Interview Archives — Page 39 of 75 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Alerts

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

January 4, 2011

Alerts are compiled by Nicole Dial and Jackie Andrews

alert@sfbg.com

FRIDAY, JAN. 7

Noam Chomsky interview

Pick the brain of linguist and author Noam Chomsky as Wild Wild West Radio hosts an interactive cyber-convo with the influential professor and political dissident. Listeners may phone in questions or chat with Chomsky online for a unique, collective experience.

3 p.m., free

Wild Wild Left Radio

www.wildwildleft.com

San Francisco Bike Party

The new year brings a new kind of mass bicycle ride, one a bit more civilized than Critical Mass. Join the inaugural San Francisco Bike Party, a new monthly ride that begins at AT&T Park and follows a planned route through the city, obeying most traffic laws along the way. But it will still be a rolling party, complete with a mobile sound system and three party stops for dancing and socializing along the way.

7:30 p.m., free

Giants Stadium, Willie Mays Gate

www.sfbikeparty.org

SATURDAY, JAN 8

Board of Supervisors swearing-in

Members of the newly elected Board of Supervisors take their oath of office, followed immediately by the election of a new board president, who could also become acting mayor once Gavin Newsom is sworn in as California’s new lieutenant governor. Or if Newsom resigns by then, the board could also directly select a new interim mayor. It promises to be high political drama under the dome.

Noon, free

Room 250, City Hall

1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Dr., SF

www.sfbos.org

Writers with Drinks

Writers with Drinks mixes genres and authors and throws in a dash of alcohol. It’s more than just a reading series, it’s also a celebration of performers, intellectuals, and writers from all over. This month it features writers Jane Wiedlin, Ethan Watters, Jesús Ángel García, and Blake Charlton. More good news: proceeds benefit the Center for Sex and Culture. 7:30 p.m.; doors open at 6:30 p.m.

$5 to $10, sliding scale The Make Out Room 3225 22nd St., SF www.writerswithdrinks.com

SUNDAY, JAN. 9

Found the Free University of SF

Matt Gonzalez, Alan Kaufman, and others are forming the new Free University of San Francisco, and they want public input. Organizers ranging from political activists to poet laureates will put on a public meeting to discuss plans for the university. The Free U aims to promote free higher level education for anyone who wants it. Future plans include a weekend-long teach-in Feb. 5–-6. Come down and help promote and organize free education. 10 a.m., free Viracocha 998 Valencia, SF 415-573-5766

Guantánamo Means Torture

Attend a public planning meeting for the national demonstration scheduled for Jan. 11 against the continuation of Guantánamo Bay’s detention facility. World Can’t Wait hosts the meeting here in San Francisco, and then travels to Washington, D.C., with Witness Against Torture, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and other activists to demand an end to the horrors of Guantánamo. 2:30 p.m., free Mechanics Library 57 Post, 415 864 5153

sf@worldcantwait.org

Joining the journey

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

January 4, 2011

news@sfbg.com

Malcolm X once said “Tomorrow is for those who prepare for it today.” And today, Malcolm Shabazz, the eldest grandson of Malcolm X, says he is trying to carry on the storied legacy of the radical advocate for African American civil rights and leading voice for the Nation of Islam.

Shabazz, 26, was recently in San Francisco discussing that legacy, as well as his own spiritual and personal journeys, which included making the pilgrimage to Mecca for the hajj in November, a requirement for Muslims that his grandfather also undertook in 1964, the year before he was assassinated.

It was the latest chapter in a long and complicated story. At the age of 12, Shabazz started a fire in his Yonkers home that left his grandmother (Malcolm X’s wife, Betty) with burns over 80 percent of her body, which led to her death a few days later. Shabazz has spent more of his adolescence and adulthood in prisons and other institutions than in the real world.

After serving four years in juvenile correctional facilities for arson and manslaughter charges for the fire, Shabazz pleaded guilty to attempted robbery in 2002. He served three and a half years in prison for that crime and then went back to prison months after his release for punching a hole in a store window.

Although he is often portrayed in media accounts as disturbed, Shabazz seemed calm and reflective during a two-hour interview with the Guardian. A soft-spoken man with few but well-chosen words, Shabazz is not unafraid to speak his mind about the state of the country and his grandfather’s legacy.

“If you want to know anything, then go back to the source,” he told us, which is what we did, reviewing his long, twisted journey to Mecca.

As the oldest male heir to Malcolm X, Shabazz was born into a fascinating family. Media accounts have documented him as a troubled young man, shuttled back and forth among family members. Like his grandfather, he spent time on the streets and in jail. Like his grandfather, it was behind bars that he finally regained his faith and found himself fully immersed in Islam. Shabazz explains that while he was born into Islam, he finally began to fee its presence in his life during his most recent incarceration period. While quarantined in Attica Correctional Facility in New York, Shabazz explained that he “didn’t have any hygiene supplies, I didn’t have any reading materials.”

But it was during his time in Attica that he met another prisoner — half Mexican, half Iranian — who identified himself as a Shia Muslim. “He asked me ‘Are you in a lie? Or are you a real Muslim?’ ” Shabazz recalled. He answered that he was a real Muslim. “He gave me reading materials to read in my cell.”

According to Shabazz, this was the man who discussed and poured over religious texts with him during their time together, and the one who inspired him to convert from the Sunni sect to Shia.

“I was raised a Sunni, everyone in my family was Sunni,” he said. There is much antagonism between the two sects, so his conversion caused a backlash akin to when his grandfather left the Nation of Islam in 1964 and declared himself a Sunni, which let to his assassination the following year.

When word spread of Shabazz’s conversion, various Sunni leaders and community members expressed their discomfort with what he had done. He explained that many people wrote to him asking him, “How could you become a Shia?”

After his release, Shabazz decided to move to Syria to study at an Islamic institute and then spent the following eight months teaching English to children. “I came home from prison [and] I wanted to get away for a little while,” he explained.

After arriving back from Syria in April, Shabazz went to Miami and worked on his memoirs, which he said are due to come out this May. The book discusses Shabazz’s life and tribulations, noting that “there are misconceptions that I would like to clear up.”

Once he returned to the United States, Shabazz decided to follow his grandfather’s footsteps and make the pilgrimage to Mecca, where, he said “the air felt different.” But he also explained how the people he saw on the pilgrimage seemed less willing to impose their rules on Americans.

“It seems like they have more fear [of] Americans than they do for Allah,” he said. “If they know you’re American, I don’t know what it is, but they leave you alone.”

Shabazz said he had the experience of a lifetime and proved his intense vigor for the Islamic faith. He circled the Kaa’ba, and despite swollen feet and a bad case of the flu, carried on his pilgrimage like a true believer. “I never saw this many people at one place at one time. It was much more of a struggle than I had anticipated,” he said. “But everything was earned.”

Decades before, his grandfather Malcolm X made his mark on American culture, taking a radical approach to demanding equal rights. When asked if his grandfather would admire President Barack Obama if he were alive today, Shabazz replied, “Definitely not. To me, Obama is no different than [George W.] Bush.”

He said that democracy in this country is a sham, an illusion effectively perpetuated by the ruling elite. “The U.S. is a land of smoke and mirrors, and they’re the best at doing what they do,” he said. “My grandfather? Hah. He wouldn’t have supported any of those dudes.”

Although Shabazz doesn’t particularly admire Obama so far, he does hope that the election of the first African-American president will “boost the esteem of the young black youth.” And he said that the messages of Malcolm X are more important today than ever.

“My grandfather once stated that there are only two types of power that are respected within the United States of America — economic power and political power — and he went on to explain how social power derives from these two. Unfortunately, the majority of the people [today] are economically illiterate and politically naive. They believe most of what they see on television and read in the papers. I say believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear.”

For his own personal politics, Shabazz said change begins with education and unity. “[Education] could be done through music, spoken word poetry, art, preaching from the pulpit, or putting in physical work right in the trenches,” Shabazz said.

In terms of unity, he cited the European Union, explaining that it is an organization “where nations that don’t necessarily like each other [but] have at least enough common sense to come together for a cause, to achieve a common goal, or to stand up against a common enemy. When it’s time to put niggers in check, they know how to come together.”

Almost 10 years after the 9/11 attacks, Shabazz sees growing potential for Islam to exert an influence in the U.S. “After 9/11, a lot of people did not know too much [about Islam]. But they started to investigate and learn more.”

Although many people’s first reaction was to turn away from the religion of jihad, Shabazz feels that many people also felt the need to educate themselves on the matter — and found that there is much more to Islam than the mainstream media portrays. And for a young man who has already led a turbulent life, Shabazz is seeking something basic from his newfound faith: “I want a peace of mind.”

Past imperfect

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

December 28, 2010

arts@sfbg.com

YEAR IN FILM We’re all media scavengers now, but archival sounds and images remain a tantalizing lure for both the documentary profile and its surrealistic double, the found footage film. The first repackages capsules of the past while the second hijacks them — different economies of exchange, to be sure, though perhaps less starkly contrasted to those accustomed to hyperlinking their way through the dustbin.

The use of obscure footage as leverage is exceedingly clear in Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, a film structured around director Tamra Davis’ intimate camcorder interview with the artist in 1985. The close-up portrait gives us Basquiat’s sly intelligence, spacey charisma, and tragic oversensitivity to judgment — all to the good, but Davis’ inability to reckon with the exchange value of her insider access is disappointing. Selling and chronicling are inextricably linked with the celebrity artist, but Basquiat’s early graffiti partner Al Diaz is the only interviewee who addresses the issue of the golden goose frankly.

The Rolling Stones have always excelled at selling themselves, so it’s no surprise to see Mick and Keith’s executive producer credits on Stones in Exile. Fortunately for us, director Stephen Kijack (2006’s Scott Walker: 30 Century Man) recognizes 1972’s Exile on Main Street as a masterpiece of vibe and accordingly focuses great attention on the zonked record’s mise-en-scène. But the strictly MOR slate of interviewees — alas, no Pussy Galore here — makes the scraps of Robert Frank’s long suppressed Cocksucker Blues (1972) feel all the more bowdlerized.

The bankable aura of the rarely seen supplants Frank’s prickly immediacy, and the dream of a rock ‘n’ roll cinema is the poorer for it. If it’s easier to accept the brief stream of Jonas Mekas’ New York City film-diaries borrowed in LennonNYC, that’s because the footage serves a narrow expositional purpose in establishing the bohemian milieu that John Lennon and Yoko Ono embraced — and also because Mekas is himself interviewed. The PBS-produced doc’s failings are the conventional ones, but its archival trove does illuminate Lennon and Ono’s creative collaborations, especially insofar as their art hinged upon probing self-consciousness and the redemptive potential of intimacy.

On the other side of the archival aisle, the mad detectives and film theorists who whisper hidden truths in our ears have become increasingly ambitious storytellers. Johan Grimonprez’s inventive Double Take slips into the realms of the unreal by characterizing the Cold War as a literally Hitchcockian play of ciphers, while Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished submits an oft-cited, little-understood Nazi propaganda film to ontological deliberation. Adam Curtis introduces his most recent raid of the archive, It Felt Like a Kiss, with print titles that speak for all these projects: “When a nation is powerful it tells the world confident stories about the future/ The stories can be enchanting or frightening/ But they make sense of the world/ But when that power begins to ebb the stories fall apart/ And all that is left are fragments which haunt you like half-forgotten dreams.”

As with Curtis’ earlier multipart films, It Felt Like a Kiss registers history as a shifting series of simultaneities and unforeseen consequences. The only slightly tongue-in-cheek cast includes Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Saddam Hussein, Enos the cosmonaut chimp, and everyone above level seven in the CIA. Initially conceived as a multichannel promenade, the film is named for the singularly disturbing pop song Carole King penned for Phil Spector and his Crystals. It’s one of four ’60s sides Curtis builds out as deeply personal, but emblematic chronicles of anguish and dread (the others are “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “River Deep, Mountain High” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”). In each case, Curtis surveys the decade’s interlocking horror shows with something like poignancy — a new feature of his work.

Atop all the uncanny déjà vus and dream-life convergences, It Felt Like a Kiss also serves up one of the greatest WTF endings in recent memory. After revealing a bunker’s worth of government computers (repurposed from Cold War fighting to credit card debt), Curtis cuts to Pillow Talk (1959). Doris Day is a vision of contentment going to bed, but then something disturbs her — on the soundtrack, a soaring engine noise is followed by a hard cut to black silence. Amazed at how economically Curtis suggests the coming impact, we cue the sequence up again and let our jaws drop when we see Day’s room number: 2001.

To be sure, there’s no rule that found footage films must generate conspiratorial heat. Jay Rosenblatt’s The Darkness of Day materializes a reserved contemplation of suicide using industrial discards — the forgotten nature of these older films itself becoming a token of loss in an elegiac context. Oblique images float upon fragmented suicide stories narrated from many different vantages: near and far, first-person and third, male and female, young and old, anonymous and notable. We hear excerpts drawn from 10 years of a diary of depression, read of an ancient Egyptian’s dispute with his own soul, and learn about the first man to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.

This last story surfaces with a montage of the bridge’s construction — a monument, but to what? — and might be read as a critique of The Bridge (2006), which unaccountably turned us into voyeurs of suicide. The Darkness of Day travels the path of Night and Fog (1955), regarding trauma indirectly, as traces and shadows. Industrial footage is not the most obvious resource to make darkness visible, but Rosenblatt’s use of mass-produced materials subtly underscore the film’s suggestion that while suicide is always discrete and thus unknowable, it is also a social phenomenon.

For a more concrete cultural history glazed with Debordian wit, Andrei Ujica’s The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu is matchless. After opening with a thoroughly demystified, inquisitorial video of Ceausescu and his wife Elena in 1989 — previously seen in Ujica’s 1992 collaboration with Harun Farocki, Videograms of a Revolution — we double back to the spectacular public funeral for the Romanian leader’s predecessor, Gheorghiu-Dej, in 1965. From here, Ujica proceeds more or less chronologically (and without voice-over) through Ceausescu’s decades in power, collecting speeches, press conferences, soft debates, home movies, inspections of factories and construction sites, and trips abroad to Communist countries and Hollywood (a letdown after the stupefying parades in China and North Korea).

One of the director’s most cunning insights is that since the totalitarian state stages reality to furnish proof of its own dominion — the problem with measuring Triumph of the Will (1933) as documentary — the resulting footage might be considered as if dictated by the leader. But by letting these “autobiographical” materials run at length, Ujica also opens a space for the accidents and lacunae that surely would have been excised from the official record. The fact that it’s so easy to imagine the propaganda version of this footage is part of the point: we calculate where the cuts would have been to “correct” Ceausescu’s diminutive posture and speechmaking, and in that gap lies much of 20th century history. The closest Ujica comes to giving the game away is when he cuts from one of Ceausescu’s baroque rhetorical performance (filmed in black-and-white, as with everything else we’ve seen up to this point) to his cheating at volleyball in a color home movie. It’s a wonderfully rude swipe at rulers everywhere and likely the single most smashing edit of the year.

Big day at the Board of Supervisors

Sasha Cuttler

December 14, 2010

Before the Board of Supervisors can adjourn for the year, it has some serious business to take care of at this afternoon’s regular meeting: approving the city’s ever-evolving America’s Cup bid, requiring party promoters to register with the city, giving final approval to the local hire ordinance, modifying the affordable housing requirements on developers, mandating building owners to study creating on-site childcare facilities, creating new special districts, strengthening local purchase standards for city contracts, and, oh yeah, selecting someone to replace Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Whoa, that’s quite a list, but you can follow the highlights – particularly on the successor mayor nominations and votes – by following the Bay Guardian’s Twitter feed at SFBG.

Despite strong progressive plays this week to elect David Campos as interim mayor – and the fallback plan of electing former Mayor Art Agnos as a caretaker interim mayor – the word around City Hall these days is that there probably aren’t yet six votes for anyone. But, asked about the chances of selecting a new mayor today, Sup. Chris Daly channeled Harvey Milk by saying, “You gotta give em hope.”

If the current board can’t make a decision today, it will get one more crack at it on Jan. 4 before the decision falls to the new board after it is sworn in on Jan. 8. While the new board is ideologically similar to the current one, its most progressive new member, Daly replacement Jane Kim, sounded very moderate themes in her recent interview with the Guardian.

Board President David Chiu will become acting mayor once Newsom becomes lieutenant governor (which he won’t delay if the current board fails to pick a new mayor), the city’s first Chinese-American mayor, something that will be politically difficult for the board to undo, particularly given his good relations with new supervisors Kim, Malia Cohen, and Scott Wiener.

But it’s still too early for that kind of speculation, particularly given the high stakes and squirrely politics at play right now. So stay tuned.

Mike Giant meditates

Andrew Lam

December 10, 2010

When you’re meeting up with a skateboarding design-graf-tattoo art giant, you prep a certain kind of question – ‘how do you post your art on your website without getting arrested’ comes to mind. But when I hung with Bay legend Mike Giant this week while he put the final touches on the pieces for his upcoming fine art show at Guerrero Gallery (opens Sat/11), I found myself ditching my notes for another line of inquiry.

Which followed this line, roughly: where do I find some of what he’s smoking?

Maybe what he’s meditating on would be a more apt way of putting it. Giant, the founder of zine publishing house Skullz Press and skate brand Rebel 8, has been pursuing enlightenment for well over a decade now – he used to lead a regular meditation session in Dolores Park followed by a group bike ride before travel and a brief stint back in his hometown of Albuquerque took him away. He finds it a integral part of his creative process. “I’m the observer to my thoughts, not the thinker. It feels like I’m just watching it happen.”

Oh wait, that was him talking about what happens when he smokes weed before he draws.

But it all comes to the same end: what Giant is searching for is a way to step back from the small urgencies and literal dialogue of life and connect to a larger undercurrent. It’s a slightly abstract artistic statement — one that fits with his scraggly, shoulder-length blonde hair, bushy beard, and elder hippie statesman status in the circles he runs in — but it’s pretty refreshing to hear someone with firm roots in street culture get up on such a positive level.

Above, Giant getting up in Western Addy. Below right, cruising through Guerrero Gallery. All photos by Andres Guerrero

The 16-odd works that Giant is showing at Guerrero were already hung on the gallery’s walls the rainy day I trekked over, half of them magazine image collages and half of them single design human hearts and skulls, fine art pieces that he’s created with sign painter’s enamel (“it’s another low brow homage.”) The collages are collections of magazine images with alternating feminine and masculine themes, accentuated with small, handwritten notes from Giant.

Here, a transcription of an ex-girlfriend’s apology for a tumultuous relationship, there, turn-ons and turn-offs. A list on a piece stacked with photos of women displays a neatly-written “things that make girls ugly” that lists coffee, cars, corporate jobs, meat, and cigarettes. Giant’s bike leans by the gallery entrance, his constant companion whose front basket has been known to hold three cases of beer at a time. There’s eloquent meditations, mundane journal-like entries – another note on the same piece reads “don’t be surprised that I like girls who can deep throat.”

Three days before the exhibit’s opening reception and the works are done. And yet throughout our interview Giant hardly stops messing with them. I watch as he tags an empty corner of one of them with one of his impossibly precise characters. Giant is known for the cleanness of his lines, and has cultivated an image of responsibility and dedication in the skate and tattoo art worlds. “I work hard. All my friends will tell you I work every day for quite a few hours in the studio,” he tells me when I remark that he’s thought of as a “smart” artist.

Hard-working, but business savvy is surely another contributor to the guy’s success. He’s landed partnerships with Pabst and Vans – the big guns in hipster advertising – and has struck upon what he sees as the secret to ensuring one’s economic worth in the art world: repetition. “It increases the value, the more that image has life on the marketplace,” he counsels.

And correspondingly, Giant’s aesthetic is fairly solid: the cholo imagery that made him a star on the tattoo scene runs throughout his design work, and onto the enameled canvasses that hang on the wall at Guerrero.

After a decade of physically grueling work he’s now retired from tattooing anyone but friends, the guy’s Facebook fan page is still overrun with entreaties to do one last tat. “How do I get work by u?” asks a gentleman named Corn Nut, into the Internet abyss. A few years back Giant did a photography series of hot chicks on bikes, drawing over the prints to make the girls into inked idols. He loves making art on skin, it’s just that his body’s not up for it anymore. “Ten years,” he says. “That’s how long most people figure you can do in tattoos.”

Although still busy with designing T shirts for Rebel 8, Giant figures that having been on the scene this long he is afforded a few shifts in medium. “I’m allowed to. I’m at a point in my career now where I don’t think it matters — I’ve started to think of the fine art thing as the place to experiment.”

He does look pretty happy in Guerrero with his fist full of Sharpies, having just smoked a humungous joint and waxed poetic on the beauty of meditation for the better part of an hour. A beauty unto himself, really, so I’ll give the last word to the Giant.

“Meditation… the whole point of that is to break your heart open. It’s way crazier than an orgasm, than a crazy LSD trip, than the greatest love you’ve ever felt. It’s important to keep in mind that there’s a different level of this. I do think I’ve felt the hand of God.”

Mike Giant: “Reflections on Past, Present, and Future”

Opening reception Sat/11 7-11 p.m., free

Guerrero Galley

2700 19th St., SF

(415) 400-5168

www.guerrerogallery.com

Jackie Beat: “Hung Puerto Rican elves only”

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

December 9, 2010

Jackie Beat: “Hung Puerto Rican elves only”

Generously talented and fantastically energetic (we’re talking 8-bit chipmunk here) LA drag entertainer Jackie Beat is in town with her new show “Jackie Beat’s All-You-Can-Eat Christmas,” Fri/10 and Sat/11 and Brava Theater. It sounds like a real festive hoot. The long-time cabaret circuit favorite, underground club hostess, and member of scandalous electro-revival band Dirty Sanchez pulled out her giant fork and dug into a little interview with us about ambrosia salad, abortion, AM schlock .. and that’s just the beginning. Go pay some money to see her!

SFBG: OK I’m dying over the concept for All-You-Can-Eat Christmas — it’s so refreshing to hear a drag queen talk about eating! What are some of your favorite foods? And do you do a lot of cooking?

Jackie Beat: Well, I was referring more to huge portions of talent, but I do love to eat! The ironic thing is that I have actually lost 100 pounds since my last holiday show, so people may think the title is actually “All-You-Can-Eat (And Then Throw Up!) Christmas,” but I promise it’s not! I still love to eat, I just eat less. My favorite holiday food has to be good old-fashioned Ambrosia Salad. It’s a big mess of pineapple chunks, pecans, shredded coconut, mandarin orange segments in heavy syrup, mini marshmallow, sour cream and Cool Whip. You can eat a huge bowl of it and then honestly tell people, “All I had was salad!”

SFBG: I love that you sing live — what kind of music is part of the new show?

JB: Most of the new material is in my amazing new outfit — yards and yards of it! Seriously, it gets harder every year to come up with new stuff. I have done thousands of song parodies, including every holiday song ever written! This year, I am doing a Country Christmas Medley, a great medley of horrible old AM radio classics — the type of crap you hear at wedding receptions — but sung with the original lyrics that were too shocking at the time. You know, so all these sweet nostalgic old songs are now about fisting and abortion. Good times! I am also doing a new song about getting a full-cavity search at the TSA and there are plenty of classics like “Santa’s Baby” and “Do Some Blow!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZThrYCy9Zzo

SFBG: Who’s your favorite Santa’s reindeer?

JB: Grumpy? Oh wait, that was one of the Seven Dwarves, right? Um, Jan? No, she was in The Brady Bunch, sorry. Um, Rudolph of course! Because he’s the fucking star — like me!

SFBG: If you had an elf of your own, what would you make him or her do for you?

JB: First he would be Puerto Rican and hung like a horse. And I think you can figure out the rest! Oh, and after THAT — he would clean the fucking house!

SFBG: Can you tell me a bit about how the show came about?

JB: Um, I had bills to pay and I don’t know how to do anything else, so…

SFBG: I bet you’ve been pretty busy in general — what have you been doing lately? Any Dirty Sanchez news? You guys just performed here, yes?

JB: We did Folsom Street Fair last year, but we are all so busy with our own lives that we seldom perform together these days. Hopefully we will be working on some new music soon!

SFBG: You’re in San Francisco pretty regularly — what are some of your favorite things about the city?

JB: The PAYING customers, of course! Times are tough and like I said, I don’t know how to do anything else.

SFBG: Unfortunately Christmas can’t last forever — what’s next for Jackie Beat?

JB: Quite possibly dropping dead right after this grueling, brutal holiday tour — so come see me now while I am still alive, bitches!

JACKIE BEAT’S ALL YOU CAN EAT CHRISTMAS

Fri/10 and Sat/11, 10:30 p.m., $20–$40. Brava Theater, 2781 24th St., SF. www.brownpapertickets.com

Class of 2010: Mark Farrell

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

December 8, 2010

steve@sfbg.com

Mark Farrell is a 36-year-old venture capitalist and political newcomer who will represent the wealthy neighborhoods of District 2 (Pacific Heights, Sea Cliff, and the Marina) after narrowly beating Janet Reilly, whose extensive political endorsements ranged from the Guardian and local Democratic Party Chair Aaron Peskin to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinsein and Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Challenging the city’s political power structure is why Farrell said he ran for office, playing up his outsider status and investment banking experience. He told visitors to his campaign website, “I am running for the Board of Supervisors to bring common sense back to City Hall” and railed against “career politicians who run for office again and again.”

In an interview with the Guardian, Farrell said he was motivated to make his first foray into politics by the dysfunction he has heard about at City Hall. “I’ve been frustrated with City Hall over the last few years, from the personal antics to the policies that have come out,” Farrell told us. “I humbly believe I have something different to bring to the table.”

Farrell calls himself a fiscal conservative who believes “our city government has gotten too large and we need to look at that,” a task he thinks he’s well-suited for given his background in finance. Yet when asked what government functions he would eliminate or cut deeply to help close a projected $700 million budget deficit over the next two years, Farrell said he can’t offer any specifics yet, saying only, “We need to make tough decisions.”

Would Farrell be open to new taxes or other revenue-side budget solutions? He told us that he won’t completely reject the idea of new taxes, but that he generally opposes them. “I don’t believe in raising taxes. We can’t raise enough revenue to get out of this problem,” Farrell said. “We need to learn to live within our means.”

Although he opposed Prop. B in this election, Farrell said public employee pension reform needs to be a part of the city’s budget solution, as well as scaling back how much the city gives to nonprofit groups, which provide many of the social services the city supports.

Farrell was born and raised in San Francisco — except for his college years, he’s spent his whole life in D2, where his parents still live — and has been friends with Sup. Sean Elsbernd since high school. Politically, Farrell also identifies with Elsbernd and fellow fiscally conservative Sups. Carmen Chu and Michela Alioto-Pier (who endorsed Farrell to replace her in D2), but he says that he doesn’t want to be politically pigeon-holed.

“I’m very much my own person and I look forward to working with everyone,” Farrell said. Indeed, part of Farrell’s frustration with City Hall politics has been the divisive relationship between the progressives and moderates, which he sees as a hindrance to finding “common sense solutions.”

“The progressive and moderate labels have been relatively destructive to San Francisco,” Farrell said. “We need to get beyond that to focus on issues.”

Yet people’s political values and worldview determine what issues they care about and the solutions they favor. For example, progressives decry the dearth of affordable being built for San Franciscans and cite city studies showing that deficit will get worse as developers build ever-more market rate housing (see “Dollars or sense?” Sept. 28), particularly in a city that is two-thirds renters.

Farrell said he supports rent control (saying he was unfairly attacked during the campaign as anti renter) and sees the dwindling rental stock and lack of new affordable units being constructed as problems, but he doesn’t have a solution to those problems. In fact, Farrell supports allowing more condo conversions, which would make the problem worse, telling us, “I believe home ownership is something we should promote.”

He was also vague about how he will approach land use issues and how tough he’ll be with developers in having them meet city design guidelines and provide affordable housing and other community benefits, saying only, “We need to have sustainable development in the city.”

Yet the issues that do animate Farrell are those typically focused on by conservative D2 voters. Farrell lists his top priorities as seeing to his district’s needs, promoting private sector job creation (“I think a lot of lip service has been paid to it, but not a lot of action by City Hall,” he said), public safety, and quality-of-life issues (he supported Prop. L, the sit-lie ordinance, calling it “very reasonable”). Generally Farrell sees San Francisco as a city in he midst of a serious fiscal crisis, “and I want to create a San Francisco that is secure for the future over the long haul.”

America’s next top band

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

December 7, 2010

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Gary Gregerson of Puce Moment has made an important discovery about bears of the human variety — many of them used to be new romantics. “Back in the day, they were wearing broaches, long shirts, and stirrup pants,” he says, discussing friends’ teenage photos in the kitchen of bandmate Jon Rueter.

The season finale of America’s Next Top Model is about to begin, but for now, it’s interview time, and there’s no better moment than the present to discuss the origins of Puce Moment. “I wanted to do an Altered Images-type band, and I told Jon, because he knows how to synth it up,” Gregerson explains, when asked about the group’s beginnings. “I said, ‘I want to be Claire Grogan!’ Then we decided we’d be more like Belinda [Carlisle] and Jane [Wiedlin].”

“Right, you said, ‘As long as I get to be Belinda,'” Rueter concurs.

The referential and the reverent (and irreverent) commingle in the world of Puce Moment. It couldn’t be any other way, considering Gregerson’s and Rueter’s intense and specific appreciations of pop music and culture. (When it comes to vintage TV, Rueter is a Knot’s Landing and Family guy, while Gregerson favors Police Woman.) Their band — with bassist Suresh Chacko and drummer Tom Marzella — takes its name from a 1949 fabric-fetish film by Kenneth Anger. It’s a brash gesture, considering Anger’s hostility toward those influenced by him. “Someone was like, ‘You don’t want to be cursed by Kenneth Anger!’,” Gregerson admits.

Puce Moment’s name is emblazoned on not one, not two, but three new four-song cassettes: Ready for a Date, Essence of Mann and Avoiding Certain Topics. Recorded at Wally Sound in Oakland, the collections showcase a sound that Gregerson labels “neo-psychedelic” and Rueter calls “swingin’ and groovy.” Ironically attuned to what one song title calls “Changing Formats,” as well as the current tape revival, the releases also suit Puce Moment’s affinity for C86-era Creation label bands such as Revolving Paint Dream. Rueter’s numbers use striking everyday images to tell stories of wavering friendship and love. Gregerson directs his attention to specific memorable characters: an activist named Maryanne; a prissy and meddlesome downstairs neighbor; and the artist Christo, who his lyric deems an “active Greek” just for the fun of it, since Christo is actually Bulgarian.

Puce Moment’s two songwriters trade off lead vocals in a manner similar to the early days of Orange Juice, when comical Edwyn Collins (that would be Gregerson) and effete James Kirk (that would be Rueter) took turns at the mic. The pair’s very first songwriting effort became Ready for a Date‘s opening track, “The Citrus Smelling Man with a Tight Wristwatch.” Its lengthy title is inspired by a real-life person. “Jon figured out [the background of] that song when we recording it,” says Gregerson. “It’s about having sex with a married man who wanted me to drive him and his wife and kids to the mall when I had a van.”

Both Rueter and Gregerson have performance punk backgrounds, Gregerson in Sta-Prest and Rueter with way-ahead-of-their-time new wave revivalists the Primadonnas, the best band from “Sussex, U.K.” ever to be based in Austin, Texas. Rueter’s moniker in the Primadonnas was Nikki Holiday, but he insists that when he was singing with crushed-velvet Martin Gore softness about being “stoned like a white balloon,” he was serious. “It’s harder for me to depersonalize lyrics, though our song ‘Girl’ is actually about a boy — a gay friend.”

“Even in the Primadonnas, my lyrics were sincere,” Rueter continues. “There was this contrast of my bandmate Otto being an asshole, a total jerk, and I was his foil. I still feel like I’m doing that, a little bit.”

“Um, I’m the hyper asshole?” Gregerson asks.

“No, but I’m the straight man, for sure.”

Lyrically, some subject matter is off-limits for Gregerson. “I really try not to write about love, and definitely not about wieners,” he says. “That’s why I like it that Puce Moment is starting to get into ’60s baroque pop, because it’s all about the path of humankind.”

True, but the time has come for Puce Moment and me to turn our attention to the path of model-kind. As Andre Leon Talley makes his guest judge outfit more and more voluminous, what Rueter labels the “high fashion cycle” of America’s Next Top Model grinds toward an inevitable a conclusion. During one commercial break, Rueter talks about Tyra’s performance as a Barbie-come-to-life in the 2000 Lindsay Lohan vehicle Life-Size. During the next, Gregerson says my imitation of Ke$ha’s rapping sounds like Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies.

So, who won ANTM? High fashion Ann, of course. Still, Tyra and company’s antics pale in comparison to the final star of our evening’s viewing: YouTube guru Katherine Chloé Cahoon, author of The Single Girl’s Guide to Dating European Men. Want to date a Bulgarian man like Christo? Cahoon will explain how — with an accent that’s pure East Coast private school lockjaw.

PUCE MOMENT

Thurs/16, 9 p.m.; $5

with Bronze, Sam Flax Keener and the Higher Color, and Lairs

The Eagle

398 12th St., SF

www.myspace.com/pucemomentsf

Saint Gravy

Andrew Lam

December 3, 2010

There is a certain faction of society — I think it’s pretty large, if you judge by NorCal standards — that regards Wavy Gravy as some sort of mystical deity from their parents’ generation. We’re not sure what he did, but you should probably address him as Mr. Gravy ’til he tells you not to.

This is a perception that is left unquibbled-with by director Michelle Esrick’s ten year labor of docu-love, Saint Misbehavin’: The Wavy Gravy Movie (opening Fri/3 in Bay Area theaters), and further untouched by my interview with Esrick and the man himself.

Saint Misbehavin’ opening scenes are an iteration of a tie-died holy man’s daily routine. We start out in Wavy’s corner bedroom, awash in sitting Buddha figurines, plastic Disney toys, beads, books, and other sacred objects. Wavy enters, and says a pray and a brief recitation of his heroes.

This spoken list serves as a blueprint for the bio-pic to come: Jesus, Mohammed, Ghandi, MLK Jr., Jerry Garcia are among those name-dropped. They serve as a background compass for the movie’s neatly plotted trajectory of Wavy’s life: Gravy is born in New York, goes from folk-beatnik Greenwich Village, to acid be-ins with Kesey in California, to the Further Bus.

And then: a stint with the Hopi tribe, and later, off to the East: to Nepal to heal blindness (with the aide of his international medical non-profit Seva). Of course, his creation of Camp Winnarainbow, a summer camp that has been teaching West Coast flower children how to play for three generations now. Today, Wavy is an elder statesman of hippies and their descendents as well as a frozen dessert. His sold-out birthday spectaculars attract crowds like a Phish concert.

A more recognizable Gravy. Photo Courtesy of Ripple Effect Films

But for our movie-viewing purposes those names at the start also essential because we don’t get to hear a whole lot about Wavy’s inner monolouge in the flick – he’s onstage here, clowning away as he does, well everywhere, not really dishing per se. Saint Misbehavin’ is no E! True Hollywood Story.

So when I got the chance to sit face to face with the man (I wore a Ringling Brothers clown hat, he had on a blue bowler and carried his familiar fish on a leash), I thought maybe we’d talk a little about how he got so Gravy. “It’s not too many kids that grow up to be a seminal member of so many artistic scenes,” I say. “Washington Park in the early ’60s, SF during the ’60s, Woodstock… but what was special about Hugh Romney (that was his square name from before he was Wavy — even before his first nom de nonsense Al Dente), how’d you get to where you are today?”

Gravy, just a little sleepy-looking in the warm office building where our interview takes place, tells me “one thing just followed from another, listing off his general path across the world.” Such is the role of a tribe elder talking to a youngster: there are things that we are not to know. What more do we need to know, really? He quotes Thelonius Monk, a friend who stand-up comedian Hugh Romney opened for. “Everyone is a genius by just being themselves.”

That’s his deal: the rainbow he travels on is available to us all, if we can only see it and trust to it’s pretty suspended bands of color. Luckily, we do have Saint Misbehavin’ to get literal with. Esrick has put together a wild ride and the information it contains teaches about Wavy’s contributions to the hippie and anti-Vietnam war movement. He was on the front lines back then – Esrick tells me that the way he deals with the chronic pain he sustains from police beatings from those days is one of the most impressive things she learned about Wavy in the 10 years she spent researching for the film with him.

I ask Wavy his reaction to seeing his epic life laid out on celluloid for thousands of strangers’ viewing pleasure. He refused to see early versions of the film when Esrick was still editing: what was it like to finally view the real thing? “You realize what a long strange trip it was – and continues to be,” he says after a moment’s pause. “It was the only time I’ve ever seen Wavy speechless,” Esrick smiles.

And so I leave our interview without really having gained any insider info on the life of Gravy. But I haven’t departed without a few gems, the primos being the story of meeting his wife (“she put peanuts in my hamburger and I fell in love,”) tips for graceful protests: “I always gave the best cop my rose. They were always very touched,” vegetarianism: “remember you are not what you eat, you are what you don’t shit,”and the truth about relations with the Middle East, spoken by a man who traveled through Iraq and Afghanistan on a rainbow bus in the 1970s: “They know the difference – there are ugly Americans that you see, and there are fellow travelers on the path of life. They recognized us as the latter.”

This from Michelle: “A full biography of Wavy’s would be 10 movies. I was interested in stringing a necklace of pearls together.” Maybe there are things we’re not supposed to know about those on high, or rather, that we don’t have to in order to know that they’re up there.

Epilogue: To gauge what maybe I am missing from the story of Wavy by virtue of not having been there in the glory days, I texted my mom today. “What did Wavy Gravy mean to you back in the day? Was he cool?” She wrote back “I don’t remember him!” Which of course, means she was really there.

Saint Misbehavin’: The Wavy Gravy Movie opens Fri/3 in Bay Area theaters.

Rites of nude math professors and Berkeley

Andrew Lam

December 1, 2010

“Frankly, I’m a bit baffled by all this,” Frenkel told us in an email follow-up to a phone interview conducted later this week. The UC Berkeley math professor was referring to the fact that the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, who had announced they would sponsor today (Wed/1)’s US premiere of his sensual math film, Rites of Love and Math, decided to pull their support earlier this week.

They had us at “sensual math film.”

“I don’t look at it as an erotic film, but there are some erotic elements,” says Frenkel. After meeting with some filmmakers in Paris, where he was on a research trip, Frenkel teamed up with Reine Graves to produce a 26-minute short that is shot on a Japanese kabuki set in a vivid palette of reds, whites, and blacks. He and co-star Kayshonne Insixieng May appear naked on a bed throughout most of the piece.

The film was inspired by a Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima, whose movie Yukoku (its English title: Rites of Love and Death, get it?) follows an army lieutenant faced with his friends’ planned coup ‘d état against their emperor. The lieutenant makes love to his wife for the last time before they ritually disembowl themselves. Years later, Mishima committed a similar suicide.

Frenkel’s version, though it borrows heavily from the aesthetics of Yukoku, has been called slightly more “Dan Brown.” In his film, a mathematician finds the formula of love, precious information he realizes might be harnessed by the powers of evil. Sensing impending doom, the brave calculator arrives at his lover’s house to etch the formula onto her stomach – preserving it. It is meant to be commentary on the dilemmas that scientists face when they discover life-changing findings – think Robert Oppenheimer of the Manhattan Project.

We asked Frenkel whether he expected that his nude scenes the movie would change his students’ view of math (and their professor) and he replied “to me, the ideas expressed in this film aren’t far from what I teach [students] in my class. Although, when I do it in the classroom, I do it in a much more conventional way.” Missionary? We kid. He expects the film to make the connection between math and the humanities, math and the world around us.

Frenkel also wrote the script in an effort to combat the strident negative stereotyping of mathematicians in the media as anti-social mad scientists. “A formula could be beautiful, like a piece of music, or a poem, or a painting,” he says.

Which seems like something the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute would be on board with. The organization’s stated mission is “to foster the genuine interest in mathematics held by people of all ages.” What better than a temperature-raising ode to the power of plus, minus, and divide? (For the record, the short’s unrated, though Frenkel somewhat optimistically estimates it would be deemed PG-13.)

Robert Bryant, the MSRI’s director, did have this to say in a letter published on the group’s website: “Early in the week of November 22, I began to get emails from distressed and upset colleagues who had viewed the trailer and found it disturbing, offensive, and/or insulting to women.” Though Bryant himself has seen both Frenkel’s version and the Mishima original, and found a screening of the two together “at first glance, to be a natural fit for MSRI,” he eventually caved to pressure from those for which Frenkel’s trailer “was revealing deep-seated gender issues in the mathematics community.” Another of MSRI’s stated goals are the advancement of women in all levels of the study of math.

Frenkel, who grew up in a small town near Moscow is surprised at the response to his film in his adopted community, home of such a storied free speech movement.

“It appears that the criticism came mostly from people who have not seen the film!” he says in his email response. “I think one shouldn’t jump to conclusions about any film after watching a two-minute trailer. I think some will view this as a form of prior censorship, because those who have criticized the film and put enormous pressure on MSRI to pull out have in effect tried to suppress the film before it was shown.”

He adds that his co-director Graves is “herself a woman director in a male dominated field,” and that the film has been screened on three different continents and featured positively in a number of publications including Science magazine. “The film is not a commentary of gender issues in science, and it should not be interpreted this way.”

At any rate, it all should make for a thrilling Q and A at the end of the free screening, which will be attended by Frenkel himself.

Marginalizing women? Or celebrating their role in truth and integers?

Rites of Love and Math and Rites of Love and Death (Yukoku)

Wed/1 7 p.m.;

Free with tickets available at East Bay Media Center (1939 Addison, Berk.)

Landmark Shattuck Cinemas

2230 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 464-5980

www.ritesofloveandmath.com

The biggest fish

Andrew Lam

November 30, 2010

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Shortly after Larry Ellison, the billionaire CEO of Oracle Corp. and owner of the BMW Oracle Racing Team, won the 33rd America’s Cup off the coast of Valencia, Spain, in February 2010, a reception was held in his honor in the rotunda at San Francisco City Hall.

The event drew members of Ellison’s sailing crew, business and political heavyweights such as former Secretary of State George Schultz, and other VIPs. Attendees posed for photographs with the tall, glittering silver trophy at the base of the grand staircase.

As part of the celebration, Ellison helped Mayor Gavin Newsom into an official BMW Oracle Racing Team jacket, and Newsom granted Ellison a key to the city, a symbolic honor usually reserved for heads of state and the San Francisco Giants after they won the World Series. Shortly after, the mayor and the guest of honor, whom Forbes magazine ranked as the sixth-richest person in the world, sat down for a face-to-face.

That meeting marked the beginning of the city’s bid to host the 34th America’s Cup in San Francisco in 2013. Since securing the Cup, Ellison has made no secret of his desire to stage the 159-year-old sailing match against the iconic backdrop of the San Francisco Bay, a natural amphitheater that could be ringed with spectators gathered ashore while media images of the stunningly expensive yachts are broadcast internationally.

Newsom and other elected officials have feverishly championed the idea, touting it as an opportunity for a boost to the region’s anemic economy. The city’s Budget & Legislative Analyst projects roughly $1.2 billion in economic activity associated with the event — the real prize, as far as business interests are concerned. It would also create the equivalent of 8,840 jobs, mostly in the form of overtime for city workers and short-term gigs for the private sector.

While the idea has won preliminary support from most members of the Board of Supervisors, serious questions are beginning to arise as the finer details of the agreement emerge and the date for a final decision draws near.

Ellison and the race organizers would be granted control of 35 acres of prime waterfront property in exchange for selecting San Francisco as the venue for the Cup and investing $150 million into Port of San Francisco infrastructure. But the event would result in a negative net impact to city coffers.

Hosting the event and meeting Ellison’s demands for property would cost the city about $128 million, according the Budget & Legislative Analyst, just as city leaders grapple with closing a projected $712 million deficit in the budget cycle spanning 2011 and 2012.

Part of the impact is an estimated $86 million in lost revenue associated with rent-free leases the city would enter into with Ellison’s LLC, the America’s Cup Event Authority (ACEA). In exchange for selecting San Francisco as a venue and investing in port infrastructure, ACEA would win long-term control of Piers 30-32, Pier 50, and Seawall Lot 330 — waterfront real estate owned by the Port of San Francisco, with development rights included. Seawall Lot 330, a 2.5-acre triangular parcel bordered by the Embarcadero at the base of Bryant Street, would either be leased long-term or transferred outright to ACEA.

The most vociferous opponent of the America’s Cup plan is Sup. Chris Daly, who has voiced scathing criticism of the notion that the city would subsidize a billionaire’s yacht race at a time of fiscal instability. “The question is whether or not the package that San Francisco’s putting together is good or bad for the city,” Daly told the Guardian, “and whether or not it’s the best deal the city can get.”

THE CREW

According to a Forbes calculation from September 2010, Ellison’s net worth is $27 billion, making him several times wealthier than the City and County of San Francisco, which has a total annual budget of about $6 billion. Ellison reportedly spent $100 million and a decade pursuing the Cup.

As soon as Ellison expressed interest in bringing the Cup to San Francisco, Newsom began charting a course. Park Merced architect and Newsom campaign contributor Craig Hartman of the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was tapped to reimagine the piers south of the Bay Bridge as the central hub for the event, and soon Hartman’s vision for a viewing area beneath a whimsical sail-like canopy was forwarded to the media.

The mayor also issued letters of invitation to form the America’s Cup Organizing Committee (ACOC), a group that would be tasked with soliciting corporate funding for the event. ACOC was convened as a nonprofit corporation, and it’s a powerhouse of wealthy, politically connected, and influential members.

Hollywood mogul Steve Bing, who’s donated millions to the Democratic Party and funded former President Bill Clinton’s 2009 trip to North Korea to rescue two imprisoned American journalists, is on the committee. So is Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, billionaire, and former mega-yacht owner who was once dubbed “the Captain of Capitalism” by 60 Minutes. George Schultz and his wife, Charlotte, are members. Thomas J. Coates, a powerful San Francisco real estate investor who dumped $1 million into a 2008 California ballot initiative to eliminate rent control, also has a seat. Coates resurfaced in the November 2010 election when he poured $200,000 into local anti-progressive ballot measures and the campaigns of economically conservative supervisorial candidates.

Billionaire Warren Hellman, San Francisco socialite Dede Wilsey, and former Newsom press secretary Peter Ragone are also on ACOC. There are representatives from Wells Fargo, AT&T, and United Airlines. One ACOC member directs a real estate firm that generated $2.5 billion in revenue in 2009. Another is Martin Koffel, CEO of URS Corp., an energy industry heavyweight that made $9.2 billion in revenue in 2009. There’s Richard Kramlich, a cofounder of a Menlo Park venture capital firm that controls $11 billion in “committed capital.” And then there’s Mike Latham, CEO of iShares, which traffics in pooled investment funds worth about $509 billion, according to a BusinessWeek article.

There’s also an honorary branch of ACOC composed of elected officials including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and others. Their role is to help the Cup interface with various governmental agencies to control air space, secure areas of the bay exclusively for the event, set up international broadcasts, and bring foreign crew members and fancy sailboats into the United States without a hassle from immigration authorities.

ACOC is expected to raise $270 million in corporate sponsorships for the America’s Cup. That money will be funneled into the budget for ACEA. It’s unclear whether the $150 million ACEA is required to invest in city piers will be derived from ACOC’s fund drive.

The city also anticipates that ACOC would raise $32 million to help defray municipal costs. “However,” the Budget & Legislative Analyst report cautions, “there is no guarantee that any of the anticipated $32 million in private contributions will be raised.”

A seven-member board, chaired by sports management executive Richard Worth, will direct the ACEA, according to Newsom’s economic advisors, but the other six seats have yet to be filled. ACEA’s newly minted CEO is Craig Thompson, a native Californian who previously worked with a governing body for the Olympics and has helped coordinate major sporting events internationally. In an interview with sports blog Valencia Sailing, Thompson provided some insight on why major corporations might be inspired to donate to the cause. Basically, the Cup is the holy grail of networking events.

“It’s a very difficult economic situation we are going through, and it’s not the best time to be looking for sponsors for a major event,” Thompson acknowledged. “On the other hand, the America’s Cup is one of the very few activities … that offer access to really top-level individuals in terms of education or economic situation. The America’s Cup is a unique platform for a lot of companies that want access to those individuals that are very difficult to reach under normal circumstances. I can tell you for example that Oracle is very pleased with the marketing opportunity the America’s Cup has presented to them. They invite their best customers and are very successful in turning the America’s Cup into a platform for generating business. The same thing can be true for a lot of different companies that need access to wealthy individuals.”

But should San Francisco taxpayers really be subsidizing a networking event for the some of the business world’s richest and most powerful players?

TRANSFORMING THE WATERFRONT

Over the past four months, Newsom’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development (OEWD) has been negotiating with race organizers to hash out a Host City Agreement outlining the terms of bringing the America’s Cup to San Francisco.

The proposal will go before the Board of Supervisor’s Budget & Finance Committee on Dec. 8, and to the full board Dec. 14. A final decision on whether San Francisco will host the race is expected by Dec. 31. ACEA and ACOC will each sign onto the agreement with the City and County of San Francisco.

From the beginning, the event was envisioned as “the twin transformation,” according to OEWD — the America’s Cup would be transformed by attracting greater crowds and heightened commercial interest while San Francisco’s crumbling piers would be revitalized through ACEA’s $150 million investment in port infrastructure.

The plan paints downtown San Francisco as the “America’s Cup Village” during the sailing events, and a study produced by Beacon Economics estimates that the financial boost would come primarily from hordes of visitors flocking to the event — more than 500,000 are expected to attend. The city expects a minimum of 45 race days, including one pre regatta in 2011 and one in 2012 (or two in 2012 if the one in 2011 doesn’t happen), a challenger series in 2013, and a final match in 2013.

The transformation of the city’s waterfront would be dramatic. In addition to the rent-free leases for Piers 30-32, 50, and Seawall Lot 330, ACEA would be granted exclusive use of much of the central waterfront, water, and piers around Mission Bay, and water and land near Islais Creek during the course of the event. Under the Host City Agreement, race organizers would have use of water space spanning Piers 14 to 22 ½; Piers 28, 38, 40, 48, and 54, a portion of Seawall Lot 337, and Pier 80, where a temporary heliport would be sited.

Seawall Lot 330, a 2.5-acre parcel valued by the Port at $33 million, lies at the base of Bryant Street along the Embarcadero and has a nice unimpeded view of the bay. Piers 30-32 span 12.5 acres, and Pier 50 is 20 acres.

The Budget & Legislative Analyst’s study predicts that the ACEA could opt to build a 250-unit condo high-rise on Seawall Lot 330, deemed the most lucrative use. Under the Host City Agreement, the city would be obligated to remove Tidelands Trust provisions from Seawall Lot 330, which guarantee under state law that waterfront property is used for maritime functions or public benefit. Tweaking the law for a single deal would require approval from the State Lands Commission, but Newsom, in his new capacity as lieutenant governor, would cast one of the three votes on that body.

The combination of construction, demolition, lost rent revenue, police and transit, environmental analysis, and other event costs would hit the city with a bill totaling around $64 million, according to the Budget & Legislative Analyst study. Since city government would recoup around $22 million in revenue from hosting the Cup, the net impact would be around $42 million. That doesn’t include the potential $32 million assistance from ACOC.

At the same time, the city would stand to lose another $86.2 million by granting long-term development rights to 35 acres of Port property for 66 to 75 years without charging rent, bringing the total cost to $128 million. OEWD representatives played down that loss in potential revenue, saying past attempts to redevelop piers hadn’t been successful because none could handle the upfront investment to revitalize the crumbling piers.

The Host City Agreement has raised skepticism among Port staff and the Budget Analyst that tempered initial enthusiasm for the event. “The terms of the Host City Agreement will require significant city capital investment and will result in substantial lost revenue to the Port,” a Port study determined. Faith in that plan seems to be eroding and it may be scrapped for an alternative plan that’s cheaper for the city.

The Northern Waterfront alternative substitutes Piers 19-29 as the primary location for the event and eliminates the Mission Bay piers from the equation. Under this scenario, ACEA would invest an estimated $55 million, instead of $150 million. In exchange, it would receive long-term development rights to Piers 30-32 and Seawall 330 on “commercially reasonable terms,” according to a Port staff report.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu requested that the Port explore that second option more fully, and the Port report notes that it would reduce the strain on Port revenue. The Northern Waterfront plan would cost the Port a total of $15.8 million, instead of $43 million, the report notes. Port staff recommended in its report that both the original agreement and the alternative be forwarded to the full board for consideration.

PHANTOM BIDS?

Under the competition’s official protocol, Ellison, as defender of the Cup, has unilateral power to decide where the next regatta will be held. Race organizers have said it’s a toss-up between San Francisco and an unnamed port in Italy — though it’s anyone’s guess how seriously a European site is being considered by a team headquartered at the Golden Gate Yacht Club, a stone’s throw from the Golden Gate Bridge.

According to a San Francisco Chronicle article published in early September, Newsom issued a memo stating that San Francisco was competing against Spain and Italy to become the chosen venue. Valencia was said to be offering a “generous financial bid,” and a group in Rome was rumored to have offered some $645 million to bring the Cup to Italian shores, the memo noted. It was a call for the city to present Ellison with the most attractive deal possible to compel him to pick San Francisco.

Speaking at an Oct. 4 Land Use Committee hearing, OEWD director Jennifer Matz told supervisors: “San Francisco was designated the only city under consideration back in July. Now we are competing against the prime minister of Italy and the king of Spain.”

However, the veracity of those claims came into question in mid-November. Daly, incensed that the Mayor’s Office never communicated with him about the Cup despite wanting to hold it in his sixth supervisorial district, launched his own personal investigation. He fired off an e-mail to Team Alinghi, a prior America’s Cup winner, and began communicating with other European contacts until he got in touch with someone in Valencia’s municipal government.

“I got a call back from a representative who basically said I should know something,” Daly recounted. Valencia, his source said, never submitted a bid to host the Cup. At a Nov. 13 press conference, Valencia’s mayor Rita Barbera confirmed this claim, according to a Spanish press report, expressing disappointment that the city had been eliminated from consideration as a host venue. “There was no formal bidding process,” she charged. She also denied reports that any money had been offered.

Meanwhile, the Budget Analyst was unable to find any concrete evidence that other host city bids had been submitted. “We have nothing to confirm that other offers have been made,” Fred Brousseau of the Budget Analyst’s office told the Guardian.

In response to Guardian queries about whether the Mayor’s Office had evidence that Italy had indeed submitted a bid, Project Manager Kyri McClellan of the OEWD forwarded a one-page resolution from the Italian prime minister assuring race organizers that there would be tax breaks, accelerated approvals, and other perks guaranteed if the Cup came to Italy. However, an Italian journalist who looked over the resolution told the Guardian that the document didn’t appear to be a formal bid, merely a response to a query from race organizers.

Daly has his doubts that either Valencia or the Italian port were ever seriously considered. “I think they were phantom bids,” he said, “created by either Larry Ellison or the Newsom administration … to place pressure on the Board of Supervisors.”

A representative from OEWD told the Guardian that officials have no reason to doubt that the European bids, and accompanying offers of money, were real. However, the city wasn’t privy to race organizer’s discussions about possible European venues. A final decision is expected before the end of the year.

Daly hasn’t held back in voicing opposition to the America’s Cup and blasted it at an Oct. 5 Board meeting. “This tacking around Sup. Daly will not get you in calmer waters,” Daly said. “I told myself I was not going to make a yachting reference. But I will bring a white squall onto this race and onto this Cup, and I will do everything in my power starting on Jan. 8 to make sure these boats never see that water.”

WIND IN WHOSE SAILS?

The America’s Cup would undoubtedly bring economic benefit to the area and create work at a time when jobs are scarce. Police officers would get overtime. Restaurant servers would be scrambling to keep up with demand. Construction workers seeking temporary employment would get gigs. Hotels would rake it in. Pier 39 would be booming. However, the Budget Analyst report cautioned: “It is unlikely that any labor benefits would remain in the years after the America’s Cup event is completed.”

Certain small businesses would catch a windfall. John Caine, owner the Hi Dive bar at Pier 28, didn’t hesitate when asked about his opinion on the city hosting the Cup. “Please come fix our piers. It’s a shout-out to Larry Ellison,” he said. Caine said he supports the America’s Cup bid 100 percent, and is excited about the boost it could give his business. The Hi Dive would not be required to relocate under the proposal, he added.

At the same time, other small business would be negatively affected, particularly those among the 87 Port tenants who would be forced to relocate to make way for the America’s Cup. The Budget Analyst’s report also notes that retail businesses in the area whose services had no appeal to race-goers might suffer from reduced access to their stores, since crowding and street closures would shut out their customers.

The sailing community has rallied in support of the Cup, and Newsom has received hundreds of e-mails from yachting enthusiasts from as far away as Hawaii and Florida promising to travel to San Francisco with all their sailing friends to watch the world-famous vessels compete.

Ariane Paul, commodore of a classic wooden boat club called the Master Mariners Benevolent Association, told the Guardian that she was excited about the opportunity for the America’s Cup to showcase sailing on the bay. “In the long term, it’s a win-win,” Paul said. “It would be great to have that boost.” As for the financial terms of the deal, she remained confident, saying, “I don’t think that the city is going to let Larry Ellison walk all over them.”

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi is often politically aligned with Daly, but not when it comes to the issue of the America’s Cup. As a kid growing up on the island of Jamestown, a tiny blue-collar community located off the coast of Rhode Island, Mirkarimi learned to sail and occasionally spent summers working as a deckhand. Every few years, the America’s Cup would come to nearby Newport, transforming the area into a bustling hub and bringing the locals into contact with famous sailors. It left an everlasting impression. When the BMW Oracle Racing Team secured the 33rd Cup off the coast of Valencia, Mirkarimi did a double-take when he saw a photograph of the winning team — his childhood friend from Rhode Island was on the crew.

Mirkarimi told the Guardian he supports bringing the Cup to San Francisco because of the economic boost the area will receive — if the Cup continues to return to San Francisco as it did for 53 years in Newport, he said, the city could look forward to a free gift in improved revenue associated with the event, and that could help quiet the tired annual debates over painful budget cuts.

At the same time, he acknowledged that the Budget Analyst report had prompted what he called healthy skepticism. “I think the onus is on the city and Cup organizers to make sure the benefits far, far outweigh the investment,” Mirkarimi said. “This effort is not just about making one of the wealthiest men in the United States that much more wealthy … That can’t be the case,” he said. “It has to be about what will the Cup do in order to be a win-win for the people of San Francisco.” Mirkarimi said he expected scrutiny of the details of the agreement at the Dec. 8 Budget and Finance Committee hearing: “Naturally, in this time of economic downturn … people want to know, what’s the outlay of cost, and what are we going to get in return?”

Good for the Jews vs. the San Franciscan Nazi

Andrew Lam

November 24, 2010

Rob Tannenbaum is a man with opinions on holidays. Thanksgiving, transcendent: “if it were up to me, I would be drinking turkey gravy.” Christmas, yawn: “it’s the most boring time of year. There’s not too much to do past stay at home and watch It’s a Wonderful Life on TV.

And Hanukkah, time to go see his comedy-music duo Good for the Jews (Cafe Du Nord, Dec. 1): “There’s a long and storied tradition of Jews in San Francisco. I hope that we will see evidence of that.” Tickets would make a great present for the first of those eight crazy nights…

Tannenbaum and partner David Fagin (who respectively moonlight as music editor of Blender and frontman for nice guy-pop band The Rosenbergs) sing well placed mockeries of Jewaphrenalia, my favorite of which being “Rueben the Hook-Nosed Reindeer,” though I’m also partial to the lounge stylings of “Going Down to Boca.” Their work comes as a follow up to Tannenbaum’s previous comedy project: What I Like About Jew, an act performed at New York’s The Knitting Factory that sold out shows six years running.

Tannenbaum is aware of what his audience wants, mainly because it’s what he himself wants out of Judaic entertainment. “When I was kid and they played Jewish music in our synagogue, it was always so horrible. It was earnest and boring, like a cross between the Indigo girls and the Old Testament.” In Good for the Jews’ creation, he was looking to capitalize on the legacy of mischief and humor inherent in Jewish consciousness, the same legacy from whence he says come Sarah Silverman and Jon Stewart’s riffs. “I wanted to start a show that was traditionally Jewish but didn’t make being Jewish seem like the most boring thing in the world,” he says.

His tongue-in-cheek celebration of his faith – well hold up, because maybe “faith” is a bad word for how Tannebaum experiences being a Jew. He told me in our recent phone interview that he only darkens temple’s door a few times a year on the high holidays, but that he likes the idea of people getting into a room to celebrate shared heritage. “The same thing is true at our show, but at our show you can drink, which I don’t think you can do at temple,” he quips. His Jewishness, he says, lies in “the things I eat, the things I laugh at, the books I read, the TV shows I watch – they’re not Jewish themed, but my gestalt is Jewish. As is my circumsized penis.”

Okay, so his tongue-in-cheek celebration of his gestalt-penis, then, delights the crowds that go to see it, most of whom have been urban, many secular Jews like himself – but diverse in ways he didn’t expect they would be when the duo launched a tour that included dates in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico earlier this year. He says at a few gigs Fagin and himself outnumbered the amount of Jews in the audience. “But sometimes those shows are more rewarding,” he says.

But the duo’s frank irreverence has been known to attract negative attention as well. Which brings us to our next topic: San Franciscan Nazis.

The last time the Good for the Jews duo played SF, they were greeted by a chap goose-stepping to some inner notion of bigot matyrdom: an Aryan Pride guy who’d come to protest their show. Tannenbaum recalls the situation in his standard one liner manner (“He felt that we were representative of the Jewish-owned media. If we’re representing Zionist power, then why am I staying at a Holiday Inn?”)

But somewhere in his memory of the event lurks the indignation it triggered: the experience of being a musician about to play a show at a respectable venue who runs into the very prejudice that his ironic music implicitly calls passé. Tannenbaum tells me he actually went outside to have a conversation with the fellow, but had to retreat when he felt himself approaching the thought of violence. “When you hear someone insulting your ancestors it tends to rile up the blood a little bit.”

The incident, in a strange way, speaks to why he’s looking forward to next week’s comedy show. “This sounds like malarky, but I really do love San Francisco. It’s the only city where I think, yeah I could live here.” Nazis and all. “It’s the end result of so much tolerance: if you’re going to tolerate people you have to tolerate Nazis, too.”

Good for the Jews

Wed/1 8 p.m., $12-15

Cafe Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 292-1233

www.cafedunord.com

Green vs. “green”

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

November 24, 2010

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Years ago, Greg Gaar was a scavenger, wandering the neighborhoods around Twin Peaks picking up bottles and other kinds of recyclable trash. He began working at the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC) Recycling Center in 1982.

During his tenure, a project designed primarily to divert waste from the landfill expanded to include a unique San Francisco native plant nursery. Located on a converted parking lot on Frederick Street near Lincoln Boulevard, the recycling center is a drop-off for recyclable materials, including used veggie oil, and a source for soil and 65 species of potted plants.

Gaar started small. “I took some seeds,” he explained, “and scattered them into a flat. They came up like fur on a dog’s back.” Over the years, he researched the natural history of the area, saved seeds, and cultivated the grounds surrounding the recycling center. HANC also converted a traffic triangle across the street into a thriving garden.

The Recreation and Parks Department, directed by Phil Ginsburg — former chief of staff to Mayor Gavin Newsom — is seriously considering a plan to evict HANC recycling center and replace it with a garden resource center.

While trading one garden center for another might not seem like a big deal, it appears to be an attack on poor people who make their living recycling cans and bottles, a group that organized to oppose Proposition L, the sit-lie ordinance that Newsom supported in this election.

Or as HANC Executive Director Ed Dunn put it: “He’s going to take it from his enemies and give it to his friends.”

The HANC recycling center has leased Rec and Park property since its inception in 1974, and it’s been at its current location for 30 years. HANC does not receive any city funding for the center, and it pays a small amount in rent for use of the parking lot. It processes roughly 160 tons of recycling per month.

Newsom has worked hard to cultivate his reputation as a green mayor and promote green-job creation, but evicting the recycling center would kill 10 green jobs. Many of the employees were formerly homeless and previously earned petty cash gathering cans to exchange at the center’s buyback station. They were hired without any help from San Francisco taxpayers and now they’re earning living wages while diverting waste from the landfill.

But some neighborhood residents are annoyed by the presence of people who arrive at the center with shopping carts filled to the brim with bottles and cans that they can exchange for cash. Buyback hours are held from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., so during those times, people who haul around bundles of recyclables line up to receive modest rewards for their hours of effort.

HANC, a progressive organization, publicly and vehemently opposed Prop. L, the voter-approved ordinance that bans sitting and lying down on city sidewalks. Newsom enthusiastically endorsed Prop. L.

Dunn believes the recycling center is being targeted due to HANC’s position on that issue. “It’s all about political payback,” says Dunn. Incidentally, Haight voters rejected sit-lie and HANC sees the pending recycling-center eviction as part of the same agenda. “It’s all part of the gentrification that’s enveloping San Francisco,” said Jim Rhoads, who chairs the HANC Recycling Committee.

Once word of the plans got out, letters started pouring into to Newsom’s and Ginsburg’s offices from the Sierra Club, San Francisco Tomorrow, the Senior Action Network, and other organizations. Additionally, the center’s supporters mailed at least 400 postcards opposing the eviction.

Residents have voiced complaints about the shopping-cart recyclers, some of whom are homeless. The Inner Sunset Park Neighbors (ISPN), which is petitioning Rec and Park to evict the recycling center, has a message posted on its website linking the shopping-cart pushers with “quality-of-life issues such as aggressive panhandling, drug use/dealing, and public safety.” ISPN also charges that the recyclers swipe cans and bottles from rolling curbside bins. The neighborhood group had not responded to requests for an interview by press time.

Rhoads believes that if the recycling buyback program is removed, it would only encourage panhandling — after all, people already lacking basic resources would lose a critical source of income. “People will be very desperate,” he said. According to the results of a HANC survey, one in six recyclers regularly turning up at the center to exchange bottles for cash sleeps outside.

The Recreation and Park Commission will discuss the possible HANC eviction at its Dec. 2 meeting. And since the recycling center is on a month-to-month lease, the 36-year-old green resource could soon suffer eviction. There’s likely to be significant resistance, since the HANC Recycling Center has forged partnerships with urban-agriculture projects throughout the city.

It was a fiscal sponsor of the Garden for the Environment and donated several tons of cardboard for mulching at Hayes Valley Farm. The HANC nursery project has distributed plants to urban agriculture projects throughout the city, including school garden plots, urban habitat corridors designed to protect rare species, and the Mission Greenbelt Project, a network of sidewalk gardens in the Mission.

Details on the proposed garden resource center that would be installed in lieu of the HANC Recycling Center are sketchy. An artist’s rendering of the plan, drawn up by the city’s Department of Public Works, envisions an outdoor classroom amphitheatre, raised garden beds, a semi dwarf orchard, and a composting area. However, Guardian inquiries to Rec and Park requesting more specific details about funding and operation went unanswered by press time.

Alerts

Andrew Lam

November 23, 2010

alert@sfbg.com

THURSDAY, NOV. 25

Indigenous People’s Thanksgiving

Join this annual sunrise celebration on Alcatraz Island to honor Mother Earth, the spirit of popular resistance to exploitation, and generations past and future. Sponsored by the International Indian Treaty Council and American Indian Contemporary Arts and featuring guest speakers, drummers, dancers, and MC Lakota Harden.

4:45-6 a.m., $14 (for adult ferry ticket)

Pier 33, SF

(415) 981-7625

FRIDAY, NOV. 26

Malling of the Sacred

Join this Black Friday protest at Emeryville’s Bay Street Mall. The mall was built on top of an ancient Ohlone burial site, and even after years of protest actions by the local Native American community, the construction of the mall was completed after the human remains were unearthed.

11a.m.–3p.m., free

Shellmound and Ohlone, Emeryville

(510 )575-8408

Fur-free Friday

Thousands of animals are slaughtered for their fur each year. Join in a peaceful protest against the fur industry on one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

Noon–2 p.m., free

Union Square, SF

(415) 448-0058

SATURDAY, NOV. 27

South of the Border

Director Oliver Stone journeys south to interview Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to investigate how the United States media has depicted him. He also speaks with several other South American presidents and creates an eye-opening documentary in the process.

1:30–4 p.m., free

Fremont Library

2400 Stevenson, Fremont

(510) 745-1400

TUESDAY, NOV. 30

Talking Trotsky

Join the Freedom Socialist Party for a screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1927 film The History of the Russian Revolution. The film is part of the Leon Trotsky discussion circle and encapsulates the world’s first socialist uprising.

7 p.m., $2–$5 sliding scale

New Valencia Hall

625 Larkin, Room 202, SF

(415) 864-1278

Death of Liberalism

Come hear journalist and author Chris Hedges discuss his latest book, The Death of the Liberal Class, which chronicles the gradual corruption and death of liberalism in the U.S., which was for decades a defense against the worst excesses of power.

6:30 p.m., $12

First Congregation Church

2345 Channing, Berk.

(510)967-4495

Green Film Festival

Enjoy a lively selection of short films including Matt Briggs; The Krill is Gone, which raises awareness of the growing threat to the world’s oceans, and Dive, in which filmmaker Jeremy Seifert and friends Dumpster dive in the back alleys and gated garbage receptacles of Los Angeles supermarkets. 6–9p.m., $10–$20 sliding scale

Ninth Street Independent Film Center

145 Ninth St., SF

www.sfgreenfilmfest2011launch.eventbrite.com

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 437-3658; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

What I remember of my interview with Yard Dogs Road Show

Andrew Lam

November 22, 2010

What I remember of my interview with Yard Dogs Road Show

“I brought my costume, it’s in this bag. Well except for the pants.” The song and dance man of the Bay’s vaudevillian acid bordello, Broadway Freddie (aka Miguel Strong, or Michael if you’re trying to get technical about it) is already seated at a corner table at the Right Spot Cafe when I arrive to chat about Yard Dog Road Show‘s first headlining show in San Francisco in years (The Independent, Sat/20).

Broadway-Miguel is wearing a striped tie, suit jacket, and dapper fedora, which by Yard Dogs Road Show standards seems vaguely pedestrian. But then he stands up. Electric blue, leopard print, so-skinny-they’re-emaciated jeans. “Miley Cyrus,” he confides, tossing his shoulder length blonde locks.

It is fitting that Broadway be a theater of the absurd. He is one of the original three progenitors (in addition to founder-manager-hype man Eddy Joe Cotton, who also wrote the heart-stoppingly wanderlustful memoir Hobo, and filmmaker Fletcher Fledujon) of the theatrically absurd touring troupe with which he makes his livelihood. He is artfully decorative in speech — as befits a man who has spent the last eight years of his life in pursuit of a vision received en route to one of Ken Kesey’s acid tests.

I can’t say he gives me too many tangibles to work with during the course of our conversation, which is fine, because he has given me some lovely images to share in the article. The Yard Dogs Road Show milieu he finds “beyond English or current events, a landscape of dreams.” Also, it is “a sequined and glittered ceremony, a joyous one.” Fledujon, Cotton, and Strong met “organically destined to be in the same constellation of stars.” Broadway himself is “an electron,” a good show is when “the wind goes through you – you’re not doing it, it’s doing you.”

“Would you like a drink?” I ask him. “Oh, well I’m supposed to be” were finger quotes involved here? “On the wagon. But yes, I’ll have one. What are you drinking – a beer? Yes, I’ll have one of those.”

Things that we do manage to establish: the members of Yard Dogs Road Show – all “fifteen or sixteen” of them, travel together in a vintage Greyhound bus, in which none of them have their own beds save Kid Casbah, this because he is “the golden leopard, untouchable.” They are good house guests. One of their pinnacle moments as a troupe was a performance in an old opera house in Braga, Portugal — a performance that took place under an omnibus of a chandelier on a tour that took them to quite a few grand opera houses, the one in Braga being the grandest.

The gang’s all here, in the Sonoma Hills. Photo by Hilary Hulteen

Its upcoming shows – the first time the group has had its own night in the Bay in two years — is for friends and family, in the looser sense of those words. New material will be debuted, this new material involving a carousel of prancing, bejeweled pony girls that Broadway and I conclude will resemble “peeking inside a Faberge egg,” a rocket man, and the Queen of Pineapple Island. We would be remiss if we did not mention that the talents of Scotty the Blue Bunny, aerialist Abigail Munn, DJ Shawna, and belly dance impresario Zoey Jakes, will be making their appearances over the two-night run.

At this point, beers have been had. We are touching on the art of the interview. Broadway says the back and forth is a skill he cherishes, and that his last two talks with a journalist were conducted from his bathtub and shower, respectively. “Do you know what would make this a truly great interview?” Broadway leans across our table, holding my gaze. “If we got absolutely wasted! The bartender can finish asking us the questions.”

I mention I enjoy Bulleit bourbon and it is liberally applied to our conversation. At this point we must rely on my trusty notebook for the gems that were imparted.

(This in the hand of the friendly bartender, who had been reading an Us Weekly upon our interruption)

Q: How do you feel about J. Simpson’s engagement?

B- Holy f…

C- Nick f??? friend Courtney or danced w/ her at club.

Q: What celebs met recently

B- Garry Busey on tour bus in Malibu. Friendly, liked bus. Wrote # on cigarette pack.

C- Paul Mooney – belligerent interview. Stressed out. Kathy Griffin was a total bitch.

B- Oscar Grant? Don’t want to go there. What art school CC of A & Crafts

(Drawing of a cell phone with a line drawn over it)

C- 3 beers: surprisingly drunk

S- what kind of whiskey would you like?

(In my handwriting)

happy excess

(sketch by Broadway of suspended circles and stars)

I think Broadway then banged out a few impromptu tunes on The Right Spot’s piano, we drank more whiskey, shenanigans, and we called it a night.

More concrete information is to be had from the Yard Dogs Road Show website itself. For instance, after a bit of digging one can turn up a rider that states that the group requires eight vegetarian and seven omnivorous meals from show venues that do catering, tortilla chips and spicy salsa “of the health food store variety” if not. Three bottles of red wine and 24 bottles of “Stella beer or comparable” either way. To me, this says a conscious approach to health in solid foods, followed by a healthy disregard for matters of the liver.

Here’s how the “great” (it really was) interview ended: Broadway and I mutually supporting each other outside the cafe, a freak November monsoon raging around us. “So. Did we cover everything?” he wonders. “I think we did a good job,” I slur at him before giving my final regards to Broadway and tripping away in the rain. I still believe it to be the case.

(Sorry about leaving you the tab, Miguel!)

Yard Dogs Road Show

With El Radio Fantastique, Zoe Jakes, DJ Shawna, and more

Fri/26 and Sat/27 9 p.m., $20

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

Are you ready for GWAR??

Sue Vaughan

November 19, 2010

Apparently, even the massive, all-powerful aliens and scumdogs of the universe known as GWAR have trouble with reception on their iPhones.

While conducting a phone interview before a show in Hollywood, band leader Oderus Urungus’ connection cut out twice, leaving him grumbling, “Maybe I’m clutching my iPhone too tightly!”

Perhaps it was his giant claws proving to be too much for our puny human technology to handle — either way, once the connection was re-established, the intergalactic beast that has led GWAR for more than a quarter century had no shortage of hilarious and outrageous things to say.

Having just finished taping a segment for the Fuel TV show Daily Habit, Oderus was being informed that he had revealed a bit more of himself to the television audience than he had thought. “I just did the show apparently with my balls hanging out the entire time and nobody told me! That’s not like a big thing for Oderus, my balls usually are hanging out — but to try to get on national TV, I’m willing to do the ball tuck, but apparently the ball tuck didn’t work, it was horrible, it looked like a duck-billed platypus coming out of a burrow or something!”

Although someone out there in TV land was undoubtedly offended by this show of alien masculinity, they can just add themselves to the scores of non-believers and critics who have unsuccessfully assailed the musical and cultural force that is GWAR over the past couple of decades. Currently celebrating their 25th anniversary, the heavy metal space gang that brought our planet recorded gems such as Scumdogs of the Universe and This Toilet Earth are back in all their unholy glory with a new album, The Bloody Pit of Horror (Metal Blade).

Propelled by the first sleazy single, “Zombies, March!,” Oderus Urungus and his cohorts have returned in fine beastly form, ready to again spread their love to fans around the globe — which of course means spraying audiences with all manner of fake blood, bodily fluids, and god knows what else.

At a time when many bands their age would be mellowing out and producing so-called “mature” material, GWAR has shown that they are only getting dirtier and heavier with time, as any fan should expect from a group with their background and history.

“With any of the records we’ve made, we didn’t really go into it with a preconceived notion of what it was going to sound like. We just went at it and tried to make the record that was appropriate to what we felt like at the time, and I guess we were feeling particularly ferocious [with this one],” says Oderus. “We just wanted to emphasize how fucking awesome we are, and recall a day not so long ago when bands actually put out an album about once a year — nowadays that just doesn’t happen, bands take forever in between albums, and half the time they’re full of re-mixes, or tracks from other albums that got cut.

We just wanted to have a whole bunch of great music for our fans, and just celebrate the idea of GWAR. One of the things about this album that’s a little different that gives it that ferocious sound is that we tuned down I believe to F#, which is basically the loosest that guitar strings can be and still stay on the neck — it sounds like the guitars are vomiting — in a good way! I think it makes for a very powerful record.”

When asked if his band of rubber aliens, mutants, deviants and demons ever looks back on their history and thinks about the fact that they’ve been doing what they do successfully for so long, the answer is a firm “No.”

“If we took the time to go back and actually examine what we were doing, we’d be so shocked and appalled that we’d stop doing it. It’s better to just keep mindlessly plugging onward,” laughs Oderus. “[With that being said] we are very well aware of just how awesome it is what we’ve managed to do, and we intend to keep doing it as long as possible — or until we escape the planet Earth, whichever comes first.”

With the release of The Bloody Pit of Horror, GWAR have been hitting the road in support, crossing the United States and making an appearance on national late night television, with a performance last month on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

“We did Springer and Joan Rivers like 20 years ago, and it took them 20 years to let us back on television!”

Oderus himself has been making several more recent appearances on TV, however — in the last year or so he’s been a regular guest on, of all places, a Fox News program, Red Eye. Although it does sound like an awfully strange pairing, the intergalactic barbarian thinks that Fox sees in him a potential for higher ratings, thus justifying having a giant space beast running around their studios.

“It is an odd match that they would put GWAR in a position where I can not only comment on society but do it over and over again, but obviously they’re having a little fun with it. It’s pretty funny to be walking around the Fox studios in New York City and run into Glenn Beck…yeah, Oderus and him are hanging out, backstage buddies!”

Having toured all over the world in the past 25-plus years, Oderus and his bandmates have seen all manner of crazy and twisted things, but the singer says that no place can hold a candle to what’s he’s seen and experienced right here in San Francisco.

“Pretty much every time we’ve been to San Francisco, it’s been insane, since the very first GWAR tour where we showed up in an old school bus, and ended up parked in the Tenderloin for a week straight, that neighborhood was really bad. And then our show at the Warfield where the bums were dropping dead right outside of the venue; the line was going around the block, they were three dead homeless people laying on the sidewalk, and out fans were just very politely stepping over their corpses, that was pretty weird!”

He also mentions a doorman selling crack by the side of the stage within just a few feet of a nearby cop — one that at first the band didn’t even believe was a real officer. “I thought he was a guy that dressed up in a joke cop outfit, because his uniform was so fucked up and dirty, and he was driving this cop car that was all beat to shit, the fenders were even hanging off it!”

With that said, Oderus is eagerly looking forward to playing here in the city on Sunday, and has some words of praise for his local fans.

“San Franciscans — you still have a complete, stone cold lock on the sickest, weirdest, most fucked up town in the United States. New Orleans has nothing on you people!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qusEPwdM7B8&feature=related

GWAR

With the Casualties, Infernaeon, and Mobile Death Camp
Sun/21, 7:30 p.m., $22-$25
Regency Ballroom
1290 Sutter St., SF
(800) 745-3000
www.theregencyballroom.com

45 sessions

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

November 19, 2010

If you type “Myron and E” into the search engine on YouTube.com, you’ll likely find a simple video clip of a record player with one of the duo’s 7-inch singles on the turntable. Play the video clip, and the turntable’s needle will descend on the vinyl. And then some of the most wonderfully sweet grooves will pipe through your speakers.

Ba-ba-ba’s fill the air, and the backbeat pops along like a Holland-Dozier-Holland gem, perhaps the Supremes’ “Back in My Arms Again.” The voice of Myron is ragged yet soulful and insistent. “This old heart of mine can’t take much more of what it’s been given,” he sings, as E contributes “shoo-bee-doo-wah” ad libs. “And you showed no shame breaking my heart.” The entire performance lasts just under three minutes, just like they used to make ’em.

The song, “It’s A Shame,” was released on Helsinki, Finland, imprint Timmion Records in January. It’s one of four singles Myron & E has recorded with The Soul Investigators, a Finnish soul band whose members run Timmion. (L.A.-based major-indie powerhouse Stones Throw Records has licensed two of the singles, “Cold Game” and “It’s A Shame,” for U.S. distribution.) All of the singles sound like a lark, but that’s part of their charm.

“It just came together,” says Myron Glasper, snapping his fingers to illustrate, during an interview at Eric Cooke’s apartment in the Lower Haight. Cooke, better known as DJ and producer E Da Boss, cohosts a club night at Oakland spot the Layover on Saturdays called “The 45 Session.” His bedroom is filled with boxes of 7-inch records, including mint copies of Myron & E’s latest jam with the Soul Investigators, “The Pot Club.” As an ode to “Oaksterdam” and California’s burgeoning cannabis industry, complete with midnight-hour “rapp” vocals from Myron, it’s the duo’s most contemporary-sounding effort to date. A full-length album, Going in Circles, is due for imminent release. E Da Boss thinks it’ll drop by December, but early 2011 appears more likely.

The Myron & E thing happened by accident. A few years ago, E Da Boss was on a European tour with local producer Nick Andre; as E Da Boss and Nick Andre, the duo has released projects such as 2010’s Robot Practice EP. Traveling through Helsinki, they met the Soul Investigators and sparked an impromptu jam session. E Da Boss grabbed a microphone and began singing. “They kept telling me, ‘You sound good, you must sing.’ I didn’t really pay attention to it,” he remembers. Later in 2008, E Da Boss was assembling a solo production showcase for Om Records, and reached out to The Soul Investigators for sounds he could chop up into hip-hop beats. (He says Om Records dismantled its hip-hop division before the album could drop. All that came from it was a 2007 single, “Go Left.”)

When E Da Boss contacted The Soul Investigators, the group made a counter-offer: if they sent him some music, would he sing on it? E Da Boss thought of Myron; the two have been friends since touring around the world as part of Blackalicious’ backing band. “When they sent the beat over, I called Myron and said, ‘These guys want me to sing on some stuff. Come over here and help me write a song.'” Within an hour, they wrote an endearingly classic tune called “Cold Game.”

Perhaps Myron and E Da Boss’ years of experience in the music industry accounts for their effortless throwback soul. Originally from Los Angeles, Myron has worked as a dancer (he made a few appearances on the classic hip-hop sketch comedy In Living Color), an R&B singer (he has recorded sessions with Sir Jinx, Foster & McElroy and Dwayne Wiggins), and a backup vocalist (for CeCe Peniston, the Coup, and Lyrics Born). When gigs are few, he even drives a big-rig truck. “Real talk, I will jump in the rig if there ain’t no work. Yeah, cuddy! Rrrr-rrr!” Myron says, eliciting peals of laughter as he trills a few lines from Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again.”

Myron & E’s first four singles have made an impact among soul fans and bloggers in the States, but the two say they’ve had far more success in Europe. Last summer, they performed for thousands at Helsinki’s Pori Jazz Festival. Myron opines that audiences there are more accepting of all forms of music. “They can go from gangsta rap to Norah Jones,” he says. Suffice to say that U.S. audiences don’t want Snoop Dogg at a Norah Jones concert.

And then there’s the question of the “retro-soul” resurgence itself. It can hardly be called a trend anymore since it’s been more than a decade since Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings recorded its first singles for the now-defunct Desco imprint, arguably marking the scene’s evolution from acid jazz revivalism to full-on deep funk aesthetics. Much of the genre’s creative energy hasn’t come from the black community, though, but from discerning record collectors inspired by a musical world that disappeared long ago. That has made for some uncomfortable conversations about appropriation — E Da Boss compares it to the way British rockers adopted Southern folk blues idioms in the 1960s.

“If I went up to the homies in the hood and said, ‘Let’s do this music,’ it probably won’t happen because it’s all about the R&B and neo-soul, the Chris Browns, and the R. Kellys,” Myron says. Some notable black artists like Raphael Saddiq, Cee-Lo Green, and Solange Knowles have begun using a “retro-soul” sound, particularly as the style has grown popular. Still, Myron & E know their efforts, however great, can’t compare to the soul legends of Motown and Stax. As Myron says, “It’s easy to make something that already exists better.”

MYRON & E

Backed by Hot Pocket; with Kings Go Forth, The Selector DJ Kirk

Fri/19, 10 p.m.; $10–$13

Elbo Room

647 Valencia, SF

(415) 552-7788

www.elbo.com

Radical diplomacy: an interview with Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Andrew Lam

November 17, 2010

“It welcomes hipsters, but advocates for a more intelligent hipsterism.”

Performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña is sitting in his unexpectedly luxurious Outer Mission live-work space, surrounded by walls of fake masonry, stacks of props for his work, and velvet paintings of lucha libre wrestlers, police officers, and John Wayne that have accumulated in the 16 years that Gómez-Peña has rent-controlled the place. In anticipation of his upcoming performance at Galeria de la Raza‘s 40th anniversary gala (Sun/21), we’re trying to figure out a few minor details about life in 21st century America.

On the table is our two shot glasses of cachacha (he’s recently returned from a performance in Brazil) immigration politics, the fate of artistic San Francisco, the role of current events in art – just the sort of small talk one always embarks upon when meeting a stranger best known to you for crucifying himself on Ocean Beach and spending time in traditional indigenous Amerindian garb, trapped in a cage stationed in the lobbies of fine art museums’. Gómez-Peña is letting me hold his chihuahua Babalú while he (Gómez-Peña, that is) chain smokes, wearing a black cowboy shirt, bolo tie, and traces of kohl smudged along his lower eyelids.

His hipster comment is about la Galeria. Gómez-Peña has been involved there for 26 years, ever since moving up from Mexico City via Los Angeles. He had heard San Francisco was good for artists, and in Galeria de la Raza, he found spiritual resonance.

“It is one of the most original Chicano-American spaces in the country,” he tells me. Gómez-Peña, whose wife, Carolina Ponce de León, is now the executive director of the gallery, says that he feels a “sentimental connection” with the place. Ever since 1984, when then-director Rene Yañez invited his Border Arts Workshop to stage their first performance in the gallery, he has made a point to bring some version of each of his projects at la Galeria.

“The Chicano Vampire” shreds border politics, Sun/21

It’s the space’s anti-nationalist viewpoint that draws him. Gómez-Peña, a native of Mexico City, is a man who has made his life on the border, examining the border, erasing the border. In the mid ’90s, the fake masonry that now dominates his ruby-red living room formed a part of “Temple of Confessions,” for which the artist, attired in tribal splendor, and a man dressed as a cholo gang member, sat ensconsed in Plexi-glass – end of the century saints incarnate. They encouraged visitors to approach their “confessionals” and divulge their secret thoughts about Mexico, Mexicans, race, nation.

I ask him what secrets they told him, how he thinks those secrets would be different now, in the age of SB 1040 and yet another peak of anti-immigrant hysteria. “At that time,” he begins, drawing on his Marlboro, “the pop culture views about Mexico were much more varied. Nowadays the dominant opinion is one of a country of ingovernability, a potential trampoline for drug smugglers and terrorists. There are no longer any redeeming mythologies.”

Gómez-Peña tells me that he thinks that in the age of strife in the Middle East and grave problems within both their interiors, the United States and Mexico are no longer looking at each other. “There is a lot of silence, indifference at the border,” says the man who has staged elaborate stunts at the nations’ fracture point, including a “border wedding” in which the bride and groom stood on either sides of the wall separating us from our neighbors to the south. He says people can’t – or don’t – tell the difference between narco traficantes and migrant workers.

It’s this miasma which makes the art done at Galeria de la Raza all the more important. The space has always been a place where cultures mixed, and where Latinos found ways to enter the psyche of the American zeitgeist. Gómez-Peña says the Chicano spoken word movement got its start there on the corner of 24th Street and Bryant, as did Frida Kahlo-mania.

But things have been changing, even for this stalwart of the San Francisco neighborhood art scene. For one thing, it’s not so neighborhood anymore. The Mission has transformed into what Gómez-Peña calls, in his typically luminous style, “a bohemian theme park.” Many of the young Chicano artists that “inform the Galeria’s aesthetics” have hightailed it out of here for the easel space and relatively easy rent checks of the East Bay and beyond.

Obama has disappointed Gómez-Peña. In the wake of a campaign that everyone believed in, wanted to believe in, the arts funding promised hasn’t been delivered. Nowadays, the artist sees fellow creatives having to work two times as hard for their paycheck, even a brain drain of people leaving for the more affordably fertile soils of Buenos Aires and Lisbon. It’s one of the subjects of his performance piece on Sunday, which he calls Strange Democracy. The program will also honor Yañez, House on Mango Street author Sandra Cisneros, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, the acclaimed Chicano Studies professor.

But through the slings and arrows of political misfortune, Gómez-Peña has found ways to be proactive. His Pocha Nostra group is one way, a program that hosts artists in both Tempe, Arizona and Oaxaca in forming multi-cultural, politically striking performance pieces – and, as he riffs, contributes to the “trafficking of artists across the border – we’re intellectual coyotes!”

And on Sunday, he can contribute his unique style to that of Galeria — a place where he says there is “radical cultural diplomacy, a place for different cultures to meet in a time in which the whole country is becoming divided ideologically and when Latinos are being demonized.” A place where we can all meet and talk in the kingdom of confessions, cachaca, and Babalú.

“40 Years Adelante!”: Galeria de la Raza benefit performance and awards ceremony

Sun/21 4-9 p.m., $40-65

Brava Theatre Center

2781 24th St., SF

(415) 826-8009

www.galeriadelaraza.org

Reel around the practice space

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

November 16, 2010

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC It’s easy enough for Corey Cunningham, guitar player for Magic Bullets, to tell that I’m there to interview the band. Although 2200 César Chávez St. is bustling for 8:14 on a Wednesday night, I’m the only one around without an instrument. Magic Bullets practices in Secret Studios, a warehouse full of closets for bands to rehearse. “Lots of bands practice here,” Cunningham said. Through the walls I can hear the muffled sounds of different groups putting work in on something between a hobby and a dream.

We find the rest of the band crammed into its rented space, surrounded by broken amplifiers. Magic Bullets is rehearsing for a show at the Rickshaw Stop, as well as for a trip to the CMJ Music Marathon, a result of songs from its 2010 self-titled album on Mon Amie having received considerable college airplay. The trip is a new opportunity — despite making music for six years, the band had to start over after the recent departures of its drummer, keyboardist, and second guitarist.

According to Cunningham, who founded the band along with singer and lyricist Phil Benson, bringing in a new drummer was the hardest part. “There are no two drummers who sound the same,” he says. “Even if they’re playing the exact same drum beat, their drum sets sound different, the way they play sounds different. It changes your sound drastically.” Once the group decided to leave out a second guitarist, Magic Bullets’ sound, evocative of U.K. guitar pop, has become clearer. In tandem, the rhythm section is less prone to stuttering and has become more propulsive.

Some bands don’t make that transition at all, observes drummer Alex Kaiser. “If everyone leaves except you — like what happened with my old band — and you’re the only person living within 500 miles, [breaking up is] a pretty easy choice,” he said. Kaiser’s last band, Tempo No Tempo, dissolved earlier this year, with one member making the popular musician move to Brooklyn and the other deciding to pursue higher education.

“There was a month or two when we weren’t really doing Magic Bullets,” Cunningham says. The remaining members started a side project, called Terry Malts, “because we didn’t have a drummer.”

“We were like, ‘Let’s just have fun,'<0x2009>” said Benson. Nathan Sweatt, Magic Bullets’ bassist and third surviving member, qualifies Benson’s optimism: “We thought, we’re paying for this practice space, we may as well get some use out of it.” The group rents the rehearsal space monthly, out of pocket, for about the price of a room in West Oakland. And it’s not necessarily cheap.

“We’re day-jobbers,” Cunningham says. Earlier I ask (in a clichéd fashion) Magic Bullets to describe its image, and the answers veer jokingly between “regular Joes” and “cage fighters.” The former is suggested by keyboardist Sean “Shony Collins” McDonnell, the other recent addition, who splits his time away from the band studying animation and kung fu. With a tendency to quip in cartoon voices, it can be hard to take him seriously. But Benson does.

“I knew Sean from being in bands in the Peninsula,” Benson says. “He actually was the lead singer of this punk band Nathan [Sweatt], and I used to go see when I was 15 years old, Jacob Ham — the local heroes. We all kind of looked up to him, and I’ve actually taken cues from his performances. I’ve told him that before, and he’s always like ‘Aww, you.’ But it’s true.”

If the band has any claim to being working class, it comes from Benson and Cunningham (Sweatt is in education; Kaiser is an “engineer for a big-ass government lab.”) Both work retail jobs for a company that will go unnamed. Cunningham: “We try not to give them too much advertising.” Benson: “Let’s just say you can buy stuff there.”

We talk about CMJ. “[It’s] one of the only things on our bucket list we haven’t done,” Cunningham deadpans, “along with a bungee jump show.” They seem excited — the closest thing they can compare it to at this point is South by Southwest, which they played in a previous incarnation. Remembering how one blog described the group as “a noticeably drunk Magic Bullets,” they begin to theorize on the relationship between alcohol and performance. Cunningham looks embarrassed and says, “Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about this.”

While the whole band is quick to be self-effacing, Cunningham appears to be the most self-critical. On Magic Bullets’ MySpace page, a link to the Pitchfork review of its recent album is accompanied by the mood “weird” and an eye-rolling smiley. When I bring it up, Cunningham is eager to talk about it. “That was a weird one, right?” he says. “Did you notice that they gave us a good number? But you wouldn’t think they liked us at all if you read what they wrote.” He has a point. The number is decent (7.2) and the reviewer doesn’t really say a whole lot. Yet the reviewer accuses the band of ripping a riff within its song “Pretend & Descend” straight from the Smiths’ “Bigmouth Strikes Again.”

Cunningham denies this. Even going back to listen to the song, he says he can’t hear the resemblance, and I don’t press it because, personally, I don’t either. What’s likely worse than the accusation of plagiarism (which puts Magic Bullets in the fine company of the Flaming Lips, Elastica, and Joe Meek), is accusing the band of sounding like the Smiths, a familiar reference in writing about the band.

“I don’t think its a bad comparison,” Cunningham says. “I think it’s just sort of a shallow comparison because there are so many other influences that are a little more noticeable. You know that song “Lying Around”? We were listening to this song called “My Old Piano” that Chic played on. It’s a Diana Ross song. If you listen, it has a rhythmic sensibility. That sounds closer [to “Pretend & Descend”] to me than any Smiths song.”

These points of reference have their use, but they also have their limits. During a Magic Bullets show at the Knockout earlier in the year, a girl mentioned to me that they sounded like, surprise, the Smiths, only to immediately begin discussing Robert Smith. The band was on point, working the crowd into a frenzy that mirrored Benson’s ecstatic dancing as he circled around the crowded stage, singing longing lyrics about relationships that had gone awry for no good reason. Right then, surface similarities didn’t matter and the costs of a practice space seemed worth it. The most important thing with a band like Magic Bullets is that they keep giving it a shot.

MAGIC BULLETS

Dec. 10, 9 p.m.; call for price

Knockout

3223 Mission, SF

(415) 550-6994

www.myspace.com/magicbullets

www.theknockoutsf

Down on the farm

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

November 16, 2010

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Sherman Island may barely register for motorists traveling over the Antioch Bridge and through the delta on Highway 160. Almost wholly owned by the Department of Water Resources, the roughly 10,000-acre patch of Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta flatland is barely developed, and probably home to more cows than people. It lies at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, where freshwater mixes with the salty seawater of the San Francisco Bay.

What isn’t obvious at first glance is that Sherman Island was once host to highly productive agriculture — but as delta water quality diminished, farmers saw their crop yields plummet. Larry Del Chiaro, who formerly headed the Sherman Island Landowners Association, used to grow asparagus, wheat, barley, safflower, milo, hay, and other crops on the island. But today, like nearly all the others who previously raised crops there, he no longer has property there and has moved on. His story illustrates how California water policies have benefited one group while affecting the livelihoods of the people who live in the state’s central water hub, the delta.

“I was a third-generation farmer on the island,” Del Chiaro told the Guardian on a hot August day in the city of Pittsburg. “My grandfather started it. My father, his brothers, my cousins were all on the island farming.” Del Chiaro majored in soil science in the 1970s and was interested in increasing crop yields, so he set up test plots and was closely monitoring their progress.

But by 1987, the yields were plummeting dramatically — a drought had hit the state, and Sherman Island farmers weren’t getting enough fresh water to sustain their crops. Instead of going to irrigate farmland in the delta, much of the scarce freshwater was being pumped south through the State Water Project to agricultural lands in the arid San Joaquin Valley, causing the delta water to get saltier and saltier.

It presented a problem that was particularly acute in that location. “Sherman Island, to use a cliché, is the plug for the Sacramento Delta,” Del Chiaro said. “We’re the last one to get the freshwater, and the first one to get the saltwater intrusion.”

The North Delta Water Agency, a regional water body, had a contract on behalf of the island’s landowners with the Department of Water Resources (DWR) that guaranteed a certain level of water quality. But DWR’s contractual obligations weren’t met that year. “As the drought continued, our water quality diminished, and diminished, and diminished, till it got to the point where we had to rely on Mother Nature for rainfall,” Del Chiaro said. “And when we didn’t get rainfall, our crops suffered.”

Under state water law, Sherman Island landowners had riparian water rights, which allowed them use of the freshwater that flowed past their land. The overarching problem, he said, was that DWR couldn’t meet contractual obligations to both the delta farmers and the San Joaquin Valley farmers in a dry year because it had over-promised water deliveries through the State Water Project. “We have no control over what Mother Nature gives us in terms of rainfall and the snow pack,” he said. “So they were being overly optimistic in terms of all those contracts.”

With the help of consultant Patrick Porgans and a San Francisco attorney, Del Chiaro and the 26 other Sherman Island landowners sued DWR for damages. In 1991, the state settled for $3.6 million, and the farmers were paid for not drawing water out of the delta. Soon after, DWR bought up the island. Once the water agency took control, it eliminated the need for DWR to satisfy contractual obligations to provide freshwater to the Sherman Island farmers. The farmers had cleared out, and the agency’s problem was solved.

“Compared to the San Joaquin Valley, the vast amount of acreage out there, the people that they employ, and the business compared to the delta, we’re kind of a drop in the bucket,” Del Chiaro noted. “Still, there are the businesses in the delta that basically survive off of our farming operation.”

Sherman Island is more well-known to recreational boaters and travelers, and Chris and Dawn Gulick provide a place for delta vacationers at Eddo’s Harbor & RV Park, located on Gallagher Slough on the east side of the island. Eddo’s wasn’t always a harbor and RV park — when Chris Gulick’s father started the business in 1967, fishing was the primary attraction and the small harbor maintained a fleet of fishing boats for rent. The State Water Project came online around the same time, marking the beginning of freshwater pumping out of the delta.

As delta water quality worsened over the years, there were fewer fish to be caught, so over the decades it became less practical to maintain the fishing vessels. Today, the fishing boats have been sold, and Eddo’s primarily gets its business from recreational boaters looking for guest slips or travelers who find their way to the quiet waterfront park to stay in their RVs.

Chris Gulick emphasized the larger picture during an interview about water issues in the delta, but he acknowledged that his business had been affected by what he saw as the state’s misguided water policies. “When we got here, the striped bass fishery was robust,” he said, “and it slowly has declined, and it steadily has declined.”

Gulick said countless experts and researchers had been in and out of the delta over the years, but he felt that the core problem had to do with governance of the system and the fact that water agencies had over-promised the water.

“The problem with the delta, or the water situation, is that the people that are in policy and are writing these guidelines don’t have a vested interest,” he said. “A lot of them don’t know a whole lot about this, but they’re the experts. They’re the ones who are supposed to be writing the plans. They don’t have a clue — and that is a prevalent attitude to the experts who come out and talk to us.”

Film Listings

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

November 16, 2010

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Peter Galvin, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. The film intern is Ryan Prendiville. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide.

OPENING

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer Was Eliot Spitzer’s very public disgrace the result of his own hubris or a loose conspiracy of business interests and conservative politicians aligned against him? Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney (2007’s Taxi to the Dark Side) gives credence to both explanations in Client 9, though his sane interest in revisiting the case stems from knowing what happened next: Spitzer left office in March 2008, months before the economy shattered. As New York’s hard-charging Attorney General, Spitzer made his reputation prosecuting white-collar crime in lieu of meaningful regulatory action at the federal level. This earned him several powerful enemies (among them former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg and billionaire Ken Langone) as well as the general scorn of Wall Street (we see footage of the market floor breaking out into cheers when Spitzer announces his resignation). Gibney scores exclusive sit-downs with the former governor as well as his regular “escort” (not pseudo-celebrity Ashley Dupré), and the multiple cameras on Spitzer (as well as the attendant “rise and fall” structure of a born fighter) makes me think the prolific filmmaker thought Client 9 might be his Tyson (2008). But alas, Spitzer merely appears diplomatic, expressing contrition and leaving the raised eyebrows to an indistinguishable slew of talking heads. And while Gibney seems to be saying that most of the tabloid sensationalism was a distraction from more serious problems, Client 9 is constantly distracted by the same material. The many titillated screen shots of the “Emperor’s Club” website are indicative of the film’s unfortunate ratio of chaff to wheat. (1:57) Opera Plaza. (Goldberg)

*Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould The Canadian piano virtuoso acquired a cult of personality granted very few 20th century classical musicians. His onstage manner was as strikingly idiosyncratic as his technique: the former marked by his sitting very low to the keyboard, often absentmindedly humming or singing along with the composition played; the latter by an exceptional clarity and control much influenced by a teacher’s formative training in “finger tapping” discipline, though also vulnerable to criticism in the realm of interpretive validity. (That debate commenced with his very first recording, the astonishingly popular 1955 Bach Goldberg Variations.) Offstage, his perceived eccentricities ranged from curious clothing to hypochondria, from the unreliable (frequently canceling gigs or whole tours) to the inaccessible (he retired from concert performance at age 32 in 1964, turning to the recording studio as better suited to his control-freakdom). He was a loner so demanding of his few trusted friends, lovers, and collaborators that one of the latter sighs in retrospect, “It was a whole career, being Glenn’s friend.” His ideas about health maintenance being bizarre to say the least, he died just after turning 50, the premature demise only enhancing his allure as artist and enigma. This documentary by fellow Canucks Michele Hozer and Peter Raymont is fascinating whether or not you’re already acquainted with Gould, or even a classical music enthusiast. A lot of the subject’s contemporaries are still around to reminisce about him, but most compelling here is the copious footage of him in performance, or as a surprisingly witty and relaxed interviewee. It doesn’t hurt that, while not quite so conventionally handsome, he holds the camera as magnetically as Chet Baker in 1988’s Let’s Get Lost. (1:46) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1 As enjoyable as the Harry Potter films are for fans, they never really hold their own. And that’s OK. They’re not Oscar bait the way the Lord of the Rings movies were, but they’re competent adaptations of a much beloved book series. While Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1 may not be a perfect film, it’s a solid translation of the source material, sure to appease the loyal readers who still can’t quite cope with the fact that the saga is nearly over. I count myself among them, and I’ll admit that it’s difficult to look at any Harry Potter movie with a critical eye. But even for an outsider, part one of Harry’s final chapter is likely to entertain, with plenty of action and a streamlined pace that helps the film move faster than past entries in the series. For devotees, the effect is greater, and the emotional wallop Deathly Hallows packs should not be underestimated. (2:26) Marina. (Peitzman)

*Kings of Pastry Between doubly unnecessary reality TV shows Ace of Cakes and Cake Boss, I thought I had just as but much fluff and frosting shoved down my throat as I could tolerate. Enter Kings of Pastry, a documentary from D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. Style-wise, the filmmakers are far removed from grating Food Network build-up, and to a degree their characteristic, subdued restraint is suiting to the subject of a very French, very serious competition, the Un des Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, or “MOF.” A competition unparalleled in the US, for the chefs involved it’s basically the World Series of Baking, with three days of nonstop puffery and sugar spinning, to the death. Okay, not to the death, but when a contestant’s towering sculpture of glass candy comes tumbling down like a Jenga set, you get the feeling that one person’s trifle is another’s tragedy. Let’s just say it’s no piece of cake. (1:24) Balboa, Elmwood. (Prendiville)

The Next Three Days From writer-director Paul Haggis and star Russell Crowe comes a drama many will avoid simply because those two names are involved. (2:02) Shattuck.

*”Psycho Geography” This Other Cinema program at Artists’ Television Access explores landscapes whose present tense is dominated by absence — the shadowy recollection of a past full of promises long since abandoned. Matt McCormick’s new Future So Bright meditates upon locations that are now detritus left behind by conquest and development of the American West — Gold Rush ghost towns, WWII military outposts, Route 66 roadside attractions, defunct farms, etc. Naomi Uman’s hour-long Ukranian Time Capsule captures the tiny village she moved to in 2006 to “get a glimpse” of her great-grandparents’ lives over a century ago. Still based around agriculture, brick-making, and vodka, things haven’t changed much — unless being even more threadbare-desperate counts. Ira and Lynne Sachs’ Last Address is a short cinematic poem silently viewing the erstwhile NYC abodes of AIDS-felled artists including Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jack Smith, and Charles Ludlam. Marcy Saude’s This Kind of Town similarly casts a lyrical eye on the ramshackle yet resilient present of 150-year-old onetime mining boomtown Ward, Colorado. Appearing in person are Rich Bott (of Animal Farm) and Bryan Boyce, respectively premiering Hard Feelings and Valencia Gardens — the former exploring “Southern California’s pharmaceutical landscape,” the latter the bulldozing of the Mission’s late housing project. Artists’ Television Access. (Harvey)

*Today’s Special This food comedy, written by and starring the Daily Show‘s Aasif Mandvi, is not an original recipe. It opens with an appetite-igniting cooking montage à la Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) and follows The Big Night (1996) structure. Samir (Mandvi) is a sous chef in a modern NYC restaurant, laboring under the dickish Dean Winters and next to the patently unnattractive Kevin Corrigan. He’s never made Indian food, despite his parents’ owning a struggling restaurant called Tandoori Palace. What is Samir to do when he gets turned down for a promotion, because his cooking is soulless? Things pick up in the film with the arrival of Mary Poppins in the form of worldly taxi driver and master chef, Akbar (Naseeruddin Shah). The course of this voyage of personal and cultural discovery is obvious, but the humor is as genuine as the performances, with the ingredients just needing a bit of time to come together. (1:39) Albany, Bridge, Smith Rafael. (Prendiville)

*Waste Land English documentarian Lucy Walker accompanied internationally successful artist Vik Muniz back to his native Brazil, where he settled in for a long-term project benefiting poor favela dwellers living the life he narrowly escaped. His object is to photograph workers who collect recyclable materials from the Jardim Gramacho — largest garbage dump in the world, located on the outskirts of Rio — and turn their portraits into massive mixed-media works. Their scaled-down reproductions will eventually fetch tens of thousands on Christie’s high-end auction block in London. The gap between subsistence-scrabbling in a landfill and the world of high-end art dealers, collectors, and institutions is a dizzying one. It might easily have made Waste Land a depressing measure of globalization’s un-equalizing impact. Yet Muniz’s impoverished subjects have an amazingly positive attitude despite all adversity, and their benefactor (who himself runs an emotional gamut from merely happy to giddy) really does improve their lot, as well as that of their community in general. Adding to this upbeat document’s appeal is an original score by Moby. (1:38) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Harvey)

ONGOING

Carlos Carlos, Olivier Assayas’s biopic of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal, begins with a warning, that while the film is the subject of historical and journalistic research, “relations with other characters have been fictionalized.” In other words: there be contradictions ahead. But I suppose that’s the least you can expect when you’re watching a 330 minute theatrical miniseries that gives the rock ‘n’ roll biopic treatment to a terrorist who, under an alias, professes “the pleasure of doing one’s duty in silence.” Much of this is intentional, questioning the convictions of extremists. One particularly well-shot scene involves Carlos (Édgar Ramírez) sexually dominating a cell member, only moments after she admits to being a German feminist. After about four hours, though, the intellectual irony begins to feel more like a filmmaker attempting to cover his bases. Carlos is an idealist, but also a sellout. An egalitarian revolutionary, but also a sexist bigot. (And so vain.) Still, the film, full of actors speaking a bevy of languages and propelled by a international punk rock soundtrack, manages to be engaging. Keep in mind, though, that the miniseries was originally aired in three parts, and viewing Carlos in one sitting should be left to the cinemasochists. (5:30) Roxie. (Prendiville)

Conviction A cross between 2001’s Legally Blonde and 1999’s The Hurricane, Conviction tells the real-life story of Betty Anne Waters, a high school dropout who spent 20 years trying to overturn her brother’s life sentence for murder. As this is clearly a film designated for Oscar season, Hilary Swank plays Betty, delivering another performance that is easy to appreciate, yet hard to enjoy. To her heavy gravity, Sam Rockwell brings a little levity as her brother Kenneth, once again playing a guy you can’t help but like, even if there’s no reason. If Conviction does anything perfectly, it’s casting, almost to a comedic degree, particularly with Clea DuVall and a scenery-devouring Juliette Lewis as Kenneth’s trashy exes. Otherwise, the story fails to convey an appropriate sense of struggle and time, as two decades behind books and bars pass onscreen all too easily. (1:47) Four Star, SF Center. (Prendiville)

Due Date One delayed appearance for a baby’s birth does not a Hangover (2009) make. After all, even the most commited baby daddy isn’t totally required to be at the blessed event, unlike a wedding ceremony. So even two films into what seems like a trilogy of bromancey men’s coming-of-age terror, director Todd Phillips already seems to working a tired old bone. Slick LA architect Peter (Robert Downey Jr.) has a self-satisfied mean streak that doesn’t seem to be abating with the birth of his first child halfway across the country, or his run-ins with budding thespian Ethan (Zach Galifianakis) — the two collide cute in the airport on their way to the so-called Best Coast. One no-fly list leads to another, and Peter is reluctantly hightailing it by rental car with the uncoolest dude in school. Oh dear: Roadtrip for Schmucks, anyone? Due Date proves that, yes, contrary to what I once believed, there is such a thing as too much Galifianakis, in perpetual shtick mode here. And even though the weathered, well-textured Downey can build character with a single well-placed, black-hearted glare, he’s saddled with such a sorry misanthropic creep here that the audience is hard-pressed to care. (1:35) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Fair Game Doug Liman’s film effectively dramatizes yet another disgraceful chapter from the last Presidential administration: how CIA agent Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), who’d headed the Joint Task Force on Iraq investigating whether Saddam Hussein had WMDs, was identified by name in the Washington Post as a covert agent — thus ending her intelligence career and placing many of her subordinates and sources around the world in danger. This info was leaked to the press, it turned out, by highest-level White House officials as “punishment” for the New York Times editorial former ambassador Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) — Plame’s husband — wrote condemning their insistence on those WMDs to justify the Iraq invasion by then already well in progress. (The CIA task force had also found zero evidence of mass-destruction weapons, but Bush and co. chose to come up with their own bogus “facts” to sway US public opinion.) Purportedly, Karl Rove clucked to CNN’s Chris Matthews that Wilson’s awkwardly-timed dose of sobering truth rendered his spouse “fair game” for exposure. Unfortunately opening here several days after it might theoretically have done some election-day good — not that many Republican voters would likely be queuing up — Fair Game may be a familiar story to many. But its gist and details remain quite enough to make the blood boil. While the political aspects are expertly handled in thriller terms, the personal ones are a tad less successful. That’s partly because we never quite glimpse what brought these two very busy, business-first people together; but largely, alas, because so many of Wilson’s diatribes come off all too much as things that might be said by Sean Penn, Rabble-Rouser and Humanitarian. This is perhaps a case of casting so perfect it becomes a distracting fault. (1:46) California, Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

For Colored Girls Sprinkling many tears and Janet Jackson’s blue steel throughout his high-camp, muy melodramatic adaptation of Ntzoke Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Tyler Perry deserves at least an E for effort in attempting to bring Shange’s choreopoem masterpiece to the screen. The result is a free-floating, somewhat tortured contemporary collection of vignettes centered on a clutch of African American women residing in an Harlem apartment building — a structure that remotely evokes an early Wong Kar-Wai omnibus like Days of Being Wild (1991), sans the narrative ambiguity and sublime cinematography — with its “colored girls,” each representing a hue in Shange’s rainbow, occasionally pouring out the poet’s original verse. Crystal (Kimberly Elise) appears to have it the hardest, burdened with an abusive baby daddy (Michael Ealy), a veteran dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Dance teacher Yasmine (Anika Noni Rose) is the beacon of positivity who finds her trust horribly betrayed. Tangie (Thandie Newton) is the saucy slut, baby sister Nyla (Tessa Thompson) is the good girl with a secret, and their mother Alice (Whoopi Goldberg) is the building’s extremely annoying holy roller. Overseeing all is the apartments’ de facto matriarch Gilda (Phylicia Rashad), safe sex activist Juanita (Loretta Devine), and social worker Kelly (Kerry Washington). Oh, yes, and there’s Miss Jackson, who plays the leather-tough, magazine-editing devil wearing Prada, and spends most of her time looking wrecked about possibly ruining her makeup with an actual facial expression. Yes, they will survive, hey, hey, and though Perry may not have been the best moviemaker to adapt Shange’s groundbreaking work, a few of his players, particularly Newton and Elise, rise above the rainbow with wrenching, scene-stealing performances. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

*Four Lions If you think terrorism is no laughing matter you might resist English director-cowriter Chris Morris’ first film, which does make it pretty damn funny — it being the fanaticism, doggerel, and dim-bulbdom that can create suicide bombers, not the suicide bombing (or other murderous acts) themselves. Yes, people get hurt here, but within the Three Stooges tradition of folks who can’t stop boinking themselves or one another with mallets, or in this case (somewhat) more sophisticated weaponry. The protagonists here are working-class Sheffield Muslims, two of whom (Kayvan Novak, Riz Ahmed) just spectacularly flunked out of terrorist training camp in Pakistan. The others include a recent convert to Islam (Nigel Lindsay) who seems to be in it solely to lend his all-purpose rage an excusing “cause,” and a guy (Adeel Akhtar) training crows to deliver bombs — well, he’s trying. Their goal: getting blown to smithereens (hopefully taking as many infidels with them as possible) during the London Marathon. So … what’s their jihad? Let’s just say zeal outstrips cogency of moral mission, let alone competency at becoming a public threat, amongst these arbitrarily Koran-misquoting bozos. Four Lions manages to mix the credible and farcical, satirizing holy-terrorism without insulting religion (or culture, or ethnicity) itself. Despite very deft performances, script and direction remain hit ‘n’ miss to a point — but at that point, encompassing the long marathon-centered climax, it all turns freakin’ hilarious. (1:42) Lumiere. (Harvey)

*The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest If you enjoyed the first two films in the Millennium trilogy — 2009’sThe Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire — there’s a good chance you’ll also like The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Based on the final book in Stieg Larsson’s series, the film begins shortly after the violent events at the conclusion of the second movie. There are brief flashes of what happened — the cinematic equivalent of TV’s “previously on&ldots;” — but it’s likely an indecipherable jumble to Girl first-timers. Hornet’s Nest presents the trial of Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the much-abused, much-misunderstood, entirely kick-ass protagonist of the series. With the help of journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and his sister Annika (Annika Hallin) as her lawyer, Lisbeth finally gets her day in court. The conspiracy that drives the story is somewhat convoluted, and while it all comes together in the end, Hornet’s Nest isn’t an easy film to digest. Still, it’s a well-made and satisfying conclusion to the trilogy — as long as you caught the beginning and middle, too. (2:28) Albany, Clay, Piedmont, Smith Rafael. (Peitzman)

Hereafter Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial effort starts out with an unusually flashy (for him) but effective setpiece: Parisian TV journalist Marie (Cécile De France) is at the end of a beach resort vacation with producer/lover Didier (Thierry Neuvic) when a tsunami hits, turning the market street on which she’s shopping into a rapids of rushing water and crushing debris. Meanwhile, two inseparable young London twins (Frankie and George McLaren), already coping with social service workers who want to take them from their junkie mother (Lyndsey Marshal), get duly separated in a less anticipated, cruel-hand-of-fate manner. And in San Francisco, loner George (Matt Damon) struggles to forget his “curse” — since a childhood near-death incident he’s been able to communicate with the dead — while an insensitive brother (Jay Mohr) insists this “gift” is a surefire moneymaker. What our main protagonists have in common is an unwanted ability, or desperate need, to glimpse the “hereafter.” It takes a very long time for Peter Morgan’s script to orchestrate their inevitable, accidental (or is it…??) paths-crossing. You might conjecture that at age 80, Eastwood felt ready to deal with the subject of mortality in a gentler, more mystical fashion than before. Perhaps Morgan wanted a break from his excellent usual docudrama terrain (2009’s The Damned United, 2008’s Frost/Nixon, 2006’s The Queen) by doing something purely, even fancifully fictive. But nothing in the film’s execution (after that startling beginning) indicates the very literal-minded Eastwood feels comfortable with or even interested in this story’s supernatural gist — was he mostly attracted by the opportunity to shoot in three swell cities? While just possibly the screenplay might have worked in other hands (Peter Weir? Werner Herzog?), here it marches listlessly toward increasing implausibility and boredom. The performers do what they can, although in the case of the child actors that’s very little indeed, while Bryce Dallas Howard overacts horribly in a support role. As composer, Eastwood does what he does — which means blanketing this DOA dud, which so badly needs tension and atmosphere, in the kind of cocktail-lounge noodling best suited for waiting rooms and pre-operative sedation. (2:09) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Inside Job Inside Job is director Charles Ferguson’s second investigative documentary after his 2007 analysis of the Iraq War, No End in Sight, but it feels more like the follow-up to Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005). Keeping with the law of sequels, more shit blows up the second time around. As with No End in Sight, Ferguson adeptly packages a broad overview of complex events in two hours, respecting the audience’s intelligence while making sure to explain securities exchanges, derivatives, and leveraging laws in clear English (doubly important when so many Wall Street executives hide behind the intricacy of markets). The revolving door between banks, government, and academia is the key to Inside Job‘s account of financial deregulation. At times borrowing heist-film conventions (it is called Inside Job, after all), Ferguson keeps the primary players in view throughout his history so that the eventual meltdown seems anything but an accident. The filmmaker’s relentless focus on the insiders isn’t foolproof; tarring Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, and Timothy Geithner as “made” guys, for example, isn’t a substitute for evaluating their varied performances over the last two years. Inside Job makes it seem that the entire crisis was caused by the financial sector’s bad behavior, and this too is reductive. Furthermore, Ferguson does not come to terms with the politicized nature of the economic fallout. In Inside Job, there are only two kinds of people: those who get it and those who refuse to. The political reality is considerably more contentious. (2:00) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Goldberg)

It’s Kind of a Funny Story Largely self-inflicted scholastic pressures having manifested themselves in an array of symptoms from “stress vomiting” to suicidal ideations, depressive Brooklyn teen Craig (Keir Gilchrist) rides his bicycle to a local hospital and announces he needs help. Expecting to be fussed over a bit and given some nice tranquilizing pill, he’s dismayed instead when the no-nonsense intake psychiatrist (Viola Davis) tells him it’s her obligation to commit him for a minimum five days’ observation. Worse, the facility’s youth psych ward is being renovated, so he’s tossed in with the crazy adults. Other residents are led by comely but self-cutting fellow teen Noelle (Emma Roberts) and mentoring yet self-sabotaging Bobby (Zach Galifianakis). Based on Ned Vizzini’s semi-autobiographical novel, Funny Story is well acted (even or especially by the atypically subdued Galifianakis), its mixed humor and poignancy nicely negotiated by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck in their third feature. But compared to the duo’s prior Half Nelson (2006) and Sugar (2008), this seems conventional and a little soft — hewing dangerously close to that sentimentally twee notion (popularized in 1966’s King of Hearts, 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, et al.) that we’re all “crazy” and lunatics are really the wisest fools of all. Heartwarming life lessons get learned, needless to say. The cuteness climaxes with an “Under Pressure” music video fantasy that belongs in an episode of Glee — not, perhaps, in a movie that begins with a 15-year-old seriously considering jumping from a bridge. (1:51) Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Jackass 3D How to capture the magic of Jackass: The Movie (2002), after 2006’s Jackass Number Two‘s bitter yuks, desperate striving for kicks, and pained grimaces? So much of Jackass has to do with body abuse: it hybridizes skate vids’ physical derring-do, backyard wrestling’s amateur one-upmanship, and the absurd lengths machismo will take boys to. What to do when the body crumbles and the imagination flags? Jackass 3D finds the remedy in the faux-excitement of 3-D, while thankfully jettisoning much of the sour, been-there tone and desperate striving of Two. Bless Johnny Knoxville and company for lampooning the 3-D medium with all the nose-thumbing gusto they can muster: tossing bowlfuls of dildos at the camera, blowing crap up until the shards rain down like Avatar (2009) jungle spew, and shooting each other with fluorescent-bright paint balls in a rainbow-hued opening that recalls ’70s kindergarten-colored memories and the gay pride flag. The ass in Jackass is foregrounded, big-time, in 3D. The perpetual shit stream — including Steve O’s bungee bounce in an overflowing port-o-potty and the human volcano that spews diarrhea — as well as stunts like Lamborghini dental surgery and the quaffing of writer Preston Lacy’s sweat will drive folks who used to frequent the carnival freak show to the cineplex, not the micro-cameos by aiders and abettors like co-producer Spike Jonze (his 2009 Where the Wild Things Are doesn’t seem so far afield from this Dickhouse production), Corin Tucker spouse Lance Bangs (who vomits on his own camera), the Margera parentals, and Rip Taylor. The inclusion of Taylor, though, tells you exactly where the boys are coming from, laughing at their own OTT antics and scattering debris like confetti along the way. (1:30) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

*Leaving Few beauties — French, English, French-English, or otherwise — have managed the transformation Kristin Scott Thomas has, in using her considerable beauty to convey unfathomable hunger. In this romantic thriller with a touch of Madame Bovary and more than a dab of noir, Scott Thomas is Suzanne, the efficient if somewhat taken-for-granted wife of a doctor (Yvan Attal, director of 2001’s My Wife Is an Actress and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s partner), whose marriage resembles a business arrangement more than a love match. The couple enlist Catalan ex-con Ivan (Sergi Lopez) to build an office for her budding physical therapy practice, and after a minor car accident, Ivan falls into Suzanne’s care, and as she grows to care more deeply about him, an affair begins. Director Catherine Corsini’s tough-eyed look at what follows — concerning the economics of marriage and the price of one woman’s individuation and passionate choices — calls to mind women’s melodramas of the ’40s and ’50s, though Corsini renders her oft-told tale of awakening with considerably less heavy-handedness and minimal condescension. That approach and Scott Thomas’ performance — the movie almost turns on the motionless, slowly evolving look in Suzanne’s eyes when she realizes what she must do — makes Leaving a departure from your average coming-of-liberation romance. (1:30) Opera Plaza, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

*Mademoiselle Chambon Stéphane Brizé’s new Mademoiselle Chambon is a movie whose protagonists lunge toward each other — even though they shouldn’t, for their own sakes and everyone else’s. Grave-voiced, craggy-faced Jean (Vincent Lindon) is a construction-site laborer; Anne Marie (Aure Atika) his assembly-line worker wife; Jeremy (Arthur Le Hourerou) the eight-year-old offspring who’s already better educated than either of them. One day Anne Marie suffers a temporarily disabling factory accident, leaving Jean to pick up Jeremy from school. There, Jean first encounters Jeremy’s teacher, Véronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain). She has the willowy body of a veteran ballet dancer and a naturally refined air — at least by his limited experiential standards. There’s an immediate if unadmitted spark between them, yet Mademoiselle Chambon doesn’t get cheap about it. None of these people are more than ordinary, kinda-attractive. As temptations and related tensions unravel their stability, Brize allows his characters to slip grip gracefully. No one behaves well, but they do behave credibly. Mademoiselle Chambon sees rational folk with well-organized lives stubbornly resisting a mutual pull whose logical outcome will surely suck for all concerned. It’s a fine, measured drama presented with typical Gallic insouciance — tenderly discreet even when conventional art and commerce shout for something more crudely dramatic. (1:41) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*Megamind Be careful what you wish for, especially if you’re a blue meanie with a Conehead noggin and a knack for mispronunciation and mayhem. Holding up hilariously against such animated efforts as The Incredibles (2004) and Monsters, Inc. (2001), Megamind uses that nugget of wisdom as its narrative springboard and takes off where most superhero-vs.-supervillain yarns end: the feud between baddie Megamind (voiced by Will Farrell) and goody-two-shoes Metro Man (Brad Pitt) goes waaay back, to the ankle-biter years. They’ve battled so often over intrepid girl reporter Roxanne Ritchi (Tina Fay) that she’s beyond bored by every nefarious torture device and disco crocodile the Blue Man throws at her. When Mega finally, unexpectedly vanquishes his foe, he finds himself with a bad case of the blues. With the help of his loyal Minion (David Cross), he decides to change the game and create his own worthy opponent, who just happens to be Roxanne’s schlubby cameraman (Jonah Hill). Chortles ensue, thanks to the sarcastic sass emanating from the Will and Tina show, although the 3-D effects seem beside the point. The resemblance to this year’s Despicable Me is more than a little passing, from the bad guy on the moral turnaround to the adorable underlings, but Megamind‘s smart satire of comic hero conventions, its voice actor’s right-on riffs, and the rock and pop licks on the soundtrack make it the nice and nasty winner. (1:36) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Morning Glory Unless you’ve never seen a romantic comedy before, there’s not much in Morning Glory that will surprise you. It’s about exactly what you’d expect —but that doesn’t actually make it any less charming. Morning Glory rests on the appeal of its leads: Rachel McAdams as our heroine Becky, Diane Keaton as the self-obsessed Colleen Peck, and Harrison Ford as crotchety newscaster Mike Pomeroy. All three of these actors, despite their talents, have made bad movies. But Morning Glory succeeds despite itself — the formulaic script, the shoehorned romance, and the predictable twists are all secondary to the undeniable chemistry between the actors. Will Becky be able to rejuvenate the morning show she’s executive producing? Will Colleen learn to be a team player? Will Mike drop the ego and show America his tender, frittata-loving heart? You know the answers already, but that doesn’t mean you won’t smile broadly when all the pieces fall into place. (1:47) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

127 Hours After the large-scale, Oscar-draped triumph of 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours might seem starkly minimalist — if director Danny Boyle weren’t allergic to such terms. Based on Aron Ralston’s memoir Between a Rock and a Hard Place, it’s a tale defined by tight quarters, minimal “action,” and maximum peril: man gets pinned by rock in the middle of nowhere, must somehow free himself or die. More precisely, in 2003 experienced trekker Ralston biked and hiked into Utah’s Blue John Canyon, falling into a crevasse when a boulder gave way under his feet. He landed unharmed … save a right arm pinioned by a rock too securely wedged, solid, and heavy to budge. He’d told no one where he’d gone for the weekend; dehydration death was far more likely than being found. For those few who haven’t heard how he escaped this predicament, suffice it to say the solution was uniquely unpleasant enough to make the national news (and launch a motivational-speaking career). Opinions vary about the book. It’s well written, an undeniably amazing story, but some folks just don’t like him. Still, subject and interpreter match up better than one might expect, mostly because there are lengthy periods when the film simply has to let James Franco, as Ralston, command our full attention. This actor, who has reached the verge of major stardom as a chameleon rather than a personality, has no trouble making Ralston’s plight sympathetic, alarming, poignant, and funny by turns. His protagonist is good-natured, self-deprecating, not tangibly deep but incredibly resourceful. Probably just like the real-life Ralston, only a tad more appealing, less legend-in-his-own-mind — a typical movie cheat to be grateful for here. (1:30) Embarcadero, California, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Paranormal Activity 2 Taking a cue from the Paranormal Activity 2 audience member who called “Bullshit!” before the final credits rolled at a recent screening, I’m haunted by the many way the filmmakers (Tod Williams directs with original writer-director Oren Peli relegated to co-producer role) could have taken Paranormal to another level, while maintaining some of the original’s DIY 21st-century-video-folk-art charm and resourcefully low-budge creepiness. How about kicking off with a good body hurl at the camera — or two or six? Or turning up the horror the in the sequel’s haunted McMansion, beyond misbehaving cabinetry — I do know that if I have to look at that kitchen island one more time I’ll have to hurt the wall-to-wall beige carpeting. Or have the demonically possessed (yes, you have to see the first installment for part two to make a lick of sense) do something genuinely, messily nasty, or having something truly dreadful happen to the innocents, namely the baby and dog? After all Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Beyond (1981) provided the blueprint for Oedipal and pet owner horror several decades ago — but then that says something about the quickie cash-in quality of Paranormal 2, which mistakes the original’s minimal action and special-effects de-emphasis for banal shots of interiors and poor pacing. The writing never quite rises beyond the level of basic-cable scares — or threatens to add much to the source material. Yep, you still have the blinkered man, willfully ignoring the red flags of intuition; the women who hesitate to go there; the mediums or brujas who offer dire warnings; and the demonic force who shall remain nameless that likes to take a bite out of human ass. This time the prize is the first male born into the family of Katie (Katie Featherston) and Kristi (Sprague Grayden) in, er, quite a while — don’t bother the movie makers with the details. And considering how annoyingly clueless most men are in Paranormal‘s world, I’d say we’re better off letting the kid go. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Red Boomers — and rapidly aging Gen-Xers — rejoice: you’re still a force to be reckoned with, even as the hairline recedes and the paunch descends. The sleeker Hollywood companion to Michael Caine’s recent turn as a killer pensioner “Dirty Harry” in 2009’s Harry Brown, Red (based on a graphic novel by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner) turns the world of black ops, convert assassinations, and the government-approved killers that make it all happen — and happen to survive long enough to retire into humdrum civilian life — into the stuff of action comedy. Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) isn’t quite ready to go quietly into the good night: he’s restless, bored, and lonely enough to strike up a telephone flirtation with Sarah, the woman charged with issuing his pension checks. Luckily she’s Mary-Louise Parker, applying the wide-eyed and game yet sarcastic and knowing qualities she brings to Weeds to the current “situation”: an assassination plot against Frank via the archetypal “Company” man (Karl Urban). The thrown-together couple is swiftly tracked from city to city while Frank rounds up the old gang, namely the very charismatic and watchable Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and Helen Mirren. Half the fun here, evident in the TV teasers, is watching Mirren quickly switch from Martha Stewart-like flower arranging to the steely application of machine gun fire, in a full-tilt formalwear. Consider Red the action-dappled, lightly entertaining wish fulfillment of so many oldsters, who have found themselves still toiling for a paycheck at time when they hoped to retire, frustrated and feeling betrayed by the so-called system and wishing they could also take it out on the proper baddies with seriously effective firepower. (1:51) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Chun)

*Secretariat In this biopic of one of the most-celebrated horses in U.S. history, Denver housewife and mother of four Penny Chenery (Diane Lane) returns to the Kentucky horse-breeding farm where she grew up, drawn to the project of reviving the ailing business. She pins her hopes on an unborn foal of questionable marketability, who she comes to believe is destined for greatness. Secretariat — or Big Red, as he’s known to his friends — is raised in the light of this belief by a small, reverent circle including his trainer (John Malkovich), his jockey (professional rider Otto Thorwarth), his groom (True Blood‘s Nelsan Ellis), and the farm’s longtime secretary (Margo Martindale), and he goes on to attain the status of a national folk hero. Director Randall Wallace has crafted an appropriately epic tale — and heavily salted the film with messages about unswerving faith and determination and hope and glory, mostly delivered in ringing, overwrought tones by Lane (which undercuts the pleasure of seeing her character quietly pursue a larger setting than the domestic scene she inhabits at Secretariat‘s outset). But somehow it’s harder to poke fun when the hero of the story is a horse, especially one of such majestic stature and jaw-dropping prowess. Each time Secretariat goes surging around the oval, in one of the film’s white-knuckle race sequences, the clichés fly and then fall away like dirt on the track. (1:56) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

Skyline (1:40) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

*The Social Network David Fincher’s The Social Network is a gripping and entertaining account of how Facebook came to take over the known social-networking universe. In this version of events — scripted by Aaron Sorkin and based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, in turn based substantially on interviews with FB cofounder Eduardo Saverin, with input from Mark Zuckerberg icily absent — a girlfriend’s dumping of Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) on a crisp evening in 2003 is the impetus in his headlong quest for a “big idea.” The film is structured around the conference-room depositions for two separate lawsuits, brought against Zuckerberg by Saverin (Andrew Garfield) and by fellow Harvard entrepreneurs Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (Armie Hammer) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) for crimes involving intellectual property and vast scads of retributive money. Unless Zuckerberg decides to post it on Facebook (which he probably shouldn’t, given the nondisclosure vows that capped off the first round of lawsuits), we’ll never know what truly motivated him and how badly he screwed over his friends and fellow students. But Fincher and Sorkin have crafted a compelling, absorbing, and occasionally poignant tale of how it could have happened. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields The release of the 1999 collection 69 Love Songs put the Magnetic Fields and Stephin Merritt, the group’s prickly mastermind, into the spotlight for the first time. Since then, the group has willingly slinked back into the arms of its devoted fan base while continuing to write some of the prettiest, cleverest, and most timeless-sounding pop songs around. Typically known as a bit of a recluse, Merritt allowed full access to the filmmakers, who captured over ten years of live footage, recording sessions, and personal interviews. Pulling back the curtain in this case isn’t a bad thing at all, as the group’s overall charm is balanced out with Merritt’s mysterious ambiguity intact. Some of the best moments — Merritt playing with his Chihuahua, casually arguing with his band mates, musing on the differences between Los Angeles and New York gay bars — find beauty in the mundane; just like the songs themselves. (1:22) Roxie. (Landon Moblad)

The Town While not quite on par with The Departed (2006) or Gone Baby Gone (2007), The Town is a solid entry into the Boston crime drama genre. Ben Affleck directs — it’s his second full-length feature after Gone Baby Gone — and stars as Doug MacRay, a lifelong bank robber who wants out of the family business. His desire to change is further complicated when he falls for Claire (Rebecca Hall), the woman he and his gang took hostage during their latest robbery. The Town doesn’t offer much in the way of surprises: if you’re familiar with the genre, you know what to expect. But it’s sleek and well-paced, with a script that at least raises some thought-provoking questions. The film also boasts a universally accomplished cast. Affleck, Hall, and Academy Award nominee Jeremy Renner are predictably good, but the two standouts are actors better known for their television work: Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm as an FBI agent and Gossip Girl‘s Blake Lively (yes, really) as a drug-addled single mom. (2:10) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Peitzman)

Unstoppable After a dunderheaded train-yard worker essentially flicks the “hellbent” switch on an unmanned train loaded with hazardous materials, it’s up to odd-couple operators Denzel Washington (old; cranky; in endearing subplot, his daughters work at Hooters) and Chris Pine (young; cocky; in weirdly off-putting subplot, his wife has a restraining order against him) to chase down that loco-motive and prove the movie’s title wrong. The film mostly darts between the interior of a train car, for Washington-Pine bickering; railroad mission control, where a miscast Rosario Dawson literally phones in her performance; TV news reports, lazily illustrating the train’s flight through rural Pennsylvania; and various low angles relative to the speeding train, so sinister it’s bright red and numbered 777 (which is, like, almost 666!) Veteran action director Tony Scott does what he can with the based-on-true-events storyline, but Unstoppable is so deadly serious and predictable it just gets boring after awhile. At least the runaway vehicle in 1994’s similar Speed had a villain to enjoy; here, there’s just an angry choo-choo. Miss you, Dennis Hopper. (1:38) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen Born almost a 1,000 years ago and long regarded a feminist groundbreaker, Hildegard von Bingen was a composer, scientist, healer, writer, visionary, and game-changer in her humanist view of faith. A Benedictine nun who became the noted female spiritual leader when there were none, she built her own convent, and attracted the attention of the Pope with her waking visions, images she would interpret as dispatches from God. The feminist director of such classics of German new wave moviemaking as The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), Marianne and Juliane (1981), and Rosa Luxemburg (1986), Margarethe von Trotta is still focused on revolutionary women, albeit, with Vision, one who finds a way to work nonviolently, within the system. The challenge here is to bring the potentially stolid and static life of a medieval mystic to the screen — there are few concrete historical details about everyday life within a convent. But aided by Barbara Sukowa — the fiery radical center of both Marianne and Juliane and Rosa Luxemburg — von Trotta manages to give Hildegard human dimensions: the abbess is far from modest and retiring when, for instance, she needs to navigate the byzantine politics of the church or when her most devoted acolyte Richardis (Hannah Herzsprung) is wrenched away. Ornamented by Hildregarde’s compelling compositions and careful never to stray into kitsch, Vision only occasionally lapses into the flatness of a standard biopic — Hildegard (and Sukowa) are too fascinating, and von Trotta has been too long absent from moviemaking. (1:51) Lumiere, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

*Waiting for “Superman” As was the case with Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, his latest documentary has an active internet campaign: pledge to see Waiting for “Superman.” The films seem like apples and oranges at first glance — Truth warned about the extinction of our species, the end of life as we know it, while “Superman” takes on the public education system. But the picture Guggenheim paints in the latter is a bleak one: our schools are failing America’s youth. In clear, relatable words, he reveals the causes of this national epidemic lack of funding, misguided unions, no accountability. Like Truth, “Superman” is a smart and inspiring call to arms. Guggenheim’s wisest choice was following a group of young schoolchildren who want nothing more than to get a good education. Their struggle provides a necessary contrast to the bureaucracy. In showing the problem’s human face, the film offers further proof — as if we needed more—that something must be done to fix a broken system. For supplemental interview, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:51) Four Star, Piedmont, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger Woody Allen’s latest, once again set in tony London, has all the moving parts for a satisfying farce of self-sabotage, but the writer-director never gets past touching up his character sketches — which are far from interesting in themselves. There is Helena (Gemma Jones), elderly and recently divorced; she wants something stronger than tea and a psychic to rescue her from reality. Her daughter Sally (Naomi Watts) either wants a child or her boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas). She gets migraines and has an eye for art, and that’s about all. Meanwhile, hubby Roy (Josh Brolin) eyes the available young body across the way from his study (Freida Pinto) when he’s not grousing about his fledgling career as a novelist. Helena’s ex Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) is off in his own corner of the movie, taking up with a dopey prostitute (Lucy Punch) who, unlike his wife, is not old. There are sparks of life when these fine actors are allowed to play off one another — Jones and Brolin, in particular, work up a nicely caustic repartee — but a chirpy narrator belies the wobbly narrative construct. And unlike 2008’s Vicky Christina Barcelona, the ethnically marked objects of desire don’t get any good lines. Banderas as an art dealer is paint-by-numbers fantasy, while Pinto’s Dia is embarrassingly elaborated: always in red, a musicology PhD student who wants to be someone’s muse, she responds favorably to Roy’s slovenly flirtations, and, the kicker, has a father who translates Eastern European authors. Jones’ spiritualist is the only one who gets a Hollywood ending, and while I suppose that’s meant ironically, there’s plenty of soft-headedness to go around. (1:38) Shattuck. (Goldberg)

The designer as performer

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

November 9, 2010

MUSIC/VISUAL ART It’s late at night, and I’m sitting at my laptop transcribing an interview with visual designer Adam Guzman, when I notice the graphics on my screen, twitching along dully to the sound of our recorded conversation. A fuchsia tube made out of small crosses rises up against a black background, something between a digitized sand worm and a Slinky, and opens its yellow maw in a pointless sort of way that’s familiar to anyone who uses Windows Media Player. All I can think of is how much Guzman must hate these visualizations.

Guzman, you see, is one-half of Fair Enough, a design partnership with Julia Tsao. In the last year they’ve been working in creating concert visuals for musicians. But these aren’t your typical, canned images projected near the stage; stock footage and trippy clip art looped or automated to roughly coincide with the beat. “We wanted to do the opposite,” Guzman says during our phone interview. “We both hated that. You go to a concert and someone is playing, and the visuals have nothing to do with what [the sound] on stage. They’re just found clips of stuff. This doesn’t make sense, and I was sort of tired of that. We wanted to make simple things that were synced to [the music] and do it in a different way.”

The Fair Enough project started when Guzman was studying at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Through Tsao, Guzman was introduced to Jason Chung, who records and performs under the name Nosaj Thing. “I actually lived with him for a little bit,” Guzman says. “He got to talking, and he was really into doing a synchronized show inspired by [shows by the Japanese rock innovator] Cornelius. At the same time, I was starting my thesis and I was really into doing projects with music and sound experiments. It just made sense to do a project with him, and it turned into this thing that consumed me for a year.”

A great deal of Guzman’s process for the project is documented on his thesis blog, aleome.tumblr.com. But it began the way it does usually for him, with exploration. “When I started, I didn’t really know what direction it was going to go in,” he says. “I started drawing and shooting video, trying to edit it together, playing with MIDI controllers and stuff like that. I tried programming too, but wasn’t really into that. Julie had been gone, and when she came back, everything just sort of clicked and we decided to do something really simple. You know, embrace our constraints. Because I’m not a pro at animation or programming or anything. Neither is she. We just wanted to use that as a design tool.”

The final product is a stunning presentation, blanketing Nosaj Thing, his DJ booth, and the music under a series of graphic banners. Whereas typical concert visuals bombard your corneas with collages of disparate elements, each image of Fair Enough’s presentation is simplified down to an aesthetic essence. The displays range from organic suggestions with flowing blobs and swarming fireflies to geometric patterns shuttering crosses and a succession of colors. But each stands out on its own.

“We modeled the show after Jason’s set,” Guzman explains. “It made sense, because for his songs there’s pieces, and he calls them up when he’s performing. A bassline, or a synth, the drums, parts of the song. We thought it would be cool to do the same thing with the visuals and have parts of songs that we could call up as well. I was into the idea of the designer as performer, and what that [might] mean. I developed what the show is today from that. It’s the same. We have two MIDI controllers, and for each song there will be anything from three to seven clips that go with different parts, and we’re mixing and calling them up live.”

Guzman goes back repeatedly to the idea of the designer as performer. It was the subject of his thesis, Sound and Vision. Interested in musical artists who have pushed visual performances to the forefront — Daft Punk, Kanye West, U2, and especially the Talking Heads and Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense — he initiated the project as a way of exploring how sound influences visuals and how visuals create music. As David Byrne puts it: “Music is physical. The body understands it before the mind.” What Guzman and Tsao have created is a musical appeal to the sense of sight.

For Nosaj Thing’s November tour, they’re essentially members of the band, rehearsing, traveling on the bus with the other acts — Toro y Moi (who they also designed visuals for) and Jogger — and performing live at the shows.

Did Guzman see this happening when he was studying design? “I always knew I wanted to do something like this,” he says. “I didn’t envision this, though. I’m really excited about what’s happening.”

If Guzman wanted to explore the relationship between design as performance, he has done so — by becoming a performer. *

NOSAJ THING

With Toro Y Moi and Jogger

Fri/12, 9 p.m., $15–$18

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

www.rickshawstop.com

www.fair–enough.com

Prison for killer cop

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

November 9, 2010

rebeccab@sfbg.com

On Nov. 5, former BART Police officer Johannes Mehserle was sentenced to two years in state prison for fatally shooting Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old African American rider, on the Fruitvale train platform on New Year’s Day 2009.

Mehserle, who is white, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in July in an incident that has become charged with racial undertones. He received credit for 292 days served in jail so far, which will considerably reduce his time in prison. It was the lightest prison sentence he could have received for the crime.

Grant supporters gathered in Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland to express anger and sorrow upon hearing news of the sentence. “I’m not shocked,” said Cat Brooks, who helped organize an afternoon rally for the Coalition for Justice for Oscar Grant. “But I’m disgusted and distraught. It seems like the justice system didn’t work.”

After the rally came to a close and night fell, protesters spilled into the streets and marched toward the Fruitvale BART Station, the scene of the crime. But after a dozen car windows were smashed along the way, police officers in riot gear corralled the group into a residential neighborhood. Police then placed 152 protesters under mass arrest, mostly on charges of unlawful assembly. Roughly two-thirds of those arrested were Oakland residents, according to the Oakland Police Department, while others were from Berkeley, San Francisco, Hayward, and other local cities.

COMMUNITY RESPONDS

A stage outside Oakland City Hall was transformed into a venue for personal expression in the wake of the sentencing. Community members lined up to air their frustrations and resolve to keep fighting. They piled flowers onto a shrine that had been created with a picture of Grant’s face. Some painted pictures, while others gave spoken word or hip-hop performances. Several told stories of loved ones who’d died in police shootings.

Cephus Johnson, Grant’s uncle, was at the Los Angeles courtroom where Mehserle was sentenced, but shared some thoughts with the Guardian beforehand. Asked what he’d thought when the verdict had been announced, Johnson said, “My first thought was that we’re witnessing the criminal justice system failing to work as it should have worked.” If the sentence fell short of the 14-year maximum, he said, “it will be another slap in the face, signifying that black and brown men are worthless.”

East Bay labor organizer Charles Dubois was among those attending the Nov. 5 rally. “Every black parent, every brown parent, lives with this nightmare of their children being killed by some cops because they thought they had a gun,” Dubois said in an interview with the Guardian. “It’s been happening since I was a kid. It’s been happening then and it’s happening now, and it’s going to keep happening until we do something.”

California Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-SF) also weighed in during a phone call with the Guardian. “This verdict is outrageous,” he said. “It’s Dan White all over again.”

JUDGE DROPS GUN ENHANCEMENT

Judge Robert Perry sided with arguments presented by Mehserle’s defense attorney, Michael Rains, when he levied a reduced punishment. Mehserle could have served up to 14 years prison for involuntary manslaughter committed while wielding a gun, but Perry tossed out the firearm enhancement.

“No reasonable trier of fact could have concluded that Mehserle intentionally fired his gun,” the judge was quoted in media reports as saying. But that appears to be what the jury found, as the prosecution argued in a presentencing memorandum.

“The evidence was presented regarding the use of the gun, and in discussing the use of the gun in the jury room, somehow or another the jury decided he had used the gun illegally,” criminal defense attorney and National Lawyers Guild observer Walter Riley told the Guardian. “One has to believe the jury expected him to have exposure to a greater amount of jail time because of that.”

Perry said he believed Mehserle suffered a “muscle memory accident” that led him to draw and fire his service weapon instead of his Taser, a cornerstone of the defense’s case.

Rains wrote to the court prior to sentencing that jurors should never have been allowed to apply the firearm enhancement to an involuntary manslaughter conviction “because in this case, there is no logical way to square a verdict of involuntary manslaughter and a finding that Mehserle intended to use his gun.”

Prosecutor David Stein of the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office countered that the jury’s conviction showed they believed Mehserle intended to shoot, but not to kill, Grant. Yet Perry agreed with the defense, conceding he had mistakenly permitted the jury to enhance Mehserle’s sentence.

Riley said he sympathized with frustrations over the gun enhancement getting dismissed. “The use of guns is too prevalent in circumstances where law enforcement comes in contact with young black people,” he said. “Our society — our civil society, our judicial authority, and our communities — have to hold government and law enforcement officers to a higher level of accountability in their interactions with citizens. When people with guns shoot an inordinate number of people of one group, it’s worth tremendous scrutiny.”

ANOTHER NIGHT IN JAIL

Twice before, activists took to the streets in furious protest over this case. In January 2009, things escalated to the point where cars were set ablaze. In July 2010, a street rally gave way to rioting and looting. So on Nov. 5, many downtown Oakland storeowners boarded up and closed business early in anticipation of a third wave of vandalism.

Yet the turnout was smaller than the previous events. And while there were reports of smashed car windshields and other instances of vandalism along the circuitous path of the march, there was far less property destruction.

The community affair outside Oakland City Hall ended around 6 p.m., when the permit expired. Soon after, activists spilled into the intersection of 14th and Broadway streets, then began advancing down 14th Street chanting “No Justice! No Peace!” and “The whole system is guilty!” The march turned right onto Madison Street, then left onto 10th Street.

A police helicopter with a spotlight kept pace overhead while it progressed, and when protesters reached Laney College, police officers in riot gear blocked them in. So protesters cut through a park and wandered in a pack until they reached the intersection of East 18th Street and Sixth Avenue in a residential neighborhood. Once again, police surrounded the protesters. This time, the crowd was trapped.

Rachel Jackson, an activist who was barricaded in, began sounding off. “We were going to Fruitvale,” she explained. “We wanted to go to the scene of the crime. All night the police have been trying to suppress our free speech.” When a nearby TV news reporter asked her about windows that had been busted along the march, she was incensed. “We will not equate glass with Oscar Grant’s life!” she responded. “If we have to come out ourselves and board up windows, we’ll do that. But what we are concerned with right now is murder.”

Reporters were allowed to exit the confined area, but if anyone else had been inclined to leave peacefully, they were unable to. Police issued a call on a megaphone telling activists, “You are all under arrest. Do not resist arrest.” By the time the mass arrest was underway, public information officer Jeff Thomason told a group of reporters that there were more police officers on the scene than protesters.

“When the rocks were being thrown, it was declared an unlawful assembly,” Thomason explained. He said a dispersal order had been issued simultaneously. Yet it would have been impossible for the trapped crowd to comply with such an order.

Meanwhile, a resident of the Oakland neighborhood who had come outside when the commotion began told the Guardian that she sympathized with the protesters. “The only thing I don’t condone is the vandalism,” said Dyshia Harvey, who surveyed the scene from behind a fence with her six-year-old son.

Harvey had been anticipating word of Mehserle’s sentencing. “I was upset. I was frustrated, angry, and hurt” by the outcome, she said. But she wasn’t surprised. “I already knew we weren’t going to get no justice,” she said. “For taking a life, 14 years isn’t enough. It makes you feel like there’s no justice in the justice system.”

NOT OVER YET

Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley has not stated whether her office will appeal Perry’s ruling. Rains told reporters in L.A. that he would appeal Mehserle’s involuntary manslaughter conviction.

Meanwhile, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice released a statement indicating that a federal investigation is in the works. “The Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California have been closely monitoring the local prosecution of this case,” a USDOJ prepared statement notes. “Now that the state prosecution has concluded and consistent with department policy, we will thoroughly review the prosecution and its underlying investigation to determine whether further action is appropriate.”

BART settled a civil lawsuit filed on behalf of Grant’s daughter in January that is likely to total $5.1 million, according to civil rights attorney John Burris’ website. Two other lawsuits, one on behalf of Grant’s mother and one on behalf of five other men on the Fruitvale station platform that night, have been consolidated into a single trial that will begin in May 2011, Burris told the Guardian.

Meanwhile, Grant’s death marked just one of three police shootings that occurred Jan. 1, 2009 — the other two cases also sparked allegations of civil-rights violations, since both victims were African American men. Adolph Grimes, 22, was fatally shot 14 times, including 12 times in the back, by a group of New Orleans police officers, who erroneously believed he was a suspect who’d fled the scene of a shooting.

The same night, Robert Tolan, 23 — the son of a Major League Baseball player — was shot and seriously injured outside his home in an upscale Houston suburb by a police officer who mistakenly believed Tolan had stolen the vehicle he was driving. Sgt. Jeffrey Cotton, the white officer who shot him, was ultimately acquitted.

CREATIVE OUTLET

Not everyone in Oakland reacted to Mehserle’s sentence by charging through the streets. The Oscar Grant Foundation, which facilitated live art performances at Frank Ogawa Plaza Nov. 5, is calling for youth groups, Bay Area schools, and adults to participate in an art and poetry showcase inspired by Grant. Information can be found online at IamOscarGrant.org. The foundation is advertising a $1,000 grand prize. Three artists from the Trust Your Struggle Collective didn’t wait to join a contest, however, and spent the afternoon of Nov. 5 adorning plywood covering the Youth Radio building windows at 17th Street and Telegraph Avenue, a few blocks from Frank Ogawa Plaza.

The mural displayed a prominent image of Grant holding his daughter, Tatiana, who was four years old when Grant was killed. The pair are flanked by the names and figures of more than 20 people killed by police.

“We asked the youth inside what they wanted to see,” Miguel Perez, an artist with the Trust Your Struggle Collective, told the Guardian as he looked over the mural. “They said they wanted to see the names of people killed by police nationwide, not just in the Bay Area. The list is so huge, it’s hard to pick out specific names.”

Perez said Trust Your Struggle is a group of artists and educators with social-justice backgrounds who create art as activism. “Being a person of color, I’ve had racist stuff said to me by the police,” Perez said. “It seems like it’s slowly been changing for the past hundreds of years, but it’s still not enough — enough being fairness.” *

Slough Feg’s Mike Scalzi talks metal, philosophy

Sue Vaughan

November 8, 2010

Slough Feg’s Mike Scalzi talks metal, philosophy

(For a review of Slough Feg’s latest, The Animal Spirits, go here. Read on for an interview with the band’s guitarist-singer, Mike Scalzi.)

San Francisco Bay Guardian: I noticed a clear theological theme running through the album. Was that – the Reformation – an area of historical interest to you? I’m interested in that choice, of a less exciting historical topic than maybe a more violent event…

Mike Scalzi: It’s not as metal, certainly. But in another way, Martin Luther was very metal, in that he was dedicated. Though he was Christian, in his dedication and his rebellion, he was metal. I was reading about all that stuff in an anthology of Western cultures. It was very general – I had to teach it. I’m a teacher. I started teaching Philosophy of Religion a year ago for the first time, and I’m not really that into teaching it, because its not my area of expertise, but I kinda had to.

[Writing music] helps me, actually. If I can write a song about it, it becomes more ingrained in my everyday thought. It becomes more second nature to say “oh, the 95 Theses!” It’s not just as a teaching aid, though. When it comes to Renaissance Christian theologians, he’s the most metal one. He’s out in the world. He’s out doing stuff, being a revolutionary. And a lot of his views are funny, a lot of the things he said were really funny and really extreme.

SFBG: Less metal for being ultimately successful, though. A lot of those so-called heretics were metal in the sense that they died for their principles, or were burnt at the stake or what have you.

MS: But he was the most badass one! Obviously, I don’t agree with him – he was a fundamentalist and all that, and he brought on fundamentalism in a way, I guess. But at least he said that trying to believe that the Bible is literal fact by reason alone is preposterous. That’s why he thought you had to exercise faith – because it’s preposterous. Everything in the Old Testament is preposterous, but you have to believe in it, purely to test your faith.

After seven records, you have to think of new things. I don’t want to repeat myself.

SFBG: What was the rubric for the lyrics that were included in the liner notes?

MS: Oh, those are the lyrics to “Trick the Vicar”

SFBG: Oh, so it’s just the one song?

MS: That was my decision. I’m sick of like…I’ve done that on every record and…

SFBG: People parse your lyrics?

MS: Oh, I don’t care about that. They come up with all sorts of weird interpretations, as if I really care that much. “Oh this means this and that means that. This is the deep meaning in this.” There’s no deep meaning in this shit! At least not that I know about! But at this point, trying to find things to say is a challenge.

With “Trick the Vicar,” I thought the lyrics to that would be important because it’s all one big pun. There’s obviously no deeper meaning, other than just being entertaining. It’s like something from a Benny Hill skit or something. So on the inside of the CD, I had all the puns – I came up with all those puns in the same month. They’re really silly, obviously.

SFBG: Well I did mean to confirm whether or not “boister” was a word.

MS: Good, good! No, its not. But when I say “There’s a boister that goes on in the cloister”…

SFBG: …from context it’s pretty clear.

MS: Yeah. It’s just a bunch of silliness, but it works for the song. I like silliness, and that’s one of the things that’s missing from a lot of metal: a good sense of humor. Metal used to have a sense of humor, in the 70s and 80s.

SFBG: That’s something that I was meaning to ask you about, if there’s a way to account for that sudden lack of humor. You have this form of music that has this potential to be taken seriously, but also the potential to be looked at with a sense of humor, or with an understanding of its many tongue-in-cheek aspects. It seems like a lot of its biggest fans, a lot of the people with the kind of familiarity with it that would enable them to see the humor, are the people least able to see it.

MS: Well, there are a lot of stupid people. You go to a metal show and you run into a lot of morons. Around here, you don’t have as many.

SFBG: I think it’s sort of like a dumbbell shaped-graph. On the one end, it attracts a lot of stupid people, but on the other end, it attracts a lot of people who are discerning and smart.

MS: I think, basically, they’re going to laugh at you one way or another. Being a metal guy, especially when you’re old, or older, or from the last generation of metal, they’re going to laugh at you. You make the choice of whether they’re going to laugh at you or with you. And I choose to laugh with them!

Also, metal, or indeed all rock and roll, is inherently funny. It is! People used to know that!

SFBG: Or inherently fun. That’s what a lot of people seem to lose sight of.

MS: Metal is inherently funny. No matter what! It’s funny. That’s one of the best things about it! It’s ridiculous, and it’s great because it’s ridiculous. People realized that way back. Black Sabbath, maybe not Led Zeppelin — they never had much of a sense of humor – Deep Purple, Judas Priest. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Early glam metal – Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot – they all had a sense of humor. Van Halen! Give me a break…that band was all humor until Sammy Hagar came, and it lost its sense of humor, and it started to suck.

The way that these things incorporated humor resembled vaudeville. That was David Lee Roth’s whole thing. Humor is part of entertainment. The most serious, heavy band, Black Sabbath, was also the most funny, because they realized – they were a British band with a British sense of humor.

SFBG: It’s interesting that you mention that. Do you think the trans-Atlantic shift had anything to do with that loss of humor?

MS: No, because Van Halen is the funniest. Maybe they’re not metal. Manowar! I don’t know if you want to open that can of worms. There’s a lot of evidence that they started out as a joke. They started out tongue-in-cheek and got serious as they went along. They know they’re funny; they may not want to acknowledge it, but they are.

SFBG: And the humor is bound up in the fact that everyone knows there is a joke, but no one will actually admit it. You can listen to it and pretend that you’re taking it seriously.

MS: It’s true of hardcore too. It used to be funny, now its all [imitates hardcore singing]. It’s lost its humor – some of it hasn’t, but most of it has. That’s one of my problems with a lot of the metal in this country, or in Germany too – people take it too seriously.

It’s the same thing with entertainment. I’m accused of being too traditionalist and narrow, but I’m bored by anything else. The way that entertainment used to be, in my opinion, was better. Period. It just used to be better. And now, it lacks.

I guess the question you’re asking is “why?” I don’t know why. I think it’s something about the world and the way people see entertainment. It has a much wider scope than it used to. People are much more involved in it as fans, and take it seriously as a statement, which is great, but maybe some of the actual enjoyment of it – from the performance standpoint and the artists’ standpoint – has been diminished by the fact that people hold it too close to their heart. The fragility of their egos and their identity are wrapped up in it in a way that causes problems.

SFBG: Like many discussions about the evolution and history of metal, I blame Nirvana. They taught people, or people took away from them this idea that if a band was trying to entertain you, that was somehow false.

MS: Well, that happened way before Nirvana, but that’s when it hit mainstream.

SFBG: There’s that line in Smells Like Teen Spirit: “Here we are now/Entertain us.”

MS: I don’t know if I have much to say about that. At the time, I didn’t like it. I heard their first album, before they were really popular, and I didn’t like it then. I was playing shows in San Francisco at the time, and I knew that I was not down with what was happening as a result of them. “Don’t try.” “Don’t give a shit.” “Nevermind.” “Be a loser.” I mean, sure, I thought that when I was a teenager. That’s the 14-year-old mentality: “everything sucks, so fuck it, man.” By the time you’re in your twenties you’ve grown out of that, you try to do something, unless you end up like Kurt Cobain, and you just fade off into negative, negative, everything sucks, and then die. [Sarcastically.] That’s great! That’s my hero! [Chuckles ruefully.] What the fuck is that?

SFBG: So, part and parcel of the conversation we’ve been having is the fact that you’re a very opinionated guy…

MS: So you’ve read my blog posts. There’s a new one today! I was just reading the comments.

SFBG: I did read them. I can only imagine what kind of comments you’re going to get on the most recent one. I was wondering if there’s something you can identify about metal that helps it attract opinionated people. Or, to reverse the chicken and the egg, if there’s something about being into metal that makes people opinionated?

MS: Well, I don’t think people get into metal for some other reason, and then get opinionated once they’re into metal. Unless you want to get into the fact that most metal is so bad now that you can get into it and say “oh god I’m so opinionated because there’s so much garbage out there. That’s true of a lot of kinds of music though.

It attracts opinionated people because it is extreme music. It attracts people who are into a certain kind of mentality. It happens from such an early age! I can’t analyze it. I got into metal, like a lot of people, when I was pretty young, and that was a long time ago! I don’t remember exactly. I don’t have immediate access to that feeling first being attracted to it. To me, its something that happened so far back that its like…

SFBG: …it’s like asking “why do you like mac ‘n’ cheese?”

MS: Exactly. And I have more access to what’s happened since then. But I don’t feel like I’m actively opinionated. People take things in, and they call them like they hear them. To me, things assault my sense, not the other way around. Nobody remembers being born into the world of music or food or anything and going “Hmm, I’m going to investigate this thing!” It’s more you hear something and you’re passed into this impression that you have. And some things, you get an impression and you go “Argh, that sucks! That really bothers me!” So my opinions, like those of most people who are opinionated, come from being stimulated by something in a positive or negative way. I would say I call it like I hear it.

I never thought of myself as opinionated until I moved here. People said that if I moved to San Francisco there would be all this great music. They said, “People out there are very enlightened.” And then I got here – 20 years ago – and I thought, “Everybody here’s not really that enlightened. There’s a lot of stupid bullshit going on out here.”

SFBG: Switching tacks completely, I’m curious about your master’s degree in philosophy. I read a little bit in another interview about what you teach, but I’m curious about what you focused on in your studies.

MS: I ended up studying Descartes for my thesis. I was interested in Descartes as a graduate student because his method was very simple and intuitive, and the whole point of it was a do-it-yourself type thing, rather than getting involved in this long academic tradition. Obviously, like anyone else, he comes from an academic tradition, but his point in Meditations [on First Philosophy] was to say “let’s erase everything that happened beforehand in philosophy and science and start on your own, with what you can know by yourself.”

I just found Descartes pretty easy to understand. I was able to maneuver in that ontology. I started taking seminars on Descartes, and I subsequently got interested in German idealism, like Kant and Schopenhauer, and like every metalhead, I was interested in Nietzsche.

In a master’s degree, you end up focusing on major guys because they have these comprehensive exams that test your knowledge of Plato, Descartes, Hume, etc. I stuck to a lot of that, because I knew I would have to take an exam on it.

SFBG: That Kantian or Cartesian originalist thinking – wiping the slate clean, starting with the Categorical Imperative, or something like that…

MS: …well, Kant is much more in the tradition, he’s not trying to wipe the slate clean. He’s just trying to be revolutionary.

SFBG: I’ll admit I’m only tenuously familiar with Kant, but I remember his ethics being founded on a sort “first principle” that ignores cultural baggage and so forth.

MS: Well, that’s what people say, but his point is to come up with something that is not dependent on circumstance in any way at all. Something that’s not empirical, that’s totally dependent on reason. Just like Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” in a way.

It’s something that you try to universalize by saying “what if everybody did this?” [Motions toward cookie on the table.] What if I were to steal this cookie? What if everybody did that? If it produces a contradiction – if its unreasonable for everybody to do something – you have to decide if it would be possible. Not if it would be right or wrong.

In order to establish a standard of right and wrong, you have to decide if it’s reasonable – could everyone do it. Suppose I don’t keep a promise – I say I’m going to show up here at 11, and I don’t. If I don’t do that, and I don’t keep my promise, what happens? It undermines the principle of the promise in the first place. If I don’t keep a promise, whatever, no big deal. What if nobody keeps promises. Could everybody do what I did? If no one keeps promises, there wouldn’t be promises in the first place.

SFBG: There’d be no point.

MS: You couldn’t make promises, because there’d be no such thing.

SFBG: Like if everyone stole, there would be no point in having property.

MS: If there were no property, you couldn’t steal. If there were no taking anybody’s word for anything, you couldn’t make a promise. It undermines its own possibility. It’s a contradiction that makes the act itself impossible. If its irrational to that extent, to the point where it makes the act itself a contradiction, then, according to Kant, its not morally permissible. That’s a little bit of a long answer.

SFBG: I’m going to attempt a sort of interviewer Triple Lutz here. Is Descartes’ idea of discarding what has come before, or Kant’s idea of ignoring circumstance to come up with principle…

MS: …Rational principle…

SFBG: …purely rational principle. Can that be applied to your creative process? In the sense that…

MS: No. [Laughs.] I wish I could say that it could. That’d be a brilliant piece of journalism. But as much as I’d love to be able to say that there’s some heavy metal calculus that I use in order to write by sheer principles of reason…no. At least, not for me. It’d be cool if there was some guy, some alchemist songwriter guy who was trying to find the principle of guitar or whatever.

SFBG: You could sort of take a stab at the categorical imperative of metal though, being like Maiden, Priest, and Sabbath, and not being affected by sort of the whims of circumstance.

MS: That’s the problem I’m encountering though. I don’t want to say that everything’s all based on the past. I don’t want to be a heavy metal anachronism. That’s what I’m getting in a lot of these responses to my Invisible Oranges articles. Again, to be philosophical about it, I get this confusion of cause and consequence. A lot of people say to me: “you don’t like death metal because you haven’t explored it.”

I try to keep the analysis somewhat objective, about why I don’t like the cookie monster vocals, the guitar sounds that are very brittle, and the drums that are triggered – clickety, clackety, clickety doesn’t sound “brutal.” It sounds like some bullshit to me.

People say, “You haven’t explored it enough. You haven’t heard the good stuff. You haven’t gone to the lengths that it takes to appreciate it.”

SFBG: If it’s good, it shouldn’t take any “lengths.”

MS: It’s confusing the cause with the consequence. It’s not that I don’t like extreme metal because I haven’t listened to enough of it. I haven’t listened to enough of it because I don’t like it. People think that I’ve come up with some sort of rigid heavy metal calculus and say “I like Priest, I like Maiden, I like Sabbath, Saint Vitus, whatever, some underground stuff too. These are the criteria of what I will listen to.”

It’s not like that! I grew up with the evolution of the whole thing, listening to it happen, and I heard things, and I said “I don’t like that! That’s crap! That sounds like someone who doesn’t care about what they’re doing.” It just sounds like shit to me, for whatever reason. And I heard more and more of it, and I chose not to investigate it.

SFBG: Getting back to philosophy just briefly, I saw in another interview that you described your music as having a Machiavellian aspect. I understand a Nietzschian aspect, but how does Machiavelli come into it?

MS: I was probably joking! I’m not sure. I was just being macho, talking about taking over the world. It’s a very vague characterization of Machiavelli, who I don’t really know shit about anyway.

SFBG: I was struck by the William Blake references in one of your old songs, “Tiger! Tiger!” Blake has always struck me as very metal.

MS: The reason that I put that stuff in there is not because of William Blake. It’s because of Alfred Bester, who quoted him.

SFBG: I noticed that you mentioned that author a lot in other interviews.

MS: A lot of sci-fi fans haven’t read him! This is insane to me. When people read The Stars My Destination – the original title of which was Tiger! Tiger! – they say “that’s the greatest fiction book I’ve ever read.” I was not a sci-fi or fantasy reader until I was 26, and someone got me that book. It was completely a fluke. I got it and I was like, “Ehh, I don’t really like science fiction books,” and then I finished it and said, “This is the best book I’ve ever read in my life.” Only on the basis of that did I get into science fiction.

SFBG: It’s tempting to ask you questions about Slough Feg’s distinctive sound, but seeing where my fellow interviewers have gone before, I was wary. It seems like we journalists want to get you to say “Oh, I choose to write songs with major chords because of this reason which is easy to print,” and your response is to say, “Look, this just my creative process; it’s how it sounds good to me.”

MS: Well, something that sounds good to me vocally sounds good because it’s catchy. If I remember it. I don’t always tape everything that I do. So, why do I remember it? That’s a whole question. Maybe I remember it because it sounds a little bit unique, maybe for some other reason.

SFBG: I think the music stands out to people, whether on record or live, because it makes melodic choices that almost seem like a deliberate subversion of the conventions of metal, like all those major chords. But I’m assuming that wasn’t a choice to subvert. That there wasn’t a point at which you were like, “Heavy metal is in minor keys – I’m going to do it a different way.”

MS: Well maybe there was! Again, it wasn’t a conscious choice. I don’t write Slough Feg songs according to music theory. I don’t say, “Now we’re going to do a song like this; now we’re going to do a song with these chords, or with this type of vocals.” If you do that, it ends up sounding overly stiff and deliberate.

But having said that, that’s not to say that there isn’t some kind of overall approach. When I do write stuff, what do I edit out? What do I keep? Stuff that reaches a certain criteria after the fact. Not when I come up with riffs, or vocals – that just happens. But what do I choose to keep? I don’t think about it consciously – it’s second nature to me now, so its hard to say – but basically, at one point, I wanted to write things that imitated Maiden, Sabbath, Thin Lizzy, Alice Cooper, Saint Vitus, Black Flag, and all that.

It became second nature to say “I want to pick up where Maiden left off,” but not to use major chords. The first “Irish-sounding” song I ever did was called “The Red Branch,” and I was sitting around in my living room, in a place I lived in years and years ago, I was sitting in my living room with an acoustic guitar, just joking around, singing to somebody as a joke, and I thought, “That’s a cool chord change!”

I keep a lot of things that other people would throw away, that they’d be scared to put on a record because it’s too silly-sounding. I say to myself “this is actually something that someone else wouldn’t do, and have the nerve to take seriously.” I think a lot of people are embarrassed to play Slough Feg-type songs. They were 20 years ago, at least. And now we’ve developed the sound to the point that it’s sort of obnoxious. People are like “what the hell man! This guy is willing to do this?!”

That’s what happened in San Francisco in the mid-nineties, playing this music. People would be like “God, you’re willing to get up onstage and play that? That sounds like nursery-rhyme music with metal instruments. It’s major. You’re singing like you’re in a 50s musical!”

Those are the kind of influences that I incorporate, maybe because it was something people weren’t willing to do, and so it sounded fresh to people.

SFBG: That sort of discomfort you describe is interesting, because you have this whole other offshoot of metal that’s built on discomfort. Black metal is based around saying “which chords can I play that will make people uncomfortable, that are the most dissonant.” You’ve come up with an incredibly unique way to do the same thing. You challenge people’s expectations, you make them uncomfortable, you take them out of their comfort zone, but instead of being really really heavy, or really fast, or really dissonant, or really down-tuned, you just have your own personal approach: to write chord changes that are, you know, silly.

MS: Or just really, really, traditional. Not that I intended that. But this is good, I think we hit the nail on the head in sense. When I started developing the sound, in the early nineties, a lot of it was a reaction. I didn’t write these looney tunes in 1989. I wrote them when I got here, and I started playing some shows, and I noticed that all the bands were drab, and all the bands played sort of one-dimensional speed metal. And I was totally nonplussed by it.

What I was writing was a reaction. I was saying “what can be done at this point?” Punk rock and speed metal and grindcore are just an extension of the same dirge – being obnoxious by being a dirge.

SFBG: And it’s an arms race, right? You can only go so fast. And then the next band that comes along has to go faster than that.

MS: And also it’s the attitude that’s so passe after a while. Spitting blood and whatever. I wanted touch on what people inevitably heard – kid’s music, or what your parents were playing – and pose the question: “are you willing to admit that this is enjoyable to you?” Slough Feg songs that do sound like they’re from a 50’s musical. Are you able to admit that this is catchy to you? That’s the punk rock maneuver, that I was able to think of it in those terms. And that’s what set us apart. But in a totally different way, in a way that goes back to like, “This is inherently enjoyable. Are you willing to partake in it, or are you too cool for it?”

SFBG: And it’s diametrically opposed to black metal. Black metal is “I will alienate you by doing something that is not enjoyable.” Your approach is “I will alienate you by doing something that is too enjoyable.”

MS: After the fact, that’s how we can analyze it. I think that’s a proper way to look at it. My songs do assault the listener, and people say “I can’t get it out of my head!” Because it’s written in very simple way – they’re really not that hard to write, but it’s a kind of songwriting that people aren’t willing to do.

Someone said to me in the 80’s, when I liked Venom a lot – they’re a very silly, vaudevillian form of Satanic metal – “Why do you like this? Anybody can do that. Anybody can play Venom songs.” And I said “yeah, that’s true. But nobody is willing to. That’s what makes it special.”

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