Health

Alerts

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Wednesday 20

Pack the court for Kali, Hayward Hall of Justice, 24405 Amador #108, Hayward; www.occupyoakland.org. 8-11am, free. Of all the outrageous and unjust arrests that have gone down at Occupy Oakland, Kali’s may be the worst. Kali was turning his life around at the Occupy Oakland camp when he was arrested in December for his “unpermitted” blanket. He was denied medication for a mental health issue for days in jail before getting in a conflict with a guard- which got him charged with assaulting a police officer. It was his third strike, and he may face life in prison. From organizers: “Wear red in support of Kali’s favorite color! Since he was an active member of the Kitchen Committee, there will be Coffee not Cops as well as a potluck afterwards.”

“Notes from a revolution,” Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF; www.booksmith.com. 6:30pm, free. In the Haight’s heyday, the Diggers were a cultural and political force to be reckoned with. The “community anarchist” collective served food in the Panhandle, ran free medical clinics, and generally cared for the large amount of people who flocked to the neighborhood in the 60s. They set up free stores and crash pads, and were known for absurd theater that makes you think. Now their broadsides have become a new book, Notes from a Revolution. Some of those involved in this recent San Francisco history will speak at the Booksmith for the books release, and there might even be some Diggers-style people-feeding afoot.

Thursday 21

Emiliano Donis benefit concert, Brava Theater, 2781 24th St., SF; www.brava.org. 7:30pm, $15-20. Emiliano Donis had only been 18 for a few weeks when he was arrested for dating his underage partner. According to his mother, Denhi Donis, they had been together at ages 15 and 17 before his birthday last fall. He was arrested in November, and has been locked up since. His moher organized this benefit concert, featuring a pretty great lineup of local bands, to help raise money for his legal fees.

Friday 22

The Black Power Mixtape room 304, Redstone building, 2940 16th St., SF; www.norcalsocialism.org. 7pm, $5-10 suggested donation. The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975, contains rare and powerful footage. There are scenes of Angela Davis being interviewed in prison, Stokely Carmicheal with his mother, and too many unnamed leaders spreading the revolution. The footage, shot by Swedish filmmakers who lacked a certain tendency to demonize those in the black liberation movement, is unique in its honesty. This screening is a fundraiser for local folks to get to the Socialism 2012 conference in Chicago next week.

Sunday 24

Queer prisoner letter-writing Station 40, 3030B 16th St., SF; www.tinyurl.com/station40. 4-6pm, free. It’s the monthly prisoner letter-writing campaign- the “post-pride (or hide from pride)” edition. From hate crime victims who fight back to sex workers to people who just don’t “look right,” LGBTQ people make up a disproportionate number of people in the criminal justice system. Come write letters to show them they’re not forgotten.

Monday 25

“The sky did not fall” Commonwealth Club, 595 Market, SF; www.commonwealthclub.org. 5:30pm, $7-20.  Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was finally repealed last July. That hasn’t stopped people to argue for its reinstatement for reasons like“they’re in close quarters, they live with people, they obviously shower with people” (Rick Santorum in October.) Get the real story at this Commonwealth Club event, where soldiers will speak on the historic repeal’s effect on their lives. At least for these soldiers, the changes weren’t shower-related, but instead related to not fearing dishonorable discharge and hiding who they love while risking their lives in the military.

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
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Frameline36, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, runs through Sun/24 at Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St., SF; and Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk. For tickets (most shows $9-$11) and schedule, visit www.frameline.org.

OPENING

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter America’s 16th president jumps aboard the bloodsucker bandwagon. (1:45) Presidio.

Brave Kelly Macdonald, Emma Thompson, and Billy Connolly star in Pixar’s fantasy about a strong-willed girl who brings turmoil upon her Scottish kingdom when she defies a long-held tradition. (1:33) Balboa, Presidio, Shattuck.

5 Broken Cameras Palestinian Emad Burnat bought his first camcorder in 2005 with the intention of bottling family memories, but when Israeli forces began the construction of settlements in Bil’in (his home village in the West Bank) Burnat stumbled into activist-filmmaker territory. In documenting his community’s nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation, Burnat’s friends and family (much like his cameras) are shot at, injured, and even killed. His son Gabreel’s first words are “wall” and “cartridge,” epitomizing the psychological toll of the struggle. Israeli forces are depicted as an eerily faceless entity, with colonialist aspirations run amok. Burnat isn’t interested in highlighting the political delicacy of the situation, and frankly, he’s given us something far more powerful than your average piece of fair-and-balanced journalism on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Splitting the difference between home-video montage and war-zone nightmare, 5 Broken Cameras skillfully merges the political and the personal, profoundly humanizing the Palestinian movement for independence. (1:30) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Taylor Kaplan)

Found Memories The literal Portuguese-to-English translation of this film’s title — “stories that exist only when remembered” — is clunky, but more poignantly accurate than Found Memories. At first, it’s not entirely clear if Brazilian Júlia Murat is making a narrative or a documentary. In an tiny, isolated community populated by elderly people, Madalena (Sonia Guedes) follows a schedule she’s kept for years, probably decades: making bread, attending church, doing chores, tending the cemetery gates, writing love letters to a long-absent partner (“Isn’t it strange that after all these years, I still find your things around the house?”), and grousing at the “annoying old man” who grinds the town’s coffee beans. One day, young photographer Rita (Lisa Fávero) drifts into the village, an exotic import from the outside, modern world. Slowly, despite their differences, the women become friends. That’s about it for plot, but as this deliberately-paced film reflects on aging, dying, and memories (particularly in the form of photographs), it offers atmospheric food for thought, and a few moments of droll humor. Note, however, that viewer patience is a requirement to reap its rewards. (1:38) SF Film Society Cinema. (Eddy)

The Invisible War Kirby Dick’s searing documentary takes a look at the prevalence of rape within U.S. military ranks, a problem whose unbelievably high levels of occurrence would long ago have caused huge public outcry and imposed reform in any other institutional context. Yet because it’s the military — where certain codes of loyalty, machismo, and insularity dominate from the grunt level to the highest ranks — the issue has not only been effectively kept secret, but perpetrators almost never suffer any disciplinary measures, let alone jail time or dishonorable discharges. Meanwhile the women — some studies estimate 20% of all female personnel (and 1% of the men) suffer sexual assault from colleagues — are further traumatized by an atmosphere that creates ideal conditions for stalking, rape, and “blame the victim” aftermaths from superiors. (Indeed, for many the superior to whom they would have reported an attack was the one who attacked them.) Most end up quitting promising service careers (often pursued because of generations of family enlistment), dealing with the serious mental health consequences on their own. The subjects who’ve come forward on the issue here are inspiring in their bravery, and dedication to a patriotic cause and vocation that ultimately, bitterly betrayed them. Their stories are so engrossing that The Invisible War is as compulsively watchable as its topic and statistics are inherently appalling. (1:39) Metreon. (Harvey) 

Oslo, August 31st Heroin movies are rarely much fun, and Oslo is no exception, though here the stress lies not in grisly realism but visceral emotional honesty. Following an abortive, Virginia Woolf-esque suicide attempt during evening leave from his rehab center, recovering addict Anders visits Oslo for a job interview. He reconnects bittersweetly with an old friend, tries and fails to meet up with his sister, and eventually submerges himself in the nightlife that once fueled his self-destruction. Expressionistic editing conveys Anders’ sense of detachment and urge for release, with scenes and sounds intercut achronologically and striking sound design which homes in on stray conversations. A late intellectual milieu is signified throughout, quite humorously, by serious discussions of popular television dramas, presumably an update of similar concerns addressed in Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s 1931 novel Le Feu follet, on which the film is based. (1:35) Elmwood, Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Sam Stander)

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World See “Apocalypse Meh.” (1:41) Marina, Piedmont, Shattuck.

Ultrasonic Is it madness to imagine a stylish new twist on the claustrophobic conspiracy thriller? Multi-hyphenate director, co-writer, and cinematographer (and musician and software engineer) Rohit Colin Rao manages just that with this head-turning indie feature film debut, while managing to translate a stark indie aesthetic encapsulated by Dischord and Touch and Go bands, lovers of Rust Belt warehouses and waffle houses, culture vultures who revere both Don DeLillo and Wisconsin Death Trip, and critics who lean too hard on the descriptor “angular.” Musician Simon York (Silas Gordon Brigham) is one denizen firmly placed in that cultural landscape, but the pressures of funding his combo’s album, coping with the diminishing returns of his music teacher livelihood, and anticipating the arrival of a baby with his wife, Ruth (Cate Buscher), seem to be piling on his murky brow. Simon begins to hear a hard-to-pin-down sound that no one else can detect, though Ruth’s eccentric and possibly certified conspiracy-theorist brother Jonas (Sam Repshas) is quick to affirm — and build on — his fears. Painting his handsome, stylized mise-en-scène in noiry blacks and wintry whites, Rohit positively revels in this post-punk jewel of a world he’s assembled, and it’s a compelling one even if it’s far from perfect and ultimately shies away from the deepest shadows. (1:30) Roxie. (Chun)

Ongoing 

Bel Ami Judging from recent attempts to shake off the gloomy atmosphere and undead company of the Twilight franchise, Robert Pattinson enjoys a good period piece, but hasn’t quite worked out how to help make one. Last year’s Depression-era Water for Elephants was a tepid romance, and Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod’s belle epoque–set Bel Ami is an ungainly, oddly paced adaptation of the Guy de Maupassant novel of the same name. A down-and-out former soldier of peasant stock, Georges Duroy (Pattinson) — or “Bel Ami,” as his female admirers call him — gains a brief entrée into the upper echelons of France’s fourth estate and parlays it into a more permanent set of social footholds, campaigning for the affections of a triumvirate of Parisian power wives (Christina Ricci, Uma Thurman, and Kristin Scott Thomas) as he makes his ascent. His route is confusing, though; the film pitches forward at an alarming pace, its scenes clumsily stacked together with little character development or context to smooth the way, and Pattinson’s performance doesn’t clarify much. Duroy shifts perplexingly between rapacious and soulful modes, eyeing the ladies with a vaguely carnivorous expression as he enters drawing rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms, but leaving us with little sense of his true appetites or other motivations. (1:42) Lumiere, Smith Rafael. (Rapoport) 

Bernie Jack Black plays the titular new assistant funeral director liked by everybody in small-town Carthage, Tex. He works especially hard to ingratiate himself with shrewish local widow Marjorie (Shirley MacLaine), but there are benefits — estranged from her own family, she not only accepts him as a friend (then companion, then servant, then as virtual “property”), but makes him her sole heir. Richard Linklater’s latest is based on a true-crime story, although in execution it’s as much a cheerful social satire as I Love You Philip Morris and The Informant! (both 2009), two other recent fact-based movies about likable felons. Black gets to sing (his character being a musical theater queen, among other things), while Linklater gets to affectionately mock a very different stratum of Lone Star State culture from the one he started out with in 1991’s Slacker. There’s a rich gallery of supporting characters, most played by little-known local actors or actual townspeople, with Matthew McConaughey’s vainglorious county prosecutor one delectable exception. Bernie is its director’s best in some time, not to mention a whole lot of fun. (1:39) Embarcadero, Four Star, Presidio, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (1:42) Albany, Four Star, Piedmont, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki.

A Cat in Paris This year’s Best Animated Film nominees: big-budget entries Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss in Boots, and eventual winner Rango, plus Chico and Rita, which opened just before Oscar night, and French mega-dark-horse A Cat in Paris. Sure, Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol’s film failed to cash in on 2011’s Paris craze, but it’s still a charming if featherweight noir caper, being released stateside in an English version that features the voices of Marcia Gay Harden and Anjelica Huston. A streetwise kitty named Dino spends his days hanging with Zoey, a little girl who’s gone mute since the death of her father — a cop killed in the line of duty. Zoey’s mother (Harden), also a cop, is hellbent on catching the murderer, a notorious crook named Costa who runs his criminal empire with Reservoir Dogs-style imprecision. At night, Dino sneaks out and accompanies an affable burglar on his prowlings. When Zoey falls into Costa’s clutches, her mom, the thief, and (natch) the feisty feline join forces to rescue her, in a series of rooftop chase scenes that climax atop Notre Dame. At just over an hour, A Cat in Paris is sweetly old-fashioned and suitable for audiences of all ages, though staunch dog lovers may raise an objection or two. (1:07) Opera Plaza. (Eddy) 

Dark Shadows Conceptually, there’s nothing wrong with attempting to turn a now semi-obscure supernaturally themed soap opera with a five-year run in the late 1960s and early ’70s into a feature film. Particularly if the film brings together the sweetly creepy triumvirate of Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and Helena Bonham Carter and emerges during an ongoing moment for vampires, werewolves, and other things that go hump in the night. Depp plays long-enduring vampire Barnabas Collins, the undead scion of a once-powerful 18th-century New England family that by the 1970s — the groovy decade in which the bulk of the story is set — has suffered a shabby deterioration. Barnabas forms a pact with present-day Collins matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer) to raise the household — currently comprising her disaffected daughter, Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz), her derelict brother, Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), his mournful young son, David (Gulliver McGrath), David’s live-in lush of a psychiatrist, Dr. Hoffman (Carter), and the family’s overtaxed manservant, Willie (Jackie Earle Haley) — to its former stature, while taking down a lunatic, love-struck, and rather vindictive witch named Angelique (Eva Green). The latter, a victim of unrequited love, is the cause of all Barnabas’s woes and, by extension, the entire clan’s, but Angelique can only be blamed for so much. Beyond her hocus-pocus jurisdiction is the film’s manic pileup of plot twists, tonal shifts, and campy scenery-chewing by Depp, a startling onslaught that no lava lamp joke, no pallid reaction shot, no room-demolishing act of paranormal carnality set to Barry White, and no cameo by Alice Cooper can temper. (2:00) SF Center. (Rapoport)

The Dictator As expected, The Dictator is, yet again, Sacha Baron Cohen doing his bumbling-foreigner shtick. Said character (here, a ruthless, spoiled North African dictator) travels to America and learns a heaping teaspoon of valuable lessons, which are then flung upon the audience — an audience which, by film’s end, has spent 80 minutes squealing at a no-holds-barred mix of disgusting gags, tasteless jokes, and schadenfreude. If you can’t forgive Cohen for carbon-copying his Borat (2006) formula, at least you can muster admiration for his ability to be an equal-opportunity offender (dinged: Arabs, Jews, African Americans, white Americans, women of all ethnicities, and green activists) — and for that last-act zinger of a speech. If The Dictator doesn’t quite reach Borat‘s hilarious heights, it’s still proudly repulsive, smart in spite of itself, and guaranteed to get a rise out of anyone who watches it. (1:23) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Double Trouble When crooks nab a priceless painting from a Taipei museum, two security guards — wannabe hero Jay (Jaycee “Son of Jackie” Chan) and Chinese-tourist-on-vacation Ocean (Xia Yu) — reluctantly team up to recover the piece. A road trip of sorts ensues, laden with petty bickering, wacky melees, bonding moments, mistaken identity, gangsters both comical and sinister, and other buddy-comedy trappings. As expected, there are a few high-flying fight scenes; in the film’s production notes, director David Hsun-Wei Chang reveals he was inspired by the Rush Hour movies. Alas, Chan is neither as charismatic nor as breathtakingly nimble as his father (and, obvi, Xia is no Chris Tucker). It should be noted, however, that one of the slithery art thieves is played by underwear model Jessica C., famed in Hong Kong for her “police siren boobs.” So there’s that. (1:29) Metreon. (Eddy)

Elena The opening, almost still image of breaking dawn amid bare trees — the twigs in the foreground almost imperceptibly developing definition and the sky gradually growing ever lighter and pinker in the corners of the frame — beautifully exemplifies the crux of this well-wrought, refined noir, which spins slowly on the streams of dog-eat-dog survival that rush beneath even the most moneyed echelons of Moscow. Sixtyish former nurse Elena (Nadezhda Markina) is still little more than a live-in caretaker for Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov), her affluent husband of almost 10 years. She sleeps in a separate bed in their modernist-chic condo and dutifully funnels money to her beloved layabout son and his family. Vladimir has less of a relationship with his rebellious bad-seed daughter (Yelena Lyadova), who may be too smart and hedonistic for her own good. When a certain unlikely reunion threatens Elena’s survival — and what she perceives as the survival of her own spawn — a kind of deadly dawn breaks over the seemingly obedient hausfrau, and she’s driven to desperate ends. Bathing his scenes in chilled blue light and velvety dark shadows, filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev (2003’s The Return) keeps a detached but close eye on the proceedings while displaying an uncanny talent for plucking the telling detail out of the wash of daily routine and coaxing magnetic performances from his cast. (1:49) Lumiere. (Chun)

Headhunters Despite being the most sought-after corporate headhunter in Oslo, Roger (Aksel Hennie) still doesn’t make enough money to placate his gorgeous wife; his raging Napoleon complex certainly doesn’t help matters. Crime is, as always, the only solution, so Roger’s been supplementing his income by stealthily relieving his rich, status-conscious clients of their most expensive artworks (with help from his slightly unhinged partner, who works for a home-security company). When Roger meets the dashing Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau of Game of Thrones) — a Danish exec with a sinister, mysterious military past, now looking to take over a top job in Norway — he’s more interested in a near-priceless painting rumored to be stashed in Greve’s apartment. The heist is on, but faster than you can say “MacGuffin,” all hell breaks loose (in startlingly gory fashion), and the very charming Roger is using his considerable wits to stay alive. Based on a best-selling “Scandi-noir” novel, Headhunters is just as clever as it is suspenseful. See this version before Hollywood swoops in for the inevitable (rumored) remake. (1:40) Lumiere. (Eddy)

The Hunger Games Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is a teenager living in a totalitarian state whose 12 impoverished districts, as retribution for an earlier uprising, must pay tribute to the so-called Capitol every year, sacrificing one boy and one girl each to the Hunger Games. A battle royal set in a perilous arena and broadcast live to the Capitol as gripping diversion and to the districts as sadistic propaganda, the Hunger Games are, depending on your viewpoint, a “pageant of honor, courage, and sacrifice” or a brutal, pointless bloodbath involving children as young as 12. When her little sister’s name comes up in the ann­ual lottery, Katniss volunteers to take her place and is joined by a boy named Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), with whom she shares an old, unspoken bond. Tasked with translating to the screen the first installment of Suzanne Collins’s rabidly admired trilogy, writer-director Gary Ross (2003’s Seabiscuit, 1998’s Pleasantville) telescopes the book’s drawn-out, dread-filled tale into a manageable two-plus-hour entertainment, making great (and horrifying) use of the original work’s action, but losing a good deal of the narrative detail and emotional force. Elizabeth Banks is comic and unrecognizable as Effie Trinket, the two tributes’ chaperone; Lenny Kravitz gives a blank, flattened reading as their stylist, Cinna; and Donald Sutherland is sufficiently creepy and bloodless as the country’s leader, President Snow. More exceptionally cast are Woody Harrelson as Katniss and Peeta’s surly, alcoholic mentor, Haymitch Abernathy, and Stanley Tucci as games emcee Caesar Flickerman, flashing a bank of gleaming teeth at each contestant as he probes their dire circumstances with the oily superficiality of a talk show host. (2:22) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

Hysteria Tanya Wexler’s period romantic comedy gleefully depicts the genesis of the world’s most popular sex toy out of the inchoate murk of Victorian quackishness. In this dulcet version of events, real-life vibrator inventor Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) is a handsome young London doctor with such progressive convictions as a belief in the existence of germs. He is, however, a man of his times and thus swallows unblinking the umbrella diagnosis of women with symptoms like anxiety, frustration, and restlessness as victims of a plague-like uterine disorder known as hysteria. Landing a job in the high-end practice of Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), whose clientele consists entirely of dissatisfied housewives seeking treatments of “medicinal massage” and subsequent “parosysm,” Granville becomes acquainted with Dalrymple’s two daughters, the decorous Emily (Felicity Jones) and the first-wave feminist Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal). A subsequent bout of RSI offers empirical evidence for the adage about necessity being the mother of invention, with the ever-underused Rupert Everett playing Edmund St. John-Smythe, Granville’s aristocratic friend and partner in electrical engineering. (1:35) Opera Plaza. (Rapoport)

The Intouchables Cries of “racism” seem a bit out of hand when it comes to this likable albeit far-from-challenging French comedy loosely based on a real-life relationship between a wealthy white quadriplegic and his caretaker of color. The term “cliché” is more accurate. And where were these critics when 1989’s Driving Miss Daisy and 2011’s The Help — movies that seem designed to make nostalgic honkies feel good about those fraught relationships skewed to their advantage—were coming down the pike? (It also might be more interesting to look at how these films about race always hinge on economies in which whites must pay blacks to interact with/educate/enlighten them.) In any case, Omar Sy, portraying Senegalese immigrant Driss, threatens to upset all those pundits’ apple carts with his sheer life force, even when he’s shaking solo on the dance floor to sounds as effortlessly unprovocative, and old-school, as Earth, Wind, and Fire. In fact, everything about The Intouchables is as old school as 1982’s 48 Hrs., spinning off the still laugh-grabbing humor that comes with juxtaposing a hipper, more streetwise black guy with a hapless, moneyed chalky. The wheelchair-bound Philippe (Francois Cluzet) is more vulnerable than most, and he has a hard time getting along with any of his nurses, until he meets Driss, who only wants his signature for his social services papers. It’s not long before the cultured, classical music-loving Philippe’s defenses are broken down by Driss’ flip, somewhat honest take on the follies and pretensions of high culture — a bigger deal in France than in the new world, no doubt. Director-writer Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano aren’t trying to innovate —they seem more set on crafting an effervescent blockbuster that out-blockbusters Hollywood — and the biggest compliment might be that the stateside remake is already rumored to be in the works. (1:52) Embarcadero. (Chun)

Jiro Dreams of Sushi Celebrity-chef culture has surely reached some kind of zeitgeist, what with the omnipresence of Top Chef and other cooking-themed shows, and the headlines-making power of people like Paula Deen (diabetes) and Mario Batali (sued for ripping off his wait staff). Unconcerned with the trappings of fame — you’ll never see him driving a Guy Fieri-style garish sports car — is Jiro Ono, 85-year-old proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a tiny, world-renowned sushi restaurant tucked into Tokyo’s Ginza station. Jiro, a highly-disciplined perfectionist who believes in simple, yet flavorful food, has devoted his entire life to the pursuit of “deliciousness” — to the point of sushi invading his dreams, as the title of David Gelb’s reverential documentary suggests. But Jiro Dreams of Sushi goes deeper than food-prep porn (though, indeed, there’s plenty of that); it also examines the existential conflicts faced by Jiro’s two middle-aged sons. Both were strongly encouraged to enter the family business — and in the intervening years, have had to accept the soul-crushing fact that no matter how good their sushi is, it’ll never be seen as exceeding the creations of their legendary father. (1:21) Bridge. (Eddy)

Lola Versus Greta Gerwig’s embattled late-twentysomething, the titular Lola, apologetically invokes the Saturn return to explain the chaos that enters her life when her emotionally underdeveloped boyfriend proposes, panics, and dumps her. Workaday elements of the industry-standard romantic comedy surface, lightly revised: a crass, loopy BFF (co-writer Zoe Lister Jones) who can’t find true love and says things like “I have to go wash my vagina”; a vaguely soulful male friend (Hamish Linklater, 2011’s The Future) who’s secretly harboring nonplatonic feelings (or maybe just an opportunistic streak); wacky yet vaguely successful Age of Aquarius parents (a somewhat toneless Debra Winger and a nicely gone-to-seed Bill Pullman). One can see why it would be tempting to blame a planet’s galactic travels for the solipsistic meandering that Lola engages in, bemusedly lurching, often under chemical influences, from one bout of poor decision-making to the next. She claims to be searching for a path out of the chaos into some calmer place (fittingly, she’s a comp lit Ph.D. candidate who’s writing her dissertation on silence), but as the movie transports us mercilessly from one scene of turmoil to the next, we have little reason to believe her. The script has funny moments, and Gerwig sometimes succeeds in making Lola feel like a charming disaster, but her personal discoveries, while certainly valuable, feel false and forced. (1:26) Metreon. (Rapoport)

Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (1:33) Balboa, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio.

Marvel’s The Avengers The conflict — a mystical blue cube containing earth-shattering (literally) powers is stolen, with evil intent — isn’t the reason to see this long-hyped culmination of numerous prequels spotlighting its heroic characters. Nay, the joy here is the whole “getting’ the band back together!” vibe; director and co-writer Joss Whedon knows you’re just dying to see Captain America (Chris Evans) bicker with Iron Man (a scene-stealing Robert Downey Jr.); Thor (Chris Hemsworth) clash with bad-boy brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston); and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) get angry as often as possible. (Also part of the crew, but kinda mostly just there to look good in their tight outfits: Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye and Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow.) Then, of course, there’s Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) running the whole Marvel-ous show, with one good eye and almost as many wry quips as Downey’s Tony Stark. Basically, The Avengers gives you everything you want (characters delivering trademark lines and traits), everything you expect (shit blowing up, humanity being saved, etc.), and even makes room for a few surprises. It doesn’t transcend the comic-book genre (like 2008’s The Dark Knight did), but honestly, it ain’t trying to. The Avengers wants only to entertain, and entertain it does. (2:23) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Men in Black III Why not? It’s been ten years since Men in Black II (the one where Lara Flynn Boyle and Johnny Knoxville — remember them? — played the villains), Will Smith has barely aged, and he hasn’t made a full-on comedy since, what, 2005’s Hitch? Here, he does a variation on his always-agreeable exasperated-guy routine, clashing with his grim, gimlet-eyed partner Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones, and in a younger incarnation, a spot-on Josh Brolin) in a plot that involves a vicious alien named Boris (Flight of the Conchords’ Jermaine Clement), time travel, Andy Warhol, the moon (as both space-exploration destination and modern-day space-jail location), and lines that only Smith’s delivery can make funny (“This looks like it comes from planet damn.“) It’s cheerful (save a bit of melodrama at the end), crisply paced, and is neither a must-see masterpiece nor something you should mindfully sleep through if it pops up among your in-flight selections. Oh, and it’s in 3D. Well, why not? (1:42) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Moonrise Kingdom Does Wes Anderson’s new film mark a live-action return to form after 2007’s disappointingly wan Darjeeling Limited? More or less. Does it tick all the Andersonian style and content boxes? Indubitably. In the most obvious deviation Anderson has taken with Moonrise, he gives us his first period piece, a romance set in 1965 on a fictional island off the New England coast. After a chance encounter at a church play, pre-teen Khaki Scout Sam (newcomer Jared Gilman) instantly falls for the raven-suited, sable-haired Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward, ditto). The two become pen pals, and quickly bond over the shared misery of being misunderstood by both authority figures and fellow kids. The bespectacled Sam is an orphan, ostracized by his foster parents and scout troop (much to the dismay of its straight-arrow leader Edward Norton). Suzy despises her clueless attorney parents, played with gusto by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand in some of the film’s funniest and best scenes. When the two kids run off together, the whole thing begins to resemble a kind of tween version of Godard’s 1965 lovers-on the-lam fantasia Pierrot le Fou. But like most of Anderson’s stuff, it has a gauzy sentimentality more akin to Truffaut than Godard. Imagine if the sequence in 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums where Margot and Richie run away to the Museum of Natural History had been given the feature treatment: it’s a simple yet inspired idea, and it becomes a charming little tale of the perils of growing up and selling out the fantasy. But it doesn’t feel remotely risky. It’s simply too damn tame. (1:37) California, Metreon, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Michelle Devereaux)

Music From the Big House See review at sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:27) Sundance Kabuki.

Peace, Love and Misunderstanding How is that even as a bona fide senior, Jane Fonda continues to embody this country’s ambivalence toward women? I suspect it’s a testament to her actorly prowess and sheer charisma that she’s played such a part in defining several eras’ archetypes — from sex kitten to counterculture-heavy Hanoi Jane to dressed-for-success feminist icon to aerobics queen to trophy wife. Here, among the talents in Bruce Beresford’s intergenerational chick-flick-gone-indie as a loud, proud, and larger-than-life hippie earth mama, she threatens to eclipse her paler, less colorful offspring, women like Catherine Keener and Elizabeth Olsen, who ordinarily shine brighter than those that surround them. It’s ostensibly the tale of high-powered lawyer Diane (Keener): her husband (Kyle MacLachlan) has asked for a divorce, so in a not-quite-explicable tailspin, she packs her kids, Zoe (Olsen) and Jake (Nat Wolff), into the car and heads to Woodstock to see her artist mom Grace (Fonda) for the first time in two decades. Grace is beyond overjoyed — dying to introduce the grandchildren to her protests, outdoor concerts, and own personal growhouse — while urbanite Diane and her kids find attractive, natch, diversions in the country, in the form of Jude (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Cole (Chace Crawford), and Tara (Marissa O’Donnell). Yet there’s a lot of troubled water for the mother and daughter to cross, in order to truly come together. Despite some strong characterization and dialogue, Peace doesn’t quite fly — or make much sense at its close — due to the some patchy storytelling: the schematic rom-com arch fails to provide adequate scaffolding to support the required leaps of faith. But that’s not to deny the charm of the highly identifiable, generous-spirited Grace, a familiar Bay Area archetype if there ever was one, who Fonda charges with the joy and sadness of fallible parent who was making up the rules as she went along. (1:36) Opera Plaza, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

Prometheus Ridley Scott’s return to outer space — after an extended stay in Russell Crowe-landia — is most welcome. Some may complain Prometheus too closely resembles Scott’s Alien (1979), for which it serves as a prequel of sorts. Prometheus also resembles, among others, The Thing (1982), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Event Horizon (1997). But I love those movies (yes, even Event Horizon), and I am totally fine with the guy who made Alien borrowing from all of them and making the classiest, most gorgeous sci-fi B-movie in years. Sure, some of the science is wonky, and the themes of faith and creation can get a bit woo-woo, but Prometheus is deep-space discombobulation at its finest, with only a miscast Logan Marshall-Green (apparently, cocky dude-bros are still in effect at the turn of the next millennium) marring an otherwise killer cast: Noomi Rapace as a dreamy (yet awesomely tough) scientist; Idris Elba as Prometheus‘ wisecracking captain; Charlize Theron as the Weyland Corportation’s icy overseer; and Michael Fassbender, giving his finest performance to date as the ship’s Lawrence of Arabia-obsessed android. (2:03) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Rock of Ages (2:03) California, Four Star, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki.

Safety Not Guaranteed San Francisco-born director Colin Trevorrow’s narrative debut feature Safety Not Guaranteed, written by Derek Connolly, has an improbable setup: not that rural loner Kenneth (Mark Duplass) would place a personal ad for a time travel partner (“Must bring own weapons”), but that a Seattle alt-weekly magazine would pay expenses for a vainglorious staff reporter (Jake Johnson, hilarious) and two interns (Aubrey Plaza, Karan Soni) to stalk him for a fluff feature over the course of several days. The publishing budget allowing that today is true science-fiction. But never mind. Inserting herself “undercover” when a direct approach fails, Plaza’s slightly goth college grad finds she actually likes obsessive, paranoid weirdo Kenneth, and is intrigued by his seemingly insane but dead serious mission. For most of its length Safety falls safely into the category of off-center indie comedics, delivering various loopy and crass behavior with a practiced deadpan, providing just enough character depth to achieve eventual poignancy. Then it takes a major leap — one it would be criminal to spoil, but which turns an admirable little movie into something conceptually surprising, reckless, and rather exhilarating. (1:34) Metreon, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Snow White and the Huntsman It’s unclear why the zeitgeist has blessed us this year with two warring iterations of the Snow White fairy tale, one broadly comedic (April’s Mirror Mirror), one starkly emo. But it was only natural that Kristen Stewart would land in the latter rendering, breaking open the hearts of swamp beasts and swordsmen alike with the chaste glory of her mien. As Snow White flees the henchmen and hired killers dispatched by her seriously evil stepmother, Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron), and traverses a blasted, virulent forest populated with hallucinogenic vapors and other life-threatening obstacles, Stewart need not act so much as radiate a dazzling benignity, weeping the tears of a martyr rather than a frightened young girl. (Unfortunately, when required to deliver a rallying declaration of war, she sounds as if she’s speaking in tongues after a heavy hit on the crack pipe.) It’s slightly uncomfortable to be asked, alongside a grieving, drunken huntsman (The Avengers’ Chris Hemsworth), a handful of dwarfs (including Ian McShane and Toby Jones), and the kingdom’s other suffering citizenry, to fall worshipfully in line behind such a creature. But first-time director Rupert Sanders’s film keeps pace with its lovely heroine visually, constructing a gorgeous world in which armies of black glass shatter on battlefields, white stags dissolve into hosts of butterflies, and a fairy sanctuary within the blighted kingdom is an eye-popping fantasia verging on the hysterical. Theron’s Ravenna, equipped in modernist fashion with a backstory for her sociopathic tendencies, is credible and captivating as an unhinged slayer of men, thief of youth, destroyer of kingdoms, and consumer of the hearts of tiny birds. (2:07) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

That’s My Boy (1:55) Metreon, SF Center.

Turn Me On, Dammit! The 15-year-old heroine of writer-director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s Turn Me On, Dammit! is first heard in voice-over, flatly cataloging the over familiar elements of the small town in rural Norway where she lives — and first seen lying on the kitchen floor of her house sharing an intimate moment with a phone sex operator named Stig (Per Kjerstad). Largely ruled by her hormones and longing to get it on with someone other than herself and the disembodied Stig, Alma (Helene Bergsholm) spends large segments of her life unspooling sexual fantasies starring Artur (Matias Myren), the boy she has a crush on, and Sebjorn (Jon Bleiklie Devik), who runs the grocery store where she works and is the father of her two closest friends: burgeoning political activist Sara (Malin Bjorhovde) and full-fledged mean girl Ingrid (Beate Stofring). Back in real life, a strange and awkward physical interaction with Artur leads Alma, excited and confused, to describe the experience to her friends, a mistake that precipitously leads to total social ostracism among her peers. With the possible exception of some unnecessary dog reaction shots during the aforementioned opening scene, documentary maker Jacobsen’s first narrative feature film is an engaging and impressive debut, presenting a sympathetic and uncoy depiction of a young girl’s sexuality and exploiting the rich contrast between Alma’s gauzier fantasies and the realities of her waking world to poignantly comic effect. (1:16) Opera Plaza. (Rapoport)

The Woman in the Fifth A rumpled American writer with a hinted-at dark past (Ethan Hawke) shows up in Paris, to the horror of his French ex-wife and confused delight of his six-year-old daughter. An ill-advised nap on public transportation results in all of his bags being stolen; broke and out of sorts, he takes a grimy room above a café and a gig monitoring the surveillance-cam feed at what’s obviously some kind of illegal enterprise. During the day he stalks his daughter and romances both sophisticated Margit (Kristen Scott Thomas) and nubile Ania (Joanna Kulig); he also dodges his hostile neighbor (Mamadou Minte) and shady boss (Samir Guesmi). Based on Douglas Kennedy’s novel, the latest from Pawel Pawlikowski (2004’s My Summer of Love), offers some third-act twists (gory, distressing ones) that suggest Hawke’s character (and, by extension, the viewer) may not be perceiving reality with 100 percent accuracy. Moody, melancholy, not-entirely-satisfying stuff. (1:23) SF Film Society Cinema. (Eddy)

Your Sister’s Sister The new movie from Lynn Shelton — who directed star and (fellow mumblecore director) Mark Duplass in her shaggily amusing Humpday (2009) — opens somberly, at a Seattle wake where his Jack makes his deceased brother’s friends uncomfortable by pointing out that the do-gooder guy they’d loved just the last couple years was a bully and jerk for many years before his reformation. This outburst prompts an offer from friend-slash-mutual-crush Iris (Emily Blunt) that he get his head together for a few days at her family’s empty vacation house on a nearby island. Arriving via ferry and bike, he is disconcerted to find someone already in residence — Iris’ sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), who’s grieving a loss of her own (she’s split with her girlfriend). Several tequila shots later, two Kinsey-scale opposites meet, which creates complications when Iris turns up the next day. A bit slight in immediate retrospect and contrived in its wrap-up, Shelton’s film is nonetheless insinuating, likable, and a little touching while you’re watching it. That’s largely thanks to the actors’ appeal — especially Duplass, who fills in a blunderingly lucky (and unlucky) character’s many blanks with lived-in understatement. (1:30) Albany, Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

 

Prancing at the revolution

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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19
Prancing at the revolution

marke@sfbg.com

QUEER ISSUE “Right now it seems we have more in common with the Christian Right than the gay liberation movement. We’ve become so focused on marriage as the end-all and be-all of gay rights that it’s completely within the realm of possibility that the next leader of Focus on the Family could be a gay man. We all have to get married now for tax breaks, health care, or to stay in this country? Are you kidding me?” Mattilda Sycamore Bernstein spilled some truth into my hot pink Princess phone.

“I don’t know how we got to this position where we’re either agitating for more tax breaks for the rich via marriage, or we’re treating people like disposable objects on hookup sites because they don’t conform to certain standards. It’s really sickening. How does any of this further any agenda at all besides becoming what we’re supposed to be fighting against? I don’t get it.”

Sycamore Bernstein, who often writes for the Guardian, was speaking about the impetus behind her latest book, Why are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (AK Press), an invigorating collection of essays from a vast variety of queer people that “challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle.” (Let’s just say that President Obama’s limp “evolution” on same-sex marriage was not going to be a topic of conversation.) From envisioning a more faggoty Internet and reclaiming perversity as a proud, queer norm to honestly exploring the complex cultural confusions that Western-originating political expressions of gayness can wreak on immigrant and native homos, Faggots goes there with inspiring directness.

“I wanted to put out something that captured the spectrum of radical queer thinking that’s been going on while it seems everyone else was in line to get married. There are so many topics that affect our lives that have just been completely bulldozed by the ‘gay rights’ corporate lobbying groups’ crazed marriagemania.

“For example, Chris Bartlett, in his contribution ‘Gravity and Levity’ talks about how the idea of ‘risk’ in the gay community has been so associated with AIDS that it may have pushed any aspiration towards risk — emotionally, politically, socially — right out of gay consciousness. Yet being gay used to be all about taking risks. It’s what got us so far in the first place!

“I think exploring how the medicalization of AIDS terminology may have numbed us from each other — or how race still defines us in the ‘community,’ or how every dollar sucked into the corporate marriage machine means less for those in need of actual life or death help, or how hate crimes legislation ridiculously puts more power and resources into the hands of the very system oppressing us — is something we desperately need right now. We’re raising an entire generation to think that marriage is the only fight. Meanwhile, we’re discriminating against ourselves in so many other ways.”

Faggots is no mere spitting into the wind, either. Although Sycamore Bernstein has been sounding the assimilationist alarm for years, the prolific author and activist, now living in Seattle, has been surprised by the tome’s positive reception. (“It’s quite shocking!” she says with a lilting laugh.) Edmund White, Samuel R. Delaney, and Mx Justin Vivian Bond offered blurbs, and younger readers and the press have been grabbing onto Faggots’ incendiary yet sophisticated tone. Could the recent wave of AIDS activist nostalgia and a Occupy-like disillusionment with big money Pride sponsorships (embodied locally, especially, by a Wells Fargo advertisement covering the entire front page of Bay Area Reporter’s Pride Issue and a Stoli-sponsored GLAAD Pride float) be buoying the book’s popularity?

“I think the re-emergence of interest in things like ACT UP is very interesting. When I came to San Francisco I was part of ACT UP, and — with everybody dying from drugs, suicide, and AIDS — there was a real drive to come together to confront this massive structural neglect and recognize how brutalities align themselves to bring about our annihilation. But nostalgia can be dangerous without recognizing the reality. There was a very real, very dangerous moment in the 1990s when activism suddenly became about discrimination in the military, of all things.

“It turned from trying to guarantee health care for all to being about whether or not we could go die faster in wars. Whose decision was that?”

Marke B. is the author of Queer: The Ultimate LGBT Gude for Youth (Zest)

 

A poly push?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
A poly push?

culture@sfbg.com

QUEER ISSUE Is San Francisco’s polyamorous community experiencing a renaissance? Pepper Mint, organizer of the recent sex education conference Open SF (www.open-sf.org), suspects the non-monogamous in the Bay Area have finally reached a critical mass. His proof? Over the weekend of June 8, OpenSF was attended by over 500 of the poly-curious and practicing.

It might be, however, that they’ve finally found something to relate to. Sonya Brewer, a somatic psychotherapist, OpenSF lecture facilitator, and queer woman of color, has been a practicing polyamorist for 15 years. Brewer pegged the high attendance numbers on Mint’s efforts to diversify the conference and include sexual minorities and other oppressed groups on its planning committee.

Those values were reflected in the conference’s keynote address, delivered by trans-identified sex educator Ignacio Rivera and transgender health educator and social justice activist Yoseñio V. Lewis. The two hosted a lecture entitled “Kink, Race, and Class,” which sought to inspire dialogue about how social forces play into the world of kink. It was one of the many unique talks over the weekend that both celebrated and critiqued the diversity and spread of the polyamorous community.

Looking over the list of lectures for the weekend — “Sex Work and Non-Monogamy,” “Fat Sluts, Hungry Virgins,” and “Trans Queering Your Sex,” to name a few — it was hard to decide which talks to attend.

I settled on two: Kathy Labriola’s “Unmasking the Green-Eyed Monster: Managing Jealousy in Open Relationships” and the Maggie Mayhem-led “Second Generation Poly.” Labriola’s hour-long talk examined jealousy from an anthropological perspective, highlighting it as a universal experience that manifests itself depending on one’s cultural upbringing. The bad news? Jealousy is unavoidable. The good news? It’s a learned behavior, and you can learn to manage it. Labriola provided us with a handy checklist to use in determining whether insecurities are based in fact or freak-out.

“Identify a situation that makes you jealous and ask the questions,” Labriola advised. “One, [do] I have a resource I value very much and I’m fearful of losing? Two, [does] another person wants that resource.? Three, [do] you believe you are in direct competition for something you want? Four, [do] you believe if push comes to shove you will lose out?” Unless you answered yes to all four, she counseled, your jealousy can be worked through.

Mayhem, dressed in a fluorescent orange space suit (a representation of her “out-of-this-world” situation, she said) sat on a panel with her partner in life and in porn Ned (www.meetthemayhems.com) and his polyamorous family: his father, and his father’s second partner — a non-hierarchical term, Maggie was quick to clarify. Maggie and her family discussed negotiating boundaries at sex parties, raising children with more than two parents, and the stigma parents of sex-positive offspring can encounter.

Given the general focus of Open SF, Maggie’s key advice had resonance: “Be the author to your own happily ever after,” she told us.

Make it better now

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Make it better now

yael@sfbg.com

Noted queer writer and speaker Dan Savage sent a hopeful message to LGBT youth with his 2010 YouTube video, “It Gets Better.” But many queer youth in the Bay Area say they aren’t willing to wait.

“If my adult self could talk to my 14 year old self and tell him anything, I would tell him to really believe the lyrics from “Somewhere,” from West Side Story. There really is a place for us. There really is a place for you. And that one day you will have friends that love and support you, you will find love, you will find a community. And that life gets better,” Savage said.

Savage and his partner Terry Miller’s message went viral. It inspired hundreds of similar videos and eventually led to the creation of the It Gets Better Project, headquartered in Los Angeles. The videos were a response to a tragic cluster of suicides by children bullied for seeming gay, a trend that was only unusual in that the media picked up on it. And for many teens across the country, the “It Gets Better” videos provided crucial hope and support.

But last week, I was talking to Stephanie, Lolo, Ose, and Mia Tu Mutch, four Bay Area teens, about what its like to be a queer youth today. We were talking at the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center (LYRIC), a center for queer youth in the heart of the Castro.

When I asked about the “It Gets Better” videos, they all had the same reaction: “Ugh. I don’t like those videos. I don’t like those at all.”

“Those videos are depressing,” Lolo said.

“Yeah. ‘Just wait ’til you’re an adult?'” Stephanie asked.

“Just wait ’til you’re an adult, and your problems will go away,” Mia said, shaking her head.

“And it’s celebrities, too,” Ose noted. “‘I got thousands of dollars, and it gets better!'”

The four of them are facilitators at LYRIC, leading weekly community-building workshops that deal with issues queer kids face. Between 17 and 21 years old, these youth are not waiting for it to get better. They’re doing it for themselves.

 

LYRIC’S OUTREACH

LYRIC definitely promotes pride and empowerment. Founded in 1988, LYRIC organizers worked to secure funding for a physical space a few years later. Since then, this purple house on Collingwood has functioned as a crucial center for Bay Area queer youth. It offers counseling, food, clothing, community building workshops that kids teach, and a safe place to hang out.

But LYRIC, like many nonprofits, has felt the impact of the severe government cuts to health and human services. As a result, its budget has suffered steady declines from approximately $1.2 million in 2008 to $954,000 this, year primarily due to shrinking government funding.

But LYRIC refuses to give up offering paid internships, a rarity in the nonprofit world.

“The City has made it clear that they no longer intend to invest significant funding into subsidized employment model programs — they want to serve greater numbers of youth at a much lower unit cost — even if we all understand that some of the most marginalized youth will no longer be getting the intensive level of support they need to make it to a successful adulthood” LYRIC’s Executive Director Jodi Schwartz told me, explaining that the organization is now growing support by more grassroots funding networks.

“We used to hire 60-70 young people per year, now it’s more like 20,” Schwartz says.

The organization still serves about 400 young people per year.

“I would guess we have 6,000 queer youth living in the city,” Schwartz said. “So we’re not reaching everyone. Not to say that all those 6,000 queer youth need a LYRIC, but they need community. We all need community.”

Youth from across the country come to San Francisco seeking that community. Often they have escaped intolerant, abusive, or dangerous situations in their families or hometowns. But when they arrive in this storied city, these youth are often disappointed.

“I was that kid who left a small town in Texas and who got to San Francisco as fast as I could,” Mia told me. “And I was like, you know, I’ll figure it out, I’ll find a job, and I’ll do this and that. And it was really hard.”

” I think that the difference is that there are more LGBT specific languages and policies, and organizations that are affirming. All of that is the best in the US, probably,” Mia said. “And there are all these cultural groups and all of that. But queerphobia and transphobia exist here just like it exists everywhere else.”

“So my big thing is how we have all these systems in place that make us a little more queer friendly,” she said. “But how do we actually get the public to stop hating people, to stop doing hate crimes, to stop bullying?”

Ose, who now lives in the Bayview, grew up closer to the city. But coming from a religious family in Modesto, he says, “I had heard things about the Castro itself. I always thought the Castro was the devil…I was a church boy.”

He remembers fear that someone he knew would recognize him in the forbidden neighborhood, that “my mom would find out and be like, what are you doing in the Castro? So I was scared to death my parents would find out I was coming to the Castro.”

That was two years ago. Now, Ose works in the Castro, and he was dressed in cut-off shorts and a slicked back Mohawk, long painted nails clicking on the table. “I’m hella gayed out,” he happily reports.

When Mia made it to San Francisco, she initially settled into the Tenderloin, rather than the gentrifying Castro.

“As a trans person, a lot of trans history is in the Tenderloin and there’s a lot of trans women who live in the Tenderloin and who work in the Tenderloin,” she explained. “So I feel more at home there. Even though it isn’t technically the gay neighborhood, it’s always been the queer ghetto and that’s where the low income and queer people of color live a lot.”

The Tenderloin is also the site of many of the services that queer youth use. Mia made some of her first local connections at Trans: Thrive, a program of the Asian Pacific Islander Center. And many of the kids at LYRIC, as well as the city’s other queer teens, benefit from Larkin Street Youth Services.

The homeless shelter oversees the only beds reserved for queer youth in the city, all 22 of them, a number Schwartz believes in inadequate. A report from Larkin Street in 2010 found that 30 percent of the homeless youth they serve identify as LGBTQQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning).

LYRIC is part of the Community Partnership for LGBTQQ Youth and the Dimensions Clinic Collaborative, which includes service organizations like the queer-specific health clinic Dimensions, the nearby LGBT Center, the Bay Area Young Positives HIV health and support nonprofit, and the city’s Department of Public Health. But LYRIC is one of only a few organizations that focuses on fun, informative community-building workshops.

 

ACCEPTANCE NOW

Savage promised queer kids that, in the distant future, they would “have friends that love and support you, you will find love, you will find a community.” But LYRIC’s workshops, largely envisioned and run by the youth themselves, show kids that they don’t need to wait: they can create those supportive networks for themselves, in the here and now.

Another such community-building effort was on display at the LGBT Center on June 15: Youth Speaks’ queer poetry slam Queeriosity. The show, which was preceded by five weeks of free poetry workshops for and by queer youth, brought together young queer people from across the Bay Area, and one could feel the love and support in the air.

“Queeriosity is important because, in the poetry scene, we have so many people with so many different backgrounds,” Milani Pelley, one of the show’s hosts and a poet who works with youth in the workshops, told me. “A lot of times people who get identified in the LGBT category, they don’t have that space where they’re front and center and it’s a space for them. It’s very important that we celebrate everyone.”

Pelley, 24, has been working with Youth Speaks since she was 16. She said the message of the It Gets Better videos might be too simple.

“Thinking about being an adult versus a teenager, adults go through the same things,” she said. “The only difference is it’s not encouraged to speak out about it, you’re supposed to act like you have it together and it’s okay.”

Mia said youthful teasing and bullying are precursors to hate crimes: “Bullying and hate crimes are related because it’s all about people not accepting you, and then violently reacting to who are. So either throwing insults or beating you up.”

On April 29, Brandy Martell, an African American trans woman, was murdered in Oakland in a likely hate crime. CeCe McDonald’s recent case has also exhibited the dangers and injustice trans women of color face. The young Chicago woman defended herself against a bigoted attacker who she ended up killing, only to spend time in solitary confinement while awaiting trial, get convicted on manslaughter, and, last week, be placed in a men’s prison to serve her sentence.

I asked the four LYRIC teachers about the campaigns of national organizations like the Human Rights Committee — such as marriage equity or LGBT soldiers — and they all shook their heads.

“There’s a huge disconnect between the national platforms of the major gay organizations and the actual realities of queer youth,” Mia said. “Like they don’t even have queer youth in the majority of their meetings, but then they act like they’re the ones fighting for our rights, you know.”

For example, she said “marriage equality wouldn’t affect me at all. Yeah, it would be okay, it would be better if it was equal across the board. But when you have people dying because of hate crimes, and dying because of bullying, and dying because they don’t have a place to stay and they’re on the streets, it’s like, I just feel like those are a lot more pressing than getting a piece of paper from the government.”

 

SETTING THE AGENDA

Mia serves on the city’s Youth Commission, where she’s designing training programs for service providers to work with LGBT youth. Ose is working with Schwartz to create programming for LGBTQ youth who don’t want to take the common path of rejecting religion and spirituality as they come to terms with other parts of their identity.

“I go to church a lot,” Ose explained. “I grew up as a Christian. And I wanted to touch base on that because a lot of times, the youth that I come across, the majority of them are being silenced…I’m still going through some issues with my own church, especially with my pastor because just recently I’ve heard that he dislikes me over the fact of the way I dress, the way I act, my feminine gestures.”

Stephanie sighed and said, “I wish there were more LYRICS around the city. One in Bayview, one in every district. And Oakland too.”

“People who provide counseling, food, clothes, water if you need it,” Lola added. “A safe space to go to, a place where you can make friends, and make connections. There need to be more places like that specifically for queer youth.”

Even in San Francisco, harassment is a reality in youth programs and schools. In 2009, the SFUSD studied Youth Risk Behavior in San Francisco’s elementary through high school public schools, and found that more than 80 percent of students reported hearing anti-gay remarks at school, and more than 40 percent said they had never heard school staff stop others from making those remarks. The survey also found that students who identified as LGBT were significantly more likely than their peers to report skipping school out of concern for their safety.

Queer youth will never stop finding informal networks of support. But structured settings like LYRIC can be vital. At places like LYRIC, youth find the community, the love, and the friends that Savage promised would appear with time — before they turn 18.

“It’s easier to build relationships and to build community when its structured, when it has a little bit of structure like, hey, this is a queer specified setting, we’re going to talk to each other, we’re going to hang out, we’re gonna do this, and then you kind of build community off of that. And because it’s based on identity, you feel more comfortable to talk about that,” Mia explained. “You have to change your reality. And you have to be the one to change it for yourself. Because ain’t nobody gonna make it better for you.”

Why do Lee, Chiu, and others want to stifle economic growth?

Sasha Cuttler
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16
Why do Lee, Chiu, and others want to stifle economic growth?

Why do Mayor Ed Lee, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, and San Francisco’s two major daily newspapers want to punish success? Because that’s exactly what their proposal to create a new gross receipts tax for businesses – in which corporations would be taxed more as they grow, thus encouraging economic stagnation – would do.

Right now, the city taxes businesses through a payroll tax, levying taxes based on the number of employees the company has. But under a gross receipts tax that would replace the payroll tax, employees have a disincentive to be productive and efficient and increase their companies’ profits because that would expose those companies to more of the city’s onerous tax burden.

Why would investors and employees want to grow a business in San Francisco when that would only submit them to higher taxes. Clearly, this is anti-business measure that is likely to plunge our local economy back into the depths of the recession. Don’t our leaders understand the need to help this fragile economic recovery?

Okay, okay, in case you haven’t guessed it yet, the previous three paragraphs are satire of the ridiculously overblown and misleading political rhetoric used by Lee and other critics of the city’s payroll tax, which they deride as as “job killer” that makes companies not want to hire new employees.

“Mayor Lee and Board President David Chiu proposed a gross receipts tax as an alternative to the City’s current payroll tax, which punishes companies for growing and creating new jobs in San Francisco,” Lee’s office wrote in a press release it distributed last week.

Yet my argument that a gross receipts taxes “punishes companies for growing” is just as logically sound as Lee’s argument that the payroll tax discourages companies from “creating new jobs” – and both arguments are also complete hyperbolic bullshit. But it’s seductively simple and widely parroted bullshit.

“To attract more companies to San Francisco and encourage existing employers to hire more employees, it is past time to do away with this tax,” our new neighbors down the hall, the editors of the Examiner, wrote in their editorial today, a oft-repeatedly refrain from the Chronicle and SF Chamber of Commerce as well. It later added that switching tax methods “wouldn’t penalize companies for employing people or paying them well. And city policy wouldn’t give employers any incentive to shed employees during a downturn.”

But the reality is that the 1.5 percent payroll tax is too small to really be a factor in the decision by corporations to add new employees, something they are already loath to do unless forced to by rising demand. It is simply one imperfect gauge of the size of a company and its ability to pay local taxes, just as the gross receipts tax is.

Health insurance costs, which Lee’s CPMC deal doesn’t adequate contain, is a far bigger factor in a company’s hiring decisions. So is commercial rent, which Lee’s corporate welfare policies are causing to go up downtown and throughout the city.

For decades, conservatives have tried to sell the general public on bogus trickle down economic theories that we all benefit from corporate tax cuts and that people will simply stop working if you tax them, ideas that should have been discarded as they were discredited. But they’re back with a vengeance, in supposedly liberal San Francisco of all places, actively peddled by key Lee supporters like billionaire venture capitalist Ron Conway, who only recently dropped his Republican party affiliation in favor of declined to state.

But it’s time to call out this voodoo economics for what it is: self-serving bullshit that ought to be rejected by citizens of a city that prides itself as being more educated and enlightened than the rubes in the flyover states that have been so thoroughly manipulated by the Republican Party and Blue Dog Democrats, to the detriment of our entire country.

Now, the Examiner’s argument that the business tax reform proposal would broaden and stabilize the tax base is a sound and meaningful argument, which is why the concept enjoys widespread support from across the ideological spectrum and is worth doing (although progressives rightful argue that if the tax base is being broadened then the city should reap some benefits from that, logic that Lee inexplicably resists).

Yet as the City Hall debates that will shape the details of business tax reform begin in a couple of weeks, it’s time to drop this misleading “job killer” label that has been promulgated by Republicans and other fiscal conservatives over the last decade and have an honest debate over what’s best for San Francisco’s private and public sectors.

Bringing the heat

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Bringing the heat

On June 13, more than 400 people, mainly from law enforcement and non-profits, gathered for a conference in downtown Oakland’s Marriott Hotel. Outside, a group of angry protesters gave impassioned speeches before trying to enter the hotel. The complex set of issues involved? The conference was organized to discuss tactics for arresting and charging child sex traffickers, but the protesters said that the conference would do nothing but further the state’s harmful impact on the lives of sex workers.

I wasn’t able to attend the conference itself; the Alameda County District Attorney’s office decided at the last minute that press would not be permitted inside. But from the conference’s description and a talk with Casey Bates, head of DA’s Human Exploitation and Trafficking Unit (HEAT), it seemed that the conference was mostly focused on improving efforts to by law enforcement to find people underage people who are having sex for money and prosecute their “traffickers,” a designation not much different than “pimps.”

According to Bates, the HEAT unit has focused on people selling sex on the street and online, and most are from California or nearby states, although he hopes the efforts can expand to people who are trafficked in from other countries.

Under the law, anyone selling sex under 18 years of age is classified as a CSEC- commercially sexually exploited child.

As DA Nancy O’Malley emphasizes on the HEAT unit website, “We have been fighting to shatter the perception of children as prostitutes and criminals undeserving of protection.  These young people are victims of child abuse.”

The sex workers rights movement, organized by people in the sex industry who see their work as legitimate, has largely called for decriminalization of prostitution and other forms of sex work since the movement off in the 1960s, with new concerns in the 21st century. Many groups have argued that police increase the violence in the lives of prostitutes, harassing and arresting them while not taking violence against sex workers seriously. The much older anti-trafficking movement, (or, as it was called at the beginning of the 20th century, anti- “white slavery,”) has many proponents who disagree, saying all prostitution involves some form of coercion. The two movements have a long history of conflict, and on June 13, this dynamic was thrust into the public eye.

Policing the problem

This conference was described as “comprehensive event designed to enhance the capacity of law enforcement and practitioners to combat commercial sex trafficking of children (CSEC).” 

“Of course we support refuges, housing, and other services for these children,” said Rachel West, an organizer with US Prostitutes Collective. “Why aren’t the police focused on that instead of spending hours on the net looking for women, or going out on the street doing street sweeps?”

But US Prostitutes Collective, part of the International Prostitutes Collective, which has been campaigning for decriminalization of prostitution since 1975, didn’t organize last week’s protest. This time it was Occupy Patriarchy, an Occupy Oakland affiliated group.

Occupy Oakland has not been shy about calling out police behaviors, from infamous incidents like the tear gas-heavy offensive on the Occupy Oakland camp last fall to shootings of local teenagers. The HEAT Conference, which was organized by the DA’s office and played host to law enforcement from across the country, was no exception.

“Whose inside this conference?” said one demonstrator who spoke during a 20-minute speak-out in front of the hotel that afternoon. “61 official speakers are law enforcement agents, DA workers, or politicians with anti-sex worker reputations. 39 speakers are individuals or representatives of non-profits. The vast majority of these work directly with law enforcement or politicians to criminalize sex workers. Where is the voice of the sex workers?” 

“What we find disturbing as anti-capitalists and anti-authoritarians is these police who, to sex workers, are oppressing us,” Clarissa McFaye, one of the demonstrators, told me in an interview. “We know that police are a very violent, fearsome presence in the lives of all sex workers, and we feel the only way that we can abolish child trafficking and exploitative forms of labor, which is all labor in actuality, is to abolish the police state.”

“They think working to enforce criminalization isn’t going to help child victims of sexual slavery. We know they exist, but we don’t feel this is a solution. We don’t think enhancing the ability to arrest people is a solution,” said McFaye.

“We really appreciate a lot of the effort that some of the non profits are doing,” McFaye continued, “We want to talk to them and form a sense of camaraderie with them and tell them that we don’t need the cops. We don’t want them. They’re bad for us.” 

Sex workers rights groups have long spoken out about police treatment of prostitutes. Stories of police harassing sex workers, going through with sexual acts while undercover before making prostitution arrests, and demanding sex in exchange for letting an arrest slide are fairly common. As McFaye told me, “they’re condoning child trafficking because they make deals with pimps.”

“Not to mention that hella cops are tricks,” she added.

Pimps and traffickers, children and minors

The HEAT Unit’s website lists 237 charges and 160 convictions made by the unit between 2006 and 2011. The statistics include trafficking as defined by California Penal Code Section 236.1, California’s Human Trafficking Statute. But they also include charges and convictions for pimping and pandering, sexual assault, kidnapping, and burglary, and the website specifies that “these statistics do not differentiate between child and adult victims, though the majority of HEAT victims are minors.”

The anti-trafficking statute defines a human trafficker as “Any person who deprives or violates the personal liberty of another with the intent to effect or maintain a felony violation of ” one of several anti-pimping, pandering, and solicitation Penal Code violations.

This includes Penal Code section 266 which defines a pimp as someone who, knowing another person has commercial sex, “lives or derives support or maintenance in whole or in part from the earnings or proceeds of the person’s prostitution.” 

But for Bates, “The way a pimp-prostitute relationship works is the pimp takes 100 percent of the cash.”

I brought up the pimp question with Cyd Nova, harm reduction services coordinator at San Francisco’s for sex workers-by sex workers health clinic, the St. James Infirmary.

“I know a lot of street-based sex workers who are totally independent,” said Nova. “Some do split their money with pimps or managers.”

Nova also said pimping’s legal definition can often have questionable consequences. “Legally that would be most peoples partners, children, friends.”

“I have met sex workers who have had their partners charged under pimping codes, which was not their relationship with that person,” Nova told me.

Many “pimping” relationships fall somewhere in between “peoples partners, children, and friends” and “the pimp takes 100 percent of the cash.” Sex workers, a criminalized class, often experience violence from both pimps and clients- but fear for their own consequenes if they report the crimes. I asked Bates his opinion on granting immunity from prostitution charges or a person who comes forward to report all too common violations committed against sex workers like rape, assault and theft.

“We do this all the time in the context of other types of crime that we work with. If it’s a murder, we may be willing to negotiate with our witness to determine whether or not is appropriate to give immunity for the person to testify against this other person, in exchange they won’t be prosecuted for the crime that they committed.”

But Nova said that striking that deal can be a major problem.

“One thing that is an issue for people forced into the industry is they are unable to receive services until they agree to testify against their trafficker. This doesn’t work for the majority of people, and it’s a major issue when you’re talking about services for trafficking victims,” he said.

At the St. James Infirmary, “We have people who have been in situations where they feel that they wanted to leave, but are not willing to bring criminal charges against the person,” he continued.

Nova also described a distinction between the terms “child” and “minor.”

“People have choices in how they use their bodies, and that includes youth. We are living in a world where sometimes people have to choose options that are not ideal,” he said. 

McFaye painted a similar picture, saying that “sex work is a form of work that all genders do sex work can make a lot more money than other options.”

“It allows me to do my political work as well as work a few times a week, instead of working at McDonalds. When I was 17 years old I tried to get a job, couldn’t find anything but shitty house cleaning jobs. Then some sex workers I knew showed me the ropes, and my life’s been a lot better ever since,” she said.

I described a similar situation, in which a minor chooses prostitution to make desperately needed money or escape an abusive situation, to Bates. “There are going to be people that make that claim,” he responded. “There’s no doubt about it. Part of the phenomenon is that a lot of people that are being abused, when they’re being abused, don’t even realize that they’re being abused. That’s a big issue,” said Bates. “People have made the claim, they did what they had to do in a difficult circumstance, and they don’t really see themselves as being a victim of crime. And what I’m suggesting is, that’s not uncommon, it’s part of the victimology actually.” 

He added, “I’m speaking specifically to people that are being trafficked. What you described doesn’t sound as much like a trafficking situation.”

But the law doesn’t allow for that kind of nuance. 

“That is a clear distinction that we want to draw. This is focused on commercial sexual exploitation of children,” Bates said. “When you become 18, you’re given a set of rights and you’re treated differently under the law.”

Solutions

The HEAT Unit’s model is unique, and if the conference has its intended consequences, it may be replicated throughout the country.

For minors that the HEAT unit identifies as CSEC, “The goal is to try to stabilize them, to figure out what services they need, what situation they came from and figure out how we can get that child back on track,” Bates told me.

“Sometimes, that requires that we detain them for a period of time so we can figure out what services are necessary. That’s somewhat controversial, because some people say that’s not appropriate. We believe that it’s in the interest of these girls initially, to figure out what’s necessary. That to turn them back on the street means to turn your back on them, period.”

Many sex workers’ rights groups, however, argue for antoher solution entirely- decriminalization of prostitution. Part of the argument for decriminalization is that sex workers would feel more comfortable coming to police with reports that they are their colleagues had been victims of crimes like rape, assault or theft. 

As Nova said, “California is currently using anti-trafficking federal funds to target all sex workers. They say, if we arrest a bunch of sex workers, some of them are going to be trafficked. This has not proven to be very effective, whereas decriminalization would result in people, who are in coercive work situations, feeling more comfortable coming forward and asking for help.

“They need an evaluation of what kind of practices are going on and what results they’re turning out,” Nova said. “A study where they have conversations with people who have been arrested and detained and talk about what their life was like, what was detrimental and what was beneficial.”

For some of the more anarchist-leaning protesters, however, the police should play no role in the solution.

“What we think would help is if we as sex workers come together is if we come together and combat this exploitation,” McFaye told me.

I asked if there was anything the police could do.

“No,” said McFaye. “They can turn in their badges. That’s what they could do.” 

When the sex workers’ rights movement took off in the ’60s, they joined the debate that had been going on surrounding prostitution and policing for a century. The movement continues- and on Wednesday, a distinctly anti-capitalist side of it made noise. These groups may be piping up more, as the Californians Against Sexual Exploitation (CASE) Act, which would increase funding and resources for policing sex traffickers, goes to the ballot this November.

Your love: Open SF conference teaches, showcases polyamorous community

Andrew Lam
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Your love: Open SF conference teaches, showcases polyamorous community

“I have a partner that I live with, two girlfriends, and a number of lovers” 

In my San Francisco, it’s not uncommon to know someone who identifies as polyamorous, or who participates in multiple loving and intimate relationships. 

In fact when I talked to Pepper Mint, conference organizer for OpenSF, he told me that the non-monagamous community in the Bay Area has finally reached a critical mass. His reasoning? Over the weekend of June 8, Open SF was attended by over 500 of the poly-curious and practicing. 

As his community expands, Mint thinks it is necessary to recognize the multitude of voices that compose polyamorous San Francisco. “I feel it is important to highlight our similarities while acknowledging our differences,” he told me as we sat on the floor outside of one of the many conference rooms at the Holiday Inn where OpenSF was in full swing around us. 

The weekend started with the Pink play party at Mission Control. There was a keynote address from trans-identified sex educator Ignacio Rivera and trans-gendered health educator and social justice activist Yoseñio V. Lewis. The two also hosted a lecture entitled “Kink, Race, and Class.”

The lecture sought to inspire dialogue about how race, racism, and class appear in the world of kink. It was one of many unique talks over the weekend that both celebrated and critiqued the diversity and spread of the polyamorous community.  Other offerings available to OpenSF attendees included “Sex Work and Non-Monagamy,”  “Fat Sluts, Hungry Virgins,” and “Trans-Queering Your Sex.” 

In another hallway that weekend, Sonya Brewer — who facilitated the “Cultivating Healthy Boundaries” lecture on Sunday — suggested the conference was well attended due to Mint’s effort to include a diversity of individuals, including sexual minorities and other oppressed groups on the planning committee. Brewer, a somatic psychotherapist and queer woman of color, has been a practicing polyamorist for 15 years. 

“It’s about finding out where your yes’ and no’s are to really connect with other people,” said Brewer. “In our culture we get taught not to listen to our bodies. It’s about teaching people their forgotten skills of connecting to themselves.”

Mint described himself to be a straight-leaning bisexual with some gender variance. I watched him push back his shoulder-length purple hair to kiss one of his female lovers hello as he confidently navigated our interview and managed the conference. 

When I asked him to describe his poly structure Mint said, “I have a partner that I live with, two girlfriends, and a number of lovers.” He was raised in a polyamorous home, and talked openly about how his childhood environment help him grow into a healthy, sex-positive community leader. “When creating a sex-positive polyamorous space there is an importance to two things; skills — communication and transparency — and building community connections. People who participate in community usually succeed in polyamory.”

For my own itinerary, I settled on two lectures: Kathy Labriola’s “Unmasking the Green-Eyed Monster: Managing Jealousy in Open Relationships” and “Second Generation Poly,” a panel featuring porn couple Maggie and Ned Mayhem and members of their family. 

Labriola’s hour-long talk examined jealousy from an anthropological perspective, highlighting it as a universal experience that manifests itself depending on one’s cultural upbringing. Her bad news? Jealousy is unavoidable. Her good news? It’s a learned behavior, and you can learn to manage it. During the lecture, she provided us with a handy checklist to use in determining whether insecurities are based in fact or freak-out. 

“Identify a situation that makes you jealous and ask the questions,” Labriola said, breaking down the checklist. “Number one, [do] I have a resource I value very much and I’m fearful of losing? Number two, [does] another person want that resource? Number three, [do] you believe you are in direct competition for something you want? Number four, [do] you believe if push comes to shove you will lose out?”

This list was one of the practical tools Labriola gave the auienced to manage their jealousy. She also discussed guided imagery, treating jealousy as a phobia, and boundary setting. The audience had several questions for Labriola once the lecture was over. My personal favorite was when an audience member asked how to deal with a jealous partner. Labriola simply replied, “Just  shut up and listen.” 

Maggie Mayhem — dressed in a fluorescent orange space suit, a representation of her “out-of-this-world situation” — sat on a panel with partner Ned, his father, and his father’s “second partner” (a non-hierarchical term, Maggie clarified for me later.) They discussed negotiating boundaries at sex parties, raising children with more than two parents, and the stigma many parents of sex-positive children can encounter. Mayhem encouraged the audience to, “Be the author to your own happily ever after.”

I left OpenSF feeling newly inspired, and informed about the diverse landscape of the Bay Area’s poly community. The conference encouraged its participants to create doctrines of love while keeping a critical and open perspective. And it provided a place for the polyamorous to come together. “People who try to create their own non-monogamy usually fail,” said Mint. “People who participate in community usually succeed. Being a part of non-monogamous community greatly increases the chance of being successful with non-monogamy, because the skills required are simply not provided by mainstream culture.” 

Distant craving

Andrew Lam
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0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS After two days of eating nothing but barbecue, fried chickens, and cupcakes, we started actually craving health food. I speak for the whole de la Cooter household, of which I am a small but important satellite. When I’m there, the kids come and jump on my bed in the morning, and mom and dad get to sleep a little longer.

That’s my importance.

Oh, and I am the one who cleans the cellar — mostly so I can put things in it. But still.

It’s nice to feel like you are part of a family, maybe you’ve noticed. And I have had no shortage of family in my life, but the blood ones are mostly very far away, so I can’t very well bathe their kids and sing them to sleep, let alone play with them.

It was nice when I was a nanny and got paid for all of the above, but I think I like being “like family” even better.

For one thing, I can argue for fried chicken and barbecue, and win! That was how it went my first day back: Barbecue for lunch, fried chicken for dinner.

And the next day was K. Chunk’s birthday, so we made pancakes with almost everything in the world in them for breakfast, by request, and then had pretty much cupcakes for lunch.

Now, Crawdad de la Cooter’s mister, Mr. Crawdad de la Cooter, makes THE best cake I have ever had. That’s why I will always, no matter where in the world I am, come chugging home for his kids’s birthdays. That’s one reason.

And it’s not anything fancy, either. Chocolate cake with white frosting. But you wouldn’t believe how moist. You wouldn’t believe how perfectly iced. Your teeth crunch then cream through the sugary, buttery quarter-inch of heaven, which blends so beautifully with the cakey softness below . . . you want to cry. But you’re too busy licking your lips and angling for your next bite.

I don’t even like cake! I’m a pie girl, all the way.

But now I like cake, thanks to Mr. Crawdad.

Anyway, after the birthday party, when the dust and wrapping paper had cleared and the Chunks de la Cooter were playing with their toys and it was time to start thinking about dinner, Mr. Crawdad says what he almost always says, at such times: Nature’s Express.

And whereas normally I would counter with, “Barbecue,” or “Fried,” I was like, “Damn straight.” And he and me grabbed our jackets and headed down to Solano to pick up.

Nature’s Express is exactly like it sounds, only moreso. It’s not just health food fast food; it’s vegan. The last time I craved vegan food was in 1997. And to give you some idea how long ago that was, it was 15 years ago.

As I recall, I hated it, but that was out of sheer curmudgeonliness. Though I am not likely to crave specifically vegan fare for another 15 years, I loved Nature’s Express. Loved it.

As in: new favorite restaurant. For real, Chunks.

I mean, sure, at first when I saw the bookshelf of vegan propaganda and the coolers full of kombucha, I almost ran screaming from the bright, friendly little joint.

But I’m glad I didn’t. The avocado and quinoa wrap was delicious, especially when I got down to the pickled ginger and jalapenos. There was also hummus, lettuce, and cabbage slaw in there, and the nice thing about vegan is you don’t have to worry about mayonnaise!

I also got the 5-A-Day smoothie, with kale, cucumber, beets, and celery, plus fruit. In fact, I take back what I said about 15 years. I’m craving another one of these earthy, refreshing juices right now.

The Chunks de la Cooter split a Brazilian Super Model smoothie, which is apple, açai, mango, and flax seeds, and I tried this and liked it, but not as much as mine.

Loved the quinoa salad, the cumin-lime dressing, with corn, cilantro, peppers, and onion.

Crawdad got the “essential lentil” — lentils over greens with an avocado dressing, hot sauce, and more slaw — which I tried, and liked.

Her mister got the spicy chik-un taco, about which he was very excited, so I tried this too. It was fine. Fake meat, though.

That’s where I draw the line.

NATURE’S EXPRESS

Daily 11:30am-8pm

1823 Solano, Berk.

(510) 527-5331

D, MC, V

No alcohol

Hospital standoff

Andrew Lam
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2
Hospital standoff

steve@sfbg.com

The controversial and long-awaited proposal by California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) to build a 550-bed luxury hospital atop Cathedral Hill and to rebuild St. Luke’s Hospital has finally arrived at the Board of Supervisors — where it appears to have little support.

So far, not one supervisor has stepped up to sponsor the deal, and board members say it will have to undergo major changes to meet the city’s needs. “There are still a lot of questions that remain,” Sup. David Campos told us, citing labor, housing, community benefits, and a long list of other issues that he doesn’t believe CPMC has adequately addressed. “It tells me there’s still more work to be done.”

CPMC, which is Sacramento-based nonprofit corporation Sutter Health’s most lucrative affiliate, has been pushing the project for almost a decade. Its advocates have subtly used a state seismic safety deadline for rebuilding St. Luke’s — a hospital relied on by low-income residents of the Mission District and beyond — as leverage to build the massive Cathedral Hill Hospital it envisions as the Mayo Clinic of the West Coast.

But the project’s draft environmental impact report shows the Cathedral Hill Hospital would have huge negative impacts on the city’s transportation system and exacerbate its affordable housing crisis. And CPMC has been in a pitched battle with its labor unions over its refusal to guarantee the new jobs will go to current employees or local residents and be unionized. There are also concerns with the market power CPMC will gain from the project, how that will affect health care costs paid by the city and its residents, and with the company’s appallingly low charity care rates compared to other health care providers (see “Lack of charity,” 12/13/11).

CPMC had refused to budge in negotiations with the Mayor’s Office under two mayors, for which Mayor Ed Lee publicly criticized the company’s intransigence last year. But under pressure from the business community and local trade unions who support the project, Lee cut a deal with CPMC in March.

That development agreement for the $2.5 billion project calls for CPMC to pay $33 million for public transit and roadway improvements, $20 million to endow community clinics and other social services, and $62 million for affordable housing programs, nearly half of which would go toward helping its employees buy existing homes.

While those numbers seem large, community and labor leaders from San Franciscans for Healthcare, Housing, Jobs and Justice (SFHHJJ), which formed in opposition to the project, say they don’t cover anywhere near the project’s full impacts. And given that CPMC made about $180 million in profit last year in San Francisco alone — money that subsidizes the rest of Sutter’s operations — they say the company can and should do better.

“This is about standing up to corporate blackmail,” SFHHJJ member Steve Woo, a community organizer with the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, told us.

 

PIVOTAL PROJECT

CPMC is perhaps the most high-profile project the board will consider this year, one that will impact the city for years, so the political and economic stakes are high.

The Planning Commission voted 5-1 on April 26 to approve the deal and its environmental impact report, citing the project’s economic benefits and the looming deadline for rebuilding St. Luke’s. The Board of Supervisors was scheduled to consider the appeal of that decision on June 12 (after Guardian press time), but activists say supervisors planned to continue the item until July 17.

In the meantime, the board’s Land Use Committee has scheduled a series of hearings on different aspects of the project, starting June 15 with a project overview and presentation on the jobs issue, continuing June 25 with a hearing on its impacts to the health care system. Traffic and neighborhood impacts would be heard the next week, and then housing after that.

Calvin Welch, a progressive activist and nonprofit affordable housing developer, said the project’s EIR makes clear just how paltry CPMC’s proposed mitigation measures are. It indicates that the project’s 3,000 new workers will create a demand for at least 1,400 new two-bedroom housing units. Even accepting that estimate — which Welch says is low given that many employees have families and won’t simply be bunking with one another — the $26 million being provided for new housing construction would only create about 90 affordable studio apartments.

“We’re going to end up, if we want to house that workforce, subsidizing CPMC,” Welch told us.

Compounding that shortcoming is the fact that the Cathedral Hill Hospital is being built in a special use district that city officials established for the Van Ness corridor — where there is a severe need for more housing, particularly affordable units. The SUD calls for developers to build three square feet of residential for every square foot of non-residential development.

“That would require building 3 million square feet of residential housing with this project,” Welch said. “We don’t think $26 million meets the housing requirement for this project, let alone what was envisioned by this [Van Ness corridor] plan.”

SFHHJJ is calling for CPMC to provide at least $73 million for affordable housing, with no more than 20 percent of that going to the company’s first-time homebuyer assistance program. That assistance program does nothing to add to the city’s housing stock and critics call it a valuable employee perk that will only increase the demand for existing housing — and thus drive up prices.

But the business community is strongly backing the deal, and the trade unions are expected to turn out hordes of construction workers at the hearing to make this an issue of jobs — rather than a corporation paying for its impacts to the community.

“After a decade of discussion, debate and compromise, the city’s departments, commissions, labor, business and community groups all agree on CPMC,” San Francisco Chamber of Commerce President Steve Falk wrote in a June 8 e-mail blast entitled “Message to the Board of Supervisors: Don’t Stand in the Way of Progress.”

“The fate of our city’s healthcare infrastructure now lies solely with the Board of Supervisors,” the Chamber says. “When it comes time to vote, let’s insist they make the right choice.”

Yet it’s simply inaccurate to say that labor and community groups support the deal, and both are expected to be well-represented at the hearings.

 

CARE FOR WHOM?

Economic justice issues related to health care access and costs are another potential pitfall for this project. SFJJHH activists note that no supervisors have signed on to sponsor the project yet — which is unusual for something this big — and that even the board’s most conservative supervisors have raised concerns that the city’s health care costs aren’t adequately contained by the deal.

“There’s a significant amount of dissatisfaction with the deal, even among conservatives,” SFJJHH member Paul Kumar, a spokesperson for the National Union of Healthcare Workers, told the Guardian.

On the progressive side, a big concern is that CPMC is proposing to rebuild the 220-bed St. Luke’s with only 80 beds, which activists say is not enough. And even then, CPMC is only agreeing to operate that hospital for 20 years, or even less time if Sutter’s fortunes turn around and the hospital giant begins losing money.

CPMC Director of Communications Kathryn Graham, responding by email to questions and issues raised by the Guardian, wrote generally and positively about CPMC and the project without addressing the specific concerns about whether housing, transportation, and other mitigation payments are too low.

On the jobs issue, she wrote, “Our project will create 1,500 union construction jobs immediately—and preserves and protects the 6,200 health care professional jobs that exist today at the hospitals. Currently, nearly 50 percent of our current employees live in San Francisco. During the construction phase of this project, we are committed to hire at least 30 percent of workers from San Francisco. We will create 500 permanent new jobs in just the next five years—200 are guaranteed to be local hires from underserved San Francisco neighborhoods. We don’t know where you got the ridiculous idea that our employees must reapply for jobs at our new hospitals. That is incorrect.”

Yet CPMC has resisted requests by the California Nurses Association and other unions to be recognized at the new facility or to agree to card-check neutrality that would make it easier to unionize. And union representatives say CPMC has offered few assurances about staffing, pay, seniority, and other labor issues.

As one CNA official told us, “If they aren’t going to guarantee jobs to the existing employees, those are jobs lost to the city.”

“We’re giving Sutter a franchise over San Francisco’s health care system for 30 to 40 years, so we should ensure there are basic worker and community protections,” Kumar said.

Welch and other activists say they believe CPMC is prepared to offer much more than it has agreed to so far, and they’re calling on the supervisors to be tougher negotiators than the Mayor’s Office was, including being willing to vote down the project and start over if it comes down to that.

“They make too much money in this city to just leave town,” Welch said of CPMC’s implied threat to pull out of San Francisco and shutter St. Luke’s. “It’s bullshit.”

Alerts

Andrew Lam
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0

yael@sfbg.com

THURSDAY 14

Solitary confinement at Pelican Bay, Audre Lourde Room, Women’s Building, 3548 18th St., SF; www.womensbuilding.org. 6:30pm, free. This panel discussion on the use of solitary confinement in the criminal justice system comes soon after a class action lawsuit challenging solitary confinement in California prisons. The Center for Constitutional Rights filed the lawsuit, Ruiz v. Brown, May 31 on behalf of prisoners at Pelican Bay State Prison. The plaintiffs have spent between 10 and 28 years in solitary confinement, generally spending at least 22 hours per day alone in windowless cells, and often denied letters, visits, any sunlight, or time spent outdoors. Many of the plaintiffs also participated in last year’s hunger strikes against inhumane conditions in prison, including solitary confinement. This lawsuit may be the crucial next step in their fight.

FRIDAY 15

India to Ireland, Sports Basement, 1590 Bryant, SF; www.indiatoireland.org. A brother and sister who rode bicylces12,000 km from India to Ireland are back with photos and stories. See what they saw and hear the tales at this fundraiser for Room to Read. The international nonprofit works “to promote literacy and gender equality in education by establishing libraries, constructing classrooms, publishing local-language children’s books, training educators and supporting girls’ education.”

SATURDAY 16

Art, culture and resistance, Redstone building, 2940 16th St., SF; www.norcalsocialism.org. 6pm, $5-10 suggested donation. What’s the music of today’s social justice movement? If it’s anyone, it’s The Coup, and frontman Boots Riley. Riley has written and performed powerful and revolutionary music for decades, from hip hop edutainment concerts that promoted efforts like the Women’s Economic Project Agenda and Copwatch to traveling guerilla hip hop concerts in protest of Prop 21 in 2000. Recently, he’s been organizing with Occupy Oakland. In July, he’ll be teaching a workshop at the Socialism 2012 conference in Chicago; the next month his book, Lyrics in Context, will be released. On Saturday he’ll discuss a tradition he helps to keep alive in Oakland: how art and resistance work together. Refreshments and mingling to follow.

Juneteenth festival, parade starts at African American Arts & Culture Complex, 762 Fulton St., SF; www.sfjuneteenth.org. Parade at 11am, festival runs through June 17. Start summer off right with the biggest Juneteenth festival on the West Coast. Juneteenth commemorates the announcement of the abolition of slavery and celebrates African American heritage, and this year will mark the 62nd annual Juneteenth in the Fillmore District. The two-day festival kicks off with a parade, followed by a family-friendly weekend complete with a classic car and motorcycle show, basketball games, fashion show, petting zoo, pony rides, live entertainment, community info booths and health fair, and more.

SUNDAY 17

African American veterans and the Civil Rights Movement, Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, 6501 Telegraph, Oakl; www.marxistlibr.org. 10:30am-12:30pm, free. Despite growing up in a United States that still had Jim Crow laws, African Americans fought in wars throughout the 20th century. When many of them returned and joined in civil rights and black liberation movements, however, they risked their lives once again. Perhaps best known is Medgar Evers, civil rights leader and World War II soldier who was assassinated by a Ku Klux Klan member in 1963. This event will explore the many veterans who joined civil rights struggles, their reasons for doing so, and how, in many cases, experiences in military service prompted involvement in the struggle back home. It will also feature a screening of the documentary Negroes With Guns, which follows the life of Army and Marine Corps veteran Robert F. Williams, who later took up arms against violent racist groups like the KKK as part of his work with the Black Armed Guard.

Sutter’s CPMC deal isn’t healthy

Zelda Bronstein
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Sutter’s CPMC deal isn’t healthy

At 10am on Friday, June 15, at the main chambers of the Board of Supervisors, the first of a series of public hearings will be held on specific aspects of the  development agreement governing the $1.9 billion Sutter Health/California Pacific Medical Center proposal to expand and centralize the giant health-care outfit’s health center by building a new 555 bed hospital at Geary and Van Ness. The deal involves demolishing the existing 220-bed hospital at St. Luke’s at Mission and Cesar Chavez and rebuilding a new 80-bed facility, expanding the Ralph K. Davies hospital at Duboce and Noe and closing down the old Children’s Hospital in Laurel Heights.

The hearing will be the first before the Board of Supervisors. Thus far, the project has been before only the executive branch: the Planning Commission and the mayor. After a brief introduction on the overall project the hearing will focus on the issue of jobs.

This is the largest project to be negotiated by the Lee administration — and although the mayor introduced it to the board in May, not one supervisor has yet joined him to sponsor the legislation. That’s an an odd situation given the importance of the project – and the fact that Mayor Lee can usually count on an automatic four votes from the conservative faction of the board. But not this time.

The hearing was requested by a coalition of more than 60 community, neighborhood, labor, and environmental organizations — San Franciscans for Healthcare, Housing, Jobs and Justice (SFHHJJ) — which has been closely following the project for the last two years.  Members of the coalition have already appealed the project’s environmental impact report, passed last month by the Planning Commission, and SFHHJJ has developed a series of amendments to the agreement that it has been pressing on the Board of Supervisors.  Board President David Chiu agreed to set a series of hearings on the project before it voted on, along with the determination of the appeal of the EIR, in  late July.  SGHHJJ hopes to use the hearings to get across the serious shortcoming of the agreement.  In addition, depending upon the appeal of the EIR,  a law suit may well be filed by some members of the Coalition.

In short, what starts next Friday is a big deal.

Not only is it a big deal in the development war that is at the heart of San Francisco politics, but it also is a big deal given what may well be done by the Supreme Court in deciding the constitutionality of all or part of the Affordable Health Care Act. If Obama’s health reform is struck down by the court, in all or in part, which seems almost certain, Sutter/CPMC’s plan will most definitely take on even more importance for the future of health care and its costs in San Francisco.

Sutter currently controls about a third of the market for health care in San Francisco.  With the construction of this project, it will control about 40 percent — a portion most knowledgable observers feel will give it market dominance  and an ability to actually set health care costs in San Francisco. Sutter’s business model — as shown in Berkeley when it took over Alta Bates and elsewhere in the state – demonstrates that  with a dominate market position, it jacks up prices.

As the San Francisco Chronicle noted in 2010: “…Sutter Health Co. has market power that commands prices 40 to 70 percent higher than its rivals per typical procedure — and pacts with insurers that keep those prices secret”.

A US Supreme Court that weakens or strikes down health care reform will simply re-establish the status-quo ante, a situation in which Sutter will thrive.

And that’s why the board’s conservative members are not supporting Mayor Lee’s deal: it simply does not protect the city — itself a major health care consumer for both its workforce and Healthy San Francisco — from Sutter’s history of turning market power into high health care charges.

SFHHJJ want the development agreement amended to place a cap on the costs charged to the city, allowing Sutter no more than 115 percent of the average charged  by  San Francisco’s other private, nonprofit hospitals.  It also wants Sutter/CPMC low charity care payments pegged at an average of what other nonprofit hospitals contribute, and it is calling for rebuilding St. Luke’s in San Francisco medically underserved south east to 180 beds, not the sure-to-fail size of 80 beds.

But there’s even more to deplore about the proposed deal.

In housing, although the EIR showed that a demand would be created for some 1,500 new two-bedroom homes, Sutter/CPMC agreed to only provide funds to build about 90 such homes. Such a massive shortfall will boost housing prices all other San Franciscans will pay.

The project’s impact on public transit at the Geary / Van Ness intersection will be large and ongoing. More than 20,000 new car trips will be generated at that intersection by the new hospital. Plans for a Bus Rapid Transit raised roadway for the 38 Geary — the most used bus line in the city — will have to be altered at an unknown price since the project calls for all auto traffic to enter the site on the Geary Avenue side.

Again, San Francisco taxpayers will be on the hook to pay for these new costs.

But it is the jobs aspect of the deal that is the most distressing. Sutter/CPMC has a long history of labor disputes with its workforce. Last year it replaced nurses who took a day off to protest their working conditions, and a replacement nurse hired by Sutter accidentally killed a patient. Sutter/CPMC refuses to agree to hire all of its 6,000 current employees for the new facilities. It’s requiring them all to apply as new workers, losing all of their seniority, with a real prospect that many currently employed San Francisco residents will lose their jobs once the new facility opens. All that Sutter/CPMC has agreed to do is hire 50 residents a year for four years – 200 new local jobs, total.

The  June 15 hearing will focus on the jobs issue and public comment is sure to be hot on this laughable “commitment” agreed to by the “jobs” administration.

Calvin Welch is a longtime community organizer living in San Francisco. He currently teachs a course in the development history of San Francisco at San Francisco State University and the University of San Francisco.

High on Fire drops off (escapes?) the Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival Tour

Sue Vaughan
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High on Fire drops off (escapes?) the Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival Tour

Disappointing news for High on Fire fans today — a press release from the veteran Oakland metal trio’s PR firm announces that the band will be dropping out of this summer’s Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival.

Here’s the deets from the release:

“High on Fire has announced that it will be forced to miss this summer’s Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival as front man and guitarist Matt Pike enters treatment for alcohol rehabilitation.  The award winning power trio (also featuring drummer Des Kensel and bassist Jeff Matz) will put its scheduled touring plans on hold indefinitely as Pike takes the necessary steps towards regaining his health.”

And remarks from the band, also from the release:

“High on Fire would like to thank everyone involved with the Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival for the opportunity to be a part of this year’s tour,” said the band in a statement. “We regretfully will have to bow out as our friend and bandmate begins his recovery, but very much appreciate having been asked to be a part of this summer’s festival run.”

It’s good to hear Pike, a thunderous presence beloved not just for HOF but also his role in stoner-metal titans Sleep (which just played Oakland Tues/5), is tending to his health. And in a sense, this break — though it comes soon after the April release of De Vermis Mysteriis, the band’s, pardon me, fucking awesome new album — could be the best thing in the long run. Think about it: without the lure of HOF pounding off riffs old and new, the Mayhem fest has just a handful of acts worth a trip all the way to Mountain View (July 1) to see. Slayer, yes. Motorhead, yes. Anthrax…ok, sure.

But as these sprawling mega-concerts tend to go, the rest of the lineup — with Slipknot at the top of the bill — is honestly one bit of bad news (The Devil Wears Prada; for hilarious guffaws, check out the Wikipedia entry explaining, oh-so-earnestly, how the band came by its oddly familiar name) after another (never heard of “I the Breather” until moments ago, but “I the making a value judgment based on the name and the crap YouTube vid I just watched”).

Anyway, my point is, once Pike recovers and is back in brutal-rock-god mode, maybe High on Fire will play some headlining gigs (yay!) in non-suburban settings (double-yay!) without bands like I the Breather crapping breakdowns all over the lawn. Get well soon, Matt Pike: heshers of the world need you more than ever these days.

Bike advocates have made real progress, but there’s still a long way to go

Sasha Cuttler
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Bike advocates have made real progress, but there’s still a long way to go

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum mused on how far this influential advocacy group has come during its 20th Annual Golden Wheels Awards last night, noting that the first such award recognized the commercial landlord at 555 Montgomery Street for installing indoor bike parking.

“Back then, that would get you a Golden Wheel Award,” she said, noting that this year’s award to the Building Owners and Managers Association of San Francisco (BOMA) was for its support of legislation requiring all commercial buildings in San Francisco to provide indoor bike parking. “We’ve come a long way in 20 years, clearly.”

In addition to the majority of the Board of Supervisors who showed up to offer their support, Shahum ticked off a long list of other city and regional officials who ride bikes and understand their potential as an increasingly important transportation option during the era of peak oil, traffic gridlock, and public health problems.

“Regularly, we have these top leaders in the city who are biking because they love it, biking because they’ve always biked,” Shahum said, citing the Sunday Streets road closures and the school district going from discouraging cycling to facilitating it as signs of the pro-bike mindset that has taken hold of San Francisco.

The fact that SFBC recognized BOMA – a powerful downtown player that has progressed from seeing cyclists as enemies to embracing them as allies – was telling of the mainstream embrace of bikes.

“We get it, we’re learning,” Meade Boutwell, president of BOMA’s board, told the crowd as he accepted the award, going on to say that “less cars are good for all of us.”

It was a lovely if ungrammatical sentiment and a sign of just how far the business community has come in accepting the imperative of promoting alternatives to the automobile. But there’s still a bit of a disconnect in San Francisco about the role that bikes play in the world’s great pro-cycling cities, evidenced partly by Boutwell’s opening comment, “Under this polyester suit is lycra.”

Keynote speaker Gil Peñalosa – executive director of 8-80 Cities, a nonprofit that promotes creation of cycling infrastructure that is safe and inviting from those 8-80-years-old – mocked the MAMILs (Middle-Aged Men In Lycra) and the notion that people should be athletic or wear special equipment to be able to cycle in cities.

“We dress normally, we act normal, and so on,” Peñalosa said, later arguing that, “Cycling is for everybody.”

In Boutwell’s defense, much of mainstream San Francisco still has a hard time accepting cycling as a normal, safe option. When the San Francisco Chronicle covered Pealosa’s visit to Sunday Streets last weekend – our version of the car-free ciclovias that Peñalosa pioneered as a city official in Bogota, Columbia more than a decade ago – reporter Sam Whiting was jarred by the guest’s casual approach.

“They had come from overseas and were riding in jeans and without helmets, both rookie mistakes,” he wrote of Peñalosa and his wife (“Sunday Streets welcomes its source of inspiration,” 6/4).

But Peñalosa argues that the real mistake is when cities cater primarily to automobiles at the expense of the safety and livability of their neighborhoods, and treat cycling as a dangerous fringe activity. He argues that cities should be built primarily around pedestrians, “but very close to the pedestrians is the cyclists…I think that cycling is just a more efficient way of walking.”

Public transit is important and should be robust, he said, but it’s just not as efficient, user-friendly, economical, or environmentally beneficial as bikes. “We need to walk and bike as a part of everyday life and then we’ll be much healthier,” he said.

Peñalosa urged the crowd to be politically active and push the city to prioritize bikes over automobiles, noting that even in wealthy neighborhoods, only about a third of residents drive cars. And from a design perspective, he said city officials must choose between “Streets for cars or streets for people.”

Once we make the latter choice, Peñalosa laid out an agenda for achieving that goal, starting with slowing vehicle speeds to no more than 20 mph in residential areas.

He cited statistics showing that only about 5 percent of pedestrians hit by cars driving 20 mph will die, whereas the fatality rate shoots up to 80 percent when the vehicles are traveling 40 mph. And for streets in which cars are traveling faster than 20 mph, he said it’s imperative to have bike lanes that are separated from cars by physical barriers, rather than just lines painted on the street.

He noted that Seville, Spain drastically increased its cycling rate in just a few years by committing to building bike infrastructure, and that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel installed that city’s first physically separated bikeway within his first 30 days in office and has perhaps the US’s most ambitious program for installing new bikeways. “San Francisco should not be any less than Chicago,” he said.

In Cogenhagen, which already boasts some of the world’s highest rates of urban bicycle use, Peñalosa said the city has sought to capture more long-distance riders by building 200 miles of “cycle superhighways” – which includes two lanes in each direction to facilitate both fast and slow riders – all for the price it costs to build about a half-mile of subway.

The goal, he said, is to make cycling as “easy, fast, and convenient” as possible, and to apply the political pressure to make that a priority because “if you aren’t doing those things then someone else is and someone else is setting the agenda.”

Wage theft task force approved

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The Board of Supervisors June 5 voted unanimously to create a wage theft task force. The task force will make recommendations to city departments concerning the prevention and correction of wage theft in the city.

Wage theft refers to employers paying less than their employees are due, and can include not paying extra for overtime, not allowing breaks, confiscating tips, and paying less than minimum wage. A 2010 study of labor conditions in Chinatown restaurants conducted by the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) found that some 76 percent of employees did not receive overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours in a week, and roughly half were not being paid San Francisco’s minimum wage.

The industries where wage theft is prominent range from restaurants and retail to domestic work. 

Approval of the task force is a step forward for groups like CPA that have been working to combat wage theft for years. It builds on the wage theft prevention ordiance, passed last July. The ordinance doubled the fine for employers who retaliate against workers that seek recourse for wage theft, and enhanced the power of the cit’s Office of Labor Standards and Enforcement (OLSE).

The Progressive Workers Alliance- a coalition of CPA, Young Workers United, the Filipino Community Center and others- advocated for the task force and helped bring in dozens of supporters to the meeting. 

Workers who suspect that their employers have violated local labor laws often come to these groups for help. Between the OLSA and advocacy groups, the people following up with these claims see a widespread problem. According to Shaw San Liu of the CPA, there are “probably hundreds if not thousands coming forward every year, and there are many more who don’t.” 

“There have been experiments in coordinating with the City Attorney and with the health department to revoke food permits,” said Liu. 

She hopes “the task force will build off these successful examples and see how we can expand them to a more comprehensive strategy.”

 

Welcome back to SF President Obama! Now, say Supevisors, give us our marijuana

Andrew Lam
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Welcome back to SF President Obama! Now, say Supevisors, give us our marijuana

Not that it’s ever a good idea, but avoid driving downtown today like the plague — President Obama’s in town! And, (as reported by SFGate), SF supervisors want him to take a stance on pot. Sup. Christina Olague has penned a letter co-signed by Sups. David Campos, and Scott Weiner that is a solid finger-wag at the current federal administrations actions against the medical marijuana industry. Here’s the meat of it:

 

We believe strongly in addressing medical cannabis as a public health issue, and we will strive to fully implement state law by protecting not only our patients, but our property owners and dispensary operators as well. We want to work with President Obama on a public health solution for medical cannabis at the federal level, once he wins a second term. In the meantime, the Department of Justice must respect our laws and honor the President’s commitment on this issue. Honoring this commitment can start by taking no further action against the nine landlords of City-permitted facilities here in San Francisco.

 

Those “nine landlords” refer to the property owners of the five SF cannabis dispensaries that have already closed, and the additional four that are set to close this month. The federal government has sent threatening letters to dispensary landlords that posit extensive jail time and civil forfeiture for those landlords that continue to allow federally-illegal drug trafficking on their property. 

Kudos to the new Sup. Olague for taking a stand. Of course, the letter’s premise is that the Sups. are staunch supporters of Obama’s re-election, they’re just asking him to improve on this particular issue. It begs the question: why would he make capitulations to win support that is already in pocket?

Tickets are sold out for his lunch at the Julia Morgan Ballroom (465 California, between Montgomery and Sansome Streets), although his campaign website encourages you to get on the waiting list — be careful, general admission tickets start at $5,000. The President’s only other scheduled stop, says SFGate, is at a “small roundtable” at One Market Plaza. 

Afterwards, the President will head south to Los Angeles to attend the annual fundraising gala for the LGBT Leadership Council, where he will no doubt be greeted affectionately for his “I support gay marriage”isms of last month. 

40 percent reporting: Not a lot of change

Zelda Bronstein
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Witrh 40 percent of the precincts reporting, there’s been very little change in the results, which is surprising: Typically the absentees don’t reflect the election-day turnout. But Prop. A is still going down by huge margins, Prop. B is still winning (and at this point, that one’s probably in the bag, striking a blow against the privatization of public resources and offering a vote of no-confidence in the direction of the city’s Rec-Park department).

It appears likely that there will be an expensive November race for Assembly in D19, with the downtown-funded (but otherwise unknown) Democrat Michael Breyer who ran an almost-Republican campaign heading for a second-place finish against Assessor Phil Ting.

And there’s no change in the results for the DCCC.

I’m a little surprised (and disappointed) that Gabriel Haaland, a longtime incumbent, isn’t making the cut this time, and I’m surprised (and pleased) that newcomer Justin Morgan, a public-health physician, is still in the top 14 on the East Side. Zoe Dunning and Matt Dorsey, two very visible LGBT leaders (she on DADT, he on same-sex marriage) are running strong; Dorsey’s in the progressive camp, and Dunning, a former military officer, is more conservative. School Board member Hyrda Mendoza isn’t making the cut, either, which is odd for a citywide elected official.

At this point, it appears that theSF Democratic Party will be a more conservative organization than we’ve been used to over the past four years. At most, the progressives will have 14 or 15 votes out of 32 (24 elected and eight ex-officio). There are plenty of reasons for that, among them the retirement of some longtime progressive members (Aaron Peskin, Jane Morrison, Milton Marks); the redistricting that created a West Side district very few progressives could compete in — and the move by the more conservative elements of the party to run a slate that included Dufty and Cohen.

Things could still change; I could be wrong. But I don’t think I am.

The funny money against Prop. B

Zelda Bronstein
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The funny money against Prop. B

Credit where it’s due: My competitor and sometimes journalistic adversary Joe Eskenazi has a nice little piece on the weird money behind the campaign against Prop. B, a policy statement about the privatization of Coit Tower. He points out that such varied groups as the California Dental Association and the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians have coughed up money to protect the right of San Francisco officials to close Coit Tower to the public and rent it out for fancy corporate parties.

And how exactly did that happen?

Well, Eskenazi manages to tie Willie Brown into it. (He also calls this “Nimby against the Swells,” which isn’t quite fair — I don’t think the supporters of Prop. B are trying to keep anything out of their back yards. If anything, they want more noisy tourists and fewer quiet, subdued rich-people events. And I don’t think the “swells” are against it as much as the mayor, his Rec-Park director and big businesses that generally back the privatization of public resources.)

But there’s another interesting twist: I’m not sure the folks who gave to the Golden State Leadership Fund Political Action Committee, which is running a No on B independent expenditure, had any clue where their money was going.

Sure, the Chamber of Commerce and BOMA know what’s up, and it’s pretty clear why they like the idea of raising money for the parks by holding exclusive private events instead of by raising taxes. But the Indians? And the dentists? By what possible stretch do they care about a San Francisco ballot measure that has nothing to do with Native American rights or oral health?

Eskenazi may be right — maybe Brown called the Indians and asked, and they threw the money his way to help his buddy the mayor (while keeping the mayor’s fingers out of this particular political pie). But the Golden State Leadership PAC, through which all this money flowed, has been around for years and gives money to candidates all over the state. (It’s definately something of a slush fund for local races — files in the Secretary of State’s office show that in 2008, money from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. flowed in and out of the PAC as it ran a campaign against the San Francisco public-power measure, Prop. H. PAC money went to David Chiu, Phil Ting and Ed Lee for mayor.) It’s based in West Hollywood and the treasurer is a guy named William Molina.

I called the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians and the California Dental Association and asked them why there were helping fund a campaign against Prop. B in San Francisco. The press person at the dental group apparently had no idea what I was talking about and asked for more details about the contribution. I gave her the date and the PAC and I haven’t heard back.

The Indians didn’t seem to clear on Prop. B, either. Kenneth Shoji, a spokesperson for the group, told me by email:

The San Manuel Band of Mission Indians made a contribution of $25,000 to the Golden State Leadership Fund PAC with the expectation of helping to support candidate(s) for public office in the 2012 elections.  We do not control where or how the PAC might extend its support beyond that.

In other words: This Coit tower thing is news to us.

UPDATE: I got essentially the same message from the dentists. Alicia Malaby at the CDA writes:

 When an organization such as CalDPAC contributes to an independent expenditure committee, that committee may spend money on races and issues that CalDPAC supports, but may also spend money on other campaigns. CalDPAC does not control how those committees spend money, and in this case, CalDPAC has no interest in and no position on Proposition B.

UPDATE TWO: Ron Cottingham at PORAC just called me and said his group has no position on or interest in Prop. B. The money that went to the PAC was earmarked to support Rob Bonta for Assembly in the East Bay. Presumably the PAC folks keep track of such things.

Maybe not. Maybe Willie or someone else made a call. It happens all the time.  I mean, somebody clearly was raising money for this PAC, which right now isn’t doing a hell of a lot besides No on B in San Francisco. (Oh, I called Brown, too. He hasn’t called back. He never does. I still always try.)

Either way, it’s a classic San Francisco political story — and it reflects how muddy and corrupt local politics can still be, even in an era of electronic disclosure and ethics laws. Why, if the dentists and Indians don’t like Prop. B, didn’t they (or any of the others in the PAC) create a No on B committee, disclose who was behind it and let the voters know a little more about the real money trail? Why funnel all this cash through a little-known Southern California PAC?

And for that matter, why is there a sudden influx of late money in this race? Has the mayor and the Chamber types suddenly discovered that Prop. B might pass — and might set a precedent against future privatization efforts?

June 5 is Election Day. Vote early and often.

 

 

 

 

 

Dick Meister: Two big tests for labor

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By Dick Meister

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

Helping get President Obama re-elected tops organized labor’s political agenda. But for now, unions are rightly focusing on special elections this month in Wisconsin and Arizona, where other labor-friendly Democrats are being challenged by labor foes.

Coming up first, on June 5, is the Wisconsin election to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who’s been labor’s public enemy No. 1 for his blatant anti-union policies. He’s been acclaimed by anti-labor forces nationwide and as widely attacked by labor.

Both sides see the election as highly symbolic, a possible guide for those seeking to limit the union rights of public employees and other workers or, conversely, for those attempting to halt the spread of Walker-like attacks on collective bargaining in private and public employment alike.

There are many reasons for replacing Walker with his recall election opponent, Democratic Mayor Thomas Barrett of Milwaukee. The AFL-CIO has come up with about a dozen reasons, headed by Walker’s severe limiting of the bargaining  rights of Wisconsin’s 380,000 public employees – a key action that helped trigger what Obama has described as a national “assault on unions.”

The AFL-CIO also complains that Walker has:

*”Led Wisconsin to last place in the nation in job creation.”

*”Disenfranchised tens of thousands of young voters, senior citizens and minority voters with voter suppression and voter ID laws.”

*”Put the health care coverage of 17,000 people at risk with unfair budget cuts.”

*”Allowed the extremist, corporate-backed American Legislative Council to exercise extraordinary influence.”

*”Made wage discrimination easier by repealing Wisconsin’s Equal Pay enforcement law.”

*”Attacked public workers’ retirement security.”

*”Blocked the path of young workers to middle class jobs by repealing rules on state apprenticeship programs.”

*”Killed the creation of more than 15,000 jobs when he rejected $810 million in federal  funds to construct a passenger rail system between Milwaukee and Madison.”

*”Sponsored new tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations that will cost the state $2.4 billion over the next 10 years.”

*”Proposed cuts to the state’s earned income tax credit that will raise taxes on 145,000 low-income families with children.”

Despite all that – and more – polls show the recall vote could go either way, with lots of campaign funding for Walker flooding in from  corporations and other union opponents across the country.

Unions have lots of tough campaigning ahead, as they do in Arizona. There, on June 12, a special election will determine who will serve in the Congressional seat held for three terms by Democrat Gabrielle Giffords. She resigned in mid-term this year while still recovering from the serious wounds she suffered during a 2011 shooting in Tucson in which six people were killed.

Ron Barber, a Giffords’ staffer who was wounded in the Tucson attack, will challenge Republican Jesse Kelly in the race to elect a representative to serve the rest of Giffords’ term. Kelly, who ran a close losing race against Giffords in 2010 , opposes  much of what the AFL-CIO supports.

The labor federation is especially unhappy with Kelly’s support for GOP proposals in Congress “which would turn Medicare into a voucher system,” and for getting $68 million in federal stimulus funds for his family’s construction firm while at the same time attacking Obama for creating the stimulus program.

Apparently, says the AFL-CIO, “Kelly lining his own pockets with stimulus dollars is proper. Everything else is socialism.” The AFL-CIO is likewise unhappy with Kelly’s endorsement by organizations considered “extremist and racist” by civil rights groups.

Like labor, Barber is a strong supporter of Social Security and Medicare. But Kelly says that Social Security is a “giant Ponzi scheme” and that Medicare recipients are “on the public dole.”

He’s said health care is a “privilege” and so presumably should not be a government-guaranteed right, and claimed that “the highest quality and lowest cost can only be delivered without the government.”

Kelly wants to reduce the Federal Drug Administration “as much as humanly possible.” He’s also advocated an end to government food safety inspections, leaving individuals to do their own inspections rather than rely on “the nanny state” to do it for them.

No wonder labor is mounting major campaigns against Kelly in Arizona and Walker in Wisconsin. Labor victories are needed there to help protect unions, their members and many others from attempts to weaken the rights, protections and other essential aid provided through government.

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

Chevron meets amid angry shareholders, liability, and environmental disasters

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Chevron meets amid angry shareholders, liability, and environmental disasters

About 40 gathered outside Chevron’s San Francisco offices yesterday to mark its annual shareholder meeting. The demonstration was organized by OccupySF’s environmental justice working group, and used art and street theater to criticize Chevron’s involvement in hydraulic fracturing, a natural gas extraction process that may threaten parts of California’s water supply.

The afternoon protest came after a larger group showed up to Chevron’s world headquarters in San Ramon for the shareholder meeting that morning. According to Ginger Cassady of Rainforest Action Network (RAN), who helped organize the protest, it was a “big, colorful demonstration” with “over 100” in attendance.

Groups like the True Cost of Chevron and RAN’s Change Chevron campaign have been pressuring the company for years on a variety of issues. This year, workers and residents in areas where Chevron operates from Ecuador, Brazil, Angola and Nigeria travelled to San Ramon to voice their concerns. These ranged from oil-contaminated land in the Ecuadorian Amazon to an explosion on an oil rig off the shore of Nigeria in January. In that explosion, two workers were killed and more than 100 local people left the city for fear of contamination and other health risks caused by a fire that burned for months before going out on its own, despite Chevron’s efforts to contain the flames.

About 30 activists from around the world entered the meeting with proxy votes, according to Cassady. None interrupted the meeting, instead waiting their turn to speak. There were no arrests.

Some people with proxy votes, however, were not allowed access to the meeting. João Antonio de Moraes, national coordinator of Brazil’s United Federation of Oil Workers (FUP), was not allowed access, along with two representatives from United Steel Workers. Another worker, at the meeting to present in support of a resolution for worker safety, was initially blocked from entering but allowed access after a dispute, but had his presentation notes confiscated.

At the meeting, Chevron CEO John Watson announced “tremendous performance momentum” for the company, with “earnings of $26.9 billion” in the past year, according to a press release.

“Watson reinforced Chevron’s long-standing culture of safety and environmental stewardship, and resulting industry-leading performance,” the press release states. “He also highlighted Chevron’s commitment to partnerships that address health, education and economic development issues in the communities where the company operates, and Chevron’s global social investments of approximately $1 billion over the past six years.”

But Chevron is also suffering financially due to liability following oil spills, explosions, and contamination, a concern protest organizers say Watson failed to address. Representatives from Chevron did not return calls for comment.

The company recently settled with plaintiffs in Ecuador after an appeals court there ordered that they pay $18 billion in fines for spilling and deliberately dumping a total of 345 million gallons of crude oil in the Amazon rainforest of northeastern Ecuador.

Stockholders in attendance voted on eleven proposals, including seven submitted by shareholders, at the meeting. All of the votes went with the recommendation of the Board of Directors- including a proposal to reform the Board of Directors itself. That proposal asked that the Board of Directors find an independent Chair to head it up, as the current Chair is Chevron’s CEO, John Watson. The Board of Directors has the authority to incentivize and, if necessary, fire CEOs.

“We believe this presents a conflict of interest that can result in excessive management influence on the board of weaken the board’s management oversight,” read the proposal.

The proposal, along with several others, mentioned the Ecuador lawsuit, saying “we believe that independent board leadership is key at Chevron, given the questions raised about the oversight by the board of the CEO’s management and disclosure to shareholders of the financial and operational risks to the company from the $18 billion dollar judgment in the Ecuadorian courts in 2011.”

“With all these major legal liabilities that Chevron is facing a lot of people are concerned,” said Cassady.  “Chevron is profitable at the expense of worker safety, the environment, human rights and our economy.”

Other stockholder proposals dealt with safety, transparency, and the environmental impacts of Chevron’s international operations. A proposal asking Chevron to disclose money spent on lobbying received approximately 23 percent of votes, a proposal asking for a report on what the company has done to reduce the risk of accidents like the Niger Delta explosion received only eight percent of the vote, and a proposal that Chevron nominate a new board member with environmental expertise failed as well with 23 percent of votes cast.

Shareholders also voted on a proposal that Chevron release a report on the financial, environmental, and community impacts of hydraulic fracturing, the focus of the afternoon protest in San Francisco. The proposal received about 27 percent of the vote.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is the process of extracting natural gas by injecting dense underground rock formations with a pressurized mixture of water, sand and chemicals. It has been hailed as an environmentally friendly alternative to oil drilling, as natural gas burns cleaner than oil.

But protest movements have coalesced around fracking practices in the Appalachian mountains region and above the Marcellus Shale, as residents report toxic chemicals in their water supplies, endangering drinking water as well as water used for raising livestock and growing food.

The 2010 documentary Gasland included now notorious footage of residents near a Pennsylvania fracking operations whose tap water bursts into flames.

Fracking operations in California are less well known. The protest outside of Chevron’s San Francisco offices yesterday drew attention to this issue- and the extensive list of chemicals present in fracking solution.

“It’s happening in California, but it’s not really talked about” said Ellen Osuna. Osuna now lives in San Francisco, but moved from New York, where she says she worried about her water supply since it comes from aquifers near the Marcellus Shale.

The protest featured an 180-foot banner, painted by artist Ruthie Sakheim. The banner listed more than 70 chemicals found in fracking fluid, in alphabetical order.

“It’s not even halfway through the A’s” said Sakheim.

She also handed out bottles of water oil-colored water labeled “Frackelicious Frackwater Unsustainable Energy Drink.” The label listed some of the more toxic chemicals involved in the process under “ingredients” along with “no preservatives, no artificial flavors, 100 percent poison.”
 
According to a report released by the Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce, fracking fluid contains 750 chemicals, which “ranged from generally harmless and common substances, such as salt and citric acid, to extremely toxic substances, such as benzene and lead” as well as many carcinogens, according to the report.

These chemicals, along with gas itself, can enter water supplies when the casing on wells cracks or when wastewater containers spill.

The Safe Drinking Water Act of 2005 specifically exempts hydraulic fracturing, a lack of regulation known as the Halliburton Loophole.

Fracking currently takes place in nine California counties, including Sacramento, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Monterey.  But the extent of hydraulic fracturing in California isn’t well known, and yesterday, the California Senate rejected SB1054, which would have required energy companies to notify landowners before using hydraulic fracturing on or near their land.

In between chants of  “ban fracking now!” Sakheim told me that she spent several months painting the banner, and plans to continue the project of listing the chemicals involved in fracking in artistic form.

“I have three kids,” said Sakheim. “I really worry about what will happen to them with these corporations having so much control to influence government.”

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