Local Archives — Page 283 of 294 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

CLUBS: Hot gay Chilidog

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October 16, 2006

New fabulous intern Chris Cooney hit up DJ Bearded Lady’s new Tuesday night shindig, Chilidog (named after the Guardian’s second favorite sex act) at the Transfer in the Castro, and came back covered in buns. Check it out. All pics of cute gay boys by my favorite local artist “the legendary Darwin Bell” a.k.a “grandma with a camera” a.k.a “the Polaroid hemorrhoid” (just kidding, lover!) — Marke B.

Who could have predicted that by fall ‘06, the Transfer Bar would own the freshest lineup of dj nights in the Castro?

Bearded Lady puts on the dog

Most nightspot makeovers in the neighborhood end up a little like bad collagen shots, all shiny and soulless and musically cloned. There are plenty of new choices if you’re looking for a place to throw down cosmo’s and lipsync to the Black Eyed Peas on a video loop, because everyone loves a good pop remix, especially when the lyrics are easy to remember for drunk people. But too many bars packed with tv screens and boys singing about lovely lady lumps can be discouraging.

TUESDAY

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October 12, 2006

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Event

Ed Halter

What is war good for? Besides lining the pockets of Dick Cheney’s fun bunch, it’s sure done a lot for the video game industry. Village Voice critic Ed Halter makes two local stops with his new book, From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games. His multimedia lecture explores “war gaming in the new world order.” (Cheryl Eddy)

7:30 p.m.
PFA
2575 Bancroft, Berk.
$4–$8
(510) 642-5249
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

Also Sat/21, 8:30 p.m.
Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia, SF
$5
www.othercinema.com

Music

Tarnation

There’s a painting from the ’30s by Thomas Hart Benton called The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley, in which a farm town in the American West reveals its ugly underbelly in the form of a drunken man threatening a woman with a knife. The landscape swoops and swirls with a brooding menace. Local country weepers Tarnation write songs for such occasions. Possessing a voice that smokes and drifts, melancholic balladeer Paula Frazer will introduce you to loves gone wrong and lives gone sour while the band dumps you knee-deep in the most forlorn corner of the lonesome desert. (Todd Lavoie)

With Peggy Honeywell and Matt Bauer
9:30 p.m.
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
$6
(415) 923-0923
www.hemlocktavern.com
www.paulafrazer.com

Breakfast with Dr. Bish

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October 10, 2006

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This weekend brings a major event: the rare return of Bruce Baillie — whose visions of San Francisco are just as brilliant and uncanny, if not as famous, as Alfred Hitchcock’s — to a movie screen in the city. Contemporary filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the director making the most revelatory commercial features today, cites Baillie as his favorite experimental filmmaker. Though Baillie primarily made short films, the philosophical rivers of beauty that run between their works are deep. The moment seemed more than right for a conversation between Baillie and filmmaker Michelle Silva, who helps run Canyon Cinema, one of the two organizations (along with SF Cinematheque) that Baillie founded. They got on the phone and let the tape roll. SFBG We’re recording. BRUCE BAILLIE How do they say that in the industry? SFBG “For quality assurance, we’re recording this conversation.” BB Well, for the recorder’s sake, I might be mumbling a little, because I’m still eating my second bowl of cereal. It’s the famous Dr. Bish’s elixir, which all filmmakers require. SFBG You’ve built a monumental body of cinema now housed in our Library of Congress. You’ve also founded two distinguished organizations, the avant-garde film distributor Canyon Cinema and the experimental film and video exhibitor San Francisco Cinematheque, which both began in your own backyard over 40 years ago. At the beginning, did you have any forethought about the significance of your work and the movement you would initiate? BB To give a generic response, probably not. People don’t operate that way generally. Adolf Hitler probably had a pretty grand idea at the beginning, but it was ill founded. Theater was always one of the bases. I was very taken by Balinese theater and Noh theater. Also [Jean] Cocteau’s admonishments that all theater must arise from local familiarity. We had all those ingredients there, almost like baking bread, and it did arise very nicely and warmly and simply. We had a theater in the woods with the neighbors coming over and putting up park benches. There was a big old willow tree by our house and conveniently, a hill behind that held the big surplus screen nicely. I always say to myself, “What is theater made of?” and it really is any collage collection of sticks and stones. It can be highly technical or it can be like the charred bones and the fire out in the desert of Mongolia. If it’s done with that kind of ancient mind-set, that kind of respect and adulation of the content — and also the Irish tradition of the manner of presentation — then you’re all right. It could be under the apple tree that I’m looking at now while we speak. I’m not too worried about all the modern stuff, aside from the problem of the way semiconscious people identify with the mere technology of it and become two-dimensional. Then you don’t have theater, you have President Bush at Harvard taking business administration. SFBG When I watch your films, such as Here I Am, the tightly framed faces reveal unconventional beauty. Could you talk about the people who do appear in your films? BB I will try … I’m going to have to wash the Bishery off my teeth. The only trouble with the Bish formula at breakfast is that it not only gives you thick ankles eventually if you keep eating it, but it’s also hard on the dentures or teeth. We don’t like to admit it on the labels. We have a big business shipping this stuff out of the house in a dehydrated form to all the filmmakers in the world. Especially in Asia, it’s very popular. We sent a batch to South Korea for a festival. I just got their booklet back, from a Dr. Kim. I didn’t realize she was such an esteemed colleague of the doctor here. Apparently the huge batch of dehydrated Bishery was rejected by most of the younger people there, who prefer their own diet, so they sent it up to North Korea. I don’t know what’s going to come of that. I might be able to save us from the bombs and everything they’re trying to throw over here. Anyway, avante, as my old friend would say — on to the question. There’s all kinds of references in our literature, especially, I suppose, in the holy works like the Gita and the writings of the Buddha, which run across the idea of direct perception. Just seeing. Or in the Bible, the Old Testament. Or the Tibetan teachings for the acolytes who were becoming monks and priests — they used to sit up above the road, maybe one at a time, and observe the faces coming up from the world below. For some reason, when most people take a camera in hand and click on a face, all they get is a two-dimensional representation. I don’t see why I’d wanna be satisfied by that. When you photograph, you photograph what is, not what is merely apparent or not. That’s the assignment, really, and it’s not completed and shouldn’t be exceptional. SFBG The spiritualism in your films, like Mass of the Dakota Sioux, Tung, and On Sundays, seems to be combined with a little bit of disdain for modern civilization. There’s that mixture. BB Well, there’s what Jesus called hatred of the world — which is something one might be able to teach his or herself along the way, to give up all the appearances and become one with the continuity of life flow itself. That’s a whole process. Some people, like myself, are born with a disdain, yes, for the world in that other sense. For example, my totem animal is a wolf, and I’ve never liked my neighbors. That’s a horrible thing, but I was born with that in my portfolio and I work with that every day. Some people really are very fond of going to the supermarket and the malls and are able to behave themselves when they’re buying a pair of shoes. Actually, whether they believe in it all or not doesn’t seem to come into any question, and overall it’s quite wonderful that they’re able to be not only very kind but loving with all of these comings and goings. To me, going to the aerodrome to pick up the Alaska Air number 387 is the most frightening kind of experience that anyone could have devised in purgatory. In my own case, since you’re asking me, this person, not someone else, about the images they project, the images are contaminated with not only a great universal love but at the same moment a great hatred for the goings on of worldly affairs and events and shapes and forms. So as I get into nature I find it less contaminated by man’s touch, but it’s also frightening in its own way, of course, with all the monsters at the edge of the world that are ready to devour you when you’re out on your sailboat in the Atlantic. And the tigers in the night and the ragings of the great beasties. SFBG In your work there will sometimes be a shot where the subject is the mist or the fog. Those two aspects cut together create a tension that has an emotional effect. How would you say your palette developed and matured over time? BB I lived my life with the camera and I deliberately took on nothing else. No family, which is the main thing one gives up to live that kind of life, and I lived en route, always on the move. Living in my car, just seeing and trying my best to get it through that little eyepiece, that little Bolex viewfinder — the first version, which was half the size of the later version. I can’t see through it anymore, it’s so small. There’s no reason at all to settle for anything less than a grand attempt at bringing back from the unknown what is there. The what is of this. Part of it can kind of humorously involve a practice that I used to throw out when I was teaching, that is, to learn to become invisible. I would line all my students up and say, “OK, everybody close their eyes,” and then I would run around the corner [laughs] and disappear. We’d go into it a little further, where I’d say, “What I really meant was we have to learn not to use the camera, just the way a policeman has to learn not to use his or her pistola.” It’s a weapon, a medium, that exists between self and other. One must become selfless, invisible, in order to relate to the other or vice versa. “When you meet the tiger on the trail, you become one with him instantly by your training so that there’s no fear.” Rather than ignorantly involving one’s self in confrontational relationships, one intelligently unifies the selfhood between the two appearances and it becomes one reality. That’s how you work with a Bolex. (Intro by Johnny Ray Huston; interview by Michelle Silva)

Geowanking

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October 10, 2006

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› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION About 18 people were gathered in the San Francisco offices of Urban Mapping, a company whose mild-mannered founder, Ian White, described their business model to me as “selling polygons.” Instantly, I felt at home. I was among the geowankers, a group of high-tech map enthusiasts whose areas of expertise range from making customizable Web maps (often built out of polygons) and geolocation software to map-based online storytelling and handheld devices that provide information about your environment as you walk through it. Imagine getting a tour of the Mission neighborhood via your smart phone, which pops up information about who painted the cool murals you’re looking at in Clarion Alley, as well as which cafés are in the immediate area. Now imagine using that same phone to upload pictures you’ve taken of the cappuccino at Ritual to your blog, complete with a map showing the exact GPS coordinates of this excellent cafe. If anyone is going to invent that device, it’s going to be a geowanker.
All of us had heard about this meeting via the geowanking e-mail list, founded by überdork Joshua Schachter, where map geeks of all stripes have been engaging in banter and mad science for more than three years. Tonight was the inaugural San Francisco geowankers meeting, and it was the first time many of us had had a chance to meet each other in person. The evening was to be an informal eat-and-chat, with presentations from Rich Gibson, coauthor of the astonishing Mapping Hacks, and Mike Liebhold, a brainiac from the Institute for the Future who said (only half-jokingly) that he wants to invent a “tricorder for planet earth.”
Gibson told us that he’s currently thinking about how to use technology to deal with the “probability characteristics of space.” In other words, how do you create an accurate high-tech map that reflects the fact that a given geographical location has a high probability of being referred to as “the Mission,” but at least 10 percent of the time might be referred to as “Noe Valley”?
This kind of question might sound silly if you look at neighborhoods purely as the creation of real estate companies that have rigid ideas about where the Mission ends and Noe Valley begins. But geowanking is all about making maps democratic and creating representations of space that reflect ordinary people’s lived experiences. The idea of letting a real estate agency call the shots on where your neighborhood’s boundaries are is absurd to a geowanker. Why not just build a digital map in layers so that you can see the real-estate-defined neighborhoods, then click into another layer that shows what ordinary people on the street think are the boundaries, then move to another layer to see where all the rivers run underneath the city?
Liebhold pointed out that as more and more people start creating their own maps and putting them online, we’re going to need to invent a system where we know which maps are “trusted” and which are just somebody rambling about how there are many paths to Blue Bottle Coffee from the Haight. Everybody began specuutf8g about a not-so-distant future when you’ll subscribe to somebody’s map data the way you might subscribe to an RSS feed (and in fact, thanks to smarty-pants Mikel Maron and pals, there is a geoRSS format). Some feeds would be trusted and some wouldn’t.
Then we got sidetracked by potential problems. What happens when the map democratization process goes nuts and so many people are tagging places on digital map services that the spatial data is a mess? And what about map spam, where people buy ads on (for example) Google Maps and suddenly your nice map of the Mission is covered with flags advertising Wells Fargo ATMs and places to buy Bud?
When the conversation wound down, we broke for wine and cookies. I got a chance to chat with Anselm Hook, the hacker who prototyped build-your-own-map service Platial.com. Platial is a mashup of Google Maps and allows you build and store customized maps that you share with friends (try it — it’s insanely addictive). Hook said his newest obsession is trying to create maps with “near-instantaneous information,” kind of like instant messaging and Google Maps rolled into one. “Imagine saying to somebody online, ‘I’m here, what should I do?’ and getting an instant reply with a map,” he enthused. “That’s what I want.”
At last it was time to go, and I headed out into the South of Market area, wishing I had Anselm’s device so I could find a local restaurant and wondering what the probability might be that somebody else would call this neighborhood Mission Bay. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who became a geowanker because she’s always getting lost.

Pumped!

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October 10, 2006

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› deborah@sfbg.com
There’s something about the infectious confidence of do-it-yourselfers that makes me feel like I can learn to build my own space rocket in the blink of an eye.
That’s definitely the vibe I got when I pedaled up to the BioFuel Oasis in West Berkeley’s light industrial district and met with three of the six women who run the worker-owned cooperative, which is doing so well it’s in the market for new digs.
After pulling off the blue coveralls she wore for a Guardian photo shoot and quickly returning to a project she had going on the computer, Melissa Hardy tells me, “It’s not that hard to work on the fuel delivery system of a car…. Let me just demystify that for you.” Folks who haven’t ventured under their own hood much may be put off knowing that the fuel filter and lines of their trusty old Mercedes-Benz could need changing if they make the switch to biodiesel, but Hardy likens these tasks to changing the tire on a bicycle.
Hardy met the women of BioFuel Oasis in the Berkeley Biodiesel Collective (www.berkeleybiodiesel.org), a group that promotes the use and creation of alternative energy through educational seminars. Before getting into biodiesel, Jennifer Radtke brewed her own wine and Gretchen Zimmermann always enjoyed tinkering with cars. They learned to make their own biodiesel while with the collective. Radtke then started BioFuel with SaraHope Smith, who no longer works with the group, in December 2003.
Thanks to them, diesel car owners can go to the BioFuel facilities garage and fill up on recycled oils processed from the greasy waste of a potato chip factory. At $3.70 per gallon, that’s more than the falling diesel prices, currently $2.83 per gallon in California, but biodiesel drivers still get pretty good mileage — about 8 percent less than when they use regular diesel fuel — and they won’t be contributing to asthma in children.
One reason the price is so high is lack of supply. After filling up his Mercedes 1980 240D and three five-gallon tubs for $113.40, customer Ryan Lamberg, who works with Community Fuels, a company in the process of building a biodiesel refinery, points out that the price can come down as more local farmers turn to growing feedstock crops.
As Radtke explains, the collective has “a commitment to selling biodiesel from recycled vegetable oil, because it is the most sustainable feedstock.”
Though veggie oil has less than half the carbon monoxide and other greenhouse gas emissions of diesel fuel, it does release more nitrogen oxides than other fuels. Perhaps in recognition of this downside, the collective has been running a series of events called “Driving Still Sucks,” which encourages people to continue to walk, bike, and bus.
“We think biodiesel is a transitional solution — not the answer,” Radtke says.
Still, the group believes in its mission to provide an alternative fuel in an alternative way to meet the demands of green-minded Bay Area residents — not to mention Willie Nelson, who stops by to fill up every time he passes through town.
“We’re busting at the seams,” Hardy says. The collective currently is seeking a new, larger space to serve the 1,600-plus customers signed up with the co-op. “We want to create a place that isn’t just a pump and run but more of a crossroads or meeting place, like a natural food store,” Radtke says. SFBG
BIOFUEL OASIS
2465 Fourth St., Berk.
(510) 665-5509
www.biofueloasis.com

Defeating Pombo

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October 10, 2006

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EDITORIAL One of the half-dozen worst members of the United States Congress represents a district less than 50 miles from San Francisco. Republican Richard Pombo of Tracy chairs the House Resources Committee and has used that post to attempt to eliminate the Endangered Species Act and gut a long list of environmental regulations. He’s been an ally of Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff. He’s rabidly antichoice. And if the Republicans keep control of the House, he will become even more powerful.
A few months ago, his seat seemed fairly safe: Pete McCloskey, a liberal Republican, challenged him in the primary but didn’t even come close to defeating Pombo. His Democratic challenger, energy consultant Jerry McNerney, was way behind in fundraising and the national Democratic Party wasn’t exactly targeting this as a competitive seat.
But times change quickly, and right now some polls (although admittedly ones taken by McNerney and his allies) show the race close enough that an upset is entirely possible. The GOP is clearly worried and has poured half a million dollars into Pombo’s campaign. McNerney’s now on the national radar; retired general Wesley Clark came out to endorse him, and there’s Democratic Party money flowing in too. But he’s still behind Pombo, and resources may turn out to be a key factor in the final weeks.
McNerney isn’t a San Francisco liberal by any stretch (he’s even been a consultant to Pacific Gas and Electric Co., albeit on alternative energy). But he’s radically better than Pombo: he’s pro-choice and pro-labor, and as someone whose career is in the wind power business, he’s got a real understanding of energy and environmental issues.
We support McNerney, and we’re more than happy to endorse him, even though he’s outside the area for which we usually issue recommendations. But for San Francisco and central East Bay residents, whose Democratic congressional representatives face no real opposition, this may be a place to put some money and political energy: McNerney is holding an SF fundraiser, and his campaign is looking for volunteer help. Defeating Pombo would be a huge coup and might be one of the most effective ways for local folks to help Democrats take back the House. SFBG
McNerney’s fundraiser is Oct. 11 from 6 to 8 p.m. at Delancey Street, 600 Embarcadero, SF. Info: (925) 556-7077.

EDITOR’S NOTES

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October 10, 2006

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› tredmond@sfbg.com
I get a little nervous when I hear prominent Democratic leaders talking about how important it is to elect John Garamendi lieutenant governor. Republican Tom McClintock, his ugly-right Republican foe, is such bad news that he must be stopped; the checkbooks need to come out and the boots need to hit the ground.
I don’t disagree on one level — but the prospect of a bad lieutenant governor isn’t by any means the scariest thing that could happen in November. In fact, the prospect of another four years of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t the scariest thing. That designation is reserved for Proposition 90.
And the situation with Prop. 90 is pretty damn scary.
This is a measure that would effectively end the ability of state and local government to regulate business. It would prevent any new law reguutf8g rents or condo conversion. It would halt most new zoning (and would allow developers to build almost anything they want in Southeast San Francisco). It’s awful, awful, awful.
And right now, it’s way ahead in the polls.
There’s a reason for that: the right-wing backers have carefully hidden the worst of the measure behind language about halting the abuses of eminent domain. If you ask California voters whether the government should be able to seize someone’s house to hand it over to a private developer who wants to build a Wal-Mart, 90 percent of them will say no. And if we hit Nov. 7 and the majority of the electorate thinks of this proposition as a way to protect homeowners, it’s going to pass.
The No on 90 message is a bit more complicated. That’s the problem with this sort of Trojan horse initiative — it’s hard to explain why it’s bad in a 30-second sound bite. But it’s possible: every single public safety group in the state (cops, firefighters, etc.) is against it, as is every major environmental group and some of the big taxpayer-rights groups, who say it will cost the public a fortune and lead to bogus lawsuits.
Explain it right and the voters will get it — but in California, that’s a very expensive proposition.
The airwaves are choked with political TV ads right now. Schwarzenegger and Phil Angelides are beating each other up, the tobacco companies and the health industry are battling over the cigarette tax (Proposition 86), the oil companies and environmentalists are going at it over Proposition 87 — and needless to say, with all the numerical alphabet soup, the public’s attention is a bit scattered.
Without a really big splash in the next few weeks, it will be hard for No on 90 to be heard above the din.
The campaign isn’t by any means floundering. The two main No on 90 committees have raised more than $3 million and have about half of that still in the bank. But $1.5 million isn’t going to be enough to make the case in a huge state where TV time is really expensive.
Most of the money right now comes from political action committees controlled by the League of California Cities, the State Association of Counties, and a few well-heeled businesses. But everyone needs to step up here; all these Democrats who have big stashes of money (Carole Migden, John Burton, etc.) need to get on the stick before we run out of time. SFBG

A real war on crime

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October 10, 2006

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OPINION Once again, with their backs against the wall, Republicans are attempting to stave off political defeat in November by playing to Americans’ fears about safety and security. Central to the conservative playbook for years has been the lie that progressives cannot keep our communities safe.
The reality is that the current, shortsighted approach to public safety, which touts punishment without rehabilitation, has been a failure. One of the starkest examples is the crisis in California’s prison and parole system — and every day that crisis comes home to San Francisco. Thousands of people are being released from behind bars with no plans and few skills or opportunities. More than 1,500 parolees are living in San Francisco at any given time, and thousands more are being released from county jail every year. Of the estimated 125,000 California prisoners who will be released this year, three out of four will end up back in prison by 2009. California has the highest recidivism rate in the country.
Behind every rearrest is a new crime, often with a new victim. Taxpayers also foot the bill — to the tune of more than $34,000 a year for each person who ends up back in prison.
It’s time for a change. We can no longer accept the fact that three out of four former prisoners will be back behind bars within three years. In this progressive city, we are committed to working together to break that cycle of recidivism by channeling former prisoners into productive lives. These programs must target the crucial process of what’s called “reentry,” the release of individuals from state prison or county jails back into their families and neighborhoods.
Two weeks ago, more than 200 reentry experts and service providers, along with government and criminal justice agencies, gathered for the city’s first-ever Reentry Summit. This past year, Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi sponsored a $1.2 million budget allocation to support new reentry programs. We’ve also spearheaded the San Francisco Reentry Coordinating Council, bringing together members from the business sector, labor, key city agencies, the clergy, and community organizations.
Members of the council have pioneered concrete reentry programs that are delivering results. District Attorney Kamala Harris has created a new accountability and workforce reentry initiative for drug offenders called Back on Track. Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s Clean Slate program provides community-education services and programs to clear criminal records to nearly 2,500 people a year. Sheriff Mike Hennessey is poised to open the Women’s Reentry Center, which will provide direct practical support services to women coming out of jail and prison.
While the city is more than doing its part at a local level to address this issue, we cannot do it alone. It is time for the state to own up to its responsibility for rehabilitating parolees and probationers and ensuring their successful return home. With a detailed, sustained, statewide reentry effort, we can guide former prisoners away from crime, reduce corrections costs, and keep our neighborhoods safe. SFBG
Kamala D. Harris, Jeff Adachi, Ross Mirkarimi, and Michael Hennessey
The writers are, respectively, the district attorney, public defender, District 5 supervisor, and sheriff of San Francisco.

Buried treasure

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October 10, 2006

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com
Despite the fast-moving urban centers that surround it on each side of the San Francisco Bay, not much about Treasure Island has changed since it was shut down as a United States naval station 10 years ago.
After the feds ceased operations on the island and at several other military installations in the mid-’90s, the idea was to give the land to local governments for redevelopment to fill the economic void of losing active bases. Since then, several plans for Treasure Island have been floated with great fanfare in the press, but all have become mired in the infamously contentious development politics of San Francisco.
Late last month, after three years of deadline extensions, the Treasure Island Development Authority (TIDA) finally received a full-blown plan from the developer — a partnership between Lennar Corp., Wilson Meany Sullivan, and Treasure Island Community Development — that was given exclusive negotiating rights over the land three years ago.
The $1.2 billion redevelopment plan must now run a gauntlet of state and local approval, including consideration from the Board of Supervisors, which is expected to hold hearings and debate the plan by the end of the year. It isn’t likely that construction will begin on the island for at least a couple more years.
The latest proposal anticipates about 6,000 new homes, 1,800 of which will be targeted to low-income residents, including 750 units for households earning no more than 60 percent of San Francisco’s median income and 440 built as part of a program for the homeless. Plans include town houses, single-family homes, and high-rise residential towers, although at least half the properties will be limited to 65 feet in height.
Right now the island contains about 800 occupied units, over half of which are market-rate leases with the John Stewart Co., while about 200 are operated under the Treasure Island Homeless Development Initiative. By the time the project is done, according to the newest plan, the island’s population is expected to balloon to around 10,000 residents, plus around 3,000 new workers necessary to maintain the minicity.
Some of the existing housing stock will be demolished, or as the plan calls it, “reconstructed.” Current residents will have an option to move into the new units or be placed in a lottery if demand for certain types of units outstrips the supply. The plan calls for about 27 percent of the overall planned housing units to be rentals.
Private automobile use would be regulated by metering ramp access to the island during peak commute hours; assessing possible congestion fees for driving on the island; limiting residential parking; and emphasizing thruways that promote walking, bicycling, and public transit.
Much of the development is slated for the west side of the island — with its breathtaking and profitable views of the city — near an existing ferry terminal that would provide access to the city all day long.
Treading lightly, Sup. Chris Daly, whose District 6 includes the island, said he supports the environmental and housing components so far, but if existing island residents mount significant opposition for any reason, he’d consider opposing the plan.
“You don’t know how clean something is until you take it out of the wash, and they’re just now starting to throw it in,” Daly told the Guardian.
Rob Black, Daly’s main challenger in the upcoming election, lives on Treasure Island. He was similarly cautious. “I think people have finally begun to think in a more progressive way about making this a more sustainable neighborhood,” Black told us. “Past plans have been so poorly put together.”
On the local level, the plan must be approved in the coming months by both the TIDA board and the Board of Supervisors. After that, it will undergo an extensive environmental impact review by the city’s planning department before returning to the board for final local approval.
The developer and the TIDA board — which is composed entirely of mayoral appointees, three of whom work directly for Mayor Gavin Newsom — must still overcome other major hurdles as well, including the fact that the Navy hasn’t turned over any of the land yet and likely won’t without major concessions.
The Bush administration has stalled the transfer, pushing for some payment before giving up valuable federal land. One tentative option is to relieve the Navy of about $45 million in environmental cleanup costs for which it is currently responsible. Those costs would then be borne by the redevelopment plan and the developer, which has already pledged $26 million for remediation. The land became contaminated in part after decades of military activity that included emergency drills with radioactive materials.
David Rist, a project manager for the state Department of Toxic Substances Control, which is overseeing the cleanup, said that while there is some contamination where residents are living today, it doesn’t pose an immediate threat to human health. Identified contaminants include dioxin, lead, and PCBs. Rist told us the cleanup, regardless of who ends up paying for it, will be “significantly done in the next two and a half years.”
After mulling over ideas, TIDA finally brokered an exclusive deal in 2003 with a company incorporated as Treasure Island Community Development, a group of Democratic Party heavyweights with deep links to the current and former mayoral administrations and other top elected Democrats.
Jay Wallace, a project planner for Treasure Island Community Development, said the plan’s mammoth size and uniqueness have required considerable and time-consuming attention to specifics. Investors anticipate spending $500 million of their own money, but they’re looking to earn upward of $125 million in profits, according to the plan.
The remaining cost of about $760 million for infrastructure, open space, and transportation system improvements could be covered largely by tax increment financing from the redevelopment area and Mello Roos bonds, both of which would essentially be funded by future property taxes, according to the latest term sheet.
Wallace told the Guardian that his group “has worked in good faith and transparency throughout this project, with over 150 public meetings before reaching this milestone and presenting this plan to the city.”
Daly said that while “there are going to be a hundred issues that need to be worked out,” the green-meets-affordable-housing theme “is the right proposal for San Francisco.”
“Political connections to the Newsom juggernaut notwithstanding, these guys are politically savvy enough to know what’s wise and what isn’t,” he said. “On the actual merits of the proposal, it’s palatable if you’re OK with the concept of high-rises in the middle of the bay.” SFBG

East Bay races and measures

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October 10, 2006

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Editor’s note: The following story has been altered from the original to correct an error. We had originally identified Courtney Ruby as running for Alameda County Auditor; the office is actually Oakland City Auditor.

Oakland City Auditor
COURTNEY RUBY
Incumbent Roland Smith has to go. He’s been accused of harassing and verbally abusing his staff and using audits as a political weapon against his enemies. The county supervisors have had to reassign his staff to keep him from making further trouble. And yet somehow he survived the primary with 32 percent of the vote, putting him in a November runoff against Courtney Ruby, who led the field with 37 percent. Ruby, an experienced financial analyst, would bring some credibility back to the office.
Peralta Community College Board, District 7
ABEL GUILLEN
Challenger Abel Guillen has extensive knowledge of public school financing and a proven commitment to consensus building and government accountability. In the last six years Guillen, who was raised in a working-class community and was the first in his family to go to college, has raised $2.2 billion in bond money to construct and repair facilities in school districts and at community colleges. Incumbent Alona Clifton has been accused of not being responsive to teachers’ concerns about the board’s spending priorities and openness.
Berkeley mayor
TOM BATES
This race has progressives tearing at each other’s throats, particularly since they spent a ton of cash last time around to oust former mayor Shirley Dean and replace her with Tom Bates, who used to be known as a reliable progressive voice.
Bates’s reputation has shifted since he became mayor, and his record is a mixed bag. This time around, he stands accused of setting up a shadow government (via task forces that duplicate existing commissions but don’t include enough community representatives), of giving developers too many special favors instead of fighting for more community benefits, and of increasingly siding with conservative and pro-landlord city council member Gordon Wozniak.
The problem is that none of Bates’s opponents look like they would be effective as mayor. So lacking any credible alternative, we’ll go with Bates.
Berkeley City Council, District 1
LINDA MAIO
Incumbent Linda Maio’s voting record has been wimpy at times, but she is a strong proponent of affordable housing, and her sole challenger, Merrilie Mitchell, isn’t a terribly serious candidate. Vote for Maio.
Berkeley City Council, District 2
DONA SPRING
A valiant champion of every progressive cause, incumbent Dona Spring is one of the unsung heroes of Berkeley. Using a wheelchair, she puts in the energy equivalent of two or three council members and always remains on the visionary cutting edge. If that weren’t enough, her sole challenger, Latino businessman and zoning commissioner Raudel Wilson, has the endorsement of the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce. Vote for Spring.
Berkeley City Council, District 7
KRISS WORTHINGTON
Incumbent Kriss Worthington is an undisputed champion of progressive causes and a courageous voice who isn’t afraid to take criticism in an age of duck and run, including the fallout he’s been experiencing following the closure of Cody’s on Telegraph Avenue, something conservatives have tried to link to his support for the homeless. His sole challenger is the evidently deep-pocketed George Beier, who describes himself as a community volunteer but has the support of landlords and the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce and has managed to blanket District 7 with signage and literature, possibly making his one of the most tree-unfriendly campaigns in Berkeley’s electoral history. Keep Berkeley progressive and vote for Worthington.
Berkeley City Council, District 8
JASON OVERMAN
Incumbent Gordon Wozniak postures as if he is going to be mayor one day, and he’s definitely the most conservative member of the council. During his tenure, Wozniak has come up with seven different ways to raise rents on tenants in Berkeley, and he didn’t even vote against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s special election last year. Challenger Jason Overman may be only 20 years old, but he’s already a seasoned political veteran, having been elected to the Rent Stabilization Board two years ago. Vote for Overman.
Berkeley city auditor
ANN-MARIE HOGAN
Ann-Marie Hogan is running unopposed for this nonpartisan post, which is hardly surprising since she’s done a great job so far and has widespread support.
Berkeley school director
KAREN HEMPHILL, NANCY RIDDLE, NORMA HARRISON
With five candidates in the running and only three seats open, some are suggesting progressives cast only one vote — for Karen Hemphill — to ensure she becomes board president in two years, since the job goes to the person with the most votes in the previous election.
Hemphill has done a great job and has the support of Latino and African American parent groups, so a vote for her is a no-brainer.
So is any vote that helps make sure that incumbents Shirley Issel and David Baggins don’t get reelected.
Nancy Riddle isn’t a hardcore liberal, but she’s a certified public accountant, so she has number-crunching skills in her favor. Our third pick is Norma Harrison, although her superradical talk about capitalism being horrible and schools being like prisons needs to be matched with some concrete and doable suggestions.
Rent Stabilization Board
DAVE BLAKE, HOWARD CHONG, CHRIS KAVANAGH, LISA STEPHENS, PAM WEBSTER
If it weren’t for the nine-member elected Rent Stabilization Board, Berkeley would have long since been taken over by the landlords and the wealthy. This powerful agency has been controlled by progressives most of the time, and this year there are five strong progressives running unopposed for five seats on the board. We recommend voting for all of them.
Oakland City Council
AIMEE ALLISON
When we endorsed Aimee Allison in the primary in June, we pointed out that this was a crucial race: incumbent Patrician Kernighan has been a staunch ally of outgoing mayor Jerry Brown and Councilmember Ignacio de La Fuente — and now that Ron Dellums is taking over the Mayor’s Office and a new political era could be dawning in Oakland, it’s crucial that the old prodevelopment types don’t control the council.
Kernighan’s vision of Oakland has always included extensive new commercial and luxury housing development, and like De La Fuente, she’s shown little concern for gentrification and displacement. Allison, a Green Party member, is the kind of progressive who could make a huge difference in Oakland, and she’s our clear and unequivocal choice for this seat.
From crime to city finance, Allison is well-informed and has cogent, practical proposals. She favors community policing and programs to help the 10,000 parolees in Oakland. She wants the city to collect an annual fee from the port, which brings in huge amounts of money and puts very little into the General Fund. She wants to promote environmentally sound development, eviction protections, and a stronger sunshine ordinance. Vote for Allison.
East Bay Municipal Utility District director, Ward 4
ANDY KATZ
Environmental planner Andy Katz is running unopposed. Despite his relative youth, he’s been an energetic and committed board member and deserves another term.
AC Transit director at large
REBECCA KAPLAN
Incumbent Rebecca Kaplan is a fixture on the East Bay progressive political scene and has been a strong advocate of free bus-pass programs and environmentally sound policies over the years. A former public interest lawyer, Kaplan’s only challenger is paralegal James K. Muhammad.
Berkeley measures
Measure A
BERKELEY PUBLIC SCHOOLS TAX
YES
This measure takes two existing taxes and combines them into one but without increasing existing rates. Since 30 percent of local teachers will get paid out of the revenue from this measure, a no vote could devastate the quality of education in the city. Vote yes.
Measure E
RENT STABILIZATION BOARD VACANCY
YES
Measure E seeks to eliminate the need to have a citywide special election every time a vacancy occurs on the Rent Stabilization Board, a process that currently costs about $400,000 and consumes huge amounts of time and energy. The proposal would require that vacancies be filled at November general elections instead, since that ballot attracts a wider and more representative group of voters. In the interim, the board would fill its own vacancies.
Measure F
GILMAN STREET PLAYING FIELDS
YES
Measure F follows the council’s October 2005 adoption of amendments that establish the proper use for public and commercial recreation sports facilities, thereby allowing development of the proposed Gilman Street fields. Vote yes.
Measure G
GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS
YES
Measure G is a nice, feel-good advisory measure that expresses Berkeley’s opinion about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions to the global climate and advises the mayor to work with the community to come up with a plan that would significantly reduce such emissions, with a target of an 80 percent reduction by 2050. Vote yes.
Measure H
IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH AND VICE-PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY
YES
In left-leaning Berkeley this is probably the least controversial measure on the ballot. Do we really need to spell out all over again the many reasons why you should vote yes on this issue?
If this measure passes, both Berkeley and San Francisco will have taken public stands in favor of impeachment, which won’t by itself do much to force Congress to act but will start the national ball rolling. Vote yes.
Measure I
AMENDING CONDO CONVERSION ORDINANCE
NO, NO, NO
Measure I is a really bad idea, one that links the creation of home ownership opportunities to the eviction of families from their homes. It was clearly cooked up by landlord groups that are unhappy with Berkeley’s current condo conversion ordinance, which allows for 100 conversions a year. Measure I proposes increasing that limit to 500 conversions a year, which could translate into more than 1,000 people facing evictions. Those evictions will hit hardest on the most financially vulnerable — seniors, the disabled, low- and moderate-income families, and children. With less than 15 percent of current Berkeley tenants earning enough to purchase their units, this measure decreases the overall supply of rentals, eliminates requirements to disclose seismic conditions to prospective buyers, and violates the city’s stated commitment to fairness, compassion, and economic diversity. Vote no.
Measure J
AMENDING LANDMARK PRESERVATION ORDINANCES
YES
A well-meaning measure that’s opposed by developers, Measure J earns a lukewarm yes. It establishes a nine-member Landmarks Preservation Commission; designates landmarks, structures of merit, and historic districts; and may approve or deny alteration of such historic resources but may not deny their demolition. It’s worth noting that if Proposition 90 passes, the city could face liability for damages if Measure J is found to result in substantial economic loss to property — all of which gives us yet another reason to say “vote no” on the horribly flawed Prop. 90 while you’re voting yes on Measure J.
Oakland Measures
Measure M
POLICE AND FIRE RETIREMENT BOARD INVESTMENTS
YES
Measure M would amend the City Charter to allow the board that oversees the Oakland Police and Fire Retirement System (PFRS) slightly more leeway in making investment decisions. The board claims that its current requirements — which bar investment in stocks that don’t pay dividends — are hampering returns. That’s an issue: between July 2002 and July 2005, the unfunded liability of the PFRS grew from $200 million to $268 million — a liability for which the city of Oakland is responsible. We’re always nervous about giving investment managers the ability to use public money without close oversight, but the new rules would be the same as ones currently in place in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Measure N
LIBRARY IMPROVEMENT AND EXPANSION BONDS
YES
Oakland wants to improve and expand all library branch facilities, construct a new main library at the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, and buy land for and construct two new library facilities in the Laurel and 81st Avenue communities. The upgrades and construction plans come in response to residents’ insistence that they need more space for studying and meeting, increased library programs and services, tutoring and homework assistance for children, increased literacy programs, and greater access to current technology and locations that offer wi-fi.
This $148 million bond would cost only $40 a year for every $100,000 of assessed property. Vote yes.
Measure O
INSTANT RUNOFF VOTING
Ranked-choice voting, or instant runoff voting, is a great concept. The city of Oakland is using it to elect officials in the November election without holding a prior June election. There’s only one problem: so far, Alameda County hasn’t invested in voting equipment that could make implementing this measure possible. Voting yes is a first step in forcing the county’s hand in the right direction. SFBG

NOISE: Ka-Chingy! For free, actually

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October 10, 2006

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Who doesn’t love free music? Can we all agree that despite its mammoth size and the weird experience of tearing through brambles and over big dogs, small children, and oldsters reading the Sunday paper, that Hardly Strictly Bluegrass wouldn’t be quite the same if it wasn’t free, free, free!?

Anyway here’s even more for you cheapskates: we all know pop stars are increasingly making more appearances at, of all things, cellie stories (Chris Brown showed at a San Leandro Verizon store last week), but now phone and wireless companies are also getting behind music in other ways.

Tomorrow, Oct. 11, Flash Concerts (backed by Cingular Wireless and Sony Ericsson) present Chingy, free, at the Mezzanine. The dealie is that fans have to register to “Get in and Win” and sending the text message city code “SF” to “FLASH” (35274). Registrants will receive “Alerts” including: event details, exclusive free concert invites, VIP access, meet & greets and special music prizing. Text “SF” to “FLASH” or visit your local Cingular Wireless store for more details.

Then you’re “Right Thurr,” as the Chingster might say. One wonders how many Sony Ericssons the dude scored with this tie-in. Ah, something to contemplate when the doors open at 8:30 p.m. at 444 Jessie St., SF.

At least you didn’t have to sit through any commercials…

Writing wrongs

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October 3, 2006

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
If there’s one person you would expect to condemn the present state of America’s political affairs, it would be Billy Bragg, right? Surely Britain’s punk poet laureate should be grabbing every microphone within reaching distance to decry the evils of our current administration. But surprisingly, his reaction is quite the opposite. “I’m encouraged by the results of the last two elections, because I believe that America has not yet decided what kind of country it’s going to be in the 21st century,” he says on the phone from Winnepeg.
Bragg is currently on a bit of a multitasking tour to showcase his two latest works: Volume II (YepRoc), a box set, and The Progressive Patriot, a book. While Volume II is an expected retrospective that covers the second half of Bragg’s career from 1988 onward, The Progressive Patriot is uncharted territory for the singer-songwriter, a treatise that addresses Britain’s national identity, the emergence of organized racism, and the political road that weaves between the two.
Much as in Britain, Bragg sees battles of ideology as a key proving ground in the future of our country and agrees with the concept of “two Americas” as it pertains to the states’ political climate. “On one hand you’ve got the neoconservative Christian right, who are getting everybody to vote and still can’t get a majority,” he says, “and on the other side you’ve got the more compassionate idea of America as a multicultural society, which just can’t get everybody to vote.” Yet as bleak and insurmountable a problem as this may seem, Bragg takes the long view. “I’m in a fortunate position. I have the opportunity to travel around and meet people trying to manifest that ‘other’ America. Reading local newspapers in America, you see all sorts of things that are going completely against the neoconservative agenda in some states.” Volume II picks up at a crucial period of Bragg’s career, kicking off with his 1988 release, Workers Playtime (Go! Discs/Elektra). The album marked Bragg’s transition from punk iconoclast to, as he would later affectionately come to be known, the “Bard from Barking.” Instead of using just his guitar and a portable amp as on his earlier recordings, Bragg included bits of orchestration on Workers, plus a band to accompany his songs of law, love, and everything in between. “The album of lost love. It’s my great lost soul album!” he says with a wistful chuckle.
At the heart of that bittersweet collection is the amazing “Valentine’s Day Is Over,” a woman’s lament over her lover, rough economic times, and the beatings that result. “That economy and brutality are related / Now I understand,” the protagonist explains wearily. Bragg feels a particular satisfaction with that song and the topics it tackles. “I often cite that as the ideal Billy Bragg song because politics and ‘the love song’ overlap in that song. It’s a really hard thing to do, rather than being a ‘love song writer’ or a ‘political song writer.’ I hate it when people divide those two. Life isn’t divided like that.”
The ever-encircled worlds of life and politics also led Bragg to write the new book, with the ideas spurred by everything from recent elections in his hometown to raising his young son. “A far-right political party called the BNP earned a seat on the council in my hometown of Barking, East London,” the songwriter says. “That was a real shock to me because these were the people that I came into politics fighting. I realized that it needed something more than just writing a song.” Being a father further drives his desire for intelligent debate around the future of his country. His concerns about nationalism are expressed in the interest of cohesion, not the racist ideal of exclusion. He explains, “I’m interested to hear your background, but what is important to me is how my children and your children are going to get on with each other. Everything else is secondary to that.”
As you might expect, Bragg’s MySpace page also bears the mark of his beliefs and ideas. It also contains his songs: items that were conspicuously absent during his recent showdown with the networking Web site. Having successfully lobbied MySpace to retool their artist agreement so that the site doesn’t “own” any artist’s uploaded content, Bragg is now taking on MTV Flux, another networking site that features an upload ability similar to YouTube. A video featuring his challenge to Flux dots the page, along with archival footage of him at various events, such as a concert in Washington, DC, in 2002. That day he addressed the crowd and warned them of a greater looming evil — not of conservatives or imperialism but of cynicism.
He still stands behind that message. “I know from personal experience that cynicism eats away your soul,” Bragg says. “God knows Tony Blair’s been spreading cynicism around for the last few years. I’ve had to fight my own.” SFBG
BILLY BRAGG
Thurs/5, 8 and 10:30 p.m.
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
$30–$35
(415) 885-0750
HARDLY STRICTLY
BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL
Sat/7, 4:40 p.m.
Speedway Meadow
Golden Gate Park, SF
Free
www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com

Naughty is nice

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October 3, 2006

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Once upon a time, a fair number of people, heartened by the Sexual Revolution and the corresponding collapse of censorship in movies, thought porn was just the preliminary phase to the next obvious step: soon, they assumed, mainstream films would also have real, explicit sex.
The last time anybody thought that was probably 1975 — or if really stoned, 1977. But for a while there, that wild idea seemed not only possible but inevitable. Deep Throat pretty much closed the obscenity conviction book on consenting adults watching adult content in public venues. Hugely successful mainstream films such as Carnal Knowledge and Last Tango in Paris seemed to be tearing down the last “good taste” barriers protecting viewers from having frank discussions about sex and its explicit simulation.
The wide-open ’70s offered a variety of liberated lifestyle choices. Cities had singles bars and sex clubs; the suburbs had hot tubs. Top 40 radio was smirking “Mama’s Got a Squeeze Box” and “More, More, More.” Even network TV had gone raunchy with “jiggle” shows (Charlie’s Angels) and odd one-off leering atrocities like the 1979 Playboy Roller Disco Pajama Party. In the midst of all this sex, sex, sex, it seemed a logical end point would be the total de-shaming of America. Fuck movies would become “real” ones, and “real” movies would include fucking.
Who could imagine how far back the pendulum would swing? Porn would survive, but it and sex would retreat behind closed doors. These days the annual art house succes de scandale, like Brown Bunny and Baise-Moi, is invariably depressing and negative.
Ergo, it is worth all kinds of cheering that somebody has finally made that movie. The one that has talented actors having plot-relevant and unfaked sex, that is beautiful, touching, funny, and artistic enough to be one of the best films of the year. It’s John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, which knows exactly how anomalous it is and where it fits into the current zeitgeist. (The most quotable line occurs when one character surveys an orgiastic scene: “It’s like the ’60s but with less hope.”) Mitchell is defiant enough to create hope, even his own zeitgeist if need be.
Cute New York City gay couple the “two Jamies” (Paul Dawson and PJ DeBoy) are considering spicing up their routine, so they consult sex therapist Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee). In a frazzled moment, she admits she’s never had an orgasm, something she’s never told her husband (Raphael Barker). These questing characters intersect with others at the sex party held regularly at chez Justin Bond (with the performer playing himself).
Shortbus finds narrative room for stalking, attempted suicide, three-ways, and every numeral on the Kinsey Scale. Yet the film never feels cluttered or sensational. In fact, its openhearted seriocomedy (the script is a collaboration between Hedwig and the Angry Inch writer-director Mitchell and the cast) integrates sex so fully into a plaintive, affirmative call for communality that shock value is only intermittent — and deliberately funny when it occurs.
Will Shortbus occasion new local obscenity challenges? Probably not. But 40 years ago, censorship battles were a constant source of news and box-office draw. Before the United States graduated from softcore to hardcore, with many court decisions en route, the hot spot for all things smutty was several thousand safe yet alluring miles away.
This passing rage for cinematic “sin” from parts North will be chronicled by SF-to-Denmark émigré Jack Stevenson at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this week. He’ll present three programs (a clip show and features Venom and Without a Stitch) during “Swinging Scandinavia: How Nordic Sex Cinema Conquered the World.”
It really did. This “myth of total sexual freedom” — as put forth in Stevenson’s book Totally Uncensored!, due in 2007 — was particularly seductive to uptight Americans. By and large, Sweden and Denmark enjoyed remarkably progressive social attitudes at the time. After preliminary taboo-nudging efforts, one dam broke with I, a Woman, a notorious tell-all turned into a show-all (by 1966 standards) portrait of the sexually restless “new woman.” It grossed an astonishing $4 million in the United States alone. But that was nothing compared to I Am Curious (Yellow), a Godardian “kaleidoscope” of hard-to-separate documentary, improv, and staged elements encompassing all the era’s sexual, political, and intellectual questionings. Finally allowed to screen in America (over 18 months after its late-1967 Stockholm premiere), it was probably the most-seen and most-loathed crossover hit prior to The Blair Witch Project — similarly drawing audiences who expected familiar genre exploitation but got something much rawer and more challenging.
A whole series of Danish porn comedies and angsty Swedish sex dramas continued to be churned out until the mid-’70s. The Scandis had brought down many original barricades: Torgny Wickman’s 1969 Language of Love (which Robert de Niro takes Cybill Shepherd to see in Taxi Driver) might be the first commercial feature to show unobscured intercourse. But they soon found themselves intellectually bored and pushed aside marketwise by the expanded allowance for soft- and hardcore production elsewhere. The yahoos (us folks) had won by simultaneously commercializing and marginalizing the Sex Rev. SFBG
SHORTBUS
Opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for showtimes
www.shortbusthemovie.com
“SWINGING SCANDINAVIA: HOW NORDIC SEX CINEMA CONQUERED THE WORLD”
Thurs/5, 7:30 p.m.; Sat/7, 7 and 9 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
$6–$10
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org

Roughin’ Justin

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October 3, 2006

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› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Don’t be tripping, sit your sexy back down slowly, and I’ll try to break the news to you gently: Justin Timberlake and I have a history.
OK, it’s not like we sat around in Pampers and OshKosh B’Gosh, playing gastroenterologist with Barbie and GI Joe and gurgling along to “White Lines.” Though I am getting a dose of feverish white-line nostalgia listening to coke-daddy ode “Losing My Way” off dusty Justy’s new Jive album, Speakerboxxx … whoops, I mean FutureSex/LoveSounds. And it’s not as if we met on The Mickey Mouse Club, brawling over mouse ears and bawling about diaper rash and paltry camera time. We don’t go that way back.
But Kimberly discovered Timberly long before a certain sheepish someone made contact with that Jackson scion’s nipple ornament. I first saw el Cueball, as I so lovingly dubbed my mousy darling’s shaved pate, fronting *NSYNC at the Santa Clara County Fair around ’98. You know, back when the strings were still apparent. I was there with a few other geezer peers, measuring the hype on the opening local Filipino American vocal group, when the budding boy banders entered prancing and the 14-year-old girls went positively cuckoo, clutching photos and near weeping with longing as Timberlake and company worked the whistled theme to Welcome Back, Kotter into the encore.
Then I met up with Timby again at the Oakland Arena when the “Justified and Stripped” tour broke away from the rest of the bubblegum boys and strapped on Christina Aguilera. Whatever you think of Aguilera’s dirty-girl front, she certainly displayed pipes and pride live, strutting around like Femlin in a black corset and short pants and belting out “Beautiful.” But that was forgotten when Timberhunk emerged — thin voice or no, the little girls were still going utterly nutzoid. They screamed, freaked, and gaped like ravenous baby birds beneath the catwalk he beatboxed upon. That’s the power of cute, man.
But Just-oh doesn’t want to be just cute anymore, as the cover of FutureSex attests: suited up in a skinny black suit like a baby Reservoir Dog, little buckeroo looks outright pissed, crushing a disco ball beneath his heel. If Justified hasn’t made it perfectly clear, Timberlake wants to be considered a force — artistic, tough-guy, whatev — to be reckoned with. Pity the poor pop-pets — Madonna, Britney, Justy — they all have such an ambivalent relationship with le fickle dance floor. FutureSex reeks of such ambition — as the swinging singles prince offers up a kind of archaic devotion to the album format and a familiar if downbeat trajectory tracing a loverboy’s woozy weave from lust to lovesickness. Witness the first half of the full-length: “FutureSex/LoveSound,” “Sexyback,” “Sexy Ladies.” Either someone’s out of synonyms for doing the doity or someone’s ob-sexed.
Musically kitted out by Timbaland in the Neptunes’ absence, FutureSex is clearly intended to be a kind of Prince-ly, sensual opus, and for having the good taste to imitate the most original funk rock stylists of the ’80s, Timba-lake should be commended. But all the CD images of Timbo smashing disco balls seem out of character, overwrought. To wax crassly, Justin tries to show us he has the balls to both musically embrace Grandmaster Flash, Queen, Lil Jon, and yes, the alpha and omega, libertine and spendthrift couple of ’80s soul, Prince and Michael Jackson, and strike out on his own. Just ignore the slimness of Timberlake’s vanilla soul. It’s barely flavored, not quite iced, with techno, barebacked beats, and retro soul, and despite the disc’s initially fluid, almost mirror-ball-like reflective programming, it opens into a dull middle section that’s broken up only by the frisky groove of “Damn Girl.” It makes you wish Timberlake had the courage of his initial fantasy-fueled single’s conviction. If only this disco baller had left it at FutureSex and Timberlake stuck to his, er, cheesy pistols and the Prince of schwing’s original program.

CALIFONE DREAMING Califone’s Tim Rutili can probably understand the urge to try out new personae. While talking about his new, gorgeous album, Roots and Crowns (Thrill Jockey), the frontperson and soundtrack composer fessed up to believing in past lives — and indeed relying on that knowledge when it came to penning tunes about kittens that see ghosts, lost eyes, and black metal fornication. “The writing process is all about that — just letting things bubble up,” he says from Chicago, where the band is rehearsing. And what does he imagine the members of Califone were in a past life? “Circus clowns.”
The ex–Red Red Meat member doesn’t seem to spook easily. Case in point: the last time Califone played San Francisco, their van was broken into. Treasured gear such as Rutili’s grandfather’s 1917 violin and a custom-made acoustic guitar, which he says was “nicer than my house,” were stolen. “They were nice enough to leave stuff that looked shitty,” he waxes positively. “It was heartbreaking, but in the end it forced us to learn a lot of new tricks, open up our ideas, and gather new things. It really did inform the recording to not have to lean on any of the old stuff.”
The scattered Califone seems to be working out the kinks in its evolution, with Rutili in Los Angeles writing music for film and the rest of the band in Chicago and Valparaiso, Ind. “I see us getting older and becoming more creative,” Rutili muses. And most people just get older and watch more TV. “That doesn’t seem to be happening with us, but it makes it more difficult too. TV is easy — keeping your eyes open and your ear to the ground and trying to remain connected and in touch with creativity is difficult.” SFBG
CALIFONE
With Oakley Hall and D.W. Holiday
Tues/10, 9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455

Small change

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October 3, 2006

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› paulr@sfbg.com
Recently a colleague reminded me — in the course of a brief correspondence heavy on mutual commiseration (for what are writers if not commiserators?) — that while change is often deplorable, it also must be accepted. “Hate change, embrace change” was her pithy, I might even say her writerly, formulation. In silent riposte, I thought of Uncle Theodore, the lovable rapscallion from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, who relieves “his infrequent bouts of depression” by singing “change and decay in all around I see” (a line from the hymn “Abide with Me”) out the morning-room window of the family’s country manse, Boot Magna, when not whoring about in London.
I like to think that while there may be change in much if not all around I see, there is not necessarily decay. But I do not like the bunches of basil I have been finding at Tower Market, now more than a year and a half under the ownership of the Mollie Stone’s chain. The basil is labeled as “local,” and indeed Mollie Stone’s touts its commitment to local, organic, and sustainable agriculture, but bunch after bunch of this stuff seems to consist of bruised, pitted, and withered leaves that would never have been set out under the old regime. I bought a nice-looking butternut squash for soup, but when I cut it open a few days later it reeked of sulfur and had to be rushed to the compost bin like a code blue patient.
Prices, meantime, have risen sharply, and although I doubt this is entirely the result of chain ownership, I don’t think chain ownership — with centralized procurement and, I suspect, heightened attention to that basic business ethic of buying low and selling high — helps matters. The store no longer sells the nifty little boxes of Spanish saffron at the checkout stands either. Instead there is, for twice as much money, some other kind, elaborately packaged to make it look like there’s more there than there is. I passed.
Wonderful restaurants reinvent themselves for Generation Text-message: first Bizou and soon Hawthorne Lane. Change, decay? I dislike change for its own sake, but fatigue is a fact, and people’s wants and expectations do shift. Yet while casualness is fine, and I have a closetful of blue jeans and T-shirts, there is something to be said for special and elevated moments. Take it away, Uncle Theodore.

Small pieces unjoined

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October 3, 2006

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› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION I think ubiquitous digital surveillance and searchability have given me a weird new sense of entitlement. I feel like I should be able to find anybody on the Web, and if I can’t — well, why not hire somebody to search the databases I can’t access? I caught myself having this exact bizarro train of thought the other day, when I was trying to locate an old friend of mine from high school.
I did all the usual things that generally yield results and have helped me find out all kinds of useless things about lost childhood friends. (That hardcore rocker boy is now a real estate agent! No way!) First I searched on his name in Google, but all I discovered was that somebody with his exact (and fairly common name) died in the Twin Towers. There was a catch though — my old friend went by his Korean name in high school but adopted an American name in college. So I started searching on his Korean name, feeling very clever. Unfortunately his Korean name is actually more common than his American one. Then I narrowed my searches, looking for his names in connection with our hometown, his college, and the city where he lived the last time I saw him. I searched news groups, MySpace, LiveJournal, and Technorati.
At last I couldn’t think of anywhere else to search. That’s when I had the aberrant thought: why not just hire a private detective? Everybody’s doing it — even HP! And I’d get one that wasn’t too expensive. Admittedly my subconscious was spiked with reruns of Veronica Mars and memories of This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a documentary in which a guy hires private detectives to figure out who the members of the Motion Picture Association of America ratings board are.
But I think I hit upon this rather extreme idea — hiring a detective to find my old friend — because I’ve become conditioned to think that all information should be accessible. Despite my belief in online privacy and anonymity, my unexamined, knee-jerk response to the situation was that somebody should be able to get this guy’s contact information for me. I mean, all I wanted was an e-mail. I wasn’t trying to get his home address or voting records.
Needless to say, I did not get a private detective, nor have I found my old friend yet. I’ve avoided becoming creepy but I’m left unsatisfied. The old promises of the Web, which David Weinberger famously characterized as “small pieces loosely joined,” have turned out to be quite different from what we all imagined. Many of us are connected, sometimes to a degree bordering on incestuousness, but many of us are not. The threads do not attach to each other. Names are lost in a sea of names. People fill blogs with entry after entry that never get read, never get linked, never receive comments. Certainly there are spirited local debates that bring us together online and amateur writing that’s as findable as a New York Times headline, but these things are rare and getting rarer. The Web is beginning to feel just like a city street: you can see all the houses, but you have no idea what’s in them. Unless you’re a thief.
I feel cheated by the walls that have gone up on the Web — not the walls that protect my personal information, but the ones that prevent me from finding friends (real friends — not friendsters). They aren’t the same walls, by the way. Walls that protect personal information should prevent people from getting access to whatever crap ChoicePoint and Visa have on you. The walls that stand between me and my old friend are the cacophony of filtered data that the Web has become. I’m sure his e-mail is out there somewhere floating around, but because he hasn’t been writing a popular blog or posting obsessively on the Linux kernel list, it’s got no juice on the search engines. Because he’s not socially findable, he’s not technically findable either. And no, it’s not because he has no e-mail. The guy is an engineer. So much for the Web breaking down barriers.
I’m going to try one last time to find him — but this time, I’ll go at it from the other direction. I’ll call his name and see if he hears me. Let’s see if there are any holes in those walls. If you know a guy who goes by Lawrence Kim or Chong Kim and who once lived in Orange County, let me know. Especially if you are him.
Let’s see if my experiment works. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who can find rare, out-of-print books online but can’t find Chong.

Editors notes

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October 3, 2006

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› tredmond@sfbg.com
There’s something scary happening in Bayview–Hunters Point, and it’s not the redevelopment bulldozers.
For some reason that I find hard to understand, community leaders like Willie Ratcliff and Marie Harrison, who are opposed to the Redevelopment Agency’s plan for that neighborhood, have signed on with a frightening gang of radical right-wing property rights advocates. The result: Harrison was standing at an antiredevelopment rally last week urging voters to support Proposition 90, almost certainly the worst piece of legislation to face California voters since Proposition 13 devastated local government in 1978.
Prop. 90 would indeed limit the ability of government agencies to seize private land for other private projects. That’s why the redevelopment foes like it. But it goes much, much further. Under Prop. 90, no local government could do anything — anything — that might reduce the value of private land without paying the owner compensation. That means no new tenant protection laws (which could cost a landlord money). No more zoning laws that reduce the maximum development potential of a lot (of course, that means no zoning controls against luxury condos that would displace local business and residents in Bayview). No new environmental or workplace safety laws.
It also places a swift and powerful kick to the midsection of any effort to seize Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s local grid and create a real public power system; under Prop. 90’s rules, that would be prohibitively expensive.
I talked to Harrison about this, and she told me she “didn’t read the law that way.” But this isn’t just a matter of opinion; it’s clear fact, and everyone with any sense realizes it.
It gets worse: I was at a New College event Sept. 29 when Renee Saucedo, the immigrant rights lawyer, asked everyone to vote yes on 90. She told me she trusted Ratcliff and Harrison.
Prop. 90 is almost unimaginably bad. If its supporters can make inroads in San Francisco, I’m very afraid. SFBG

Divorcing Columbus

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October 3, 2006

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OPINION This year may go down in history as the one new immigrants reignited a civil rights mobilization in the United States. Their efforts, like those of the black liberation movement of the ’60s, will certainly become a catalyst for progressive action from many communities. As southern Italian Americans, this Columbus Day we have to ask our community the age-old question — which side are we on? Unfortunately, many of us have chosen exactly which side we are on: supporting racist immigrant bashers, whether they are legislators in the halls of Congress or vigilante Minutemen. As progressive Italian Americans, we support new immigrants because of the simple fact that our folks were once in the same situation that newcomers find themselves in: overworked, exploited, and demonized for quick political gain. It’s time for the Italian American community to finally reclaim our social justice tradition, divorcing the dazed and confused explorer who discovered a country that was already inhabited. Instead of Columbus, we honor the Italians, Cubans, and Spaniards of Ybor City, Fla., who worked in the cigar industry and were able to create a Latin culture based on values such as working-class solidarity and internationalism (see “Lost and Found: The Italian American Radical Experience,” Monthly Review, vol. 57, no. 8). We also remember the Italian American radicals who were a part of labor actions in the early 1900s, including the Lawrence textile, Paterson silk, Mesabi Iron Range, and New York City Harbor strikes. This year, instead of conquest, we acknowledge those who stood up for justice. Everyone knows about Al Capone, but what about Mario Savio, a founder of the free speech movement in Berkeley in the ’60s? Most people can recite the names of Italian American singers such as Madonna and Frank Sinatra, but they don’t know Cammella Teoli, the 13-year-old southern Italian girl who appeared before Congress in 1912 to testify in her broken English about the horrible working conditions in America’s sweatshops. It’s not surprising that Italian Americans forgot those things. We faced a lot of discrimination when we arrived: two unionists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were falsely accused of murder and executed. Italian Americans in the south were lynched by white supremacists. During World War II, thousands were relocated or jailed on suspicion of being enemy aliens. After the war, the anticommunist witch hunts began with the arrest and deportation of Italian American radical Carl Marzani. Today, Italian Americans don’t have to face these threats, yet those who immigrate from Central and South America, Asia, and the Middle East do. It is unlikely that Congress will pass any form of legislation reform this year, and many cities have instituted local statutes designed to run immigrants out of town. Minutemen and similar groups are harassing day laborers in the Bay Area and beyond. As Italian Americans, we call upon our paesani and paesane to remember our roots. Emboldened racists can be stopped — when those of us they claim to represent support the work of grassroots organizations of color bravely confronting these throwbacks. By divorcing Columbus, we start to break down the logic of conquest, which invariably leads to wars abroad and repression at home. SFBG Tommi Avicolli Mecca and James Tracy Tommi Avicolli Mecca and James Tracy are Italian American radicals who organize the annual “Dumping Columbus” reading. This year it’s Oct. 9, 7 p.m., City Lights, 261 Columbus, SF, featuring the legendary Diane DiPrima.

THURSDAY

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October 3, 2006

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Oct. 5

Visual Art

“Who’s Afraid of San Francisco?”

Who’s afraid of San Francisco? The whole world, it sometimes seems, including the people who live here. A new group show at Frey Norris Gallery brings together more than 20 works by local artists that examine San Francisco and what it stands for in the public consciousness. Recent “Bay Area Now”-er Frederick Loomis’s apocalyptic work reps the visionary side of matters, while an attractively vivid painting by Enrique Chagoya that chows down on Ellsworth Kelly is one of at least a few works dealing with immigration. (Johnny Ray Huston)

6-9 p.m. reception
Through Nov. 16
Frey Norris Gallery
456 Geary, SF
Free
(415) 346-7812
www.freynorris.com

Music

ADULT.

The Detroit duo, formed in 1997, don’t adhere to the whims of popular youth culture: it is this very aversion that helped inspire their very mature handle. ADULT.’s calculated sparse beats, often reminiscent of kitchen utensils clattering, collide with ominous synthesizers and seething vocals to form a heavily dissonant brand of no wave techno that demands a visceral reaction. They don’t care if it’s love or hate, as long as it makes you listen. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)

With Hardplace and Landshark
9 p.m.
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
$13
(415) 625-8880
www.mezzaninesf.com
www.adultperiod.com

NOISE: BENEFIT

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October 2, 2006

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Hey friends,
We’re playing a show at thee Parkside this Wednesday to help raise funds for Bordertown Skate Park. In case you’re unfamiliar with the park and its story, it started in ’04 with local skaters pouring concrete under the 580 in West Oakland and is now a fully legit nonprofit organization. It’s on it’s way to becoming a truly epic park has been a hugely positive influence on the community, but they need help to see it through.

We’ll be joined by Clay Wheels and River of Rust, so, yeah, we’re keepin’ it real with a full-on skate rock bill. Hope you can join us.

Cheers,
Mike

Bordertown Benefit at thee Parkside
Clay Wheels
AM Magic
River of Rust

6 bucks
Wednesday, October 4
8pm

http://www.supersm.com/cwphotos.html
http://www.ammagicmusic.com/photos.html (or the one attached)

River of rust might have something on myspace:
http://www.myspace.com/riverofrust

also little stephen’s show with magic christian

No more Will and Willie

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September 29, 2006

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By Tim Redmond
I showed up Thursday morning of the Clear Channel studios on Townsend Street to appear on KQKE’s morning talk show, Keepin’ it Real with WIll and Willie, featuring comedian Will Durst and former Mayor Willie Brown, and the producer met me at the door with some sad news: The show had been cancelled, summarily. Two more days on the air. As of Monday morning, the Will and Willie show would be gone.

I’m told the show had a decent (if not stellar) listener base, and was making money. But not enough money — the way Clear Channel sees things, it’s entirely about the bottom line. So the locally produced show that actually took on local issues will be replaced with The Stephanie Miller Show, a syndicated program out of L.A. I’m sure the show is great, and funny and everything else that a lot of Air American programming is — but it’s not about San Francisco. It’s not local.

Once upon a time — and it wasn’t really all that long ago — local radio stations had at least some responsibility to cover local news and issues. Now the Quake, like the rest of the local Clear Channel line up, will have no real local anything, except traffic.

I never thought I’d say this, but we’ll miss you, Willie Brown.

Boys? What boys?

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September 27, 2006

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com
I meet bandleader, videographer, and Mission District indie icon Leslie Satterfield at Ritual café on a summer evening as she walks up Valencia Street looking weather-beaten and weary from her recent travels. Is she just back from a cross-country tour, I wonder? No, she was precisely where you’d expect the guitarist from Boyskout to have been: camping. She survived days of deer watching and near–bear sightings in the Sierras, and despite her desire for a hot shower and warm bed, Satterfield settles in with a cappuccino and some good stories.
Satterfield may be best known for her post-punk quartet Boyskout, a band that’s risen the ranks since its inception in 2001 to tour around the United States and Germany and headline major local venues including Mezzanine and Bimbo’s 365 Club. But the sandy-blond, late-20s songwriter has been also turning heads of late with her filmmaking.
Her video for Film School’s song “11:11” — a minimalist travelogue set in San Francisco streets and tunnels — is the latest work for her own Sharkbone Productions, which has also produced Boyskout videos shown internationally at major gay and lesbian film festivals. Her latest projects include a video for Rough Trade UK–signed act Scissors for Lefty and a self-produced experimental film that she describes as “being about love and creating what you believe.”
“Most of my films have been about how we create our own realities with our mind and how powerful the mind itself is — how your thoughts create everything that happens to you,” Satterfield says.
With her Mission artist garb — black boots and worn dark denim — I figure Satterfield had a youth spent in mosh pits and zine-collective punk hangouts. On the contrary, she grew up listening to the Beatles, Olivia Newton-John, and Simon and Garfunkel, while spending a lot of time drawing. She earned a BA in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design and resided in Amsterdam for a year before moving west. Now in addition to classics from Elton John and Heart, her iPod holds songs by Coco Rosie, the Libertines, and Tapes ’n Tapes. It’s an eclectic collection of music, similar to the local bands she holds dear and performs with regularly. The list includes up-and-coming acts like the Fucking Ocean, Tartufi, Full Moon Partisans, Death of a Party, and the Mall, as well as Shande — the group fronted by her sometime–guest guitarist Jennifer Chochinov.
Admittedly a shy, coy romantic who’s just completed an all-acoustic album, Mixing Memory with Desire (Dial), as J-Mod, Satterfield was initially a reluctant lead vocalist. You wouldn’t know it from Boyskout’s recent rock-out performances: Satterfield’s steely, saucerwide blue eyes zap the audience playfully while she mixes it up with her bandmates onstage. Along with bassist Piper Lewine, keys and violin player Christina Stanley, and drummer Ping (and occasionally adding guest guitarists like Chochinov or Daniel Dietrick to the lineup), Satterfield slayed audiences at South By Southwest this year in Austin and returned immediately to begin recording Boyskout’s now completed second album, Another Life (Three Ring). At the time we speak, eight of the planned 11 songs are done but won’t be out, well, until they’re done. “I’m a huge perfectionist,” Satterfield confesses. “The biggest in the world. I really like to take my time and do things to a tee.”
The songs I’ve heard from the project, including the Nocturne-era-Siouxsie-sounding “Spotlight” and the jittery dance-rock slab of “Lobby Boys,” are as refreshing as local underground music can get (word to Live 105). Meanwhile, Satterfield’s singing on the J-Mod disc (fantastically recorded at Hyde Street Studios) resembles Nico or Hope Sandoval in their darkest, most mysterious moments. Each album serves as an introduction to Satterfield’s thoughtful and dissonant guitar playing, a style that compliments her alabaster-smooth voice. Based on her range of projects and contacts, I get the impression that Satterfield has some big opportunities on the horizon.
Other recent adventures include a trip to Portland to teach at the Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls. “I taught last year in New York, and it was really fun. I worked with a group of 8-year-olds who formed their own band called Pink Slip.” Which reminds me, I never did get to ask Satterfield what her day job is. For now I’ll just assume it’s the professional term for “brilliant multidisciplinary artist.” SFBG
BOYSKOUT
With the Mall and the Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower
Oct. 5, 9:30 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com
www.boyskout.com

SUNDAY

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September 26, 2006

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Oct. 1

Music

Sonic Youth

For 25 years, Sonic Youth have dutifully served as a gateway band. Just as the group has made room in its discography to accommodate elegant noise rock and more avant-garde explorations, so too have its members cashed their cred to draw attention to their own favorites, some pop (e.g., Nirvana), most not. Many record hounds of a certain age can attribute much of their most challenging music to Sonic Youth’s generous thumbs-up – for me, this list includes titles like Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come and Wolf Eyes’ Dread. Though the band’s trademark noise rock is refined with each new release, its taste for adventure remains, here showing its face in the band’s cherry-picking local favorites Erase Errata and 16 Bitch Pile-Up as openers. (Max Goldberg)

8 p.m.
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
$25
(415) 346-6000
www.thefillmore.com
www.sonicyouth.com

Music

The Mass and Triclops!

Oaktown’s Golden Bull has been having some pretty bad-ass Sunday evening shows, thanks to Scott Alcoholocaust. Such as? Such as the Mass, one of the heaviest rock bands going, and Triclops!, which features the brutalized vocals of John Geek from the Fleshies as well as members from Bottles and Skulls, Victim’s Family, and Lower Forty-Eight. Their Web site states their musical goal is “to keep rock music uncomfortable for themselves and others.” Listen to “Bug Bomb” and you’ll see what they mean … somewhere in the instrumental break, you’ll swear the ghost of Steel Pole Bath Tub had crawled into your ear and laid eggs. (Duncan Scott Davidson)

With Grayceon and We March
7 p.m.
Golden Bull
412 14th St., Oakl.
$5
(510) 893-0803
www.myspace.com/bigbulls
www.themass.us
www.triclopsband.com

WEDNESDAY

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September 26, 2006

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Sept. 27

Event

“Slam Arnold Poetry Competition”

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been shot at, beat up, and humiliated as Conan, Commando, the Terminator, and a kindergarten cop. Most Bay Area residents would agree the governor can handle a little bit of verbal abuse. The San Francisco League of Young Voters is hosting the “Slam Arnold Poetry Competition” at the Balazo Gallery to help boot the actor out of office, register voters, and educate young people about important issues. The event will open a forum for discussion regarding current political concerns. Work by local artists will be on the walls, and 12 popular regional poets will compete for prizes and laughs. Ill-Literacy will perform, along with female MCs Rhapsodistas. (Kellie Ell)

6-11 p.m.
Balazo 18 Art Gallery
2183 Mission, SF
$10-$25, sliding scale
(415) 255-7227
www.balazogallery.org
www.indyvoter.org

Film/Event

SF 360 Home Movie Night: American Blackout

It’s a little too late for you to host an American Blackout screening, but it isn’t too late to attend one at someone else’s house – even though some places have already reached sold-out capacity. This first installment of SF360 Home Movie Night showcases Ian Inaba’s documentary about schemes against black voters, which generated waves of praise at the latest SF International Film Festival. Guerilla News Network member Inaba focuses on the campaigns – including covert ones – waged against Democratic Rep. (and outspoken George W. Bush and 2000 presidential election critic) Cynthia McKinney. (Johnny Ray Huston)

10 p.m. (postscreening after-party)
Tosca
242 Columbus, SF
Free
1-866-456-WEED
www.partylaunch.com/ironweedfilms