for this city, and for our bay, as well as our waterfront. That’s what the issue is,” Agnos told us. “The spin doctors had their ass handed to ’em … had their ass handed to ’em, by a low-income group of allies, over their $20,000–$30,000, gold-plated contracts per month. And so now, they understand.”

They understand that the waterfront of San Francisco is a battleground and the people are willing to fight to ensure the public interest trumps private profits.

A rendering of proposed development at Pier 70, envisioning tech offices and housing.

PRECIOUS PARCELS

A historic map hanging in a corridor at the Port of San Francisco building, in a rehabbed terminal at Pier 1 along The Embarcadero, traces the original curve of a coastline that once separated the city from San Francisco Bay.

The existing waterfront juts out considerably from where its natural edge once fell, and today’s urban landscape features a mix of entire neighborhoods, tall buildings, parks, restaurants, merchant corridors, and transport terminals, all perched atop fill covered by layers of concrete.

Its shipping days long gone, much of San Francisco’s human-constructed waterfront now serves as a draw for visitors, the iconic subject of countless tourist photographs. But at other locations along the shoreline, vacant waterfront parcels are hotly contested land-use battlefronts.

“We’re clearly in a period of significant controversy,” the Port’s Special Project Manager Brad Benson told us. The Warriors Arena, Benson said, had been an opportunity for the Port to rehabilitate and generate revenue from Piers 30-32, which originated as two finger piers constructed in 1912, joined by a concrete slab in the 1950s.

Despite being in control of some of the most valuable real estate along the West Coast, the Port of San Francisco remains in a perpetual financial pinch, due to its need to fix up crumbling piers and aging infrastructure. The Port is governed by a Waterfront Land Use Plan, outlining possible uses for each parcel, and it also conducted a survey to identify properties that could be developed to help generate revenue.

“The Port has a big capital need,” Benson said, noting that many of the “piers and buildings were beyond their useful life when they were transferred to the city” from the state in 1968. Facing nearly $2 billion in capital needs, the Port’s modus operandi is to seek out private developers to partner with on development projects for parcels under its ownership, in order to secure funding that would go toward backlogged improvements.

That didn’t happen with the Warriors, however — the sports team approached the city out of the blue, and the project quickly won the fervent backing of Mayor Lee, who has appointment power over the five-member commission that governs the Port. At one point, Lee even claimed that this flashy sports arena would be his “legacy project.”

To longtime grassroots activists who are deeply involved in how land-use decisions are made on valuable waterfront parcels, it looked to be yet another example of what Prop. B supporter Jennifer Clary called “kneejerk development” — out of sync with carefully thought out shoreline planning efforts.

“The Port gets jerked around by every mayor,” said Clary, president of San Francisco Tomorrow, part of the coalition backing Prop. B. “Every mayor comes up with some stupid project.” She ticked off a list of failed waterfront developments (such as Mills Mall, proposed for Piers 27-31; and a 50-story U.S. Steel Building that would have towered over the Ferry Building), only to have them voted down or halted by grassroots neighborhood activists who viewed them as inappropriate designs fueled by greed and greased by political connections.

Behind the objection to Prop. B, Clary added, “is that the mayor will have to think a little more” before backing projects of this nature.

Whether opponents of the Warriors Arena plan looked at it and saw a traffic nightmare, an inappropriate use of public land, or a bad financial deal for a city needing to contend with ever-growing pressures on its critical infrastructure, members of the coalition that’s backing Prop. B feared the public would have little sway when it came to the final decision-making. A bid to restore that balance, by arming voters with veto power under the law, was the impetus behind Prop. B.

City Hall has ignored the will of regular folks who collectively own Port land along the shoreline, said Agnos, campaign consultant Jon Golinger, and Prop. B proponent and Sierra Club volunteer Becky Evans — listening only to the Mayor’s Office and deep-pocketed developers who stand to make millions by building on extremely valuable land that’s held in the public trust under California law.

“The people are putting the developers in touch with the values of this city, and what we want in this city,” Agnos said, thumping his index finger on the table to emphasize the point. “Prop. B puts people in the room who have not been there, and now [developers] have to pay attention.”

The task of developing Piers 30-32 would have required expensive substructure modification, requiring the involvement of bureaucratic agencies such as the US Army Corps of Engineers, the Bay Conservation Development Commission, and the State Lands Commission. The Warriors estimated that it would invest $120 million in improvements such as seismic upgrades and an elevation grade to deal with the looming problem of sea-level rise, but the threat of having to win voter approval represented yet another hoop to jump through. So when a new option opened up offering greater certainty, the Warriors pulled the plug on Piers 30-32.

Even though Lee’s “legacy project,” the main physical target of Prop. B, is no longer a factor in the June election, backers of the initiative say the measure is still important to restore democratic balance in a development process that freezes out ordinary citizens. Opponents, meanwhile, say the initiative threatens to undermine a complex planning process that engages the public and needn’t be tampered with.

IN THE PIPELINE

Prop. B would prohibit city officials from approving taller buildings than are currently allowed under zoning for Port-owned waterfront parcels, unless voters give those height increases a green light at the ballot box.

Since many of the properties in question are already built out, or preserved by historic landmark designation, Prop. B would impact only a handful of waterfront lots that remain in play as potential sites for new development. Among them are Piers 30-32 and Seawall Lot 351, the site of the 8 Washington luxury condo tower that the electorate flushed down the tubes in a decisive ballot referendum vote last fall, despite Board of Supervisors’ approval.

The same group that opposed 8 Washington launched Prop. B. Last year’s ballot referendum — also named Prop. B, and buoyed by the campaign slogan No Wall on the Waterfront — asked voters whether they favored increasing building heights above the zoning limit at the waterfront site where the luxury condo project would have gone.

San Francisco voters, in no mood to support a high rise for the superrich at a time when anger over skyrocketing rents was bubbling over and droves of low-income residents were being edged out by eviction, shot it down. Many political observers took the outcome as a signal that City Hall politicians are out of touch with voters.

Simon Snellgrove, the developer of the failed 8 Washington project, is reportedly working on a new building design. But since any new plans for 8 Washington are embryonic at best, and the fate of Piers 30-32 is anyone’s guess, the Prop. B ballot measure has immediate implications for two waterfront developments in particular.

One, on and around Pier 48, is being pushed by the San Francisco Giants. The other lies farther south, at Pier 70, a sprawling strip of waterfront that runs behind Illinois Street, from The Ramp restaurant at Mariposa to the old Potrero Power Plant.

The Giants’ planned development would be a short distance from AT&T Park.

During World War II, some 18,500 workers built ships at Pier 70 for the war effort, in brick and metal warehouses that still stand vacant and dilapidated. The site also housed a coal-fired power plant that was later converted to natural gas, leaving behind toxic residue that is up to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to remediate. Farther north along Pier 70, BAE Systems conducts ship repair, a task that has been performed at the site since 1868.

Today, a 28-acre parcel of Pier 70 that is proposed for development by Forest City is home to nothing more than pigeons, feral cats, and the occasional hawk that swoops into a cavernous metal-roofed structure that stands near the waterfront and dates back to 1941, barely visible from the street. Someday in the not-so-distant future, developers imagine it will be populated with tech office workers (Google is used as an example of an anchor tenant in slides presented to the city), makers and small vendors, and thousands of residents who would call the place home.

The site is zoned with a 40-foot height limit, but developers are considering plans with a range of building heights that would be on a similar scale to Mission Bay. Part of the improvements to the property will require raising the elevation grade to deal with sea-level rise. Forest City has planned for a minimum of around 1,000 residential units — the majority market-rate, but with a mix of affordable housing as well.

Representatives from Forest City said that if Prop. B passes, “We’ll be prepared to seek voter approval with a dynamic project guided by … a community-based master plan,” and had not taken an official stance on the ballot measure. If voters were to reject an increase of the 40-foot height limit at the site, which is zoned for heavy industry, the project would no longer be financially feasible.

GIANT TOWER SCRUTINIZED

At Seawall Lot 337, a parcel near the Giants’ stadium which is primarily used as a parking lot during baseball games, the team is backing a project that would include 3.5 million square feet of new residential, office, and retail development, possibly including a 380-foot tower. Across the way at Pier 48 would be a new Anchor Steam brewery, and about five acres of open space.

The Giants plan resulted from the Port’s request for potential development partners to submit bids for that property, which went out in 2007.

“They very quietly have been pushing a plan that Prop. B made public,” Golinger said of the Giants’ plans. “They screamed at everyone involved in our coalition during the signature drive to get us to drop it. They funded a lawsuit … to get it kicked off the ballot.”

The Guardian independently confirmed that the team is part of the group that has challenged Prop. B in court. That legal challenge was unsuccessful in getting the initiative struck from the June ballot, but a judge could take up the question again if Prop. B is approved.

The parcel where the Giants have pitched a rental housing, office, and retail complex with a maximum height limit of 380 feet is zoned with a height limit of zero, zoned for open space in city plans. Nevertheless, “The [Port’s request for qualifications] called for developing up to 300 feet,” Benson explained, calling the current zoning “a remnant of the old Mission Bay plan,” which envisioned a park with wetlands and open space. The Port’s request for proposals went out after a subcommittee was formed, and public hearings were held on the design plans.

Asked why the Port would bake such a tall height limit into its RFQ, Benson responded, “There was a desire to avoid replicating the heights at Mission Bay,” the nearby redevelopment area characterized by lower, boxy buildings that seem to be universally regarded as ugly and lacking charm.

Few people are as intimately familiar with Mission Bay as Corinne Woods, whose houseboat is enveloped on either side by the sprawling development. When Woods first claimed a berth at Mission Creek for her floating home in 1985, “it was surrounded by open empty fields, abandoned warehouses, and lots of fennel,” she said. “We had wonderful parties.”

Outside her dock just off Channel Street is a community garden, a strip of green space shaded by willow and eucalyptus trees where night herons take refuge. Just beyond that is the Mission Bay South redevelopment area, a sprawling construction site that’s ushered in building cranes, swirling dust, pile drivers, and more recently, a five-alarm blaze that required the entire Fire Department to extinguish.

The fledgling neighborhood that now occupies the already-built part of Mission Bay might as well have dropped out of the sky, and the building profiles are wide and flat. “I would rather see slim, articulated towers, with more open space,” Woods admitted.

In the years between 1985 and today, Woods has fought the Port on behalf of her live-aboard community to be allowed to remain floating in place, becoming an unlikely expert on the byzantine process of waterfront planning along the way.

As a key member of half-dozen or so community advisory groups formed to weigh in on major waterfront developments, Woods has ardent faith in the civic engagement aspect of the planning process. She fears Prop. B could upset years of careful neighborhood negotiations by limiting the discussion to nothing more than a conversation about height limits.

Corinne Woods opposes Prop. B.

Woods is a plaintiff in the lawsuit the Giants are funding to challenge Prop. B, aligned with developer-friendly housing activist Tim Colen and building trades head Michael Theriault on the side that opposes Prop. B. But despite the millions of dollars that are on the line, Woods insists she has no dog in this fight. “I can’t even get free tickets to Giants games,” she said.

She does hope for the five-acre park that the Giants plan would install as part of the Seawall 337 / Pier 48 plan, a short walk from her houseboat. But she says her opposition to Prop. B is rooted in her experience of a traditional planning process that rewards neighbors who have the patience to sit through hours of grueling advisory group meetings with negotiating power vis-à-vis developers. Asked directly what the problem is with letting voters weigh in, Woods responded, “Because they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about!”

But that leave-it-to-the-experts attitude is just the thing that Prop. B’s backers say is dangerous for waterfront planning, since it places final decision-making in the hands of profit-seeking real estate interests, a public agency in dire need of funding, and a mayor with political ties to developers.

THE HOUSING QUESTION

Given that the thrust of Prop. B is to democratize the planning process, few are in a hurry to align themselves with the formal No on B campaign — most of the opposition money seems to have been funneled into the Giants’ lawsuit, even though the Giants have officially taken a neutral stance on Prop. B. However, the message from opponents of Prop. B is that the initiative would kill sorely needed housing.

The Port of San Francisco, which is legally barred from taking a position on the initiative, reported in a February analysis to the Department of Elections that it could have the effect of leaving between 1,990 and 3,690 new housing units “delayed, reduced, or abandoned,” including between 268 and 596 affordable units. Those figures are based on early project proposals brought by the Warriors, the Giants, and Forest City, assuming those planning proposals would be “delayed by a need for a vote, or rejected by the voters” under a Prop. B regime.

A nonbinding Giants term sheet notes that the team would build rental housing, 15-20 percent of those units affordable, while Forest City’s Pier 70 proposal includes 1,000 new housing units with on-site affordable that would exceed the 12 percent required under city law.

Targeting housing “is a scary message,” campaign consultant Golinger said, charging the opposition with preying on voters’ fears to encourage people to vote down a measure that would democratize waterfront planning.

“This myth that we’re trying to stop housing is just that,” Agnos chimed in. “It’s just a political ploy by those who want to build high-end, high-rise, luxury condos — a la 8 Washington, a la Giants — on public property.”

The housing question is key. At a time when so many people are facing eviction or being priced out, the refrain that building more housing is the only solution to relieve pressure is oft-repeated, particularly by developers. However, these projects would introduce far more market-rate units than affordable projects, plopping down well-to-do neighborhoods in spaces that have sat on the margins in recent history, further changing the social character of the city. And proponents of Prop. B question whether the waterfront is really the right place to add new affordable units.

Meanwhile, the affordable housing community seems to be aligned in its support of Prop. B. The San Francisco Tenants Union, the Affordable Housing Alliance, the AIDS Housing Alliance of San Francisco, and other organizations that have aligned to push for stronger tenants’ rights and promote affordable housing have all endorsed the measure.

WHO DECIDES?

Given the popularity of a measure that fundamentally seeks to democratize the planning process, all development teams with skin in the game have declined to take a position on the measure. So have Mayor Lee and Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, who each played significant roles in recent waterfront battles, with Lee championing the Warriors Arena and Chiu opposing 8 Washington and assisting with the signature-gathering effort to stop it.

Sup. David Campos, in contrast with Chiu and Lee, has taken a stance on Prop. B. In a recent interview, he outlined his reasons for supporting it.

“I think that something has happened in City Hall, where I think the approval process is such that it has led to certain projects being approved that don’t really reflect the reality of what this city needs, and that have truly left the public out of the process in a meaningful way,” Campos told us. “And 8 Washington passed 8-3 at the Board of Supervisors, with a supermajority. The fact that the voters overwhelmingly rejected that project tells you that there has been a disconnect between what the board and folks in City Hall are doing, and where the public actually is.” To correct that imbalance and allow more San Franciscans to shape the city’s waterfront, Campos said, “I think it’s appropriate for us to go to the ballot and let the voters decide.”

Lawsuits target Airbnb rentals

Michael Redmond

April 29, 2014

LAWSUITS TARGET AIRBNB RENTALS

The San Francisco City Attorney’s Office last week filed a pair of lawsuits against local landlords who illegally rent out apartments on a short-term basis, units that had been cleared of tenants using the Ellis Act. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Tenants Unions has hired attorney Joseph Tobener to file more such lawsuits, and he is preparing to file at least seven lawsuits involving 20 units.

The lawsuits are the latest actions in a fast-moving crackdown on Airbnb and other online companies that facilitate short-term apartment rentals that violate city laws against converting apartments into de facto hotel rooms, including VRBO.com and Homeaway.com.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu recently introduced legalization that would legalize, limit, and regulate such rentals, a measure that will be considered this summer. That legislation comes on the heels of Airbnb’s decision to stop stonewalling the city (and us at the Guardian, which has been raising these issues for the last two years) by agreeing to start paying the transient occupancy taxes it owes to the city for its transactions and creating new terms of service that acknowledge its business model may violate local laws in San Francisco and elsewhere (see “Into thin air,” 6/6/13).

As we’ve reported, City Attorney Dennis Herrera has been working with tenant groups and others on a legal action aimed at curtailing the growing practice of landlords using online rental services to skirt rent control laws and other tenant protection, removing units from the permanent housing market while still renting them out at a profit.

“In the midst of a housing crisis of historic proportions, illegal short-term rental conversions of our scarce residential housing stock risks becoming a major contributing factor,” Herrera said in a public statement. “The cases I’ve filed today target two egregious offenders. These defendants didn’t just flout state and local law to conduct their illegal businesses, they evicted disabled tenants in order to do so. Today’s cases are the first among several housing-related matters under investigation by my office, and we intend to crack down hard on unlawful conduct that’s exacerbating—and in many cases profiting from—San Francisco’s alarming lack of affordable housing.”

Tobener tells the Guardian that the San Francisco Tenants Union hired him to discourage local landlords from removing units from the market. “The San Francisco Tenants Union is just fed up with the loss of affordable housing,” Tobener told us. “It’s not about the money, it’s about getting these units back on the market.” (Steven T. Jones)

SF LOOKS TO MARIN FOR RENEWABLES

Just in time for Earth Day, a renewed effort to reduce the city’s carbon emissions was introduced at the April 22 Board of Supervisors yesterday. Sup. John Avalos introduced a resolution calling for a study of San Francisco joining Marin Clean Energy, which provides renewable energy to that county’s residents.

The move is seen largely as an effort to circumvent Mayor Ed Lee’s opposition to implementing a controversial renewable energy plan called CleanPowerSF (see “Revisionist future,” April 15).

“Mayor Lee and the Public Utilities Commission objected to CleanPowerSF, but they have offered no other solution to provide San Franciscans with 100 percent renewable electricity,” Avalos said in a public statement. “With this ordinance, we can either join Marin or we can implement our own program, but we can no longer afford to do nothing.”

The resolution is the latest effort in the long saga to implement CleanPowerSF, San Francisco’s proposed renewable energy alternative to PG&E, whose current energy mix is only 19 percent renewable. Much of PG&E’s current mix is dirty and directly contributes to half of San Francisco’s carbon footprint, according to the city’s own recent Climate Action Strategy.

Joining Marin under a Joint Powers Authority would provide a vehicle for San Francisco to enact CleanPowerSF’s goals, long blocked by the mayor. San Francisco’s renewable energy effort may have lingered in legal limbo for years, but Marin made the switch to renewables in 2010.

“It’s something people want, and it also reduces greenhouse gas emissions,” Marin Clean Energy Executive Officer Dawn Weisz told the Guardian. Much of Northern California, she noted, has little choice but to use PG&E for their electricity.

“The people never chose to have a monopoly in place,” she said. “People like having choices.” (Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez)

BEACH FIRES CONTAINED

The National Parks Service is once again moving to limit and maybe even ban fires on Ocean Beach, replaying an episode from 2007 that was temporarily solved by volunteers and artistic new fire rings placed by the group Burners Without Borders, despite a lack of follow-through by NPS’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Citing complaints about burning toxic materials, leaving messes, and people drinking on the beach (gasp!), the GGNRA this week announced a summer pilot program that would include moving the curfew up from 10pm to 9pm, installing a dozen new fire rings, and improved public outreach and monitoring of the conditions on the beach.

“We [have] over the years seen a rising problem over safety and general breaking of park rules like broken bottles. And with incidents of assault and underage drinking, mostly occurring during the night, GGNRA Area Director Howard Levitt told the Guardian.

But Tom Price, who helped create the 2007 compromise, said GGNRA never kept its end of the bargain — such as installing more rings to supplement the half-dozen created by artists, or creating visible signage so visitors would know what the rules area — and now it’s acting in a rapid, unilateral, and unreasonable way to ban beach fires.

“They never did the outreach or education or put out more fire rings,” Price said, urging people to let GGNRA know they support allowing fires on Ocean Beach, one of just two spots within GGNRA jurisdiction where they’re allowed (Muir Beach is the other). “The Parks Service has to be reasonable, and banning fires after 9pm in not reasonable.” (Steven T. Jones and Bryan Augustus)

TAX WEALTH, PIKETTY SAYS

French economist Thomas Piketty got a warm welcome in San Francisco last week when nearly 200 people turned out to hear him discuss what is fast-becoming the defining book of this new Gilded Era of escalating disparities in wealth: Capital in the 21st Century.

“The book has been so popular that Harvard University Press has run out,” The Green Arcade owner Patrick Marks said in introducing Piketty at a the April 22 event held across Market Street from the bookstore, in the McRoskey Mattress Company, in order to accommodate the large crowd.

Indeed, Capital has recently been lauded by a string of influential publications, ranging from The Nation through The New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, all acknowledging this as perhaps the most exhaustive study on wealth data ever collected — and a clear-eyed warning that capitalism isn’t the self-correcting system that its biggest boosters claim it is.

Piketty’s work shows how when the return on capital is greater than the annual growth rate of the overall economy, which is usually the case (except when interrupted temporarily by the major wars of the 20th Century, or the 90 percent tax rate on the highest US incomes after World War II), that dynamic consolidates wealth in ever-fewer hands, which is bad for the health of the economic system. The only real cure, Piketty concludes, is a progressive global tax on wealth. Yet Piketty tries to avoid being too prescriptive, choosing to let his research speak for itself. “All I’m trying to do is present this book so everyone can make up his own mind,” Piketty told the gathering. In fact, he thinks the cure he outlines at the end of his book is less important than what comes before it: “You can disagree with everything in Part IV and still find interest in Parts I, II, and III.” (Steven T. Jones)

Alerts: April 30 – May 6, 2014

Michael Redmond

April 29, 2014

WEDNESDAY 30

Nature slideshow: The Wilds of San Francisco and You

474 Valencia, Suite 295, SF. www.wildequity.org. 6:30-8:30pm, free. San Francisco has 32 pockets of undeveloped land set aside for the preservation of the natural world. These pockets hold the last remnants of wildness once found across the lands where we now live, but do we have room in our parks and our hearts for nature in this city? Please join Brent Plater, Executive Director of the Wild Equity Institute, for a photographic exploration of the remaining wild areas in San Francisco, discuss the threats they face, and learn how you can help these areas thrive.

THURSDAY 1

May Day: Worker’s rally

City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett, SF. 11:30-1:30pm, free. May Day is International Workers Day and in San Francisco, like many other places around the world, workers come out to support each other and rally for better benefits and safer work environments. Workers, community advocates, community members and environmentalists, along with hundreds of supporters, will come together in front of City Hall to celebrate the achievements the labor movement has made throughout the years.

FRIDAY 2

Tenant rights training

San Francisco Main Library, 100 Larkin, SF. www.tenantstogether.org. 1-3pm, free. Issues such as eviction lawsuits (and threats thereof), rent increases, cost pass-throughs, unsafe living conditions, and security deposit theft are some of the major problems tenants face in San Francisco. This workshop will teach basic San Francisco tenant rights and identify the major nonprofit groups who specialize in assisting tenants with their rights. The workshop is oriented for nonprofit community service providers who want to better help and refer their clients who are having tenant problems. All are welcome.

SATURDAY 3

Elections 2014: Meet the Candidates

Starry Plough Pub, 3101 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 465-9414. 2-4:30pm, free. The 2014 candidates from the Peace and Freedom Party and the Green Party for California leadership will be at a forum on Saturday to express their solutions for the problems that our state currently faces. The Peace and Freedom Party is committed to socialism, democracy, ecology, feminism, racial equality, and internationalism. Come to hear their responses to defeat the “corporate capitalism” that runs our state.

TUESDAY 6

The Case for Six Californias

595 Market, SF. www.commonwealthclub.org. 6pm, $20 or $7 for students. Come hear the argument for the infamous “six Californias” idea you’ve seen circulating all over your Facebook feed. Tim Draper, the main proponent behind the potential ballot initiative, will be speaking about how our state has become ungovernable, and why splitting up into smaller states would be beneficial for everybody. It’s a radical idea, but could it work? Come with your questions and criticisms for this radical proposal that could be on the ballot this November.

Guardian Intelligence: April 30 – May 6, 2014

Michael Redmond

April 29, 2014

ONE FOR THE BOOKS

Polish your reading glasses: Sat/3 marks this first ever California Bookstore Day, a party featuring readings, author and artist appearances, and one-day-only, limited-edition book releases, taking place simultaneously at some 90 bookstores up and down the state. It’s modeled on the mega-successful Record Store Day, natch. A dozen bookstores in San Francisco have signed on, including Green Apple, City Lights, Booksmith, Books Inc., and Borderlands. Check www.cabookstoreday.com to find the celebration closest to you. Because hey, what kind of party has Amazon thrown for you lately?

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

The Attic, the dank 24th Street dive bar known for its decrepit vinyl booths, a pervasive questionable smell, and, somehow, boatloads of charm, closed its doors for good last week. Those in the know say owner Roger Howell (a former owner of Mad Dog in the Fog) will be using his liquor license at the schmancy new Gashead Tavern on Mission. No word yet on whether there will be DJs at that establishment who play nothing but the Clash if you ask them, or bartenders who give you endless bowls of Goldfish crackers, or a welcoming gang of hard-drinking regulars who cheer when you find your phone still at the bar after leaving it there the night before. RIP.

AIRBNB REG SHIT SHOW

Last year, when we at the Guardian were the only ones shouting about Airbnb‘s tax evasion and illegal short-term rentals, is was a lonely struggle. Then other journalists caught onto the story, Sup. David Chiu introduced his regulatory legislation a couple weeks ago, and the issue began to heat up. This week it all became a full-blown shit show, with rival rallies at City Hall on April 29. Opponents of the legislation are threatening a fall ballot measure that would reinforce the short-term rental ban in residential areas and give rewards to people who rat out their Airbnb-using neighbors. Perhaps we should be careful what we wish for.

MANY HAPPY RETURNS

It’s alive! The UC Theatre — the 1,460-seat Berkeley landmark, once beloved for its killer repertory film programming, but closed since 2001 — will undergo an eight-month renovation starting this summer and re-open as a nonprofit live music venue in 2015. According to a press release sent out by its new directors, Berkeley Music Group, the venue will present “approximately 75 to 100 shows a year, featuring a culturally diverse range of local, national, and international artists performing music genres ranging from Americana to zydeco and everything in between.” Located just two blocks from the Downtown Berkeley BART station, it will feature both touring and local bands and musicians, as well as comedy shows, a speaker series, and (yesss!) film screenings. Bonus: a full-service restaurant and bar, too. Bookmark www.theuctheatre.org to stay posted on the latest.

GLOBAL ECO-ACTIVISTS HONORED

Six winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize were awarded this week in San Francisco. The prestigious awards were given to Desmond D’Sa of South Africa, who organized a campaign to shut down a toxic waste dump; Ramesh Agrawal of India, who led disenfranchised communities in a successful effort to seek information on industrial activities and shut down a proposed coal mine; Suren Gazaryan of Russia, who helped expose the illegal use of federally protected forestland; Rudi Putra of Indonesia, who is targeting palm oil plantations that have triggered massive deforestation; Helen Slottje of New York, who provided pro-bono legal assistance to help pass bans on fracking; and Ruth Buendía Mestoquiari who led indigenous people of Peru in a fight against large-scale dams that would have displaced them.

WESTERN HIPNESS

Missionites and other east-side San Franciscans are always bashing the Outer Richmond and the Outer Sunset. Dubbed the Outerlands, its too foggy, too far, too quiet, or too-blah to make the visit worthwhile. You know what? The Outerlands doesn’t need you anymore, Mission! They’ve got a brand new parklet at Simple Pleasures Cafe on 35th avenue. Soon they’ll have overpriced coffee, Google buses, and white-washed ethnic food too! Avenues, represent.

TECH HEAD GOES FREE

San Francisco-based RaidumOne CEO Gurbaksh Chalal allegedly beat his girlfriend 117 times, but the man will not go to jail. A jury found Chalal guilty of misdemeanor violence and battery charges, and will serve three years probation, spend 52 weeks in a domestic violence program and perform 25 hours of community service. The court through out video evidence of the incident that police had seized from Chalal’s home as inadmissible. Chalal wrote on his blog, “This was all overblown drama because it generates huge volumes of page views for the media given what I have accomplished in the valley.” He then invoked the “American Dream” and lamented the cost to his soon-to-go-public company. Silicon Valley doesn’t have an entitlement problem. Nope.

FLAPPING FANCY

The Guardian’s Roaring ’20s-themed “Feathers and Fedoras” party last Friday at the de Young Museum drew a huge crowd of vintage-lovers. Zincalo Trio performed old-time favorites and gypsy jazz, the flapper-attired Decobelles dance troupe did a mean Charleston, and the de Young’s dazzling “Georgia O’Keefe and Lake George” exhibit provided a perfect artistic backdrop.

NOW READ THESE

The 2014 Northern California Independent Book Awards were announced last week, and must-read winners include Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (fiction), George Albon’s Fire Break (poetry), Mary Roach’s Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (nonfiction), Amy Stewart’s The Drunken Botanist (food writing) and Al Capone Does My Homework by Gennifer Choldenko (middle-grade readers). The NCIBA winners were determined by a coalition of independent bookstores, see more at www.nciba.com

CLIPPERS OWNER RACISM

How did people react to the racist comments allegedly made by Los Angeles Clippers owner Don Sterling? Clippers players: Removed their warmup shirts in a silent protest so that Clippers team logos would not be displayed. Magic Johnson: “He shouldn’t own a team any more. And he should stand up and say, ‘I don’t want to own a team any more.'”

President Barack Obama: “When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don’t really have to do anything, you just let ’em talk.”

Snoop Dogg (in an online video addressing Sterling directly): “Fuck you, your mama, and everything connected to you, you racist piece of shit.”

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