International

Come on, Mr. Sheriff

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By Tim Redmond

Here’s a great idea: Supervisors Tom Ammiano and Ross Mirkarmimi are pushing for a resolution that would call on the San Francisco sheriff to refuse to carry out Ellis Act evictions. Sheriff Mike Hennessey doesn’t seem so hot on this; he says he doesn’t want to face a contempt of court citation and wind up in his own jail.

But hey, it’s a San Francisco tradition: Back in 1977, then-Sheriff Dick Hongisto refused to evict the residents of the International Hotel, and spent five days in jail before relenting. The worst that would happen to Hennessey: He’d be stuck for a few days in his own clink, where I suspect he’d be treated well (and would learn a bit about how the inmates feel day to day). Eventually, he’d probably have to relent, too — but what a glrious legal battle. It would be an other great example of what we call Civic Disobedience — using the clout of the city and the full legal resources of the city to defy an immoral law. Gavin Newsom did it with same-sex marriage. Now, Hennessey has a chance to make history. Go for it, Mike.

FRIDAY

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JULY 21

MUSic

Dabrye

Hip-hop comes in many forms, one of the most interesting of which can be found in the music of Dabrye, a glitch-hop project by producer Tadd Mullinix. His dense, Prefuse 73-esque electro-glitch breaks are stunning, lending themselves neatly to surreal rhymes from his friends, who include the illustrious likes of MF Doom. On his new record, Two/Three (Ghostly International), his work has taken on a particularly dark, psychedelic undercurrent. The show will feature one of the best MCs from the record, Kadence. (Michael Harkin)

With Percee P and Mophono
10 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com

MUSIC

Mr. Lif

A veteran conscious rapper from Boston, Definitive Jux artist Mr. Lif erases the negative hip-hop cloud hanging over that city since it spawned Benzino. Though he’s been laying it down since 2001, Lif’s profile has been considerably upped over the past couple of years as a member of the Perceptionists, an underground supergroup he formed with Akrobatik and DJ Fakts One. Now Lif brings his politically tinged, old-school crowd-rocking abilities back to town in support of his new Mo’ Mega (Def Jux). (Garrett Caples)

9 p.m.
Slim’s
333 11th St., SF
$15
(415) 255-0333
www.slims-sf.com

Zeitgeist

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By Steven T. Jones
Zeitgeist, in addition to being my satellite office, is an aptly named bar. The place and the people it attracts seem to capture the spirit of our troubled times, drawing together counterculture rebels and many of the cogs in the very machines that we are fighting against (albeit usually young people striving to stay hip despite their day jobs).
After a few days worth of a running e-mail argument with SFSOS’s Ryan Chamberlin about his ridiculous but successful efforts to stop a pot club from locating in his Fisherman’s Wharf neighborhood, it was weird to bump into him at Zeitgeist. We rarely see eye-to-eye about anything politically, but we each try not to hold grudges and share an appreciation for the Zeitgeist…as well as this bar.
So we continued our e-argument face-to-face over beers. He likes the wholesomeness of red states and wants there to be little red enclaves in San Francisco, free from pot clubs and other undesirable elements. Ya know, for “the children.” I argue that he’s being moralistic, judgmental, and unrealistically trying to control things beyond his control.
Soon, some guy next to us was leaning into the conversation, and when I asked where he stood on the question, he backed me up. But then he got a mischievous smile on his face when I asked for his story. “I work in the White House,” he said, to which I replied for both of their benefits, “Well, you guys should get along great.”
They didn’t, but he and I did. Well, from there it got curiouser and curiouser, they say, as my new friend (whose identity I confirmed, but will protect for now), his buddy, and I headed down the rabbit hole of discussing at length American empire, international law, Iraq, war crimes, and impeachment – all with a White House lawyer, around my age of 37, who is directly involved with all these questions. He’s a careerist who just happened to fall in with the neocons, and he shared my belief in the malevolence of characters like Dick Cheney, but he still believes that only American power, exerting globally on people whether they like it or not, can fix this almost hopeless situation our country has created for itself.
And I came away feeling like all of us, from local activists and journalists to those controlling the levers of power, are just bumbling our way through life, pretending like we know what we’re doing and trying not to fuck things up worse than they were before. Maybe that is the modern American Zeitgeist.

Past ain’t past

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› cheryl@sfbg.com
“What is the international camp language? It’s beating.” In an instant, a guide at the former concentration camp just outside of Mauthausen, Austria, transforms a group of high schoolers from giggly to terrified. From the looks of the parking lot, Mauthausen is like any other historical attraction. Sightseers roll up in enormous motor coaches, clutching digital cameras loaded only with fun-time Euro-vacation shots — until now.
There’s no narration in KZ, Rex Bloomfield’s layered doc about the Mauthausen camp’s post–World War II transformation into an exceedingly unsettling tourist destination. (KZ is short for the German word Konzentrationslager, or concentration camp.) The film is largely composed of interviews with visitors, guides (“I’ve been taking antidepressants for years,” one remarks woefully), and Mauthausen residents — many too young to remember the camp’s horrors and some too old to realize that Hitler Youth nostalgia isn’t something most folks would want caught on tape. The disconnect between town and camp, past and present, can be breathtaking. “McDonald’s” and “Mauthausen” are painted on the same billboard; a young couple shrug off the fact that their comfy home once belonged to an SS officer; and the local tavern features lederhosen, suds, and a folkie strummer whose sunny lyrics praise “the cider tavern up by the KZ.”
Though Bloomfield doesn’t shape his film with archival footage, talking-head academics, or voice-overs, the way KZ is edited makes it pretty clear he’s just as stunned as we are by the juxtapositions his film uncovers. An elderly Mauthausener remarks that during the war she wasn’t sure what was going on in the camp, just that it was “nothing good”; moments later the camera cuts to a group nervously shuffling into the KZ’s gas chamber, where they hear incredibly graphic descriptions of deaths that happened where they now stand.
For its San Francisco Jewish Film Festival engagement, KZ screens with the short The Holocaust Tourist: Whatever Happened to Never Again?, which examines the off-kilter rebirth of Jewish culture (think faux-Hebrew signage and “Jewish-style” restaurants that serve pork) in Krakow, Poland, owing to the popularity of Schindler’s List. What visitors to Mauthausen or Krakow (the closest big city to Auschwitz) actually get out of their experiences is unclear; some seem deeply moved, while others are simply checking off another stop on, say, their “Highlights of Poland” itinerary. As both films point out, being a tourist is perhaps all most people can — or should — be in places where such evil still lingers.
Meanwhile, in Tel Aviv, Israel, folks with zero interest in confronting horror head-on can’t avoid it when a suicide bomber targets their hangout, a laid-back watering hole called Mike’s Place. Amazingly, filming for the documentary Blues by the Beach — intended as a feel-good look at “real life in Israel” beyond headline-grabbing violence — had begun before the April 2003 attack. After the project’s primary catalyst, American producer Jack Baxter, was seriously injured in the blast, Joshua Faudem (an Israeli American with a filmmaking background who happened to be a Mike’s Place bartender) carried on with help from his then-girlfriend, Pavla Fleischer, also a filmmaker.
Despite this stunning chain of coincidences, Blues by the Beach unfortunately suffers from lack of focus, shifting from Baxter’s search for a doc subject to Mike’s Place to Faudem’s failing relationship with Fleischer. Though the filmmakers’ post-traumatic stress is well earned, it can get tedious. Far more inspiring is the resilience of Mike’s Place itself. Visit the bar’s Web site (www. mikesplacebars.com) for a striking illustration of how recent tragedy offers just as much opportunity for off-the-wall juxtaposition as anything left over from World War II: a page memorializing the victims of the bombing and another page proudly displaying pics from the bar’s annual “Pimp-n-Ho” costume bash. SFBG
SAN FRANCISCO
JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
July 20–Aug. 7
See Film listings for showtimes
and venues
(925) 275-9490
www.sfjff.org

Fair fees for rich developers

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EDITORIAL The information that emerged from the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use Committee on July 12 was mind-bending: According to a new city report, private developers will not even consider going forward with a big housing construction project unless the profit margin is at least 28 percent.
Think about it: Without a guaranteed profit about three or four times larger than what most normal businesses strive for, the developers won’t pour an ounce of concrete. And they still complain that the city wants them to build more affordable housing.
As housing activist Calvin Welch pointed out at the hearing, it used to be illegal in most states to charge that much interest on loaned money. The word for it was usury.
And in much of the construction industry, profit margins are far, far slimmer than that. On big public-works projects, like the Bay Bridge retrofit and the construction of the new terminal at San Francisco International Airport, the margin was designed to be about 5 percent.
As Steven T. Jones reports on page 15, this information, which has received very little press attention, ought to be the strongest boost yet for advocates of what’s known as “inclusionary housing” legislation — rules that would require developers building market-rate housing units to set aside a percentage of those units for sale or rent at levels that are affordable to nonwealthy San Franciscans. The current law requires that 12 percent of the units in any project have to be priced below market rate. (That goes up to 17 percent if the affordable units are built somewhere off-site or if the developers simply pay a per-unit fee into a city low-cost housing fund.)
Sup. Chris Daly, who has long been an advocate of inclusionary housing, forced the developer of One Rincon Hill, a high-rise condo project, to hike the affordable-housing share to 25 percent last year — and that convinced him that the city’s legal requirement was too low.
So now the supervisors are looking at increasing the levy, and as part of the discussion, a task force operating under the Mayor’s Office of Housing hired a consultant to look at industry finances and standards. If the report is correct, and 28 percent margins are considered a minimum in San Francisco’s private-sector housing market, then the rather modest increases the supervisors are looking at (a hike from 12 to 15 percent of below-market-rate units and some tighter rules for enforcement) are eminently reasonable. In fact, the legislation isn’t nearly ambitious enough.
Suppose the city mandated 25 percent below-market-price units in all new housing projects of more than, say, 20 units. Would the developers really walk away, saying that profits of, say, 20 percent just weren’t enough? Somehow, we doubt it — in fact, we suspect there are plenty of builders out there who would be more than happy with that level of return. And suppose the market for high-end, million-dollar condos — which clearly aren’t serving the unmet housing needs of the city anyway — started to dry up. So what? San Francisco doesn’t need more housing for the very rich. In fact, the overall impact of these luxury housing projects on the city is almost certainly negative — that sort of housing tends to drive out blue-collar industry and is already turning parts of the city into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley.
Daly argues that without these new market-rate projects, very little affordable housing will be built. And he has a point. Government subsidies and nonprofit programs are immensely valuable, but there’s never enough public cash to meet the stratospheric need for affordable housing in San Francisco.
But there’s no reason for the city to be held hostage by developer profits that exceed all reason. At the very least, the board should approve Daly’s proposals — and should look seriously at jacking up the requirements even more. SFBG

A tale of two museums

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› amanda@sfbg.com
The Presidio, converted from military to civilian use 12 years ago, has six million square feet of former officers’ quarters, barracks, and buildings that make it unlike any other national park in the country.
This public space has become home to a mixed bag of occupants — primarily private citizens, a smattering of nonprofit organizations, and an increasing number of commercial enterprises — as the Presidio Trust pursues a controversial congressional mandate to be financially self-sustaining.
Two different museums have also vied for residence at the site of the park’s Main Post: the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center (CIMCC) and the Disney Museum. Both submitted viable proposals for exhibition space, representing starkly different futures for the Presidio.
This is the story of how one may get to stay and the other just had to go. This is also the story of how the Presidio Trust is transforming a prized national park into just another piece of real estate to be claimed by the highest bidder.
LOST HERITAGE
In Presidio Trust literature, the Main Post is called the “heart of the Presidio.” The centrally located seven-acre parcel includes an enormous parking lot surrounded by dozens of buildings that provide a steady stream of traffic pumping through the arteries of Presidio Boulevard and Doyle Drive. If you were hoping to attract a regular flow of visitors to your museum, the Main Post would be an ideal place to put it.
Photographs of classic Presidio architecture usually show the northwestern edge of the Main Post where Buildings 103 and 104 are a stately couple among a quintuplet of identical four-story brick structures. They are now empty, except for some temporary office space. Approximately 44,000 square feet each, the historic barracks were built between 1895 and 1897 to accommodate troops returning from frontier battles during the conquest of Native American tribes.
When the National Park Service was handed the Presidio in 1995, the CIMCC became one of the first “park partners” to set up office. For almost two years, the museum negotiated with the park service to lease additional space for the first living museum of Native American culture in California.
The museum planners took a shine to Building 103, paid for a $44,000 renovation study, and kicked off the necessary fundraising with a $2 million allocation from then–Senate president pro tem Bill Lockyer. Joseph Myers, a Pomo Indian, lawyer, and chairman of the CIMCC Board of Directors, said there was a lot of enthusiasm for the project.
“Even when we just had office space here we had international visitors wandering through, wondering when there would be a museum here,” he said.
Things were looking hopeful, and on Sept. 21, 1996, the Presidio, originally home of the Ohlone tribe, hosted a formal dedication of the return of a Native American presence to the park. Then-mayor Willie Brown attended the ceremony and pledged his support to the project.
Not long after, the Presidio’s power structure radically shifted. The park was split into two areas, with Area A along the waterfront managed by the park service and the inland Area B and the bulk of its buildings, including the Main Post, managed by the Presidio Trust — the result of a newfangled proposal by Rep. Nancy Pelosi that won acceptance in a Republican-controlled Congress.
The Presidio is the first national park with a mandate to pay its own way; the trust’s finances are governed by a board of seven presidential designees — initially chaired by downtown-friendly Toby Rosenblatt and including Gap founder Donald Fisher. The new landlords informed the CIMCC that all real estate negotiations were on hold.
“We tried very hard to convince them we would be good tenants,” Myers told the Guardian. “The Presidio is originally one of the places where Indians suffered at the hands of Spanish conquistadors. They were tortured and killed for not being good slaves. That’s old history, but it’s certainly morally and culturally acceptable to consider the Presidio a good place for a museum.”
But over the course of three years, serious discussions with the trust were delayed, and alternate plans and proposals for different buildings were ignored. In September 2000, at Myers’s insistence, the CIMCC finally met with Presidio staff and was encouraged to submit a proposal to renovate three dilapidated buildings near Lombard Gate.
The deadline to submit was short, but the CIMCC met it and museum planners say they were promised a decision within 14 days. Nine months later they received a formal response with, according to Myers, no solid answer. They continued waiting until an article in the San Francisco Chronicle informed them that the buildings had been leased to a private foundation from Silicon Valley.
The results of that deal now stand within sight of the Main Post: the Letterman Digital Arts Center, 850,000 square feet of space renovated and leased for $5.6 million a year by the private company Lucasfilm.
According to Presidio spokesperson Dana Polk, negotiations didn’t work out because the CIMCC couldn’t pay rent or put money into the work on the building. “They weren’t able to do either,” she said.
Somehow the museum was able to do it elsewhere. After withdrawing all proposals and vacating its office space, the CIMCC purchased a 24,000-square-foot building in Santa Rosa. The museum pays $10,000 a month in mortgage for the building, now worth $3 million, and it’s a better deal than the Presidio offered: a leased space at $50,000 a month after $10 million in renovations paid out from the CIMCC’s pocket. But it doesn’t lessen the irony or pain of the situation.
“The philosophy behind keeping the Presidio alive for public access was not for the purpose of George Lucas and Disneyland, but for California culture,” said Myers. “I think they have their own idea of what cultural projects are, and it’s not us.”
The new museum is still under construction in Santa Rosa and will include displays of indigenous art and archives. The National Indian Justice Center already calls it a home, and there are regular workshops on subjects like storytelling and art, current issues, and traditional uses of California native plants.
“That would have been a perfect fit for a national park,” said Joel Ventresca, chair of Preserve the Presidio, a watchdog group that’s fought past Presidio developments. He likened the CIMCC to exhibits in Yosemite where visitors can learn about the lives and legacies of local tribes. “Where is that in the Presidio? It’s nowhere.”
Actually, he’s not quite right. Directly in front of Building 103, there’s an old, paint-chipped sign with faded letters that reads, “Old Burial Ground. The area immediately to the west of this marker was used by the Indians, Spaniards, and Mexicans to bury their dead — 1776–1846. The remains are now in the National Cemetery, Presidio of San Francisco.”
MICKEY MOUSE PROPOSAL
If the CIMCC had found a home in Building 103, Myers would be preparing to welcome a new next-door neighbor. The Disney Museum is the next bastion of culture vying for residence in the Presidio and it has designs on Building 104.
The proposal comes from the nonprofit Disney Family Foundation — a compendium of Walt’s family, headed by daughter Diane Disney Miller, that split from the Disney Company. Due to a curiosity about Walt Disney apparently unsatisfied by several theme parks around the world (one of which, at 47 square miles, is nearly the size of all of San Francisco), the family is looking for a place to display what remains of Disney’s personal artifacts.
Museum planners hope that by 2009 they can invite the public to view items like the Academy Awards he once won and the cars he once drove. Part of the Disney proposal includes renovating Buildings 108 and 122 as well, and the overarching plan is for office space and a reading room, gift shop, and café.
Walt Disney never lived in San Francisco, and when asked why the Disney Family Foundation selected the Presidio, trust spokesperson Polk said of the family, “They live relatively locally, in Napa. They’ve always enjoyed the Presidio and the history here.”
No agreements have been signed yet between Disney and the trust, and according to Polk the project is still subject to approval by the Presidio board. But the foundation has announced the plan on its Web site and held a celebration in November 2004, where Miller and trust staff answered questions about the project.
When the Presidio was first conceived as a national park in 1994, it was sold to the public as a “global center dedicated to the world’s most critical environmental, social, and cultural challenges.” Part of the National Park Service’s General Management Plan was to house people and organizations inspired by their unique setting to do good work for the public benefit. Then when Congress put a financial noose around the park and designed the Presidio Trust with a mandate for fiscal sustainability, that vision was blurred.
“This underlying issue of letting market forces come into play in a national park, it’s a terrible precedent,” said Presidio activist Ventresca. “People who have an important cultural story to tell are given the cold shoulder, and people with deep pockets are being given a place to build a monument to their father.” SFBG

The planet of the mutants

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› johnny@sfbg.com
It’s been nearly 40 years since Sérgio Dias Baptista of Os Mutantes saw Ten Years After at the Fillmore, but he still has, well, vivid memories of his first visit to San Francisco as a naive 17-year-old. He remembers sitting on a bench at a park in Haight-Ashbury and seeing a man on a faraway hilltop slowly walking toward him, until the man finally arrived — to offer Dias what he claims was his first joint. “I think it was also the first time someone showed me a peace sign, and I didn’t understand what was that,” the ebullient guitarist says. “I thought it stood for ‘Victory.’”
Dias hopes to bring some “nice ‘inner weather’” to a much different United States this week, when the antic victorious peacefulness of Os Mutantes takes over the same venue where he once saw Nottingham’s finest. “It’s going to be, like, ‘Whoa!’” he predicts. “Flashbacks all over the place!”
Imagine if the Monkees or Sonny and Cher were true subversives rather than sedatives and you have a glimmer of Os Mutantes’ initial censor-baiting carnival-esque presence on Brazilian TV shows such as The Small World of Ronnie Von. If fellow tropicalistas Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were the Bahians with bossa nova roots, then Dias, his brother Arnaldo, and Arnaldo’s girlfriend Rita Lee Jones — a vocalist known for her spontaneous raids of network costume wardrobes — were the Tropicália movement’s outrageous São Paulo–based rock ’n’ roll wing. With a pianist-composer for a mother and a tenor singer–poet for a father, the Dias brothers lived and breathed music. “Working 10 or 12 hours a day on songs became a normal thing for us,” says Dias, who wears a cape on the front of the group’s first album and an alien skullcap on the back of their second. “The level of expectation was high, but without any demands. That was very good for our technical development.”
This amazing development, overseen by Karlheinz Stockhausen–influenced producer Rogério Duprat — the George Martin or Phil Spector or Jack Nitzsche or Pierre Henry of Tropicalismo — can be heard on the group’s triple crown of classics, 1968’s Os Mutantes, 1969’s Mutantes, and 1970’s A Divina Comédia, ou Ando Meio Desligado. “There was no psychedelia — Brazil received information in kaleidoscope,” Dias asserts, using a favorite interview metaphor. Whether generated by drugs or by cultural conduits, the kaleidoscopic sound of Os Mutantes’ first three records ranges from Ventures-like guitar riffing (“I have to thank [Ventures guitarist] Nokie Edwards for hours of pleasure,” says Dias) to hallucinatory and surreal choral passages (such as Os Mutantes’ time stopper “O Relógio”) and Janis Joplin–like freak-outs about domestic appliances (the third album’s “Meu Refrigerador Não Funciona,” or “My Refrigerator Doesn’t Work”).
A reaction to international pop culture inspired by modernist poet Oswald de Andrade’s “Cannibalist Manifesto,” the sound of Os Mutantes and their fellow Tropicalistas wasn’t music to the ears of Brazil’s military dictatorship or to those of younger music fans who adhered to post–bossa nova nationalist tradition or derivative Jovem Guarda rock. In October 1967, at TV Records’ Second Festival of Brazilian Popular Music, both Veloso (performing “Alegria, Alegria,” which name-drops Coca-Cola) and Gil (performing “Domingo No Parque” with Os Mutantes) received the type of reaction Bob Dylan had recently gotten for going electric. “It felt good. You pull out your fists and think, ‘OK, they’re against us, so let’s show them the way,’” Dias says when asked about the era’s battles against forces of repression. “When you’re young, you think you’re indestructible or immortal.”
Tropicalismo’s figureheads soon learned otherwise. The following year brought the landmark compilation Tropicália ou Panis et Circensis, recorded the same month as the massive protests in Paris, its title fusing Veloso’s anthem “Tropicália” (which mentions the Brigitte Bardot film Viva Maria) and Os Mutantes’ “Panis et Circensis.” Turning a catchphrase from the May revolts into a song (“É Proibido Proibir”), Veloso soon faced an onslaught of eggs and tomatoes as well as boos during performances. In December 1968, Brazilian president Artur da Costa e Silva imprisoned Veloso and Gil, who were later exiled to England. One could say Os Mutantes got off lucky in comparison, as they were still able to flout the Federal Censorship Department through the gothic-vault morbidity of A Divina Comédia’s cover art and through mocking sound effects on TV. “It was a dark period, but we fought with a smile,” says Dias, who doesn’t miss a chance to compare Brazil’s Fifth Institutional Act with the United States’ Patriot Act. “We were jokers, but we were serious jokers.”
Today, eight years after Beck’s best album, Mutations (featuring the single “Tropicalia”), Os Mutantes and their contemporaries are surfing another deserved cosmic wave of younger-generation wonderment, and it’s more apparent than ever that the movement’s major musical artists covered each other’s tracks in a way that emphasized — rather than hid — their unity and intent. The recent Soul Jazz comp Tropicália: A Brazilian Revolution in Sound begins with Gil’s “Bat Macumba” and closes with the Os Mutantes version. Through moments like Gal Costa’s gorgeous “Baby” (another Veloso composition also covered by Os Mutantes), the lesser-known but perhaps superior collection Tropicália Gold, on Universal, highlights the music’s oft-overlooked links to bossa nova and the ties between Tropicalismo îe-îe-îe and Françoise Hardy’s languid yé-yé. Veloso’s autobiography, Tropical Truth, gives shout-outs to Jean-Luc Godard, but Serge Gainsbourg had to have been just as much an influence on Veloso’s lyrics and the whiz-bang! noises on Os Mutantes recordings such as A Divina Comédia’s “Chão de Estrelas.”
Since he laments that Al Jazeera isn’t readily available in Brazil, Sérgio Dias might be the first to note that Brazilian TV and popular music ain’t always what they used to be, regardless of the fact that Gil is now the country’s Minister of Culture. For example, the ’90s brought the bizarre blond ambition of Playboy playmate–turned–pop star and kids TV host Xuxa — not exactly the girl Os Mutantes had in mind when they “shoo shoo”-ed through Jorge Ben’s “A Minha Menina.” But the Dias brothers still have many reasons to celebrate. Earlier this year, a Tropicália exhibition at the Barbican in London brought the movement’s visual artists, including the late Hélio Oiticica (who coined the term Tropicália), together with their current technicolor children such as Assume Vivid Astro Focus. It also led to a live performance by Os Mutantes with new vocalist Zélia Duncan — the first time the Dias brothers appeared onstage together in over three decades. Devendra Banhart, who had written to the group asking to be their roadie, was the opening act.
“I felt like the guys going into the arena,” says Dias. “It was such a burst of energy — it was outrageous. After the show, the audience stood yelling ‘Mutantes!’ for 10 minutes. It’s such a humbling situation, to think about people wanting this 30 years later. It makes me want to bow to the universe.” SFBG
OS MUTANTES
With Brightback Morning Light
Mon/24, 9 p.m.
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
$37.50
(415) 346-4000
www.thefillmore.com

Workers nights

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With the AFL-CIO split last year, and millions of undocumented workers fighting for their jobs, the climate is ripe for the Bay Area to celebrate its labor solidarity. San Francisco has long been a wealthy city, but it also has the most organized labor movement in the nation.
For 13 years, LaborFest has celebrated that movement here and around the world. This year’s festival celebrates labor history landmarks: the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the 1934 General Strike, the 1946 Oakland General Strike, and the 120th Anniversary of May Day and the turning point at Haymarket Square, where workers striking for an eight-hour workday led to the creation of International Worker’s Day across the globe.
“San Francisco has always been an international city,” Steve Zeltzer, one of the founders of LaborFest and a member of the Operating Engineers Local 39 Union, told the Guardian. “Its working class has always been an international working class. Workers have the same experience all over the world, and it’s important to have an international labor media and art network.”
In only three years, workers rebuilt San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. A photo exhibit at City Hall of historic photographs and contemporary images by Joseph A. Blum is one of the ongoing exhibits with this year’s LaborFest. A new mural by Mike Connor at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts depicts the city from rubble to bridge spans, under the banner “One Hundred Years of Working People’s Progress,” and includes scenes from the 1934 strike and an International Longshore and Warehouse Union Strike. Connor, a union electrician based in New York, has been showing labor paintings and murals with LaborFest since 2002.
“San Francisco is definitely a pro-union city, but today there’s a lot of people who don’t know the history of unions,” he told us. Connor’s paintings offer a visual tour of labor’s history. “If you keep people educated about unions and labor,” Connor said, “they don’t have to repeat history.”
So how did the city rebuild so quickly?
“Unlike New Orleans after (Hurricane) Katrina,” offered Seltzer, “San Francisco had organized labor for the ‘06 earthquake. After the ‘01 strike, where transit workers were brutally beaten by police, workers formed the Union Labor Party.”
The party ran candidates and swept offices, and by 1906 all city supervisors were Labor, including the mayor, Eugene Schmitz. Schmitz and the supervisors were eventually ousted or resigned in the face of graft and bribery charges, but the Labor Party remained strong. “San Francisco has had two labor mayors,” says Seltzer, “but today you wouldn’t even know it.”
The festival is global in its reach, with Japan, Turkey, Bolivia and Argentina among the countries in the LaborFest network holding their own art and video events. San Francisco workers have long celebrated solidarity with international laborers. The film Solidarity Has No Borders tells the story of San Francisco dock workers who, in 1997, refused to handle cargo in a ship sailing from Liverpool, where dockworkers were fighting for their rights demonstrate. According to Seltzer, Bay Area dock workers in the past have boycotted working with cargo from apartheid South Africa and El Salvador.
LaborFest does not limit its focus to unionized labor. Daisy Anarchy’s one-woman show Which Side Are You On? celebrates sex industry workers around the world. Sex-workers, either unionized like the Lusty Lady or not, are workers fighting against exploitation.
“The Labor Council supports them being organized,” said Zeltzer. “San Francisco is open to sex workers organizing more than anywhere else. They are workers like anyone else.”
This year’s May Day demonstrations were a historic development for the labor movement because undocumented workers are neither unionized nor organized. The massive marches in Chicago and Los Angeles alone represented millions of undocumented workers joined by organized labor and trade unionists. The film The Penthouse of Heaven- May Day Chicago 2006 features footage from the Chicago demonstration, the city whose Haymarket riots 120 years ago are some of the most prominent in labor history. A one-day strike for an eight-hour workday was held on May 1st, 1886. On the 4th, following a shooting and riot the previous day at a plant, a bomb exploded in Haymarket Square, killing eight police officers. Though the bomb thrower was never identified, seven men received death sentences.
Worldwide appeals for clemency led to the establishment of May 1 as International Worker’s Day across the world. The United States, however, has not adopted the holiday, but the mass demonstrations on May 1 of this year celebrated the country’s own international workers in solidarity.
The festival continues through July 31st, with historical walks commemorating the Oakland General Strike, labor films at the Roxie Theater, readings at Modern Times Bookstore, a Maritime History Boat Tour, and dozens of other events in San Francisco and Oakland. Go to www.laborfest.net for a complete schedule.

Talk to me, dammit

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Welcome to the Bruce Blog, where editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann (B3) will be giving you his thoughts on everything from his home town in Rock Rapids Iowa to his 40 years publishing the nation’s premier West Coast alternative newsweekly.

Oh, and PG&E, sunshine, international press freedom, the Potrero Hill martini, the decline and fall of the great gin and tonic and few other things you need to know about.

He’s on vacation until July 25th; check back then. And talk back to him, dammit.

Anatomy of a scandal foretold

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MEXICO CITY (July 7th) — Mexican elections are stolen before, during, and after Election Day. Just look at what happened in the days leading up to the tightest presidential election in the nation’s history this past July 2nd.

By law, the parties and their candidates close down their campaigns three days before Election Day. On Wednesday night June 28th, as the legal limit hove into sight, a team of crack investigators from the Attorney General’s organized crime unit descended on the maximum security lock-up at La Palma in Mexico state where former Mexico City Finance Secretary Guillermo Ponce awaits trial on charges of misuse of public funds “ much of which he appears to have left on Las Vegas crap tables.

During his nearly six years in office, outgoing president Vicente Fox has often used his attorney general’s office against leftist front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to counter his growing popularity, including a failed effort to bar the former Mexico City mayor from the ballot and even imprison him.

Now, in a desperate last-minute electoral ploy by Fox’s right-wing National Action or PAN party to boost the fortunes of its lagging candidate Felipe Calderon, the agents tried to pressure Ponce into testifying that AMLO and his PRD party had used city revenues to finance his presidential campaign but Ponce proved a stand-up guy and ultimately rebuffed the government men.

The imprisoned finance secretary’s refusal to talk greatly disappointed both Televisa and TV Azteca, Mexico’s two-headed television monopoly that has waged an unrelenting dirty war against Lopez Obrador for months and even years. Indeed, TV crews were stationed out in the La Palma parking lot to record Ponce’s thwarted confession for primetime news and both networks had reserved time blocks on their evening broadcasting, forcing the anchors to scramble to fill in the gap.

That was Wednesday night. On Thursday June 29th, Lopez Obrador’s people awoke to discover that the candidate’s electronic page had been hacked and a phony message purportedly signed by AMLO posted there calling upon his supporters to hit the streets “if the results do not favor us.” Although officials of Lopez Obrador’s party, the PRD, immediately proved the letter to be a hoax, the pro-Calderon media broadcast the story for hours as if it were the gospel truth, eventually forcing the PRD and its allies to reaffirm that AMLO would abide by results released by the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), the nation’s maximum electoral authority, even if the IFE’s numbers did not favor the candidate.

The PRD pledge was a reiteration of a “pact of civility” that Televisa had browbeat PRD president Lionel Cota into signing in early June. “Hackergate,” as the scandal quickly became known, was designed to prevent Lopez Obrador’s supporters from protesting the fraud that the electoral authorities were already preparing.

That was Thursday. On Friday, June 30th, after more than five years of false starts, Fox’s special prosecutor for political crimes placed former president Luis Echeverria under house arrest for his role in student massacres in 1968 and 1971. Not only was the long overdue arrest portrayed by big media as a feather in Fox’s — and therefore, Calderon’s – cap, but it also put the much-hated Echeverria, a pseudo-leftist with whom Calderon has often compared Lopez Obrador, back on the front pages. Since Echeverria is an emeritus member of the PRI, the bust killed two birds with one very opportunist stone.

That was Friday. On Saturday June 1st, two PRD poll watchers in conflictive Guerrero state were gunned down by unknowns, invoking the memory of hundreds of party supporters who were slaughtered in political violence after the 1988 presidential election was stolen from party founder Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, up until now Mexico’s most conspicuous electoral fraud.

That was Saturday. On Sunday, July 2nd, Felipe Calderon and the PAN, aided and abetted by the connivance of the Federal Electoral Institute, Mexico’s maximum electoral authority, stole the presidential election before the nation’s eyes.

As mentioned above, Mexican elections are stolen before, during, and after the votes are cast. During the run-up to July 2nd, the IFE, under the direction of Calderon partisan Luis Carlos Ugalde, systematically tried to cripple Lopez Obrador’s campaign. Venomous television spots that labeled AMLO “a danger” to Mexico were allowed to run, sometimes four to a single commercial break, for months on Televisa and TV Azteca despite an indignant outcry from Lopez Obrador’s supporters. The IFE only pulled the plug on the hit pieces under court order.
In a similar display of crystal clear bias, Ugalde and the IFE winked at Vicente Fox’s shameless, unprecedented, and unconstitutional campaigning for Calderon, and refused to intervene despite AMLO’s pleas for the president to remove himself from the election.

One of the IFE’s more notorious accomplishments in this year’s presidential elections was to engineer the non-vote of Mexicans in the United States, an effort that resulted in the disenfranchisement of millions of “paisanos” living north of the Rio Bravo. Undocumented workers were denied absentee ballot applications at consulates and embassies and more than a million eligible voters were barred from casting a ballot because their voter registration cards were not up to date and the IFE refused to update them outside of Mexico. Untold numbers of undocumented workers who could not risk returning to Mexico for a minimum 25 days to renew their credential were denied the franchise the IFE was sworn to defend. The PRD insists that the majority of undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. would have cast a ballot for Lopez Obrador.

The left-center party has considerable strength in Los Angeles and Chicago, the two most important concentrations of Mexicans in the U.S. When thousands of legal Mexican residents from Los Angeles caravanned to Tijuana to cast a ballot for Lopez Obrador, they found the special polling places for citizens in transit had no ballots. The 750 ballots allocated to the special “casillas” had already been taken by members of the Mexican police and military.

In Mexico City, when voters in transit lined up at one special polling place, according to noted writer Elena Poniatowska, hundreds of nuns presumably voting for the rightwing Calderon displaced them and were given the last of the ballots.

Back in the bad old days when the long-ruling (71 years) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) stole elections with impunity, most of the larceny took place in the polling stations –stolen or stuffed ballot boxes, multiple voting, altered vote counts — but since national and international observers like the San Francisco-based Global Exchange became a regular feature of the electoral landscape here, such overt fraud has diminished and the cumulative number of anomalies recorded in 130,000 casillas July 2nd seemed insignificant when compared to the size of the victory Calderon was already claiming the morning after — i.e. the John Kerry Syndrome, named in memory of the Democratic Party candidate’s sudden capitulation in Ohio in 2004 for much the same reason.

Nonetheless, this “fraude de hormiga” (fraud of the ants) which steals five to 10 votes a ballot box, when combined with the disappearance of voters from precinct lists (“razarados” or the razored ones) can fabricate an electoral majority: The long-ruling PRI (which failed to win a single state July 2nd) was a master of this sort of “alquemia” (alchemy) during seven decades of defrauding Mexican voters.

During the build-up to July 2nd, independent reporters here uncovered what appeared to be IFE preparations for cybernetic fraud. One columnist at the left national daily La Jornada discovered parallel lists of “razarados” on the IFE electronic page; one of the lists contained multiples of the other. While the columnist, Julio Hernandez, made a phone call to the IFE to question this phenomenon, the list containing the multiples vanished from his computer screen.

Similarly, radio reporter Carmen Aristegui was able to access the list of all registered voters through one of Felipe Calderon’s web pages, and the list had been crossed with one containing the personal data of all recipients of government social development program benefits. Former social development secretary (SEDESO) Josefina Vazquez Mota, is Calderon’s right hand woman and the PAN candidate’s brother-in-law Diego Zavala, a data processing tycoon, designed programs for both the IFE and the SEDESO. Utilizing voter registration rolls and lists of beneficiaries of government programs is considered an electoral crime here.

AMLO’s people went into July 2nd fearing a repeat of 1988 when the “system” purportedly “collapsed” on election night and did not come back up for ten days. When results were finally announced, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas has been despoiled of victory and the PRI’s Carlos Salinas was declared the winner.

Lopez Obrador’s fears were not unwarranted.

When on July 2nd AMLO’s voters turned out in record-breaking numbers, Interior Secretary officials urged major media not to release exit poll results that heralded a Lopez Obrador victory. Ugalde himself took to national television to declare the preliminary vote count too close to call, and Mexicans went to bed without knowing whom their next president might be.

Preliminary results culled from the casillas (PREP) that ran erratically all night and all day Monday showed Calderon with a 200,000 to 400,000-vote lead, activating suspicions that cybernetic flimflam was in the works. When the PREP was finally shut down Monday night, the right winger enjoyed a commanding lead and Televisa and TV Azteca proclaimed him a virtual winner. U.S newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune followed suit, and the White House was poised to celebrate a Calderon victory.

But there was one fly in the IFE’s ointment: 42 million Mexicans had voted July 2nd, but only the votes of 39 million appeared in the PREP and Lopez Obrador demanded to know what had happened to the missing 3,000,000 voters. Then on a Tuesday morning news interview with Televisa, Luis Carlos Ugalde admitted that the missing votes had been abstracted from the PREP because of “inconsistencies”. Indeed, 13,000 casillas — 10% of the total — had been removed from the preliminary count, apparently to create the illusion that Calderon had won the presidency.

Meanwhile all day Monday and into Tuesday, AMLO supporters throughout Mexico recorded thousands of instances of manipulation of the vote count. A ballot box in Mexico state registered 188 votes for Lopez Obrador but only 88 were recorded in the PREP. Another Mexico state ballot box was listed 20 times in the preliminary count. Whereas voters in states where the PAN rules the roost, cast more ballots for president than for senators and congressional representatives, voters in southern states where the PRD carried the day cast more ballots for congress than for the presidential candidates. Among the PRD states that purportedly followed this surreal pattern was Tabasco, the home state of two out of the three major party presidential candidates, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and the PRI’s Roberto Madrazo.

On Wednesday morning, with the tension mounting to the breaking point and demonstrators already massing in the street, a final vote count began in Mexico’s 300 electoral districts. Although the tabulation of the votes was programmed to finish Sunday, IFE officials pushed the recount ahead at breakneck speed. As the day progressed, PAN and PRI electoral officials, charging Lopez Obrador’s people with trying to obstruct the process, repeatedly rejected PRD demands to open the ballot boxes and recount the votes inside one by one in instances where Lopez Obrador’s tally sheets did not coincide with numbers in the PREP or were different from the sheets attached to the ballot box. When a recount was allowed such as in one Veracruz district, Lopez Obrador sometimes recouped as many as a thousand votes.

Surprisingly, by early afternoon, AMLO had accumulated a 2.6% lead over Calderon — and his supporters were dancing in the streets of Mexico City. And then, inexplicably, for the next 24 hours, his numbers went into the tank, never to rise again — at the same time that the right-winger’s started to increase incrementally. By late evening, AMLO was reduced to single digit advantage and a little after 4 AM Thursday morning, Calderon inched ahead. It had taken 12 hours to count the last 10% of the votes and still there were districts that had not reported.

When Lopez Obrador addressed the press at 8:30, he condemned “the spectacle of the dance of numbers” and announced that the PRD and its political allies would impugn the election — he had proof of anomalies in 40,000 polling places (a third of the total) and would present them to the “TRIFE”, the supreme electoral tribunal with powers to annul whole districts and states, within the 72 hours dictated by the law.

Then, in his typically hesitating, Peter Falk-like way of saying things, AMLO called for the second election — the one that takes place in the street — beginning at 5 PM Saturday in the great Zocalo plaza at the political heart of this bruised nation.

Although Lopez Obrador’s words were perhaps the culminating moment of this long strange journey, Mexico’s two-headed TV monster chose to ignore them – Televisa was otherwise occupied with “entertainment” news, and soon after the screens filled up with game shows and telenovelas (soap operas.) Although it had not yet concluded, the telenovela of the vote count disappeared into the ether of morning television.

This chronicle of a fraud foretold is an excerpt from John Ross’s forthcoming “Making Another World Possible:Zapatista Chronicles 2000-2006” to be published this October by Nation Books.

SUNDAY

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JUlY 9

SCREENING/TALK
Buyer Be Fair: The Promise of Certification
Watch Buyer Be Fair: The Promise of Certification at a screening sponsored by the Bay Area Fair Trade Coalition, followed by a discussion led by John De Graaf of TransFair USA. (Deborah Giattina)

7 p.m.
Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia, SF
Free
(415) 824-3890, jwalsh@transfairusa.org (RSVP)

event
SF General Strike Walk
Steee-rrr-ike! I’ve done it before and could do it again, and I ain’t talking about throwing or missing a baseball. This morning, in conjunction with the mammoth and multifaceted LaborFest, [www.laborfest.net] International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 member Jack Heyman leads a walk and history talk devoted to the famous 1934 West Coast longshore strike. Focusing on how the strike was organized and why it was successful, Heyman will include some key historical sites related to the police violence of Bloody Thursday and the effective protests (remember those?) that took place in its wake. (Johnny Ray Huston)

10:30 a.m.
Harry Bridges Plaza, front of Ferry Building
Embarcadero, SF
Free

After my son’s death

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OPINION I am a mom who never wanted to have a gold star after my name.
Last month, after two years of requests, I finally received the Army’s report on how my son, Patrick, died. Some of the information I already knew, through some of Patrick’s brave soldier friends who were with or near him when he died. They told me much of what was in the report. They told the truth, and the government reprimanded them for doing so.
But having the information reported to me in detail on June 21 only increased the hurt — and my determination to stop other mothers from having gold stars after their names.
Patrick was a loving boy with a great sense of humor. He grew to be a strong man who was friendly to everyone, and he especially loved and cared for children. He raised his two children to be the same.
At 31, he was successful in business, earning a comfortable income. He was also a patriotic American who, after Sept. 11, wanted to serve his country. Against the advice of his Army veteran father and me, he joined the California National Guard Engineering Battalion out of Petaluma, being assured that he would serve stateside.
He was not trained as an infantryman. He was not trained to train Iraqi soldiers to be our soldiers.
Patrick was killed on June 22, 2004, outside of Fort Anaconda near Balud, Iraq. Iraqi soldiers he had been training killed him.
This government took my son, my most treasured gift, in a war we did not need to start. Now my life is dedicated to stopping mothers from losing sons, on both sides. You can help me with that.
I want to build centers for our veterans, who are having serious problems when they come home. I know our government should care for them, but that’s not happening. The returning soldiers have physical and psychological needs that are being ignored and that will come back to haunt them and us in years ahead.
I want to see good alternatives to military service that ordinary citizens can contribute to and benefit from.
That’s why I support the World Service Corps proposal sponsored by the People’s Lobby. If Congress adopted the plan, by the time the World Service Corps entered its seventh year, one million Americans could be voluntarily serving in the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Habitat for Humanity, Head Start, Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross, the International Rescue Committee, Oxfam, Mercy Corps, or state conservation corps.
Had this been in existence when Patrick wanted to serve his country, I believe he would have joined a nonmilitary organization, and he would be alive today.
Had this program been in existence for decades, there would not be as much hatred fired at our soldiers. There would not be as many soldiers coming home with serious needs.
Ask your congressperson to support the World Service Corps plan. Please help by visiting the Web sites listed below and giving whatever you can, to help make these lifesaving programs happen. SFBG
Nadia McCaffrey
Nadia McCaffrey lives in Tracy.
www.patrickspirit.org
www.worldservicecorps.us
www.peopleslobby.us
www.freedomfromwar.org

FOURTH OF JULY

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The Fourth of July listings were compiled by Joseph DeFranceschi and Duncan Scott Davidson. All events take place on July 4 unless otherwise noted.

Fireworks Dinner with Jazz Piano Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; 392-3434, www.topofthemark.com. 7:30pm, $189 per couple. The music of jazz pianist Ricardo Scales and breathtaking views of the city’s fireworks display accompany this elegant dinner of a four-course fixed menu served with a complementary bottle of champagne.
Fourth of July Waterfront Festival Pier 39, Fisherman’s Wharf, Ghirardelli Square, The Cannery, SF; 705-5500, www.pier39.com. 1:30-10pm, free. This all-day fair featuring entertainment, arts and crafts, food, and American flags ends with the famed Municipal Pier Fireworks Extravaganza starting at about 9:30pm.
Hornblower Yacht Forth of July Cruises Pier 33, Embarcadero, SF; 1-800-467-6256, www.hornblower.com. Noon, $49; 6:30pm, $119–$219. Spend the afternoon out on the bay with Hornblower’s lunch cruise; or why not watch fireworks and enjoy a buffet dinner ($119), or an all-inclusive, four-course extravaganza ($219) on your evening voyage.
Kayak Trip to 4th of July Fireworks City Kayak, Pier 39, SF; 357-1010, www.citykayak.com. 6pm, $68. Paddle around with sea lions, enjoy the fireworks and sip champagne (included) from the best seat in the house on this unique aquatic experience.
Red and White Fleet Forth of July Fireworks Cruises Pier 43 1/2 at Fisherman’s Wharf, SF; 673-2900, www.redandwhite.com. 7:45pm, $45 ($25 for kids age 1-11). Red and White Fleet will send out four ships to cover this popular event so get your tickets early and don’t forget your Dramamine.
El Rio BBQ and Bandfest El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; 282-3325, www.elriosf.com. 3-8pm, free admission. Come listen to rock music from the Birds and Batteries, Low Red Land, Mr. Divisadero, and Solar Powered People. Drink beer all day — it’s the American way.
BAY AREA
4th of July at the Berkeley Marina Berkeley Marina, 201 University, Berk; (510) 548-5335, www.ci.berkeley.ca.us. noon-9:30pm, free. Berkeley’s all day, alcohol-free, fair with entertainment, food, games, face painting, and giant waterslide is a great place for families and ends with, you guessed it, fireworks.
4th of July Celebration at Jack London Square Broadway at Embarcadero, Oakl; 1-866-295-9853, www.jacklondonsquare.com. 1-9:30pm, free. With international food, children’s activities, arts and crafts, and fireworks the real highlight of this event is a free two hour pops concert by the Oakland East Bay Symphony.
Fuck the 4th Sale AK Press, 674-A 23rd St., Oakl; (510) 208-1700, www.akpress.org. July 3, 4:10pm, free. In addition to 25 percent off everything in the warehouse (books, CDs, DVDs, clothing), and sale books for as low as $1, there will be entertainment, food, and an atmosphere of summer glee.
Oakland A’s Beer Festival McAfee Coliseum (East Side Club), 7000 Coliseum Way, Oakl; (510) 638-4627, oakland.athletics.mlb.com. Noon-2pm, ticket to the game needed for entry. Sample beers from over 30 breweries before enjoying America’s game on America’s day. Play ball!
Redwood City 67th Annual Independence Day Parade Brewster and Winslow, Redwood City; (650) 365-1825, www.parade.org. 10am, free. Redwood City hosts the country’s largest July 4th parade and their all-day festival features food, entertainment, vendors of all sorts, marching bands, and ends in traditional fashion with a fireworks display at around 9:30pm.
San Francisco Symphony Shoreline Amphitheatre, One Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View; (650) 967-3000, www.livenation.com. 8pm, $15-28.50. You’ll soon forget that Mountain View’s beautiful outdoor amphitheater is built atop a garbage dump when guest conductor Randal Fleisher leads the San Francisco Symphony in a concert complete with fireworks. The program features music and clips from Disney film favorites.
USS Hornet 4th of July Party USS Hornet Museum, 707 W. Hornet, Pier 3, Alameda; (510) 521-8448, www.hornetevents.com. 10am-9:50pm, $20 ($5 for kids). View a F-14 Tomcat and Apollo space capsule among other items on a tour of this aircraft carrier which will have music, games, children’s activities, and a great view of the Bay Area fireworks.
The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. We cannot guarantee the return of photos, but enclosing an SASE helps. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone. SFBG

Mr. Big Stuff

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

America is unquestionably the land of the large. We well realize that gigantic things generate a sense of awe — along with danger — as it currently applies to presidential hubris and supersized snacks. It’s no accident that the artists who work biggest are United States residents — not to mention men: Think of James Turrell, who transformed a crater in the Arizona desert into a massive temple to natural light; Richard Serra, whose hefty steel sculptures have blocked public plazas and famously crashed through a gallery floor; Christo, whose canvases are world landmarks and entire states; and even Jeff Koons, who effectively inflated a topiary puppy to the size of a mountain. They may have international reputations (and a few peers in other countries), but there is something undeniably American in the desire to realize dreams that large. The trick is to translate that sense of awe into something more than size envy.
Matthew Barney is perhaps the first contemporary artist to translate the idea of that monumental impulse to the media age. His latest venture, “Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint,” which opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this week (look for a review in these pages soon), is a sizable, career-spanning project. Like most of his work, it involves a feature-length film, and objects and images that relate to a self-invented universe, one filled with references to the human body, landscapes, and landmarks. Perhaps, as some critics have suggested, Barney’s work extends the enveloping nature of film into three-dimensional space, or synthesizes various art forms into a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk — that total, epic extravaganza of a term that’s frequently attached to Barney. Whatever it’s called, it feels like something major.
A HIGH PRICE TO PAY?
Barney’s Drawing Restraint series — which comprises performances, videos, a feature film, and drawings — is rooted in the idea of struggle, transformation, and creation. The pieces in the ongoing series reflect the artist’s changing means — the earliest of them were done with Barney attempting to make drawings on the wall while shackled with rubber tethers or jumping on a trampoline and inscribing a self-portrait on the ceiling. Drawing Restraint 14, which was recently executed at SFMOMA, involved the artist scaling the building’s tubular skylight and drawing on the curved wall. Drawing Restraint 9, as has been widely reported, costars Barney’s real-life partner Björk, was filmed on a large Japanese whaling ship and employed the full crew as extras (a primary theme of the film is Barney’s identity as an occidental — read: American — in an inscrutable Japanese culture), and was realized on a budget of nearly $5 million.
That seems an attractive sum for an artist to be working with, but not when you compare it to the costs of this country’s greatest cultural exports — Hollywood movies — or even the price of an impressionist painting at auction. It definitely pales before Damien Hirst’s recently publicized bid to make the priciest work of art ever: a diamond-encrusted skull costing some $18.8 million. If Barney could raise those kinds of funds, most likely he’d have little trouble taking his vision to a next level, be it with CGI effects or with greater amounts of his signature material, petroleum jelly.
EXCESS AND RESTRAINT
The SFMOMA exhibition involved casting 1,600 gallons of the stuff, a relatively small amount in Barney terms, in a rectangular mold — a process that was slowed by clogged hoses and a minor rupture on the museum steps. As he did at the Guggenheim with his 2003 Cremaster Cycle exhibition, Barney easily occupies a good chunk of the museum. The show covers the whole of the fourth floor, which has, for the first time, most of its walls removed. The now-vast galleries house a few whale-sized sculptures, all illuminated with hundreds of industrial-looking lightbulbs installed by Barney’s crew. Clusters of sleek flat-screen monitors hang from the ceiling throughout. While it’s not the most expensive show that SFMOMA has mounted — recent ones involving less exotic materials have had much bigger price tags — Drawing Restraint feels deluxe, even if its most used material is cool, white plastic instead of precious stones.
Is Barney’s work gracious or self-absorbed? Is his work fueled by ego, the art market, or artistic drive? These are difficult questions, and although the Cremaster exhibition was accompanied by a telephone book–sized catalog with reams of explanatory text, it’s still difficult to know. Critic Jerry Saltz, in a review of Drawing Restraint 9, described Barney as “a mystic exploring his own inner cathedral.” It seems apt, as that religious edifice is a cavernous container in which to contemplate mystical phenomena, not to mention a form to which museums are often compared. We’re meant to enter them and be quietly wowed, whether we believe the dogma or not.
Those who have tickets to the already sold-out Barney lecture on June 23 — an example of his rock star status — will most likely come away with a sense that the artist possesses a genuine humbleness and an unerring drive to realize his vision. He thinks big, and manages to live up to his ambitions with dignity. Whatever you think of his work, you gotta admire his supersized pluck. SFBG
MATTHEW BARNEY: DRAWING RESTRAINT
June 23–Sept. 17
Fri.–Tues., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.;
Thurs., 11 a.m.–>8:45 p.m.
SFMOMA
151 Third St., SF
$7–$12.50, free for 12 and under and members (free first Tues.; half price Thurs., 6–8:45 p.m.)
(415) 357-4000
For Drawing Restraint events, go to www.sfmoma.org

CHATTING WITH MR. VENGEANCE

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During the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival, where Lady Vengeance screened under its original title, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, director Park Chanwook (through a translator) discussed payback, villains, and cyborgs.
SFBG Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance don’t really form a conventional trilogy in terms of characters and plots — but they share themes [betrayal, revenge] and motifs [child kidnappings, kidney transplants]. Were all three films conceived at once?
PARK CHANWOOK They just happened. I didn’t plan them from the beginning. After the first film [Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance], I didn’t want to make another film about revenge, but somebody brought me a very nice script about revenge: Oldboy. The third one [Lady Vengeance] actually came out in relation to the questions I received at a press conference before filming Oldboy. People asked, why would I deal with revenge again?
SFBG What made you decide to have a female character as the lead in the final film?
PC Because it’s the last film of the trilogy. In my previous films, the females did not have any major roles. I wanted to compensate for the lack of female presence, so I decided to have a female as the lead character. I wanted to give it a different touch, so I thought a female would be best.
SFBG The lead actor from Oldboy [Choi Min-sik] also appears in Lady Vengeance. Why did you choose to use him again, and why did you cast him as a villain instead of a hero this time?
PC There’s no direct connection between those two films, simply because it’s the same actor. He happens to be a great actor who can portray the role of a villain. Actually, the actor Choi had never taken any role as a villain previously — his image in Korea is warm and like a patriarch. In this film he has this image of a children’s teacher, but underneath there is this image of villain. The fixed image actually helped to disguise the real villain.
SFBG Your films are known for being violent, but there is also a sense of humor, however dark, that’s very apparent in all of them. What do you think is the connection between humor and violence?
PC I wanted to avoid ending the film with a dark, heavy scene because I wanted to give the audience room to have a more intelligent interpretation of the whole story. If you have only violence then you may miss that chance. This way, you can step back and think about it more objectively.
SFBG What’s next for you?
PC The title of my next film is I Am Cyborg — that’s the direct translation from Korean. Once I release it the English title might be different. It’s the story of this mental patient who thinks that she may be a cyborg, and she meets a boy. It’s a romance! (Cheryl Eddy)

Foreign cures

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> barsandclubs@sfbg.com

It’s Saturday morning, 10 a.m., and the sun streaming into your bedroom is driving a wedge into your brain. Someone put little socks on your teeth while you were sleeping. You smell like a distillery. You failed to follow any of the drunken rules when you stumbled home, pantsless, the night before: You didn’t drink a big jug of water and take two ibuprofen, and you didn’t make yourself a fried egg sandwich. (You know about that one, right? Grilled cheese sandwich with a fried egg and mayo inside — works every time.) You promise yourself you’re never going to mix mai tais, margaritas, and merlot again. With a Mary Jane finale.
But if you’re up for some real chow (instead of crackers, club soda, and Emergen-C), fortunately you’ll find salvation in a number of our city’s dining outposts. Since there are cultures that have been dealing with hangovers for many moons longer than our little post–Barbary Coast enclave has, I went on a citywide tour to unearth the best international food cures to help counteract the deleterious effects of knowing a bartender, blacking out at bachelor parties, or just drinking to forget.
A hot bowl of the Vietnamese noodle soup pho (pronounced fuh) comes highly recommended as a restorative by a couple restaurant owners I know, and some bona fide boozehounds. Turtle Tower (631 Larkin, SF. 415-409-3333) in Little Saigon has the best pho in the city, and number nine, the Pho Ga/chicken noodle soup — a steaming bowl of silky, hand-cut rice noodles and some darned good white chicken meat — is your rescue. Since Turtle Tower’s pho is considered to be northern, or Hanoi, style, it comes in a light broth with cilantro and a side of lemon and sliced peppers. Order the small size — it’s plenty big enough, trust. Back it up with a tangy lemon soda and you are seriously set. Lucky you, they’re open early, so you can get your slurp on.
Some other folks wise to the soup-as-hangover-antidote method are those wild ones of the mountains, the Basque. Sheepherders really know how to party. (What else can you do there? Wait, don’t answer that — just leave the sheep out of this.) Their classic day-after elixir is garlic soup. Visit Piperade (1015 Battery, SF. 415-391-2555, www.piperade.com) and order a bowl of hearty soup made with rock shrimp, bacon, bread, garlic, and egg. It covers all the bases. You can eat at the cozy bar, so don’t let the white tablecloths scare you.
OK, everyone has heard of the infamous Mexican hangover cure, menudo. (No jokes about the band, please, that’s tired.) Menudo is a soup made with beef tripe (yes, it comes from three of a cow’s four stomachs), hominy, onion, and spices. Sometimes you’ll find some pork knuckles or calf’s foot. The Greeks have a version of it; same goes for a number of South American countries, and you’ll even find a variant in the Philippines. Menudo is traditionally only available on the weekends, so I made sure I was good and hungover the Sunday I stumbled into Chava’s (2839 Mission, SF. 415-282-0283) to try it. How hungover? How about a wedding rehearsal dinner the night prior, with a cavalcade of flutes of sparkling wine, red wine, and a couple French 75s followed by two old-fashioneds? Yeah, I was feeling it.
But, um, here’s what I’ve decided about menudo: On the days when you’re so nauseated you need to get sick, come to Chava’s, get a bowl of menudo to go, bring it home, and open the lid. Just one whiff, partnered with the sight of the rubbery tripe and animal parts, will inspire a great big Technicolor yawn. No offense to Chava’s, but you simply had to grow up with the stuff to be able to eat it, let alone eat it when you’re hungover.
Speaking of fatty food: It’s supposedly tough on your liver the day after, since it’s already working double time to flush out all those nasty toxins, but I say whatever — if the fat makes you feel good, eat up. This is where el Farolito (2951 24th St., SF. 415-641-0758) lives up to its “little lighthouse” name, especially for those who can’t see through their morning-after daze. The doctor is ready to see you now: The super quesadilla suiza is a flour tortilla exploding with a mass of carne asada, cheese, meat, avocado, salsa, and sour cream that you can pick up and hold in your quivering DTs-afflicted hands. It’s so huge you can bring the rest of it home for when you’re hungry again. (What is it about hangovers that turns everyone into Count Snackula?)
A runner-up in the “Mexican food–bad for you” category are the nachos (and a Pacifico, if you can manage it) at Taqueria Can-Cun (2288 Mission, SF. 415-252-9560). The nachos saved me one afternoon after a bleary night in North Beach with some Italians (don’t ask). You’ll get a pile of meat, refried beans, avocado, cheese, sour cream, jalapeños, and their lousy grainy chips that actually come to life in the nachos. Spicy too. Feeling more arriba now?
The Irish know a thing or two about hangovers, and you can find a hearty Irish breakfast — sausage, bacon, black-and-white pudding (you might not want to eat it — it’s made with blood), baked beans, potatoes, mushrooms, and eggs any style — at the Phoenix Bar and Irish Gathering House (811 Valencia, SF. 415-695-1811, www.phoenixirishbar.com). The place is nice and dark, even during the day, so you don’t have to dine in your sunglasses (unless someone punched you in the eye because you were mouthing off). There are all kinds of brunch dishes and other greasy foods served until late in the day, and you have plenty of options for some hair of the dog at the bar. I’d say they know their clientele.
A partyer pal was kind enough to let his secret out of the (barf) bag for me: the Korean dish bi bim bap from Hahn’s Hibachi (1305 Castro, SF. 415-642-8151), a magic combo of chicken, pork, or marinated beef and vegetables on a bed of rice, with a raw egg on top. Throw some hot sauce on and mix it all up in its hot stone bowl so the bits of rice on the edge get crispy and the egg cooks. The name literally means “thrown-together rice,” and while there are definitely more authentic places around town, hangover day is never good for serious exploration — you need a sure thing.
The hungover French (well, those from the region of Brittany, anyway) would surely cosign a crepe from Ti Couz (3108 16th St., SF. 415-252-7373). These aren’t the finest crepes in the world, but I would say an order of the complete crepe (ham, cheese, and a sunny-side up egg inside) with the Ti Couz mimosa (made with peach schnapps — I know, you thought you were done with schnapps) while sitting out in the sun will get you feeling très bon again.
Lastly, our tour of the culinary landscape of San Francisco wouldn’t be complete without a couple classic American burger options. I am not alone in vouching for the wonders of a Whiz Burger (700 S. Van Ness, SF. 415-824-5888) cheeseburger and a root beer freeze. There’s even a decent veggie burger, and tasty seasoned waffle fries. But it’s hard to beat a giant juicy burger hot off the grill while hanging out on the patio of Zeitgeist (199 Valencia, SF. 415-255-7505) on a Sunday, with an ice-cold beer or one of their Bloody Marys. My badass bartender friend Kenny Meade from Vertigo Bar recommends either a shot of Fernet or, post-Zeitgeist, a Mexican chocolate milkshake from Mitchell’s Ice Cream (688 San Jose, SF. 415-648-2300, www.mitchellsicecream.com). He’s gotten me drunk enough times for me to totally trust him on this little piece of advice. SFBG
In between potential Betty Ford benders, Marcia Gagliardi somehow publishes a delicious weekly column about the SF restaurant scene, the Tablehopper, at www.tablehopper.com. Got a favorite foreign hangover cure? Let us know: barsandclubs@sfbg.com.

DJ without borders

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> barsandclubs@sfbg.com

If you were born in Algeria, of Jewish and Berber descent, and had a penchant for classical Indian raga, you might be as disinclined to align yourself with any one school of thought or music as genre-blending DJ Cheb i Sabbah is. Equally at home in Morocco, France, India, and San Francisco, he has been skillfully infusing traditional South Asian, Arabic, and North African melodies with modern electronic beats in the Lower Haight since 1990, first at Nickie’s BBQ and now every Wednesday night at Underground SF. On June 16, Cheb i Sabbah celebrates the release of his sixth album with Six Degrees Records, La Ghriba, with 1002 Nights, his performance group of vocalists, percussionists, and dancers, and superstar Senegalese singer Baaba Maal.
SFBG You started DJing in Paris, how many years ago now?
DJ CiS It makes me look ancient, but 1963, 1964 is when I started. I was 17.
SFBG And have you DJed continuously for 40 years?
DJ CiS I’ve had three professional DJ incarnations. In 1963 that was the first one. Second one was 1980, also in Paris, and then the next one was about 16 years ago, here. In between I performed with the Living Theatre, then raised a family. Working at Rainbow Grocery, working at Amoeba Records …
SFBG You worked at Rainbow?
DJ CiS Actually it’s a funny story, because that’s how I started spinning again. I worked at the one on 15th, before the big new one opened on Folsom. I would make tapes, and then whenever I went to work, if somebody liked my tape, they would play it. One day this guy comes up to me, his name is Bradley, and he says, “Man, this music is cool.” I say, “Yeah, that’s raï music from Algeria,” and he says, “You know what, I have a little club in the Lower Haight called Nickie’s, and if you want to come on a Tuesday Night and spin some music, I’ll give you $40.” At first I was, like, “I don’t know about this, it’s not like Paris,” although within two weeks there was a line outside the door. Then [legendary jazz musician and sometime Sabbah collaborator] Don Cherry would come to Nickie’s, and I would say to him, “I don’t know if I’m going to stick with it,” and he actually forced me to. He said, “No, you should stick with it. It’s important.”
SFBG So we have Don Cherry to thank.
DJ CiS From there I spent 10 years spinning at KPFA. Later on I became the world music buyer in Berkeley for Amoeba, and in those 14 years I put on close to 40 shows which I produced.
SFBG The 1002 Nights shows?
DJ CiS Yes, with Khaled. With Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It was a period where I did quite a few shows.
SFBG And you’re going to be doing that again, the 1002 Nights?
DJ CiS Yeah, but this time I’m being hired more than actually putting on the show. The last show I did produce, which was actually a huge one, and very successful, was one I recently did with Khaled at the Berkeley Community Theatre, and there were 3,300 people there.
SFBG Do you decide in the club what kind of beats you’re going to add, or do you decide in the studio?
DJ CiS I think the producing aspect is different than the dance floor one. However, the great thing about being a DJ is if you do a mix, you can try it out right away. You don’t have to wait to find out if people like it or not. But it’s really two different approaches, because also it’s very subjective. Is Shri Durga [his first record on Six Degrees] a danceable album or not? Well, I don’t know. I think it is. Maybe not every track, but not every minute of the day is there to dance. And it does have a focus on the tradition, you know. I’m not trying to do such a modern thing with just a little bit of the tradition. I’m doing the opposite. The tradition is first; second is bringing in what we call these days “global electronica,” which is better than “world music.”
SFBG You’ve referred to it as “outernational” music. How is that different from “international”?
DJ CiS It just goes … out [gestures, hands apart]. It seems like “outer” opens it up to the idea that we don’t need national boundaries and restrictions and all of that, but maybe that’s a whole other discussion. I think the challenge for a DJ is to never refuse any kind of audience. If you were to spin a heavy metal set, you would find the heavy metal that appeals to you, because there’s good music in every area. It’s a gift, Don Cherry would say. You have to give it. SFBG
DJ CHEB I SABBAH AND 1002 NIGHTS WITH BAABA MAAL
Fri/16, 8 p.m.
Masonic Auditorium
1111 California, SF
(415) 776-4702
www.masonicauditorium.com
www.sixdegreesrecords.com

Great head here

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> barsandclubs@sfbg.com

“Half of Americans haven’t tried decent beer,” says William Brand, the Oakland Tribune’s resident beer columnist and local brew expert. Back in the sixth grade, Nebraska native Brand was himself weaned on the likes of Budweiser, Hamm’s, and Coors, wan beverages he now refers to as mere “alcohol vehicles” — brewed with rice and corn, cheaply made, and lacking any real taste. “That’s not beer,” he says, “that’s just crap.”
Brand encountered his first crap-free beer during a stint in the Navy, when he was stationed near Washington, DC. Friends took him out to a posh German restaurant and there, he recalls, he ordered a Wurzburger amber “in a very nice pilsner glass.”
“I took one taste,” he says, “and it was amazing. I never tasted anything like it. Until then, everything I ever tasted was awful.”
He soon mail ordered a home-brewing kit from England and began his long journey to respected beer connoisseurship. Since 1989, his Oakland Tribune column, “What’s on Tap,” has been steering beer fanatics toward the finest local suds. We asked him to share some Bay Area brewery history and talk about some of his local favorites.
SFBG You used to brew your own beer. Why did you stop?
BRAND I moved to California in 1970. I had one glass of Anchor Steam and realized I didn’t have to brew any beer. And of course then the whole beer-making revolution happened. It really all started in the Bay Area, with the Portland area right behind it. In the United States, home brewing was made legal in ’78. Brewpubs became legal in California in ’81.
SFBG How has the American microbrew movement evolved since then?
BRAND For a while it was all Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. But that’s all ancient history. Young Americans traveled to Europe, discovered good beer, and started brewing it. Now there’s about 1,300, 1,600 breweries in America. There’s more beer — and more styles of beer — in America than in any other country in the world.
SFBG What distinguishes the Bay Area microbrew scene?
BRAND Well, you can’t really say “the Bay Area.” You have to say “Northern California.” And it’s a toss-up between Northern California and the Pacific Northwest for beer nirvana. In the US it’s becoming like Germany or Belgium, where different people from different regions have their own styles. In the Pacific Northwest they go for dark and strong beers. In Northern California we’re famous for extremely hoppy beers.
Beers are measured in international bitterness units — it’s a scale that beers use. For comparison purposes, Budweiser is 13 IBUs; Stella is 30 IBUs. We have lots of beers that are 100 IBUs or more. It’s a style that’s becoming known as double IPA [India Pale Ale].
SFBG With an eye toward both quality and adventurous weirdness, what are some of your favorite Bay Area beers?
BRAND There’s one called Watermelon Wheat from 21st Amendment Brewery in San Francisco. It’s a blend of wheat and barley, and they actually put watermelon in it, which really comes through. You’d think it would be ghastly beer, but it’s quite good. Another of my favorites comes from Drake’s Brewing in San Leandro, and it’s called Papa Denogginizer. It’s hugely hops — and somewhere around 11 percent alcohol. Then go to Marin Brewing Company in Larkspur, and the guy there is making barrel-aged beers. With barrel-aged beers, you brew your beer, you ferment your beer, then you put it in a whiskey barrel or a wine barrel. Going over to Magnolia Brewery on Haight Street, the brewer makes a mild beer in a high hop area. And he brews cask ales — real ale — in the English style.
SFBG If you really want to impress, say, a Belgian — which local beers would you introduce them to?
BRAND Actually, the ones that are really interested in what we’re doing in the US are the Belgians. They’re really smart, and they’re watching us, and there are a few Belgian breweries that are making American-style beer. Most of the Belgians that come over here are looking for something strong and hoppy. So I’d try and find them something like Old Yeltsin — brewed by HopTown Brewing Company in Pleasanton — or a barley wine. There’s a bar and grill called Schooner’s in Antioch that makes a barley wine. It’s quite strong — around 10 or 11 percent — and they age it for a year or two or three, and it’s astounding. So I’d go with our own styles. There are also some American breweries that are doing a Belgian style. In the Bay Area one place for that is Russian River Brewing Company in Santa Rosa — they do stunning stuff.
SFBG So you might say that Europeans understand American beer.
BRAND There’s a lot of respect in Europe for American beer makers today. And there’s no animosity at all. The thing about beer is that people are never snobby. People only become beer snobs when they don’t know what they’re talking about — or when they’re talking about crappy beer. SFBG
Want more brew-haha? Contact William Brand at whatsontap@sbcglobal.net.
THE BREWERIES
21st Amendment Brewery www.21st-amendment.com
Drake’s Brewing www.drinkdrakes.com
Marin Brewing Company www.marinbrewing.com
Magnolia Brewery www.magnoliapub.com
HopTown Brewing Company www.hoptownbrewing.com
Schooner’s www.schoonersbrewery.com
Russian River Brewing Company www.russianriverbrewing.com

Tonight is what it means to be young

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TEEN FLICKS In the late ’70s and early ’80s a funny thing happened at the movies: Suddenly aware of a whole pocket-moneyed demographic betwixt Disney and the R rating, major studios began targeting a median audience, aged 15. (Ultimately they’d even get their very own designation, PG-13.) An explosion of post-Meatballs teen comedies soon replaced sex farce fucking and wanking with peeping and pranking. Even "nicer" films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the John Hughes–Molly Ringwald trilogy viewed adolescence as a self-contained world, not the way station to adulthood American Graffiti proposed just a few years earlier.

With the anthemic whining of Pink Floyd’s The Wall as personal soundtrack, kids who’d missed the big party of the ’60s grasped rebellion as attitude, sans social consciousness. Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge (1979) and Adrian Lyne’s Foxes (1980) were fairly realistic portraits of aimless teenage escape from broken institutions (family, school). Exploring the same themes but leaving realism behind, the movies in Jesse Ficks’s Midnites for Maniacs’ "Latch-Key Kids Quadruple Feature" offer archetypal youth-persecution scenarios gone baroque via pop-fantasy tropes and bottomless (if depthless) directorial extravagance. To a generation just learning to want its MTV, albeit with a vengeance, such edgy glamour felt all the more "real" for being surreal.

Following his prior S.E. Hinton adaptation, The Outsiders, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 Rumble Fish replaced saturated-color swoon with a B&W faux-beatnik poesy derived equally from American International Pictures, Maya Deren, and Dal??. Its mannerisms are too indulgent to defend, too dazzling to deny — what other movie could stockpile so many desperate debtors to James Dean (Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke, Dennis Hopper, Tom Waits, Nicolas Cage) and get away with it?

But Rumble Fish is acoustic haiku compared to the florid power balladry of director Walter Hill’s two most delirious action comix. Discarded by Paramount as an exploitation movie and belatedly acclaimed by critics, 1979’s gang warfare phantasmagoria The Warriors was so flagrantly exciting — Bic-waving 60-year-old Pauline Kael called it "visual rock" — that actual gang fights broke out in theaters, causing at least one death and much moral outrage. Its titular protagonists (derived, by way of a 1965 novel, from ancient Greek military history!) are scrappy underdogs fighting through rival gang turfs across a hallucinatory NYC. KISS Army–meets–Marvel Comics pillow hump? Blood-churning metaphor for life itself? Whatever: The Warriors remains trash-treasure gold.

Hill went even more nuts with "rock & roll fable" Streets of Fire, a neon-hued rainbow of ’50s juvenile delinquent nostalgia, new wave futurism, and pure 1983 mainstream cheese. Note the Pat Benatar postures struck by music superstar Ellen Aim (Diane Lane, in her bad "bad girl" period) before she’s abducted by freakazoid fan/rapist Willem Dafoe, necessitating rescue by laconic ex Michael Pare. "It’s so much better going nowhere fast," she wails in the quintessentially flamboyant opening set piece. Exactly! Streets of Fire is a stupid, gorgeous, guilty pleasure.

Simple guilt motivates the evening’s opening anomaly. Cipher in the Snow is a somber 21-minute lesson produced in 1973 by Brigham Young University in which a teenage boy exits a school bus to enigmatically expire in the wintry drifts. Why? As various authorities puzzle out later, nobody bothered to love him. Shown even in non-Mormon classrooms for several years, Cipher left a lasting impression on many because it explicitly amplified what many 15-year-olds think: No one cares about me, but if I just died, they’d be soooo sorry. (Dennis Harvey)

LATCH-KEY KIDS QUADRUPLE FEATURE

Cypher in the Snow, 7 p.m.; Rumble Fish, 7:45 p.m.; The Warriors, 9:45 p.m.; Streets of Fire, 11:59 p.m.

$10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.midnitesformaniacs.com

San Francisco Black Film Festival

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REVIEW Other local fests may grab more attention, but the ever-growing San Francisco Black Film Festival, now in its eighth year, is well worth seeking out for its consistently strong and diverse programming. The opening night film, Son of Man, sets the story of Jesus Christ in modern South Africa; other narratives (features and shorts) in the fest explore family ties, romance, and social issues. However, SFBFF’s most fascinating entries come in the form of its many documentaries, which take on everything from the origins of AIDS to maverick filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles — whose cinematic portrait bears the fest’s wittiest title, How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (And Enjoy It). Micah Schaffer’s moving, insightful Death of Two Sons explores the eerily parallel lives of Amadou Diallo — the unarmed Guinean immigrant gunned down in 1999 by trigger-happy NYPD officers while innocently reaching for his wallet — and a white American Peace Corps volunteer stationed in Diallo’s home village. The aftermaths of both men’s deaths (Diallo’s killers were acquitted; the African cabdriver who caused the fatal crash served jail time) speak troubling volumes about race-relations-as-international-relations. Another well-made doc that spins an often infuriating tale is The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, which mixes vintage footage with contemporary interviews in its detailed look at the 1955 murder that’s credited with launching the modern civil rights movement. (Cheryl Eddy)

SAN FRANCISCO BLACK FILM FESTIVAL June 6–11

See Film Listings (below) for additional information

New Wests

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› jksfbg@aol.com

California is a tragic country — like Palestine, like every Promised Land.

— Christopher Isherwood

FREQUENCIES Last Monday, President Bush ordered 6,000 National Guard troops to join the 12,000 federal Border Patrol agents already stationed along the US-Mexico border. Then, moments later, in a deft now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t Oval Office magic trick, he acted as if it hadn’t happened. "[The United States] is not going to militarize the southern border," he told the press about the military troops he had just assigned to the southern border. "Mexico is our neighbor and our friend."

Forget that the Border Patrol is already the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency. Forget that the border has been militarized since at least 1992, when the Navy was brought to Southern California to replace chain-link fences with corrugated steel sheeting recycled from the Vietnam War. Forget that the 1994 fence that ran out into the sea from Imperial Beach was made of old landing strips from the first Persian Gulf War. Forget that 1994’s Operation Gatekeeper turned the canyons and gulches at the southern edge of California into a battle zone of klieg lighting, infrared scopes, underground sensors, and digital fingerprinting systems. Forget that since 1995, the Border Research and Technology Center in San Diego has been developing "correctional security" devices in tandem with the US prison system.

This was all just flimsy history next to the real denial that came two days later when it was announced that the nonmilitarization plan was accepting bids from leading military contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, all of whom have been active in Iraq and Afghanistan. So while the National Guard may not be armed (but may be, as SNL recently joked, sipping Coronas in celebration of being anywhere but Iraq), chances are good there will be radar balloons and surveillance planes. Throw in a few crackpot Minutemen brigades and we’ll be looking at the biggest domestic battalion ever assembled against a nonexistent international enemy.

After all, Mexicans come north not out of aggression or zealotry or the need for oil, but out of hope, the same hope that once fueled earlier westward migrations of Oakies and Anglos to the same plots of land. In the era of free trade, the North is the new West, or as Dave Alvin suggests in the title of his new album of California cover songs, West of the West (Yep Roc), a still emergent republic of dreams that hasn’t found a stable map.

Alvin was born in Downey, outside of Los Angeles, and he’s always been a firmly Californian songwriter. For all his working-class allegiance to the "California Dreaming" school — the factories, manual labor, toxic suburbs, and cement rivers of his songs never crush his epic sense of western romance — Alvin has always seemed to understand Mexican California. He’s written about Mexican farmworkers and barmaids, and most presciently, he wrote "California Snow" with El Paso–Ju?

Here’s Bill!

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The gluttonous Willie Brown era lead to a city workforce of mangers who earned princely salaries in exchange for their political loyalty, but appeared to have little in the way of clear job responsibilities.

The cries for reform from auditors and other watchdogs eventually fueled the creation of a Management Classification and Compensation Plan designed to both streamline the city’s hiring process and trim a top-heavy class of department managers.
 
The process has been slow and complex, to put it lightly. But one way to measure its effectiveness so far may be to consider the complaints coming from political hacks bitter about losing status on the city’s totem pole.
 
In April, the Guardian reported that former board supervisor Bill Maher, now a “regulatory affairs manager” at the San Francisco International Airport, seemed to have difficulty showing up for work even half the time, according to documents we’d obtained that tracked his usage of a complimentary airport parking card included in his compensation package.

Maher was a Willie Brown political ally who earned his $95,000-a-year post at the airport in 1998 under the former mayor. Since then, he’s managed to hang on to the job and sail through more $30,000 in raises, to $128,000, despite a dubious job description.

But when the human resources department set its sights on Maher’s job through an MCCP review, he was knocked back from a Manager V position to Manager III in early 2004.
 
Maher shouldn’t have had much to complain about; the change did not affect his current salary. But the change did affect his eligibility for certain types of pay raises in the future, so Maher lashed out, warning MCCP Team Coordinator Robert Pritchard in an April 2004 letter that he planned to appeal the decision to the Civil Service Commission. In the letter, Maher valiantly made a renewed attempt to describe exactly what it is that he does for the airport:
 
“Reporting directly to the airport director, this position serves as a political consultant/advisor to the Airport Director regarding the political climate and assists the Director in the overall management, planning and coordination of highly political, sensitive and politically visible projects as assigned.”
 
Huh? Wha?
 
Apparently, the position wasn’t “political” enough, because after further review, Pritchard recommended to the commission earlier this month that Maher’s appeal be denied. According to Pritchard’s findings, “ …the position has no supervisory or budgetary responsibilities typical of the higher level classes.”
 
As it happens, the city’s budget analyst, Harvey Rose, agreed Maher’s duties seemed vague at best, because he recently made the preliminary recommendation that Maher’s job be eliminated entirely. According to a May 22 report from Rose’s office, the decision was based on “the lack of workload and deliverables information, the duplicative nature of the position’s functions, and the position’s high cost …” (Rose’s final budget recommendations won’t be finished until June 5.)
 
The Guardian also reported in April that management excess appeared to exist elsewhere at the airport. We noted that sources of ours had complained about the airport’s International Economic and Tourism Development Director, a post created for the politically well-connected Bill Lee under Gavin Newsom after the mayor removed Lee from his job as city manager. (The San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier & Ross have published versions of this story as well.)
 
Lee’s salary and mandatory fringe benefits, including a city car, cost taxpayers nearly $186,000 a year. His job, according to Rose’s report, is to “support international business growth.” But the airport never provided to Rose data that proved Lee had inspired any growth in international cargo or passengers. Rose, subsequently, made the preliminary recommendation that Lee’s position also be eliminated by late September “based on the lack of quantifiable economic benefits and cost savings associated with this position …”
 
No one at the airport’s Bureau of Community Affairs was available to comment on either Lee or Maher’s positions. But in April, Lee disputed any suggestion that his job was merely a “soft landing,” and insisted that he’s continuing to establish new business relationships between the city and key Asian countries.
 
Airport Spokesman Michael McCarron also told us in April that Maher spends much of his time off site “reviewing and attending appropriate board, commission and regulatory meetings.”
 

As part of his explanation, McCarron added at the time, “It is important for the airport to be aware of community sentiment that may impact the airport and the regulatory climate within in [sic] which it must exist.”

 
Clear as a bell.
 

Doing the Cannes-Cannes, Part Two

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Gary Meyer of the Balboa is at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Here is the second of his reports.

What a day! They’ve moved things around. Problems with my accreditation badge mean I can’t get into the movies. Offices that used to be in the Palais are at the other end of the Croisette, a 20 minute walk. The lines are huge and don’t seem to move. Finally I get my problems cleared up but every screening is full. Even my friends connected with some movies can’t get me in. The day is almost over and I haven’t seen one film yet. BUZZZZ. “Good morning. This is your 7am wake up call. Have a nice day.” Anxiety dreams are the worst here. I am feeling guilty that I only saw four films yesterday, but that was all there was worth seeing.

The morning started promisingly. Ken Loach’s newest, The Wind that Shakes the Barley , is generally well-received. Cillian Murphy proves that his acting turns in Breakfast on Pluto and Red Eye were not flukes. He stars as a young doctor faced with an offer to practice medicine in London — or stay in his village and become increasingly involved in forming a guerilla army to fight the “Black and Tan” army from England, sent to squash Irish independence. Set in the 1920s, the film has contemporary relevance. The first half is exciting, playing like a grand adventure with a political conscience, just as we have come to expect from Loach. The second half slows a bit but still worked for me.

Continuing in the history vein, with sociology and myth thrown in, is Rolf de Heer’s Ten Canoes. This Dutch director has developed a small but faithful following with his diverse filmography of under-distributed movies including The Quiet Room, Dance Me to My Song, and Alexandra’s Project. Ten Canoes was developed with actor David Gulpilil (most known for starring in Walkabout) who was interested in the stories of his own tribe, the Ramingining people. Gulpilil narrates (in English) simultaneous stories related to forbidden love but separated in time by many generations. There is a certain irreverence in his storytelling that is surprising: What is a flatulence reference doing in a story set hundreds of years ago? But then one realizes people have passed wind as long as they have existed. The guilty warrior is moved to the back of the line as they go through the forest — and more bawdy humor reminds us that dirty jokes aren’t new.

Ten Canoes is an impressive accomplishment on many levels. Though its austerity may be off-putting for some audiences, the fascinating stories, stunning visual delights, and truly unique experiences make it worthy of distribution.

The next two films shouldn’t be watched on a full stomach … but a viewer might not want to eat afterwards either. Taxidermia is the second feature from Hungarian director György Pálfi, after his astonishing Hukkle. Like Ten Canoes — another film dealing with several generations in a family — Taxidermia opens with a story of an orderly masturbating while observing his master’s young daughters, and servicing the man’s rather large wife on a monthly basis. The accidental offspring grows up to become a champion eater, winning contests while becoming a national, very fat, hero. Just as the sexual escapades of his father were graphically portrayed, we are shown huge amounts of vomit following the son’s competitions. The absurdity of it generates nervous laughter from those who haven’t turned away from the screen. He grows older, and becomes so large he cannot move. When he explodes, his son, a taxidermist, does what you might expect — and then what you won’t expect.

In some ways Taxidermia is a brilliant piece, with incredible cinematography, black humor, and a couple of visual treats. A brief sequence in a pop-up storybook and one exploring the myriad of uses for a bathtub are moments I should like to see again. But this is a hard movie to recommend to most; the gross outs just keep coming, each topping the previous one. Obviously, it’s only for those who can stomach it.

If one hasn’t lost his or her appetite after Taxidermia, the fiction film adapted from Eric Schlosser’s non-fiction book Fast Food Nation could move anyone in that direction. The author developed the screenplay with director Richard Linklater (whose animated science fiction film, A Scanner Darkly, screens here next week). The story centers around an executive at a thinly disguised hamburger chain — “Mickey’s” — who is sent to Colorado to investigate reports concerning fecal matter in beef. Along the way he encounters a number of characters working at the slaughterhouse and at the chain’s local burger joint.

In trying to cover as many controversial bases as he can, Schlosser may have taken on too many issues (the treatment of illegal aliens, sexual harassment, America’s poor dietary habits, the lack of sanitary conditions in both the meat-processing plant and the retail outlets, corporate neglect for bigger profits, etc). But the over-ambitious narrative rarely makes the impact these issues deserve. Following Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, Schlosser’s investigative book confirmed that things aren’t much better in the 21st century. Though trying to reach a wider audience with a narrative film is a noble idea, it doesn’t succeed as either entertainment or piece of muckraking. The French seemed to generally like Fast Food Nation, probably because it makes for an easy anti-American target. But they also eat fast-food burgers in huge numbers.

High concept

The Marche is a massive film market that happens simultaneously with the film festival. More junk that you ever imagined is produced all over the world, and thousands of films are being sold here. Some are finished and others are in development. Many will never be finished.

We can always expect ripoffs of Hollywood blockbusters. There is no description for Sacrament Code or Stealing the Mona Lisa in the ads because the makers are probably hoping for some down and dirty direct-to-international video and cable sales. I’ve seen ads for at least three pirate movies, each looking very much like the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean II, with supernatural elements floating through the art work and featuring casts of total unknowns who look a lot like Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley.

One of my favorite things at Cannes is seeking out the most ridiculous titles for movies selling in Marche. Are you ready for a horror film about “hair extensions that attack the women that wear them?” Japan’s Toei is selling it here. Exte will star Chiaki Kuriyama, the crazy chain-swinging schoolgirl in Kill Bill.

And how about Motor Home Massacre? No description offered and none is needed.

Whatshisnamesnewfilm

The masses gathered at Cannes rarely refer to upcoming Festival movies by their title. We are asked, “Are you going to see the new Almodovar?” or “Did you see the Turkish movie?”

We say: “I liked the first feature from the director of that short Wasp,” and “Don’t miss the Indonesian documentary about the tsunami aftermath.”

This puts the film in a context that is easier to explain than “Are you going to see Volver? Iklimler? Red Road? Serambi?”

What do those titles mean? Until enough people have seen or heard about them, they are merely strange words or odd phrases. Volver is the new film from Pedro Almodovar; it’s a bit more subdued than some of his over-the-top recent entertainments. Penelope Cruz, who returns to her roots in Spanish cinema, plays a mother dealing with a teenaged daughter, a lonely sister, and an aging aunt. When the aunt dies, her dead mother appears, first as what the women assume is a ghost — but, maybe she never died in the fire that took their father? Initially the filmmaker continues his homage to Hitchcock with a surprise murder (and Bernard Herrmann-like music) before moving more to melodrama. While not a great film, Volver is wonderfully entertaining, full of surprises, and features a performance by Cruz that made me an instant fan. The buzz is great.

Iklimler has an English title of Climates, an appropriate description of the hot and cold relationship between a man and a woman who break up during a beach vacation and meet again in the snow. Like director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s previous film Uzak (Distant), the Cannes Grand Prix winner in 2003, this film could be best described as contemplative. On the surface it is a simple story of a relationship, but the emotions and motivations dig much deeper. The characters are believable, the emotions real, and the performances powerful. With virtually no camera movement, the filmmaker beautifully composes each shot; so impressed with his work, the camera stays in that one position for long sequences. Some raved about this “work of art,” but gorgeously composed images don’t make a movie. For me, this slowed too much midway. I stayed with it and appreciated the ending, but as with so much at the festival, Iklimler is an acquired taste. No doubt I will be damned for my comments.

Red Road is another story. Scottish director Andrea Arnold’s first feature is a tense and original thriller. Working from a concept proposed by Lars Von Trier’s team, three different filmmakers set out to create original stories based on the same main characters. Each were given notes; the same two actors will star. Red Road is the first to be made. A woman works for a security company watching various video monitors for possible troublemakers in a rough neighborhood. She concentrates on a man recently released from prison for a crime obviously committed against someone close to her. This variation on Hitchcock’s Rear Window grows increasing more tense as details are carefully revealed. Despite a few missteps, the film works well and Arnold is a talent to watch (her Oscar-winning short, Wasp, was a knockout).

In a given day there will rarely be a logical pattern to the order of film-watching — and the segue from one to the next can be very strange. Following Red Road with Serambi was such a radical shift. This documentary explores the aftermath of the tsunami, following children, young adults, and adults who search for their friends and relatives while coming to the realization they must rebuild their lives and city.

Another documentary, Boffo! Tinsletown’s Bombs and Blockbusters proved a good way to end a day that also included a program of shorts and a long Korean film about young soldiers that left me cold (The Unforgiven). Boffo! is by onetime Bay Area director Bill Couturie. Packed with film clips and great interviews, it tries to help us figure out why a movie is a hit or flop — even if people from filmmakers to studio heads come back to writer William Goldman’s quote: “Nobody knows nothing.”

Cannes journal #1:

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FEST REPORT The trip to Cannes always starts when I get on the plane in San Francisco looking to see if anyone I know is aboard. The 747 was huge, but full exploration didn’t reveal any obvious candidates for the festival.

Once in Paris things change. On the transfer to Nice I always run into several friends making the final leg of the journey to the south of France and 10 days of movies, morning till dawn. We compare stories about how much sleep we did or didn’t get, before leaving and on the plane. And make the inevitable jokes about being jet-lagged and surely taking naps in films.

Each year I also spot someone famous getting on my plane. One year I chatted with French superstar Jeanne Moreau. I had been involved in distributing a movie she directed, L’Adolescente. Another time, Michael Richards (Kramer on Seinfeld) was nervous about the trip. It was his first time in France, and he was appearing at the premiere of the movie Unstrung Heroes. He was a nervous wreck. He couldn’t figure out how to use the pay phones and was scared by security and certain he would never find his way to the right gate at De Gaulle (a reasonable worry). I befriended him and showed the way.

This year, as the long line waited to board the flight, Snakes on a Plane star Samuel L. Jackson was escorted to the front of the line. A member of the Cannes jury, he had a hat pulled down so he’d only be half-recognized. Someone in the line called out, "I’ll see you in Cannes," to make sure we all knew where they were both headed.

Arriving a day early has its benefits. The crowds haven’t assembled. One can take care of accreditation and press orientation and study the various program books. A press screening of The Da Vinci Code was the only scheduled event. I had already seen it and instead chose to have dinner with friends.

On the first day of the festival I saw three films, all of them official selections caught at press screenings. A good way to start off the morning was with something not too demanding: Paris Je T’Aime is a collection of 20 five-minute films by an eclectic group of international directors — including Gus Van Sant, the Coen Brothers, Walter Salles, Alfonso Cuar??n, Alexander Payne, Gurinder Chadha, Tom Tykwer, and Wes Craven — guiding a superstar cast that ranges from Natalie Portman to Gena Rowlands, Sergio Castellitto to Fanny Ardant. (Ben Gazzara, Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi, and Bob Hoskins are also featured.) Each piece is about love in Paris. They are like simple short stories; the best ones aren’t overly ambitious.

Next up was a film from Paraguay, Hamaca Paraguaya. At only 78 minutes, it was still not the kind of movie to see when jet-lagged. When the lights went up, I asked my neighbor, author Phillip Lopate, if I’d snored. He said I was a very considerate napper and wanted to know how he had done. Just fine, I guess, as he didn’t wake me up. I have no doubt it will be hailed as a work of art by someone.

Much better was Summer Palace, the first competition film. Director Lou Ye (Suzhou River, Purple Butterfly) has constructed a complex story of relationships, starting in 1989 China. A student leaves her small town and boyfriend to attend university in Beijing. She discovers both friendship and sex, with the pleasures and confusion they can bring. We journey through the political changes in China and Germany (where some of the characters go) over the next 15 years as the group of friends separate and rejoin. The result is often powerful, vibrant, and involving. The film overstays its welcome at 140 minutes; some careful editing will help make it even better.

Summer Palace is the only Asian film in the competition, and it arrives amid controversy. The Chinese government has complained that the producers didn’t get censorship approval and have broken the law by submitting it to Cannes. But the filmmakers claimed they didn’t submit it to Cannes — it must have been the sales agent in France. This won’t be the first time Chinese censorship has garnered attention here. The highest-profile case was with Zhang Yimou’s 1994 To Live.
My favorite overheard comment to date: Sitting in front of a sandwich stand, a young British woman told her companion that film sales have been tough and that the DVD market has slowed to practically nothing — "We are looking for video on demand, computer downloading," she said. "Anything where people don’t have to leave their homes." (Gary Meyer)

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