“Human Be-In stories could fill a thousand books. One day they will.
Because the Be-In was designed as a genetic memory to be called on when needed.
Yet, one essential question has never even been asked, let alone answered. Of the multidozen books already written about that day in San Francisco’s Polo Field, Jan 14, 1967, the one question which has never been asked by all the scholars with their versions of the truth is this:
How could it be that 20,000 people arrived,
enjoyed the day in absolute peace (hitherto unknown) and with not a single policeman present to keep order?
1967 San Francisco was a hostile city. New youth energy was about to request/demand much needed changes in America – no need to list them since most have actually come to pass: official race hate is gone, gay hate is gone, the list is long.
To gather, in those days, in free assembly still required a PERMIT. A permit issued by a city that arrogantly refused it.
When the permit request was refused, I approached my friend, the late great attorney Melvin Belli, with this “really big problem”. Big because thousands of people with flowers , love, food and hope to share were ready to arrive at the Polo Grounds by the sea. Mel had the answer instantly – he sent his secretary downtown and asked and received in 5 minutes a permit for his birthday party at the Polo Field.
Jan 14 was not even his birthday. Armed with this piece of paper, the Be-In entered History.”
The original Human Be-In on Jan. 14, l967, was not just a giant hippy party. It had an important political purpose and political consequences and helped mobilize the youth movement against the war in Vietnam
By Bruce B. Brugmann
As a participant in Friday night’s Human Be-In, the pre-40th Anniversary “Summer of Love” event on Sept. 2,
I plan to provide a bit of revolutionary poetry/journalism (my phrase) from my old friend and journalism colleague, the late Allen Cohen. Allen was the editor of the Oracle during the Summer of Love in l967 and a major organizer of the Human Be-in in Golden Gate Park.
He also published and pioneered what I considered the most colorful newspaper in the world at that time.
And how he did it was a San Francisco classic. The Oracle was printed by the Howard Quinn Co., at 298 Alabama Street, along with the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Black Panther paper, the Berkeley Barb, and a host of underground papers and alternative papers of the era.
One night the Oracle staff came in with their flats and asked the pressmen, a rough and tumble crew, if they could get some special color in the paper. The hippies, some in bare feet, wanted this and they wanted that and they were rapidly driving the pressmen crazy. Finally, the pressmen just waved them to the press and said in effect, go ahead, do it your way. So the Oracle hippies went to work and put all kinds of colored dyes in all of the ink wells on the press, with no consideration for what color went where. The result was a rainbow of colors, all kinds, splashed across the front page and every page in the paper. The Oracle was an immediate sensation, on the streets and amongst mainstream newspaper people still tied to the old-fashioned letterpress printing.
Allen was creating a revolution in newspaper printing at the same time he was promoting a cultural and anti-Vietnam war revolution with the politics of the Be-in.
His wife, Ann Cohen, wrote me that “the media this year has left out how the Be-In came to happen and it feels as if it will go down in history as just a big party.” So she sent me a piece he did at the time on the politics of the Be-In and a letter, dated Jan. 1, 1967, asking Art Kunkin, editor of the LA Free Press, to publish an announcement
of the Be-In and “help the echoes of this event reverberate throughout the world.”
Allen crystalized a key issue of the time: that there was a “philosophical split that was developing in the youth movement. The anti-war and free speech movement in Berkeley thought the hippies were too disengaged and spaced out. Their influence might draw the young away from resistance to the war. The hippies thought the anti-war movement was doomed to endless confrontations with the establishment which would recoil with violence and fascism.”
The idea was to have a Be-In, a “powwow,” to bring the two poles together and to strengthen the youth movement and bring on the “revolution.”
Click on the continue reading link below to see how Allen described it all:
EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, scrambling to blunt community criticism of the Redevelopment Agency’s activities in Bayview–Hunters Point, has appointed a new agency director, Fred Blackwell. But the problem was not with the top of the agency (the outgoing director, Marcia Rosen, was neither corrupt nor incompetent) but rather with the entire direction that redevelopment has taken in San Francisco under several generations of mayors. It’s time to take seriously the suggestion of Sup. Ross Mirkarimi — that the agency be taken out of the mayor’s control and given to the district-elected supervisors.
Redevelopment is a powerful tool that has been terribly misused all over the nation, and the scars in San Francisco are real and lasting. A rapacious Redevelopment Agency determined to wipe out low-income housing devastated huge swaths of the Western Addition and South of Market in the 1960s, and the communities still haven’t fully recovered. Some people argue that the entire program should be abolished — that redevelopment should be consigned to the dustbin of bad urban history.
But at a time when it’s terribly hard for cities like San Francisco to raise money for affordable housing, basic infrastructure (see accompanying editorial), and ambitious programs like public power, the legal advantages of redevelopment are too good to give up. A state-chartered redevelopment agency sells bonds and raises money with nothing to back up the bonds except the projected increase in property taxes expected from improving a blighted area. The city can’t do that on its own; if it could, then raising, say, a billion dollars for affordable housing would be relatively simple.
In theory, the redevelopment agency could also fund municipal wi-fi, public power, and all sorts of other major projects.
The problem, of course, is that a lot of people in low-income neighborhoods don’t trust redevelopment — and given the history, it’s hard to blame them. But part of the essential problem with the Redevelopment Agency in past years has been its utter lack of accountability; the Western Addition and SoMa plans were drawn up in secret and executed with little regard for community input.
As long as San Francisco supervisors are elected by district, they will be, by definition, more accountable, closer to the neighborhoods, and less corrupted by money than any citywide elected official. Giving the board control over redevelopment is a far better model.
Plenty of cities allow their legislature to run redevelopment. The city councils of both Oakland and Berkeley also function as the directors of those cities’ redevelopment agencies. It’s time to move San Francisco into that column. *
EDITORIAL It’s annoying that San Francisco progressives and good-government voters will have to spend time and money this fall trying to defeat Mayor Gavin Newsom’s phony wi-fi initiative. It won’t be easy, either: the mayor is, in the words of one blogger, Sasha Magee, promising free ice cream. He’s telling San Franciscans that they can have wireless Internet access everywhere in town without paying a dime. Hard to get people to turn down that deal.
But the mayor isn’t telling the truth — and when this battle is over, the progressives need to offer a much better alternative.
For many people, the promise of Internet access in the mayor’s plan will prove to be entirely false. The wi-fi deal that Newsom has put together will probably work fine for people checking their e-mail on laptops from park benches downtown and outdoor tables at sidewalk cafés. But people who live or work deep inside buildings, far from windows and walls, won’t get any signal at all. And anyone who lives or works more than two stories up won’t get a signal either.
And of course, the free signal, when it works, won’t be fast enough to do much but (slowly) check your e-mail, if there are no attachments to download. You want real broadband, you’re going to have to pay a monthly fee.
That, as we have reported over and over, is because this is a private-sector deal: the network (if it’s actually built) will be owned by EarthLink and Google, and the two companies will be trying to make money off it. They’ll do that by selling premium service (that is, service at a rate most people would consider tolerable) and by targeting everyone on the network with ads.
Although the ballot measure is vague and legally meaningless, it will be the vote of confidence Newsom can use to push the Board of Supervisors to approve his EarthLink-Google deal — that is, unless, as has been widely suggested in the business media, EarthLink shifts direction and decides not to pursue any more municipal wi-fi deals and the city is left holding the bag. So advocates of a true universal broadband alternative need to start working now to present another, better option.
And the best way to do that is to begin drafting a comprehensive citywide broadband initiative for the June 2008 ballot.
Broadband access is and ought to be part of the city’s basic civil infrastructure — something that, like water (and, someday, electricity), is offered through a publicly owned and controlled system at the lowest possible rates. Low-cost broadband would be an immense advantage to local businesses and a huge convenience for local residents and (unlike Newsom’s joke of a deal) would actually do something to address the digital divide.
Wi-fi would be a part of the package, of course, but the plan should also include a citywide fiber-optic network that would bring reliable, fast, and technologically up-to-date Internet access to every address in the city. And while it would cost the city some money up front to build it, the system would almost certainly pay for itself in just a few years. And it could be paired with the construction of a citywide public power system.
Next June may not be a high-turnout election statewide, but in San Francisco, Democrats will be out in force with one of the most contested primaries in local history, pitting Assemblymember Mark Leno against Sen. Carole Migden for the Third District senate seat. Both candidates will be pushing voter turnout — and both can be pressured to support publicly owned municipal wi-fi as a campaign issue (and to back the growing antiprivatization agenda in San Francisco).
Defeating the mayor’s plan is just step one — and the time to start with step two is today.<\!s>*
Ruth Fallenbaum, a private psychologist based in Berkeley, decided to withhold her annual dues to the American Psychological Association this year. She told us her "gut reaction" was to withhold support from the 148,000-member organization because it allows — and even advocates — the participation of its members in coercive prisoner interrogations at CIA-run sites like Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
While the American Medical Association, the World Medical Association, and the American Psychiatric Association have banned doctors and psychiatrists from participating in these interrogations, many American Psychological Association members argue that psychologists can help ensure subjects are treated in an ethical and humane manner. Others — like Fallenbaum and members of the group she helped form, Psychologists for an Ethical APA — feel that an "ethical interrogation" is an oxymoron.
At the APA’s 115th annual conference, held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center on Aug. 17 to 20, Fallenbaum and many other psychologists and activists spoke — and rallied at the Yerba Buena Gardens — in favor of a rule that would have banned psychologists from engaging in military interrogations at US military prisons "in which detainees are deprived of adequate protection of their human rights."
The moratorium they advocated — which only recently made it onto the APA’s agenda — was overwhelmingly voted down Aug. 19 at the APA Council meeting after an hour of public comment that was mostly in support of the moratorium. A competing motion that reaffirmed the organization’s position against torture "and other cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment or punishment" was unequivocally passed, leaving a schism between the organization and the rejected resolution’s supporters.
For the latter, concerns remain about what role — if any — psychologists should play in detention centers, which are notorious for human rights violations that are tantamount to torture. Can these health professionals, abiding by the medical field’s basic tenet of "do no harm," retain their integrity in such lawless centers?
According to the APA, the new resolution frames a context for interrogations that is free of fear tactics and actually prevents abuse. Psychologists conducting interrogations can assist in "rapport building with the detainees rather than abuse," Rhea Farberman, the organization’s spokesperson, told the Guardian.
In its approved resolution, the APA for the first time lays out 14 forms of inhumane treatment that it opposes. The list includes mock executions, water boarding, sexual humiliation, isolation, exploitation of phobias, and induced hypothermia — all of which have reportedly been employed by American interrogators. In May the Department of Defense released a previously declassified report detailing the Army’s use of psychological techniques on Guantánamo Bay detainees in 2002.
The approved APA resolution also calls on the US government to reject acts of torture and limits the psychologist’s role to providing therapeutic benefits, ideally keeping the centers in compliance with international human rights law.
As US Army Col. Larry James, who serves as a psychologist at Guantánamo Bay, told the crowd before the vote, "If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die."
But that point simply reinforced the concerns many have about sanctioning torture. "If psychologists have to be there so detainees don’t get killed, those conditions are so horrendous that the only moral and ethical thing is to leave," Laurie Wagner, a psychologist from Texas, said at the meeting, eliciting cheers from many audience members.
Another debate raged over the APA’s Ethics Code 1.02, which says that psychologists — when in conflict with their own ethics and the law — can choose to abide by the governing authority. Fallenbaum and other psychologists we interviewed felt that the code has an eerie resemblance to pre–<\d>Geneva Convention sentiments of crimes committed on the basis of "just following orders." But the APA states that the code, which was last modified in 2000, was originally intended to settle domestic debates, namely whether or not a psychologist should have sex with a client.
The approved torture resolution includes loopholes, according to Dr. Neil Altman, a former member of the APA Council who proposed and drafted the defeated moratorium. For example, it could still allow sleep deprivation prior to interrogations as a way to soften prisoners up. And its reference to "significant harm" is one Altman finds ambiguous. "It still leaves wiggle room," he told us.
Stephen Behnke, the APA’s ethics director, remains adamant that psychologists play a key role in a safe and sound interrogation process, something that might not occur if they are not present. "Some people say that a psychologist’s role should be picking up the pieces [of trauma]. Some say it should be preventing it," Behnke told us. The resolution "was a very clear affirmation that we support both roles."
Bruce Crow, head of the Behavioral Medical Department at the Brooke Army Medical Institute in Texas, assigns psychologists to detainee centers, although he was undecided about their participation. "I don’t have an answer about whether they should or shouldn’t be there," he told us. Nonetheless, the newly passed resolution "will provide better guidelines for psychologists assigned to detention centers."
On July 20, President George W. Bush issued an executive order to relaunch a coercive interrogation program at CIA "black sites." Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, said psychologically manipulative techniques — subject to medical oversight — will be part of the program.
Taking this recent history into account, the conference hosted eight workshops — before and after the votes on the APA resolution and Altman’s counteramendment — with a theme of "Ethics and Interrogations: Confronting the Challenge."
A few hours after the torture measure was defeated, many of the workshop participants gathered for two hours of heated discussion at an ethics town hall. When media outlets videotaping the event were asked to leave by APA officials after a 10-minute time limit, an outcry for "more transparent practices" resonated throughout the room, and the journalists were allowed to stay for the remainder of the session.
Another moratorium could take more than two to three years to get on the APA’s agenda, according to Altman. But Dr. Steven Reiser, a senior faculty member in the International Trauma Studies Program at Columbia University and the founder of Psychologists for an Ethical APA, remains hopeful.
"We have to stand up for human rights," Reiser told us after the town hall meeting. "If we can’t stand up to risks, then we’re colluding with the forces that [deny] human rights."<\!s>*
Theater is where you find it this fall. For instance, at a warehouse party where assembled guests — artists, authors, bons vivants, goatees, and rockers of all stripes — get so carried away that a play suddenly breaks out among them (it can happen). Or in the offices and cubbyholes where a group of Dutch actors retreat midperformance to mine universal truths about the minutiae of mundane alienation. Or hovering just above the stage, where astrocosmonautical new best friends, stranded like circus performers, orbit together after a space shuttle disaster. Or on a kitschy converted kid shuttler known as the Mexican Bus, which a trio of disembodied Chicanos use to cruise the Mission. Theater, in short, is going to be a ubiquitous presence, maybe even the stranger eyeing your canapé, so watch out.
Sweeney Todd Kicking off its national tour in San Francisco, John Doyle’s pared-down, blood-bespattered hit Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s musical thriller also begins the American Conservatory Theater’s new season on a guaranteed high note.
Aug. 30–Sept. 30. Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF. (415) 749-2ACT, www.act-sfbay.org
San Francisco Fringe Festival It’s the 16th annual array of 50-minute feats, under-an-hour undertakings, and terse tirades. Perennially fast, cheap, and out of control.
Expedition 6 San Francisco hosts the world premiere of playwright-director (and well-known actor) Bill Pullman’s theatrically stylized, documentary-based take on the real-life encounter between Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts stranded in space after the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster. Think of it as Apollo 13 with a trapeze.
Sept. 8–Oct. 7. Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, bldg. D, Marina at Laguna, SF. (415) 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org
The MagiCCal Mission Tour Albeit now in Los Angeles, the performers of Culture Clash (Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, Herbert Siguenza) are forever local theater champs with deep roots in the Mission District. In a unique take on the guided tour, they climb (virtually) aboard the rolling fiesta known as the Mexican Bus to act as your (prerecorded) guides through their own private Mexico (del Norte).
Kommer This Yerba Buena Center for the Arts engagement marks the Bay Area debut for Kassys, the acclaimed Amsterdam-based Dutch theater company. A physically exact multimedia work, Kommer (Dutch for "sorrow") begins as a comical and poignant play about a group of friends gathered in mourning, then shifts gears to follow the individual actors out of the theater as each returns to a separate little workaday world, shedding light on "private and public moments of human frailty."
Sept. 14. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org
Lies You Can Dance To Flyaway Productions — known for athletic, risk-taking, society-critiquing, and female-empowered dance performances in venues from rooftops to industrial cranes — previews a work in progress at the Marsh: Lies You Can Dance To, an investigation of "how the human body responds to lies told over and over at the level of national policy," by artistic director and Bay Area dancer-choreographer Jo Kreiter, with music by Bay Area composer-musician Beth Custer.
Sept. 14–16. Marsh, 1062 Valencia, SF. 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org
Continuous City This work in progress exploring postmodern interconnectivity and our changing sense of place in a global context is a tech-savvy performance piece that attempts to extend the reach of theater by, among other things, uploading video contributions from a social networking site. It’s a collaboration between Bay Area actors, UC Berkeley students, and New York’s the Builders Association (responsible for the visually stunning Super Vision at the YBCA in August 2006).
Oct. 5–14. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Lower Sproul Plaza (near Bancroft at Telegraph), Berk. (510) 642-9988, theater.berkeley.edu
After the Quake As part of its 40th season, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre hosts the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production of a new play by renowned Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle), helmed by Tony Award–winning director Frank Galati (The Grapes of Wrath, Ragtime). Adapted from Murakami’s 2000 collection of short stories, After the Quake is an intimate tale about a shy storyteller and registers the tremors of an unstable world while confronting the challenge of living with fear.
Des Moines Campo Santo premieres Denis Johnson’s fast-paced, darkly poetic, hilarious, and fascinating multicharacter stream of confession and moral conflict. The brilliant author turned playwright’s past collaborations with the company include Psychos Never Dream and Soul of a Whore. In what Intersection for the Arts and Campo Santo are calling their take on dinner theater, the play will unfold amid a hip cocktail mixer in a warehouse not far from the company’s usual digs on Valencia.
Slouching Towards Disneyland Inimitable radio and stage personality Ian Shoales (a.k.a. Merle Kessler) and quick-fingered, ever-versatile musician-composer Joshua Raoul Brody team up for this wry, cranky song and rant, purportedly "a wild ride in words and music through world history from Genesis to George W."
Nov. 8–Dec. 1. Marsh, 1062 Valencia, SF. 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org
Are you looking for edginess? Do you prefer subtlety to pizzazz? The upcoming dance calendar has it all, however exotic or traditional your tastes. Fortunately, presenters seem to be aware of the Bay Area’s knowledgeable and supportive dancegoing audience. Cal Perfomances’ monthlong focus on Twyla Tharp — with the American Ballet Theatre and the Joffrey and Miami City ballets — and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ presentation of international companies whose work circles around big ideas (reality, peace, identity) are particularly noteworthy. Two smaller venues deserve equal attention: ODC Theater, long a stalwart supporter of local companies, has restarted an excellent presenting series of touring artists who can’t fill larger spaces; and CounterPULSE, which, in addition to showcasing fresh works, offers ongoing postperformance conversations between dancers and their audience.
Nora Chipaumire Chipaumire left the Bay Area to join Urban Bush Women, the country’s preeminent African American all-female dance group. Nobody who saw her last performance at ODC could possibly have forgotten the fierce intensity of the statuesque Zimbabwean’s dancing. She returns with Chimurenga, her one-woman multimedia show in which she meditates on her and her country’s history.
Erika Shuch Performance Project Shuch is never afraid of pushing sensitive buttons. She also does her homework and often works with collaborators. Her new 51802 looks at how incarceration imprisons and liberates those left behind.
Sept. 13–29. Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, SF. (415) 626-3311, www.theintersection.org
Chris Black Black really wanted to be a baseball player, but she ended up a dancer-choreographer of witty and theatrically savvy dance theater works. In her newest, Pastime, she gets to be both, with nine innings, nine dancers, and three weekends of free shows.
Sept. 15–30. Justin Herman Plaza, Embarcadero at Washington, SF; Precita Park, Precita at Harrison, SF; Golden Gate Park, Peacock Meadow, JFK near Fell entrance, SF. www.potrzebie.com
Mark Morris Dance Group Morris choreographing to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has to be either sublime or a travesty. By all accounts, he has succeeded where just about everyone else (except George Balanchine) has failed. The West Coast premiere of the tripartite Mozart Dances will surely enthrall the Morris faithful; it may even convert a few straggling skeptics.
Sept. 20–23. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Lower Sproul Plaza (near Bancroft at Telegraph), Berk. (510) 642-9988, www.calperformances.net
Smuin Ballet One of Michael Smuin’s great accomplishments was the encouragement he gave to performers whose dances could not be more different from his own. Amy Seiwert is an exceptionally gifted choreographer whose reach and expertise have been growing exponentially. Her new piece will be the seventh for the company, joining works by Smuin and Kirk Peterson.
Oct. 5–14. Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.smuinballet.org
Armitage Gone! Dance In the ’80s, Karole Armitage’s steely-edged choreography to punk scores shook up the New York dance world. Now, after 15 years of self-imposed exile in Europe, she has come home. For her company’s Bay Area debut, she brings the enthusiastically acclaimed Ligeti Essays and Time Is the Echo of an Axe Within a Wood.
Oct. 13–14. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 392-2545, www.performances.org
Oakland Ballet Company At 72, Oakland Ballet’s Ronn Guidi won’t give up. He is bringing the company back with a splendid, all–French music program: Marc Wilde’s Bolero, set to Maurice Ravel; Vaslav Nijinsky’s The Afternoon of a Faun, to Claude Debussy; and Guidi’s Trois Gymnopédies, to Erik Satie.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph When Joseph’s Scourge premiered at the YBCA two years ago, it was impressive though uneven. No doubt this hip-hop-inspired — and by now heavily traveled — look at family and society from a Haitian perspective has since found its groove.
Lines Contemporary Ballet Alonzo King opens his company’s 25th season with two world premieres inspired by classical music traditions that allow for improvisation, baroque and Hindustani. Freedom within strictures — leave it to King to find their common ground where none seems to exist.
Nov. 2–11. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 987-2787, www.linesballet.org
Faustin Linyekula/Les Studio Kabako For his return engagement, the Congolese choreographer is bringing his Festival of Lies, an installation–fiesta piece that both celebrates and mourns what his country has become. The Nov. 10 show runs from 6 p.m. to midnight and includes local performers.
Nov. 8–10. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 987-2787, www.ybca.org
Philip Glass fans are getting ready to camp out in San Francisco this fall.
The most influential composer of the late 20th century, Glass marked his 70th birthday Jan. 31, but the celebration continues throughout the fall in the Bay Area with concerts presented by SF Performances, Stanford University’s Lively Arts, the OtherMinds Festival, the SF Conservatory of Music, and the Cabrillo Festival in Santa Cruz in what has essentially become an ad hoc Glass festival.
At the center of this pan-Bay series of performances, recitals, lectures, and seminars will be the world premiere of Glass’s Appomattox, a major new commission by the San Francisco Opera. Set to a libretto by British playwright Christopher Hampton, the two-act Appomattox dramatizes the eponymous historical battle of the American Civil War and the events leading to the surrender of Confederate general Robert<\!s>E. Lee to US general Ulysses<\!s>S. Grant.
With a loss of 600,000 lives, the Civil War is easily the most devastating event in US history — but what have we learned? "The issues that were raised at the time are very much at the heart of social change in our country today: states’ rights, racism, you name it," Glass said recently from his home in Nova Scotia. "On the good side, we are still engaged in resolving these issues. That is one of the great things about our country, that we haven’t shied away from the issues. We embraced the difficulties as we tried to find solutions. We had some measures of success and some not. But [these issues] never stopped being relevant, because they were never resolved."
Glass’s previous operas, such as Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten, exude brilliant ideas and a sense of innovation, and in tandem with multimedia and experimental projects such as the high-profile cinematic Qatsi trilogy, they earned him a place among the 20th century’s great iconoclasts — not to mention a spot in the punch line to a joke on The Simpsons.
Yet Glass continues to evolve. With Appomattox, the composer has chosen a historical topic that lends itself to an arched yet linear narrative leading to a well-defined climax. And judging from his newer works, his compositional style has acquired a surprisingly lush lyricism. One might suspect Appomattox of being Glass’s first opera in grand 19th-century style, although the composer reassured those who fear he might be softening with age, "It is going to be a very confrontational piece. Some of the elements will be quite difficult for some people."
One such element is Appomattox‘s score, which integrates Old Testament hymns sung by black Southerners to welcome Abraham Lincoln during his visit to Richmond, Va.; military songs by the Arkansas First Brigade; and civil rights ballads.
"I wanted to include in the musical language the feeling and the musical culture of that time and of the present time," Glass explained. "While this was written for voices skilled in operatic singing, there are other kinds of music in this opera as well. This was for me one of the most interesting things, to try to bring together different music that would normally not be heard at the same time."<\!s>*
SELECTED PHILIP GLASS EVENTS
"Music of Philip Glass" Joined by cellist Wendy Sutter, Glass takes to the ivories in a recital of his chamber music, including the local premieres of "Songs and Poems for Cello," Etudes nos. 2 and 10, and "The Orchard for Piano and Cello."
Book of Longing Glass collaborated with singer-songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen on this multimedia work, staged by choreographer Susan Marshall, with the composer on keyboards at this West Coast premiere.
Oct. 9. (650) 725-ARTS, livelyarts.stanford.edu
OTHER TOP CLASSICAL AND OPERA PICKS
Il Rè Pastore Philharmonia Baroque opens the new season with a rare performance of this dazzling gem, written when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a mere teenager. Though the plot is a bit silly, the thrilling score is full of vibrant, infectious energy and includes a fabulous string of showstoppers that foretell the genius of the composer’s mature operas.
New Esterhazy String Quartet As part of a multiyear, comprehensive survey of Franz Joseph Haydn’s string repertoire in anticipation of the composer’s bicentennial in 2009, the local string quartet offers a fascinating exploration of Haydn’s quartets against a backdrop of early American history, finding unexpected associations linking the Old and New Worlds.
Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela The appointment of 26-year-old Venezuelan conductor Dudamel to the top post of music director of the LA Philharmonic shocked the American symphonic establishment, but Dudamel is the next great thing. He has proved his mettle as the guest conductor of major European orchestras and as the artistic director of the excellent Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, which recruits and grooms students from the poorest barrios in the country. They’ll perform works by Dmitry Shostakovich, Leonard Bernstein, and Latin American composers.
Nov. 4. (415) 864-6000,www.sfsymphony.org
For more Glass events and classical picks, go to Noise, the Guardian‘s music blog, at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.
1. Billy Childish Who can fathom the mind of a Childish? The insanely productive garage rock legend carves out a space in yet another medium, exhibiting the woodcuts and paintings that inspired him to cofound the stuckism art movement, a figurative response to the Charles Saatchi–championed so-called Young British Artists.
Sept. 5–30. Reception Sept. 5. Needles and Pens, 3253 16th St., SF. (415) 255-1534, www.needles-pens.com
2. "American Cuisine" To serve man? Ramekon O’Arwisters riffs on the notion that people of color will be dished at America’s last supper, cooking up sculpture and other pieces that examine the cultural codes crammed into Oreos, watermelons, bananas, and other loaded comestibles.
3. "Cliff Hengst and Scott Hewicker: S.A.N.E." The acronym may stand for the head-scratching "something, anything, nothing, everything," but we can all relate to the bad trips, group gropes, and ritualized get-downs of psychedelic flip-outs both yesterday and today. Those are the focus, filtered through ’60s exploitation flicks, of Hewicker’s paintings and videos, while Hengst relies on handmade signs and wall drawings to explore other unhinged hues. In conjunction with the exhibit, the duo have also put together Good Times: Bad Trips (Gallery 16 Editions), a volume of ill-fated acid-gobbling accounts.
Sept. 14–Nov. 3. Reception Sept. 14. Gallery 16, 501 Third St., SF. (415) 626-7495, urbandigitalcolor.com/gallery16/galleryframe.html
4. "John Slepian: Caged" Is it an alien hedgehog or some hairy displaced and dismembered body part? The onetime San Francisco Art Institute instructor’s interactive sculpture delves into what makes us feel human and how we identify with the, ugh, other.
5. Maria Forde Keep your peepers peeled for this follow-up to the San Francisco artist’s 2006 solo show, "A Strange 31 Years," which comprised 32 oils based on each pop culture–dappled year of her life.
1. "Bruce Conner and James Rosen" Multimedia artist and filmmaker Conner will show a number of highly detailed drawings, contrasting with Rosen’s take on the often-religious paintings of old masters.
2. "Something Was There: Early Work by Diane Arbus" An exhibition of more than 60 prints highlights the otherworldly, haunting world of Diane Arbus, capturing her early years, from 1956 to 1962.
3. "Will Rogan" The artist’s photographs work an uncanny magic as deceptively everyday subjects are choreographed in a poignant, poetic way.
Oct. 4–Nov. 3. Jack Hanley Gallery, 395 Valencia, SF. (415) 522-1623, www.jackhanley.com
GLEN HELFAND
The contemporary art world tends to get all academic and serious on us, so it’s interesting to note that a good number of fall gallery and museum offerings mine colorful, dreamy realms of spectacle, luxury, and humor — a welcome respite from all the truly problematic shit going on out there.
1. "Libby Black: The Past Is Never Where You Think You Left It" This Goldie winner may have left San Francisco for her home state of Texas, but the move has served to sharpen her handmade take on the LVMH luxury empire. Black’s new work includes a Louis Vuitton disaster-center cot, complete with deluxe valise and accessories that stow perfectly underneath, and a series of paintings that exude the pansexual myths of the West — as found in high-fashion adverts. It’s the perfect prelude to the Union Square opening of the retail dream house, Barneys New York, this fall.
2. "Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson" and "Jeff Wall" Fitting factoid: Danish artist Eliasson, the subject of a San Francisco Museum of Modern Art–organized survey, was actually commissioned by Louis Vuitton to create its 2006 Christmas windows. The works that constitute this much-anticipated show are large scale and immersive and use water, light, and scent to generate natural phenomena and delightful shifts in perception. We’re looking forward to the tunnel that will wrap around the fifth-floor catwalk. A related exhibition is a showcase for Eliasson’s BMW-sponsored hydrogen-fueled race car enmeshed in a skin of stainless steel and ice. If you need something with a different kind of theory, check out SFMOMA’s other big fall exhibit, a major survey of Wall’s glamorously, cinematically politicized light box–mounted photographs, co-organized by SFMOMA director Neil Benezra.
"Take Your Time" runs Sept. 8, 2007–Feb. 24, 2008; "Jeff Wall" runs Oct. 27, 2007–<\d>Jan. 27, 2008. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org
3. "Michael Arcega: Homing Pidgin" Bay Area artist Arcega’s stock in trade is a smooth fusion of easily accessible materials (his infamous manila folder galleon) and politically barbed pun (it was called Conquistadork). As part of the de Young’s Connections Gallery program, Arcega has been rooting around in the museum’s extensive Oceanic collections, creating new display contexts that highlight colonialization and the ensuing cross-cultural visual influences. Serious stuff, but Arcega’s sure to imbue it with incisive wit.
Oct. 6, 2007–Jan. 20, 2008. De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, SF. (415) 750-3614, www.thinker.org/deyoung
Oct. 29, 2007–Feb. 11, 2008. Geffen Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art, 152 N. Central, LA. (213) 621-1741, www.moca-la.org/museum/moca_geffen.php?
JOHNNY RAY HUSTON
1. Open Studios Yes, the museums and even some smaller spaces have epic shows planned this fall. But are any of these blockbusters as truly expansive as Open Studios, an event that’s also closer to the everyday creation of art in the city than any other? Look for an interview in our Pixel Vision blog with ArtSpan executive director Therese Martin, whose vision includes activist elements and who is bringing new facets to Open Studios.
Oct. 6–Nov. 4. Throughout San Francisco. (415) 861-9838, www.artspan.org
2. "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination" and "Douglas Gordon: Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from About 1992 until Now" These neighboring shows should illustrate waves in the flux between film and video and spark discord and discourse about their connections to museum space. Obviously, Cornell’s legacy is broader and richer than such concerns — as the rather opaque name of his exhibition hints, maybe? As for Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho is here.
"Joseph Cornell" runs Oct. 6, 2007–Jan. 6, 2008; "Douglas Gordon" runs Oct. 27, 2007–<\d>Feb. 24, 2008. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org
3. "Capp Street Project: Mario Ybarra Jr." SoCal contemporary artist Ybarra has made a metamural for our city, the result of intensive research into the history of murals and the history of the Bay Area. I can’t wait to see it.
Sept. 6, 2007–Sept. 6, 2008. CCA Wattis Institute, Logan Galleries staircase, 1111 Eighth St., SF. (415) 551-9210, www.cca.edu, www.wattis.org
4. "The Fox Sisters Crack Their Toes" Paintings that use glitter and beauty products as main ingredients are a special San Francisco treat, thanks to the polish — nail polish, that is — flair, and talent of Rodney O’Neal Austin and the late Jerome Caja. Now Jamie Vasta adds ambiguity to the practice; you’d have to be looking beneath the sparkle to figure out she’s butch and, in some cases, to realize that she’s even using something other than traditional ingredients.
5. "James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography" This year’s winners include Walt Odets. As a teen, Odets had the guts to photograph family friend Jean Renoir and the observant instinct required to do an excellent job of it. Today he discovers surprising planes of vision, details, and passages within everyday settings.
Oct. 23–Nov. 17. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org
STEVEN JENKINS
1. "There Is Always a Machine Between Us" Love your laptop more than your boyfriend? Logging on more than getting off? Salvage your relationship and sharpen your carpal-tunnel vision at this exhibition of interactive works inspired by and sourced from the Internet, where Chechen secessionists, mail-order brides, hand lickers, and Morrissey-mad conspiracy theorists meet the ghosts of David Wojnarowicz and Princess Di.
Sept. 6–Nov. 17. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org
2. "Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson" From some freezing fjord located in the dreamland between Vespertine and Volta comes Icelandic multimedia artist Eliasson, whose immersive installations play with temperature, moisture, and light to icy-hot effect. This ambitious retrospective — the artist’s first major US show — promises to transform SFMOMA’s pristine galleries into hallucinatory zones of global warming and feverish desire.
Sept. 8, 2007–Feb. 24, 2008. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org
3. "Hiroshi Sugimoto: History of History" A welcome follow-up to this summer’s spectacular Sugimoto retrospective at the de Young, this savvy exhibition juxtaposes the Japanese artist’s deceptively minimalist photographs with prehistoric fossils and 15th-century religious artifacts from his personal collection. Will this be a history of progress, faith, or violence?
Oct. 12, 2007–Jan. 6, 2008. Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin, SF. (415) 581-3500, www.asianart.org
4. "Biotechnique" Featuring a hothouse of hydroponic organisms, semiliving objects, mad-professor lab equipment, bacteria paintings, easy-being-green gizmos, and Silicon Valley inventions, the creepy-crawly conceptual "Biotechnique" digs beneath the topsoil of technology to unearth decidedly unnatural growths and cultures. Or, in the words of tennis racket–<\d>wielding arachnophobe Alvy Singer, "We’re talking major spider."
Oct. 26, 2007–Jan. 6, 2008. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2700, ybca.org
5. "Marie-Antoinette and the Petit Trianon at Versailles" Froufrou flourishes pile up like buttery petits fours in this frilly, silly, splendid re-creation of Kirsten Dunst’s shopaholic alter ego’s Versailles getaway. Queeny interior decorators, slip on your pretty pink pumps, eat cake, and prepare to swoon.
Nov. 17, 2007–Feb. 17, 2008. California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park (near 34th Ave. and Clement), SF. (415) 750-3600, www.thinker.org/legion
Be human
We live in no less confusing times than our counter-culture progenitors of the ’60s did. Last Sunday, August 18th the commemorative Summer of Love event that was scheduled was postponed due to complicated permitting procedures. The postponed event is not to be mixed up with the September 2nd, blockbuster event, which is still on. There is a pre-love event this Friday, a revival of the “Human Be-in” event that took place on the foggy Golden Gate polo field on January 14, 1967 and eventually went down in history as a defining moment of the decade. Folks who were actually there (though might not actually remember it) will be in attendance: folkie Country Joe McDonald, Grateful Dead manager Rock Scully, pro-pot former District Attorney Terence Hallinan, pirate radio DJ and Buddhist thinker Scoop Nisker, our very own editor and publisher of the Bay Guardian Bruce Brugmann and many more will participate in the “be-in.” Several hundred of the Council of Light members, who have been organizing the September 2nd 40th anniversary event, will be there too. Eric Christensen, a former KGO TV producer, moderates. The Eye Witness Blues Band performs.
8 p.m., free
2b1 Multimedia
3075 17 St., SF www.2b1records.com/summeroflove40th
GREEN CITY For sisters Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, the last possible moment to lessen humanity’s impact on the environment — the 11th hour, from which the new documentary they cowrote and codirected aptly takes its name — has come upon us. But unlike other doom-and-gloom envirodocs that engulf viewers with guilt about how we are tearing apart our only planet, this movie is supposed to demonstrate that it’s not too late to shift old habits.
The 11th Hour "really helps you understand what’s happening," Conners Petersen told the Guardian about the Warner Brothers Independent release, which opens in theaters Aug. 17. The movie places the often oxymoronic combination of pragmatism and idealism hand in hand: "You feel a better sense of control in that way," she says.
Conners Petersen and Conners spent three years conducting lengthy interviews with 71 top thinkers and activists, ranging from physicist Stephen Hawking to Paul Hawken, the Marin author of TheEcology of Commerce (Collins, 1994). In their film, they juxtapose 91 minutes of the ecoexperts’ wisest words with quick-paced, music video–<\d>style montages of both environmental destruction and at least partially counteracting ideas and innovations like biomimicry.
And unlike 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, this film — narrated and produced by seasoned ecoactivist Leonardo DiCaprio — spends only about seven minutes covering global warming. "Our film contextualizes global warming as being part of a larger problem," Conners says.
The codirectors emphasize this holistic, all-part-of-a-larger-puzzle approach, which they say the mass media seldom takes when examining any environmental problem.
The environment "isn’t a single-article issue," Conners says. "When Leo’s on camera, he says it’s a convergence of crises. It’s all of it together that’s making it a tipping point. And all of it includes our behavior."
It’s our habits of "disconnect, denial, and laziness," she adds, that keep people from bothering to examine — or change — their impact on the Earth. "It’s like you’re sick with a disease with a known cure, and the medicine’s right there, and you look at it and say, ‘I’m not taking that.’<\!s>"
Environmental action, they say, does not necessarily have to extend to planting trees in Kenya, as Nobel Peace Prize winner and 11th Hour interview subject Wangari Maathai did through the Green Belt movement, or running a scientific radio series, as did interviewee David Suzuki. It’s about being aware of organic peaches that are shipped to the supermarket from Chile and drinking water that may not be from the finest geyser.
"Once you start connecting the detergent under your sink to a dead zone, you start seeing the world as a whole, and your relationship with this planet and life on it will deepen," Conners Petersen says.
The sisters created the Web site 11thhouraction.com to allow individuals and communities to discuss ways to bring the film’s broad-scale ideas and innovations to the local level, whether those efforts involve sharing the most energy-efficient household appliances (compact fluorescent light bulbs, anyone?) or putting solar panels on a high school.
Conners Petersen stresses her "Why wait for the federal government to take action?" mentality by pointing out that nearly 600 mayors in the United States have signed on to the Kyoto Protocol without permission from President George W. Bush.
"If you fight against these things that are so big and immovable, you’ll give up," Conners says. "So if you start locally, [ask] what’s the position of your city council person and the mayor?"
The sisters are no amateurs on the environmental-media scene. Conners Petersen is the founder and codirector of the Tree Media Group and executive editor of Global Viewpoint. They’ve produced two documentaries — Global Warming (2001) and Water Planet (2004) — for DiCaprio’s Web site, and Conners will soon be directing her first narrative feature, Earthquake Weather.
The 11th Hour used 150 hours of stock footage, more than any other documentary in history. The lofty quotes that didn’t make it into the film have found a home on YouTube and the movie’s official Web site, wip.warnerbros.com/11thhour.
"Even though there’s a lot of information, it’s an emotional film," Conners says. "Rather than just telling you information that you intellectually take into the world, I feel like the film is done in such a way that you feel the world in a different way."<\!s>*
Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.
TECHSPLOITATION Paper archives are dangerous. For the past several weeks, I’ve been standing knee-deep in paper untouched by human hands for decades, sorting through decaying files and strange pamphlets, breathing so much dust that I cough all night afterwards. It’s even worse for archivists and librarians who work with materials that are older than a century; they report that spores and mold on materials give them headaches, short-term memory loss, diminished lung capacity, and severe allergies.
Back in 1994, an archivist working with century-old materials in an antique schoolhouse wrote an e-mail to a conservation listserv that sounded so ominous it could practically have been the introduction to a Stephen King novel. "For several months I sorted through water-damaged ledgers and artifacts. Many were covered with a black soot-like dust," she wrote. "After a few months, I noticed I was losing my balance, my short-term memory was failing, and I began dropping things." Years later, after her lung capacity had dropped 36 percent and her memory was damaged permanently, a doctor finally diagnosed her condition. She’d been poisoned by mold on the archival materials she’d devoted her life to preserving.
A letter published in Nature in 1978 points out that old books and papers actually develop infections, colloquially called "foxing," that look like a "yellowish-brown patch" on the page. That patch, explain the letter writers, is actually a lesion caused by fungus growing on the book "under unfavorable conditions." Today most libraries recommend that conservationists working in archives with old materials and books wear high-efficiency particulate air filtering masks.
My archival adventures this month don’t involve foxing, or brain-damaging mold. I’m preserving an historical paper trail that’s too recent to have gone toxic. In fact, I’m in the odd position of trying to organize the papers of an organization, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, whose entire mission since 1980 has been to promote the ethical uses of technology, and to build a prosocial, paperless future.
With all the dangers of paper archives, and all the love for computers at the CPSR, why bother to preserve the organization’s papers at all? Why not, as one member of the CPSR asked me, just scan everything and create a digital version of CPSR history? There are million reasons why not, but all of them boil down to two things: scale and redundancy.
Over the past quarter century, the CPSR has accumulated 65 crates of papers and nine tall metal filing cabinets full of records. Some of the papers are cracking with age; some are old faxes or personal letters on onionskin paper; some are pamphlets or zines; some are poster-size programs; others are little, folded stacks of handwritten notes. There are photographs, floppy disks, VHS tapes, and even a reel of film. Even if we had all the resources of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that is scanning books onto the Web at a rapid clip, the CPSR scanning project would take weeks. More important, we aren’t scanning regular papers and books. We have so many kinds of archival material that we’d need specialists who knew how to scan them properly without damaging the originals.
Plus, how would we label each item we’d scanned? Every single one would need to be put into a portable, open file format and labeled with data by hand to identify it. That’s a project that could take months if done by a team of pros and years if it’s being done by volunteers. So part of creating a paper archive is simply a matter of pragmatism. It’s easier to preserve history on paper.
More important, though, we need a paper backup copy of our history. I love online archives as much as the next geek, but what happens when the servers blow out? When we stop having enough power to run data storage centers for progressive nonprofits? And even if digital disasters don’t strike, history is preserved through redundancy. The more copies we have of the CPSR’s history, in multiple formats, the more likely it is that generations to come will remember how a brave group of computer scientists in the 1980s spoke out against the Star Wars missile defense system so loudly that the world listened.
When it comes to preserving history, every digital archive should have a paper audit trail.<\!s>*
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who is not just the president of the CPSR but also its archivist and janitor.
REVIEW "One single picture could be the mother of cinema," one of our leading auteurs has observed. Apichatpong Weerasethakul would have said saint, Jean-Luc Godard death, and Quentin Tarantino motherfucker, but only renowned Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami could glimpse in a lone image the maternal nurturing of reel life. With remarkable films such as Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), And Life Goes On (1991), and Through the Olive Trees (1994), Kiarostami has put his country on the world-cinema map in the uneasy decades following the plucking of the feathers from the shah’s Peacock Throne. Faux-vérité documentation, unscripted drama, and deceptively casual construction characterize Kiarostami’s complex narratives, most of which eschew the overt nationalist critique of his more politically trenchant peers (Samira Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi) in favor of to-be-or-not-to-be philosophizing and a quasi-spiritual appreciation of fleeting pleasures — the lengthening of late-afternoon shadows across a park bench, confessional conversations with jovial strangers, ditching homework to watch soccer on TV.
Now approaching 70, the creatively restless and keenly observant Kiarostami has recently refocused on photography, with which he has been intermittently engaged since the 1970s. In conjunction with a retrospective of both his widely celebrated and his lesser-known works at the Pacific Film Archive, which runs through Aug. 30, the Berkeley Art Museum has mounted a bracingly stark exhibition of Kiarostami’s photographs, culled from four distinct series. Sporting the disappointingly generic title "Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker" — one of his film titles, such as The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), would have sufficed — the show fortunately far transcends its unpromising nomenclature and, like a Kiarostami film, slowly and indelibly reveals its aesthetic mastery, meditative rewards, and picturesque wanderlust.
In his introduction to the exhibition — which benefits from handsome, unadorned installation in BAM’s airy upper galleries — Kiarostami notes that still images, unlike films, are not weighed down with viewers’ expectations of narrative progression or conventional entertainment. Stripped of sustained storytelling and freed from the need to posture or pander — not that his films ever stoop to such commercial demands — Kiarostami’s photographs are nonetheless imbued with dramatic arcs, panoramic vistas, hints of intrigue, and a rigorously intellectual yet unrepentantly earthy moviemaker’s sure, sensual approach to framing, sequencing, and characterization, even if the scene-stealers are all blackbirds.
Camera in hand, Kiarostami regularly embarks on long walks across his homeland, frequently crossing hundreds of miles on epic treks on which the journey truly is the destination. Iran’s war-torn topography, haunted by the ghosts of dissidents and withering under the ceaseless gaze of enemies real and imagined, is for the ever-inquisitive Kiarostami a locus of geographic wonder and emotional extremes. Guided only by a moral compass, he traverses desolate roads and loses himself in his country’s seasonal secrets. Kiarostami keeps to himself on these outward- and inward-looking road trips, but as Scottish troubadour Roddy Frame — who for years memorably viewed the world through his Aztec Camera — once noted, loneliness and being alone aren’t always the same. "Not being able to feel the pleasure of seeing a magnificent landscape with someone else is a form of torture," Kiarostami confesses in the exhibition intro. "That is why I started taking photographs. I wanted somehow to eternalize those moments of passion and pain."
Kiarostami fully explores the dichotomy of these heightened instances in a quartet of works unified by the artist’s steady perspective (nothing seems to disturb his calm) and ability to appreciate the hushed prescience of transformation — in mind, body, and physical surroundings — where preoccupied passersby might only see oil slicks and burkas. In the Roads and Trees series, Kiarostami depicts in grainy, high-contrast black-and-white photos the byways and trunks that stretch onward and upward forever, bisecting his country vertically and horizontally into socially segmented fields of ground and sky. Whether smoothly paved or roughly pebbled, the roads are nearly empty, bereft of the comings and going that typically signal industrial progress and limitless options. Stasis defines the stunning Snow White series as well. Absence is palpably present in these bleak yet beautiful images in which anthropomorphized trees are starkly silhouetted against unending fields of pure white snow.
Winter’s monochromatic chill thaws into vibrant color in the Trees and Crows photographs, all taken on the verdant grounds of palaces in Tehran where flocks of birds have taken up residence as the winged heirs apparent to ousted royals. Crows are highly valued in Iran as a special species that lives longer than most and bears witness to national history. Kiarostami reverently views them as birds of pray, pecking and genuflecting on deep green lawns that appear freshly painted.
Kiarostami is back on the road in the Rain series, now behind the wheel of a car and looking through the windshield at patterns of water on glass and raindrops falling on yet more tall trees. ("If I were not a filmmaker, I would have become a truck driver," he told Deborah Solomon in a New York Times interview earlier this year.) Careening across flooded two-lane blacktops, these gorgeous, pictorialist photos drive straight into abstraction.
Many of Kiarostami’s poems begin with the lines "The more I think<\!s>/ The less I understand," an admission of epistemological uncertainty — and unfettered emotional sincerity — that informs every image in this show. Like the archetypal wanderer who quests for a life worth living in his award-winning 1997 film Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami concludes in these photographs that the search for meaning is an affirmation of time well spent on the road to nowhere.<\!s>*
ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: IMAGE MAKER
Through Sept. 23, $4–<\d>$8 (free first Thurs.)
Wed. and Fri.–<\d>Sun., 11 a.m.–<\d>5 p.m.; Thurs., 11 a.m.–<\d>7 p.m.
The dust is still settling after a contentious Board of Supervisors hearing July 31 about public health problems allegedly related to the 1,500-unit condo complex that Lennar Corp. is building on Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard. Department of Public Health officials succeeded in convincing a narrow board majority not to urge a temporary halt to the project but failed to reassure hundreds of mostly African American residents of Bayview–Hunters Point that their health has not been negatively impacted by Lennar’s inability to properly monitor naturally occurring asbestos and control dust at the hilltop site.
At the hearing, minister Christopher Muhammad of the Muhammad University of Islam, which lies adjacent to Parcel A, urged a shutdown and accused the city of "environmental racism," while Dr. Arelious Walker of the True Hope Church of God in Christ and Rev. J. Edgar Boyd of Bethel AME argued that the project is safe and beneficial to the community and that, in Walker’s words, there is "no evidence to warrant a shutdown." Many project supporters were brought in by Lennar on buses. Some observers called the clash "a holy war in the Bayview."
After the board voted 5–6 against a shutdown, there were angry allegations that some pastors had not publicly disclosed their financial interest in seeing the construction project continue. During the hearings, neither Walker nor Boyd disclosed that they had a contract with Lennar to build 200 homes on Parcel A. Reached by phone, Walker denied any self-interest in recommending that Lennar’s construction project continue. "My history disproves that," Walker told the Guardian. "If anyone unearths any evidence of harm, I’d back off my support."
The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is doing an assessment based on a July 17 request by the Department of Public Health. In a public health assessment of Oak Ridge High School in El Dorado County, where naturally occurring asbestos was exposed during construction of a playing field, the federal agency found that athletes, coaches, and maintenance workers were "at higher risk [of exposure to asbestos] than previously thought," according to spokesperson Susan Muza. But while the agency recommended soil removal and landscaping, Muza told us it did not recommend the school be relocated or closed.
Meanwhile, Walker also rejects the notion that Bayview–Hunters Point is being torn apart by competing religious factions. "Minister Muhammad’s group has helped prove that there is a serious problem," Walker said. "I applaud him for that. We just disagree about the dust, but that’s not going to bring about a breach. I refuse to let there be a holy war."
Walker said his motive is more African American homeownership. But he learned how tough that is when he developed 20 town houses near Candlestick Point. "We wanted a 50 percent African American homeownership rate, but only two families ended up qualifying," Walker said, blaming "bad credit."
That raises questions about the likelihood that Bayview–Hunters Point’s predominantly African American and low-income community will be able to afford Lennar’s condos, with prices ranging from $300,000 for units required to be "affordable" (about 30 percent of the units) to $700,000 for market-rate units. (Sarah Phelan)
A couple of years ago, filmmaker Thom Anderson remarked to me that all films about war, even those that aim to show its injustice, are prowar.
War Made Easy might be the first film I’ve seen since hearing Anderson’s assertion that effectively counters such a claim. Admittedly, Anderson was likely referring only to dramatic movies, especially those produced by Hollywood. Yet even a contemporary doc such as Fahrenheit 9/11 not only takes the honor of military force for granted but spins it into a cause for voice-over dramatics. In contrast, War Made Easy codirectors Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp’s documentary uses Norman Solomon’s recent book to perform an autopsy on the now-zombified propaganda surrounding post-1940s US war.
Alper and Earp’s doc skips smart-ass sarcasm and the usual air of incredulity in order to make complex points clear, and it does so skillfully and quickly. It still has moments when horror and humor commingle, such as when various embedded TV reporters cream their business slacks or loaned camouflage gear during assertions of love for aircraft such as the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and the A-10 Wart Hog.
George Santayana’s famous statement that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it is proven without a doubt throughout War Made Easy. A parade of presidents mouths variations of the same theme, which goes something along the lines of “We love democracy and peace so much that we have to murder others to maintain it.”
With the passing of time, the words and phrases used to justify US military action have become increasingly debased and the puppets mouthing them more craven, until today, when we have George W. Bush repeating the word evil more often than an old metal album skipping on a turntable. Yet if evil exists, he and his cronies are exact embodiments of what they decry. Witness a moment in this movie when Bush describes Saddam Hussein as “a homicidal dictator addicted to weapons of mass destruction.” (Johnny Ray Huston)
Americans no longer like the war in Iraq. They know it is not going well. Still, most don’t really want to know how things got so bad. Ergo, there’s probably not much hope No End in Sight will join the ranks of those rare recent must-see documentaries involving penguins, Global Warming 101, or Michael Moore. That’s too bad, because Charles Ferguson’s film has no preaching-to-the-converted tone or snarky on-camera filmmaker.
Ferguson, a sometime lecturer at UC Berkeley, draws on heavyweight connections to show how the administration continually matched arrogant, ignorant policy with new staff, people who — not unlike Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld — lacked experience in combat and postwar infrastructure rebuilding, let alone knowledge of Middle Eastern history, culture, and relations.
“I don’t do quagmires!” Rumsfeld quips in one of several gag-inducing moments of news conference levity. It’s repeatedly noted that Bush didn’t read even the one-page summaries crafted for his wee attention span.
No End in Sight includes input from US and Iraqi scholars as well as former Pentagon, CIA, and White House staff, sorely disillusioned American military leaders, and grunts badly wounded by inept policy. This movie should be required viewing for all US citizens currently obsessed with gas prices, the wacky misadventures of Lindsay Lohan, and their navels. The DVD version is going to make a great Christmas present. (Dennis Harvey)
Throughout its history, the Soviet Union felt like the final frontier to many Americans. What was happening on the other side of that iron curtain? The Russians wondered too. Since travel between the countries was so limited, their inhabitants often had to turn for information to the cultural products that made it — both ways — past Russia’s gatekeepers. How better to hide meaning than in fairy tales and outer space? The Pacific Film Archive celebrates an age of anxiety and this age of information with its marvelous series "From the Stars to the Tsars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema."
The films of "From the Stars to the Tsars" span the period from the 1912 short The Cameraman’s Revenge and Aelita, Queen of Mars — the 1924 silent classic that inspired Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World — to 2005’s First on the Moon. The series’s other notable traversal is between high and low culture. Some entries were partly seen at drive-ins in the 1960s thanks to Roger Corman, who bought the rights to The Heavens Call (1959) and Planet of Storms (1961) and scavenged their footage; To the Stars by Hard Ways (1982; reedited 2001) made an appearance as Humanoid Woman on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Then there are the films more familiar to art house patrons; the two by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972’s Solaris and 1979’s Stalker, cemented his reputation, and the former was hailed as the Soviet response to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The rest of the series falls between these poles. Although their politics and plots vary, all the films share a joy in the medium’s magic and an affinity for dazzling and provocative visual effects, whether they be ridiculous, sublime (the signal that Stalker‘s mysterious Zone is ready for its visitors is a marvel of quiet beauty), or both.
Another obvious draw is these films’ Russian-ness. Ruslan and Ludmila (1972) is based on an Aleksandr Pushkin epic, and Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1961) is an adaptation of a story by Nikolay Gogol. There is no Soviet Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but some movies manage to work in anti-Western views. The Amphibian Man, shot in Cuba in 1962, offers a damning critique of capitalism in the person of its villain (Mikhail Kozakov), a dishonest, slave-driving, anything-for-a-pearl bastard who wants to marry the girl our hero loves — against her will, of course. Zero City, filmed at the height of perestroika, includes a speech by the town prosecutor (Vladimir Menshov) against European ideas, which he says are all the more fatal for their rationality and practicality.
This is not to say that the Soviet Union escapes its directors’ indignation. The clearest examples come at its end points, the start and finish of the great people’s experiment. Aelita shows class conflict and housing shortages; made more than 60 years later, 1988’s Zero City depicts the denunciation and rehabilitation of rock ‘n’ roll and its partisans as caprices all the worse for their life-destroying results. But the most transparent criticism comes in 2005’s First on the Moon. Made well past the fall of the USSR, the film is a look back, documentary style, at its country’s space program, which in this version beat the Americans’ to the earth’s natural satellite. There are winks to the fictionality of this exercise via sometimes too-cinematic shots, but the most obvious touches are images such as that of a group of children saluting with straight faces "the cause of Stalin and Lenin," then breaking into laughter. The government appears at its worst when it covers up the successful trip and spends years trying to contain the cosmonaut who made it, but the fact that the Soviets never did get to the moon — let alone first — is the movie’s strongest critique.<\!s>*
TECHSPLOITATION There’s a horrifying new menace to children that’s never existed before. Experts estimate that 75 to 90 percent of pornography winds up in the hands of children due to novel technologies and high-speed distribution networks. That means today’s youths are seeing more images of perversion than ever before in the history of the world.
What are the "new technologies" and "distribution networks" that display so much porno for up to 90 percent of kids? I’ll give you one guess. Nope, you’re wrong; it’s not the Internets. It’s print.
The year is 1964, and I’m getting my data from financier Charles Keating. He had just formed Citizens for Decent Literature, an antiporn group whose sole contribution to the world appears to have been an educational movie called Perversion for Profit. Narrated by TV anchor George Putnam, the flick is an exposé of the way "high-speed presses, rapid transit, and mass distribution" created a hitherto unknown situation in which kids could "accidentally" be exposed to porno at the local drugstore or bus station magazine rack. Among the dangers society had to confront as a result of this situation were "stimulated" youths running wild, thinking it was OK to rape women, and turning into homosexuals after just a few peeks at the goods in MANifique magazine.
A lot of the movie — which you can watch for yourself on YouTube — is devoted to exploring every form of depravity available in print at the time. We’re treated to images of lurid paperbacks, naughty magazines, and perverted pamphlets. At one point, Putnam even does a dramatic reading from one of the books to emphasize their violence. Then we get to see pictures of women in bondage from early BDSM zines.
But the basic point of this documentary isn’t to demonstrate that Keating and his buddies seem to have had an encyclopedic knowledge of smut. Nor is the point that smut has gotten worse. Putnam admits in the film that "there has always been perversion." Instead, the movie’s emphasis is on how new technologies enable the distribution of smut more widely, especially into the hands of children. In this way, Keating’s hysterical little film is nearly a perfect replica of the kinds of rhetoric we hear today about the dangers of the Web.
Consider, for example, a University of New Hampshire study that got a lot of play earlier this year by claiming that 42 percent of kids between the ages of 10 and 17 had been accidentally exposed to pornography on the Web during the previous year. The study also claimed that 4 percent of people in the same age group were asked to post erotic pictures of themselves online. News coverage of the study emphasized how these numbers were higher than before, and most implied that the Web itself was to blame.
But as Perversion for Profit attests, people have been freaking out about how new distribution networks bring pornography to children for nearly half a century. Today’s cyberteens aren’t the first to go hunting for naughty bits using the latest high-speed thingamajig either; back in the day, we had fast-printing presses instead of zoomy network connections.
It’s easy to forget history when you’re thinking about the brave new technologies of today. Yet if Keating’s statistics are to be believed, the number of children exposed to porn was far greater in 1964 than it is today. Perhaps the Web has actually made it harder for children to find pornography. After all, when their grandparents were growing up, anybody could just walk to the corner store and browse the paperbacks for smut. Now you have to know how to turn off Google’s safe search and probably steal your parents’ credit card to boot.
And yet Fox News is never going to run a story under the headline "Internet Means Kids See Less Pornography Than Ever Before." It may be the truth, but you can only sell ads if there’s more sex — not less. *
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who learned about sex before she learned about the Internet.
Oaxaca, Mexico — Those of us who report from the front lines of the social-justice movement in Latin America share an understanding that there’s always a bullet out there with our name on it. Brad Will traveled 2,500 miles, from New York to this violence-torn Mexican town, to find his.
Throughout the summer and fall of 2006, the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca was on fire. Death squads, the pistoleros of a despised governor, rolled through the cobblestoned streets of this colonial capital, peppering with automatic weapon fire the flimsy barricades erected by masked rebels. Hundreds were killed, wounded, or imprisoned.
Will, a New York Indymedia videojournalist, felt he had to be there. Xenophobia was palpable on the ground when Will touched down. Foreign journalists were attacked as terrorists by the governor’s sycophants in the media: "Si ves un gringo con cámara, matanlo!" the radio chattered — if you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!
For much of the afternoon of Oct. 27, Will had been filming armed confrontations on the barricades just outside the city. He was trapped in the middle of a narrow street while gunshots boomed all around him, but he kept filming, looking for the money shot.
And he found it: on his final bits of tape, two clearly identifiable killers are perfectly framed, their guns firing. You hear the fatal shot and experience Brad’s shudder of dismay as the camera finally tumbles from his hands and bounces along the sidewalk.
By all visible evidence, Brad Will filmed his own murder. But this is Mexico, where justice is spelled impunity — and Will’s apparent killers continue to ride the streets of Oaxaca, free and, it seems, untouchable.
Curiously, this egregious murder of a US reporter in Mexico has drawn minimal response from US Ambassador Tony Garza, an old crony of President George W. Bush. Why this lack of interest? Can it be that Washington has another agenda that conflicts with justice for Will — the impending privatization of Mexican oil?
HEADING SOUTH
Will was once a fire-breathing urban legend on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Whether perched atop the Fifth Street squat where he had lived for years and waving his long arms like Big Bird as the wrecking ball swung in, or being dragged out of City Hall dressed as a sunflower while trying to rescue the neighborhood’s community gardens, this child of privilege from Chicago’s wealthy North Shore was a legitimate street hero in the years before the World Trade Center towers collapsed and the social-change movement in New York City went into deep freeze.
Will hosted an incendiary weekly show on the New York pirate station Steal This Radio and was an early part of Indymedia, the Web publishing experiment born during the "Battle of Seattle," the World Trade Organization protests that rocked that city in 1999.
With his long hair neatly tied back and parted down the middle, with his granny glasses and fringe beard, and with his fierce commitment to building community, Will seemed to have emerged whole from a more utopian time in America.
He was an independent journalist, one of the growing number of people, such as Josh Wolf in San Francisco, who use the Internet and their video cameras to track and report on social moments and injustice. He wore no credential from any major news organization. But using outlets like Indymedia, he — like Wolf, who spent seven months in prison to avoid giving the police a copy of his video outtakes — represented part of the future of journalism.
Will’s journey to the land where he would die began right after Sept. 11, 2001. Dyan Neary, then a neophyte journalist, met Will in a South Street skyscraper elevator coming down from the WBAI studios from which Amy Goodman broadcast soon after the terrorist attacks.
"We walked down the piles. They were still smoking," Neary remembered in a phone call from Humboldt County. "We were both really scared. We thought this was not going to be resolved soon. Maybe never. So we thought we should go to Latin America, where people were still fighting."
Will and Neary spent most of 2002 and 2003 roaming the bubbling social landscape of Latin America. In Fortaleza, Brazil, they confronted the director of the Inter-American Development Bank during riotous street protests. They journeyed to Bolivia too and interviewed Evo Morales, not yet the president. They traveled in the Chapare rainforest province with members of the coca growers’ federation. They hung out in Cochabamba with Oscar Olivera, the hero of the battle to keep Bechtel Corp. from taking over that city’s water system. Everywhere they went, they sought out pirate radio projects and offered their support.
In February 2005, Will was in Brazil, in the thick of social upheaval, filming the resistance of 12,000 squatters at a camp near the city of Goiânia in Pernambuco state, when the military police swept in, killing two and jailing hundreds. On his videos, you can hear the shots zinging all around him as he captured the carnage. Will was savagely beaten and held by the police. Only his US passport saved him.
Undaunted by his close call, Will picked up his camera and soldiered back through Peru and Bolivia, and when the money ran out, he flew back to New York to figure out how to raise enough for the next trip south. He was hooked. In early 2006, drawn like a moth to flame, he was back, tracking Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign through the Mayan villages on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
In the spring of 2006, Will was back in New York as he tracked the Other Campaign and the incipient rebellion in Oaxaca on the Internet from his room in Williamsburg. (The rent gougers had forced him out of the Lower East Side.) He was poised to jump south again, friends say, but was worried that he would just be one more white guy getting in the way.
In the end, the lure of the action in Oaxaca pulled him in. He bought a 30-day ticket, caught the airport shuttle from Brooklyn to John F. Kennedy International Airport, and flew south Sept. 29. His return was set for Oct. 28. He never made that flight.
THE COMMUNE OF OAXACA
A mountainous southern Mexican state traversed by seven serious sierras, Oaxaca is at the top of most of the nation’s poverty indicators — infant mortality, malnutrition, unemployment, and illiteracy. Human rights violations are rife. It’s also Mexico’s most indigenous state, with 17 distinct Indian cultures, each with a rich tradition of resistance to the dominant white and mestizo overclass. Oaxaca vibrates with class and race tensions that cyclically erupt into uprising and repression.
The Party of the Institutional Revolution, or PRI, ruled Mexico from 1928 to 2000, the longest-running political dynasty in the world. The corrupt organization was dethroned by the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and its picaresque presidential candidate, Vicente Fox, former president of Coca Cola México.
But in Oaxaca, the PRI never lost power. While voters were throwing off the PRI yoke all over the rest of the country, in Oaxaca one PRI governor had followed another for 75 years. The latest, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, a protégé of party strongman and future presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo, won a fraud-marred election over a right-left coalition in 2004.
In the first 16 months of his regime, Ruiz proved spectacularly unresponsive to the demands of the popular movements for social justice. When, on May 15, 2006, National Teachers Day, a maverick, militant local of the National Education Workers Union known as Section 22 presented its contract demands, Ruiz turned a deaf ear. Then, on May 22, tens of thousands of teachers took the plaza and 52 surrounding blocks and set up a ragtag tent city. Each morning the maestros would march out of their camp and block highways and government buildings, which were soon smeared with anti-Ruiz slogans.
Ruiz retaliated before dawn June 14, sending 1,000 heavily armed police officers into the plaza to evict the teachers. Low-flying helicopters sprayed pepper gas on the throng below. Ruiz’s police took up positions in the colonial hotels that surround the plaza and tossed down concussion grenades from the balconies. Radio Plantón, the maestros’ pirate radio station, was demolished and the tent city set afire. A pall of black smoke hung over the city.
Four hours later a spontaneous outburst by Oaxaca’s very active community, combined with the force of the striking teachers and armed with clubs and Molotov cocktails, overran the plaza and sent Ruiz’s cops packing. No uniformed officers would be seen on the streets of Oaxaca for many months. And on June 16, two days after the monumental battle, 200,000 Oaxacans marched through the city to repudiate the governor’s "hard hand." The megamarch was said to extend 10 kilometers.
John Gibler, who closely covered the Oaxaca uprising as a human-rights fellow for Global Exchange, wrote that the surge of the rebels June 14 soon transformed itself into a popular assembly. The Oaxaca Peoples Popular Assembly, or APPO, was formally constituted June 21. The APPO had no leaders but many spokespeople, and all decisions had to be made in assemblies.
A CITY PARALYZED
For the next weeks, the actions of the APPO and Section 22 paralyzed Oaxaca — but the rest of Mexico took little notice. Instead, the nation was hypnotized by the fraud-marred July 2 presidential election in which a right-wing PAN-ista, Felipe Calderón, had been awarded a narrow victory over leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the candidate of a coalition headed by the Party of the Democratic Revolution. López Obrador was quick to cry fraud, pulling millions into the streets in the most massive political demonstrations in Mexican history. Oaxaca still seemed like small potatoes.
But Oaxaca is an international tourist destination, and the APPO and Section 22 protests had closed down the tourist infrastructure, blocking the airport and forcing five-star hotels to shutter their doors. On July 17, Ruiz was forced to announce the cancellation of the Guelaguetza, an indigenous dance festival that has become Oaxaca’s premiere tourist attraction, after roaming bands of rebels destroyed the scenery and blockaded access to the city.
Ruiz began to fight back. By the first weeks of August, the governor launched what came to be known as the Caravan of Death — a train of 30 or 40 private and government vehicles rolling nightly, firing on the protesters. Ruiz’s gunmen were drawn from the ranks of the city police and the state ministerial police.
To keep the Caravan of Death from moving freely through Oaxaca, the APPO and the union threw up barricades; 1,000 were built in the working-class colonies throughout the city and its suburbs. The rebels piled up dead trees, old tires, and burned-out cars and buses to create the barricades, which soon took on a life of their own; murals were painted using the ashes of the bonfires that burned all night on the barriers. Indeed, the barricades gave the Oaxaca struggle the romantic aura of the Paris Commune uprising of 1871 and attracted droves of dreadlocked anarchists to the city.
An uneasy lull in the action gripped Oaxaca on Oct. 1, when Will arrived at the bus terminal, then found himself a cheap room for the night. The break wouldn’t last long.
ON THE BARRICADES
Like most non-Mexicans who style themselves as independent reporters, Will had no Mexican media credential and therefore was in the country illegally, working on a tourist visa and susceptible to deportation. To have some credential other than his Indymedia press card to hang around his neck, he got himself accredited with Section 22 and wore the rebel ID assiduously.
On Oct. 14, APPO militant Alejandro García Hernández was cut down at a barricade near Símbolos Patrios, a downtown plaza. Will joined an angry procession to the Red Cross hospital where the dead man had been taken.
In the last dispatch he filed from Oaxaca, on Oct. 16, Will caught this very Mexican whiff of death: "Now [García Hernández lies] waiting for November when he can sit with his loved ones on the day of the dead and share food and drink and a song … one more death — one more martyr in a dirty war — one more time to cry and hurt — one more time to know power and its ugly head — one more bullet cracks the night."
The dynamic in Oaxaca had gotten "sketchy," Will wrote to Neary. Section 22 leader Enrique Rueda Pacheco had cut a deal with the outgoing Fox government and forced a back-to-work vote Oct. 21 that narrowly carried amid charges of sellout and payoffs. If the teachers went back to work, the APPO would be alone on the barricades and even more vulnerable to Ruiz’s gunmen. But backing down was not in the assembly’s dictionary, and the APPO voted to ratchet up the lucha (struggle) and make Oaxaca really ungovernable.
Mobile brigades were formed — young toughs armed with lead pipes and nail-studded boards who hijacked buses still running in the city, forced the passengers off, and rode around looking for action. Later the buses would be set afire. Charred hulks blossomed on the streets of the old colonial city. The barricades were reinforced to shut down the capital beginning Oct. 27.
The escalation proved to be a terrible miscalculation. In Mexico City the postelectoral turmoil had finally subsided, and PAN was ready to deal with the PRI; bailing out the governor of Oaxaca was the PRI’s price of admission.
It wasn’t a good time for inexperienced foreigners. Ruiz’s people were checking the guest lists at the hostels for "inconvenient" internationals. Immigration authorities threatened extranjeros with deportation if they joined the protests. The local US consul, Mark Leyes, warned Americans that he would not be able to help them if they got caught up in the maelstrom.
Adding to this malevolent ambiance, a new pirate station popped up Oct. 26. Radio Ciudadana (Citizens’ radio) announced it was broadcasting "to bring peace to Oaxaca" and to celebrate the honor of "our macho, very macho governor." The announcers seemed to have Mexico City accents. Wherever they had been sent from, they let loose with a torrent of vitriolic shit — stuff like "We have to kill the mugrosos [dirty ones] on the barricades." The extranjeros, the radio said, were stirring up all the trouble: "They pretend to be journalists, but they have come to teach terrorism classes."
More frightening was this admonition: "Si ves un gringo con cámara, matanlo!" — "If you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!"
This poison spewed out of local radios all day Oct. 26 and 27, but whether Will heard the warnings — and if he did, whether knew what they meant — is unclear. He didn’t speak much Spanish.
SHOT IN THE CHEST
On Oct. 27, Will went out to do interviews on the barricade at Santa María Coyotepec, about 20 kilometers from the city. The three barricades at Coyotepec, Cal y Canto, and La Experimental were crucial to closing down Oaxaca the next day. The broad Railroad Avenue where the barricade was stacked was empty. Nothing was moving. Will walked on to the next barricade at La Experimental to check out the action.
Soon after the Indymedia reporter left, all hell broke loose at Cal y Canto. A mob of about 150 Ruiz supporters stormed down Railroad Avenue, led by what witnesses thought was a Chevy Blazer. The vehicle was moving very fast. "We thought it would try and crash through the barricade," Miguel Cruz, an activist and witness, recalled. But the SUV stopped short, and several men jumped out with guns blazing. The APPO people hunkered down behind the makeshift barrier and moved the women and kids who were with them into a nearby house. Then they went on the counterattack with Molotov cocktails, homemade bazookas that fired bottle rockets, and slingshots. Most of the mob had melted away, and with the gunmen retreating, the rebels torched their vehicle.
Will heard about the gunfire and hurried back to Cal y Canto with a handful of other reporters. They arrived a little after 3 p.m.
Will climbed under a parked trailer to film the shooters. He focused on a man in a white shirt. When an APPO activist (who is not seen on the videotape) came running by, Will indicated the shooter — "Camisa blanca." While all this was going on, the camera captured a bicyclist peddling dreamily through the intersection. Soon after, a large dump truck appeared on the scene, and the group on the barricade used it as a mobile shield as they chased the gunmen down the avenue.
Suddenly, the pistoleros veered down a narrow side street, Benito Juárez, and took refuge in a windowless, one-story building on the second block. The only access to the building was through a large metal garage door, and the reporters followed the APPO militants, many of whom were masked, as they tried to force their way in. Will stood to one side of the door for a minute, poised for the money shot. Then the compas tried unsuccessfully to bust down the big door by ramming the dump truck into it.
In the midst of this frenzy, five men in civilian dress — two in red shirts (the governor’s color) and the others in white — appeared at the head of Benito Juárez, about 30 meters away, and began shooting at the rebels.
Two of the gunmen were later identified by Mexican news media as Pedro Carmona, a cop and local PRI political fixer, and police commander Orlando Manuel Aguilar Coello. One of those in the white shirts, crouched behind Carmona, was Abel Santiago Zárate, a.k.a. El Chino. Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello were reported to be the personal bodyguards of municipal president Manuel Martínez Feria of the PRI. The other two would later be fingered as Juan Carlos Soriano, a.k.a. El Chapulín (the grasshopper), and Juan Sumano, both Santa Lucía del Camino police officers. All five are eminently identifiable in the film Will shot just moments before the bullets hit him.
When the shooting erupted, Will took cover on the opposite side of the narrow street from the rest of the media. He was crouched against a lime green wall when the first bullet came. On the video soundtrack, you can hear both the shot and Will’s cries of dismay as it tore through his Indymedia T-shirt and smashed into his heart. A second shot caught him in the right side and destroyed his innards. There was little blood spilled, the first slug having stopped his heart.
In footage that witness Gustavo Vilchis and others filmed, the entrance wound of the first shot looks like a deep bruise. The second shot was not recorded on the soundtrack and may have been fired simultaneously with the first.
Others were shot in the pandemonium. Oswaldo Ramírez, filming for the daily Milenio, was grazed. Lucio David Cruz, described as a bystander, was hit in the neck and died four months later.
As Will slid down the wall into a sitting position, Vilchis and activist Leonardo Ortiz ran to him. Will’s Section 22 credential had flown off, and no one there knew his name. With bullets whizzing by, the compas picked Will up and dragged him out of the line of fire and around the corner to Árboles Street, about 35 paces away. Along the way, his pants fell off.
"Ambulance! We need an ambulance! They’ve shot a journalist!" Vilchis, a tall young man with a face like an Italian comic actor’s, shouted desperately. Gualberto Francisco, another activist, had parked his vochito (Volkswagen Bug) on Árboles and pulled up alongside Will, who was laid out on the pavement in his black bikini underwear.
Ortiz and Vilchis loaded the dying Will into the back seat. They thought he was still breathing, and Vilchis applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. "You’re going to make it … you’re all right," they kept telling him. But Will’s eyes had already turned up — he was perdido (lost), as they say in Mexico.
The vochito ran out of gas, and while the frantic young men ferrying Will were stuck in the middle of the Cinco Señores crossroad, it began to rain hard. They tried to stop a taxi to take them to the Red Cross, but the driver supported the government and wanted to argue. Finally, they flagged down a pickup truck and laid Will out in the bed. He was dead when he arrived at the hospital, according to the report by the coroner, Dr. Luis Mendoza.
THE OUTRAGE BEGINS
Oct. 27 was the bloodiest day of the Oaxaca uprising. Four people were killed besides Will: Emilio Alonso Fabián, Esteban Ruiz, Esteban López Zurita, and Audacia Olivera Díaz.
Unlike their murders, Will’s death triggered international outrage. Because he was so connected — and because much of the episode was recorded on film —the shot of the mortally wounded Indymedia reporter lying in the middle of a Oaxaca street went worldwide on the Web in a matter of minutes.
There were instant vigils on both coasts of the United States. On Oct. 30, 11 of Will’s friends were busted trying to lock down at the Mexican consulate off Manhattan’s Park Avenue, where graffiti still read "Avenge Brad!" in December. Anarchists splattered the San Francisco consulate with red paint. Subcomandante Marcos sent his condolences and called for international protests. Goodman did an hour-long memorial.
On March 16, 2007, at its midyear meeting in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, the Inter-American Press Association, an organization devoted to freedom of speech and the press in the Americas, passed a resolution calling for action on the Will case.
"The investigation into the killing has been plagued by irregularities and inconsistencies, and no arrests have been made," the group said in a statement. IAPA called for the federal attorney general to take over the investigation, "in view of the lack of confidence in state authorities and the lack of progress in the case, so that it may apprehend the culprits, who, according to one theory of the investigation, may be indirectly linked to state authorities."
The official reaction to Will’s death was more cautious. "It is unfortunate when peaceful demonstrations get out of hand and result in violence," a US spokesperson told the media, seeming to blame the APPO for Will’s killing. After once again warning Americans that they traveled to Oaxaca "at their own risk," Ambassador Garza commented on the "senseless death of Brad Will" and how it "underscores the need for a return to the rule of law and order."
"For months," he said, "violence and disorder in Oaxaca have worsened. Teachers, students, and other groups have been involved in increasingly violent demonstrations."
Garza’s statement sent Fox the signal he had been waiting for. Now that a gringo had been killed, it was time to act. The next morning, Oct. 28, 4,500 officers from the Federal Preventative Police, an elite force drawn from the military, were sent into Oaxaca — not to return the state to a place where human rights, dignity, and a free media are respected but to break the back of the people’s rebellion and keep Ruiz in power.
On Oct. 29 the troops pushed their way into the plaza despite massive but passive resistance by activists, tore down the barricades, and drove the commune of Oaxaca back into the shadows.
In Mexico the dead are buried quickly. After the obligatory autopsy, Brad’s body was crated up for shipment to his parents, who now live south of Milwaukee. After a private viewing, the family had him cremated.
SHAM ACCOUNTABILITY
Killing a gringo reporter in plain view of the cameras (one of which was his own) requires a little sham accountability. On Oct. 29 the state prosecutor, Lizbeth Caña Cadeza, announced that arrest warrants were being sworn out for Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello, two of the five cops caught on film gunning Will down, and they were subsequently taken into custody.
The scam lost currency two weeks later when, on Nov. 15, Caña Cadeza dropped a bombshell at an evening news conference: the cops hadn’t killed Will, she said; he was shot by the rebels.
Will’s death, she insisted, had been "a deceitful confabulation to internationalize the conflict" and was, in fact, "the product of a concerted premeditated action." The mortal shot had been fired from less than two and a half meters away, Caña Cadeza said — although there is nothing in the coroner’s report to indicate this. The real killers, she said, were "the same group [Will] was accompanying."
In the state prosecutor’s scenario, the order of the shots was reversed: first Will had been shot in the side on the street, then rematado (finished off) with a slug to the heart on the way to the hospital in Francisco’s vochito.
The prosecutor’s plot was immediately challenged by the APPO. "The killers are those who are shown in the film," Florentino López, the assembly’s main spokesperson, asserted at a meeting that night.
And in fact our detailed investigation shows that there is very little evidence to support Caña Cadeza’s theory. Photos from the scene, some published in the Mexican media, show Will’s body with a bloody hole in his chest on the street near where he fell — indicating that his fatal heart wound occurred well before he was dragged into the car where he was supposedly shot.
There’s another problem with the prosecutor’s suggestion: nobody on the scene saw any APPO members, or anyone except the authorities, carrying guns. This reporter has talked to numerous eyewitnesses, and all told the same tale: the rebels at the barricade that day had no firearms with which they could have shot Will.
Miguel Cruz, who spent much of Oct. 27 with Will, first at the Council of Indigenous People of Oaxaca, of which he is a member, and then on the barricade at Cal y Canto and on Juárez Street, is a soft-spoken young Zapotec Indian, but he pounded vehemently on the kitchen table when he addressed Caña Cadeza’s allegations.
"The compañeros had no guns. What gun is she talking about? They had slingshots and Molotovs but no guns. The PRI-istas and the cops had their .38s, and they were shooting at us," he said. "We were trying to save Brad Will’s life, not to kill him."
And if Caña Cadeza had any proof of her allegations, she likely would have filed charges. But none of the protesters or Will’s companions has been formally charged with the killing. Prosecutors have never publicly presented the alleged murder weapon.
But by the time Caña Cadeza told her story, of course, the only way to determine for sure the order of the bullets and the distance from which they had been fired would have been to exhume Will’s body. And there was no body; he had been cremated the week before.
On Nov. 28, Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello were released from custody by Judge Victoriano Barroso because of "insufficient evidence," with the stipulation that they could not be rearrested without the presentation of new evidence.
Caña Cadeza, who is now running as a PRI candidate for the state legislature, collaborated closely on the case with Oaxaca secretary of citizen protection Lino Celaya. Both reported to Ruiz’s secretary of government, Heliodoro Díaz, who in turn reported directly to the governor. There seems little doubt that the prosecutor’s accusations of murder against Will’s comrades — and the determination of innocence for the apparent killers — came straight from the top.
ON THE EVIDENCE TRAIL
Dr. Mendoza was occupied when I stopped by the Oaxaca city morgue to ask for a copy of the autopsy report on which the state has based its allegations.
"Will died eight months ago," Mendoza complained testily. "Do you know how many others have died since? How many autopsies I’ve performed?" He gestured to a morgue room where cadavers were piled up.
The coroner was scrunched over his desk, filling out the paperwork for one of the dead. He didn’t have any time to look for the autopsy report. I was not the first reporter to ask him about the document. "What paper are you from anyway?" he asked suspiciously, and when I showed him my media card, he told me that it didn’t sound like a real newspaper to him. "I know what I’m doing. I worked as a coroner in your country," he snapped defensively and waved me out of the office.
But Mendoza might not be quite as cocksure as he sounded. A senior agent for the US government in Oaxaca, who asked not to be named in this article, told me later that Mendoza confided to him that he was no ballistics expert, nor could he determine from how far away the bullets were fired.
I walked into the police commissary under the first-floor stairs of the Santa Lucía del Camino Municipal Palace. The small room was crowded with cops and cigarette smoke. Three of the officers were in full battle gear, and the rest were plainclothes. I had been warned not to ask for Carmona, the most prominent red shirt on Will’s film. Carmona is described as a prepotente — i.e., a thug with an attitude who is always packing.
Instead, I asked the desk clerk if I could get a few minutes with Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello. For all I knew, the two were sitting in the room behind me. The desk clerk studied my card. "Qué lástima!" he exclaimed — what a shame. Santiago Zárate had just left and wouldn’t be back until after six. Aguilar Coello was off that day. When I called back after six, Santiago Zárate was still not available. Nor were he and Aguilar Coello ever available the dozen or so times I called back.
This sort of stonewalling is not terribly unusual for Mexico, where killer cops often sell their services to local caciques (political bosses) and go back to work as if nothing had happened. Those who direct this sort of mayhem from their desks in the statehouses and municipal palaces — the "intellectual assassins," as they are called — are never held accountable for their crimes.
A VISIT FROM HOME
In March, Brad’s parents, Kathy and Howard Will, and his older brother and sister paid a sad, inconclusive visit to Oaxaca. They had hired Miguel Ángel de los Santos Cruz, a crackerjack human rights lawyer who has often defended Zapatista communities in Chiapas. Gibler, the Global Exchange human-rights fellow, was the translator.
The Wills, upper-middle-class Americans, had little experience with the kind of evil that lurks inside the Mexican justice system; the trip was a traumatic, eye-opening experience.
The federal Attorney General’s Office had taken over the case from the state in December, but rather than investigating police complicity and culpability, it was pursuing Caña Cadeza’s dubious allegation blaming Will’s companions for his killing.
Gustavo Vilchis, Gualberto Francisco, Leonardo Ortiz, and Miguel Cruz were summoned to give testimony, with the Wills in attendance. Testifying was a risky venture, as the witnesses could have been charged with the murder at any moment, but out of respect for the family, the compas agreed to tell their story to the federal investigators. During the hearing they were repeatedly questioned about and asked to identify not the cops who appear on Will’s film but their own compañeros, some masked, who appeared on tape shot by Televisa, the Mexican TV giant. They refused.
When Los Santos accompanied the Wills to a meeting with Caña Cadeza, she touted her investigation and promised them a copy of its results. But she refused to allow the family to view Will’s Indymedia T-shirt and the two bullets taken from his body. They were, she explained, under the control of Barroso — the judge who had cut loose the cops.
THE POLITICS OF OIL
There are larger geopolitics at work here.
The US Department of State has a certain conflict of interest in trying to push first-year Mexican president Calderón to collar Will’s killers. The crackdown in Oaxaca was all about a political deal between Calderón’s PAN and Ruiz’s PRI: if PAN saved the governor’s ass, the PRI would support the president’s legislative package.
Indeed, the PRI’s 100 votes in the lower house of the Mexican Congress guarantee Calderón the two-thirds majority he needs to alter the constitution and effect the change that’s at the top of his legislative agenda — opening up Petróleos Mexicanos, or PEMEX, the nationalized petroleum corporation and a symbol of Mexico’s national revolution, to private investment, a gambit that requires a constitutional amendment.
Since then-president Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated Mexico’s petroleum industry from Anglo and American owners and nationalized it in 1938, the United States has been trying to take it back. "Transnational pressure to reprivatize PEMEX has been brutal," observed John Saxe Fernandez, a professor of strategic resource studies at Mexico’s autonomous university, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
During the run-up to the hotly contested 2006 presidential elections, candidates Calderón and López Obrador debated the privatization of Mexico’s national oil corporation before the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico City; former US ambassador Jeffrey Davidow moderated the debate. When the leftist López Obrador insisted that he would never privatize what belonged to all Mexicans, the business leaders stared in stony silence. The conservative Calderón’s pledge to open PEMEX to private investment drew wild applause. Calderón was, of course, Washington’s horse in the fraud-marred election.
In order to accommodate Washington, Calderón needs a two-thirds majority in the congress — and the PRI’s votes in the lower house are crucial to guaranteeing passage of a constitutional amendment. "Without the PRI’s votes, PEMEX will not be privatized. That is why Calderón has granted Ruiz impunity," Saxe Fernandez concluded.
Washington is eager to see PEMEX privatized, which would create an opportunity for Exxon Mobil Corp. and Halliburton (now PEMEX’s largest subcontractor) to walk off with a big chunk of the world’s eighth-largest oil company. Pushing Calderón too hard to do justice for Will could disaffect the PRI and put a kibosh on the deal.
It is not easy to imagine Brad Will as a pawn in anyone’s power game, but as the months tick by and his killing and killers sink into the morass of memory, that is exactly what he is becoming. 2
John Ross is the Guardian‘s Mexico City correspondent. This story was comissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and is running in about 20 alternative papers this week.
Perhaps the best thing my parents ever did for me was to raise me as a Persian in America. I hated this at the time, not understanding why I needed to learn how to perform Persian dances, eat Persian food, or speak Farsi if we weren’t actually in Iran. I now realize I was lucky not only to find a cultural identity but also to experience living in two cultures — and with two languages — at once.
Not all children have a built-in culture base at home, though. But they can have the next best thing if they’re enrolled in language immersion programs, particularly if they start early.
"Language is a natural phenomenon within us, and the earlier we open it, the better," says David Fierberg, the events and communications manager of the French American International School. "It’s an important tool in a child’s development and opens up new pathways of thought, creating a stronger cultural awareness."
That’s why schools around the Bay Area are increasingly embracing this method of schooling. Some are already established in the city, such as the FAIS, which was founded in 1962. Others are just getting started, such as Starr King Elementary School, where a Mandarin immersion program for kindergarten students just finished its first year.
And such programs are available at all levels. The Scandinavian School, for example, is a preschool that uses the educational techniques of its eponymous region, while the FAIS has extensive prekindergarten–to–eighth grade and high school programs. In most cases the experience isn’t just about teaching a particular language or culture but also about presenting a different kind of education.
PARLEZ-VOUS ALGEBRA?
At the FAIS the demand for a rigorous education starts young, and admission is competitive. Those accepted are sent straight on the full-immersion pathway, with a curriculum developed by the French Ministry of Education. Grades K to three are taught 80 percent in French and 20 percent in English, while third grade through middle school is split 50-50. From then on French is a large part of the high school student’s education, with certain classes taught only in French or only in English.
"There is sort of a natural flow," Fierberg says. "The students learn both French and English history and culture, government. Drama is taught in French, as is sports, while music classes are held in English. And French and English math is taught."
French and English math? But isn’t math a universal language?
Yes, Fierberg says. But the methodologies are different. In France, math is more process oriented, focusing on formulas and word problems. American math is more answer oriented. In other subjects the FAIS places a French-method emphasis on oral presentation, memorization of poetry, and dictées, wherein teachers read a paragraph and students write what they hear.
HÄR OCH NÅ
Though the Scandinavian School only teaches preschool students, its educational methods are still clearly different from American — and French — traditions. In fact, director and teacher Mimmi Skoglund finds the Scandinavian method often challenges the expectations of her students’ American parents, who ask questions like "Why doesn’t my child come home with things done at school every day?"
"We try to clarify that it is not the product that is important, it’s the process," Skoglund explains. "That, I think, is very Scandinavian. I have never had that question in Sweden. Another question that always comes up is discipline. [We] try to solve problems, figure out what happened, and come up with a solution — and most of the time, the children are involved. Never do we use time-outs."
Another big difference, Skoglund says, is the emphasis Americans place on preparing kids for the next step in life, whereas Scandinavian education focuses on the here and now.
"It is important to just be and enjoy whatever you have. We try to create a place where children can be children," she says. "We believe we are academic, but through play and the children’s own interests."
AND THEN?
The practical implications of this type of schooling are varied, but most people agree that a bilingual education is an asset in the global economy. Furthermore, Bay Area immersion programs seek not to divide children from their American culture but to broaden their understanding of it.
"FAIS adheres to an educational methodology that has been around since the mid-1800s," Fierberg says. "Students are receiving a broad range of education that isn’t held hostage to politics and societal conventions. But it is held in the US, so it does incorporate what is going on around the kids into the English curriculum so that they have an idea of the changes in society."
It’s also important to note that the FAIS is accredited by the California Association of Independent Schools, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, and the French Ministry of Education, allowing students to transition uninterrupted to other schools in the United States and in France.
But one of the greatest goals of the program is to help participants enhance a sense of self as they learn about fellow students, their teachers, and the families they meet during homestays in Normandy in their fifth-grade year.
While all this makes immersion education sound idyllic, it can also be overwhelming for young students. FAIS alumni profiles are open, candid, and complex, revealing such a program’s potential drawbacks. Some drawbacks are merely annoying, as shown in 1974 FAIS alumna Karen Heisler’s memory of adults incessantly asking her to "say something in French" when she was too shy even to say something in English. Others are more serious.
"I remember the solitary struggle with a curriculum that none of my ‘at home’ friends shared and the lonely uniqueness of going to a school nobody had heard of," she says.
Francis Tapon, a 1988 alumnus, agrees, adding that it was often hard to relate to other people. "We were in a cocoon, sheltered from the real world, where people are proud if they can say, ‘Una cerveza, por favor.’<\!q>"
And for many, the value of bilingual education didn’t sink in until much later, just one of the trade-offs parents and students are forced to make. The others? It can be frustrating for students new to a language to be in a class with those who are already fluent. Parents often have the extra job of carrying on language immersion through home activities. And teachers say building interest in a culture completely outside themselves is difficult with children, who are the center of their own worlds. But inherent in a commitment to an immersion program is the expectation of roadblocks and challenges.
And Fierberg says it’s worth the result, the creation of well-rounded adults who understand their roles in a changing world, whether they use French in an international career or simply to order a bottle of wine at a restaurant. "We’d like for them to see difference as something that’s attractive," he says.*
There’s a curious but significant distinction between a job and a career. A job is something that we (usually) spend a third of our life doing, (usually) in exchange for financial compensation. While a job is inherently meritorious, it also connotes trading time for wages: an eternally losing proposition. Unless it’s paired with "hand" or "blow," there’s a modicum of doom in our breath when we utter the word.
A career, however, seems to hold aloft our daydreams and aspirations. Careers are crafted, built, and achieved. And yet, if we work for too long without keeping focus on our passions, our career sometimes becomes that trap we fall into before we know it, the thing people associate with us but we don’t associate with ourselves. At that point, our career can become the dark mirror that reflects our failure to take a risk. It is our soul death.
So there’s nothing more inspiring than meeting someone who loves what he or she does and gets paid for it. Ultimately, it’s not about getting a high-paying job; it’s about having a career that makes you happy. Lars Larson, master brewer of Trumer Brauerei in Berkeley, is one of those lucky schmucks who are making it on their own terms.
Larson’s path to Berkeley and brewing Trumer Pils has been a long and rewarding one, and it seems to be the result of his paying attention to his instincts. It’s doubtful that any child sets out to oversee an artisan beer operation, but Larson admits he can’t recall a single beer he’s disliked, "even sips of beer I snuck from my dad’s glass as a kid."
Larson spent part of his high school years studying in Germany, where the legal drinking age is 16. Around the time he graduated from college with a history degree in the late 1980s, he became interested in what was then a burgeoning craft-beer movement. Inspired by the energy of artisan beer making and the chance to return to Germany, he relocated to Berlin to get a degree in fermentation sciences. It was 1990, right after the Berlin Wall came down. After participating in the historic events that followed, Larson accepted a job at a brewery in Argentina, where the light lager style of German pilsner was popular.
"The principles of brewing are the same worldwide, but culturally [Argentina] was a phenomenal experience," Larson says. "I wouldn’t trade those years for anything."
When he returned to America four years later, he landed in Longview, Texas, working for Stroh’s, which produces such beers as Schlitz and Lone Star. The company had a four-million-barrel capacity and more than 400 employees working in three shifts for an around-the-clock industrial operation. That was by far the most commercial beer-making environment he’d ever been in.
"There’s really a limited set of actions that occurs in the brewing process itself," he says. "But learning different aspects of the business was a great experience."
When the Stroh’s factory closed, Larson took a few interim jobs before accepting his master brewer post at Trumer. Now he’s part of the international team that’s helping to develop the Trumer Pils brand regionally and beyond.
Trumer’s roots are far from the Bay Area. Founded in Salzburg, Austria, in 1601, the artisan brewery established a second location in Berkeley in 2003 because of one thing the two cities share: soft water, an important component in brewing pilsners.
There’s also a historic connection between Berkeley and beer. "The mayor of Berkeley [Tom Bates] just came for a tour," Larson mentions. "He was the guy in the 1970s who helped push legislation to enable brewpubs in California, so in part he’s the reason why we’re here today."
And Larson is glad Trumer is here. Calling this part of the country a great place to live, he says, "People love good food and drink here, and we enjoy being part of that local movement."
But what does Larson actually do? Does a master brewer job entail what we think it does? "I work with great people, and it is great fun, but it isn’t just a frat party," Larson cautions. "It’s not slugging beer all day long."
Actually, it’s the variety in his job that makes it interesting for him. "I work on plants, foodstuffs, chemicals, and machines," he says. "There are different tasks to do each day, and because our original brewery is in Austria, I get to travel to Europe and speak German."
And though beer making is an ancient art, Larson says his work is more rooted in technology and the modern age than one might expect — though it also involves plenty of hard labor.
"It’s really an industrial operation, and there are a lot of safety considerations," Larson says. "There are chemicals, gases, steam, and fast-moving machinery. It’s hot, sweaty, dirty work, and a lot of times you’re beat at the end of the day. It’s quite physical work and not for everybody."
Larson says brewing’s future seems bright. It’s a rapidly growing profession, which means there will be more jobs like his in the years ahead. But since "it’s a job that’s pretty high up on the list," newcomers will need to get in on the ground level, where they can learn more aspects of the business. It also wouldn’t hurt to have a strong background in chemistry, biology, and microbiology; to combine a food sciences degree with a fermentation sciences degree from a school such as UC Davis; and to learn to make beer at home.
As far as Larson is concerned, such work is worth the result: in his case, a great job doing something he loves.
"You meet a lot of great people in this business," he says. "And we love that we get to do something that we enjoy and that we can also share with others."*
Trumer Brauerei offers tours Mondays, 4 p.m. Private group tours can be arranged.
New author Jess Bruder hooked up with the Flaming Lotus Girls on the playa in 2005 as they were building Angel of the Apocalypse, featuring the group prominently in her just-released “Burning Book.”
Photo by Caroline Miller, aka Mills By Steven T. Jones
With only a few more weeks until thousands of Bay Area residents head out to Burning Man, the anticipation is palpable. Impossibly ambitious art projects are being pushed toward completion at a frenzied pace in myriad local warehouses and work spaces, people’s bicycles and hair are taking on a sassy and colorful flair, fencesitters are making the decision to attend or not, and burners can be seen buying googles, costumes, and dozens of gallons of waters at stores around town.
Into this excitement now comes “Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man” by Jessica Bruder, an engaging collection of words and images from everyone’s favorite countercultural blowout. The book will hit the streets Aug. 7, but you can catch Bruder — who logged time with lots on local burners, from Extra Action Marching Band to the Flaming Lotus Girls — tomorrow at 7 p.m. at Booksmith in SF or Aug. 6 at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books in Berkeley.
Or out on the playa at the end of the month. See you there.
And so in the end Rupert Murdoch wanted the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones more than did the Bancroft family that owned them for more than 100 years.
Yet another sad day for the newspaper business as these crown jewels of journalism slipped into the Maw of Murdoch and the slime of the New York Post, Fox News, the O.J. Simpson autobiography, and Murdoch’s sellout ventures in China.
For me, the saddest headline in WSJ history was the top head on the front page of the Aug. 1 edition: “Murdoch Wins His Bid for Dow Jones,” with the front page subheads that nailed down the outcome for the world to see: “News Corp.’s Success Follows Delicate Dance Between Suitor, Target” and “Bancroft Family Agrees to $5 Billion Offer After Deal on Fees, A New Owner for Journal.”
The workroom of KUSF, 90.3 FM, has always looked just this side of combustible. It’s a second home to the radio station’s new-music volunteers, a tightly packed DIY office space papered with band posters from top to bottom. Ancient desks are pinned against each wall, one holding a beat-down stereo. Two huge metal-hinged lockers loom in the corner, monoliths stickered beyond recognition with archeological layers of rock ‘n’ roll’s past. I stare at them and try to remember the exact location of a Barkmarket sticker I myself put up more than 15 years ago. No dice.
Down the hallway — KUSF is crammed into a lone walkway in the basement of Phelan Hall on the University of San Francisco campus — Program Director Trista Bernasconi is helping a cultural producer get his next show sorted out. Putf8um records hang on the walls behind her, a reminder of the respect the noncommercial station has commanded from the musical community since its inception in 1977.
But high-caliber programming was almost no match for the university’s management, which sought to sell its license in 2006.
"Last year the university tried to sell us, and their main thing was that we were not connected to the students," says Bernasconi, a 10-year station veteran and former USF student. "It’s hard because San Francisco is expensive and [students] have to work so many jobs, but there’s been a major push to get more involved."
Coming back from the edge of the FM grave is an excellent reason to party and one that happens to coincide with the station’s 30th anniversary. After four months of celebration, the most impressive event occurs when Yo La Tengo perform a benefit for the beleaguered institution. "We wanted to celebrate in a big way and started thinking about a band that represents what KUSF is about," co–<\d>music director Irwin Swirnoff explains. "Yo La Tengo came into our mind because they’re a band that always progresses." Bernasconi echoes Swirnoff’s enthusiasm, seeing the benefit as a big step in on-campus visibility. "We have an exclusive," she adds, smiling. "There are even a couple of professors who like Yo La Tengo and are really into KUSF now."
But indie popularity and the fact that Swirnoff praises the group’s last three albums as its "three best" played only a part in making Yo La Tengo the top choice. Since 1996 the band has participated in Jersey City, N.J., noncommercial station WFMU’s annual pledge drive to support local, poorly funded radio.
Running a radio station with extremely limited funding is possible only because of the thousands of hours of volunteer work by people from the different departments of KUSF. While the university contributes half of KUSF’s operating budget, there are capital expenses, such as replacing the busted transmitter suffered six years ago, that the station and its volunteers must absorb. Swirnoff feels it’s a crucial distinction to make: "Every day that music is getting played and tickets are being given away it’s amazing, because besides a couple of paid positions, we’re all volunteers and somehow we figure out a way to get it done."
Swirnoff splits his duties with three other music directors — Miguel Serra, DJ Schmeejay, and Lenode — in an effort to combat the sheer volume of music that the station is expected to absorb. Another KUSF veteran, fundraising coordinator Jet, who along with Bernasconi holds one of the station’s few paid positions, explains that volunteering means never really being off the clock. "I have taken a pay cut to take the job," she says with a laugh. "So it’s a labor of love. I put in my volunteer hours as well, so I’m not only an employee, I’m also a volunteer, and I’m not only a volunteer, I’m still also a listener."
But what about the listeners? According to Arbitron, KUSF’s 3,000-watt basement transmitter is able to reach an audience of about 50,000, and luckily the station has managed to allocate part of its shoestring budget to broadcasting via the Internet radio network Live365.com, enabling listeners worldwide to tune in even if they’re beyond the reach of the transmitter. Still, the consumer landscape has changed radically since the station debuted. From the erosion of the major-label hierarchy to the digital explosion of the past decade, people are now drowning in musical options ranging from iTunes to DIY podcasts to satellite radio.
What lures the KUSF faithful through this technological glut is the content and, ultimately, the DJs who provide it. The cultural programming alone is enough to intrigue: where else in the country does the Hamazkayin Armenian Hour run back-to-back with I Heart Organics? New-music programming is no less varied, as DJs are required to pull half of their shows from the "currents" section of the library. While listening to Jacob Felix Heule’s show, which runs Wednesdays from midnight to 3 a.m., I hear dub combo African Head Charge, ’60s pop chanteuse Lesley Gore, and local band Rubber O Cement within 30 minutes. It’s the kind of schizophrenic genre jumping that has created the reputation KUSF enjoys today.
The station’s history lives on in the current new-music staffers. Every volunteer with an air shift has a story about a predecessor who introduced them to band X or taught them how to perform board function Y. Swirnoff, for example, first learned of the station after Sonic Youth cut a record in memory of then-music director Jason Knuth, and he remembers thinking, "I gotta get on KUSF." Jet says her station hero is legendary Rampage Radio‘s Ron Quintana — the guy who named Metallica.
As a former DJ and ex–<\d>promotions director, I recall an on-air mentor who would gesture toward Slayer’s Decade of Aggression, admonishing me to "always end with something apocalyptic." I’d follow her advice right here, but with volunteers who give so selflessly to keep the station alive, there’s a good chance that — at least for now — KUSF will keep the end times at bay.<\!s>*
"This is the first day of my life<\!s>/ I’m glad I didn’t die before I met you." Yes, it almost feels like that in the afterglow of Kiki and Herb’s Alive from Broadway tour, which wound up a too-brief engagement at the American Conservatory Theater’s Geary Theater on July 29. As a longtime duo pulled from retirement after their 2004 Carnegie Hall farewell (and for purported septuagenarians), Kiki (Justin Bond) and Herb (Kenny Mellman) are in incredible shape. And their chosen form, the lounge act writ large, smells equally fresh these days, even as it did its brazen best to stink up the enormous stage at the Geary.
To begin with, Bond’s Depression-schooled Kiki: at first glance, her look, like the 1970s incarnation of a louche and dangerously idle Malibu mom, was enough to draw unconscious childhood traumas swiftly to the surface. Outfitted (by costume designer Marc Happel) in a chiffon explosion that brings to mind a giant multicolor drip candle balanced on two liquor bottles, Kiki stormed onstage evoking a perfect pastiche of iconic torch singers, celebrity chanteuses, and other glamour goddesses, belting out fearsome interpretations of (in her hands) immediate pop schmaltz from all quarters of the music charts. Not only the Bright Eyes number "First Day of My Life" but also other (eventually) recognizable ditties by the Wu-Tang Clan, the Mountain Goats, and Bob Merrill came tumbling out in renditions that have to be heard to be believed. Suffice it to say that, in its diabolical way, it all worked, much like the popular songs in a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms siege operation.
Kiki’s renowned stage banter — which included a recounting of the duo’s personal and professional history and a sodden, delusional tale about a stuffed animal and the manger where Jesus was born — came punctuated with tantalizing hanging pauses, of a duration no longer than that needed to fill a very large glass of whiskey. As the evening’s single act waxed on, Kiki treaded from tipsy to sloppy with the incomparable poise of a true showbiz lush. Her remarks ("I always say, if you weren’t molested as a child, you must have been an ugly kid") ranged from off-color to off the hook to, at least once, right off the stage (as a now decidedly tight Kiki found herself literally up an artificial tree).
Mellman’s blowzy Herb, meanwhile, piped in from behind the piano on a near-continual tidal wave of notes like a hideous mashup of Liberace and McCoy Tyner. Herb doesn’t just tickle the ivories; he fellates them with the gusto of a rising porn star. He turns the grand piano into the instrument of a grand mal. Over this outrageous cacophony and sustain-pedal abuse, Herb (a laconic underdog whom pal Kiki publicly pities as not only gay and Jewish but a technical "retard" to boot) barks out harmonies like a tuxedoed Tourette’s victim.
Music and mayhem this precisely, hilariously awful may require something approaching genius. No wonder Bond and Mellman, the real-life performing team who created Kiki and Herb after meeting in San Francisco 20 years ago, have been doing this sort of thing for a while. If a cabaret drag act in San Francisco is not what you’d call new terrain, Kiki and Herb remind one of the enduring strength of the form when in the right hands and shoes.
First of all, cabaret’s devil-may-care insouciance masks the premium it places on skill, and Bond and Mellman, extremely clever and agile talents, have skill to kill. Bond’s performance in particular dazzles. You could watch it nightly and still revel in every detail of its perfect execution, the arch beauty of its take on the atrocious. And his voice, notably powerful and supple in its coarse histrionics, never falters in delivering full-throated commitment to the task.
But cabaret since the Weimar Republic is also the theatrical medium most closely associated with eye-of-storm moments in ages of cultural decadence and political peril. Kiki’s brash social commentary, giving vent to, among other things, her bottomless contempt for George<\!s>W. Bush (whom her lawyer has advised her she must not wish mortal harm to from the stage) and all the rest of them, is frank, funny, and unforgiving — and it strikes just the right notes somehow, as her politics boil down to a slurred Rodney King–<\d>like sound bite that’s as sensible as it is unabashedly innocent: "Just be nice, for Chrissake."<\!s>*
