Mission

Mr. Miserabilism

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Some of Michael Haneke’s early made-for-TV movies are showcased in the aptly titled mini-retrospective "Bitter Pills" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In them, Haneke’s now-characteristic austerity — long static takes, cryptic narrative omissions — is yet undeveloped. But his nihilistic take on society is already present.

The four-hour 1979 Austrian miniseries Lemmings maps out disillusions among the embittered, hypocritical generation of Austrians who "lost" World War II and their suffocated teen offspring. Parent-child relations are toxic. Bonds between peers are no less fucked. Encompassing suicide, infidelity, auto-abortion, vandalism, and joyless full-frontal nudity, Lemmings‘ tragic first part, set in the 1950s, is self-contained. The second part, which takes place years later, finds new ways to rain consequence on its cheerless protagonists and their children.

Black-and-white and Fassbinderesque, 1984’s Fraulein coughs up another fine mess. A German soldier returned from a lengthy Russian POW camp internment finds his family members have long since embarked on brave new paths which range from sell-out capitalism to Elvis-imitative juvenile delinquency. The overall picture is surprisingly quasi-lurid. Today’s Haneke would never allow his miserablism to be diluted by such relative zest.

Adapted from a novel by Joseph Roth, 1993’s The Rebellion is quite different. Mixing archival footage with new material in color and faux-distressed sepia, it chronicles the downward spiral of a one-legged WWI veteran (Branko Samarovski). The whole thing is a classic Teutonic tale of a naive hero efficiently destroyed by the system. Then, as now, Haneke had a gift for making even the bitterest life-lesson pills curiously, even compulsively edible.

BITTER PILLS: MICHAEL HANEKE MADE-FOR-TELEVISION

Thurs/12 through June 19, $6–$8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

The house that Hiero built

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

**Update: The Paid Dues Independent Hip Hop Festival has been cancelled. See below for more details.

I’m not accustomed to receiving rappers at my home at 8 a.m. — an hour most rappers have only heard of — but I made an exception for Tajai Massey, member of Souls of Mischief and Hieroglyphics. A self-confessed early riser and the first MC to ever accept my offer of a cup of coffee, Massey is a busy man.

While gearing up for the Hieroglyphics’ Freshly Dipped tour, which kicks off June 14 with the Paid Dues Festival at the Berkeley Community Theatre, the lanky 33-year-old head of the group’s Hiero Imperium label was about to head to Seattle for a spot date with his new rock outfit, Crudo, with Dan the Automator and ex-Faith No More frontman Mike Patton. Meanwhile Massey’s been juggling two upcoming projects, one of which he hopes to release in the fall: a new, self-produced Hieroglyphics disc and the fourth studio release by Souls of Mischief, produced by legend Prince Paul. In the interim, he’s prepping fellow Souls-member Opio’s second solo album, Vulture’s Wisdom, Vol. 1 (Hiero Imperium), for July.

Yet none of this accounts for our meeting. Our conversation instead focused on Massey’s other job: overseeing his own imprint within Hiero, Clear Label. Though begun in 1999 to release his SupremeEx trip-hop collaboration with Hiero Web designer StinkE, Projecto: 2501, Clear Label really established itself circa 2005 with two artists of a very different sort: Shake Da Mayor of "Stunna Shades" fame and Beeda Weeda, whose 2006 full-length, Turfology 101, yielded the hit "Turf’s Up."

While Shake has since departed, Beeda has cemented his Clear Label connection, moving his whole camp, Pushin’ the Beat (PTB), into Hiero’s two-story East Oakland compound, which was purchased by the veteran collective in 2004. Known within Hiero as "the Building," though designated "Hiero" by everyone else, the space houses nine rooms, five studios, and a small warehouse of T-shirts, CDs, and other goods. Soon Beeda’s friend and collaborator, J-Stalin — himself signed to one of the Bay’s biggest rap independent labels, SMC — began bringing his own Livewire crew by, including Shady Nate, Clear Label’s next signee.

Bulging with the usual conglomeration of computers, mixing boards, rough-hewn vocal booths, and a fine layer of empty 1800 bottles and Swisher Sweet ashes, PTB’s two ground floor studios contrast with the Building’s general tidiness, like a kids’ playspace in an otherwise adult house. Yet they also exhibit an atmosphere of dedication. Dropping by on any given day, among the crowd of just-past-high-school aspiring MCs, you might see Beeda and Stalin studiously hunched over spiral notebooks with Mistah FAB, working on their NEW (North-East-West) Oakland project.

And FAB isn’t the only high profile visitor: everyone from San Quinn to the Federation comes through. Too $hort stops by regularly, and even national acts like Dem Franchize Boyz and Cease of Junior Mafia have found their way here. Given that Beeda and Stalin are two of the hottest young Oakland rappers and attract such elite company, Hiero suddenly finds itself at the center of what might be called the Bay’s post-hyphy moment, one embodied in a tougher, less dance-oriented sound, combined with classic Bay slap and tempered by R&B overtones.

"I wasn’t after a bunch of streeter-than-street dudes," Massey said, laughing. "But I sure ended up with some."

THE OTHER BAY BRIDGE


Intentional or not, the current emphasis on street rappers is consistent with Clear Label’s overall mission.

"Our fans aren’t that forgiving. Even bringing up other acts like Knobody or Musab, who are on the same tip as Hiero — our fans want Hiero music," Massey said, in reference to Hiero Imperium artists and the group’s demanding backpacker following. "So we’ll give it to them, and let Clear Label be the outlet for other acts, especially my relationship with PTB/Livewire."

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Oakland hip-hop converges on the Hiero HQ. Photos by Alexander Warnow

It helps, Massey continued, that J-Moe, the CEO of PTB, has a vision. "That dude is a genius," the Clear Label honcho said. "He’s called the Machine, because he’s always working." With an uncanny ability to spot new talent — like 17-year-old phenom Yung Moses, who J-Moe dubs "the future face of the franchise" — the Machine is a crucial part of the evolution of Clear Label.

But Clear isn’t just a "street label," Massey continued. He’s working with a "rock ‘n’ roll" dude, Chris Maarsol, as well as League 510, which he describes as working in "really a new genre." Hailing from East Oakland, 510 blends lyrical, positive rap and house-influenced grooves in a mix the group calls "Town Techno." "It’s like bridging the hyphy movement and the alternative crowd," Massey said. "I know they’ll do well in cities like Miami, Chicago — where they have a house scene — and in Europe."

Interestingly, according to Massey, European fans have been more receptive to Hiero’s new connections than the domestic audience. "It’s crazy," he said with a laugh. Among other acts, Massey also scooped up Baby Jaymes, digitally re-releasing his 2005 debut, The Baby Jaymes Record (Ghetto Retro), and dropping a new single, "The Bizness," including Turf Talk. "Baby Jaymes is huge in Germany and Belgium, even Australia," Massey added. "I’m in Amsterdam and people are like, ‘Where’s Beeda Weeda?’ Out there people understand the association, whereas in Oakland, they have no idea. It’s odd how Europeans look deeper into it, and it’s a whole different language."

‘WE ALL FROM OAKLAND’


Perhaps it isn’t so odd. The language barrier may even facilitate European acceptance, because despite the differences between Hiero’s conscious lyricism and PTB/Livewire’s grimy topics, the musical bond is already there.

"There are more similarities than differences," Opio told me. "We all from Oakland. Hiero looked to Too $hort and E-40 when we began our independent hustle."

Though he admittedly can’t keep track of the crews’ ever-expanding rosters, former Hiero Imperium head Domino — who, after helming the organization from its mid-’90s inception, stepped down in 2006 to concentrate on production — also welcomes the influx of young talent. "As you get older," he said, "there’s not the same excitement as an artist. You can’t totally get it back, but you can feed off their new energy."

Beyond their shared approval, members of Hiero have already begun to collaborate with PTB/Livewire. Souls member A-Plus, for example, produced the dancehall-inspired opener, "Da Town," on Beeda’s new all-original mixtape, Talk Shit Swallow Spit — possibly the hottest Bay Area disc this year — while Casual appears on Beeda’s forthcoming album, tentatively titled Turf Radio. PTB, moreover, has added a more conscious lyricist, Tre Styles, upsetting what Opio describes as "the boxes the corporate market puts people in."

Massey agrees. "Look at Beeda or Shady. Their mentality isn’t ‘go dumb, go stupid,’<0x2009>" he noted. "Their lyrics are militant, and these guys are growing." Massey was also quick to point out the multidimensional side of J-Stalin, whose crime-ridden raps are infused with melancholy ambivalence about street life. "Stalin could be big like 2Pac," he opined. "He’s not trying to look hard. He’s a little dude, but he’s got all this heart and emotion."

Stalin himself is more modest, albeit slightly, at least concerning his upcoming SMC disc, The Pre-Nuptial Agreement. "Pre-Nup is going to be one of the greatest Bay Area albums ever," he said. "I ain’t saying I’m the best rapper. I’m saying I put together a great album." Judging by the songs he played for me that day — including the radio-ready "Get Me Off" with E-40 — he’s right. SMC’s Will Bronson is sufficiently confident in Stalin — and Beeda — to partner with Thizz Entertainment this summer to bring out the former’s Gas Nation as well as the latter’s The Thizzness, both pre-albums designed to tide fans over before their full-lengths in the fall.

"Stalin and Beeda are the only two new artists really buzzin’," Bronson said. "I couldn’t go a week without hearing about them."

As a result, Stalin and SMC plan to collaborate on future Livewire projects, including a group disc showcasing up-and-comers Shady and J Jonah, longtime members such as ROB, Lil Blood, and Ronald Mack, and newer recruits like Philthy Rich and 17-year-old Lil Ruger, whose wild, almost Keak-esque flow foretells fame.

The connection to SMC and Vallejo’s Thizz, moreover, suggests a serious new coalition which, given the waning of hyphy, threatens to become the next major force in Bay Area rap. "We’re just trying to keep the unity," Stalin concluded. "Because we’re all from different places, we wouldn’t be able to do this in the street."

UNITED FRONT


Such unity, always in short supply in the Bay, is one of the most intriguing aspects of the Hiero/PTB/Livewire situation. "We’ve got a movement, but it’s not a movement," said Jamon Dru, who, along with DJ Fresh, Tower, and others, formed the Whole Shabang, an autonomous production squad linked to both PTB and Livewire. "We’re trying to make music everyone will feel, not just the Bay. That’s put a hurt on us because we do have a ‘fuck everyone else’ attitude, like, ‘I don’t care if anyone else likes this shit.’ But we got families, friends, people in jail we gotta feed. We can’t be half-steppin’ like that."

Like Traxamillion, and unlike many local producers, Dru is candid about the influence of the radio on his sound. "It’s a little Southern-influenced," he said, "a little East Coast with Fresh chopping up samples, but with the 808s and a West Coast bassline. Every beat we make with samples, we gotta put an 808 knock in it." While it’s difficult to generalize, given the work of so many producers, Dru’s statement is a good sketch of the PTB/Livewire sound: it looks to the Bay’s older mob music through the modern lens of hyphy, even as it sheds the more gimmicky excesses of the latter.

Beginning his career under Beeda Weeda’s wing, Dru is already a mogul of his own, currently developing 19-year-old Gully, whose work can sampled on his mixtape Hustla Movement. Like Yung Moses, the saltier-voiced, vowel-stretching Gully is considered one of the most promising rappers in the camp, and the two are already slated for a collaboration. A song like Gully’s "Bush," imagining the life of a ghetto youth who suddenly finds himself a soldier in Iraq, even suggests that Hiero’s more politically progressive themes are creeping into the youngster’s work.

At present, however, Beeda remains the "face of the franchise" for PTB and Clear Label.

"Beeda’s got the biggest buzz," Massey said, "so it makes sense to lead off with him. I just want to set him up properly." Proper set-up in the Bay generally involves a "pre-album," and Beeda’s got three. Besides the all-original Talk Shit mixtape and The Thizzness, Beeda’s collaboration with DJ Fresh, Base Rock Baby — an ’80s-themed disc referring to Beeda’s generation as the first to be born after the crack epidemic began — appears in July.

"We’re going to push that online," Massey said, though there will be hard copies for sale. "Right now, if Beeda’s record sales matched his popularity, I’d be ready to retire." Still, he confessed, "everyone has Turfology, but only a few people bought it," citing the difficulties of selling albums in the era of burnt CDs and file-sharing, not to mention ongoing recession under the George W. Bush administration.

Another problem was the lag between Beeda’s video for "Turf’s Up" becoming popular on YouTube and the actual release of Turfology, confusing consumers who assumed the CD was already out. "This time we got the timing down," Beeda said. "We’ll build that buzz first, and everything will be ready to go." Nonetheless, as falling numbers of mainstream releases attest, selling albums has grown increasingly difficult regardless of timing.

"That’s not how we eat anymore," Dru said. "You put out an album to get shows and verse features [guest appearances on other artists’ songs]. So we gotta look at these songs as bait." Massey, meanwhile, is seeking other income streams to support his label and artists, like soundtracks and licensing.

As Massey confirms, street rap comes with headaches not usually associated with Hiero. A few weeks ago, as Clear Label began preparing Shady Nate’s debut, Son of the Hood, for release, Shady was arrested on an alleged weapons violation and remains incarcerated pending trial.

"They’re trying to throw the book at him," Massey said. "I’m hoping we can work it out because Shady’s a good dude, and his album is great." Even if Shady has to do a stretch in prison, Son of the Hood will probably see the light of day sometime later this year.

Ultimately the big question for PTB/Livewire is whether the coalition can achieve the mainstream success that eluded the hyphy movement. Beeda and Stalin think so, and with the support and mentorship of the Hiero camp, they have as good a chance as any in the Bay — and maybe even the best.

With the long view of a rapper 15 years into his career, Massey is philosophical about the prospects of his Clear Label empire. "If we break even it’s cool," he said. "If we make money, even better. But if I break even, I’m happy, because it wasn’t a loss for me to put out great music."

PAID DUES FESTIVAL***

With Hieroglyphics and others

Sat/14, 5 p.m., $40

Berkeley Community Theatre

1900 Allston, Berk.

www.ticketmaster.com

***This show has been cancelled. From the promoters: Guerilla Union and MURS 3:16 regret to announce that the PAID DUES INDEPENDENT HIP HOP FESTIVAL scheduled for Saturday, June 14 at the Berkeley Community Theatre in Berkeley, CA, has been cancelled due to matters beyond our control.

For fans that have purchased tickets to the show, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Refunds are available for ticketholders at the point-of-purchase.

Election as prologue

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› steve@sfbg.com

San Francisco politics shifted June 3 as successful new coalitions altered the electoral landscape heading into the high-stakes fall contests, when seven of the 11 seats on the Board of Supervisors are up for grabs.
Progressives had a good election night even as lefty shot-caller Sup. Chris Daly suffered a pair of bitter defeats. And Mayor Gavin Newsom scored a rare ballot box victory when the southeast development measure Proposition G passed by a wide margin, although voters repudiated Newsom’s meddling with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission by approving Prop. E.

But the big story wasn’t these two lame duck politicians, who have served as the two poles of local politics for the past few years. It was Mark Leno, who handed Sen. Carole Migden her first electoral defeat in 25 years by bringing together progressives and moderates and waging an engaged, effective ground campaign. In the process, he may have offered a portent of things to come.

The election night speech Leno gave just before midnight — much like his entire campaign — didn’t break along neat ideological lines. There were solidly progressive stands, like battling the religious right’s homophobia, pledging to pursue single-payer health care, and blasting Pacific Gas & Electric Co. for funding sleazy attack pieces against him, reaffirming his commitment to public power.

But he also thanked Newsom and other moderate supporters and heaped praise on his political consulting firm, BMWL, which has run some of downtown’s nastiest campaigns. "It was clean, it was smart, and it was effective," Leno said of his campaign.

The Migden campaign, which had the support of Daly and many prominent local progressives, often looked dirty by comparison, marred by past campaign finance violations that resulted in Migden getting slapped with the biggest fine in state history and by Daly’s unethical misuse of the Guardian logo on a mailer that made it appear as if we had endorsed Migden.

Old alliances seemed to crumble around this election, leaving open questions about how coalitions will form going into an important November election that’s expected to have a crowded ballot and huge turnout.

UNITY AND DIVISION


There are things that unite almost all San Franciscans, like support for public schools. In this election that support came in the form of Prop. A — a measure that will increase teacher salaries through a parcel tax of about $200 per property owner — which garnered almost 70 percent of the vote.

"These numbers show that people believe in public education. They believe in what we’re doing," school superintendent Carlos Garcia told a jubilant election night crowd inside the Great American Music Hall.

Also uniting the city’s Democrats was the news that Barack Obama sewed up the party’s presidential nomination June 3, ending a primary battle with Hillary Clinton that had created a political fissure here and in cities across the country.

"The winds of change are blowing tonight. Let me congratulate Barack Obama on his victory," Leno said on election night, triggering a chant of "Yes we can" from the crowd at the Upper Market bar/restaurant Lime.

Local Clinton supporters were already switching candidates on election night, even before Clinton dropped her campaign and announced her support for Obama four days later.

"As a strong Hillary person, I’m so excited to be working for Obama these next five months," DCCC District 13 member Laura Spanjian, who won reelection by placing fourth out of 12 slots, said on election night. "It’s my number one goal this fall."

Leno also sounded conciliatory themes. In his election night speech, Leno acknowledged the rift he created in the progressive and LGBT communities by challenging Migden: "I know that you upset the applecart when you challenge a sitting senator."

But he vowed to repair that damage, starting by leading the fight against the fall ballot measure that would ban same-sex marriage and overturn the recent California Supreme Court decision that legalized it. He told the crowd, "I invite you to join together to defeat the religious right."

A day later we asked Leno about whether his victory represented a new political center in San Francisco and he professed a desire to avoid the old political divisions: "Let’s focus on our commonalities rather than differences," he said, "because there is real strength in a big-tent coalition."

But this election was more about divisions than unity, splits whose repercussions will ripple into November in unknown ways. Shortly before the election, Daly publicly blasted "Big Labor" after the San Francisco Labor Council cut a deal with Lennar Corporation, agreeing to support Prop. G in exchange for the promise of more affordable housing and community benefits.

On election night, Newsom couldn’t resist gloating over besting Daly, whose affordable housing measure Prop. F lost big. "I couldn’t be more proud that the voters of San Francisco supported a principled proposal over the political proposal of a politician," Newsom told us on election night, adding, "Today was a validation of community investment and involvement over political games."

While Daly and some of his progressive allies have long warned that Leno is too close to Newsom to be trusted, one of the first points in Leno’s speech was the celebrate the passage of Prop. E, which gives the Board of Supervisors more power to reject the mayor’s appointees to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. "As an early supporter I was happy to see that," Leno said.

Susan Leal, the former SFPUC director who was ousted by Newsom earlier this year, said she felt some vindication from the vote on Prop. E, but mostly she was happy that people saw through the false campaign portrayals (which demonized the Board of Supervisors and erroneously said the measure gave it control over the SFPUC.)

"This is one of the few PUCs where people are appointed and doing the mayor’s bidding is the only qualification," Leal told us on election night.
Sup. Tom Ammiano, who will be headed to the Assembly next year, agreed: "It shows the beauty contest with the mayor is over and people are willing to hold him accountable."

ANALYZING THE RESULTS


On the day after the election, during a postmortem at the downtown office of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, political consultants Jim Stearns and David Latterman sized up the results.

Latterman called the Prop. E victory "the one surprise in the race." The No on E campaign sought to demonize the Board of Supervisors, a strategy that clearly didn’t work. Firing Leal, a lesbian, helped spur the city’s two major LGBT groups — the Harvey Milk and Alice B. Toklas Democratic clubs — to endorse the measure, which could have been a factor when combined with the high LGBT turnout.

"This may have ridden the coattails of the Leno-Migden race," Stearns said.

In that race, Stearns and Latterman agreed that Leno ran a good campaign and Migden didn’t, something that was as big a factor in the outcome as anything.
"Migden did too little too late. The numbers speak for themselves. Leno ran a really good race," Latterman said, noting how Leno beat Migden by a large margin in San Francisco and came within a few thousand votes of beating Joe Nation on his home turf of Marin County.

"It was a big deal for Leno to get so close to Nation in Marin," Stearns said.

Leno told us the polling his campaign did late last year and early this year showed he had a strong advantage in San Francisco, "so with that, I invested a lot of time and energy in Marin County."

Stearns attributed the big Prop. G win to its large base of influential supporters: "The coalition-building was what put this over the top." Daly chalked it up to the $4 million that Lennar spent, saying it had bought the election. But Stearns, who was a consultant for the campaign, didn’t agree: "I don’t think money alone ever wins or loses campaigns."

Yet he said the lack of money and an organized No on G/Yes on F campaign did make it difficult to stop the Lennar juggernaut. "You need to have enough money to get your message out," Stearns said, noting that "Nobody knew that the Sierra Club opposed [Prop. G]."

In the one contested judge’s race on the ballot, Gerardo Sandoval finished in a virtual dead heat with incumbent Judge Thomas Mellon. The two will face off again in a November runoff election because a third candidate, Mary Mallen, captured about 13 percent of the vote.

"How angry is Sandoval with Mallen now?" Latterman asked at the SPUR event. "If that 13 percent wasn’t there, Sandoval wins."

Both Latterman and Stearns agreed that this election was Sandoval’s best shot at unseating a sitting judge. "He’s going to face a tougher test in November," Stearns said.

The other big news was the lopsided defeat of Prop. 98, which would have abolished rent control and limits on condo conversions in addition to its main stated aim of restricting the use of eminent domain by local governments.

"It just lost bad," Latterman said of Prop. 98, the second extreme property rights measure to go down in recent years. "It just needs to go away now…. This was a resounding, ‘Just go away now, please.’<0x2009>"

LOOKING FORWARD


Aside from the Leno victory, this election was most significant in setting up future political battles. And progressives won a big advantage for the battles to come by picking up seats on the city’s two Democratic County Central Committees, a successful offensive engineered largely by Daly and Peskin, who were both elected to the eastside DCCC District 13.

"On the DCCC level, we took back the Democratic Party," said Robert Haaland, a progressive who was reelected to the DCCC District 13.

"The fight now is over the chair. The chair decides where the resources go and sets the priorities, so you can really do a lot," Haaland told us.

Many of the fall supervisorial contests feature races between two or three bona fide progressives, so those candidates are going to need to find issues or alliances that will broaden their bases.

In District 9, for example, the candidates include housing activist Eric Quezada (who lost his DCCC race), school board president Mark Sanchez, and Police Commission member David Campos — all solid progressives, all Latino, and all with good bases of support.

Campos finished first in his DCCC District 13 race just ahead of Peskin. Speaking on election night at the GAMH, Campos attributed his strong showing to walking lots of precincts and meeting voters, particularly in the Mission, an effort that will help him in the fall.

"A lot of Latino voters are really eager to be more involved [in politics]," Campos said. "Speaking the language and being an immigrant really connects with them."

Campos thinks public safety will be a big issue on voters’ minds this fall, an issue where he has strength and one that progressives have finally seized. "Until Ross Mirkarimi came along, progressives really weren’t talking about it," Campos said.

So, does Campos’ strong DCCC showing make him the front runner? When I asked that question during the SPUR event, Latterman said he didn’t think so. He noted that Sanchez has always had strong finishes on his school board races, citywide contests that includes the Portola area in District 9 but not in DCCC District 13. In fact, Latterman predicted lots of acrimony and close contests this November.

"If you like the anger of Leno vs. Migden, we’ll have more in the fall," Latterman said of the competitive supervisorial races.

Leno hasn’t been terribly active in local contests since heading to Sacramento, and he told us that his focus this fall will be on state ballot fights and the presidential race. He hasn’t made endorsements in many supervisorial races yet, but his two so far are both of progressives: Ross Mirkarimi in District 5, and David Chiu in District 3. And as he makes more supervisorial endorsements in the coming months, Leno told us, "I will be fighting for progressive voices."

Sarah Phelan contributed to this story.

Valet

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PREVIEW I admit I was a little skeptical on first receiving Valet’s Naked Acid (Kranky) in the mail. I was burned out on Terry Riley–inspired meditation music even before seeing the garishly New Age "vibe painting" gracing the sleeve. It took a couple of weeks for me to get around to actually listening to the thing, and I’m glad I waited: the album begins with bell chimes, distant drums, and a what sounds like a thumb-piano loop, but what follows is hardly Tubular Bells, part two. Naked Acid is a drone album, but an incredibly brave one in which emotions are laid bare and a surprising range of musical textures flow from a minimalist sonic palette. Take three tracks in their chronological order: "Drum Movie"’s milky growl sounds fit for a David Lynch movie. "Keehar"’s reverb-licked guitar plays like celestial rock. "Fuck It"’s scraping drawl evokes Patti Smith played at half-speed or a duskier Mazzy Star.

Though Valet springs from the same Portland, Ore., DIY scene as White Rainbow, guiding light Honey Owens’ musical family tree includes Austin, Texas’ Jana Hunter, Finland’s Lau Nau, and fellow Portlander Grouper. All these women are pushing the female singer-songwriter format into new atmospheric, painterly territory, taking advantage of loop pedals and thick layers of reverb to collapse the distance between performance and production. Naked Acid‘s constant dissolve hovers uneasily between Karen Dalton remove and electronic opacity. After 40 minutes of enclosed drifting, Owens finally bobs to the surface on "Streets," turning a few pirouettes over a bustling programmed beat before clipping it off in noisy heat.

When Owens opened for Atlas Sound here last March, she was plagued by sound problems and seemed lost in the gestalt of her multiplanar drones. This time she plays at two smaller venues — Hemlock Tavern and a Mission District underground space — better suited to her diffuse blues, though it may take something else for her to shake something indelible from what, for now, remains ineffable.

VALET With Galactic Core, Kawabata Makoto, and Numinous Eye. June 18, 9 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

Fashion bug: Prada, Built by Wendy sale it up

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Cool and collected in Built by Wendy.

Shopping Spy eyes two lil’ sales that should be on all fashion-trawling bargain hunters’ radar.

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One: fashionista staple Prada‘s painterly, juicy-cute spring/summer line is now on sale – don’t the models look like Karen Kilimnik waifs lost in a Oskar Kokoschka dreamscape? Love those crazzzeee-awesome tulip-heeled, jewel-hued shoes. I haven’t checked the sale out, but for those who wanna beat Shopping Spy to it, the SF store is at 140 Geary, SF. (415) 391-8844.

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Is that actress Robin Tunney modeling the fall ’07 Built by Wendy line?

Two: Longtime coolster NYC label Built by Wendy is ushering in its new SF store with a neat lil’ sample sale. It started Friday – and lordy, the lines to the two dressing rooms were long. Not as bad as the windy queues for the Xbox or iPhone, but Shopping Spy thinks the new store can use more o’ those and full-length mirrors. Oh well, it’s a work in progress, much like your toils over those fab Built by Wendy sewing patterns.

The boutique is set to officially open on June 15, and in the meantime you can pick up bargains on their recent collections: mini-trenches, safety-pinned sweaters, striped shorts, cute jumpers, blouson-ish silk party frocks, and flower-strewn sexy-secretary blouses. No guitar straps in sight. Designer Wendy Mullins’ coats and jackets come in at around $140 on sale, the silk dresses are about $70, the tops are around $45-$60, T-shirts are $20, and bare, tied-strap cotton play-tops clock in at $10. Hey, there’s men’s stuff, too. The sample sale continues Saturday, June 7, noon-7 p.m., and Sunday, June 8, noon-6 p.m., at the new Built by Wendy San Francisco, 3520 20th St. between Valencia and Mission, SF. (415) 824-1582.

Built by Wendy causes pocket wriggles

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By Dona Bridges

I could have sworn that my credit card wriggled in my pocket as I was walking along Valencia the other day in the glorious Mission sunshine. I figured it was a Pavlovian response to the red and white awning of Minnie Wilde, a frequent stop for me (and source of many, many free airline miles courtesy of United Visa). I shrugged off the supernatural tremor and walked on determinedly: later for you, my plastic frenemy.

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Local Artist of the Week: Ryan Alexiev

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LOCAL ARTIST Ryan Alexiev
TITLE Postcard invite for “The Land of a Million Cereals”
THE STORY Cereal is the most popular breakfast food, and the third most popular product in American supermarkets. Currently there are more than 400 cereals, primarily distinguished by their ad campaigns. The substance of cereal is, in this light, ideology. Through prints, sculpture, video, and drawings, “The Land of a Million Cereals” explores cereal’s history and importance as a paradigmatic consumer product. In the role of a Bulgarian peasant, Alexiev does battle with Frankenberry, who wields a powerful golden spoon — free in every box!
BIO Ryan Alexiev was born in Los Angeles and raised in Alaska by Bulgarian immigrants. He received a BFA in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004 and an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2007. He currently lives and works in San Francisco.
SHOW “The Land of a Million Cereals,” Fri/6 through July 12. Wed.–Sat., 1–6 p.m. or by appointment. Opening reception Fri/6, 6–9 p.m. Mission 17, 2111 Mission (Suite 401), SF. (415) 861-3144, www.mission17.org.
WEB SITE www.ryanalexiev.com

So much “Useless” beauty

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Perhaps cinema is useless. Jia Zhangke entertains this idea — as a subtext — in his 2007 documentary Useless.

As the waves of raves for Jia have rolled in, I’ve felt a bit detached. In the case of Useless, however, I responded immediately to Jia’s vision. By focusing on clothing and to some extent fashion, he takes on subjects I find inherently filmic. (I’ll watch documentaries about Yves Saint-Laurent, Yohji Yamamoto, and yes, I’m a Project Runway devotee). More important, he appears to be outside his comfort zone. The friction that results, and the deep ambiguity and ambivalence at the heart of Jia’s movie, reward repeat viewings.

Useless takes its title partly from a clothing label of that name started by designer Ma Ke, who is profiled in the second of the film’s three sections. After she muses on the "shame" of China being associated with mass-produced cheap goods, Jia films the unveiling of her debut collection for Paris Fashion Week, where at least one older European model is nonplussed by the weight of the clothing, which has been dug up from the ground after a period of burial.

The potential meaning of such moments ricochets silently — yet far from painlessly — off the gorgeous gliding images of employees at work in a clothing factory in the beginning of the film, and a somewhat dramatized portrait of an obsolete tailor shop in Jia’s hometown of Fengyang at the close. Some reviews have faulted Useless for not relying on literal touches such as intertitles or voice-overs. But when Ma Ke’s deluxe car heedlessly speeds by a tailor on foot, Jia doesn’t need words to make a point. He isn’t out to damn Ma Ke — my guess is that the filmmaker in him identifies with her.

NEW WORKS BY JIA ZHANGKE

Thurs/5 and Sun/8, call for times

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2700

www.ybca.org

Faith-based initiative

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW The Contemporary Jewish Museum was founded in 1984 as the Jewish Museum San Francisco, and "starchitect" Daniel Libeskind’s building design, which seemingly bursts out of an 1881 vintage brick facade opposite Yerba Buena Gardens, began taking shape nearly a decade ago. But for all intents and purposes, the CJM’s opening this week marks the launch of a new art space that must affirm its brand identity on our cultural landscape. The folks behind this identity-based museum aim to instill a sense of belief in the place as a meaningful institution and to lure repeat visitors — Jews and non-Jews alike. With a prominent public location — and what could be a decent café — the odds are in its favor.

Other factors might continue that momentum. The building itself is a bold yet restrained move by an architect whose Jewish Museum in Berlin tends to overshadow its contents. The CJM, however, succeeds in feeling both formidable and intimate. The spaces balance form and function: they look good and seem like they can accommodate and contextualize the works within. Still, the programming itself should be the primary element in attracting viewers.

The opening offerings include a delightful survey of work by the New Yorker cartoonist William Steig, organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, and a sound series selected by John Zorn. But the centerpiece exhibition, "In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis" — an ambitious, CJM-organized conglomeration of newly commissioned installations and historical and contemporary artworks and artifacts — is a clear sign the admin is taking the museum’s challenge seriously and thinking big.

The show is designed to offer entry points to a range of viewers, its biblical foundation rooted in the Old Testament volume of Genesis, which speaks to Christians and Jews and allows the concept of creation to relate to art, religion, and science. The curators — museum director Connie Wolf, deputy director Fred Wasserman, and assistant curator Dara Solomon — abide by an imperative not to restrict exhibited works to pieces by Jewish makers. "In the Beginning" unfolds in a hallway antechamber with a flat-screen monitor displaying a grainy video of images of the Earth and the moon as seen from Apollo 8, television footage widely seen on Christmas Eve 1968, with audio of the astronauts reading the opening verses of Genesis. The inclusion points to a curatorial openness to pop-cultural artifacts as part of a contemporary art dialogue.

The seven commissioned installations are the headliners in the expansive temporary exhibition space, and they’re by a deliberately diverse group of artists. There are pieces by Matthew Ritchie and Trenton Doyle Hancock, artists who set down complex personalized cosmologies that essentially are their own elaborate creation myths, and both manage to create works with visual appeal. For a piece titled Day One, Ritchie uses a couple of gently angled walls for a graphically ornate mural that accommodates orb-shaped projections of roiling, animated landscapes, sun flares, flocks of ambiguous black shapes, and a soundtrack of the artist pondering existence and creation. A more rambunctious spirit pervades Hancock’s In the Beginning There Was the End, in the End There Was the Beginning, which is set against dizzying cartoonlike wallpaper and depicts a mythological narrative involving characters called Mounds and lowly Vegans.

The exhibit’s inspiration is literary, and text appears frequently, as in the somewhat vertigo-inducing animated work by Shirley Shor, an ex-Bay Area resident who swirls projections, in English and Hebrew, of Web-gathered references to Genesis down a wishing-well structure. Ben Rubin contributes God’s Breath Hovering over the Waters (His Master’s Voice), a sound sculpture inspired by an antenna developed by Bell Labs physicists in the 1960s that, according to the artist, led to audible evidence of the Big Bang. A Kabbalistic-inspired work by Mierle Laderman Ukeles is the show’s most spiritual, and involves layered audience participation including forging a personal covenant with the artist, the public, and the self.

Filmmaker Alan Berliner adds a more crowd-pleasing form of participation with Playing God, a satisfying interactive, seven-channel video — one for each day of creation — installation that emulates a slot machine as it generates phrases with words from Genesis. Audio-visual jackpots can be had, and pushing the glowing buttons quickly becomes addictive.

The show’s inclusion of historical and archival material is a riskier gambit. While designed to enrich the exhibition themes, adding objects such as a 15th-century biblical manuscript page, a Tiepolo drawing, Tom Marioni’s shadowbox assemblages, and Barnett Newman’s 1948 painting Onement II starts to seem cluttered, or, as they say in Yiddish, ungehpotchkeyed. Still, the "something for everyone" approach clearly stems from a gracious perspective or brand, not an obfuscating one. And that’s a curatorial position worth a return visit.

CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM

Opening exhibits include "In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis," Sun/8–Jan. 4, 2009; opening events include "Dawn 2008," Sat/7, 8 p.m., $10-$15 with Dengue Fever and Jonathan Safran Foer; grand opening Sun/8, 10 a.m. ribbon-cutting, 11 a.m. doors, free.

Contemporary Jewish Museum

736 Mission, SF

(415) 655-7800

www.thecjm.org, www.dawn2008.org

Stephen Pelton Dance Theater

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PREVIEW Stephen Pelton’s full-bodied and thoughtfully structured choreography fits his dancers like second skins. It’s one of the most appealing aspects of the work from this longtime San Francisco artist who now spends half of his time in London. Another of his gifts is choosing music — whether it’s Radiohead, Schubert, or Edith Piaf — that supports his purposes ever so smoothly. Often drawing inspiration from literary sources, Pelton is a storyteller in the manner of poets who suggest, evoke, and analogize — but don’t spell out. The results are dances that resonate like a Zen bell. He may be best remembered for The Hurdy-Gurdy Man (1998), that strangely haunting solo drawn from documentation of Hitler’s body language. He also has created such epics as The American Song Book (1997), which uses popular American music to evoke three different periods in US history. But Pelton’s choreography is most at home in intimacy, full of contradictory impulses in which violence looks lyrical and tenderness totters at the edge of the abyss. A note of melancholy and resignation permeates much of it; perhaps this is not unexpected from an artist who came of age during the worst days of the AIDS crisis. Pelton describes and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me, this season’s premiere, as a meditation on aging. Performed solo and as an ensemble, the piece grew out of a World War II poem by Anglo-Irish poet Louis MacNeice. The work’s accompanying music is from the English composer Gavin Bryars. This program includes a preview of next year’s Citizen Hill, last season’s Tuesday, Not Here (created for the remarkable Nol Simonse in 2003), and Christy Funsch in her reworked 2007 Solo for Somebody.

STEPHEN PELTON DANCE THEATER Thurs/5–Sat/7, 8 p.m., Sun/8, 7 p.m. Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St., SF. $20–$25. (415) 273-4633, (415) 826-4441, www.dancemission.com

Election night parties

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Here’s a roundup of the main local election night parties:
Yes on A – Great American Music Hall, O’Farrell and Polk streets

Yes on F, No on G – Grace Tabernacle Church, 1121 Oakdale

Yes on G, No on F – Javalencia Café, 3900 3rd Street

Mark Leno – Campaign HQ, 1344 Fourth Street (at “D” Street)
San Rafael, CA 94901 (he might also stop by Lime, 2247 Market Street, where some DCCC candidates – including Laura Spanjian and David Campos – are having a party)

Carole Migden – Campaign HQ, 121 9th St., near Minna

Joe Nation – Wipeout Bar and Grill, 302 BonAir Center, Greenbrae

Fiona Ma for Assembly – Soluna, 272 McAllister

No on 98/Yes on 99 – 1601 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland

League of Young Voters, Sandoval for Judge, progressive DCCC candidates and some Yes on F and No on Prop. 98 supporters – El Rio, 3158 Mission Street

And then there’s the Bay Guardian’s “Don’t Dodge the Drafts” election night party, 7-9 p.m. at Kilowatt, 3160 16th Street btw Valencia/Guerrero. Bring your voting stub for drink specials.

Wheatpaste for peace: SF Peace Billboards Project launches

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Photos and text by Ariel Soto

About 100 art lovers gathered at the University of San Francisco (USF) on Memorial Day, May 26, to participate in a bus tour around the city to see 10 billboards by 10 artists from around the world that showcase their visions of what peace looks like, as part of the San Francisco Peace Billboards Project. The tour was headed by USF visual art professor Richard Kamler who first conceived the idea for the billboard project after wondering, in his words, “Why confine these images to the walls of a museum when we can take them to the community and have a significant impact?” The billboards will continue to be on display until June 22nd throughout San Francisco.

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Peace billboard by Israeli artist Uzi Broshi at 22nd Ave and Irving

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Peace billboard by Japanese artist Betty Nobue Kano at Masonic Ave. and Fulton

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Artist Betty Nobue Kano

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Iranian artist Taraneh Hemami (left) with USF visual art profesor Richard Kamler

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Peace billboard by Iranian artist Taraneh Hemam at Divisadero Street and Hayes Street

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Peace billboard by Tibetan artist Jamyoung Singye at Mission Street and 6th Street

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Artist Jamyoung Singye

Prop 98 could destroy the next Kerouac

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By Jen Sullivan Brych

What if Jack Kerouac couldn’t find a cheap place to crash in San Francisco so he could drink at Vesuvio Café and bang on his typewriter? Would he have been forced to remain in the “sanitarium” of San Luis Obispo, as he referred to it? Would he have been forever missing what a biographer called the “feverish intensities” of San Francisco, never inspired to write again?

Even worse, what if the next generation of Kerouacs and Alice Walkers and Michelle Teas can’t afford to live in San Francisco anymore? The frightening Proposition 98 on the June 3 ballot would eliminate all rent control in California. If San Francisco loses rent control, it loses writers and its literary scene.

“If rent control goes, I know I’d lose my apartment soon enough,” said writer Peter Orner via email. Orner wrote The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. He was also a Finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award for Esther Stories.

Orner has lived in the Mission for about five years. “They’d replace me with an investment banker in about forty seconds,” he said.

So why should people care if writers like Orner leave the city en masse? Richard Florida, University of Toronto business professor and author of the book The Rise of the Creative Class, argues that this group of people is creative, makes good money, and values diversity. The creative class includes writers of all genres, as well as educators, financiers, scientists and techies.

The group is attracted to urban areas like San Francisco, which ranked number one in Florida’s creativity rankings for large cities, because of its theater venues, its cafes and spoken word performances, its rock musicians and art galleries; in other words, because of its writers and artists and the quality of life they provide. Florida argues that cities which are successful in attracting this creative class are prospering, while cities that don’t are not. So, if rent control vanishes and the writers and artists disappear, our city by the Bay will suffer.

Lit: Erick Lyle on rehab for Newsom and SF, the awful flair of Willie Brown, book box mansions and life in the City

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This week’s Lit features a review of Erick Lyle’s new book On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City (Soft Skull Press, 272 pages, $14.95). Liam O’Donoghue recently talked with Lyle, who will be appearing at Get Lost Travel Books on June 4th and AK Press Warehouse in Oakland on June 5th:

By Liam O’Donoghue

SFBG: The phase “secret history” is in the subtitle of your book and the term “urban archeology” is used to describe it. Did it feel like an archaeological project — like you were digging up this buried history of the city — when you were compiling the book?
Erick Lyle: When I moved to San Francisco I was lucky enough to be around a lot of older folks who told me their stories about the city and I fell in love with this place instantly. I feel like I’ve got all those stories filed away in my mind, so that when I’m out, riding my bike around the city, if I’m at a certain intersection, for example, I’ll think, “Oh, this is where that punk club was in 1988, but it’s also where so-and-so broke up with her boyfriend in 1995 and there was that one time when a guy tried to hit me with a 2×4.” But I can see all these layers simultaneously in my mind, and for me, part of the enjoyment of living here for awhile is seeing how these layers fit together over time. It gives an added dimension to, for example, a protest event you might be doing, to understand how that event fits into the longer history of the area.

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Erick Lyle, in his secret mansion enjoying the high life

As far as thinking about it as archeology at the time, I wouldn’t say that we were so self-conscious that we would do generator shows in the street so we could say, “This is history.” But if we don’t write this shit down, no one is, it’s not making it in the Chronicle or anywhere else. The things that happen in the doorsteps of the Mission or on the dance floor at the punk club or are spray-painted on the walls: these are the things that make up our lives. That’s the fabric of life in the city.

Art Street Theatre

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PREVIEW The places we long to be often have the greatest hold on our imaginations. In Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina dream of returning to Moscow, believing it’s the only place they can be truly happy. Of course, in Chekhov’s version, they never do manage to reach the Promised Land. Their dreams unfulfilled, the sisters eventually must resign themselves to their respective quiet desperations. Mark Jackson’s Yes, Yes to Moscow, which makes its North American premiere at Dance Mission Theatre for the San Francisco International Arts Festival, imagines the long-awaited arrival of the sisters to Moscow and the pitfalls of getting what you wish for.

Jackson, whose focus on the physical has long been a hallmark of his work, collaborates with Berlin-based choreographer Sommer Ulrickson, American actor Beth Wilmurt, and German performance artist Tilla Kratochwil to create a multidisciplinary, multilingual, multifaceted production. A smash hit at the Deutsches Theater a continent away (leading to a commission for Jackson and Ulrickson to collaborate again in 2009), Moscow‘s San Francisco debut fits in well with SFIAF’s theme: the truth in knowing/now. Forced by an unsympathetic and foreign reality to reexamine their assumptions about home, Moscow, and familiarity, the sisters must confront the not-knowing within their now, and rediscover truth as best they can.

Art Street Theatre Fri/30, 9:30 p.m.; Sat/31, 4:30 p.m.; Sun/1, 7 p.m. Dance Mission Theater, 3316 24th St., San Francisco. $20. 1-800-838-3006, www.sfiaf.org.

The orbs

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In Thorsten Fleisch’s five-minute Energie! (2007), an untamed 30,000-volt current exposes photographic papers that are then sequenced in a manner that suggests or reveals systems of electrons. Fleisch’s film is a blast. Its black-and-white lightning formations resemble angry veins in the eyeball of an electrical beast — and the veins in your eyes will sprout similarly after gazing at this strobe attack by Fleisch, a student of Peter Kubelka.

The orb that gradually rises to the center of the screen during Energie could be a ferocious cousin of the eclipse that forms the insignia for the digital projects of Other Cinema, Craig Baldwin’s space for visions in the Mission. It also serves as a core symbol for Other Cinema’s latest calendar-closing "New Experimental Works" program.

Here’s an orb, there’s an orb, everywhere’s an orb, orb! There’s one at the center of Shalo P’s Vengeance 2.0, which begins with a word of warning from Michael Jackson before mixing Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo (1958) and numerous Batman symbols into a brew fans of Paper Rad and Michael Robinson might enjoy. There’s even a character named Orb in Apple, a sword-clanging, sprite-eared, and typically ingenious vision from "from the hideous director of Dawn of the Evil Millennium," Damon Packard, whose movies are as potent as laughing gas and better than all other drugs.

Eli Marias’ and Amos Natkin’s An Internal Camaraderie might not feature an orb, but its new age mix of hilarity and potent hypnotism includes just about everything else, including fluorescent rainbow colors, a sea of testifying infomercial faces, and one well-deployed white turtleneck.

Other highlights among "New Experimental Works" that this reviewer was able to see include: Roger Deutsch’s Act Your Age, where a pencil is not just a pencil; Tony Gault’s Count Backwards From 5 (2007), in which images of water — with a powerful use of voice-over — convey the mystery of family and death; and Danny Plotnick’s Out of Print, a four-minute testimonial that should be placed in a time capsule.

OTHER CINEMA: "NEW EXPERIMENTAL WORKS"

Sat/31, 8:30 p.m.; $7

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

Bullet time

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

An utterly complete retrospective of Johnnie To’s films would be too much to ask, really. To’s résumé to date involves nearly 50 features, with at least one release nearly every year since 1986. His work also spans such a gobsmacking array of genres that even an audience of dedicated fans might experience exploding-head syndrome. And genre is the key word here; the man’s a master at it, a trait that has earned him admiration if not fame stateside — probably a good thing, given the cautionary tale of the Hollywoodized John Woo. Though even his most bizarre Chinese New Year farces occasionally pop up at the 4-Star Theatre (and probably nowhere else in the Bay), To’s most internationally acclaimed entries are his action flicks, filled with blazing guns, taciturn antiheroes, and, inevitably, at least one scene in which several characters pause their killin’ to enjoy a hearty meal.

So, sorry, completists — To’s exercises in romance (including 2001’s gloriously offensive Love on a Diet, which makes Eddie Murphy’s fat-suit adventures look subtle), his 1993 supernatural tough-chick classic The Heroic Trio, and his goofy comedies (like 2003’s young-doctor yukfest Help!!!) are not repped in the Pacific Film Archive’s "Hong Kong Nocturne: The Films of Johnnie To." Even the PFA admits, in their notes on the series, this is a "small sampling" of To’s output. But if I had to pick nine To films — culled, as the PFA’s are, from To’s output under his own Milkyway Image banner, created in 1997 — my sampling would likely resemble what’s on tap through June.

The essential To screens first: 1999’s The Mission, as close to perfection as he’s ever come. Spare, gritty, and obsessed with the business of male bonding (a To leitmotif), The Mission is about five gunslingers (all character types: a hairdresser, a barkeep, a pimp, etc.) who come together to protect a mob boss, then close ranks when they’re ordered to off one of their own. To regular Anthony Wong plays the hairdresser — a guy so grim he’s known as "The Ice" — so you know this shit is serious.

The theme of loyalty among assassins who’ve become friends despite themselves is echoed in 2006’s Exiled, which brings back much of the Mission cast. In this modern-day spaghetti western, the gang is charged with killing a former comrade who’s left the organization and settled down with wife and baby. A straightforward execution is discarded in favor of an endlessly complicated scheme that involves a gold heist, double-crossing mob heavies, seedy operating rooms, and more; naturally, slow-motion bullet ballets punctuate every act with gory grace. Wong, as a sad-faced killer caught between doing the right thing for his boss and the right thing for his conscience, is typically top notch.

The more overtly linked Election (2005) and Triad Election (2006) also address the gangster code, taking a darkly realistic look at how Hong Kong gangsters select their leadership — honor takes a back seat to power, and money, of course, means everything. Breaking News (2004) adds eager TV crews to To’s usual cops-‘n’-robbers stew. There’s a lesson learned about not turning police business into a media circus, and yes, it’s a lesson tattooed into Hong Kong streets with many, many bullets.

"Hong Kong Nocturne" may be the PFA’s program title, but not every selection is a dark tale. Throw Down (2004) is a judo comedy. The amusing if overlong Fulltime Killer (2001, codirected with frequent collaborator Wai Ka-fai) follows dueling hired guns O (Takashi Sorimachi, stone-faced but Snoopy-obsessed) and Tok (a particularly smirky Andy Lau). To’s meta-intentions are signaled at the start, when Tok voiceovers, "I like watching movies, especially action movies." My general feeling on Fulltime Killer, from a later Tok observation: "Not the best movie, but I like the style." For an even more bizarre Lau performance, 2003’s Running on Karma is recommended; the star plays a psychic bodybuilder turned stripper. A muscle suit that eclipses even Love on a Diet‘s stunt-costume gimmickry is prominently featured.

The series’ local premiere, 2007’s Mad Detective, is unfortunately non-noteworthy. The rubber-faced Lau Ching-wan, a To favorite, stars as the titular detective. He hears voices! The voices are embodied by actors who follow him around! The conceit gets old fast. For a better Lau-To pairing, pick up 1999’s Running Out of Time — not part of "Hong Kong Nocturne" but worthy enough to be. *


"HONG KONG NOCTURNE: THE FILMS OF JOHNNIE TO"

May 29–June 27, check Web site for schedule, $9.50– $13.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, UC Berkeley, Berk

(510) 642-1412, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Hold out for Hunters Point

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EDITORIAL In the late 1980s, Mayor Art Agnos put forward a plan for development at Mission Bay, which at that point was an underused plot of land that used to be a Southern Pacific railroad yard. He negotiated with the developer, Catellus Corp., and cut what he insisted was the best deal the city could possibly get. He insisted that any more demands — for, say, increased affordable housing — would have so damaged the project’s finances that nothing would ever be built.

Development opponents took the issue to the voters — and the mayor’s plan lost. Catellus promptly came back with a much sweeter deal.

It’s worth remembering that lesson, because next week voters will be faced with a stark choice for a massive Hunters Point–Bayview redevelopment plan. Mayor Gavin Newsom and his allies say the city has squeezed major concessions from the developer, Lennar Corp. The San Francisco Labor Council and two community groups have forced Lennar to sweeten the pot even more (see "Assessing the deal," page 11). At this point, the city’s supposed to have the best deal it can possibly get.

But with all due respect to the Labor Council, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), and the San Francisco Organizing Project, it’s not good enough.

The battle — which is shaping up as a very close contest — involves dueling ballot measures Propositions G and F. Prop. G is the deal Newsom and Lennar are pushing; it would give the financially troubled developer the right to build 10,000 new housing units, office and retail space, and a new football stadium, along with 300 new acres of parks, in one of the city’s most economically depressed areas. Some of the new housing would be available at below-market rates. Prop. F raises the ante a big notch: it would require that half of all Lennar’s housing be available to people making less than the median area income, which is $75,000 for a family of four.

For the record, it’s worth noting that the new concessions labor got would never have happened if Sup. Chris Daly and a group of Bayview–Hunters Point activists hadn’t placed Prop. F on the ballot. In fact, organized labor wasn’t terribly involved in the redevelopment project until a couple of months ago. That’s when Lennar’s team of political consultants realized that they might be facing a shellacking at the ballot June 3.

The polls show that Prop. F is very popular — and for good reason. It’s a simple proposal that makes excellent intuitive and practical sense. As housing activist Calvin Welch likes to say, San Francisco doesn’t have a housing crisis — the city has an affordable-housing crisis. Multimillionaires don’t have trouble finding places to live. And unfortunately, much of the new housing being built in this city is targeted to the very rich: typical market-rate one-bedroom condos start at around $500,000 and soar quickly into the millions. The rest of the city is getting forced out, and the dramatic, profound gentrification is transforming San Francisco.

Even the city planning department recognizes what’s going on: the Housing Element of the city’s General Plan states that 64 percent — nearly two-thirds — of all new housing ought to be affordable.

But the vast majority of the residents of Bayview–Hunters Point could never afford the vast majority of the new housing units Lennar wants to build. Prop. F seeks to address the deep imbalance in the proposed housing mix.

Lennar is squealing, saying it can’t possibly make the project pencil out with that much affordable housing. The company’s political team pushed the Labor Council to side with them, and in exchange for endorsing G and opposing F, labor got some worthy goodies. The level of what Lennar calls affordable housing is now higher than 30 percent — but when you actually look at those numbers, only about half of the 30 percent is truly affordable to the neighborhood residents who face being forced out of town. There’s also a new job training program and a mandate that new businesses allow their staff to unionize through a simple card-check process (although the city would almost certainly mandate that anyway).

But the bottom line is that the deal labor cut doesn’t meet what ought to be the standard for all new housing in San Francisco. Even after all the concessions, roughly 70 percent of the new units will be available only to rich people. That’s not acceptable in a city that is rapidly losing its artists, writers, musicians, immigrants, students … just about everyone who makes San Francisco such an exciting place to live is now an endangered species. And labor’s deal fundamentally does nothing to change that.

Vote yes on F and no on G. And if Lennar won’t build enough affordable housing, let’s scrap this deal and find someone who will. *

Putting the “Van” in “Van Morrison”

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By Phil Eil

I was walking down Mission Street the other night, just South of Cesar Chavez, when I saw something that made my heart skip. No, it wasn’t another ex-girlfriend lookalike (they’re everywhere, I swear), it was a 1991 white Toyota Previa — a doppelganger of my first car — parked in front of The Knockout.

The Previa, if you don’t know, was a Toyota minivan produced from 1991 to 1997 (their popularity followed roughly the same arc as Soundgarden’s). With a name derived from the Italian word “to preview” or “to look ahead,” Previa enthusiasts, past and present, agree — the Previa was a visionary feat of engineering.

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Targeting immigrants…in a good way

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San Francisco celebrated Spanish-speaking cultures over the weekend with fun Carnaval events in the Mission District, and housing activists followed that up by commandeering six billboards and using them to put out messages in Spanish urging voters to reject Prop. 98, which would end rent control and restrictions on conversion of rental properties to condos.
Members of the clandestine coalition who liberated the billboards say immigrants have already had to endure an increase in immigration sweeps and a rising level of anti-immigrant vitriol from the right, so now is the time to fight back against a change in housing laws that would hit low-income immigrants particularly hard.
One member of the coalition who was named, Ruben Salazar, said in a public statement: “What we need now are big, bold reminders shortly before the election to turn out the vote on June 3. Prop 98 is a wolf in sheep’s clothing hiding from public attention and sneaking into law during an off-season election. We decided to take over corporate billboards to loudly expose the hidden agenda of Prop 98 and to reclaim the corporate media for community use.”

Blast from the past

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Intern Phil Eil checks out his neighborhood diner – without nearly kissing his mother.

Does your license plate read, “MCFLY”? Have you been scanning Craig’s List for a Flux Capacitor? Well, while you’re waiting for that “Your DeLorean is ready,” phone call (the waiting list is eight months last time I checked), head over to Al’s Good Food Cafe at Mission and 29th Street. The place is a time machine, itself — definitely where Doc Brown dines when he’s in the Bay Area.

Al’s opened in 1947 and it hasn’t changed much since. From the original Cattle Queen of Montana poster signed by Ronald Reagan to the menu descriptions (“Maiden Christina’s Special: A breakfast feast for the delicate lady with the big appetite…”), the place is steeped in old-school American allure. As “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” played over the speakers, I ate a Jo’s Special — three extra large eggs scrambled with ground chuck, fresh spinach, green onions and mushrooms — and tried to named the movie stars pictured on the walls. Jimmy Dean. Audrey Hepburn. That other guy from Rebel Without a Cause.

But while the décor of Al’s is the real deal (as opposed to, say, Chili’s), the reason to eat there is not the Bing Crosby champagne bottle (“He only gave them to his closest friends,” Jean, my waitress, told me) or the Thank-You note from Florence Henderson. It’s the hospitality. Al’s daughters Jean and Joann have been working there since the restaurant opened, and they keep it grounded in its original principles. “Everyone here aims to please,” Joann told me. Jean added, “My father always said, ‘Soup and coffee is like saying, ‘Hello.’”

Leaving the restaurant, I put on my sunglasses, popped in a lollipop (it came free with the bill), and headed back out to Mission St.—back to the future.

Al’s Good Food Café
3286½ Mission, SF
(415) 641 – 8445

Al's Cafe 012.JPG
When this thing hits 88 miles per hour, you’re gonna see some serious…scrambled eggs.

Strange powers

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Witch! The accusation — or is it rallying cry? — that slices through Goblin’s pounding score for Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria is newly pertinent. Witchery reigns within strains of black metal and the long-awaited third chapter in Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy (which began three decades earlier with Suspiria), this summer’s invigoratingly zany naked bloodbath Mother of Tears. It’s tempting to credit film curator Joel Shepard with a sorcerer’s clairvoyance, because the "Witchcraft Weekend" he has programmed for the screening room at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is so damned prescient.

The centerpiece of "Witchcraft Weekend"<0x2009>‘s imaginatively and near-immaculately selected quartet of movies — the dark void or blinding light around which the other three orbit — is Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 Day of Wrath. I’ll be brazen enough to admit that my first encounter with this masterpiece occurred one evening while flipping channels, when its flaming dramatic core — a harsh counterpoint to the heroic final stakes of his peerless 1927 The Passion of Joan of Arc — flickered before my eyes and basically branded my psyche (and soul?) for eternity. There are few scenes in cinema as bluntly harrowing as the demise of accused witch Herlofs Marte (Anna Svierkier): her defiance and her fear of death — but not of God — rage as forcefully as the man-made inferno that consumes her.

Day of Wrath might be the most quietly terrifying or suspenseful art film ever made (though it shouldn’t be blamed for the form’s current crimes against patience or intelligence), because Dreyer seamlessly connects realism with a deeply ambiguous understanding of spirituality and fate. That is no small achievement, and one that’s been increasingly rare with the passage of time. The fate of Herlofs Marte is evident from the film’s first scene, where she hands herbs from a gallows garden to another woman, stating, "There is power in evil." Seconds later the bells begin to toll for her and — thinking of a past secret — she flees to seek refuge in the household of Absalon (Thorkild Rose); his bear of a mother, Marte (Sigrid Neiiendam); and his young wife, Anne (Lisbeth Movin), who seems to possess strange powers.

In the feline, fiery-eyed Movin, Dreyer finds this lonelier film’s answer to Falconetti from The Passion of Joan of Arc: in other words, an actor whose face becomes (to paraphrase André Bazin quoting Béla Balasz) a timeless and more ambivalently transcendent "document." Critics have pointed out Day of Wrath‘s abundant visual similarities with Italian Renaissance and Flemish painting, particularly the works of Rembrandt (James Agee went so far as to point out one sequence’s resemblance to Rembrandt’s 1632 Lesson in Anatomy), and Bazin is intuitively and perhaps more insightfully correct in invoking the film’s influence on Robert Bresson’s equally classic 1951 Diary of a Country Priest. But it takes Pauline Kael to sympathetically hone in on the feminine "erotic tensions" of what she deems "the most intensely powerful film ever made on the subject of witchcraft." As she puts it, "Dreyer dissolves our terror" as characters are "purified beyond even fear." But the sense of fear and terror he instills is purer than that engendered by the horror genre’s gleeful scare tactics.

"Witchcraft Weekend"<0x2009>‘s trio of other films steer clear of Blair Witch and Harry Potter terrain as well as the easy, if extremely enjoyable, kitsch of Teen Witch (1989) or The Craft (1996) to explore and connect less obvious instances of celluloid sorcery. In a manner that magnifies the resonance of Day of Wrath‘s austere use of black and white, Shepard brings in a pair of contrasting Technicolor sights: the Queen or Witch (spine-chillingly vocalized by Lucille La Verne) from 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the scorpio-rising bikini sacrifices of William O. Brown’s 1969 cult obscurity The Witchmaker. The program’s series of spells begins with the wicked Witchcraft Through the Ages, a 1968 abbreviated revision of Benjamin Christensen’s energetically episodic 1922 silent work Häxan, featuring a frenetic and playful jazz score by Jean-Luc Ponty and mordantly misogynist narration by William S. Burroughs. *

WITCHCRAFT WEEKEND

Thurs/23–Sun/25

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Spork

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Spork’s sporks are surprisingly elegant utensils, considering that the word itself is lovably ugly, like a dog with a crumpled face, hopelessly short legs, and/or absurdly wrinkly skin — and considering that the thing itself, a spoon with a clipped mustache of fork tines, is no lovelier. The spork might be the apotheosis of Southern-fried American cheesiness; it’s easy to picture one replacing the pitchfork in a redraw of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, with Homer Simpson as the farmer. But if your spork is made of handsome stainless steel and has a nice weighty feel in your hand, you have probably drifted into Spork, a Mission restaurant that opened about a year ago in a tired Kentucky Fried Chicken space on Valencia, and you are almost certainly not Homer Simpson, though you might be ravenous.

The KFC was incongruous to the point of camp, and I never saw anybody in it despite my frequent visits to Valencia Cyclery across the street to have broken spokes replaced. Like the Days Inn near the symphony hall, it was a remnant of an earlier time and — in the case of KFC, a greasier one. The Sporkers (led by chef-owner Bruce Binn, whose distinguished vita includes stints at Delfina, Postrio, and Bix) are well aware of the past and, in a series of clever moves, have simultaneously embraced and distanced themselves from it. The interior decor of the restaurant incorporates bits of the previous occupant’s design; the stump of an old venting hood has been turned into a handsome light fixture, while refrigerator cooling fans have been repositioned in a transom above an interior door. There are also plenty of booths along the window with a familiar fast-food angularity, but the color scheme — gray paint and blond wood — isn’t one you’d be likely to find in any fast-food restaurant in the country.

Since the restaurant’s mantra is "slow food in a fast food shell," we were not surprised to learn that the kitchen places a heavy emphasis on sustainability and locavorousness. All the seafood is wild and taken from well-managed fisheries; more than two-thirds of the restaurant’s waste is recycled or composted; and used cooking oil gets turned into biodiesel. Like a child determined not to repeat a parent’s mistakes, Spork corrects for the culinary sins of KFC about as much as it possibly can.

Yet Binn’s food isn’t at all precious or fussy. It’s hearty and vivid — a glimpse of what all-American food might look like in a better world, or at least a better America. There’s even a dish that comes with a spork: mussels and pork ($18), basically a plate of mussels steamed in an unnamed (but dark?) Belgian beer and plated with a slab of slow-roasted pork loin, some whole-wheat toasts dabbed with chipotle aïoli, and a substratum of asparagus. The spork in question is rather handsome; it’s a stainless-steel spoon with the fork tines subtly shaved into the far end of the bowl, like a grille, and more decorative than useful.

For deals on a menu, it’s hard to beat an item that costs $0. That’s the charge — right there, in print! — for Spork’s dinner roll, a tripartite, wonderfully soft bun sprinkled with crunchy sea salt and presented with a pat of whipped honey butter. They’ll bring you more than one, too (as many as you want, probably), but one is plenty for two people and more than satisfies the daily white-flour quota. Softness does have its price.

Given the fresh tartness of strawberries, it’s long surprised me that they aren’t used more as tomato substitutes, particularly in the spring, when such tomatoes as we find around here are coming from distant locales we don’t even want to know about. Binn makes a lovely little salad ($9) from organic strawberries; the slices are marinated in aged sherry and plated with effusions of wild arugula, almond slivers, a syrupy balsamic reduction, and a warm goat cheese fritter on top.

As if to offset the white-flour megadosings in the dinner rolls, the kitchen serves an Alaskan halibut fillet (at $24 the priciest dish on the menu) on the slope of a farro hillock. Farro is an ancient wheatberry much used by the Roman legions; it’s quite similar to barley but different enough from both ordinary wheat and barley to be nutritionally valuable, not to mention tasty, especially when cooked with leek. (Although farro is a whole grain, Binn’s grains were plump and fluffy, which mystified and impressed me until I made my own a few nights later, having first soaked the farro overnight, and voilà.) Apart from the fish itself, sautéed to a golden tender-crispness, the plate held a royal flush of red-beet slices whose vivid, Burgundy-colored sweatings added some welcome color to a floe of fiery but wintry-white horseradish cream.

The Spork experience might be at its most quasi-Southern when your swift and friendly server, clothed in black, presents the dessert menu. Beignets and root beer floats? Elvis would like those, but he’d probably like "Elvis has left the building" ($6) even more. Despite its arty deconstructedness, it was a housemade peanut butter cup beside a blob of vanilla gelato beside a chain of banana slices, with caramel sauce underneath and salted peanuts scattered all around. All of it was good and swirled together nicely, but the peanut butter cup was quite spectacular. It had been warmed through in the oven to the point of melting, and its peanut butter filling was granular and (unlike the blindingly sweet commercial kind) not particularly sugary — a close relation of homemade peanut butter, which you can make in a food processor with good quality unsalted peanuts and some neutral vegetable oil as a binder. You could even scoop it out of the bowl with a spork, if you have one. *

SPORK

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 6–10 p.m.

Fri.–Sat., 6–11 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

1058 Valencia, SF

(415) 643-5000

www.sporksf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Loudish but bearable

Wheelchair accessible

Starry-eyed and stripped

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW More than one witness has reported that Mayor Gavin Newsom, fiancée in tow, dropped by the jam-packed opening reception for photographer Ryan McGinley’s show at Ratio 3. The civic-minded pair joined the fray of cool kids and art world cognoscenti — I heard John Waters and Todd Oldham were there — and in some ways the appearance was apropos: the artist and politician share a lineage of tall, charismatic Irish Catholics who inspire others to action. Noting celebrity, political, and religious connections is admittedly a little suspect in a review of a contemporary art show; still, the youthful but stately mayor’s presence at a gallery on a somewhat gritty Mission side street has meaning as an expression of the widespread appeal of McGinley’s pictures. Who could resist lush images of nubile white boys and girls cavorting naked amid what seem like national parks and roadside America?

McGinley is a particularly American artist. One of the photographs on view is even a dead ringer for an Andrew Wyeth painting. Rather than Christina crouched in the wheat field, McGinley’s Running Field (2007-08) offers a lithe young woman dashing through golden rolling hills wearing only white sneakers. His choreographed vision is a brand of hipster organic purity, a dream of back-to-the-land naturalism and free love.

McGinley also manages to straddle a number of positions and demographics. Among the 16 pictures in this satisfying exhibition, there’s full frontal male nudity, and a wonderful image of a shirtless blond guy embracing a black bear, both of which unabashedly read as queer. A centrally placed picture of a group of hikers in a rocky canyon plays like a still from an update of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970). McGinley’s photograph exudes cineaste hippie-spiritual vibes, as does the acid trippy image titled Blue Falling (2007-08), in which the silhouette of a male figure — the hair on his legs crisply visible in profile — is seemingly suspended in an intensely hued sky. Dakota’s Crack Up (2007-08), visualizing an ebullient male/female couple caught in an active moment of undressed while roller-skating, brims with both clothing-optional resort appeal and fashion photo bravado.

The youth and nakedness of this universe seems to be related to Larry Clark’s kid obsessions, except McGinley is still young himself — he had a solo show at the Whitney five years ago, when he was 24 — and his surprisingly wholesome pictures are more hooked on fresh air and community than the more troubled eroticism of the wizened though still dreamy-eyed elder artist. A cinematic influence also binds these two figures. Most of the photos in McGinley’s show blur the line between naturalism and studio artifice: the hikers on the rocks are positioned in light in such a way that they appear to have been inserted digitally, the woman in Fireworks Hysteric (2007-8) seems to be floating in a glittering, celestial space, as do other subjects who have been catapulted into thin air. And is that a naked dude embracing a stuffed animal or a real live bear?

According to the artist, the animal is a living thing, albeit a trained one. He also admits the colors in his works are achieved through an intense darkroom practice. That gray area between the real and the imagined works in the artist’s favor, lending his images a sense of the uncanny: the activities captured in his photos did happen, though they come across as otherworldly.

There’s also a performance art backbone to McGinley’s process. His photos depict a team of models, cast for their looks as well as their athletic abilities, who travel together for extended periods. The constant contact promotes intimacy and physical fearlessness, and while they are very believable as an actual pack of marauding, hopeful young people, they are in fact a constructed entity — a family of paid actors directed by an artist with a clear vision of a kind of communal lifestyle. McGinley assuredly realizes these images, but they don’t come off without some suspicion. Where can these photographs go from here? The likeability of the pictures — and models — is tinged with envy and perhaps a resentment of the cool high school kids who seem impervious to social or sexual obstacles. That McGinley’s models reportedly sustain their share of photo-shoot injuries only attests to his winning feats of fiction. It all appears so smooth and dreamy. I don’t know what the mayor thought, but in the end, McGinley’s work won me over, and I want the feeling to last. *

RYAN MCGINLEY: SPRING AND BY SUMMER FALL

Through June 21

Wed.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

Ratio 3

1447 Stevenson, SF

(415) 821-3371

www.ratio3.org

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