Occupy

Corporations, people, money, and speech

Andrew Lam
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Corporations, people, money, and speech

tredmond@sfbg.com

On July 24, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors weighed in on a policy debate that’s become a powerful cause on the American left. By a unanimous vote, the supervisors placed on the November ballot a measure calling for a Constitutional amendment to end corporate personhood.

“We’re living in a time of trickle down economics and tax breaks for the rich,” Avalos said, later adding, “Big corporations [are] able to spend vast amounts of money” and have “the greatest influence on the outcome of elections.

“We need to look at our Constitution and have it amended so we aren’t looking at corporations as living, breathing people,” Avalos said.

That’s an immensely popular sentiment in this country, and it’s been stirred up by the US Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a ruling that has come to represent all of the evils of big-money politics rolled into one two-word phrase.

More than 80 percent of Americans say they want the decision overturned. Six states, including California, have passed resolutions calling for a Constitutional amendment. Occupy protesters have made it a big issue. Marge Baker, policy vice president for People for the American Way, wrote a Huffington Post piece calling the campaign “A Movement Moment.”

But while Citizens United is a great rallying point, the challenge here goes way beyond one court decision. Citizens United didn’t create corporate personhood. Repealing the decision won’t end the flow of money in politics — and a lot of First Amendment experts are exceptionally nervous about anything that seeks to mess with this central part of the Bill of Rights.

And for all the denunciation of Citizens United, the solution — drafting the actual language of a new Constitutional amendment — turns out to be more than a little tricky.

MICHAEL MOORE AND HILARY CLINTON

Citizens United v. FEC has a complicated history. In 2002, Congress passed the McCain-Feingold Act, which barred corporations and unions from funding “electioneering” activities in the period right before an election.

The right-wing group Citizens United complained that Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 911 was an attack on George W. Bush and intended to influence the 2004 election, and the courts dismissed that complaint, saying that there was no evidence the independent documentary was an illegal campaign contribution.

Citizens United then started making its own “documentaries,” including one in 2008 that many saw as a campaign commercial against Hillary Clinton. The FEC found that the video was, in fact, “electioneering,” and the case wound up at the Supreme Court.

The legal decision was complicated, but among other things, the court ruled that a ban on independent corporate spending on election campaigns was a violation of the First Amendment rights of those business entities.

That was amplified when Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney uttered his famous line, “corporations are people.”

But in reality, Citizens United alone hasn’t caused the tsunami of big money that’s poured into elections, including the 2012 campaigns. Much of the cash contaminating the presidential coffers this year comes not from corporations effected by the ruling but from individuals and private trusts that have been free to throw money around for decades.

“The flood of money is disgusting and corrupting,” Peter Scheer, director of the California First Amendment Coalition, told us. “But it isn’t coming from public corporations. It’s mostly wealthy people and private trusts, and they didn’t need Citizens United to do this.”

In fact, the groundwork for modern sleaze was set a long time ago, in 1976, when the Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo that, in effect, money was speech — and that any rich individual could spend all he or she wanted running for office.

What the Supreme Court has done, though, is set the modern political tone for campaign finance — among other things, invalidating a Montana law that barred corporate contributions to campaigns. And in the majority ruling and the assenting opinions, the court made clear that it doesn’t think government has any role in leveling the campaign playing field — that it’s not the business of government to decide that the money and speech of rich people and big business is drowning out the opinions and speech of the rest of the populace.

SO NOW WHAT?

So now that every decent-thinking human being in the United States agrees that there’s too much sleazy money in politics and that it’s not a good thing for government to be for sale to the highest bidder, the really interesting — and difficult — question comes up: What do we do about it?

There are a lot of competing answers to that question. And frankly, none of them are perfect.

That may be one reason why the ACLU is mostly on the sidelines. When I contacted the national office to ask if anyone wanted to talk about the efforts to overturn Citizens United, spokesperson Molly Kaplan sent me an email saying “we actually don’t have anyone available for this.”

But on its website, the organization — in a nuanced statement on campaign reform — notes: “Any rule that requires the government to determine what political speech is legitimate and how much political speech is appropriate is difficult to reconcile with the First Amendment.”

In an ACLU blog post, Laura Murphy, director of the group’s Legislative Office in Washington DC, argues that “a Constitutional amendment—specifically an amendment limiting the right to political speech—would fundamentally ‘break’ the Constitution and endanger civil rights and civil liberties for generations.”

But David Cobb, one of the organizers of Move To Amend, which is pushing a Constitutional amendment, told me that “the idea that spending money is sacred is part of the problem, the reason that we don’t have a functioning democracy.”

There are two central parts to the problem: The notion that corporations have the same rights to free speech as people, and the notion that money is speech. Eliminate the first — which is immensely popular — and you still allow the Meg Whitmans and Koch brothers of the world to pour their personal fortunes into seeking political office or promoting other candidates.

Eliminate the second and you open a huge can of worms.

“It would be a disaster, in my view,” Scheer said. “As a general principle, I’m frightened by the concept of tampering with the Constitution.”

Money may not equal free speech, but it’s hard to exercise the right to free speech in a political campaign without money. And there are broader impacts that might be hard to predict.

But Peter Schurman, one of the founders of MoveOn.org and a leader in Free Speech for the People, told me that “it’s a false premise that money equals speech. The point is to get a level playing field.”

THE PROPOSALS

Move to Amend and Free Speech for People are promoting similar approaches, Constitutional amendments that, in fairly simple terms, would radically and forever alter American politics. Several members of Congress have offered Constitutional amendments that include similar language.

The Move to Amend proposal is the broadest and cleanest. It states: “The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only. Artificial entities, such as corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities, established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law.”

It goes on to say: “Federal, State and local government shall regulate, limit, or prohibit contributions and expenditures, including a candidate’s own contributions and expenditures, for the purpose of influencing in any way the election of any candidate for public office or any ballot measure.”

It also includes this statement: “Nothing contained in this amendment shall be construed to abridge the freedom of the press.”

Free Speech for the People is simpler. It only addresses the corporate speech issue: “People, person, or persons as used in this Constitution does not include corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities established by the laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state, and such corporate entities are subject to such regulations as the people, through their elected state and federal representatives, deem reasonable and are otherwise consistent with the powers of Congress and the States under this Constitution.”

Cobb notes that the Move to Amend measure doesn’t say how political speech should be regulated; it just opens the door to that kind of lawmaking. “The question of how to protect the integrity of the electoral process is a political question, not a Constitutional question,” he said. In the end, there’s a huge issue here. The framers of the Constitution, their political consciousness forged in a battle against big and repressive government, feared as much as anything the notion of rulers controlling the rights of the people to speak, write, assemble, publish (oh, and carry firearms) freely. Corporate interests (with the possible exception of the British East India Company, which monopolized the tea trade) weren’t a major concern.

And First Amendment purists still recoil at the idea that government, at any level, could make decisions limiting or regulating political speech. I sympathize. It’s scary. But in 2012, it’s easy to argue that the power of big money and big business has far eclipsed the power of government, that for all practical purposes, the rich and their corporate creations are the government of the United States — and that the people, assembled and exercising the power envisioned under the Constitution, need to make rules to, yes, level the playing field. Not rashly, not in crazy ways, with full cognizance of the risks — but also with the recognition that the current situation is fundamentally unacceptable, and that the potential dangers of messing with the First Amendment have to be balanced with the very real dangers of doing nothing.

Protest song

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Protest song

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Woody Guthrie would have turned 100 this summer, and numerous centennial celebrations mean that hundreds of people probably have “This Land is Your Land” stuck in their heads at this exact moment. But Guthrie was as much a political icon as he was a catchy folk singer. His “Union Maid” was the anthem of countless labor struggles, and he wrote a regular column for a communist newspaper. “This Land is Your Land” itself was penned in response to the complacent patriotism of “God Bless America.”

Political movements, of course, have always had soundtracks. Before Guthrie was singing the working man’s songs, the Wobblies were writing their own. Slaves sung — or whispered — about freedom as they traveled the Underground Railroad, and civil rights activists bellowed “We Shall Overcome” on marches and in jail. And for several years, the folk music scene was synonymous with the anti-Vietnam War movement.

While there is no one quite like Bob Dylan on the radio right now, or hoards of activists (that we know of) crooning from jail cells, plenty of local musicians are keeping up the tradition of writing and performing protest songs. If you ask any of them whether they’re primarily musicians or primarily activists, they’ll answer that the two identities are inseparable — and that 100 years after Woodrow Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, the intersection of art and politics is still a completely natural one.

For Bonnie Lockhart, a member of the East Bay group Occupella, music inspired her to become a lifelong activist, and politics later supported her career as a musician. Growing up in conservative Orange County, she listened to civil rights songs on the radio. “I remember being so moved by the music. I had no context in which to understand what was going on in the South but because that music moved me, I pursued it and found out,” she explained. “It drew me into understanding that something was terribly wrong in our country and that people were doing something incredibly exciting about it.” Later, her involvement in the Women’s Movement gave her courage to pursue a musical career.

Activists have long recognized the power of song to raise morale and create cohesion. “Music is a powerful force for unity,” said Arthur Holden of the Musicians Action Group (MAG).

The amorphous MAG emerged from the more organized Bay Area Progressive Musicians Association, and now consists of a small group of veteran activists and anyone else wants to join them at demonstrations. Initially, music was a crucial political tool. “The police were not happy having picket lines blocking things and nobody knew what to do with a bunch of people with instruments,” said MAG clarinetist Gene Turitz. “When we saw the police coming we would get between the strikers and the police. It would at least stymy them.”

Now, one of the group’s primary goals is to preserve the sounds of historical struggles. MAG is one of the rare groups that continues to perform the Communist anthem “The Internationale.”

“Whenever we do it at a demonstration, someone comes over to us with tears running down their cheeks [in recognition],” Turitz said. The classic pieces have equal importance for those hearing them for the first time, Turitz said, recalling playing “Bread and Roses,” a tune about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory strike, at a march on Cesar Chavez Day. “A guy in a Latino union group comes over and says, ‘That’s the most beautiful song, what’s it about?’ When I tell him, he gets thrilled. It’s that kind of thing we’re trying to preserve.”

Today, the concept of political musicians achieving commercial success might sound oxymoronic, and groups like Peter, Paul and Mary might seem a thing of the progressive past. “When I was coming up in the ’70s, you could record for real companies,” said Lockhart. “It was still capitalism but it wasn’t this voracious. The record labels weren’t into being monopolies, they were into having a niche.”

Others pointed to a more fragmented, diffused political scene to explain the lack of politics on the radio. But many believe that music is just as integral in contemporary struggles as it was in the past, even if the audience it reaches is smaller and the format is more innovative.

“I think our younger generation is just as engaged in art for social change,” said Talia Cooper, a 26-year-old Oaklander who performs original political songs at rallies. Some current Bay Area groups, such as the Brass Liberation Orchestra, consist mostly of younger musicians.

Cooper, who records under the name Entirely Talia, remembered going to long Occupy lectures at the beginning of the movement and watching the crowd become re-energized when she lead them in song.

“People go to demonstrations and passively listen to speakers. There’s just so much listening people can do,” said Occupella’s Hali Hammer. “When they’re singing, they’re directly involved.”

“I used to think it was cheesy for people to say that revolutions need art,” Cooper said. “But if you think about what gets people to show up, it’s the beautiful posters, or the flashmob with the dancers, or the singing.”

Occupella meets Mondays from 5-6pm at the weekly “Tax the Rich” demo on Solano Avenue at Fresno Avenue, Berkeley.

Bay Area activists join in anger over Anaheim police shootings

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Last weekend in Anaheim, police shot and killed two young men. Every day since, protesters have taken to the streets. This weekend, a national day of protest following the killings helped spread the call for justice in Anaheim spread to the Bay Area. 

Manuel Diaz, 25, was unarmed when he was killed by Anaheim police July 21. When a crowd gathered at the scene as Diaz lay bleeding, police fired rubber bullets and pepper balls into the crowd. One police dog got loose, charged at a baby, and bit the child’s father. Police say they used crowd control because the people had grown rowdy, and that some were throwing rocks. The next day, police shot a 21-year-old, Joel Acevedo, who they say shot at officers while fleeing. 

Anaheim police shot another man the next day, a suspected burglar, marking the eighth officer-involved shooting in Anaheim so far this year. Five of the shootings resulted in death, and all but one of those killed were Latino.

“What’s going on here in Orange County is symbolic of a problem with the system,” Eduardo Perez, a 21-year-old student who attended Sunday’s protest told the Orange County Register. “This wouldn’t happen to white people. This is racism, simple as that.” 

Saturday was a designated a national day of action, and protests in New York, Oakland, Seattle, and Chicago took place, while a smaller group marched Friday in San Francisco. 

Tensions boiled over between protesters and Anaheim police Tuesday. Police say that protesters smashed windows and set fires. They shot at a crowd of hundreds with rubber bullets, beanbags and pepper balls, arresting 24 by the end of the night. That was what an Occupy Oakland medic, who preferred to be quoted as Elle, want to head down. 

“I saw an insane amount of force being used to disperse protesters who I think are rightfully angry. I noticed there was nobody there as a medic, reaching out to do first aid,” Elle said. 

On Sunday, protesters rallied at the APD headquarters and attempted a march to Disneyland. Law enforcement officers in camoflauge uniforms, toting tear gas launchers, blocked them the crowd from getting near Disneyland.

“They were stopped by the SWAT team that apparently wears desert camo,” said Elle, noting that Anaheim police and Orange County sheriff’s deputies, many on horseback, also confronted the march. 

Although Elle says that she did observe mounted police “using their horses almost as batons to shove and hit protesters onto the street,” she only treated minor injuries as a medic. 

”The unfortunate thing about being a medic is that these people who are being arrested need your help the most,” she said.

“The arrests they made were pretty violent, the ones that I saw. They hit one guy over the head with their baton as they were taking them to the van. They carried another woman out from a back alley, and she was crying and terrified. They were pretty brutal to the people they were arresting.”

Elle says she wanted to go help in Anaheim in part to help build a unified movement.

“We’re building a movement in Oakland around a really similar situation,” she said.

“If our state, community, country is going to make these murders stop all these communities need to rise up together and say this is unacceptable, we need to stop. It’s going to take a lot of people getting out there into the streets and building constant popular support to say this is an unacceptable use of our tax dollars.”

That “constant popular support” has been mounting in the Bay Area so far in 2012. Occupy Oakland started off the year with a march to the Oakland City Jail, and, the next day, joined with the Oscar Grant Committee for a march and rally commemorating his death. As officer-involved shootings have continued throughout the year, family and supporters have continued to take to the streets in response. 

“I also wanted to help build a bridge between Oakland and Anaheim,” Elle says of her trip. 

“If every community is issuing statements saying we want police to be held accountable for these deaths, we want to revoke the police officers’ bill of rights, we want active legislation preventing stop and frisk, active legislation to protect people’s fourth amendment rights, I think it could accomplish something,” Elle said.

Queens, aliens, isles of wonder, and more: what to watch this week

Sue Vaughan
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My pick for movie of the week is The Queen of Versailles, a likely (I’m callin’ it in July) inclusion on my top 10 list for 2012. Seriously, this doc is revealing, timely, surprising, beautifully lensed (by photographer-turned-director Lauren Greenfield), and affords an insidery peek into the mysterious borderlands between extreme weath and excessive tackiness.

Hollywood would like you to see either an alien-invasion comedy with Ben Stiller or the fourth Step Up entry … you could do worse, but you could do better. Frankly, I’d pencil in The Queen of Versailles for your Saturday night, and settle in tonight for the 2012 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, which comes complete with the amusement park-ish title “Isles of Wonder.” All the buzz indicates that the extravaganza, directed by Danny Boyle (not known for his subtlety), will be one for the ages, or at least supply some juicy fodder for the meme generation.

Reviews of everything opening this week (spoiler: there’s a lot) below the jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoVRetUMub0

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry Unstoppable force meets immovable object — and indeed gets stopped — in Alison Klayman’s documentary about China’s most famous contemporary artist. A larger than life figure, Ai Weiwei’s bohemian rebel persona was honed during a long (1981-93) stint in the U.S., where he fit right into Manhattan’s avant-garde and gallery scenes. Returning to China when his father’s health went south, he continued to push the envelope with projects in various media, including architecture — he’s best known today for the 2008 Beijing Olympics’ “Bird’s Nest” stadium design. But despite the official approval implicit in such high-profile gigs, his incessant, obdurate criticism of China’s political repressive politics and censorship — a massive installation exposing the government-suppressed names of children killed by collapsing, poorly-built schools during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake being one prominent example — has tread dangerous ground. This scattershot but nonetheless absorbing portrait stretches its view to encompass the point at which the subject’s luck ran out: when the film was already in post-production, he was arrested, then held for two months without official charge before he was accused of alleged tax evasion. (He is now free, albeit barred from leaving China, and “suspected” of additional crimes including pornography and bigamy.) (1:31) (Dennis Harvey)

The Queen of Versailles Lauren Greenfield’s obscenely entertaining The Queen of Versailles takes a long, turbulent look at the lifestyles lived by David and Jackie Siegel. He is the 70-something undisputed king of timeshares; she is his 40-something (third) wife, a former beauty queen with the requisite blonde locks and major rack, both probably not entirely Mother Nature-made. He’s so compulsive that he’s never saved, instead plowing every buck back into the business. When the recession hits, that means this billionaire is — in ready-cash as opposed to paper terms — suddenly sorta kinda broke, just as an enormous Las Vegas project is opening and the family’s stupefyingly large new “home” (yep, modeled after Versailles) is mid-construction. Plugs must be pulled, corners cut. Never having had to, the Siegels discover (once most of the servants have been let go) they have no idea how to run a household. Worse, they discover that in adversity they have a very hard time pulling together — in particular, David is revealed as a remote, cold, obsessively all-business person who has no use for getting or giving “emotional support;” not even for being a husband or father, much. What ultimately makes Queen poignantly more than a reality-TV style peek at the garishly wealthy is that Jackie, despite her incredibly vulgar veneer (she’s like a Jennifer Coolidge character, forever squeezed into loud animal prints), is at heart just a nice girl from hicksville who really, really wants to make this family work. (1:40) Smith Rafael. (Dennis Harvey)

Red Lights Skeptics and budding myth busters, get ready. Maybe. Director-writer Rodrigo Cortés blends the stuff of thrillers and horror in this slippery take on psychics and their debunkers. Psychologist Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) and her weirdly loyal assistant Tom (Cillian Murphy) investigate paranormal phenomena — faith healers, trance mediums, ghost hunters, and psychics — in order to peer behind the curtain and expose all Ozs great and small. Spoon-bending blind ESP master Simon Silver (Robert De Niro) is their biggest prize: he’s come out of retirement after the death of his most dogged critic. Has Silver learned to kill with his mind? And can we expect a brain-blowing finale on the same level as The Fury (1978)? Despite all the high-powered acting talent in the room, Red Lights never quite convinces us of the urgency of its mission — it’s hard to swallow that the debunking of paranormal phenomenon rates as international news in an online-driven 24/7 multiniched news cycle — and feels like a curious ‘70s throwback with its Three Days of the Condor-style investigative nail-biter arc, while supplying little of the visceral, camp showman panache of a De Palma. (1:53) (Kimberly Chun)

Ruby Sparks Meta has rarely skewed as appealingly as with this indie rom-com spinning off a writerly version of the Pygmalion and Galatea tale, as penned by the object-of-desire herself: Zoe Kazan. Little Miss Sunshine (2006) directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris helm this heady fantasy about a crumpled, geeky novelist, Calvin (Paul Dano), who’s suffering from the sophomore slump — he can’t seem to break his rock-solid writers block and pen a follow-up to his hit debut. He’s a victim of his own success, especially when he finally begins to write, about a dream girl, a fun-loving, redheaded artist named Ruby (scriptwriter Kazan), who one day actually materializes. When he types that she speaks nothing but French, out comes a stream of the so-called language of diplomacy. Calvin soon discovers the limits and dangers of creation — say, the hazards of tweaking a manifestation when she doesn’t do what you desire, and the question of what to do when one’s baby Frankenstein grows bored and restless in the narrow circle of her creator’s imagination. Kazan — and Dayton and Faris — go to the absurd, even frightening, limits of the age-old Pygmalion conceit, giving it a feminist charge, while helped along by a cornucopia of colorful cameos by actors like Annette Bening and Antonio Banderas as Calvin’s Big Sur-dwelling boho mom and her furniture-building boyfriend. Dano is as adorably befuddled as ever and adds the crucial texture of every-guy reality, though ultimately this is Kazan’s show, whether she’s testing the boundaries of a genuinely codependent relationship or tugging at the puppeteer’s strings. (1:44) (Kimberly Chun)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW1aAxBG_50

Sacrifice Power-mad General Tu’an (Wang Xueqi) engineers the slaughter of the entire Zhao clan — including the newborn son who’s the last of the line. But the baby’s been swapped with the child of the doctor, Cheng Ying (Ge You), who delivered him, and the deception train pretty much goes off the rails after that. Suffice to say the Zhao heir survives while Cheng Ying’s wife and infant do not, and Tu’an is none the wiser. Revenge seems the only logical move, so Cheng Ying patiently waits years for the boy to grow up and learn martial arts from Tu’an, plotting that he’ll reveal the truth when the (kinda bratty) child becomes capable of killing his beloved “godfather” — a.k.a. the guy who massacred his family (and the family of his adoptive father). If that sounds complicated, know that this epic from Chen Kaige (1993’s Farewell My Concubine) has over two hours to get through all those plot mechanics. Also, it’s gorgeously shot, mixing the classy trappings of a big-budget historical melodrama with thunderous battles and scenes of brutal violence. (2:10) SF Film Society Cinema. (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBw1PFjKnrs

Shit Year Santa Cruz artist Cam Archer’s 2006 debut feature Wild Tigers I Have Known was a texturally gorgeous but content-lite exercise that often seemed like an extended audition for the role of Next Gus Van Sant. (The real one was, in fact, its executive producer.) This sophomore effort strikes pretty much the same (im-) balance. Colleen West (Ellen Barkin) is a famous, now middle-aged actress who decides to retire — why, we don’t know, particularly since she only seems more brittle, dissatisfied, and hollow upon retreating to an isolated home in a woodsy area. (She doesn’t even seem to like nature.) There, she tolerates a sorta-friendship with an irritatingly chirpy neighbor (Melora Walters), endures a visit by the irritatingly uncomplicated, stable brother she was never close to (Rick Einstein), and recalls an unfulfilling affair with her much younger co-star in a play (Luke Grimes). She also imagines (?) appointments with a terse interrogator (Theresa Randle) offering some sort of futuristic experience-simulation service in an eerie all-white environ. While one questions whether there actually was one, per se, Archer’s fragmentary script alternates these flashbacks, surreal interludes, and present-tense expressions of existential ennui (“I’m surrounded by a world of nothing,” Colleen moans) into pretty formations. The film’s black and white photography (by Aaron Platt), editing, production design, musical choices, etc. are all impeccably mannered. But our protagonist’s bored self-absorbsion and self-pity, lacking any backgrounding psychology, is ultimately as vacuous a dead-end as it is when Vincent Gallo is baring his soul. Having a bitchy, platinum-haired Barkin do the job for Archer makes the effect a little campier, but no more resonant. That said, this movie would probably seem brilliant if watched on quaaludes. (1:35) Roxie. (Dennis Harvey)

Step Up Revolution The Step Up franchise makes a play for the Occupy brand, setting up its fourth installment’s Miami street crew, the Mob, as the warrior dance champions of the 99 percent — here represented by a vibrant lower-income neighborhood slated for redevelopment. Embodying the one percent is a hotel-chain mogul named Bill Anderson (Peter Gallagher), armed with a wrecking ball and sowing the seeds of a soulless luxury monoculture. Our hero, Mob leader Sean (Ryan Guzman), and heroine, Anderson progeny and aspiring professional dancer Emily (Kathryn McCormick), meet beachside; engage in a sandy, awkward interlude of grinding possibly meant to showcase their dance skills; and proceed to spark a romance and a revolution that feel equally fake (brace yourself for the climactic corporate tie-in). The Mob’s periodic choreographed invasions of the city’s public and private spaces are the movie’s sole source of oxygen. The dialogue, variously mumbled and slurred and possibly read off cue cards, drifts aimlessly from tepid to trite as the protagonists attempt to demonstrate sexual chemistry by breathily trading off phrases like “What we do is dangerous!” and “Enough with performance art — it’s time to make protest art!” Occasionally you may remember that you have 3D glasses on your face and wonder why, but the larger philosophical question (if one may speak of philosophy in relation to the dance-movie genre) concerns the Step Up films’ embrace of postproduction sleights of hand that distance viewers from whatever astonishing feats of physicality are actually being achieved in front of the camera. (1:20) (Lynn Rapoport)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G8rzHJsWpM

The Watch Directed by Lonely Island member Akiva Schaffer (famed for Saturday Night Live’s popular digital shorts, including “Dick in a Box”), The Watch is, appropriately enough, probably the most dick-focused alien-invasion movie of all time. When a security guard is mangled to death at Costco, store manager and uber-suburbanite Evan (Ben Stiller, doing a damn good Steve Carell impersonation) organizes a posse to keep an eye on the neighborhood — despite the fact that the other members (Vince Vaughn as the overprotective dad with the bitchin’ man cave; Jonah Hill as the creepy wannabe cop; and British comedian Richard Ayoade as the sweet pervert) would much rather drink beers and bro down. Much bumbling ensues, along with a thrown-together plot about unfriendly E.T.s. The Watch offers some laughs (yes, dick jokes are occasionally funny) but overall feels like a pretty minor effort considering its big-name cast. (1:38) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5Z2zG6xMA0

The Well-Diggers Daughter Daniel Auteuil owes a debt of gratitude to Marcel Pagnol, courtesy of his breakthrough roles in the 1980s remakes of the writer and filmmaker’s Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring. He returns the favor with his debut directorial work, reworking the 1940s film and crafting a loving, old-school tribute to Pagnol. The world is poised on the edge of World War I; Auteuil plays salt-of-the-earth Pascal Amoretti. The poor widower does the town’s dirty work (oh, the dangerous symbolism of hole-digging) and cares for his six daughters — his favorite, the eldest and the most beautiful, Patricia (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), has caught the eye of his assistant, Felipe (Kad Merad). The happy home — and tidy arrangement — is shattered, however, when Patricia meets an inconveniently dashing pilot Jacques Mazel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), who sweeps her away, in the worst way possible for a girl of her day. “You’ve sinned, and I thought you were an angel,” says the stunned father when he hears his beloved offspring is pregnant. “Angels don’t live on earth,” she responds. “I’m like any other girl.” Faced with the inevitable, Auteuil and company shine a sweet but, importantly, not saccharine light — one that’s as golden warm as the celebrated sunshine of rural Provence — on the proceedings. And equipped with Pagnol’s eloquent prose, as channeled through his love of the working folk, he restores this tale’s gently throwback emotional power, making it moving once more for an audience worlds away. (1:45) (Kimberly Chun)

Activists rally for alleged victim of illegal foreclosure

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A few dozen rallied in front of the building that houses a branch of PNC bank July 26, demanding that the bank not foreclose on Yin Wong, an elderly Bayview resident who says the bank is foreclosing on her illegally.

Wong says she never missed a mortgage payment on the home that she and her family have lived in since 2001. She was paying through electronic transfer, where payments were automatically transferred from her bank account monthly. She says that in October 2009, she discovered the bank had rejected her previous two payments. The next month, she received a foreclosure notice for non-payment. 

“I never said I cannot pay,” Wong says. She says after she was tracked for foreclosure, all efforts to pay were refused, even though she had the money.

“If it happened to another person, I wouldn’t believe it. But it happened to me,” Wong said, adding that “In other countries all over the world this wouldn’t happen…just America, of freedom and democracy.”

Protesters chanted in support of Wong and blocked the main entrance to 575 California, where PNC has offices. A security guard said the building hadn’t seen that kind of demonstration since it housed Chevron.

Activists compare Wong’s case to that of the Cruz family, who also had their electronic transfer payments to PNC rejected without explanation, resulting in being tracked for foreclosure and eviction from their Minnesota home. Their case galvanized national support and made headines when they travelled with supporters to PNC’s Pittsburgh headquarters last week.

Wong has received support from the Eviction Defense Collaborative (EDC), and two attorneys from the group were at the rally protesting on her behalf. One EDC lawyer, Deepa Varma, said that even with fairly obvious illegal foreclosures such as Wong’s, homeowners usually lose in the courts. The EDC would often warn clients that fighting against banks in these cases was a largely unwinnable uphill battle.

But she said the recent push to fight back against foreclosures, fueled largely by various Occupy efforts, has changed all that.  

“A year before Occupy, the position in our office was to say, you’ll just have to move,” said Varma. “It would have felt impossible”

But now, Varma said, “there’s more of us, and people have actually made it happen. The turning point for me was seeing Josephine get back in her house,” she said. Josephine Tolbert, 76, was locked out of her home was little warning last fall. After pressure from activists, including Occupy the Hood SF, Occupy San Francisco, and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), Tolbert has now received a loan modification and is back in her home.

“After that I was like, anything is possible so long as they realize we’re not going to keep quiet outside the courts,” Varma said.

Wong has been working with the EDC since she was served her first eviction notice three years ago. 

California is a non-judicial foreclosure state, meaning local governments automatically enforce foreclosures that lenders call for. Foreclosure cases are generally not reviewed unless a homeowner challenges a lender legally. Then, according to Varma, lenders need only prove that they filed appropriate eviction paperwork to prove their case—not that the foreclosure itself has legal merit.

Wong wanted to go to trial to prove her case, Varma said. “She said, I did everything right. I have nothing to hide.” But PNC wanted to settle the case through a series of motions of summary judgment. “They filed motion after motion,” recounts Varma, saying that courts almost always decide in favor of lenders in these types of motion. But Wong’s case was unusual– “we kept beating them.”

After three years, PNC finally beat Wong at a bench trial last month when a judge ruled against her. Their win was only based on being able to prove to the judge that they had record of the appropriate paperwork in Wong’s foreclosure preceedings, not that Wong had missed payments, meriting the foreclosure in the first place, according to EDC attorney Josh Schieber. 

Scheiber said that while he’s been working on Wong’s case, she has consistently tried to submit her payments and on the occasions offered to pay the whole mortgage. The bank doesn’t seem interested.

But Wong refuses to give up, and she hopes that the confrontation yesterday might have reopened those lines of communication.

Wong and an interpreter from Occupy Bernal waited in the building’s lobby about 45 minutes while supporters chanted “keep Yin in her home.” 

“They want to make me become homeless, but they still don’t want to talk to me,” Wong said as she waited, guessing “they’re scared because they know they did the wrong thing.”

PNC sent down a representative to meet with Wong who assured her that he would fax the documents that she had brought with her, evidence of the unlawful foreclosure, to corporate headquarters

Wong and her family are scheduled for eviction Wednesday.

“I hope they postpone it so we can keep talking,” Varma said.

Best of the Bay 2012: Local Heroes

Andrew Lam
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2012 Local Heroes

Alex Tom and Shaw San Liu

Alex Tom and Shaw San Liu — the executive director and lead organizer for the Chinese Progressive Association, which celebrates its 40th anniversary on Aug. 4 — have laid the groundwork for a progressive resurgence in San Francisco by organizing Chinese immigrants and actively building close and mutually supportive relationships with working-class allies throughout the city.

The two have been involved in just about every recent effort to counter the pro-corporate neoliberalism that has come to dominate City Hall these days. They have seized space with Occupy San Francisco and they have supported labor unions and helped to create the Progressive Workers Alliance. They have fought foreclosures and pushed for affordable housing reforms, and they have protected vulnerable immigrant workers from wage theft by unscrupulous employers.

“Shaw San and Alex are incredibly talented organizers and movement builders who are managing to do the nearly impossible,” said N’Tanya Lee, who worked closely with the pair as the director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. “They have built an authentic base of working-class Chinese immigrants who are interested in fighting for change in their community, and are creating a grassroots organization at the forefront of building multi-racial alliances to combat the divide-and-conquer strategies that are confronting us.”

Liu, who joined CPA six years ago, said she’s always inspired to see the old photographs on the walls of CPA’s office, and to read the history of CPA’s organizing and advocacy on behalf of working people. She said the organization has always understood the need to forge alliances with labor unions and other progressive interests.

“The organization itself has been, since its inception, playing a critical role in bridging the needs of Chinese interests with other communities,” Liu said. “I’ve always seen my role as bridge building.”

Today — with stagnant real wages, a deteriorating social safety net, and growing power by corporations that enjoy unprecedented political clout thanks to Citizens United and other court rulings — the need to organize people across cultural lines is more important than ever, even if that begins by addressing the individual needs of each community.

“Always at our core, it’s about empowering our folks to be able to voice their own struggles and visions,” Liu said.

Working to build that capacity within the Chinese immigrant community is hard and important work, Liu said, but it’s equally important to connect with the struggles of working class people from other communities, uniting to effectively counter the political dominance of employers and property owners.

Lui framed the struggle as: “How do we build unity and not have that be lip service?”

Tom and Liu have demonstrated that they know how to do just that, despite the diversity of sometimes-conflicting interests on the left and in a working class squeezed by recession and feelings of economic uncertainty.

“The issue that will unify people is good jobs that are accessible to everyone,” Liu said.

Yet she also said that working class organizing is needed to counter the simplistic “jobs” rhetoric coming from City Hall, which politicians are using to advocate for tax cuts to big corporations.

“More and more, it exposes itself as a total lie,” Liu said of the argument that the city should be facilitating private sector job creation with business tax cuts. “So much points to the fact that the US economic system doesn’t benefit everyone … When we talk about jobs, we talk about what kinds of jobs we want and for whom.”

 

2012 Local Heroes

Stardust and Ross Rhodes

Ross Rhodes and Stardust, like all of the people involved in Occupy Bernal, are neighbors. But until Stardust helped found the group — a local take on Occupy focused on stopping unjust foreclosures and evictions — they didn’t know each other.

Now they do, and if it wasn’t for Occupy Bernal, Rhodes is sure he would no longer have the house that his parents bought in 1964.

A former college football star, Rhodes injured his knees and back playing. He lives on disability payments, volunteering at the 100 Percent College Prep Club, and bringing home-cooked meals to seniors in his area. He also coached kids in the Junior 49ers program until it became too hard on his injuries.

Stardust, an ESL teacher and oboe player in the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony and the SF Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band, has been working for LGBT rights, women’s rights, and online civil rights for years. When Occupy took off, he gravitated toward the neighborhood fights against foreclosures.

Like people all over the US, Rhodes and his wife were fooled several years ago by a pick-a-payment loan plan. At the time, World Savings was peddling the deals through neighborhoods, promising potential borrowers that they could send their kids to college, buy a car, take vacations — and modify their loans after a year.

But when Rhodes started to apply for loan modifications, he was denied. He kept receiving letters asking for more information, often the same information he had already given — a common story that led to part of the Homeowners Bill of Rights that will guarantee a single point of contact from the bank. He was stumped when he was told he needed more income — the bank said it wouldn’t accept payments that were more than 30 percent of a borrower’s income, and Rhodes was getting a fixed disability check.

He found another income source as a homecare provider, but after all the time that the bank wouldn’t accept his payments, Rhodes was marked as someone who wasn’t making payments, and was tracked for foreclosure.

Meanwhile, Occupy Bernal was working on more than 100 similar cases in its neighborhood. The organizers hadn’t quite convinced Mayor Ed Lee to help at that point, but Rep. Pelosi’s staffers were on their side, getting banks to prioritize the cases of those working with Occupy Bernal. They worked with other community groups like Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) to do physical occupations of homes. But for those who had received a notice of default and a notice of sale — two steps in the foreclosure process that precede the auction of a property — Stardust was there with another tactic.

He spearheaded Occupy the Auctions. He shows up at City Hall at 1:30 every day and tries to disrupt foreclosure auctions. He’s been there continuously since April 27, 2012, and has stopped dozens of home sales. When fighting the eviction of a neighbor, he is sometimes backed by more than 100 people. But many days it’s just Stardust.

Now, Rhodes is in a loan modification process. Rather than conflicting and confusing machine-generated paper work, he gets regular calls about the status of his modification from a point person in Wells Fargo’s executive complaint office. He testified in Sacramento in favor of the Homeowners Bill of Rights, which passed July 2. He’s also become an Occupy Bernal organizer on top of his other volunteer pursuits.

Stardust battles mega-banks and the city’s wealthiest in his work. But he says the biggest challenge is helping people to get over the shame they feel when they realize they are facing foreclosure. “It’s not their fault,” he says. “It’s the system.”

Friends of Ethics

In the summer of 2011, at the behest of the Ethics Commission, the Board of Supervisors put on the ballot a measure that would have loosened some of the rules for campaign consultant reporting, and would have allowed further changes in the city’s landmark ethics laws without a vote of the people. It had unanimous support on the board — and frankly, technical changes in campaign laws are not the kind of sexy stuff that gets the public angry.

But a small group, led in part by five former ethics commissioners, took on the task of defeating the measure. The activists also took on the challenge of defeating Prop. E, which would have allowed the supervisors to amend future measures passed by the voters.

Despite being outspent by tens of thousands of dollars, Friends of Ethics — a small grassroots operation — prevailed. Both measures were defeated (32 percent to 67 percent in the case of Prop. E, the worst loss of all the local measures on the ballot).

The group is great at forming coalitions: in the case of the No on E and F campaign, Friends of Ethics reached out to some 30 organizations that formally joined in opposing the measures after hearing presentations.

The members of FOE are a fractious group of organizers and shit-disturbers who don’t always get along or agree on other issues. But they’ve come together to do something nobody else does: make protecting and expanding political reform laws a front-line priority.

And the battle goes on. Not long after the November 2011 election, Supervisor Scott Wiener introduced legislation that would have led to less disclosure of political contributions before an election, and would have made it easier to conceal who was making contributions and paying for campaign mailers. The Wiener bill would weaken campaign contribution limit, giving the wealthiest donors greater power in elections.

When the amendments were heard at a well-attended Rules Committee in June (with plenty of public comment from Friends of Ethics), the supervisors sent the amendments back to the Ethics Commission to be rewritten.

The next step for the Friends of Ethics is to work with interested supervisors to push for changes to the city’s campaign laws that will actually benefit the public, such as increased transparency in election contributions and expanded campaign restrictions for those receiving contracts and other benefits from the city.

In an era defined by the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United case and a nationwide assault on fair elections, it’s critical work.

Friends of Ethics can be reached at sfethicsfriend@gmail.com

2012 Local Heroes

The Occupy movement

When Adbusters magazine called for people to show up on September 17, 2011, in New York City to protest the way Wall Street was holding the country hostage, no one could have predicted what would emerge.

It was the start of a movement, and San Francisco heeded the call. About 100 people gathered in the city’s Financial District. They started camping. And the effort exploded.

In the first few weeks, camps sprung up across the country. In Chicago and Los Angeles, in Bethel, Alaska and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, people were drawn together. But, unlike most protests, they stayed together. Night after night.

Along the way, a certain prevailing narrative from outside observers never quite got it right. First the camps were dismissed as nothing but bratty college students and hippies. Then they were called dirty and filled with homeless people. (Occupy challenged the whole idea of a monolithic homeless population. Once they had a home in the Occupy tent cities, homeless people were just — shocker — people.)

By December, when most of the campers had been kicked out, the narrative shifted. Occupy was resting, hibernating, many declared. Some snickered at the fair-weather activists who would only come out in the sunshine.

But in the Bay Area, at least, that hibernation story was simply false. On December 12, Occupy Oakland brought out thousands for its second port shutdown, in solidarity with port workers. On January 20, downtown banks were forced to close for the day and people in the streets celebrated Occupy San Francisco’s shutdown of the financial district. A week later, 400 were arrested when thousands tried to turn a vacant Oakland building into a community center. This was no hibernation.

Actions in some way inspired or fueled by Occupy have continued into the spring and summer. On March 1, Occupy, with a focus on student debt and accessible education, formed the 99 Mile March. Dozens marched from the Bay Area to Sacramento to join thousands of students and supporters in calling for an end to cuts to education; hundreds then occupied the Capitol building. On April 22, Occupy, with a focus on food justice, formed the Gill Tract Occupy the Farm action. Hundreds took a UC Berkeley-stewarded tract of land slated for a baseball diamond and a Whole Foods and planted it, turning it into a farm with rows of crops, a kids space, and a permaculture garden. On June 15, Occupy formed the Lakeview sit-in and Peoples School for Public Education, which taught day camp to children and refused to leave a beloved Oakland elementary school, one of five slated for closure.

Police eventually won the many-months battle with most Occupy groups in the Bay Area. The camps are mostly gone, though a tenacious group keeps its 24-hour protest in front of the Federal Reserve.

But because of Occupy — and its accompanying burst in resistance, creativity, and the belief that we really can, and must, come together to do something — dozens of Bay Area residents remain in homes that were facing foreclosure. Hundreds of people who felt forgotten and abandoned have found community. Thousands have been inspired to start their own projects and work with others.

When Adbusters called Occupy Wall Street to action, it was under the banner of “democracy not corporatocracy.” That ain’t an easy project. But it has already made the world a better and more hopeful place. 

Best of the Bay 2012: BEST ROCK ‘EM SOCK ‘EM REVELRY

Andrew Lam
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BEST ROCK ‘EM SOCK ‘EM REVELRY

What do you do for a ‘tweenager’s birthday? Too old for a scavenger hunt, too young for a dance party, too quickly bored for pretty much anything. Except, that is, a good robot war. Thanks to Bot Bash Parties, you don’t even have to leave your house for such mechanical mania. Zachary Lytle, who built his first robot when he was younger than some of his party guests, and who has won the world robotics tournament three times, will set up a four-foot-square ring in your living room that’ll house a tournament of six vicious, whirring, cutting, flipping remote-controlled robots that can occupy as many as 24 kids. Along the way, partygoers are treated to a basic roboting lesson. For world-weary ‘tweens and their parents, this does compute.

(707) 228-5088, www.botbashparty.com

BEST OF THE BAY 2012

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BEST OF THE BAY 2012

FLYING HIGH

By Marke B.

marke@sfbg.com

Welcome to the Guardian’s Best of the Bay 2012!

This is our 38th annual celebration of the people, places, and things that make living here such a great experience. Inside, you’ll find a feast of winners in categories like Best Burrito, Best Band, Best Strip Club, Best Shoe Store, Best Place to Watch the Sunset, Best Drag Queen, and beyond.

More than 15,000 of our readers voted in our Best of the Bay Readers Poll for their local, independent favorites in more than 200 of these categories, including several new ones we added this year, like Best Yoga Teacher, Best Comedy Show, Best Food Festival, and Best Lunch.

You’ll find the results inside — as well as 150 Best of the Bay Editors Picks that highlight some Guardian favorites, old and new, that we think deserve some special recognition for lighting up our lives this year.

We’ve also included many enthusiastic quotes from our readers who responded to the question, “Best of the Best: What’s your favorite thing about living here?” We got tons of great answers! We wish we could run all of them. But rest assured, there’s a whole lot to love in the Bay.

This year, there was no question that the state of the economy had a profound effect. The Occupy movement continues to resonate here, even while many of the world’s biggest tech companies draw well-to-do people from all over the world. As the population of the Bay Area shifts and grows, debates about authenticity and integration have raged, and sometimes it seems like everyone’s at sixes and sevens.

And yet. The sheer gorgeousness, thriving alternative culture, and promise of freedom and acceptance that are unique to our shores continue to attract amazing characters, visionary dreamers, and explorers of both inner-cosmic and rugged outdoor terrain. We at the Guardian like to think of the Best of the Bay issue as a special document — a map charted through our crazy little corner of the universe, drawn up by people coming together to talk about the things we love.

In 1974, Esquire magazine asked us for ideas for its Best of the USA issue, which led us to publish the original Best of the Bay. Made by the people of the Bay Area for the people of the Bay Area, it’s our opportunity to celebrate the people and places that make this city great. We were the first weekly paper to publish a regular “best of” issue. Thirty-eight years later — and 45 years after we opened our doors — we’re still going strong.

Editing this year’s issue with Caitlin Donohue was a hoot. I shower grateful smooches on all our fabulous collaborators, especially creative aces Brooke Robertson and Mirissa Neff, diligent copy editor Emily Appelbaum, the Guardian staff, and the ever-supportive Hunky Beau, my own personal Best of the Bay.

But most of all we thank you, dear reader, for your generous participation, for making the Bay Area such an astounding place to live, and for turning us on to great new things this year. Peace.

 

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

Chloe Fleury is a French illustrator who fell in love with international travel on a trip to California when she was 10 years old. She now lives in the inspirational Mission District, where she likes to transform flat sheets of paper into three-dimensional objects, sometimes even bringing them to life through stop-motion animation. Unfortunately, we were unable to animate Best of the Bay this year, but if you like the illustrations in this issue you can check out work that Fleury has done for the likes of Cosmopolitan, Warner Bros Records, Condé Nast Traveler, Chronicle Books, Target, and Anthology Magazine at www.chloefleury.com

 

BEST OF THE BAY STAFF

BEST OF THE BAY EDITORS

Caitlin Donohue, Marke B.

CREATIVE DIRECTORS

Brooke Robertson, Mirissa Neff

ASSISTANT

Graham Misenheimer

ILLUSTRATOR

Chloé Fleury

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Emily Appelbaum, Robert Avila, Soojin Chang, Yael Chanoff, Kimberly Chun, Cheryl Eddy, Nicole Gluckstern, Emily Hunt, Sean Hurd, Steven T. Jones, Ali Lane, Kelly Lovemonster, Phil McGrew, Virginia Miller, Tim Redmond, Cat Renz, Emily Savage, April M. Short, Ariel Soto-Suver, Ruth Tam

BEST OF THE BAY PHOTOGRAPHY

Rafi Aji, Gabriel Hurley, Gene X. Hwang, Virginia Miller, Brittany M. Powell, Anastacia Powers, Amber Schadewald, Ariel Soto-Suver, Trevor Traynor, Godofredo Vasquez

COPY EDITOR

Emily Appelbaum

Film Listings

Andrew Lam
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0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, and Lynn Rapoport. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. Due to early deadlines for the Best of the Bay issue, theater information was not available at presstime.

OPENING

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry Unstoppable force meets immovable object — and indeed gets stopped — in Alison Klayman’s documentary about China’s most famous contemporary artist. A larger than life figure, Ai Weiwei’s bohemian rebel persona was honed during a long (1981-93) stint in the U.S., where he fit right into Manhattan’s avant-garde and gallery scenes. Returning to China when his father’s health went south, he continued to push the envelope with projects in various media, including architecture — he’s best known today for the 2008 Beijing Olympics’ “Bird’s Nest” stadium design. But despite the official approval implicit in such high-profile gigs, his incessant, obdurate criticism of China’s political repressive politics and censorship — a massive installation exposing the government-suppressed names of children killed by collapsing, poorly-built schools during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake being one prominent example — has tread dangerous ground. This scattershot but nonetheless absorbing portrait stretches its view to encompass the point at which the subject’s luck ran out: when the film was already in post-production, he was arrested, then held for two months without official charge before he was accused of alleged tax evasion. (He is now free, albeit barred from leaving China, and “suspected” of additional crimes including pornography and bigamy.) (1:31) (Harvey) The Queen of Versailles Lauren Greenfield’s obscenely entertaining The Queen of Versailles takes a long, turbulent look at the lifestyles lived by David and Jackie Siegel. He is the 70-something undisputed king of timeshares; she is his 40-something (third) wife, a former beauty queen with the requisite blonde locks and major rack, both probably not entirely Mother Nature-made. He’s so compulsive that he’s never saved, instead plowing every buck back into the business. When the recession hits, that means this billionaire is — in ready-cash as opposed to paper terms — suddenly sorta kinda broke, just as an enormous Las Vegas project is opening and the family’s stupefyingly large new “home” (yep, modeled after Versailles) is mid-construction. Plugs must be pulled, corners cut. Never having had to, the Siegels discover (once most of the servants have been let go) they have no idea how to run a household. Worse, they discover that in adversity they have a very hard time pulling together — in particular, David is revealed as a remote, cold, obsessively all-business person who has no use for getting or giving “emotional support;” not even for being a husband or father, much. What ultimately makes Queen poignantly more than a reality-TV style peek at the garishly wealthy is that Jackie, despite her incredibly vulgar veneer (she’s like a Jennifer Coolidge character, forever squeezed into loud animal prints), is at heart just a nice girl from hicksville who really, really wants to make this family work. (1:40) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Red Lights Skeptics and budding myth busters, get ready. Maybe. Director-writer Rodrigo Cortés blends the stuff of thrillers and horror in this slippery take on psychics and their debunkers. Psychologist Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) and her weirdly loyal assistant Tom (Cillian Murphy) investigate paranormal phenomena — faith healers, trance mediums, ghost hunters, and psychics — in order to peer behind the curtain and expose all Ozs great and small. Spoon-bending blind ESP master Simon Silver (Robert De Niro) is their biggest prize: he’s come out of retirement after the death of his most dogged critic. Has Silver learned to kill with his mind? And can we expect a brain-blowing finale on the same level as The Fury (1978)? Despite all the high-powered acting talent in the room, Red Lights never quite convinces us of the urgency of its mission — it’s hard to swallow that the debunking of paranormal phenomenon rates as international news in an online-driven 24/7 multiniched news cycle — and feels like a curious ’70s throwback with its Three Days of the Condor-style investigative nail-biter arc, while supplying little of the visceral, camp showman panache of a De Palma. (1:53) (1:53) (Chun)

Ruby Sparks Meta has rarely skewed as appealingly as with this indie rom-com spinning off a writerly version of the Pygmalion and Galatea tale, as penned by the object-of-desire herself: Zoe Kazan. Little Miss Sunshine (2006) directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris helm this heady fantasy about a crumpled, geeky novelist, Calvin (Paul Dano), who’s suffering from the sophomore slump — he can’t seem to break his rock-solid writers block and pen a follow-up to his hit debut. He’s a victim of his own success, especially when he finally begins to write, about a dream girl, a fun-loving, redheaded artist named Ruby (scriptwriter Kazan), who one day actually materializes. When he types that she speaks nothing but French, out comes a stream of the so-called language of diplomacy. Calvin soon discovers the limits and dangers of creation — say, the hazards of tweaking a manifestation when she doesn’t do what you desire, and the question of what to do when one’s baby Frankenstein grows bored and restless in the narrow circle of her creator’s imagination. Kazan — and Dayton and Faris — go to the absurd, even frightening, limits of the age-old Pygmalion conceit, giving it a feminist charge, while helped along by a cornucopia of colorful cameos by actors like Annette Bening and Antonio Banderas as Calvin’s Big Sur-dwelling boho mom and her furniture-building boyfriend. Dano is as adorably befuddled as ever and adds the crucial texture of every-guy reality, though ultimately this is Kazan’s show, whether she’s testing the boundaries of a genuinely codependent relationship or tugging at the puppeteer’s strings. (1:44) (Chun)

Sacrifice Power-mad General Tu’an (Wang Xueqi) engineers the slaughter of the entire Zhao clan — including the newborn son who’s the last of the line. But the baby’s been swapped with the child of the doctor, Cheng Ying (Ge You), who delivered him, and the deception train pretty much goes off the rails after that. Suffice to say the Zhao heir survives while Cheng Ying’s wife and infant do not, and Tu’an is none the wiser. Revenge seems the only logical move, so Cheng Ying patiently waits years for the boy to grow up and learn martial arts from Tu’an, plotting that he’ll reveal the truth when the (kinda bratty) child becomes capable of killing his beloved “godfather” — a.k.a. the guy who massacred his family (and the family of his adoptive father). If that sounds complicated, know that this epic from Chen Kaige (1993’s Farewell My Concubine) has over two hours to get through all those plot mechanics. Also, it’s gorgeously shot, mixing the classy trappings of a big-budget historical melodrama with thunderous battles and scenes of brutal violence. (2:10) SF Film Society Cinema. (Eddy)

Shit Year Santa Cruz artist Cam Archer’s 2006 debut feature Wild Tigers I Have Known was a texturally gorgeous but content-lite exercise that often seemed like an extended audition for the role of Next Gus Van Sant. (The real one was, in fact, its executive producer.) This sophomore effort strikes pretty much the same (im-) balance. Colleen West (Ellen Barkin) is a famous, now middle-aged actress who decides to retire — why, we don’t know, particularly since she only seems more brittle, dissatisfied, and hollow upon retreating to an isolated home in a woodsy area. (She doesn’t even seem to like nature.) There, she tolerates a sorta-friendship with an irritatingly chirpy neighbor (Melora Walters), endures a visit by the irritatingly uncomplicated, stable brother she was never close to (Rick Einstein), and recalls an unfulfilling affair with her much younger co-star in a play (Luke Grimes). She also imagines (?) appointments with a terse interrogator (Theresa Randle) offering some sort of futuristic experience-simulation service in an eerie all-white environ. While one questions whether there actually was one, per se, Archer’s fragmentary script alternates these flashbacks, surreal interludes, and present-tense expressions of existential ennui (“I’m surrounded by a world of nothing,” Colleen moans) into pretty formations. The film’s B&W photography (by Aaron Platt), editing, production design, musical choices, etc. are all impeccably mannered. But our protagonist’s bored self-absorbsion and self-pity, lacking any backgrounding psychology, is ultimately as vacuous a dead-end as it is when Vincent Gallo is baring his soul. Having a bitchy, platinum-haired Barkin do the job for Archer makes the effect a little campier, but no more resonant. That said, this movie would probably seem brilliant if watched on quaaludes. (1:35) Roxie. (Harvey)

Step Up Revolution It’s Occupy meets The Goonies (1985) — with better moves than the “Truffle Shuffle” — when the dancin’ Step Up kids take on an evil developer who threatens their ‘hood. (1:20)

The Watch Suburban dudes (including Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, and Jonah Hill) band together when aliens make an unscheduled visit. (1:38)

The Well-Diggers Daughter Daniel Auteuil owes a debt of gratitude to Marcel Pagnol, courtesy of his breakthrough roles in the 1980s remakes of the writer and filmmaker’s Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring. He returns the favor with his debut directorial work, reworking the 1940s film and crafting a loving, old-school tribute to Pagnol. The world is poised on the edge of World War I; Auteuil plays salt-of-the-earth Pascal Amoretti. The poor widower does the town’s dirty work (oh, the dangerous symbolism of hole-digging) and cares for his six daughters — his favorite, the eldest and the most beautiful, Patricia (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), has caught the eye of his assistant, Felipe (Kad Merad). The happy home — and tidy arrangement — is shattered, however, when Patricia meets an inconveniently dashing pilot Jacques Mazel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), who sweeps her away, in the worst way possible for a girl of her day. “You’ve sinned, and I thought you were an angel,” says the stunned father when he hears his beloved offspring is pregnant. “Angels don’t live on earth,” she responds. “I’m like any other girl.” Faced with the inevitable, Auteuil and company shine a sweet but, importantly, not saccharine light — one that’s as golden warm as the celebrated sunshine of rural Provence — on the proceedings. And equipped with Pagnol’s eloquent prose, as channeled through his love of the working folk, he restores this tale’s gently throwback emotional power, making it moving once more for an audience worlds away. (1:45) (Chun)

ONGOING

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter Are mash-ups really so 2001? Not according to the literary world, where writer Seth Graham-Smith has been doing brisk trade in gore-washing perfectly interesting historical figures and decent works of literature — a fan fiction-rooted strategy that now reeks of a kind of camp cynicism when it comes to a terminally distracted, screen-aholic generation. Still, I was strangely excited by the cinematic kitsch possibilities of Graham-Smith’s Lincoln alternative history-cum-fantasy, here in the hands of Timur Bekmambetov (2004’s Night Watch). Historians, prepare to fume — it helps if you let go of everything you know about reality: as Vampire Hunter opens, young Lincoln learns some harsh lessons about racial injustice, witnessing the effects of slavery and the mistreatment of his black friend Will. As a certain poetic turn would have it, slave owners here are invariably vampires or in cahoots with the undead, as is the wicked figure, Jack Barts (Marton Csokas), who beats both boys and sucks Lincoln’s father dry financially. In between studying to be a lawyer and courting Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the adult Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) vows to take revenge on the man who caused the death of his mother and enters the tutelage of vampire hunter Henry (Dominic Cooper), who puts Abe’s mad skills with an ax to good use. Toss in a twist or two; more than few freehand, somewhat humorous rewrites of history (yes, we all wish we could have tweaked the facts to have a black man working by Lincoln’s side to abolish slavery); and Bekmambetov’s tendency to direct action with the freewheeling, spectacle-first audacity of a Hong Kong martial arts filmmaker (complete with at least one gaping continuity flaw) — and you have a somewhat amusing, one-joke, B-movie exercise that probably would have made a better short or Grindhouse-esque trailer than a full-length feature — something the makers of the upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies should bear in mind. (1:45) (Chun)

The Amazing Spider-Man A mere five years after Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man 3 — forgettable on its own, sure, but 2002’s Spider-Man and especially 2004’s Spider-Man 2 still hold up — Marvel’s angsty web-slinger returns to the big screen, hoping to make its box-office mark before The Dark Knight Rises opens in a few weeks. Director Marc Webb (2009’s 500 Days of Summer) and likable stars Andrew Garfield (as the skateboard-toting hero) and Emma Stone (as his high-school squeeze) offer a competent reboot, but there’s no shaking the feeling that we’ve seen this movie before, with its familiar origin story and with-great-power themes. A little creativity, and I don’t mean in the special effects department, might’ve gone a long way to make moviegoers forget this Spidey do-over is, essentially, little more than a soulless cash grab. Not helping matters: the villain (Rhys Ifans as the Lizard) is a snooze. (2:18) (Eddy)

Beasts of the Southern Wild Six months after winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance (and a Cannes Camera d’Or), Beasts of the Southern Wild proves capable of enduring a second or third viewing with its originality and strangeness fully intact. Magical realism is a primarily literary device that isn’t attempted very often in U.S. cinema, and succeeds very rarely. But this intersection between Faulkner and fairy tale, a fable about — improbably — Hurricane Katrina, is mysterious and unruly and enchanting. Benh Zeitlin’s film is wildly cinematic from the outset, as voiceover narration from six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) offers simple commentary on her rather fantastical life. She abides in the Bathtub, an imaginary chunk of bayou country south of New Orleans whose residents live closer to nature, amid the detritus of civilization. Seemingly everything is some alchemical combination of scrap heap, flesh, and soil. But not all is well: when “the storm” floods the land, the holdouts are forced at federal gunpoint to evacuate. With its elements of magic, mythological exodus, and evolutionary biology, Beasts goes way out on a conceptual limb; you could argue it achieves many (if not more) of the same goals Terrence Malick’s 2011 The Tree of Life did at a fraction of that film’s cost and length. (1:31) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Bernie Jack Black plays the titular new assistant funeral director liked by everybody in small-town Carthage, Tex. He works especially hard to ingratiate himself with shrewish local widow Marjorie (Shirley MacLaine), but there are benefits — estranged from her own family, she not only accepts him as a friend (then companion, then servant, then as virtual “property”), but makes him her sole heir. Richard Linklater’s latest is based on a true-crime story, although in execution it’s as much a cheerful social satire as I Love You Philip Morris and The Informant! (both 2009), two other recent fact-based movies about likable felons. Black gets to sing (his character being a musical theater queen, among other things), while Linklater gets to affectionately mock a very different stratum of Lone Star State culture from the one he started out with in 1991’s Slacker. There’s a rich gallery of supporting characters, most played by little-known local actors or actual townspeople, with Matthew McConaughey’s vainglorious county prosecutor one delectable exception. Bernie is its director’s best in some time, not to mention a whole lot of fun. (1:39) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (1:42)

Brave Pixar’s latest is a surprisingly familiar fairy tale. Scottish princess Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald) would rather ride her horse and shoot arrows than become engaged, but it’s Aladdin-style law that she must marry the eldest son of one of three local clans. (Each boy is so exaggeratedly unappealing that her reluctance seems less tomboy rebellion than common sense.) Her mother (Emma Thompson) is displeased; when they quarrel, Merida decides to change her fate (Little Mermaid-style) by visiting the local spell-caster (a gentle, absent-minded soul that Ursula the Sea Witch would eat for brunch). Naturally, the spell goes awry, but only the youngest of movie viewers will fear that Merida and her mother won’t be able to make things right by the end. Girl power is great, but so are suspense and originality. How, exactly, is Brave different than a zillion other Disney movies about spunky princesses? Well, Merida’s fiery explosion of red curls, so detailed it must have had its own full-time team of animators working on it, is pretty fantastic. (1:33) (Eddy)

A Burning Hot Summer (1:35) SF Film Society Cinema.

Dark Horse You can look at filmmaker Todd Solondz’s work and find it brilliant, savage, and challenging; or show-offy, contrived, and fraudulent. The circles of interpersonal (especially familial) hell he describes are simultaneously brutal, banal, and baroque. But what probably distresses people most is that they’re also funny — raising the issue of whether he trivializes trauma for the sake of cheap shock-value yuks, or if black comedy is just another valid way of facing the unbearable. Dark Horse is disturbing because it’s such a slight, inconsequential, even soft movie by his standards; this time, the sharp edges seem glibly cynical, and the sum ordinary enough to no longer seem unmistakably his. Abe (Jordan Gelber) is an obnoxious jerk of about 35 who still lives with his parents (Mia Farrow, Christopher Walken) and works at dad’s office, likely because no one else would employ him. But Abe doesn’t exactly see himself as a loser. He resents and blames others for being winners, which is different — he sees the inequality as their fault. Dark Horse is less of an ensemble piece than most of Solondz’s films, and in hinging on Abe, it diminishes his usual ambivalence toward flawed humanity. Abe has no redemptive qualities — he’s just an annoyance, one whose mental health issues aren’t clarified enough to induce sympathy. (1:25) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

The Dark Knight Rises Early reviews that called out The Dark Knight Rises‘ flaws were greeted with the kind of vicious rage that only anonymous internet commentators can dish out. And maybe this is yet another critic-proof movie, albeit not one based on a best-selling YA book series. Of course, it is based on a comic book, though Christopher Nolan’s sophisticated filmmaking and Christian Bale’s tortured lead performance tend to make that easy to forget. In this third and “final” installment in Nolan’s trilogy, Bruce Wayne has gone into seclusion, skulking around his mansion and bemoaning his broken body and shattered reputation. He’s lured back into the Batcave after a series of unfortunate events, during which The Dark Knight Rises takes some jabs at contemporary class warfare (with problematic mixed results), introduces a villain with pecs of steel and an at-times distractingly muffled voice (Tom Hardy), and unveils a potentially dangerous device that produces sustainable energy (paging Tony Stark). Make no mistake: this is an exciting, appropriately moody conclusion to a superior superhero series, with some nice turns by supporting players Gary Oldman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. But in trying to cram in so many characters and plot threads and themes (so many prisons in this thing, literal and figural), The Dark Knight Rises is ultimately done in by its sprawl. Without a focal point — like Heath Ledger’s menacing, iconic Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight — the stakes aren’t as high, and the end result feels more like a superior summer blockbuster than one for the ages. (2:44) (Eddy)

Farewell, My Queen (Benoît Jacquot, France, 2012) Opening early on the morning of July 14, 1789, Farewell, My Queen depicts four days at the Palace of Versailles on the eve of the French Revolution, as witnessed by a young woman named Sidonie Laborde (Léa Seydoux) who serves as reader to Marie Antoinette (Diane Kruger). Sidonie displays a singular and romantic devotion to the queen, while the latter’s loyalties are split between a heedless amour propre and her grand passion for the Duchess de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen). These domestic matters and other regal whims loom large in the tiny galaxy of the queen’s retinue, so that while elsewhere in the palace, in shadowy, candle-lit corridors, courtiers and their servants mingle to exchange news, rumor, panicky theories, and evacuation plans, in the queen’s quarters the task of embroidering a dahlia for a projected gown at times overshadows the storming of the Bastille and the much larger catastrophe on the horizon. (1:39) (Rapoport)

Headhunters Despite being the most sought-after corporate headhunter in Oslo, Roger (Aksel Hennie) still doesn’t make enough money to placate his gorgeous wife; his raging Napoleon complex certainly doesn’t help matters. Crime is, as always, the only solution, so Roger’s been supplementing his income by stealthily relieving his rich, status-conscious clients of their most expensive artworks (with help from his slightly unhinged partner, who works for a home-security company). When Roger meets the dashing Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau of Game of Thrones) — a Danish exec with a sinister, mysterious military past, now looking to take over a top job in Norway — he’s more interested in a near-priceless painting rumored to be stashed in Greve’s apartment. The heist is on, but faster than you can say “MacGuffin,” all hell breaks loose (in startlingly gory fashion), and the very charming Roger is using his considerable wits to stay alive. Based on a best-selling “Scandi-noir” novel, Headhunters is just as clever as it is suspenseful. See this version before Hollywood swoops in for the inevitable (rumored) remake. (1:40) (Eddy)

Ice Age: Continental Drift (1:27)

The Intouchables Cries of “racism” seem a bit out of hand when it comes to this likable albeit far-from-challenging French comedy loosely based on a real-life relationship between a wealthy white quadriplegic and his caretaker of color. The term “cliché” is more accurate. And where were these critics when 1989’s Driving Miss Daisy and 2011’s The Help — movies that seem designed to make nostalgic honkies feel good about those fraught relationships skewed to their advantage—were coming down the pike? (It also might be more interesting to look at how these films about race always hinge on economies in which whites must pay blacks to interact with/educate/enlighten them.) In any case, Omar Sy, portraying Senegalese immigrant Driss, threatens to upset all those pundits’ apple carts with his sheer life force, even when he’s shaking solo on the dance floor to sounds as effortlessly unprovocative, and old-school, as Earth, Wind, and Fire. In fact, everything about The Intouchables is as old school as 1982’s 48 Hrs., spinning off the still laugh-grabbing humor that comes with juxtaposing a hipper, more streetwise black guy with a hapless, moneyed chalky. The wheelchair-bound Philippe (Francois Cluzet) is more vulnerable than most, and he has a hard time getting along with any of his nurses, until he meets Driss, who only wants his signature for his social services papers. It’s not long before the cultured, classical music-loving Philippe’s defenses are broken down by Driss’ flip, somewhat honest take on the follies and pretensions of high culture — a bigger deal in France than in the new world, no doubt. Director-writer Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano aren’t trying to innovate —they seem more set on crafting an effervescent blockbuster that out-blockbusters Hollywood — and the biggest compliment might be that the stateside remake is already rumored to be in the works. (1:52) (Chun)

Jiro Dreams of Sushi Celebrity-chef culture has surely reached some kind of zeitgeist, what with the omnipresence of Top Chef and other cooking-themed shows, and the headlines-making power of people like Paula Deen (diabetes) and Mario Batali (sued for ripping off his wait staff). Unconcerned with the trappings of fame — you’ll never see him driving a Guy Fieri-style garish sports car — is Jiro Ono, 85-year-old proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a tiny, world-renowned sushi restaurant tucked into Tokyo’s Ginza station. Jiro, a highly-disciplined perfectionist who believes in simple, yet flavorful food, has devoted his entire life to the pursuit of “deliciousness” — to the point of sushi invading his dreams, as the title of David Gelb’s reverential documentary suggests. But Jiro Dreams of Sushi goes deeper than food-prep porn (though, indeed, there’s plenty of that); it also examines the existential conflicts faced by Jiro’s two middle-aged sons. Both were strongly encouraged to enter the family business — and in the intervening years, have had to accept the soul-crushing fact that no matter how good their sushi is, it’ll never be seen as exceeding the creations of their legendary father. (1:21) (Eddy)

Katy Perry: Part of Me (1:57)

Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (1:33)

Magic Mike Director Steven Soderbergh pays homage to the 1970s with the opening shot of his male stripper opus: the boxy old Warner Bros. logo, which evokes the gritty, sexualized days of Burt Reynolds and Joe Namath posing in pantyhose. Was that really the last time women, en masse, were welcome to ogle to their heart’s content? That might be the case considering the outburst of applause when a nude Channing Tatum rises after a hard night in a threesome in Magic Mike‘s first five minutes. Ever the savvy film historian, Soderbergh toys with the conventions of the era, from the grimy quasi-redneck realism of vintage Reynolds movies to the hidebound framework of the period’s gay porn, almost for his own amusement, though the viewer might be initially confused about exactly what year they’re in. Veteran star stripper Mike (Tatum) is working construction, stripping to the approval of many raucous ladies and their stuffable dollar bills. He decides to take college-dropout blank-slate hottie Adam (Alex Pettyfer) under his wing and ropes him into the strip club, owned by Dallas (Matthew McConaughey, whose formidable abs look waxily preserved) and show him the ropes of stripping and having a good time, much to the disapproval of Adam’s more straight-laced sister Brooke (Cody Horn). Really, though, all Mike wants to do is become a furniture designer. Boasting Foreigner’s “Feels like the First Time” as its theme of sorts and spot-on, hot choreography by Alison Faulk (who’s worked with Madonna and Britney Spears), Magic Mike takes off and can’t help but please the crowd when it turns to the stage. Unfortunately the chemistry-free budding romance between Mike and Brooke sucks the air out of the proceedings every time it comes into view, which is way too often. (1:50) (Chun)

Marvel’s The Avengers The conflict — a mystical blue cube containing earth-shattering (literally) powers is stolen, with evil intent — isn’t the reason to see this long-hyped culmination of numerous prequels spotlighting its heroic characters. Nay, the joy here is the whole “getting’ the band back together!” vibe; director and co-writer Joss Whedon knows you’re just dying to see Captain America (Chris Evans) bicker with Iron Man (a scene-stealing Robert Downey Jr.); Thor (Chris Hemsworth) clash with bad-boy brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston); and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) get angry as often as possible. (Also part of the crew, but kinda mostly just there to look good in their tight outfits: Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye and Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow.) Then, of course, there’s Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) running the whole Marvel-ous show, with one good eye and almost as many wry quips as Downey’s Tony Stark. Basically, The Avengers gives you everything you want (characters delivering trademark lines and traits), everything you expect (shit blowing up, humanity being saved, etc.), and even makes room for a few surprises. It doesn’t transcend the comic-book genre (like 2008’s The Dark Knight did), but honestly, it ain’t trying to. The Avengers wants only to entertain, and entertain it does. (2:23) (Eddy)

Moonrise Kingdom Does Wes Anderson’s new film mark a live-action return to form after 2007’s disappointingly wan Darjeeling Limited? More or less. Does it tick all the Andersonian style and content boxes? Indubitably. In the most obvious deviation Anderson has taken with Moonrise, he gives us his first period piece, a romance set in 1965 on a fictional island off the New England coast. After a chance encounter at a church play, pre-teen Khaki Scout Sam (newcomer Jared Gilman) instantly falls for the raven-suited, sable-haired Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward, ditto). The two become pen pals, and quickly bond over the shared misery of being misunderstood by both authority figures and fellow kids. The bespectacled Sam is an orphan, ostracized by his foster parents and scout troop (much to the dismay of its straight-arrow leader Edward Norton). Suzy despises her clueless attorney parents, played with gusto by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand in some of the film’s funniest and best scenes. When the two kids run off together, the whole thing begins to resemble a kind of tween version of Godard’s 1965 lovers-on the-lam fantasia Pierrot le Fou. But like most of Anderson’s stuff, it has a gauzy sentimentality more akin to Truffaut than Godard. Imagine if the sequence in 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums where Margot and Richie run away to the Museum of Natural History had been given the feature treatment: it’s a simple yet inspired idea, and it becomes a charming little tale of the perils of growing up and selling out the fantasy. But it doesn’t feel remotely risky. It’s simply too damn tame. (1:37) (Michelle Devereaux)

Patang (The Kite) Loving memories tethered to a place (Ahmedabad, India), moment (the city’s kite festival, the largest of its kind in the country), and season (according to the Hindu calendar, the event coincides with the day that wind direction shifts) beautifully suffuse this first feature film by director and co-writer Prashant Bhargava. Certainly Patang (The Kite) is the story of a family: Delhi businessman Jayesh (Mukund Shukla) has returned with his freewheeling, movie-camera-toting daughter Priya (Sugandha Garg) to his majestically ramshackle family home, where he supports his mother, sister-in-law (Seema Biswas of 1994’s Bandit Queen), and nephew Chakku (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). He’s come to indulge his childhood love of kite flying and to introduce Priya to Ahmedabad’s old-world sights and ways. Entangled among the strands of story are past resentments —harbored by Chakku against his paternalistic uncle — and new hopes, particularly in the form of a budding romance between Priya and Bobby (Aakash Maherya), the son of the kite shop owner. Above all — and as much a presence as any other — is the city, with its fleeting pleasures and memorable faces, captured with vérité verve and sensuous lyricism on small HD cameras by Bhargava and director of photography Shanker Raman. Their imagery imprints on a viewer like an early memory, darting to mind like those many bright kites dancing buoyantly in the city sky. (1:32) (Chun)

People Like Us The opening song — James Gang’s can’t-fail “Funk #49” — only partially announces where this earnest family drama is going. Haunted by a deceased music-producer patriarch, barely sketched-out tales of his misadventures, and a soundtrack of solid AOR, this film has mixed feelings about its boomer bloodlines, much like the recent Peace, Love and Misunderstanding: these boomer-ambivalent films are the inverse of celebratory sites like Dads Are the Original Hipsters. Commodity-bartering wheeler-dealer Sam (Chris Pine) is skating on the edges of legality — and wallowing in his own kind of Type-A prickishness — so when his music biz dad passes, he tries to lie his way out of flying back home to see his mother Lillian (Michelle Pfeiffer), with his decent law student girlfriend (Olivia Wilde). He doesn’t want to face the memories of his self-absorbed absentee-artist dad, but he also doesn’t want to deal with certain legal action back home, so when his father’s old lawyer friend drops a battered bag of cash on him, along with a note to give it to a young boy (Michael Hall D’Addario) and his mother Frankie (Elizabeth Banks), he’s beset with conflict. Should he take the money and run away from his troubles or uncover the mysterious loved ones his father left behind? Director and co-writer Alexa Kurtzman mostly wrote for TV before this, his debut feature, and in many ways People Like Us resembles the tidy, well-meaning dramas about responsibility and personal growth one might still find on, say, Lifetime. It’s also tough to swallow Banks, as gifted as she is as an actress, as an addiction-scarred, traumatized single mom in combat boots. At the same time People Like Us isn’t without its charms, drawing you into its small, specific dramas with real-as-TV touches and the faintest sexy whiff of rock ‘n’ roll. (1:55) (Chun)

Prometheus Ridley Scott’s return to outer space — after an extended stay in Russell Crowe-landia — is most welcome. Some may complain Prometheus too closely resembles Scott’s Alien (1979), for which it serves as a prequel of sorts. Prometheus also resembles, among others, The Thing (1982), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Event Horizon (1997). But I love those movies (yes, even Event Horizon), and I am totally fine with the guy who made Alien borrowing from all of them and making the classiest, most gorgeous sci-fi B-movie in years. Sure, some of the science is wonky, and the themes of faith and creation can get a bit woo-woo, but Prometheus is deep-space discombobulation at its finest, with only a miscast Logan Marshall-Green (apparently, cocky dude-bros are still in effect at the turn of the next millennium) marring an otherwise killer cast: Noomi Rapace as a dreamy (yet awesomely tough) scientist; Idris Elba as Prometheus‘ wisecracking captain; Charlize Theron as the Weyland Corportation’s icy overseer; and Michael Fassbender, giving his finest performance to date as the ship’s Lawrence of Arabia-obsessed android. (2:03) (Eddy)

Rock of Ages (2:03)

Romantics Anonymous An awkward, bumbling Parisian chocolatier named Jean-Rene (Benoît Poelvoorde) falls for his gorgeous, equally awkward sales rep, Angélique (Isabelle Carré), while never missing an opportunity to say the wrong thing, surrender to shyness, or panic under pressure. It’s crucial for films involving such protracted awkwardness to give the audience something to cling to emotionally, but instead we’re handed a limp, formulaic story, sorely underdeveloped characters, and lazy writing in which the protagonists act uncharacteristically stupid/gullible/oblivious for the sake of plot-expedience. Amélie (2001) mined similar thematic territory, but its success lay in the depth of its characters; Romantics Anonymous is about little more than the idea of two hopeless romantics, and that’s simply not enough to hold interest. It’s beautifully scored, lovingly shot, and steeped in vintage French atmosphere — but that doesn’t compensate for sketchy characterization and weak, predictable storytelling. (1:20) Roxie. (Taylor Kaplan) Safety Not Guaranteed San Francisco-born director Colin Trevorrow’s narrative debut feature Safety Not Guaranteed, written by Derek Connolly, has an improbable setup: not that rural loner Kenneth (Mark Duplass) would place a personal ad for a time travel partner (“Must bring own weapons”), but that a Seattle alt-weekly magazine would pay expenses for a vainglorious staff reporter (Jake Johnson, hilarious) and two interns (Aubrey Plaza, Karan Soni) to stalk him for a fluff feature over the course of several days. The publishing budget allowing that today is true science-fiction. But never mind. Inserting herself “undercover” when a direct approach fails, Plaza’s slightly goth college grad finds she actually likes obsessive, paranoid weirdo Kenneth, and is intrigued by his seemingly insane but dead serious mission. For most of its length Safety falls safely into the category of off-center indie comedics, delivering various loopy and crass behavior with a practiced deadpan, providing just enough character depth to achieve eventual poignancy. Then it takes a major leap — one it would be criminal to spoil, but which turns an admirable little movie into something conceptually surprising, reckless, and rather exhilarating. (1:34) (Harvey)

Savages If it’s true, as some say, that Oliver Stone had lost his way after 9/11 — when seemingly many of his worst fears (and conspiracy theories) came to pass — then perhaps this toothy noir marks his return: it definitely reads as his most emotionally present exercise in years. Not quite as nihilistic as 1994’s Natural Born Killers, yet much juicier than 2010’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, this pulpy effort turns on a cultural clash between pleasure-seeking, honky Cali hedonists, who appear to believe in whatever feels good, and double-dealing Mexican mafia muscle, whose apparently ironclad moral code is also shifting like drifting SoCal sands. All are draped in the Stone’s favored vernacular of manly war games with a light veneer of Buddhistic higher-mindedness and, natch, at least one notable wig. Happy pot-growing nouveau-hippies Ben (Aaron Johnson), Chon (Taylor Kitsch), and O (Blake Lively) are living the good life beachside, cultivating plants coaxed from seeds hand-imported by seething Afghanistan war vet Chon and refined by botanist and business major Ben. Pretty, privileged sex toy O sleeps with both — she’s the key prize targeted by Baja drug mogul Elena (Salma Hayek) and her minions, the scary Lado (Benicio Del Toro) and the more well-heeled Alex (Demian Bichir), who want to get a piece of Ben and Chon’s high-THC product. The twists and turnarounds obviously tickle Stone, though don’t look much deeper than Savages‘ saturated, sun-swathed façade — the script based on Don Winslow’s novel shares the take-no-prisoners hardboiled bent of Jim Thompson while sidestepping the brainy, postmodernish light-hearted detachment of Quentin Tarantino’s “extreme” ’90s shenanigans. (1:57) (Chun)

Take this Waltz Confined to the hothouse months of a summer in Toronto, Take This Waltz is a steamy, sad takedown of (rather than a take on) the romantic comedy. That’s only because it’s very romantic and very funny, often at once, but otherwise the film has nothing in common with its generic sistren. It’s a feel-good movie for the cynics, directed by actor turned director Sarah Polley (2007’s Away From Her). Margot (Michelle Williams) is a writer married to Lou (Seth Rogen), who is sweet and caring and cooks chicken for a living. Both are in their late 20s, and they are obviously each others’ first loves. It is a love like that of children: idealistic and blooming, but they never have a serious conversation. Enter neighbor Daniel (Luke Kirby) — a conventionally sexier man than Lou, more swarthy and sweaty. Soon, Margot is conflicted and confused, torturing herself with some heavy emotional gymnastics and flip-flopping. Williams is always good at using her face to convey feeling. In one of two scenes of the film set on a Scrambler carnival ride, the entire arc of Margot registers on her facial gestures, from scared to elated to uncertain as the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” surrounds her. Margot may be indecisive, but she is never docile about her desires. She does, inevitably, make a decision and there is eventual closure, unlike most everything else out there in the indie ether. (1:56) Smith Rafael. (Ryan Lattanzio)

Ted Ah, boys and their toys — and the imaginary friends that mirror back a forever-after land of perpetual Peter Pans. That’s the crux of the surprisingly smart, hilarious Ted, aimed at an audience comprising a wide range of classes, races, and cultures with its mix of South Park go-there yuks and rom-commie coming-of-age sentiment. Look at Ted as a pop-culture-obsessed nerd tweak on dream critter-spirit animal buddy efforts from Harvey (1950) to Donnie Darko (2001) to TV’s Wilfred. Of course, we all know that the really untamable creature here wobbles around on two legs, laden with big-time baggage about growing up and moving on from childhood loves. Young John doesn’t have many friends but he is fortunate enough to have his Christmas wish come true: his beloved new teddy bear, Ted (voice by director-writer Seth MacFarlane), begins to talk back and comes to life. With that miracle, too, comes Ted’s marginal existence as a D-list celebrity curiosity — still, he’s the loyal “Thunder Buddy” that’s always there for the now-grown John (Mark Wahlberg), ready with a bong and a broheim-y breed of empathy that involves too much TV, an obsession with bad B-movies, and mock fisticuffs, just the thing when storms move in and mundane reality rolls through. With his tendency to spew whatever profanity-laced thought comes into his head and his talents are a ladies’ bear, Ted is the id of a best friend that enables all of John’s most memorable, un-PC, Hangover-style shenanigans. Alas, John’s cool girlfriend Lori (Mila Kunis) threatens that tidy fantasy setup with her perfectly reasonable relationship demands. Juggling scary emotions and material that seems so specific that it can’t help but charm — you’ve got to love a shot-by-shot re-creation of a key Flash Gordon scene — MacFarlane sails over any resistance you, Lori, or your superego might harbor about this scenario with the ease of a man fully in touch with his inner Ted. (1:46) (Chun)

30 Beats A sweltering summer day or two in the city ushers in a series of youthful good-lookers, unencumbered and less than dressed, together in kind of NYC-based mini-La Ronde that I’m surprised Woody Allen hasn’t yet attempted. Fresh young thing Julie (Condola Rashad) is off to pop her cherry with lady’s man Adam (Justin Kirk of Weeds), who’s more accustomed to chasing than being chased. Unsettled, he consults with sorceress Erika (Jennifer Tilly), who plies him with sexual magic and then finds herself chasing down her booty-call bud, bike messenger Diego (Jason Day), who’s besotted with the physically and emotionally scarred Laura (Paz de la Huerta). What goes around comes around in director-writer Alexis Lloyd’s debut feature, but alas, not till it’s contorted and triangulated itself in at least one ridiculously solemn BDSM scene. Matters get trickier when romance begins to creep into these urban one-offs. Nonetheless, those with short attention spans who like their people-watching with a healthy splash of big-city hookups, might find this adult indie as refreshing as a romp with a beautiful stranger they’ve briefly locked eyes with. (1:28) (Chun)

To Rome with Love Woody Allen’s film legacy is not like anybody else’s. At present, however, he suffers from a sense that he’s been too prolific for too long. It’s been nearly two decades since a new Woody Allen was any kind of “event,” and the 19 features since Bullets Over Broadway (1994) have been hit and-miss. Still, there’s the hope that Allen is still capable of really surprising us — or that his audience might, as they did by somewhat inexplicably going nuts for 2011’s Midnight in Paris. It was Allen’s most popular film in eons, if not ever, probably helped by the fact that he wasn’t in it. Unfortunately, he’s up there again in the new To Rome With Love, familiar mannerisms not hiding the fact that Woody Allen the Nebbish has become just another Grumpy Old Man. There’s a doddering quality that isn’t intended, and is no longer within his control. But then To Rome With Love is a doddering picture — a postcard-pretty set of pictures with little more than “Have a nice day” scribbled on the back in script terms. Viewers expecting more of the travelogue pleasantness of Midnight in Paris may be forgiving, especially since it looks like a vacation, with Darius Khondji’s photography laying on the golden Italian light and making all the other colors confectionary as well. But if Paris at least had the kernel of a good idea, Rome has only several inexplicably bad ones; it’s a quartet of interwoven stories that have no substance, point, credibility, or even endearing wackiness. The shiny package can only distract so much from the fact that there’s absolutely nothing inside. (1:52) (Harvey)

Trishna Ever difficult to pin down, director Michael Winterbottom continues his restless flipping between the light (2010’s The Trip), artily experimental (2004’s 9 Songs), pulpy (2010’s The Killer Inside Me), and the dead serious (2007’s A Mighty Heart). Trishna, loosely based on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and set in small-town and big-city modern-day India, lines up neatly on the bookshelf alongside Winterbottom’s other Hardy bodice-ripper, 1996’s Jude. By chance beautiful village girl Trishna (Freida Pinto) falls in with the handsome, thoroughly Westernized Jay (Riz Ahmed) and his laddish pals on holiday. A truck accident leaves her father unable to provide for their family, so she goes to work at the luxury hotel owned by Jay’s father and overseen by his privileged son. There she gently gives him language tips, accepts his offer to educate her in travel industry management, and enjoys his growing attentions, until one day when he rescues her from roving thugs only to seduce her. Though she flees to her family home and eventually has an abortion, Trishna still proves to be an innocent and consents to live in Mumbai with Jay, who is flirting with the film industry and increasingly effaces his trusting girlfriend as their sexual game-playing becomes increasingly complicated. The shadows of both Hardy and Bollywood flit around Trishna, and this cultural transplant nearly works — the hothouse erotic entanglement between its two principals almost but not quite convinces one that Trishna would be driven to desperate ends. Still, even as Trishna, like Tess, infuriates with her passivity, her story occasionally enthralls — the fruit of Pinto’s surprisingly brave, transparent performance. (1:53) (Chun)

Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Witness Protection (1:54)

Your Sister’s Sister The new movie from Lynn Shelton — who directed star and (fellow mumblecore director) Mark Duplass in her shaggily amusing Humpday (2009) — opens somberly, at a Seattle wake where his Jack makes his deceased brother’s friends uncomfortable by pointing out that the do-gooder guy they’d loved just the last couple years was a bully and jerk for many years before his reformation. This outburst prompts an offer from friend-slash-mutual-crush Iris (Emily Blunt) that he get his head together for a few days at her family’s empty vacation house on a nearby island. Arriving via ferry and bike, he is disconcerted to find someone already in residence — Iris’ sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), who’s grieving a loss of her own (she’s split with her girlfriend). Several tequila shots later, two Kinsey-scale opposites meet, which creates complications when Iris turns up the next day. A bit slight in immediate retrospect and contrived in its wrap-up, Shelton’s film is nonetheless insinuating, likable, and a little touching while you’re watching it. That’s largely thanks to the actors’ appeal — especially Duplass, who fills in a blunderingly lucky (and unlucky) character’s many blanks with lived-in understatement. (1:30) (Harvey) *

 

Killing of suspect with box cutter may have been legal. But was it necessary?

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Police officers have dangerous jobs, and when confronted with subjects who may threaten their lives, they have to think fast under stress. When a subject has something classified as a “deadly weapon,” police are justified by law in shooting to stop the threat.

As SFPD spokesperson Carlos Manfredi explained to me for an article in this week’s paper, the official policy isn’t “shoot to kill.” But subjects are often killed, since officers are trained at the police academy to aim for the body’s center mass and to shoot until any threat to their life is neutralized.

It seems many tools and common items can fall under the “deadly weapon” category. The SFPD’s third fatal officer-involved shooting this year occurred July 18 when Pralith Pralourng apparently lunged at an officer. His deadly weapon? A box cutter.
 
In January 2011, Raheim Brown Jr. was shot by Oakland School Police. He was allegedly wielding a screw driver. Last July, Charles Hill was shot by BART police. He was drunk, lying on the ground, and hurled a pocketknife at police, missing them by 10 feet.

When used just right, a box cutter, a screwdriver, or a pocket knife can certainly be deadly weapons. But when a subject is exhibiting likely mental disability, drunk and lying on the ground, or 20 years old and in a car, isn’t there any other type of combat police could use to neutralize the threat?

At a press conference today Police Chief Greg Suhr said that police do take defensive tactical training, which trains officers in using less than lethal weapons. But the July 18 situation warranted the use of lethal weapons, Suhr said.

“The officer was facing a life or death situation. She had to do what she could to protect herself.,” Suhr said.

Suhr explained that the officer had been on the force 20 years, during which time she had received multiple trainings in crisis intervention training, which he called the “most progressive in the country.”

That training deals with psychology and teaches how to deescalate situations in which a subject is a “danger to himself,” Suhr said. But, since the subject had already allegedly attacked a co-worker, the the officer’s life was considered in danger.

Meanwhile, Occupy San Francisco activists who still protest and sleep outside the Federal Reserve on Market Street attained video and audio of people who claim to be witnesses who contradict the police story. One says that “he was on his back, then [paramedics from] the ambulance turned him facing downwards…they but a bag over his body and his head. Next thing, when everybody started looking at they got nervous and they started acting like they were doing CPR even though the guy was gone. It took the ambulance 20 minutes to get there.”

In a video that has been viewed more than 17,000 times on youtube, another man who claims to be a witness says “they had him in cuffs, and they shot him.” In another video shot by the same man, Robert Benson, another man says “he was in handcuffs and they shot him twice in the chest…I saw it.”

The Bay Guardian has not been able to confirm these accounts.

Pralourng’s death was likely legal. He could likely have injured an officer with the six-inch box cutter he carried, although it may have been difficult to kill her. But his crime did not merit the death penalty, and he now joins the ranks of Hill, Brown and others who’s small blades and screwdriver were considered weapons deadly enough to justify their deaths by the SFPD, BART Police, Oakland School Police respectively. It’s hard not to ask—did Pralourng have to die?

To be a poster artist during Occupy: Chuck Sperry on psychedelic art, social change, and port shutdowns

Andrew Lam
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To be a poster artist during Occupy: Chuck Sperry on psychedelic art, social change, and port shutdowns

With Occupy’s first anniversary sneaking up on us, has enough time past since its inception to reflect on its urban encampments and frightening conflicts with law enforcement in a rational, reasonable manner? Maybe rational is the wrong word — I’m sure many would agree that the movement’s major contributiont to date was a general firing up of the 99 percent, even of those 99 percenters who would sooner have ridden a bike to work than sit in on GA meeting in Oscar Grant Plaza. Through leaving its agenda undefined, Occupy allowed us all to paint our own hopes and dreams for the world onto it like a piece of drawing paper. 

For some more literally than others. This month, an exhibit opened at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that accumulates the work of 25 Bay Area artists who spun their Occupy dreams into poster form. Chuck Sperry is perhaps one of the most well-known name of the bunch. Sperry’s lived in the Bay since 1989, and recently came home early from a camping trip to answer our questions about his relationship with Occupy, the way he distributed his “This Is Our City And We Can Shut It Down” prints on the day of the Oakland port shutdown, and general “what does art mean” token asks. 

SFBG: At what moment did you realize that Occupy was an important event? How did you first hear about it? 

CS: Through the beginning of 2011, I was creating an installation for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curated by Renee de Cossio, with artists Chris Shaw and Ron Donovan. Each artist would install work in one of three artists’ gallery windows on the side of the SFMOMA on Minna Street. The proposal for the installation was to bring the aesthetic of San Francisco’s poster traditions to painting, and to realize these in monumental form. I wanted this piece to reflect San Francisco’s poster history beginning in the freedom of speech movement through the 1960’s, and to also reflect the psychedelic tradition that gave birth to the rock poster.

While I was working on an 11-foot by nine-foot acrylic painting, I was following the progress of the Arab Spring movements, Tahrir Square, and the gathering Occupy Wall Street movement that was spreading across America. I decided to use my reaction to these events as inspiration for an iconographic painting titled, “Saint Everyone.” I wanted to express the opening mind, and spreading enlightened humanism, the decentralization of power — or awakening sense of people power — to the piece. I used vibrating, reactive colors to paint a figure holding an opening lotus (symbol of enlightenment), against a background of op-art circles, which communicate decentralization — that the background has many centers — like the movement which has no leaders.

“Saint Everyone” was installed at the SFMOMA in June 2011. So I was getting with it by then.

As Occupy Oakland was forming by the fall of 2011, my artist friend Jon-Paul Bail of Political Gridlock was printing his iconographic “Hella Occupy Oakland” posters on Frank Ogawa Plaza (re-named Oscar Grant Plaza) from the point when people were first gathering there. When I say printing, Jon-Paul Bail was printing live, right there, with a table set up in the open, printing and handing people freshly-made posters. In a few short weeks he had printed hundreds, if not, thousands of posters which were being handed out to people there. He was joined there on Oscar Grant Plaza by Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza of Dignidad Rebelde, who created more iconographic posters for the Occupy movement.

SFBG: What led to your decision to make art inspired by Occupy? Was it a different process than your other creative projects?

CS: In September I was in an art show, LA VS. WAR, with Bail, Barraza, and Cervantes, (among others) and we discussed making posters for the November 2 Occupy action to close the Port of Oakland. Fellow artist Chris Shaw — who was involved in the SFMOMA Window Gallery Installation — offered to pay for the production of any Occupy posters through the printing account of rock band Moonalice who was in solidarity with Occupy. 

I created “This Is Our City, And We Can Shut It Down.” I usually work with images and take a lot of time to work my art into a design. In this case, the message was so overriding and important that I felt it was my job as an artist to stay out of the way, and let the words and message do their job. So in this way it was different. I used color theories learned in studying the long San Francisco tradition of psychedelic poster art, the use of hot colors against cold colors to make the words read from a half mile away — haha! I wanted a strong, radical message, used with bold nurturing colors that convey a positive emotion. It would not be a typical political poster.  

SFBG: How do you want your Occupy poster to be used?

CS: Chris Shaw and I discussed printing our posters on heavy paper stock, and printing on both sides to double the exposure we could give people to our message. You could use this poster as a placard, hold it up over your head. It would make quite an impression and be useful to the action. I stood at Oscar Grant Plaza next to the street and passed out nearly 1000 posters in 45 minutes to the front of the march, so when television camares picked up the action at the Port of Oakland, the front of the march was a sea of my poster with the message, “This Is Our City, And We Can Shut It Down.” No one directed us to make these posters. No one asked. We just did it. And passed them out.

SFBG: What’s been some of your favorite protest art throughout history?

CS: I am very inspired by Emory Douglas‘ art in the Black Panther Party newspaper. I’ve had the honor to work with Mr. Douglas to reprint some of his iconic images. I also am very fond of the French Situationist posters of May 1968, and had the good fortune to print a poster, while I was visiting Paris to make a poster show about five years ago, on the very same press that produced these memorable images. When my artist friend told me that Guy Debord had worked with artists on this very same press, I laughed and dropped to my knees and just could not believe it.

Sperry at Occupy

I invited Jon-Paul Bail to collaborate in teaching a class at the Free University of San Francisco, as I’m organizing the art department of that cooperatively-organized free school. We told the story of making posters for the Occupy movement and created a poster for the Occupy Education action last spring. I think the ideas coming together from the Occupy protests will move through society in a very healthy and transformative way. There’s no way to stop people once they have been awakened to their potential. 

SFBG: What is the role of art in social protest?

CS: Art can reach many people in many walks of life. I was invited by San Francisco’s Varnish fine art gallery to exhibit at SCOPE / Miami in conjunction with Art Basel Miami art fair. Even in the context of the fine art world I felt it was important to express the social revolution that was taking place through the Occupy movement, and created a piece titled, “Mind Spring,” which expressed some of the same ideas I put in my SFMOMA painting and my Occupy poster. In “Mind Spring”, I created an icon of the worldwide Occupy movement and it’s antecedent in the Arab Spring. The figure wreathed in blooming spring flowers is a representation of the surprising enlightened humanism, the opening mind, the broadened socio-political possibilities which has swept the world in 2011.

I’ve had many discussions about the role of political art over the years. Two solutions to this problem constantly come to mind, first, “content over style” — that content is more important than style. Your message is the most important element in creating art of social protest. Second, that “the personal is political”, your own experience is so very often shared by others all over the world. When you make a piece of art in social protest, and just tell your story from your own perspective, and you do not hold back, you will be describing a situation that is shared by others half a world away. It’s uncanny, but our local problems are very similar to everyone else’s globally. So get in there and try to change what you can from where you are. Many hands make light work.  

“Occupy Bay Area”

Through Oct. 14

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-ARTS

www.ybca.org

Stage Listings

Andrew Lam
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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

THEATER

OPENING

“Bay Area Playwrights Festival” Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; www.playwrightsfoundation.org. $15. Opens Fri/20, 8pm. Various showtimes and dates. Through July 29. The 35th annual festival presents six new plays: Grounded by George Brant; Ideation by Aaron Loeb; Brahmani by Aditi Brennan Kapli; Samsara by Lauren Yee; The Hundred Flowers Project by Christopher Chen; and Tea Party by Gordon Dahlquist.

BAY AREA

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Forest Meadows Amphitheater, 890 Belle, Dominican University of California, San Rafael; www.marinshakespeare.org. $20-35. Previews Fri/20 and Sun/22, 8pm. Opens July 28, 8pm. Runs July 29, Aug 12, Sept 2, 16, 23, and 30, 4pm; Aug 3, 5, 12, 18, 24, 26, Sept 7, 9, 15, 28-29, 8pm. Through Sept 30. Marin Shakespeare Company performs the Bard’s classic, transported to the shores of Hawaii.

Noises Off Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; www.aeofberkeley.org. $15. Opens Fri/20, 8pm. Runs Fri- Sat, 8pm; Aug 12, 2pm. Through Aug 18. Actors Ensemble of Berkeley performs Michael Frayn’s backstage comedy.

ONGOING

Absolutely San Francisco Alcove Theater, 414 Mason, Ste 502, SF; www.thealcovetheater.com. $32-50. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through Aug 18. A multi-character solo show about the characters of San Francisco.

Duck Lake The Jewish Theater, 470 Florida, SF; www.duck-lake.com. $17-35. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through July 28. By terns gross and engrossing, PianoFight’s Duck Lake — written and produced by associated sketch comedy locals Mission Control — proves a gangling but irresistible flight, a ballet-horror-comedy-musical with fair helpings of each. By the shore of the eponymous watery resort with a mysterious past as an animal testing site, a perennially “up-and-coming” theater director named Barry Canteloupe (poised and sassy Raymond Hobbs) marshals a pair of prosthetic teats and other trust-building paraphernalia in a cultish effort to bring off yet another reimagining of Swan Lake. His cast and crew include a rebounding TV starlet (a sure and winsome Leah Shesky), a lazy leading man (delightfully dude-ish Duncan Wold), a supremely confident and just god-awful tragedian (a duly expansive Alex Boyd), and a gleeful misfit of a tech guy (an innocently inappropriate, very funny Joseph Scheppers). When the thespians come beak-to-beak with a handsome local gang leader (a nicely multifaceted Sean Conroy) and his rowdy band of sun-addled jet-skiers (the awesome posse of Daniel Burke, David Burke, and Meredith Terry), a star-crossed college reunion ensues between the tattooed tough and the hapless production’s white swan. Meanwhile, “scary fucked-up super ducks” go on a killing rampage under tutelage of some cave-bound weirdo (an imposing, web-footed Rob Ready), leading to love, mayhem, and shameless appropriation of timeless musical numbers. It’s all supported by four tutu’d mallards (the po-faced, limber ensemble of Christy Crowley, Caitlin Hafer, Anne Jones, and Emma Rose Shelton) and flocks of murderous fellow fowl (courtesy of Crowley’s fine puppet design). And don’t worry about the convoluted plot, all will be niftily explained by an old codger of a groundskeeper (a hilariously persuasive Evan Winchester). If the action gets attenuated at times across two-plus hours, a beguilingly agile cast and robust concept more than compensate for the loosey-goosey. (Avila)

5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, SF; www.tidestheatre.org. $20-38. Thu/19-Sat/21, 8pm (also Sat/21, 10pm). Tides Theatre performs Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood’s comedy about five women forced into a bomb shelter during a mid-breakfast nuke attack.

Fwd: Life Gone Viral Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat/21, 8:30pm; Sun/22, 7pm. The internet becomes comic fodder for creator-performers Charlie Varon and Jeri Lynn Cohen, and creator-director David Ford.

Marat/Sade Brava Theatre, 2781 24th St, SF; (415) 863-0611, www.ticketfly.com. $20-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm (also Sun/22, 1:30pm). Through July 29. Marc Huestis and Thrillpeddlers present Peter Weiss’ macabre Tony-winner.

The Scottsboro Boys American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-95. Wed/18-Sat/21, 8pm (also Wed/18 and Sat/21, 2pm); Sun/22, 2pm. American Conservatory Theater presents the Kander and Ebb musical about nine African American men falsely accused of a crime they didn’t commit in the pre-civil rights movement South.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.rayoflighttheatre.com. $25-36. Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through Aug 11. Halloween comes early this year thanks to Ray of Light Theatre’s production of Sweeney Todd and all its attendant horrors. Set in bleakest, Industrial Revolution-era London, this Sondheim musical pushes the titular Todd to enact a brutal vengeance on a world he perceives as having stolen the best of life from him, namely his family and his freedom. No fey, gothic vampire, ROLT’s Sweeney Todd (played by Adam Scott Campbell) is both physically and psychically imposing, built like a blacksmith and twice as dark. Pushed over the line between misanthropic and murderous, Sweeney Todd methodically plots his revenge on the hated Judge Turpin (portrayed with surprising sympathy by Ken Brill) while the comfortably comical purveyor of pies, Mrs. Lovett (Miss Sheldra), dreams of a sunnier future. Mrs. Lovett’s no-nonsense, wisecracking ways aside, there are few laughs to be had in this slow-burning dirge to the worst in mankind, and as the body count rises, it is made abundantly clear that all hope of redemption is also but a fantasy. Contributing to the dark mood are Maya Linke’s imposing, industrial set, Cathie Anderson’s ghostly green and hellfire amber lighting, and a spare chamber ensemble of six able musicians conducted by Sean Forte. (Gluckstern)

Vital Signs Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Sat, 8:30pm. Extended through Aug 25. The Marsh San Francisco presents Alison Whittaker’s behind-the-scenes look at nursing in America.

Waiting… Larkspur Hotel Union Square, 525 Sutter, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $49-75. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through Aug 5. Comedy set behind the scenes at a San Francisco restaurant.

The Waiting Period MainStage, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $15-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 5pm. Extended through August 4. Brian Copeland (comedian, TV and radio personality, and creator-performer of the long-running solo play Not a Genuine Black Man) returns to the Marsh with a new solo, this one based on more recent and messier events in Copeland’s life. The play concerns an episode of severe depression in which he considered suicide, going so far as to purchase a handgun — the title coming from the legally mandatory 10-day period between purchasing and picking up the weapon, which leaves time for reflections and circumstances that ultimately prevent Copeland from pulling the trigger. A grim subject, but Copeland (with co-developer and director David Ford) ensures there’s plenty of humor as well as frank sentiment along the way. The actor peoples the opening scene in the gun store with a comically if somewhat stereotypically rugged representative of the Second Amendment, for instance, as well as an equally familiar “doood” dude at the service counter. Afterward, we follow Copeland, a just barely coping dad, home to the house recently abandoned by his wife, and through the ordinary routines that become unbearable to the clinically depressed. Copeland also recreates interviews he’s made with other survivors of suicidal depression. Telling someone about such things is vital to preventing their worst outcomes, says Copeland, and telling his own story is meant to encourage others. It’s a worthy aim but only a fitfully engaging piece, since as drama it remains thin, standing at perhaps too respectful a distance from the convoluted torment and alienation at its center. (Avila)

BAY AREA

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson The Stage, 490 S. First St, San Jose; www.thestage.org. $25-$50. Wed-Thu, 7:30pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through July 29. An overrated president and rock musical at once, the 2010 Broadway hit by Alex Timbers (book) and Michael Friedman (music, lyrics) takes its first Bay Area bow in San Jose Stage’s ho-hum production, directed by Rick Singleton. In this proudly irreverent but rarely very witty take on mob-democracy and the pack of jackals that are our illustrious political forefathers, a vicious and ambitious cornpone Jackson (David Colston Corris, subbing for Jonathan Rhys Williams) takes his Indian-hating ways to the top of the political establishment on a wave of backwoods resentments and Tea Party-style populism. Present-day parallels should run deep here, but the play is so shallow in its humor that it feels one-note for the most part, while its South Park-like insouciance has an unintentional way of making jokes about the Trail of Tears feel “too soon.” This American Idiocy and the 13 accompanying musical numbers are gamely if not always smoothly essayed by cast and band alike (under musical direction by Allison F. Rich), but dumb satire lines up with a generally unappealing score, straining after saucy eloquence while sounding derivative of the emo fare served up by the likes of Spring Awakening and that lot. A tack away from sheer vulgarity and buffoonery toward moralizing history lesson comes late in the hour and its guilty pretention — along with earlier gratuitous, vaguely uncomprehending references to Susan Sontag and Michel Foucault — only makes matters worse. (Avila)

For the Greater Good, Or The Last Election This week: Mosswood Park, MacArthur between Webster and Broadway, Oakl; www.sfmt.org. Free (donations accepted). Sat/21, 2pm. Various venues through Sept. 8. “Don’t they understand that without us they don’t have anything?” asks Gideon Bloodgood (Ed Holmes), investment banker at the top of the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s vivisection of the “real” American Dream, For the Greater Good, Or the Last Election. But surely the hero of a Mime Troupe show cannot possibly be a billionaire? Well, sort of. Though Bloodgood enriches himself dishonestly with precarious investments and outright theft in this Occupy-era melodrama, he actually does occasionally spare a sentiment for Mom and apple pie, or anyway his daughter Alida (Lisa Hori-Garcia) and cookies baked by the unsuspecting victim of his ill-gotten gains, the Widow Fairweather (Keiko Shimosato Carreiro) — now living at the last Occupy encampment standing in the city. Alida, however, displays no compunction in throwing aside his affection and her prospective seat in Congress, running off to join the occupiers for reasons that truthfully appear about as politically motivated as her father’s parasitic avarice, leaving him to join forces instead with the most unlikely of allies — the impeccable, ingenuous Lucy Fairweather (Velina Brown), heiress to a stolen legacy, and staunch patriot. Based loosely on 19th century play The Poor of New York, The Last Election attempts to turn a presumptive ode to the free market into its swan song with good-humored, if predictable, results. (Gluckstern)

King John Forest Meadows Amphitheater, 890 Belle, Dominican University of California, San Rafael; www.marinshakespeare.org. $20-35. Opens Fri/13, 8pm. Runs Sat/21, July 27, 29, Aug 4, 10-12, 8pm; Sun/22 and Aug 5, 4pm. Marin Shakespeare Company kicks off its 2012 outdoor summer festival season with this history play.

The Kipling Hotel: True Misadventures of the Electric Pink ’80s Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through Aug 26. This new autobiographical solo show by Don Reed, writer-performer of the fine and long-running East 14th, is another slice of the artist’s journey from 1970s Oakland ghetto to comedy-circuit respectability — here via a partial debate-scholarship to UCLA. The titular Los Angeles residency hotel was where Reed lived and worked for a time in the 1980s while attending university. It’s also a rich mine of memory and material for this physically protean and charismatic comic actor, who sails through two acts of often hilarious, sometimes touching vignettes loosely structured around his time on the hotel’s young wait staff, which catered to the needs of elderly patrons who might need conversation as much as breakfast. On opening night, the episodic narrative seemed to pass through several endings before settling on one whose tidy moral was delivered with too heavy a hand, but if the piece runs a little long, it’s only the last 20 minutes that noticeably meanders. And even with some awkward bumps along the way, it’s never a dull thing watching Reed work. (Avila)

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Sister Thea Bowman Memorial Theater, 920 Peralta, Oakl; www.lowerbottomplayaz.com. $10-25. Fri/20-Sat/21, 7pm; Sun/22, 2pm. Lower Bottom Playaz perform August Wilson’s music-industry expose.

The Marvelous Wonderettes Fox Theatre, 2215 Broadway, Redwood City; www.broadwaybythebay.org. $20-48. Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through July 29. Broadway By the Bay performs Roger Bean’s retro musical, featuring classic tunes of the 1950s and ’60s.

Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Julia Morgan Theatre, 2640 College, Berk; www.berkeleyplayhouse.org. $17-35. Thu, Sat, and July 25, 7pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, noon and 5pm. Through Aug 19. Berkeley Playhouse performs a musical based on the candy-filled book, with songs from the 1971 movie adaptation.

Salomania Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $30-55. Wed/18-Sat/21, 8pm; Sun/22, 2 and 7pm. The libel trial of a politically opportunistic newspaper publisher (Mark Andrew Phillips) and the private life of a famous dancer of the London stage — San Franciscan Maud Allan (a striking Madeline H.D. Brown) — become the scandalous headline-grabber of the day, as World War I rages on in some forgotten external world. In Aurora’s impressive world premiere by playwright-director Mark Jackson, the real-life story of Allan, celebrated for her risqué interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, soon gets conflated with the infamous trial (20 years earlier) of Wilde himself (a shrewdly understated Kevin Clarke). But is this case just a media-stoked distraction, or is there a deeper connection between the disciplining of “sexual deviance” and the ordered disorder of the nation state? Jackson’s sharp if sprawling ensemble-driven exploration brings up plenty of tantalizing suggestions, while reveling in the complexly intermingling themes of sex, nationalism, militarism, women’s rights, and the webs spun by media and politics. A group of trench-bound soldiers (the admirable ensemble of Clarke, Alex Moggridge, Anthony Nemirovsky, Phillips, Marilee Talkington, and Liam Vincent) provide one comedy-lined avenue into a system whose own excesses are manifest in the insane carnage of war — yet an insanity only possible in a world policed by illusions, distractions and the fear of unsettled and unsettling “deviants” of all kinds. In its cracked-mirror portraiture of an era, the play echoes a social and political turmoil that has never really subsided. (Avila)

Truffaldino Says No Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; www.shotgunplayers.org. $18-25. Wed/18-Thu/19, 7pm; Fri/20-Sat/21, 8pm; Sun/22, 5pm. For centuries, stock characters have insidiously demonstrated to the working classes the futility of striving against type or station with broadly comedic pratfalls, doomed to play out their already-written destinies with no hope for a change in script. Truffaldino (William Thomas Hodges) is one such pitiable character. Longing for his airheaded mistress, Isabella (Ally Johnson), playing second fiddle to his father, the iconic Commedia dell’Arte fool Arlecchino (Stephen Buescher), Truffaldino becomes increasingly dissatisfied with the monotony of the “old world” and strikes out for the new one — eventually washing up in Venice Beach. Despite their dayglo California veneer and sitcom-appropriate shenanigans, the new world characters he meets quickly come to resemble the stock commedia characters Truffaldino has left behind, and he finds himself similarly trapped in their incessantly recurring cycle — pining predictably for valley girl waitress, Debbie (Johnson again). What thankfully cannot be predicted is how Truffaldino manages to rewrite his destiny after all while reconciling his two worlds in a raucous comedy of errors anchored by the solid physical comedy of its stellar cast, particularly that of Stephen Buescher as both Arlecchino and Hal, who bounces, prances, tumbles, and falls down the stairs with the kind of rubber-jointed dexterity that should come with a “kids, don’t try this at home” warning label. (Gluckstern)

Upright Grand TheatreWorks at Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield, Palo Alto; www.theatreworks.org. $24-73. Tue-Wed, 7:30pm; Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 7pm. Through Aug 10. TheatreWorks launches its 43rd season with the world premiere of Laura Schellhardt’s play about a musical father and daughter.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Ballroom With a Twist” Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter, Second Flr, SF; www.marinesmemorialtheatre.com. $49-79. Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2 and 6pm. Through July 29. Dancing With the Stars pros and contestants from American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance perform pumped-up ballroom dance and music.

BATS Improv Bayfront Theater, B350 Fort Mason Center, SF; www.improv.org. Fri, 8pm, through July 27: “Naked” Theatresports, $17. Sat, 8pm, through July 28: “Spontaneous Broadway,” $20.

“Elect to Laugh” Studio Theater, Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; (415) 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. Tue, 8pm. Through Nov 6. $15-50. Veteran political comedian Will Durst emphasizes he’s watching the news and keeping track of the presidential race “so you don’t have to.” No kidding, it sounds like brutal work for anyone other than a professional comedian — for whom alone it must be Willy Wonka’s edible Eden of delicious material. Durst deserves thanks for ingesting this material and converting it into funny, but between the ingesting and out-jesting there’s the risk of turning too palatable what amounts to a deeply offensive excuse for a democratic process, as we once again hurtle and are herded toward another election-year November, with its attendant massive anticlimax and hangover already so close you can touch them. Durst knows his politics and comedy backwards and forwards, and the evolving show, which pops up at the Marsh every Tuesday in the run-up to election night, offers consistent laughs born on his breezy, infectious delivery. One just wishes there were some alternative political universe that also made itself known alongside the deft two-party sportscasting. (Avila)

“Expiration Date: Still Good” Jewish Theater, 470 Florida, SF; www.pianofight.com. Thu/19, 8pm. $20. PianoFight’s female-driven comedy group ForePlays performs fan-fave sketches.

“Fauxgirls! San Francisco’s Favorite Drag Revue” Infusion Lounge, 124 Ellis, SF; www.fauxgirls.com. Thu/19, 7pm. Free. With Victoria Secret, Alexandria, Chanel, Maria Garzi, and more.

“Fishnet Follies” Rrazz Room, Hotel Nikko, 222 Mason, SF; www.fishnetfollies.com. Fri/20, 10:30pm. $20-45. Classic burlesque revue with Vienna La Rouge, Jessabelle Thunder, Cici Stiletto, and more.

“Folded Into a Tempest” Noh Space, 2840 Mariposa, SF; www.shashahigby.com. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through July 28. $18-25. Sha Sha Higby performs an exploration of life, death, and rebirth using her unique sculptural costumes and puppetry.

Keith Lowell Jensen San Francisco Punch Line, 444 Battery, SF; www.punchlinecomedyclub.com. Wed/18, 8pm. $15. The comedian performs and tapes a new CD for Stand Up! Records.

“The Jersey Devil” SF Mime Troupe, 855 Treat, SF; www.acmfund.org. Thu/19-Fri/20, 8pm. Free (donations accepted). Berserker Residents present a sideshow-inspired performance exploring the myth of the Jersey Devil.

“Jillarious Tuesdays” Tommy T’s Showroom, 1000 Van Ness, SF; www.jillarious.com. Tue, 7:30. Ongoing. $20. Weekly comedy show with Jill Bourque, Kevin Camia, Justin Lucas, and special guests.

“Majestic Musical Review Featuring Her Rebel Highness” Harlot, 46 Minna, SF; www.herrebelhighness.com. Sun, 5pm. Through Aug 12. $25-65. Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, performers in Baroque-chic gowns, music, and more.

“Mixed Relief” Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, 450 Post, SF; www.actorsequity.org. Mon/23, 7:30pm. $5-10. Part of LaborFest 2012, this staged reading of a play about women writers of the WPA is promoted by the Actors’ Equity Association and benefits the Actors Fund.

“Postcard from Morocco” Cowell Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.sfopera.com. Thu/19, 8pm; Sun/21, 2pm. $40-60. Young-artist training group Merola Opera Program presents Dominick Argento’s dreamy masterpiece.

“Soundwave ((5)) Humanities: The Future Bionic” Lab, 2948 16th St, SF; www.projectsoundwave.com. Sat/21, 8pm. $12-25. Multimedia and interactive performances by Jay Kreimer, Diana Burgoyne, and the Cellar Ensemble. 

 

Trust the police?

Andrew Lam
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11
Trust the police?

yael@sfbg.com

On July 16, 2011, Kenneth Harding Jr. lay bleeding on the ground. He was surrounded by San Francisco Police officers, who were in turn surrounded by neighbors and community members. The minutes ticked by and no ambulance arrived. After 28 minutes, Harding was dead at 19. The official story: after being stopped in a Muni fare check, Harding ran from police, drew a gun, and shot himself.

A year later, family members and community supporters maintain that the official story is a lie. A protest on his death’s anniversary this week shut down Muni service for an hour in his honor.

But protesters weren’t speaking of just Harding. Since he was killed by law enforcement officers, so were Charles Hill, Alan Blueford, and Derrick Gaines. All have led to varying degrees of protest that feed tensions between the cops and segments of the community.

Hill’s fatal shooting by a BART cop in San Francisco sparked last summer’s OpBART demonstrations, the energy from which flowed into early manifestations of the Bay Area’s Occupy movement, which was also marked by tense standoffs with cops that were followed by “fuck the police” marches throughout the Bay Area.

Despite such lingering tensions, Mayor Ed Lee recently suggested curbing gun violence by giving cops stop-and-frisk authority, a controversial idea that has been the subject of massive protest movements in New York City where what critics say is widespread racial profiling heightens tensions between police and communities of color.

Lee’s idea was widely criticized, triggering the Board of Supervisors to pass a resolution on July 10 criticizing the idea, urging Lee to abandon it, and saying it would destroy trust between the community and police.

There has always been tension in San Francisco between police and segments of the community, but a series of emotional, high-profile episodes and unsatisfying official responses over the last year has frayed that relationship even more than normal.

 

HARDING’S CASE

When Harding was killed, his mother Denika Chatman moved from Seattle to San Francisco. She wanted to convict the officers she believes murdered him. But the SFPD announced within weeks of the shooting that Harding had shot himself.

Now, Chatman and attorney John Burris have filed a federal lawsuit. “I know that it was murder,” she said. “I know his human rights had been violated.”

Chatman and other family members and friends maintain that when Harding was stopped while off-boarding the T train by SFPD officers and asked for proof of paying the $2 fair, he was unarmed. Harding ran, and those officers drew guns and shot him.

Police say that Harding had pulled out a gun as he ran and shot at police, prompting their return fire. They didn’t recover a gun at the scene, but after a weeklong “community effort,” police say a neighbor turned in a gun found at the scene.

The gun shot .38 caliber bullets, police reported—smaller than the .40 caliber bullets in a standard-issue SFPD weapon. The police crime lab then concluded Harding’s fatal wound was from a .38 caliber bullet, a finding confirmed later by the Office of the Medical Examiner.

A widely circulated video show’s Harding on the ground, bleeding to death, as police stand around him.

But as SFPD spokesperson Carlos Manfredi tells it, “The officers did not just stand around. Officers had just been involved in a violent confrontation, they were fearful for their lives…A hostile crowd began surrounding the officers.”

“It wasn’t until more officers arrived on scene to assist the primary officers and prevent them from being surrounded by a hostile crowd that could have potentially escalated the situation. Not to mention, the ambulance would not be able to enter a violent scene that could potentially put their lives at risk, until we feel it is safe,” he said. “Remember, the officers did not know if Harding was laying under the gun. Approaching an armed gunmen who was shooting at officers is extremely dangerous and life-threatening.”

But many say the police shouldn’t be afraid of the community it patrols. When Chatman moved to the Bay Area, she says, she found a community in Bayview-Hunters Point. She also found support in a movement against police violence, made up largely of grieving mothers.

When hundreds marched in San Francisco demanding that George Zimmerman be charged with murdering Trayvon Martin in Florida, Chatman joined other African American mothers in condemning police killings of their sons. Since Martin’s death, similar deaths have continued in the Bay Area.

Alan Blueford, 18, was killed May 6 in Oakland three weeks before he graduated high school. Derrrick Gaines was 15 when he was fatally shot June 5 in South San Francisco. Each case feeds anew the fears and resentments some communities feel toward the police.

 

POLICING THE COMMUNITY

Some Occupy reactions continued a tradition of a certain type of radical response to police: just get them out. For many, police are like foreign occupying forces in neighborhoods, afraid of locals they don’t understand and willing to shoot to kill in mildly threatening situations. Harding and Gaines were running away when they were shot; Blueford was allegedly wielding a screwdriver. In all these situations, shooting to wound likely would have sufficed for self-defense.

When asked how she would like to see police interact differently with Bayview-Hunters Point residents, Chatman didn’t see much potential. “Not at this point,” Chatman said. “There’s been too many murders. Things would have to change drastically. And the mayor trying to implement a stop and frisk? Kenny is a worst example of stop and frisk and racial profiling.”

Indeed, at the end of a tense year, Mayor Lee’s idea of adopting the stop-and-frisk tactics used in New York and Philadelphia has been met with intense dissent. Sup. Malia Cohen — whose District 10 includes Bayview-Hunters Point — and former Mayor Willie Brown, two of the mayor’s supporters, immediately came out against the idea.

“San Francisco should remain focused on community policing that values both law enforcement and building relationships with communities who live with gun violence. Anything less would undermine decades of hard work in building trust between local law enforcement and our neighborhoods,” she wrote in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed.

Even the SFPD is wary of the idea.

“We are not passing stop and frisk,” Manfredi told the Guardian. “It’s not even an option on the table for the department. We’re using the same method we’ve been using this whole time: probable cause and reasonable suspicion.”

 

A TROUBLING PATTERN

The anniversary of Harding’s death comes a week after the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement released a highly circulated report that concluded an African American is killed by a police officer or someone “deputized to act in their name” every 40 hours.

“We call [the killings] ‘extrajudicial’,” the report notes, “because they happen without trial or any due process, against all international law and human rights conventions.” The report notes that only nine people have been charged in the 110 killings it looks at, and none convicted.

On paper, San Francisco isn’t having a particulary bad year. Manfredi said there have been “two officer-involved shootings and at least one was a fatality” so far in 2012. That’s compared to eight officer-involved shootings with three fatalities in 2011 and 14 officer-involved shootings with three fatalities in 2010.

But community perceptions and unease can linger for a long time when incidents don’t seem properly investigated or atoned for.

“It’s very alarming. Especially the rate that it’s happening at. And anybody is paying attention, they’re starting use all the same stories for all these young black teenage males that they’re murdering,” Chatman said.

Alan Blueford, 18, was killed by Oakland Police on May 6. He was confronted by police on suspicion of hiding a gun and ran away. Police first said he had drawn a gun and shot an officer as he ran; an investigation later revealed that the officer who was injured shot himself in the foot. There has been no evidence uncovered that Blueford had a gun.

A month later, Derrick Gaines, 15, was confronted by South San Francisco police, again for looking suspicious. Police say he ran away and drew a gun, and that they needed to fire in self-defense. At a community speak-out July 13, Gaines’ mother, Rachel Guido Red, said she had just received the coroner’s report. It’s conclusion? “Derrick was shot in the back.”

She related what she believes happened: “He was running. He was scared. He was tripped by the officer, and he didn’t have a chance to pick himself up because this man played judge, jury, and executioner.”

Over and over, police investigations clear the cops of wrongdoing, as an investigation of Hill’s shooting on a San Francisco BART platform recently did. Chatman said lawsuits like the one she filed are often the only way to seek justice.

 

DEMANDS FOR CHANGE

Chatman wants to see shoot-to-kill policies changed. “I would like to see a bill passed making these people responsible for murder,” she said. “And then maybe they’ll start going back to original ways, of maybe wounding somebody, firing a warning shot, or doing something to injure the person, instead of shooting to kill. Because now they all come with their guns drawn. How come every police man there has to shoot? Why do they all have to shoot? Why can’t one officer shoot, and just shoot to wound?”

Manfredi said the policy isn’t shoot-to-kill, but it isn’t shoot-to-wound either. Instead, it’s to aim for “center mass” (the torso area) and shoot until there is no longer a threat. “We never, ever had a shoot to kill policy,” he said. “We shoot to stop the threat. And once we assess the threat and realize there’s no longer a threat, then we stop.”

Sharen Hewitt, founder of the Community Leadership Academy and Emergency Response Project (CLAER) is also indignant about Harding’s murder. “I don’t think that I should pay for Kenneth Harding to be shot down in my streets because he didn’t have two dollars,” she said.

In her decade of work with CLAER, Hewitt has overseen many projects that improved conditions for families whose children were killed by police, from funding funerals for families who can’t pay to bury their dead to counseling for family members other than biological parents of murdered kids. CLAER also sends emergency responders to sites of murders.

“We thought it was important to deal with the immediacy of the homicide and provide support so we could mitigate the possibility of retaliation,” Hewitt said.

Hewitt also has ideas for how to increase trust in police. “They need to understand the nuances, so they see Johnny with the hoodie on and know, he’s a star quarterback. I’d like to see my cops, paid by my tax dollars, not going to Sonoma County to spend them. One day the officer might be out running and he’ll have a hood on, and he’ll understand the nuances of what people are going through,” Hewitt said. She also advocates for housing set-aside for police in every neighborhood, insuring that officers live in neighborhoods they patrol.

We asked Manfredi about this idea. “I’m a big proponent of having officers live in the community where they work, because then they can engage with the community,” he agreed. But, he said, “one of the major issues about San Francisco, the cost of living is extremely high. To buy a home out here, we’re talking in the millions of dollars. That’s just too expensive.”

He said that to make the idea work, the city would need to “implement some type of program or plan where they offer discounts for public officials so they can afford to live in the city.” He explained that even in less expensive areas like Bayview and Sunnydale, the cost of housing would be too high for police officers to raise a family.

The current entry-level salary for SFPD officers is $88,842 to $112,164. By comparison, the median household income in San Francisco is about $71,000. According to city-data.com, the median household income in Bayview is $47,147. In Sunnydale, Hewitt’s neighborhood, that figure is $33,641. “I would say, the police are part of the community,” Hewitt said. “And they must be held to community standards. What I’d like to do is make it part of common thought that they are perceived as community members.” She said the African American community has differing ideas on how to address police-related problem, but the tension is widely felt. “It’s not like the black community is monolithic,” she said, “although we are bearing the collective brunt.”

City College fights back

Andrew Lam
-
19
City College fights back

news@sfbg.com

When your options are bad, terrible, and unthinkable, how do you choose which way to go? And should that decision be graded on a curve that takes into account the dire fiscal circumstances facing most public colleges in California these days?

City College of San Francisco (CCSF), which serves more than 90,000 students a year, last year did what some consider unthinkable: laying off administrators and leaving a reserve fund at dangerously low levels in order to save classes and stave off faculty layoffs. The current $187 million operating budget has a reserve of only $2.2 million, or just over 1 percent compared to the state-recommended 5 percent.

Such decisions may cost the college its accreditation and threaten its very existence, but they also represent legitimate differences over what role educational institutions should play in their communities.

In June, the college came under fire for administrative and financial mismanagement by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, a private organization that evaluates K-12 schools and higher education institutions every six years.

Although the commission applauded the school for its commitment to students, it placed the school under its most severe sanction before accreditation is terminated: “show cause.”

It identified eight problem areas that the college has failed to address since 2006, which include measuring student learning outcomes, attaining financial solvency, and revising the college’s mission statement to reflect current fiscal realities.

“The team finds that the current, ongoing funding for San Francisco City College appears insufficient to fully fund the mission of the college as it is currently conceived,” the commission wrote in its June report. “The team advises the college to assure the mission of the college is obtainable based on accurate short-term and long-term funding assumptions.”

Essentially, the commission is recommending a refocusing of the school’s mission to prioritize college transfer classes. The report went on to say that too many people making decisions through a highly decentralized governance system slowed down or halted altogether the college’s ability to make cuts where it needed to — or where the state and commission thought cuts should be made.

These competing visions of how community colleges should continue to exist have driven a wedge between local college officials and state-level decision makers — a clash made clear through City College’s accreditation woes.

“It’s not that City College isn’t doing a good job, it’s that these are emerging trends we have,” former Student Trustee Jeffrey Fang said. “In the long run, it might actually improve City College. The bad part is that it came at a time when we are so strapped and mired neck deep in political games.”

Those games have starved funding for public education statewide, in the process redefining the role of community colleges.

“City College has a very ambitious mission. Part of that mission is that it’s a true community college,” CCSF spokesperson Larry Kamer said. “Now, decisions are being made de facto by the budget and we need to re-evaluate that mission.”

 

PUTTING THE “COMMUNITY” IN COLLEGE

Adult education used to be integrated into K-12 districts. But over the years, two-year “junior” colleges took over that responsibility, transforming them into today’s “community” colleges.

The newly minted community colleges began serving thousands of immigrants learning English, job seekers needing new skills, and elderly citizens looking to continue their education. But when California’s budget crisis hit a critical point, that all began to change.

Three years ago, the California Legislature said when the community colleges cut courses, they shouldn’t cut courses involving transfer, career technical education, and basic skills, State Community College Chancellor Jack Scott said in a phone interview.

Scott is responsible for overseeing all 112 community colleges in California, a quarter of all community colleges in the country. He’s on the cusp of retirement, and the end of his tenure has been marked with the changing mission of the colleges he oversees.

“I want it clearly understood that I personally want to see the community colleges offer all the classes it wants to,” he said. “But with scarcity, you have to prioritize. If you offer the same classes you did before, you’ll go bankrupt. Something has to give.”

The state agreed and asked community colleges to prioritize enrollment, with a focus on recent high school graduates who plan to transfer to a university in two years and anyone else seeking a degree or certificate.

If community colleges can’t afford to offer classes sought by their broader communities, and K-12 schools are ill-equipped to plug back into that task, does the notion of continuing adult education just fade away?

David Plank, executive director of policy analysis for California Education, a Stanford University-based research center, says it just may: “I don’t think that responsibility will be reimposed on K-12 districts because it was always seen as a sort of add-on supplementary responsibility.”

 

BUDGET WOES TRICKLE DOWN

California’s Master Plan for Higher Education — which mandates that community colleges provide classes for everyone — only worked as long as there was money to fund it. But Plank says that money has been steadily shrinking since 1978 when voters passed Proposition 13, which capped property tax increases and raised the voting threshold for the Legislature to increase other taxes.

As funding from Sacramento has been slashed by more than $500 million in the past year alone, California’s 112 community colleges have turned away more than 300,000 students trying to enter the system. If Governor Jerry Brown’s tax proposal wins in November, community college funding will stay at about the same level, but if it fails, the system will see further cuts of more than $340 million.

“The system now is breaking down,” Plank said. “We’ve finally reached a point where the state’s share is too small to hold things together. We see tuition going up at very rapid rates and a substantial deterioration both in access and affordability.”

In flush times, community colleges could serve everyone — rich and poor, those seeking new skills and others working toward a new degree. Now, the community college system faces two choices if it’s unable to find new sources of revenue: continue on the path of deep cuts, or change its priorities altogether.

City College Board member Steve Ngo cites new statistics that show enrollment in English as Second Language (ESL) classes are trending down, a sign that those classes should be cut first. “The community should lead. If the demand is down, you’re not serving your community,” he said.

Yet others say community colleges should strive to serve everyone who needs them.

“Some [classes] are really valued by our Pacific Islander population, but their enrollment may not be as high. Should those classes go away? I don’t think so. It’s something I feel like the whole college community needs to come to grips with” CCSF math instructor Hal Hunstman said.

City College ESL instructor Susan Lopez said her classes have been cut about 29 percent over a decade, which she considers drastic.

“Despite that large and somewhat intentional reduction, we still serve 20,000 annually throughout the city. By comparison with our very large ESL Department, the English Department serves only 7,000,” Lopez said. “How could we abandon those who are most educationally needy and often desperately poor in favor of those who are less needy?

“We need to step up adult education across the board,” she said. “The problem is all the pressure to do less and to fund less of this type of education.”

 

SMOTHERED ON ALL SIDES

The accreditation commission is an independent body, but it’s been pressured too.

“In the current climate of increased accountability, our regional accrediting associations find that tight spot to be more like a vice,” a commission newsletter said in 2006. “On one side are forces at the national level ready to throw out regional accreditation in favor of a federal approach; while at the local level, they are faced with institutions resistant to rapid change and increased scrutiny.”

In the past year, private entities ponied up thousands of dollars to help usher in a new numbers-based approach to education. In 2011, a 20-member body comprised of public and private representatives was charged with evaluating the community college system.

Called the California Community College Student Success Task Force, its creation was mandated by the state, but to many people it reeked of privatization.

Several private organizations funded the task force’s work, including the Lumina Foundation, an educational research and grant-making institution with ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a controversial lobbying group for private interests that authored the Stand Your Ground gun law.

By fall 2011, students, faculty, and administrators across the state began to question the task force’s methods and recommendations, which initially included proposals to cut many non-credit and enrichment courses, restrict financial aid, prioritize transfer students, and cap the number of units one person could take.

Under the veil of increasing so-called “student success,” the task force was asking schools to prioritize limited funds and change their missions to once again become “junior” colleges — a fate that City College has refused to accept.

City College’s Board of Trustees passed a resolution in November 2011 opposing the task force, nearly unanimously, with Ngo the sole dissenting vote. Then-Chancellor Don Griffin warned that the task force’s agenda was a transparent attack on open access that would disproportionately affect poor people and people of color, imploring the board to reject its recommendations.

“They’re talking about taking over the vehicle of community colleges and turning it into something else,” Griffin said. “We have to take a hard stand because everybody around the state is watching City College of San Francisco.”

Students and faculty at City College joined the fight. They spoke out at Board of Governors meetings in Sacramento. They wrote letters, emails, and scathing editorials. The school’s student-run school newspaper, The Guardsman, led a statewide campaign opposing the task force.

Despite the public’s concerns, the California Community Colleges Board of Governors adopted the task force’s final report in January.

“As wonderful as open admissions is, if it’s a false promise to an objective, it fails,” Peter MacDougall, Board of Governors member and task force chair, said at the January meeting.

“Our objective is to have that promise realized, that’s what the recommendations are intended to achieve.”

Ultimately, the initiative succeeded, shifting priority enrollment to students who are freshly in the college system. The Task Force report is now Senate Bill 1456, sponsored by Sen. Alan Lowenthal and commonly known as the Student Success Act of 2012.

 

AHEAD OF THE PACK

As everyone waits with crossed fingers hoping for a favorable outcome at the ballot in November, City College officials are fighting keep the school open.

“Do we alter our mission slightly, or fundamentally? It’s not clear yet what we’re going to do,” Ngo said.

The trustees have until October to present the commission with a plan and then until March to prove they can achieve it. In the meantime, the commission requires that preparations be made for potential closure, which Interim Chancellor Pamila Fisher and other CCSF officials say won’t happen.

Only two other community colleges received a “show cause” order this year: College of the Redwoods and Cuesta College. Yet as of January, 25 percent of California’s community colleges are under sanctions, according to the accreditation commission documents.

Federal funding hinges on the certification and other educational institutions, such as the University of California and the California State University systems, only accept transfer credits from other accredited institutions.

Everyone seems to agree that City College is too big to fail — with more than 90,000 students, it’s the largest community college in the nation — but how it will look and operate in the future remains unknown.

City College already cut dozens of classes this year — including many with students already enrolled after the spring semester began. But City College isn’t alone in its plight.

Santa Monica Community College caused an uproar earlier this year when it proposed charging more for popular classes. As of July 1, classes cost $46 per unit but under Santa Monica’s proposal students would pay $180 per unit for courses in high demand.

When students protested this two-tiered payment system in April, police pepper-sprayed them, just five months after UC Davis students received the same brutal treatment for holding a non-violent Occupy-style action against their own tuition hikes.

“What we see is a move towards privatization, in the sense that we are now expecting students to pay a larger share of the cost,” Plank said. “Over certainly the last 40 years, California has been steadily disinvesting in post secondary education.” Whether tuition increases at the CSUs and UCs in the near future depends on whether voters approve Brown’s tax proposal this November. City College’s financial future hinges not only on the governor’s tax proposal, but a local parcel tax initiative as well. City College needs both to pass in November just to break even. “A lot of San Francisco’s workforce is educated at City College,” City College board member Chris Jackson said, adding that for poor and working class people, it’s the only affordable option. In addition, as veterans return from foreign conflicts, ex-offenders are released from prison and enrollment capped at the state universities, Jackson said, “We need local investment in City College.”

Dick Meister: Labor and the media

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www,dickmeister,com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

The coming of the Internet has had a profound impact on media coverage of working people and their unions. No, the mainstream media have not expanded their generally limited and shallow labor reporting or their generally anti-labor editorial positions. But there now are dozens of non-mainstream websites and blogs, such as the Bay Guardian’s, that provide in-depth labor coverage. The print versions of union newspapers and newsletters could never reach the very much larger audience that’s now available via the Internet.

There are even pro-labor broadcast outlets, such as Pacifica Radio’s KPFT in Houston, that cover labor issues in depth. The broadcasts and labor websites and blogs expose many people to labor activities and issues they may not otherwise have heard of, or understand – including pro-labor views,

Use of the Internet also has made it easier for unions to communicate with their own members.

But there’s still a major problem. Those pro-labor online outlets don’t necessarily reach the general audience that labor needs to reach. They primarily or solely reach only labor supporters and union members who often are in effect talking only to each other.

That may be good for the morale of unions and union supporters and provide them ammunition to use in their struggles. But unions need to reach a broader audience if they are to effectively combat the anti-unionism that’s so commonly voiced in the mainstream media.

How would they do that? That’s not for me to say, but I am confident that it can be done. After all, unions got their message out in the pre-Internet years when the media were at least as ant-labor as they are today, probably even more so.

The pre-Internet newspapers that unions had to rely on to spread their message were at best indifferent to working people and their unions. That basic situation hasn’t much changed. As in those days, it isn’t so much that the mainstream media are anti-union – though they are that – but that their labor coverage is generally limited. In-depth reporting of labor issues is as rare as pro-labor editorials.

As in the pre-Internet days, many of today’s media outlets are not much interested in covering labor except in a clearly anti-labor manner. They devote their closest attention to critics of union actions and especially the attacks on the public employees who have become the vanguard of the labor movement and thus the main target of anti-union forces.

But at least the Internet gives unionized workers and their supporters an option,  and their militant actions, such as those opposing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker,  have forced many in the previously labor-indifferent media to pay close attention to their activities, however much they may disparage them.

But it remains that despite the complexity of labor issues and the importance of labor to many of their readers, very few of today’s newspapers have reporters who are assigned to cover labor exclusively.  mainstream radio and TV stations have never had such reporters.

Some media outlets assign labor coverage to business reporters, who typically cover labor from the generally adversarial approach of their business sources. They’re concerned with the effect of labor on business, and, of course, labor’s role in politics, which is also usually covered from a non-union, if not anti-union point of view.

Internal union matters such as the election of officers are generally ignored unless there’s a scandal involved. Strikes that draw lots of public attention are heavily covered, but with the stress on the strikes’ affect on the general public rather than on the issues involved. Only very rarely does a mainstream media outlet side with a striking union or even explain the union’s position thoroughly.

Part of the reason for this is simply that newspapers and other mainstream outlets generally are themselves in adversarial relationships with unions – those that represent their employees.

During the formative years of American unions long before the Internet, when unions engaged in highly visible and often exciting organizing attempts, newspapers had little choice but to cover their activities in some detail.  Union activity was news, big news, as it has again become just recently with massive pro-worker demonstrations nationwide.

But there is a major difference between then and now. In those pre-Internet years labor was covered extensively and usually by reporters assigned to that specific task. Virtually every newspaper had a labor reporter or two.

But the number of labor reporters has declined steadily ever since organized labor established itself and became merged into the middle class, ever since its activities lost their novelty, and were expanded to encompass complex matters far beyond the easily covered issue of simply seeking union recognition.

The major turning point came just after World War II. At first there was a great deal of newsworthy labor activity, including many strikes and other highly visible actions as union members sought to make up for the compensation they lost under the tight wage and price controls that prevailed during the war years.

But after that surge of postwar strikes, labor turned to less exciting, less visible activities that are not as easily covered  as are strikes and related matters. That takes expert labor reporters and few have been available. That basic situation has not changed over the past half-century.

There have been some important exceptions to the dismal mainstream media coverage of labor in recent years, notably including the country’s major newspaper of record. The New York Times still covers labor fairly and in some detail, and its labor reporter, Steven Greenhouse, is among the best U.S. reporters of any kind.

Most media outlets, however, are still concerned primarily with labor’s militant actions and cover even those superficially. Most see no need for coverage that goes beyond the surface excitement, no need for expert reportage, although some recent labor actions, such as those of the Occupy Wall Street movement, have forced the media to look closer at some issues that previously have been only superficially examined – if examined at all.

There are, in any case, too few mainstream reporters who are adequately versed in labor matters. There are too few who have the trust of workers and their unions, which naturally hesitate to provide them much of the information that’s needed to adequately and fairly explain labor’s positions. The result has been labor coverage that’s generally shallow, often uninformed and frequently biased.

Unfortunately, that is unlikely to change any time soon.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www,dickmeister,com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

The People’s School

Andrew Lam
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The People’s School

yael@sfbg.com

Oakland elementary schools that were packed with kids until a few weeks ago are now closed for the summer — and five are closed for good. In October the school board voted to close them in a move that would save about $2 million per year.

But many Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) residents are not pleased. At the Oct. 26 meeting where the vote was cast, 500 protested. Concerned parents and teachers have been petitioning and meeting with school board members and Superintendent Tony Smith for months, trying to reverse the decision.

“No one wants to close schools, but the OUSD made this difficult decision because it’s in the best long-term interest of students,” reads a June 22 press release.

Resistance to that decision now continues at one school that was supposed to close June 18. To the dismay of the district, it remains open. Lakeview Elementary is the site of a sit-in and free school, orchestrated by parents and teachers.

“Lakeview has strengths,” the June 22 press release goes on to say. “It has shown improved academic performance in recent years and, boasts a strong sense of community and close alignment with its afterschool programs.” But low rankings in attendance and test scores overshadowed those strengths in the decision to close the school.

Yet it seems that “strong sense of community” seems to be more powerful than the school board thought.

SENSE OF COMMUNITY

Joel Velasquez, a parent of three and PTA member who has had children at Lakeview for 10 years, didn’t think it would come to this.

“I’ve watched everything that went on as a parent here for 10 years,” Velasquez said. When the school was threatened, “I probably spent 20 hours a week meeting, talking, emailing, researching, sending, forwarding — I mean, this is something that has been ongoing.”

“I met with Tony Smith for an hour,” Velasquez said. “I sat with board members.”

But as the end of the school year approached, he was growing more desperate, so he ended up making an announcement: “On the last day of school, I’m not going to leave. And I hope that people join me.”

They did. Lakeview’s building is slated to be turned into administrative offices, and that process was scheduled to begin two weeks ago.

Now, the school that should be filling up with district employees’ office supplies still has children running around its grounds. Organizers opened the People’s School for Public Education, and classes, taught by an army of credentialed teachers and qualified volunteers, run from 9am to 3pm, Monday through Friday.

At a June 27 visit, I toured the school and sat in during a Social Justice class. In the People’s School’s organic garden, a smiling gardening teacher had to stop an overzealous six-year-old from drowning the kale. “They love watering!” he shrugged. Another child, still mesmerized 30 minutes after the official end of music class, improvised on the djembe along with the drumming teacher. From a balcony, a volunteer called to him: “There’s ice cream!” he looked up, considered, and then kept drumming.

The group of kids has grown since the school opened June 15, as parents hear about the summer school and come see it for themselves. The Lakeview sit-in is unlike other recent occupations in the careful vetting process each visitor gets. After all, protecting the kids and their education is the most important goal of the project. But during school hours, parents are permitted to come inside and stay with their children as long as they want, seeing what the school is like.

Still, getting parents to send their children to a summer camp that isn’t technically legal isn’t always easy. “I think our society, not just parents, are really reluctant to do something like this,” Velasquez said. “But I see it as a positive service to the community. We’re using the building for what it’s intended to be used for.”

Julia Fernandez, a high school math teacher, got involved with the effort to save the schools through the Occupy Oakland Education Committee, and her two children, ages 2 and 4, are enrolled in the summer school.

As a nine-year resident of Oakland, Fernandez says, the cuts affect her and her family. She’s taking part in the demonstration partly “for my own kids,” Fernandez said. She said the cuts “affect the school where my kids would go. It’s likely that it’s going to be closed or turned into a charter school.”

“But the thing that motivates me the most is all these attacks that are happening against people,” Fernandez said. She guessed that it was adversity of many kinds, not just school closures, that motivated many parents to join the protest and send their kids to the People’s School.

“People are really upset about all the attacks that are being done on regular working class people. People are losing their homes, they’re getting laid off, and now their schools are closing. It just seems like all these services, all these rights people should have, are being taken away”

MORE THAN MONEY

Organizers emphasize that the money saved seems paltry, just $2 million for five functioning schools.

“Think about it, this is not very much,” Velasquez said. “And they’re wasting almost $4 million to do these transitions to close the schools. They’re spending more than the savings.”

OUSD spokesperson Troy Flint confirmed that the savings will be “in the $2 million range,” and that the total cost of the transition is about $3.7 million.

These expenses include about $117,000 one-time moving related costs and about $200,000 in staffing, including paying a transition director.

They also include $95,000 in transportation costs, which may not be one-time expenditures; they may “as needed for an additional year or more,” Flint said in an email.

Meanwhile, about 1,000 students will be displaced by the move. Many will move to Grass Valley and Burckhalter, and these school’s capacities will be expanded with portable classrooms.

“The promise that we made to students was that we would guarantee students at the closing school a place at a school that was higher performing than the one we were leaving. We were able to live up to that promise,” Flint said.

However, there was a problem: “Most of the schools that perform in the top tier are already subscribed to capacity, so we had to expand the capacity using portables.”

Will these high performing schools remain high-performing as an influx of new students show up at their doors in the fall? After all, Oakland has many more elementary schools than comparable districts, a result of the small schools movement, a policy adopted in 2000 that led to the closure of some larger schools, which were replaced by smaller ones. According to a study conducted by Brown University’s Annenburg Institute for Education Reform, Oakland small schools are “safer, calmer, and more welcoming to families” than the schools they replaced.

But as private donations from those excited about small schools, notably the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, run out — along with federal and state money — Oakland may be reverting to larger institutions.

And as the OUSD sees it, that may not be a bad thing.

“To build toward the day when every OUSD school is a high-quality school, we need to concentrate our time, attention and resources in a manageable number of sites instead of spreading ourselves too thin,” he said in an email. “Quality over quantity is the goal when we can’t do both and the current financial environment prevents us from properly caring for 101 schools.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD PROBLEM

One of the reasons for the stated school closure is that it ranked in “the bottom quarter of elementary schools in terms of the number of children living within a half-mile of the school or within the attendance area” and the “lowest percentage of neighborhood students attending the school (30 percent).”

The school is also 99 percent children of color.

As Oakland Tribune education reporter Katy Murphy has written, about half of students in Oakland attend schools outside their district. As a statement from the group Decolonize Oakland points out, “We have to question why the families of black and brown students who live outside of Adams Point have chosen Lakeview.”

Maybe it’s that strong sense of community? All of the other schools slated for closure are also in the flatlands and serve mostly African American and Latino students.

Root, formerly Occupy the Hood Oakland, has played a big part in the organizing. So has Education for the 99 Percent, Occupy Oakland’s education working group, and other Occupy Oakland volunteers.

“A lot of people from Occupy have been extremely supportive and we wouldn’t be able to do this action without that support,” Velasquez said. “For example, the food, they have come every single day to feed, not just breakfast, lunch and dinner, but snacks and drinks.”

The sit-in has also received support from labor groups. A letter signed by more than 50 teachers’ union leaders and local school employees declares, “An injury to one is an injury to all. Let’s seize this opportunity to fight alongside parents, students, and community. We will mobilize our members to support this struggle.”

LEADERSHIP?

The demonstration has not, however, received support from the city of Oakland. Officers from the OUSD Police Service has visited the school several times (and Velasquez says they have done so without warning, despite agreeing to call first to avoid scaring children). Oakland police have been on site as well, and the protesters have received warnings to leave.

“I still remain hopeful that the protesters will see that the most forward-looking resolution to the standoff is to disperse peacefully and to concentrate their efforts on improving the school district for the year 2012/2013 and beyond,” Flint told me. “Right now we still believe that if there’s a relatively prompt resolution to the standoff, we’ll be able to meet our targets to get the facilities ready.”

“It’s not clear why they’re doing this sit-in in Oakland, an overwhelmingly Democratic district where Republicans can’t get elected,” Flint said. “The fundamental problem with this issue is all the Republicans have taken a no taxes pledge.”

Velasquez agrees. “It’s criminal what the state of California is doing right now,” he said. “But we’re focusing our attention on Tony Smith and the board because they’re accepting these conditions, and they shouldn’t…So if they feel that way, why are they not doing something about it, instead of accepting the conditions, and hurting the families and the students? Most importantly the kids.” Flint said the board would be willing to work with the group, but that the sit-in is pointless. “I don’t view this current action as something that is providing us any additional leverage,” he said, though he noted that his office had not attempted to use the sit-in to pressure the state. “We’ve coordinated people across the state, sending in postcards and petitions,” he explained. But when asked what worked best, he said nothing has. “I can’t name a time we’ve been successful,” he said, “because I don’t think we’ve been successful.” As budget cuts sweep the country many governments are feeling this kind of defeatism. The Peoples School for Public Education may not last forever. But they’ve taught 30 kids for free for more than two weeks now, and despite limited time and resources, show no sign of stopping.

Sit-in at Lakeview elementary raided, free classes continue, rally at 5pm

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This post has been updated

A sit-in at Oakland’s Lakeview Elementary School ended early this morning as police from the Oakland School Police force entered the school building, making two arrests.

The dispersal was calm by all accounts, although protesters say that officers threatened to use chemical weapons to disperse the crowd, which included young children.


Officers from the Oakland School Police force, the Oakland Housing Authority Police force, Oakland Police Department, and California Highway Patrol were deployed to end the protest, according to a statement from OUSD Superintendent Tony Smith.

“There were children there, parents and teachers and a few occupiers,” said Lola, an organizer with Occupy Oakland who was supporting the sit-in on 4am security duty when police arrived.

There were 20-25 sit-in participants present when police arrived, according to Lola and another Occupy Oakland participant who was on the scene, Alyssa Eisenberg. “There were at least 15 police cars when I drove up,” Eisenberg said.

“The officers were saying, we’ve given you notices now we’re going to give you 15 minutes to leave. Then they gave an official dispersal order and they said, ‘If you do not disperse we’ll use chemical agents against you,’” Lola recounts.

Oakland parents, teachers, elementary school-aged children and supporters had been demonstrating at the school for 17 days. The school is one of five marked for closure by the Oakland School Board, a move that parents and teachers opposed.

The demonstration consisted of a free day camp for children called the People’s School for Public Education, a community garden, and a 24-hour sit-in involving half a dozen tents on the school property.

As protesters left the school, “it was very calm,” Lola said. “All the people that were there left willingly except two,” a parent organizer and an alum of the school who sat in a classroom rather than leave when police arrived. The two were cited for trespassing and released.

Police then erected a new fence outside the public school, and demonstrators went to a park across the street with the goal of continuing to teach free classes to children.

“Officers wouldn’t let [National Lawyers Guild] legal observers or journalists into the building,” said Lola, describing these observers standing on concrete structures outside the gates of the school in order to see what happened.

Organizers have planned a rally in protest of the raid and the ongoing school closures. They plan to meet today at 5pm outside of Lakeview Elementary.

“People who were occupying said this isn’t the end, they have more direct action civil disobedience plans,” Lola said.

Occupy brings the noise to the Canadian consulate for Quebec students

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Activists with Occupy San Francisco, Occupy Education Northern California and other groups staged a small demonstration outside the building that houses the Canadian consulate to express solidarity with student strikes in Quebec.

Protesters brought pots and pans to the building at 580 California, banging them in tribute to the casserole marches that have characterized the Quebec strikes.

Students in Quebec province have been on strike since February. School has let out for the summer, but the uprising shows no sign of stopping- in a massive demonstration June 22, some reports showed 100,000 marching in the streets of Montreal, and recently teachers have pledged to join students. 

“Last Friday, they had 100,000 people in the streets,” cried Stephan Georgiou, a former CCSF and UC Berkeley student. “The students of Quebec have continued to take to the streets despite Bill 78.”

Bill 78, passed as an emergency measure May 18 by the National Assembly of Quebec, forbids protests on or near school grounds, requires that march organizers submit their route to police in advance of demonstrations, and attempts insure that all classes resume in late summer.

Security guards allowed two protesters into the building and representatives from the consulate came to the lobby to receive a list of demands written by the group, which included the release and dismissal of charges against imprisoned students, the repeal of Bill 78, and “the end of all austerity measures for students, because education is a human right.”

Protests in Quebec began over proposed tuition hikes, and at yesterday’s rally, students from area high school and colleges told stories of their student loan debt during the rally.

“I was a senior in high school in the 2011/2012 school year. I applied to SF State,” said Hannah Stutz, 17. “My parents are currently in debt, so I needed to apply for financial aid.”

With a loan offered by FAFSA, Stutz said, “I was awarded $70 if I take out a $30,000 loan.”

“I’m a single father, I have yet to graduate college, and I’m $60,000 in debt,” said another protester.

Last March, US total student loan debt surpassed $1 trillion.

“It’s approaching the amount of the bank bail outs,” said one protester. “They should have just bailed out all the student debt. The money would have gone to the banks anyway.”

Indeed, activists and polticians have thrown around the idea of widespread student loan debt forgiveness, as well as a debt strike– simply refusing to pay.

“The average debt people graduate with is now $25,000,” said Beezer de Martelly, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, “and we all know how quickly these prices are escalating.”

“On November 9, we were beaten in exchange for trying to keep dept down for future generations,” she said, recalling Occupy Cal protests against tuition hikes during which students were notoriously beaten by police.

“There is a large group of students here in California planning on forming our own student union,” said Georgiou.

After leaving the building’s lobby, satisfied with proof that the consulate had faxed the group’s demands to Canadian Premier Jean Charest, Occupy CCSF organizer Janice Suess thanked the crowd for coming out.

“Not only are we in solidarity with the students in Quebec,” said Suess, “but we’re building our own movement here.”

Our Weekly Picks: June 27-July 3

Andrew Lam
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WEDNESDAY 27

“Turbulence (a dance about the economy)”

Breaking down the proscenium is one thing. Favoring installations over stage presentation is another. But messing with the distinction of representation and participation is something else entirely. No one I know of so radically questions the very essence of performance as does Keith Hennessy. What do you call it when in the process of creation, the viewer disappears into the action? For Hennessy it’s a political act. “Turbulence, (a dance about the economy),” which he describes as a “collaborative failure,” was already in the making when Occupy Wall Street exploded. Just as in life, during the “Turbulence” presence at CounterPULSE last December, some people stepped up, others left, the majority sat and waited. (Rita Felciano)

8pm, free

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

(415) 626-2060

www.counterpulse.org


THURSDAY 28

Andy Rourke of the Smiths (DJ set)

Your inner disco dancer better not be dead, because Smiths bassist Andy Rourke is coming to town, with a crate of records in tow. Ever since he moved to NYC from across the pond, Rourke has become a fixture in the city’s DJ circuit. Instead of aiming for a unified sound with his sets, he jumps impulsively between pop, funk, and electronica, compiling a vibrantly erratic patchwork quilt of his musical influences. Will Rourke tip his hat to the Mozfather with a few beloved Smiths numbers when we least expect it? Only one way to find out, so, clubgoers of the world unite! (Taylor Kaplan)

With Aaron Axelsen and Omar

10pm, $12

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

 

Russian Circles

These dudes produce a lot of noise for just three people. The Chicago-based Russian Circles employ heavy use of effects pedals to layer their instrumental, wallowing metal, creating a deep pitß of sound. Their songs seamlessly transition from chugging, mathematical guitar riffs to soft, melodic interludes. In concert, the band is impressively able to replicate and expand upon their complex recorded work, which features enough tempo, time signature, and key shifts to awe anyone with a basic understanding of music theory. It’s metal for the thinking (wo)man, but not to worry, it still shreds. (Haley Zaremba)

With Deafheaven, And So I Watch You From Afar

8pm, $14

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com


FRIDAY 29

“The Official Blues Brothers Revue”

With an all-star musical cast and the comedic genius of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the beloved 1980 film The Blues Brothers paired one of the best soundtracks of all time with an action packed storyline that continues to thrill. The movie — which screens at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland on Friday night — has also inspired a top notch musical tribute show, “The Official Blues Brothers Revue,” featuring the talents of Wayne Catania and Kieron Lafferty as Jake and Elwood, all with the approval of Belushi’s estate and Aykroyd. So put on your suits, shades, and fedoras and get ready to join the boys this weekend on their “mission from God!” (Sean McCourt)

Fri/29-Sat/30, 8 and 10pm, $25–$35

Yoshi’s

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com

 

Pepper 19-Year Anniversary

It’s been 19 years since a gaggle of scruffy dance-and-drink fanatics took over Monday nights at Don’s Different Ducks bar in the Lower Haight, spun some funky house records, and imbibed with abandon, often using the plywood-covered pool table as a dance floor. Pepper, they called it, and although it’s moved around a lot since the Don’s days (it was one of the Guardian’s favorite roving parties of the 1990s), it’s still held strong, retaining its ragtag aura even as its players have become lionized. For this installment, at 222 Hyde in the Tenderloin, DJ Charlotte the Baroness returns from her new home in Chicago to join originator Toph One, fresh out of the hospital after a tragic hit-and-run, on the decks with the Pepper family. Good friends, good fortune, new faces, no-holds-barred dancing. (Marke B.)

9pm, $5

222 Hyde, SF

(415) 345-8222

www.222hyde.com

 

Dent May

She visits from Brooklyn, he attempts to show her a fun time. “You Can’t Force a Dance Party,” from 2009’s The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele, wryly introduced May as an affective personality to rival Jonathan Richman and Jens Lekman. It’s not hard to see the autobiographical elements in his music when he sings of his native state, “For you I’ll try so hard to make you see, it ain’t so bad in Mississippi.” Dropping out of NYU, May returned home to work on music and helped found the Cats Purring arts collective/”infotainment cult.” With his new release, Do Things — a slice of sun that sounds like the product of playing with a drum machine after listening to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” on repeat/acid — May proves that the party is wherever he goes. (Prendiville)

With Quintron and Miss Pussycat

9pm, $9–$12

New Parish

579 18th St., Oakl.

www.thenewparish.com

 

Sat/30 9:30pm, $10–$12

With Quintron and Miss Pussycat, Shannon and the Clams

Elbo Room

647 Valencia, SF (415) 552-7788

www.elbo.com

 

Sandwell District

The SF techno scene blossomed nicely in spring, a kaleidoscope of pixellated textures, live experiments, and visiting representatives of a global scene unburdened from any anti-intellectual strains by the rise of pop EDM. There was also some damn good dancing to be had, no lie. Perhaps auguring a summer full of even deeper, and, perhaps, harder sounds, a showcase from Berlin’s Sandwell District label kicks the season off with some sophisticated boom-boom from Function, Rrose, and Silent Servant at Public Works, presented by the As You Like It party crew. Entrancing UK slow-burn disco king Mark E gives something to swing our skirts to upstairs, and the whole shebang kicks off with the debut of Amélie Ravalec’s documentary Paris/Berlin: 20 Years of Underground Techno. (Marke B.)

9pm, $15–$20

Public Works

161 Erie, SF

(415) 932-0955

www.ayli-sf.com


SATURDAY 30

The Slow Motion Cowboys

The music of the Slow Motion Cowboys has a subtle summery ease — it makes you want to pick up a banjo and play along, perhaps while sipping some lemonade out on the porch. You’d close your eyes and strum along to the sounds of upright bass, gentle guitar picking, baritone ukulele, and fiddle. The group’s original songwriting style and arrangements capture that wistful feeling of yearning that so characterizes classic folk and bluegrass music. While contemporary enough to strike interest in a city audience, their sound is country enough to provide you with much needed peace of mind on a Saturday night out on the town. (Shauna C. Keddy)

6pm, $8–$10

Amnesia

835 Valencia, SF

(415) 970- 0012

www.amnesiathebar.com

 

Kafana Balkan

Admit it: you could use a lot more woozy oompah-pah in your life, a splash of wheeling fiddle-dee-dee, soaring hurrah, and bouncey bass arpeggio. Forget the automated four-four march of your quotidian existence, and whirl away from the rat race like a romanticized gypsy, a musical nomad free of the cubicle, the log-in, the comments section, the endless update. Kafana Balkan, one of our best Romani-inspired parties, mixes gypsy tunes and strong drink with a wee bit of playa dust to conjure non-stop ecstatic dancing: this blowout with live powerhouses Brass Menazeri and Fishtank Ensemble (and fantastic DJ Zeljko) is just the ticket to chase away any reality blues. (Marke B.)

9pm, $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF.

www.slimspresents.com


SUNDAY 1

Party Hard(ing)

When it comes to the high stakes game of gentrification, the Divisadero Corridor — lovingly dubbed DivCo by the passels of farmers market-minded individuals that have repopulated the once-African American, once-Western Addition — is betting high. The neighborhood has the critical mass of sustainability activists needed to launch high profile wars against big bank incursion, and drive the conversation on what kinds of new businesses belong on their street. The Harding Theater at 616 Divisadero is a new battle site. Neighborhood groups hope to thwart the efforts of condo developers and make it a community space. Today, come party and fundraise to that end with local vendors, barbers, musicians, and chefs in a gorgeous Alamo Square mansion. (Caitlin Donohue)

7-10pm, $20

Westerfield Mansion

1988 Fulton, SF

Facebook: Party Hard(ing)

www.nddivis.org

 

Lower Dens

Ever since Lower Dens made some year-end lists with 2010’s Twin Hand Movement, bandleader Jana Hunter has kept Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity in heavy rotation. And, it shows. The Baltimore outfit’s breakthrough follow-up record, Nootropics, doubles down on thick, Krautrockabilly grooves, with the Zen-like propulsion of Lou Reed cruising the Autobahn. The production aesthetic is fascinating in its ability to sound both dry and soaked in reverb, and the album’s second half reveals a newfound interest in Musique concrète, giving the material an artier edge. Sure, they’ve upped their studio game, but the question remains: how will the band rock these songs in a live setting? (Kaplan)

With No Joy, Alan Resnick

8pm, $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com


MONDAY 2

The Casualties

Punk’s not dead! The Casualties made sure of it when they formed in New York in 1990 with the purpose of bringing punk back to its roots, in the style of the Exploited and pre-Rollins Black Flag. More than 20 years and eight studio albums later, they’re following through on their proclamation “The punx are fucking here/ You know who we are/ We’re here til the end/ Die hards! Die hards!” With over two decades to perfect their stage dives and liberty spikes, the Casualties are guaranteed to deliver a killer show. Expect some brutal circle pits. (Zaremba)

With Nekromantix, Down By Law, Lower Class Brats, the Sheds

7pm, $16

Oakland Metro Opera House

630 Third St, Oakl.

(510) 763-1146

www.oaklandmetro.org

The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

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