Parks

Hands off social security!

David Talbot
-
2

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

Republican leaders in Congress would have us believe that most Americans support cutting Social Security and Medicare payments as a way to cut the federal budget deficit. But don’t you believe it.

As the AFL-CIO and other labor sources have discovered, that’s at best a figment of the Republican imagination. Or, as is most likely, it’s a bald-faced political lie.

The proof came in a poll marking the 75th anniversary of Social Security this year. It was conducted by a prominent research organization, Greenberg Quilan Rosner, and commissioned by the nation’s leading public employee unions, the Service Employees International and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, joined by MoveOn.org and the Campaign for America’s Future.

The poll was in response to Republican House leader John Boehner’s call for reducing the federal budget deficit by raising the Social Security retirement age to 70, while continuing President Bush’s massive tax breaks for multi-billion-dollar corporations and wealthy individuals.

Boehner, that is, wants to lower the Republicans’ rich friends’ taxes at the expense of Americans who must rely on Social Security payments, averaging less than $14,000 a year, to meet their basic living expenses.

It would make much more sense, of course, to reduce the deficit by increasing taxes on the wealthy at least to the level they were before Bush’s tax cuts, rather than do it by raising the retirement age and making other financial cutbacks that hurt low and middle income Americans.

So, what did the poll show?

Most Democrats and independents responding wanted to end the Bush tax cuts that, if not repealed, will increase the deficit by an estimated $3.1 trillion over the next decade and reduce government revenue by more than $650 billion. That obviously would greatly curtail Social Security and other government programs for poor and middle class Americans.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that most of the Republicans polled did not want to repeal the tax cuts and thus help government provide more services to those who need them, often badly need them.

Nevertheless, nearly 70 percent of the probable voters polled, whatever their political party, opposed cutting Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit.
What’s more, two-thirds of the Republicans also opposed raising the retirement age, despite their general dislike of the Social Security system. Raising the retirement age from 67 to 70 obviously would greatly curtail Social Security and other government programs designed to help poor and middle class Americans. But that apparently didn’t disturb many of the Republicans polled. Most of them did not want to repeal the tax cuts under any circumstance.

The AFL-CIO concluded – and quite accurately, I think – that “those conservative politicians who want to use concern about deficits as an opening to go after Social Security or Medicare risk a backlash” from voters.

The poll made clear that relatively few people are buying the Republican claims that Social Security and Medicare outlays are a major cause of the continuing federal budget deficit. Too many people have too much sense to believe that.

But what did sensible voters see as the main causes of the deficit?

Nearly half of those polled blamed the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
About a third blamed the bailouts of big banks and the auto industry.

Nearly a third blamed lobbyists and special interests for getting unnecessary spending put into the budget.

Almost as many placed the major blame on President Obama’s economic recovery or stimulus plan.

About one-fourth blamed the Bush tax cuts.  A relative few blamed the economic recession that reduced tax revenue and required costly government support for the unemployed. A relatively few others blamed the deficit on the cost of Medicare prescription drug benefits.

What it boils down to is this, as the AFL-CIO’s James Parks said in a bit of public advice to GOP Congressman Boehner:  “The public doesn’t like your plan to cut their Social Security so your rich friends can get another tax break.”

Anyone doubting the popularity and importance of Social Security need only consider a recent AARP survey that showed  “exceedingly high” support for the program.

” Clearly,” said AARP researcher Colette Thayer, ” most Americans rely on Social Security and expect it to be a source of income in their retirement. In fact, it is the most commonly cited source of retirement income.”

    Whatever their ages, whether over 30 or under, the poll – just as others like taken on the program’s anniversary dates five, 15 and 25 years ago – shows that Social Security is one of the government’s most important programs in that it provides essential retirement income to millions of Americans who would otherwise have little or no income.

The Campaign for America’s Future and MoveOn.org, will be jointly campaigning for candidates in the coming midterm elections who’ll pledge to block cuts in Social Security and Medicare and otherwise back the organizations’ liberal agendas. The unions that helped them sponsor the poll will also be waging major campaigns, as will other AFL-CIO affiliates.

They’re backing the kind of political candidates we should all back – and as strongly as we can. Our social security depends on it.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

Apathy and the arboretum

David Talbot
-
5
Apathy and the arboretum

OPINION Nobody believed it could happen, that the ordinance might pass. On the face of it, it seemed inconceivable. The very idea that visitors would have to pay to enter a public park appeared absurd, and had been rejected only the year before. Some believed the hype and were convinced that this would help solve the budget deficit. Others expected someone besides themselves would take action, or believed that that the $7 fee, once imposed, would apply only to nonresidents.

So, by and large, people sat on their hands. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Botanical Garden Society at Strybing Arboretum, the driving force behind the privatization of the arboretum in Golden Gate Park, was using the camouflage of hard times to mask the absurdity of its proposal. The way had been carefully paved. A real estate developer and Bolinas resident handpicked by Mayor Gavin Newsom to head the Recreation and Park Commission voiced his enthusiasm. The rubber-stamp commission he heads passed it on to the Board of Supervisors. Despite the presence of his grandfather’s native plant garden within the arboretum, the mayor lent his support.

The society had craftily employed lobbyist Sam Lauter, who had set up meetings between individual supervisors and wealthy trustees.

The strategy succeeded. Astonishingly, only three supervisors voted against the ordinance imposing a fee on entrance to the arboretum. Leading the charge for the measure was John Avalos, who had added a “sunset” clause along with other vaguely worded amendments. At the hearing, the ever-congenial Chris Daly accused opponents of “elitism.” No public comment was permitted, and no supervisor questioned Recreation and Parks Department head Phil Ginsberg, although Eric Mar did announce his intention to join the Botanical Garden Society.

Much was made about union jobs — as though holding three gardeners’ salaries hostage to the passing of a privatization ordinance was a reasonable proposition.

As things stand now, the society is planning to allow its members free admission to the arboretum. Given that the reason for the $7 fee is all about the budget, this makes no logical sense. Low-income people and the undocumented (not to mention the homeless) will be excluded.

The society is also planning to build a $13 million glorified greenhouse that would have its own entrance on John F. Kennedy Drive. No community discussion has been held, but that has not deterred the society from soliciting the state to pay $7 million toward this so-called “sustainable gardening center,” an edifice that would likely memorialize the likes of Dede Wilsey or similar donor.

So what’s a good citizen to do? If you value public free space, the wings of the society need to be clipped. The best way to do this is to directly contact the offices of your supervisors, especially Sups. John Avalos (554-6975), David Campos (554-5144), David Chiu (554-7450),Michela Alioto-Pier (554-7752), Sean Elsbernd (554-6516) and Carmen Chu (554-7460). And vociferously voice your feelings.

Otherwise, the fee will not sunset next year — or any year.

Harry S. Pariser is a long-term resident of the Inner Sunset. You can join the Yahoo! group at groups.yahoo.com/group/keepthearboretumfree.

Brilliant essay on the state of California

Zelda Bronstein
-
6
Brilliant essay on the state of California

Vast treatises have been written about the California mess and how we got where we are today. But a professor at UC Berkeley’s school of public policy sums the whole thing up in one brilliant, short letter to his students. You can read the whole thing here (thanks, Calitics), but the gist is that today’s generation of California kids is the collective victim of a massive swindle:


Swindle–what happened? Well, before you were born, Californians now dead or in nursing homes made a remarkable deal with the future.  (Not from California? Keep reading, lots of this applies to you, with variations.) They agreed to invest money they could have spent on bigger houses, vacations, clothes, and cars into the world’s greatest educational system, and into building and operating water systems, roads, parks, and other public facilities, an infrastructure that was the envy of the world. They didn’t get everything right: too much highway and not enough public transportation. But they did a pretty good job.


Young people who enjoyed these ‘loans’ grew up smarter, healthier, and richer than they otherwise would have, and understood that they were supposed to “pay it forward” to future generations, for example by keeping the educational system staffed with lots of dedicated, well-trained teachers, in good buildings and in small classes, with college counselors and up-to-date books.  California schools had physical education, art for everyone, music and theater, buildings that looked as though people cared about them, modern languages and ancient languages, advanced science courses with labs where the equipment worked, and more. They were the envy of the world, and they paid off better than Microsoft stock. Same with our parks, coastal zone protection, and social services.


This deal held until about thirty years ago, when for a variety of reasons, California voters realized that while they had done very well from the existing contract, they could do even better by walking away from their obligations and spending what they had inherited on themselves.  “My kids are finished with school; why should I pay taxes for someone else’s?  Posterity never did anything for me!”  An army of fake ‘leaders’ sprang up to pull the moral and fiscal wool over their eyes, and again and again, your parents and their parents lashed out at government (as though there were something else that could replace it) with tax limits, term limits, safe districts, throw-away-the-key imprisonment no matter the cost, smoke-and-mirrors budgeting, and a rule never to use the words taxes and services in the same paragraph.


That about sums it up, and I hate to say it, but my generation — the baby boomers who were supposed to change the world in such a wonderful way — is guilty of just the opposite. If the WWII folks were the Greatest Generation, then the boomers are the Selfish Generation.

SF Chamber attacks — lamely

Sasha Cuttler
-
0
SF Chamber attacks — lamely

The right-wing San Francisco Chamber of Commerce has had a pretty bad track record in local electoral politics in recent years, and its latest attack ads on progressive members of the Board of Supervisors demonstrates why: the group’s muddled and hypocritical messaging is barely comprehensible to the average San Franciscan.

The San Francisco Chronicle this morning announced the new ad campaign, the first salvo resulting from strategy sessions with Mayor Gavin Newsom and other downtown players, and the article included a funny conflict about whether or not the Chronicle is giving free advertising space to the effort.

But the ads themselves are even funnier – although inadvertently so – asking voters whether “your city supervisor” prefers “buses or benefits,” “parks or pensions,” or “paychecks or pinkslips.” Apparently, the Chamber is trying to capitalize on this political season’s fashionable attacks on public employee pensions and benefits, but the false choices that the Chamber sets up actually say more about its own promotion of this sort of zero-sum game within the public sector.

Hundreds of city employees have gotten pink slips in the last couple years directly because Newsom and the Chamber have sabotaged proposed revenue measures, even those that would help small businesses. They’ve played cynical political games that have cut Muni service and caused fares to double since Newsom became mayor, with Muni money diverted to help fund the paychecks, benefits, and pensions of police and firefighters – core Newsom constituencies to whom he gave overly generous deals to secure their early support for his 2007 re-election – while recently negotiating a deal that would exempt them from being affected by Jeff Adachi’s pension reform measure for another two years.

But targets of the ads don’t even need to know this whole backstory to see that the ads are simply false choices, lamely presented. Another swing and a miss from the once-mighty Chamber.

Beach fossils

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
2
Beach fossils

arts@sfbg.com

“Live from Betty Ford, it’s the Eddie Money show!” — Eddie Money, Santa Cruz, 8:45 PM, 7/30/10

MUSIC It’s hard to convey your passion for amusement parks without sounding like the lyrics to “Lakeside Park,” Rush’s sentimental 1975 tribute to the summertime midway. Hopefully this observation should serve as a decent justification for an elegy to the unspoken muse of the group’s Caress of Steel.

Consider the beginning of summer in the Bay Area. It can’t properly be called a seasonal phenomenon; rather, summer doesn’t officially begin until you’ve been bombarded with that stupid goddamn Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk commercial — the one that’s remained pretty-much untouched since 1994 — at regular 10-minute intervals. Recall the slightly askance shot of smiling oily young people running on the beach in weirdly lurid 1990s-era one-piece bathing suits, screaming brats strapped into the Fireball, maybe some kind of close-up of a Dip ‘n’ Dots kiosk, all unfolding to the strains of “California Sun.” For better or for worse, this has become the harbinger of the Northern California summer.

Unlike the adjacent pier, another tourist destination, suspended precariously above the water by barnacle-encrusted poles, the boardwalk feels so thoroughly entrenched in its surroundings that it’s effectively become a natural feature of the Santa Cruz shoreline. Years from now, the pelican shall nest on the Giant Dipper “Scenic Coaster”‘s wooden bones while sea lions caper with jellyfish and squid in the sepulchral wrack of Neptune’s Kingdom (the big arcade with Skee-Ball, I mean).

I know it’s naïve to think the commercial hasn’t actually changed — tragically, some new versions of the iconic annoyance have been springing up, laced with recycled footage, of course. Likewise, the Boardwalk has seen a handful of new rides incorporated into its landscape since the commercial originally aired. But stepping onto it in the warm California sun really makes you feel as though you’ve unwittingly wandered into some perpetually-20-years-ago liminal zone — like Richard Linklater’s Austin, Texas, or the Los Angeles of 1987’s Surf Nazis Must Die.

The living, and their fiberglass approximations, populate the “Bands on the Beach!” series, the annual free showcase for long forgotten, mid-level, Frankensteined back together rock acts. It’s certainly hard not to feel cynical about the series after Gregg Rolie (original lead singer for Santana) amuses the crowd with a timely “Who let the dogs out?” reference. But at their core — and I’m only being slightly facetious here — there’s something awesome and spontaneous about these concerts, a judo-like grappling with the condition of being presented as a reanimated artifact.

The first set I caught this summer was Blue Öyster Cult, who I’d seen earlier this year at the Santa Cruz County Fair in Watsonville. BÖC’s facility with vocal harmony and baroque, intertwining guitar arrangement is often discounted. And while the band maintains a rightfully dedicated/defensive cult fanbase, it nevertheless picked up a different set of fans with a certain comedy sketch based on a highly, highly exaggerated cowbell enthusiasm. Multiple factors conspire to make the band’s set a one-note joke, an opportunity to wring those last few precious drops of irony out of a period that’s becoming rapidly depleted.

If this was universally the case, Friday nights at the Boardwalk would be downright sadistic. But Blue Öyster Cult takes seriously the kind of gig that numerous lesser acts would treat as some kind of where-are-they-now closing vignette from an early-period Behind the Music. The dreamy main riff and strange ersatz reggae of “Burnin’ for You” fused together with the sound of waves and ride-machinery and the permeating scent of weed smoke mysteriously radiating from the old hippies and biker couples getting down on the beach. It turned something that for all intents and purposes should be sad and creepy into something weird and beautiful.

But the obverse, and perhaps more exciting face of the summer concert series arcade token is the Eddie Money experience. If Blue Öyster Cult rises above its pigeonholing as a goofy retro spectacle, Mr. Money gleefully embraces it with a show that can only be described as a resplendent, lurid train-wreck. Eddie Money is no resurrected has-been. Quite the contrary: he is finally capable of carrying his earlier work to its full potential — sung by a “supercharged city kid with rock ‘n’ roll in his soul” (as per Journey’s Steve Perry on an episode of Midnight Special).

Staples like “Two Tickets to Paradise” and “Take Me Home Tonight” are admittedly catchy, but ultimately banal. But in the senior Money’s filthy clutches they drip with sleaze. He gingerly struts around the stage while crooning his myriad hits in a scratchy approximation of his original singing voice. He interrupts nearly every song to demand that we “shake it with the money-maker,” and to illustrate what this might look like, he opens and spreads his black suit jacket and gyrates toward the crowd. His set isn’t so much about music as it is about performing the paunchy, slightly unhinged middle-aged ’80s rocker, a staple of the free concert circuit, and a persona that Money seems to have perfected. The Eddie Money of that Midnight Special clip is dead; in his place is someone infinitely more interesting.

Classy to the end, the Money-man closes his set with a “don’t let your girlfriends drive” joke, as the 200-plus in attendance file out of the Boardwalk. Be sure to leave the beach as clean as you found it!

SANTA CRUZ BOARDWALK BANDS ON THE BEACH!

Fridays, 6:30 and 8:30 p.m.; through Sept. 3; free

(Fri/13, Spin Doctors; Aug. 20, Papa Doo Run Run; Aug. 27, Starship starring Mickey Thomas; Sept. 3, The Tubes featuring Fee Waybill)

Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk

400 Beach, Santa Cruz

(831) 423-5590

www.beachboardwalk.com/concerts

 

Two views:Joanna Newsom at the Fox, 8/2/10

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

By Amber Schadewald and Sam Stander

TAKE ONE “Have you seen her before?” a spirited woman asked a random couple in the front row at Oakland’s Fox theater Monday night, just before the lights began to dim. “She’s a fucking angel.” And it’s hard to disagree. California’s own folk-harp-composing-wonder Joanna Newsom is a beautiful, beautiful being who produced a perfectly impressive evening with song after long song of feather-light melodies. 

The show was lined with songs new and old, but consisted primarily of those from her February release, Have One On Me [Drag City, 2010]. Her fingers danced like tiny forest fairies across the towering collection of strings, creating surreal melodies that otherwise only exist in dream sequences and lands of happily ever after. Newsom’s whole face smiled as she played and I especially enjoyed watching her bright red lips as they took on various shapes; from large o’s that created airy open vowels to horizontal concoctions that produced Newsom’s classic, fluttering sounds. Her “new” voice, or what has developed after nodules were removed from her vocal chords last year, is gorgeous and full, yet hasn’t lost all the unique characteristics fans adore and non-fans despise. 

The evening’s mini-orchestra was comprised of local musicians, hailing from Oakland and Alameda. Together they delivered flute melodies, trombone solos, tender violins, banjo, electric guitar and all kinds of funky lil’ sounds to fulfill Newsom’s intricate compositions. Closing my eyes, I saw all kinds of stereotypical soothing images: dolphins clearing the surf, dew drops on roses, whiskers on kittens….well, to say the least, I left the Fox feeling so content, you could’ve wrapped me up with a bow.

Angel? I’d say Ms. Newsom is more of a real-life Cinderella, hypnotizing all the forest critters with her organic harp and piano sounds, calling them to her like a pied-piper, but instead of making them clean her room, she puts them all into a deep, satisfying slumber. Ahhhhh. (Schadewald)

TAKE TWO Remember when Joanna Newsom was this weird dark-horse harp wunderkind with a challenging (some would say grating, others might say revelatory) singing style? That was eight years ago, believe it or not, and by most accounts the 28-year-old singer songwriter has since outrun the shadow of her perceived fey persona to establish herself as a formidable force in modern popular music. Her prodigious skill (which opener Robin Pecknold compared, oddly, to Einstein) was on display Monday 8/2 at Oakland’s Fox Theater, where she took the stage with a five-piece backing band and played a set featuring material from all three of her LPs.

The band set-up is necessary to convey the complexity of her more recent compositions, including bangers like “Emily,” the epic opening track from 2006’s Ys [Drag City], originally arranged by Van Dyke Parks but reduced for this group by multi-instrumentalist Ryan Francesconi. Not so surprisingly, however, the most powerful sonic moments emanated from Newsom’s harp and voicebox. Sometimes, she reaches a kind of ecstatic energy where she is shout-singing some of her lyrics, hitting the odd notes that were more characteristic of her singing voice prior to her development of vocal cord nodules in 2009.

The other musicians provided texture throughout, but on certain numbers, the talented players especially stood out. Andrew Strain’s mournful trombone on “You and Me, Bess” complemented Newsom’s playing beautifully, while the Celtic-y fiddle from Mirabai Peart and Emily Packard added lushness to “Kingfisher.” Have One on Me highlight “Good Intentions Paving Company” was accompanied by “some Pecknolds and some Newsoms” who came out on stage and appeared to be tapping rhythm sticks or drum sticks together.

Newsom is a virtuoso harp player, but in keeping with the general diversification of her music on Ys and this year’s Have One on Me, she spent a lot of the show at the piano, switching off instruments roughly every other song. Her performance of “Inflammatory Writ,” which already features piano in its recorded form on The Milk-eyed Mender [Drag City, 2004], featured a country-inflected arrangement that may very well improve upon the classic album version. Other songs that benefited from live performance were Have One on Me opener “Easy,” on which the whole band just sounded smashingly good, and older track “Peach Plum Pear,” which closed the set before the encore. It’s a testament to Newsom’s development that her wailing intensity at the end of that song now far outstrips the force of the overdubbed choruses on the recording. Still one of her most strikingly beautiful compositions, both musically and lyrically, the track as performed Monday sounded like the closing song to a melancholy romantic film.

In contrast to the quasi-refined aesthetic of much of her music, Newsom brought Pecknold onstage for an encore of “Picture,” the boozy Kid Rock/Sheryl Crow (or Allison Moorer) duet. Perhaps those anticipating a collaboration on “On a Good Day,” a Newsom track that Pecknold covers, might have been disappointed, but the change in tone was both hilarious and well-executed. The auxiliary Pecknolds and Newsoms returned to the stage to snap in time and dance across the stage, before the close of the show was met with a second standing ovation.

Newsom’s novel-length songs might seem a tight fit for a riveting live show, but especially when juxtaposed with Pecknold’s lovely-sounding but formless songs in the opening act, the brilliant structure of her pieces kept the concert hurtling forward. If you’re the sort to dismiss Newsom’s harp-driven stylings as something quaint or merely trendy, seeing her live might persuade you otherwise, since this harpist is as exhilarating as any more conventional rocker or folkie you’ll encounter onstage anytime soon. (Stander)

 

The deal is done

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
1
The deal is done

Mayor Gavin Newsom was quick to frame the Board of Supervisors’ 10-1 vote for Lennar Corp.’s massive redevelopment proposal for Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard on July 27 as a sign that plans to revitalize the Bayview are about to begin.

“Now we can truly begin the work of transforming an environmental blight into a new center of thousands of permanent and construction jobs, green technology investment, affordable housing, and parks for our city,” Newsom claimed in a prepared statement after the board (with Sup. Chris Daly as the lone dissenter) approved Lennar’s 700-acre project.

The proposal calls for 10,500 residential units; 320 acres of parks, retail and entertainment facilities, green-tech office space; and a San Francisco 49ers stadium if the team decides not to move to Santa Clara.

But Kofi Bonner, who worked for Mayor Willie Brown before becoming Lennar’s top Bay Area executive in 2006, said the vote means he can start shopping the plan around. “Now we have to find some money to move forward with the project,” Bonner told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Given the stubbornness of the recession, Bonner’s revelation that Lennar has yet to find all the necessary investors means local workers and public housing residents could be waiting a long time for jobs and housing in Bayview. If and when the project finally breaks ground, it will involve building condos in the Bayview’s only major park.

These realities undermine the claims of Lennar, which used the mantra of “jobs, housing, and parks” in 2008 to sell Proposition G but made no mention of a bridge over environmentally sensitive Yosemite Slough or selling state parkland for condos.

Also disturbing, says Sierra Club local representative Arthur Feinstein, is the lack of any economic analysis to support Lennar’s claims that the bridge is needed.

Indeed, the only thing clear to longtime observers of the plan is that the much vaunted jobs won’t happen soon, most of the housing will be unaffordable to current Bayview residents, and Candlestick Point State Recreation Area, the only major open space in the Bayview, will be carved up so Lennar can build luxury condos on waterfront land.

These concerns have led the Sierra Club to threaten a lawsuit over issues on which Board President David Chiu was the swing vote in favor of the Lennar and Redevelopment Agency plan. Yet Chiu told the Guardian that the process got him thinking that it might be time to reform the redevelopment process.

“Now might be a good time to address concerns about the potential for inconsistency between Redevelopment and the city when it comes to land use and planning visions,” Chiu said. “And I have concerns about the tax increment financing process.” Tax increment financing allows the Redevelopment Agency to keep all property tax increases from the project, up to $4 billion, to use in redevelopment projects rather than into city coffers.

Chiu says the amendment he offered July 12, which narrows Lennar’s proposed bridge over Yosemite Slough by half, was based “on the belief that having a connection between jobs and housing is important. And I had understood that it would cost the developer an additional $100 million if the bridge was removed.”

But Feinstein counters that it’s hard to imagine that building a bridge over an environmentally sensitive slough will attract investors that support green technology. He is concerned that the development is expected to attract 24,465 new residents but that the Lennar plan fails to mitigate for transit-related impacts on air quality. “The Bayview already has the highest rates of asthma and cancer in the city,” Feinstein said.

Chiu says the supervisors can introduce separate legislation to address this concern. “It’s my understanding that an air quality analysis could be implemented by the board,” he said.

Although the board’s July 27 vote was a relief for termed-out Sup. Sophie Maxwell, its failure to support the no-bridge alternative, increased affordability standards, and an air quality analysis could result in expensive and time-consuming litigation, Feinstein warns.

And although Sups. Chris Daly, Ross Mirkarimi, David Campos, John Avalos, and Eric Mar supported all three of these amendments, they were ultimately thwarted by a redevelopment law that limits the city’s control of such projects.

During the meeting, Daly acknowledged that it would be impossible for Lennar to meet his 50 percent affordability amendment. But he noted that if the project becomes too expensive “there’s going to be a pretty new neighborhood with lots of white folks living in the Bayview.”

But after Michael Cohen, Newsom’s top economic advisor, said the project would not be financially viable with 50 percent affordability, Sups. Chiu, Maxwell, Bevan Dufty, Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu, and Sean Elsbernd voted against Daly’s amendment.

These same six supervisors voted against Mirkarimi’s proposal to eliminate plans for a bridge across Yosemite Slough, even though Cohen was unable to point to any economic analysis to support Lennar’s claims that the bridge is necessary.

Arc Ecology owner Saul Bloom, whose nonprofit did studies indicating that an alternative route wrapping around the slough is feasible, says Lennar’s plan illustrates the problem that San Francisco has with development. “Elected officials couldn’t do anything,” he said, except give the nod to a plan he describes as “developed by a mayoral administration and approved by that mayor’s political appointees [on the Redevelopment Agency board],” Bloom said.

“The message that the environmental community takes away from all this is that it doesn’t pay to play well,” Bloom continued. “No matter how much you spend to try and ensure that litigation is not the only way to obtain the desired outcome, ultimately the message that comes back from the city and the developer is ‘sue us!’ That brings out the worst political conduct, not the most appropriate.”

Feinstein wouldn’t confirm that a Sierra Club lawsuit is imminent, but predicted that if the coalition — which includes Golden Gate Audubon, the California Native Plant Society, and SF Tomorrow — goes to court, it’s likely to win. “If we do litigate, we’ll probably do it on a wide range of issues,” Feinstein said. “They approved a fatally flawed document, and they could provide no documented evidence of the need for a bridge — and admitted that publicly.”

Feinstein contends that Lennar’s plan has been a runaway project from the get-go. “The idea was to march it through before the mayor is gone with little regard for process. And despite all the much vaunted public meetings, little in the plan has changed,” he said.

Feinstein added that he was disappointed in Chiu’s stance on the bridge. “There were five supervisors in the Newsom camp, but as board President, Chiu had a responsibility to be more vigilant,” he said. “We told him what’s wrong with the bridge plan, but he didn’t share our view.”

“This is a rare opportunity,” Maxwell said before the board’s final vote. “It focuses public and private investment into an area that has lacked it in the past. It’s unmatched by any development project in San Francisco. This project is large and complicated, no doubt. But let us not be fearful of this project because of its scale, because how else can we transform a neglected landscape?”

But project opponents say everyone should fear a deal that required the board to ask Lennar’s approval to amend a plan that was pitched by the Newsom administration and approved by a bunch of mayoral appointees on the Redevelopment Commission with little chance for elected officials to make changes.

Mirkarimi said the problem with a process in which redevelopment law trumps municipal law is that it creates a shadow government in those few municipalities in California where the Board of Supervisors or City Council is not the same entity as the Redevelopment Commission.

“This is not the first time Redevelopment’s plans have trumped the concerns of local residents,” Mirkarimi said, referring to the agency’s botched handling of the Fillmore District in the 1960s, which led to massive displacement of African and Japanese Americans.

“I’ve been told, ‘Don’t worry, Ross, this is not going to happen, we’re not going to use eminent domain.’ Well, jeez, that’s a consolation, because even when we’ve exercised our legislative influence and given our blessing, [Redevelopment] unilaterally changed the plan after it left the board,” Mirkarimi said, referring to Lennar’s decision to replace rental units with for-sale condos when it first began work on the shipyard in 2006. “That suggests a condescending role in which the developer is able to go to the Redevelopment Commission and make a unilateral change.”

Mirkarimi’s concerns seemed justified after Cohen, Bonner, and Redevelopment Director Fred Blackwell huddled in a corner of City Hall during the board’s July 27 meeting to decide which of the supervisors’ slew of amendments they would accept. When Cohen returned with the amendments organized into three categories (acceptable as written, to be modified, and completely unacceptable), Mirkarimi’s no-bridge amendment had been sorted into the “unacceptable” pile.

“With regard to your insistence on the economic reasons [for the bridge], please point to which document says that,” Mirkarimi said, leafing in vain through the project materials.

Cohen mentioned “a lessening of attractiveness,” “a lower-density product,” and a reduction of revenue available through tax increment financing to pay for the bridge.

“Yes, but I’m still trying to look for the information and all I’m hearing is this pitch,” Mirkarimi said. “The economic study is absent. There are no supporting documents here. This is why I feel it’s justified for us to have a review of this.”

Cohen rambled on about “rigorous public discussion over a number of years” and claimed that a “huge amount of studies had been done.”

“But there is no economic study,” Mirkarimi repeated.

The board then voted 6-5 against Mirkarimi’s amendment after deputy City Attorney Charles Sullivan said that the only way to remove the bridge — since the project’s environmental impact report had rejected that option — would be to reject the entire plan. “I wish we had been able to eliminate the bridge,” Campos told the Guardian after the vote. “Part of the challenge we have is to reexamine how Redevelopment works and explore the potential for taking it over.”

Daly believes the bridge has nothing to do with connecting the neighborhood to the city. “The idea is to allow white people to get the fuck out of the neighborhood,” he said. “And it connects a different class of people to a new job without having to go through a low-income community of color. That’s why the bridge is needed.”

Mirkarimi said he was satisfied that he had dissected the arguments against the no-bridge alternative but fears that institutional memory is lacking on the current board. “A lot of my colleagues have not been involved in the debacle,” he said, referring to decades of problems with redevelopment in San Francisco. But Maxwell was all smiles. “I did my homework a long time ago — that’s why they couldn’t touch the core of the project,” she said. “They just added to and augmented it.”

Board had to ask for Lennar’s approval…

Mary Magee
-
0

Images by Luke Thomas

The Board of Supervisors found itself in the humiliating position July 27 of having to ask for the approval of Lennar and the city’s Redevelopment Agency before it could amend Lennar’s massive redevelopment plan for Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard.

If that’s not an argument for reforming how this city approaches redevelopment, I don’t know what is. Especially since the Board’s meeting illustrated only too well how thoroughly Lennar’s local executives, who used to work for the city under Mayor Willie Brown,  understand this game and how to outfoxed any resistance to their ongoing effort to eat San Francisco whole.

“This is a rare opportunity,” Sup. Sophie Maxwell said ahead of the Board’s 10-1 vote (Sup. Chris Daly was the lone dissenting voice) to approve Lennar’s entire plan. “It focuses public and private investment into an area that has lacked it in the past,”continued Maxwell, who represents the district that encompasses the shipyard and Candlestick Point. ” It’s unmatched by any development project in San Francisco. This project is large and complicated, no doubt. But let us not be fearful of this project because of its scale, because how else can we transform a neglected landscape?”

But who wouldn’t be afraid of a deal that found Maxwell, Board President Chiu and Sups. Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu, Bevan Dufty and Sean Elsbernd joining forces to vote against Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s proposal that Lennar be required to include a non-bridge alternative?

And who wouldn’t be doubly afraid, given that these six supervisors took that vote after Michael Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor, was unable to point to a single document to support his claims that Lennar’s $100 million bridge over an environmentally sensitive slough is actually needed?

Talk about scary.

To his credit, Mirkarimi did a good job of illustrating what’s wrong with a process that allows a private developer like Lennar to pitch plans and get mayoral appointees to approve them, but doesn’t allow San Francisco’s elected officials to make any amendments unless the developer and Redevelopment agree.

At the root of this travesty is the fact that redevelopment law trumps municipal law, a power imbalance that creates a shadow government in those few municipalities in California where the city council or board of supervisors is not the same entity as the Redevelopment Commission.

San Francisco is one such municipality, and, as Mirkarimi explained, this is not the first time that Redevelopment’s plans have trumped the concerns of local residents.

“I’m the supervisor for the Fillmore, the first urban renewal laboratory took place in my district, and I vowed to never let it happen again, ”Mirkarimi said, referring to the massive displacement of African Americans and Japanese Americans that took place when Redevelopment decided to makeover the Fillmore in the 1960s.

“I’ve been told, “Don’t worry, Ross, this is not going to happen. We’re not going to use eminent domain,’” Mirkarimi continued. “Well, Jeez, that’s a consolation! Because even when we’ve exercised our legislative influence and given our blessing, [Redevelopment] unilaterally changed the plan after it left the Board. That suggests a condescending role in which the developer is able to go to the Redevelopment Commission and have a unilateral change.”

Mirkarimi was referring to how proposed rental units on Parcel A, the first parcel of shipyard land released for redevelopment, became for-sale condos at Lennar’s request, without the Board having any recourse, even though the area surrounding the redevelopment is ground zero for the city’s last remaining African American community and home to other low-income communities of color.

Deputy City Attorney Charles Sullivan explained that the s supervisors would require the approval of the developer and Redevelopment to amend Lennar’s latest plan, under Redevelopment law. Failing that, their only recourse would be to reject Lennar’s plan in its entirety–a nuclear option that only Daly seemed prepared to carry through.

Sup. David Campos noted that the city’s legal advice had been “somewhat of a moving target.” His comment suggested the Board had  been misled in the critical weeks before this final vote, including ahead of the Board’s July 14 vote to accept certification of the project’s final environmental impact report.

“When a number of us raised questions about the EIR, we were told we couldn’t, but that we would probably be able to make changes to the substantive plan,” Campos recalled. “But now we are getting a more complicated answer.”

Deputy City Attorney Sullivan said the situation was complicated, because some of the proposed amendments “don’t involve a simple stroke of the pen.”

But Campos pointed to the fact that Board President Chiu had introduced an amendment that only allows for a 41 ft. bridge across Yosemite Slough, thereby halving the width of the 82 ft. bridge that Lennar is proposing to build.

That amendment, which Chiu introduced July 12,  leaves the door open for the 82 ft. version of the bridge, if the 49ers indicate interest in a new stadium on Hunters Point Shipyard, a possibility the city claims is still alive, even though Santa Clara voters approved a new stadium for the 49ers this June.

“So, why can you amend the plan to include a scaled-down version of the bridge but not eliminate it altogether?” Campos asked.

“You can make that motion by voting not to approve the project,” Sullivan said.

“So, the change has to point to something already embedded in the project?” Campos asked.

“Or not be a rejection of everything that’s already been brought forward,” Sullivan replied.

After Mirkarimi proposed his no-bridge alternative, along with a slew of other amendments that Daly, Campos, and Sups. Eric Mar and John Avalos had been working on to strengthen the proposed development, Cohen, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s top economic advisor, huddled somewhere in City Hall along with Kofi Bonner,  Lennar’s top local executive and Fred Blackwell, the head of SF’s Redevelopment Agency to decide which of the Board’s amendments they would accept.

Cohen returned with the amendments organized into three categories: acceptable as written, modified, and completely unacceptable.

And predictably enough (to anyone  tracking Lennar’s insistence on a bridge) Mirkarimi’s no-bridge amendment had been tossed into the “unacceptable” pile.

“With regards to your insistence on the economic reasons for the bridge, please point to which document says that,” Mirkarimi said, leafing through the project materials that were piled on his desk.

Cohen mentioned a number of factors, including an alleged “lessening of attractiveness,” “a lower density product” and a reduction of property tax revenue that would be available through tax increment financing to pay for Lennar’s proposed bridge.

“Yes, but I’m still trying to look for the information, and all I’m hearing is this pitch,” Mirkarimi replied. “The economic study is absent. There are no supporting documents here. This is why I feel it’s justified for use to have a review of this.”

Cohen talked some more about “rigorous public discussion over a number of years.”

“But there is no economic study,” Mirkarimi repeated. At which point a deafening silence pervaded the Board’s venerable chambers, much as if the emperor had shown up without his proverbial clothes.

Deputy City Attorney Sullivan broke the silence by indicating that the only way for the Board to move a no-bridge alternative forward would be to stop all project approvals and send the plan back to Redevelopment.

And Mirkarimi reminded the supervisors that at the Board’s July 13 hearing, Cohen had said that there was no conclusive evidence around the need for the bridge.

But then the Board voted 6-5 against Mirkarimi’s proposal, a move insiders said was more about not pissing off Labor, which hopes to create jobs for iron workers, and not pissing off Lennar, whose control runs deep and wide, and less about being convinced of the actual need to build over the last unbridged waterway in the city’s southeast sector.

And a couple of amendments later, the Board gave its blessing and it was all kisses and hugs and applause in the Board Chambers, even though the folks from Dwayne Jones Communities of Opportunities (COO) program, who usually show up to support the plan, strangely weren’t in attendance, rumoredly because their program has been cut off at the knees in the last few weeks, following Jones resignation as COO’s director.

“I wish we had been able to eliminate the bridge,” Campos told me after the Board’s final vote. “I think part of the challenge we have is to reexamine how Redevelopment works and explore the potential for taking it over.”

Mirkarimi was satisfied that he had dissected the arguments against the no-bridge alternative, but feared that institutional memory is lacking on the Board, and that without fundamental Redevelopment reform, the city is in danger of seeing this kind of travesty repeated, over and over.

“A lot of my colleagues have not been involved in the debacle,” Mirkarimo said, referring to how Redevelopment’s infamous role dates back five decades, and how Lennar has been working the local political scene for longer than most of the Board’s current members.

But Maxwell was all smiles.
“I did my homework a long time ago, that’s why they couldn’t touch the core of the project,” she said. “They just added to and augmented it.”

With Maxwell’s days on the Board drawing to a close, I asked what she’s contemplating doing next.

“Sophie is looking into water policies and conservation,” Maxwell said. “Without blue there is no green.

It was about then that Mayor Gavin Newsom released a press statement that blabbed on in vaguely frothing terms about what would happen next.

“Now we can truly begin the work of transforming an environmental blight into a new center of thousands of permanent and construction jobs, green technology investment, affordable housing and parks for our City,” Newsom said

His words came shortly before Bonner said that Lennar would now start looking for investors, and shortly after Cohen admitted that it could be years before anything in Lennar’s plan actually gets built. But none of them mentioned that the Sierra Club and other environmental groups are planning to sue the City over the bridge, an outcome that could have been averted, Sierra Club officials warned, if the No-bridge alternative had been  included in the final redevelopment plan.

Stay tuned….

 

Film listings

David Talbot
-
0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Erik Morse, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide at www.sfbg.com. Due to early deadlines for this issue, theater information was incomplete at press time.

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL

The 30th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival runs through Aug 9 at the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk; CineArts@Palo Alto Square, 3000 El Camino Real Bldg Six, Palo Alto; and Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, 118 Fourth St, San Rafael. Tickets (most shows $11) are available by calling (415) 256-TIXX or visiting www.sfjff.org. All times pm unless otherwise indicated.

WED/28

Castro Mrs. Moskowitz and the Cats 11:30am. Ingelore with "Surviving Hitler: A Love Story" 1:15. Budrus 4. Arab Labor: Season Two 6:30. Army of Crime 9.

THURS/29

Castro "Panel: Is Dialogue Possible? How Films Help Us Talk About Israel (…Or Not) 11:30am. Bugsy 1. Sayed Kashua: Forever Scared with Arab Labor: Season One, Episode 10 3:45. A Film Unfinished 8:45. The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground with "Seltzer Works" 8:45.

SAT/31

CineArts A Small Act noon. Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story 2. A Film Unfinished 4:15. Saviors in the Night 6:45. Father’s Footsteps 9.

Roda Bena noon. "Arab Labor: Season Two" 2. "Utopia in Four Movements" (live event) 4:30. The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground with "Seltzer Works" 7. Protektor 9:45.

SUN/1

CineArts My So Called Enemy noon. My Perestroika 2. The Worst Company in the World with "Baabaa the Sheep" 4. Anita 6:30. "Arab Labor: Season Two" 8:45.

Roda "Grace Paley: Collected Shorts" (shorts program) noon. Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story 2:15. A Film Unfinished 4:15. Budrus 6:45. Gruber’s Journey 9:15.

MON/2

CineArts Ahead of Time 2. Surrogate with "Guided Tour" 4. Te Extraño (I Miss You) with "Escape from Suburbia" 6:15. Bena 8:30.

Roda Long Distance with "You Can Dance" 2:15. Sayed Kashua: Forever Scared with "Arab Labor: Season One, Episode 10" 4. A Room and a Half 6. "Jews in Shorts: Focus on Israeli Narratives" (shorts program) 8:45.

TUES/3

CineArts Mrs. Moscowitz and the Cats 2. Long Distance with "You Can Dance" 4. The Wolberg Family with "Perfect Mother" 6. Jaffa with "The Orange" 8.

Roda 9 Years Later with "Perin’s Dual Identity" 2:30. Amos Oz: The Nature of Dreams 4:30. Anita 6:30. Illusiones Ópticas with "What About Me?" 8:45.

OPENING

*Alamar Pedro González-Rubio’s gorgeous Alamar ("to the sea") is set between landscapes (land and sea) and ways of telling (fiction and documentary). The bare frame of a plot places a young boy with his father and grandfather, Mayan fishermen working the Mexican Caribbean. The sweetness of this idyll is tempered by its provisional bounds: the boy will return to his mother in Rome at the end of his compressed experience of a father’s love. Every shot is earned: there are several in which the camera bucks with the boat, physically linked to the actors’ experience. The child is at an age of discovery, and González-Rubio channels this openness by fixing on the details of the fisher’s elegant way of life and the environmental contingencies of their home at sea. (1:13) Sundance Kabuki. (Goldberg)

Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore Secret agent pets return, in 3-D. (1:40)

Charlie St. Cloud Zac Efron goes boating. (1:40)

Countdown to Zero This documentary takes on the nuclear arms race. (1:30) Embarcadero, Shattuck.

Dark House On a dare, a little girl enters the house "where the weird kids live," and finds a slew of children slaughtered, their murdering foster mother in suicidal death throes. Fourteen years later, Claire (Meghan Ory) is plagued by nightmares. Her therapist has the bright idea that she should "face the past" and unlock her repressed memories by visiting the house in question. Yeah, that’ll work. The arrival of high-tech spookhouse impresario Walston (Jeffrey Combs) provides a convenient plan of action, as he wants to hire her entire college acting class as live performers in a press preview of his latest creepy creation, a house of holographic horrors tastelessly located in the still-vacant site of that child massacre. Natch, before you can say "avenging evil spirit," the illusory frights turn into cast-winnowing real perils. This allows director-scenarist Darin Scott (who previously wrote 1995 horror omnibus Tales from the Hood) to toss in a bevy of genre familiars, from zombies to an axe-wielding scary clown. But Dark House isn’t meta-horror so much as a fairly ordinary slasher that’s more silly than it is self-aware (let alone scary). Meh. (1:26) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Dinner for Schmucks When he attracts favorable notice and a possible promotion from his corporate boss, Tim (Paul Rudd) is invited to an annual affair in which executives compete to see who can dig up the freakiest loser dweeb for everyone to snicker at. He literally runs into the perfect candidate: Barry (Steve Carrell), an IRS employee whose hobby is making elaborate tableaux with stuffed dead nice in tiny human clothes. He’s also the sort of person who, in trying to be helpful, inevitably wreaks havoc on the unlucky person being helped. Which means the 24 hours or so before the "Biggest Idiot" contest provide plenty of time for well-intentioned Barry to nearly destroy Tim’s relationship with a girlfriend (Stephanie Szostak), reunite him with Crazy Stalker Chick (Lucy Punch), and imperil his wooing of a multimillion-dollar account. Director Jay Roach (of the Austin Powers and Meet the Fockers series) has a full load of comedy talent on board here. So why are the results so tepid? This remake softens the bite of Francis Veber’s 1998 original French The Dinner Game by making Tim not a yuppie scumbag but a nice guy who just happens to have a jerk’s job (his company seizes ailing firms and liquidates them), and who doesn’t really want to expose hapless Barry to humiliation. But even with that satirical angle removed and a wider streak of sentimentality, it should cough up more laughs than it does. (1:50) (Harvey)

Farewell In Joyeux Noel (2005) director Christian Carion’s new drama, a KGB agent slips top-secret documents to a French businessman, hoping to bring about the end of the Cold War. Fun fact: Fred Ward plays Reagan. (1:53) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael.

*Kisses Sweet as a lingering caress or a smooch swiftly snatched, Kisses is besotted with the feel, lights, and ambiance of Dublin and the sensation of being young, free, and all too ready to plunge into the mysteries of adulthood. Next-door neighbors living on the outskirts of the big city, Kylie (Kelly O’Neill) and Dylan (Shane Curry) have a few things in common: they’re both children forced to grow up far faster than they like. When Dylan strikes back at his abusive father, the two flee, vowing never to return. Their goal is to find Dylan’s older brother, who ran from their father’s beatings long ago. And through their street-wise but still innocent eyes — and Kisses‘ gradual, graceful transition from black and white to color — Dublin takes on a subtle magic, one that darkens as the night and its dangers progress. To his credit, director and writer Lance Daly avoids striving for epic statements with Kisses. Rather, he keeps his unashamedly romantic focus tight on the moment and his two riveting leads, coaxing a wonderful performance in particular from O’Neill, whose angelic contenance, giving-as-good-as-it-gets lip, and bulldog feistiness stays with you long after Kisses‘ tender touch has faded. (1:15) (Chun)

*Orlando The director Sally Potter recently revealed during a panel discussion in New York that she was once told, "There’s only one golden rule: nobody should ever try to adapt Virginia Woolf!" Eighteen years later Potter’s fantastic Orlando (1992) stands as proof to the contrary. As whip smart and thick with history and allusion as Woolf’s 1928 "biography" of its titular time-traveling, gender-bending hero, Orlando feels less like an adaptation of its source material than a collaboration with it. While the sumptuous costumes and lush production design certainly do their part, Woolf’s sharp humor and nuanced observations about art, nature, gender, and, well, nearly everything else, truly come alive thanks to Tilda Swinton’s performance in the title role. With her androgynous features, dry delivery, and winking, direct addresses to the camera, Swinton carries Orlando‘s journey from male consort to Queen Elizabeth (Quentin Crisp, in a brilliant bit of casting that would be his last onscreen appearance), to the most desired woman in 18th century London, to modern day published author and mother, with the practiced ease of a prima ballerina. Orlando elevated the flame-haired actor from Derek Jarman-muse to full-blown art house star. Come and see why. (1:33) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Sussman)

Winnebago Man This documentary tells the strange story of Jack Rebney, a YouTube sensation (thanks to a cussin’-tastic RV commercial outtake) who has no idea of his viral fame. (1:15) Shattuck.

ONGOING

Agora There’s a good movie somewhere in Agora, but finding it would require severe editing. It’s not that the film is too long, though it does drag in stretches. The problem is that there are too many stories being told: Hypatia of Alexandria, the central figure, only emerges as the focus well into the film. Meanwhile, there’s Davus (Max Minghella), the slave boy in love with her; Orestes (Oscar Isaac), the student who tries to win her affection; Synesius (Rupert Evans), the devout Christian. We jump from character to character and plot to plot — the conflict between the pagans and the Christians, the conflict between the Christians and the Jews, and Hypatia’s studies in astronomy. Agora is so scattered that by the time it reaches its tragic conclusion — only a spoiler if you haven’t already Googled Hypatia — there’s little room to breathe, let alone grieve. While Hypatia herself is a fascinating subject, Agora is weighed down by all the stories it’s intent on cramming in. (2:06) (Peitzman)

*Anton Chekhov’s The Duel Conformity vs. freedom, small-town whispers vs. the heavy hand of the law — Georgian director Dover Kosashvili successfully teases out some of the tensions in the Anton Chekhov novella, encapsulating the provincial pressures brought to bear on deviants and nonconformists during a steamy summer in a seaside resort town in the Caucasus. Dissolute civil servant and would-be intellectual Laevsky (Andrew Scott) is in the bind, as he gripes to the town doctor Samoylenko (Niall Buggy). Laevsky has everything he wants: he’s coaxed the creamy, married Nadya (Fiona Glascott) into living with him openly, yet now that her husband has died, he desires nothing more than to be free of her. In the meantime upstanding zoologist Von Koren (Tobias Menzies) simmers in the background, gaging Laevsky’s social mores and practically oozing contempt. Matters come to a head as Laevsky begs a loan from Samoylenko to escape his ripening paramour, who is also beginning to feel the gracious perimeters of the town closing in around her. From the buttons-and-bows millinery details to the oppressive dark wood furnishings, Kosashvili even-handedly builds a compelling Victorian-era mise en scene that seems to perfectly evoke the Chekhov’s milieu — it’s only when the title entanglement comes to pass that we finally see which side he’s on. (1:35) Smith Rafael. (Chun)

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo Opening with the humid buzz of crickets and the probings of bug aficionados in the thick of a forest, first-time documentarian Jessica Oreck puts Japan’s fascination with insects under the microscope. Preferring to let the images and interview subjects speak for themselves, she turns a lens to young children who clamor to buy sleek, shiny, obsidian beetles, as well as the giant big city gatherings of insect collectors — events that likely are less than familiar to western audiences. Oreck’s intent is to get at the ineffable attraction behind such astonishing sales as that of a single beetle for $90,000 not so long ago, and to that end, she weaves in looks at insect literature and art, visits to Buddhist temples, and historical factoids about, for instance, the first cricket-selling business in the early 1800s. (1:30) (Chun)

Breathless (1:30)

*City Island The Rizzo family of City Island, N.Y. — a tiny atoll associated historically with fishing and jurisdictionally with the Bronx — have reached a state where their primary interactions consist of sniping, yelling, and storming out of rooms. These storm clouds operate as cover for the secrets they’re all busy keeping from one another. Correctional officer Vince (Andy Garcia) pretends he’s got frequent poker nights so he can skulk off to his true shameful indulgence: a Manhattan acting class. Perpetually fuming spouse Joyce (Julianna Margulies) assumes he’s having an affair. Daughter Vivian (Dominik García-Lorido) has dropped out of school to work at a strip joint, while the world class-sarcasms of teenager Vinnie (Ezra Miller) deflect attention from his own hidden life as an aspiring chubby chaser. All this (plus everyone’s sneaky cigarette habit) is nothing, however, compared to Vince’s really big secret: he conceived and abandoned a "love child" before marrying, and said guilty issue has just turned up as a 24-year-old car thief on his cell block. Writer-director Raymond De Felitta made a couple other features in the last 15 years, none widely seen; if this latest is typical, we need more of him, more often. Perfectly cast, City Island is farcical without being cartoonish, howl-inducing without lowering your brain-cell count. It’s arguably a better, less self-conscious slice of dysfunctional family absurdism than Little Miss Sunshine (2006) — complete with an Alan Arkin more inspired in his one big scene here than in all of that film’s Oscar-winning performance. (1:40) (Harvey)

Cyrus It’s tempting to label Mark and Jay Duplass’ Cyrus as "mumblecore goes mainstream." Yes, the mumblecore elements are all there: plentiful moments of awkward humiliation, characters fumbling verbally and sometimes physically in desperate attempts to establish emotional connections, and a meandering, character-driven plot, in the sense that the characters themselves possess precious little drive. The addition of bona fide indie movie stars John C. Reilly, Catherine Keener, and Marisa Tomei — not to mention Hollywood’s chubby-funny guy du jour, Jonah Hill — could lead some to believe that the DIY-loving Duplass brothers (2005’s The Puffy Chair, 2008’s Baghead) have gone from slacker disciples of John Cassavetes (informally known as "Slackavetes") to worshippers at the slickly profane (with a heart) altar of Judd Apatow. But despite the presence of Apatow protégé Hill (2007’s Superbad) in the title role, Cyrus steers clear of crowd-pleasing bombast, instead favoring small, relatively naturalistic moments. That is to say, not much actually happens. Mumblecore? More or less. Mainstream? Not exactly. Despite playing a character with some serious psychological issues, Hill comes off as likeable. Unfortunately the movie is neither as broadly comic nor as emotionally poignant as it needs to be — the two opposing forces seem to cancel each other out like acids and bases. (1:32) (Devereaux)

Despicable Me Judging from the adorable, booty-shaking, highly merchandisable charm of its sunny-yellow Percocet-like minions, Despicable Me‘s makers have more than a few fond memories of the California Raisins. That gives you an idea of the 30-second attention-span level at work here. Thanks to Pixar and company, our expectations for animated features are high, but despite the single lob at Lehman Brothers aimed toward the grown-ups, the humor here is pitched straight at the eight and younger crowd: from the mugging, child-like minions to the all-in-good-fun, slightly quease-inducing 3-D roller-coaster ride. Gru (Steve Carell) is Despicable‘s also-ran supervillain — a bit too old and too unoriginal for a game that’s been rigged in the favor of the youthful, annoyingly perky Vector (Jason Segel), who’s managed to swipe the Giza Pyramids and become the world’s number one bad dude. When Vector steals away the crucial shrink ray needed for Gru’s plot to thieve the moon, the latter pulls out the big guns: three adorable orphans who have managed to penetrate Vector’s defenses with their fund-raising cookie sales. It turns out kids have their own insidiously heart-warming way of wrecking havoc on one’s well-laid plans. Filmmakers Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud do their best to exploit the 3-D medium, but Avatar (2009) this is not. Nor will many adults be able to withstand the onslaught of cute undertaken by all those raisins, I mean, minions. (1:35) (Chun)

*Exit Through the Gift Shop Exit Through the Gift Shop is not a film about the elusive graffiti-cum-conceptual artist and merry prankster known as Banksy, even though he takes up a good chunk of this sly and by-no-means impartial documentary and is listed as its director. Rather, as he informs us — voice electronically altered, face hidden in shadow — in the film’s opening minutes, the film’s real subject is one Thierry Guetta, a French expat living in LA whose hangdog eyes, squat stature, and propensity for mutton chops and polyester could pass him off as Ron Jeremy’s long lost twin. Unlike Jeremy, Guetta is not blessed with any prodigious natural talent to propel him to stardom, save for a compulsion to videotape every waking minute of his life (roughly 80 percent of the footage in Exit is Guetta’s) and a knack for being in the right place at the right time. When Guetta is introduced by his tagger cousin to a pre-Obamatized Shepard Fairey in 2007, he realizes his true calling: to make a documentary about the street art scene that was then only starting to get mainstream attention. Enter Banksy, who, at first, is Guetta’s ultimate quarry. Eventually, the two become chummy, with Guetta acting as lookout and documenter for the artist just as the art market starts clambering for its piece of, "the Scarlet Pimpernel of street art," as one headline dubs him. When, at about three quarters of the way in, Guetta, following Banksy’s casual suggestion, drops his camcorder and tries his hand at making street art, Exit becomes a very different beast. Guetta’s flashy debut as Mr. Brainwash is as obscenely successful as his "art" is terribly unimaginative — much to the chagrin of his former documentary subjects. But Guetta is no Eve Harrington and Banksy, who has the last laugh here, gives him plenty of rope with which to truss himself. Is Mr. Brainwash really the ridiculous and inevitable terminus of street art’s runaway mainstream success (which, it must be said, Banksy has handsomely profited from)? That question begs another: with friends like Banksy, who needs enemies? (1:27) Roxie. (Sussman)

Get Him to the Greek At this point movie execs can throw producer Judd Apatow’s name on the marquee of a film and it’s a guaranteed blockbuster. It’s hard to say whether this Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) spin-off benefits from the Apatow sign of approval or if it would be better off standing on its own, but it definitely doesn’t benefit from comparisons to its predecessor. Russell Brand returns as the British rock star Aldous Snow, and Jonah Hill, playing a different character this time, is given the task of chaperoning the uncooperative Snow from London to LA in 48 hours. Despite a great cast, including a surprisingly animated P. Diddy, the story is pretty bland and can’t match the blend of drama and comedy that Marshall achieved. Of course, none of that matters because the movie execs are right: if you like Apatow’s brand of humor, you’re going to have a good time anyway. (1:49) (Peter Galvin)

*The Girl Who Played With Fire Lisbeth Salander is cooler than you are. The heroine of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling book series is fierce, mysterious, and utterly captivating: in the movie adaptations, she’s perfectly realized by Noomi Rapace, who has the power to transform Lisbeth from literary hero to film icon. Rapace first impressed audiences in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009), a faithful adaptation of Larsson’s premiere novel, and she returns as Lisbeth in The Girl Who Played With Fire. The sequel, as is often the case, isn’t quite on par with the original, but it’s still a page-to-screen success. And while the first film spent equal time on journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), The Girl Who Played With Fire is almost entirely Lisbeth’s story. Sure, there’s more to the movie than the hacker-turned-sleuth — and the actor who plays her — but she carries the film. Rapace is Lisbeth; Lisbeth is Rapace. I’d watch both in anything. (2:09) Smith Rafael. (Peitzman)

*The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo By the time the first of Stieg Larsson’s so-called "Millennium" books had been published anywhere, the series already had an unhappy ending: he died (in 2004). The following year, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo became a Swedish, then eventually international sensation, its sequels following suit. The books are addicting, to say the least; despite their essential crime-mystery-thriller nature, they don’t require putting your ear for writing of some literary value on sleep mode. Now the first of three adaptive features shot back-to-back has reached U.S. screens. (Sorry to say, yes, a Hollywood remake is already in the works — but let’s hope that’s years away.) Even at two-and-a-half hours, this Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by necessity must do some major truncating to pack in the essentials of a very long, very plotty novel. Still, all but the nitpickingest fans will be fairly satisfied, while virgins will have the benefit of not knowing what’s going to happen and getting scared accordingly. Soon facing jail after losing a libel suit brought against him by a shady corporate tycoon, leftie journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) gets a curious private offer to probe the disappearance 40 years earlier of a teenage girl. This entangles him with an eccentric wealthy family and their many closet skeletons (including Nazi sympathies) — as well as dragon-tattooed Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), androgynous loner, 24-year-old court ward, investigative researcher, and skillful hacker. Director Niels Arden Oplev and his scenarists do a workmanlike job — one more organizational than interpretive, a faithful transcription without much style or personality all its own. Nonetheless, Larsson’s narrative engine kicks in early and hauls you right along to the depot. (2:32) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Great Directors Sussing taste in movies isn’t always as easy as perusing a shelf — not everyone necessarily cares to watch repeatedly even the films they esteem most. (Of course 1941’s Citizen Kane is brilliant, but do I own that? Nix. But 2000’s Dude, Where’s My Car? Yup.) Thus Angela Ismailos’ new documentary Great Directors is as interesting for what it reveals about the curator as for insights from "great" filmmakers themselves. Ismailos has tony taste: good if idiosyncratic, the kind you can respect yet argue with. She’s a real cineaste. And a narcissist, falling into that realm of filmmakers who make movies about other people yet incessantly insert themselves into the frame. Still, there have been far worse offenders in the realm of Gratuitous Me: The Documentary, and Ismailos chooses her subjects — plus filmic excerpts — with beguiling intelligence. The interviewees are very articulate. Are all "great"? Well, it’s hard to argue against Bernardo Bertolucci and David Lynch. Richard Linklater and Todd Haynes are inspired next-generation American choices. With John Sayles we enter the land of good intentions. Likewise Ken Loach and Stephen Frears. The jury’s still out on Catherine Breillat, while one truly odd choice is Liliana Cavani (1974’s S–M Nazi romance The Night Porter); offering contrast is Agnès Varda, whose puckish cinema is hobbit-like in its denial of sex. Several participants share tales of production travails, like Lynch claiming "It’s beautiful to have a great failure" (i.e., 1984’s Dune) since it freed him to make smaller, more personal projects like next-stop Blue Velvet (1986). Preening and adoring her idols in camera view, Ismailos flashes her good taste around. This would be more annoying if her taste wasn’t, in fact, pretty choice. (1:26) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Grown Ups In order of star power, Grown Ups casts Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, and David Spade as five fortysomething friends who reunite to attend the funeral of their high school basketball coach, and play catch-up over a long weekend together at a cabin by the lake. If you’re expecting five of America’s biggest comedy stars to form like Voltron and make the most hilarious movie of the year, you’ve got a sad day coming. Grown Ups is never the sum of its parts, it’s about on par with Sandler’s other producing/starring affairs, and probably features a lot of the same jokes. People fall in poop and little kids say cute things designed to make audiences awww, but history has shown that’s exactly what a popcorn viewer is looking for. By these standards, Grown Ups is a perfectly summer-y movie. (1:42) (Galvin)

*I Am Love I Am Love opens in a chilly, Christmastime Milan and deliberately warms in tandem with its characters. Members of the blue-blood Recchi family are content hosting lavish parties and gossiping about one another, none more than the matriarch Emma (Tilda Swinton). But when prodigal son Edoardo befriends a local chef, Emma finds herself taken by both the chef’s food and his everyman personality, and is reminded of her poor Soviet upbringing. The courtship that follows is familiar on paper, but director Luca Guadagnino lenses with a strong style and small scenes acquire a distinct energy through careful editing and John Adams’ unpredictable score. Swinton portrays Emma’s unraveling with the same gritty gusto she brought to Julia (2008), and her commitment to the role recognizes few boundaries. You’ve probably seen this story before, but it has rarely been this powerful. (2:00) (Galvin)

Inception As my movie going companion pointed out, "Christopher Nolan must’ve shit a brick when he saw Shutter Island." In Nolan’s Inception, as in Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio is a troubled soul trapped in a world of mind-fuckery, with a tragic-vengeful wife (here, Marion Cotillard) and even some long-lost kids looming in his thoughts at all times. But Inception, about a team of corporate spies who infiltrate dreams to steal information and implant ideas, owes just as much to The Matrix (1999), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and probably a James Bond flick or two. Familiar though it may feel, at least Inception is based on a creative idea — how many movies, much less summer blockbusters, actually require viewer brain power? If its complex house-of-cards plot (dreams within dreams within dreams) can’t quite withstand nit-picking, its action sequences are confidently staged and expertly directed, including a standout sequence involving a zero-gravity fist fight and elevator ride. Though it’s hardly genius — and Leo-recycle aside — Inception is worth it, if you don’t mind your puzzle missing a few pieces. (2:30) (Eddy)

*Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work Whether you’re a fan of its subject or not, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s documentary is an absorbing look at the business of entertainment, a demanding treadmill that fame doesn’t really make any easier. At 75, comedian Rivers has four decades in the spotlight behind her. Yet despite a high Q rating she finds it difficult to get the top-ranked gigs, no matter that as a workaholic who’ll take anything she could scarcely be more available. Funny onstage (and a lot ruder than on TV), she’s very, very focused off-, dismissive of being called a "trailblazer" when she’s still actively competing with those whose women comics trail she blazed for today’s hot TV guest spot or whatever. Anyone seeking a thorough career overview will have to look elsewhere; this vérité year-in-the-life portrait is, like the lady herself, entertainingly and quite fiercely focused on the here-and-now. (1:24) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

John Rabe John Rabe (Ulrich Tukur) was the Oskar Schindler of Nanking: A man who, under discreetly opportunist pretenses, attempted to keep the Chinese in a safety zone from the Japanese in the late 30s. Steve Buscemi plays Robert Wilson, a surly American doctor. He’s to Tukur as Ben Kingsley was to Liam Neeson in 1993’s Schindler’s List, but without the nuance or iconic chemistry. Tukur is understated, bordering on uninteresting, and Buscemi is just over-the-top. Unlike Spielberg’s film, John Rabe grants us little access to the stories of civilians. The film is so preoccupied with people of power and those like Rabe, couched in a world of privilege, that the film lacks an emotional, human center. It’s impossible to feel much of anything because we’re never asked to feel, nor are we ever asked to endure any especially difficult scenes. Even the occasional rain of hellfire isn’t as wallop-packing as it ought to be. (2:14) (Ryan Lattanzio)

*The Kids Are All Right In many ways, The Kids Are All Right is a straightforward family dramedy: it’s about parents trying to do what’s best for their children and struggling to keep their relationship together. But it’s also a film in which Jules (Julianne Moore) goes down on Nic (Annette Bening) while they’re watching gay porn. Director Lisa Cholodenko (1998’s High Art) co-wrote the script (with Stuart Blumberg), and the film’s blend between mainstream and queer is part of what makes Kids such an important — not to mention enjoyable — film. Despite presenting issues that might be contentious to large portions of the country, the movie maintains an approachability that’s often lacking in queer cinema. Of course, being in the gay mecca of the Bay Area skews things significantly — most locals wouldn’t bat an eye at Kids, which has Nic and Jules’ children inviting their biological father ("the sperm donor," played by Mark Ruffalo) into their lives. But for those outside the liberal bubble, the idea of a nontraditional family might be more eye-opening. It’s not a message movie, but Kids may still change minds. And even if it doesn’t, the film is a success that works chiefly because it isn’t heavy-handed. It refuses to take itself too seriously. At its best, Kids is laugh-out-loud funny, handling the heaviest of issues with grace and humor. (1:47) (Peitzman)

*Knight and Day A Bourne-again Vanilla Sky (2001)? Considerably better than that embarrassingly silly stateside remake, though not quite as fulfilling as director James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma (2007) rework, this action caper played for yuks still isn’t the most original article in the cineplex. But coasting on the dazzling Cheshire grins of its stars, Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, reunited for the first time since Sky, you can just make out the birth of a beautiful new franchise. Everygirl June Havens (Diaz) is on her way to her sister’s wedding when she collides-cute at the airport with Roy Miller (Cruise). After killing the passengers and pilots on their plane, he literally sweeps her off her feet — thanks to some potent drugs. Picture a would-be Bond girl dragged against a spy-vs.-spy thriller semi-against-her-will — grappling with the subtextual anxiety rushing beneath all brief romantic encounters as well as some very justifiable survival fears. Can June overcome her trust issues? Is Roy the man of her dreams — or nightmares? Mangold and company miss a few opportunities to have more fun with those barely teased out ideas, and the polished, adult-yet-far-from-knowing charisma of the leads doesn’t quite live up to sophisticated interplay of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, or even the down-home fun of Burt Reynolds and Sally Field, but it’s substantial enough for Knight and Day to coast on, for about 90 minutes tops. (2:10) (Chun)

The Last Airbender There must be some M. Night Shyamalan fans out there. How else does one explain the fact that he keeps making movies? And yet, most of his post-Sixth Sense (1999) work has ranged from forgettable to downright reviled. His latest disaster is sure to fall into the latter category: in The Last Airbender, he takes a much-loved Nickelodeon cartoon and transforms it into an awkwardly paced, poorly acted mess. Woefully miscast Noah Ringer stars as Aang, the avatar with the power to end the Fire Nation’s dominion. Along with his friends, siblings Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) and Katara (Nicola Peltz), Aang must — oh, just watch the damn show. For newcomers, the film is as confusing as Shyamalan’s equally self-indulgent Lady in the Water (2006). For fans of the TV show, The Last Airbender is nearly unbearable, condensing the entire first season into one film by removing the humor, the heart, and the complexity of the characters. There’s no twist here — we expect Shyamalan to disappoint, and he does. (1:34) (Peitzman)

*Let It Rain Well-known feminist author Agathe Villanova (writer-director Agnès Jaoui) is taking a rare break from her busy Paris life, visiting her hometown to see family, vacation with boyfriend Antoine (Frédéric Pierrot), and do a little stumping for her nascent political career. But despite the ever-picturesque French countryside as background, all is not harmonious. Antoine complains Agathe’s workaholism (among other things) is killing their relationship, particularly once she agrees to be time-consumingly interviewed for film about "successful women" by shambling documentarian Michel (coscenarist Jean-Pierre Bacri) and local Karim (Jamel Debbouze). Her married-with-children sister Florence (Pascale Arbillot) is having a secret affair with Michel, but seems more focused on old resentments springing from Agathe being their late mother’s favorite. Karim — son of the family’s longtime housekeeper (Mimouna Hadji) — bears his own grudge against the clan and brusque, officious Agathe in particular. Being happily wed, he’s further bothered at his hotel day job by his attraction to co-worker Aurélie (Florence Loiret-Caille). These various conflicts simmer, then boil over as the documentary shooting goes from bumbling to disastrous. In 2004, Jaoui delivered a pretty near perfect Gallic ensemble seriocomedy in Look at Me. This isn’t quite that good. Still, her seemingly effortless skill at managing complex character dynamics, eliciting expert performances (including her own), and weaving it all together with insouciant panache makes this a real pleasure. The problem with Agnès Jaoui: she’s so good it chafes that (acting-only gigs aside) she’s made just three films in ten years. Pick it up, girl! (1:39) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

The Lottery (1:21) Roxie.

Micmacs An urge to baby-talk at the screen underlines what is wrong with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film: it is like a precocious child all too aware how to work a room, reprising adorable past behaviors with pushy determination and no remaining spontaneity whatsoever. There will be cooing. There will be clucking. But there will also a few viewers rolling their eyes, thinking "This kid rides my last nerve." It’s easy to understand why Jeunet’s movies (including 2001’s Amélie) are so beloved, doubtless by many previously allergic to subtitles. (Of course, few filmmakers need dialogue less.) They are eye-candy, and brain-candy too: fantastical, hyper, exotic, appealing to the child within but with dark streaks, byzantine of plot yet requiring no close narrative attention at all. The artistry and craftsmanship are unmissable, no ingenious design or whimsical detail left unemphasized. In Micmacs, hero Bazil (Dany Boon) is a lovable misfit who lost his father to an Algerian landmine, then loses his own job and home when he’s brain-injured by a stray bullet. He falls in with a crazy coterie of lovable misfits who live underground, make wacky contraptions from junk, and each have their own special, not-quite-super "power." They help him wreak elaborate, fanciful revenge on the greedy arms manufacturers (André Dussollier, Nicolas Marié) behind his misfortunes, as well as various human rights-y global ones. So there’s a message here, couched in fun. But the effect is rather like a birthday clown begging funds for Darfur — or Robert Benigni’s dreaded Life is Beautiful (1997), good intentions coming off a bit hubristic, even distasteful. (1:44) (Harvey)

Predators Anyone who claims to be disappointed by Predators has clearly never seen parts one and two in the series; all three are straight B-movie affairs (though 1990’s Predator 2 takes everything oh-so-slightly over the top. Gary Busey’ll do that). And if you’ve seen either of the recent Predator-versus-Alien flicks, Predators should feel like a masterpiece. Nimród Antal directs under the banner of Robert Rodriguez’s production company, which explains the presence of Danny "Machete" Trejo in the cast. Adrien Brody stashes his Oscar in a safe place to star as Royce, a well-armed mercenary who awakes to find himself in free fall, plummeting into a strange jungle along with other elite-forces types (including Brazilian Alice Braga, playing an Israeli soldier). It doesn’t take long before Royce realizes that "this is a game preserve, and we’re the game." I wish Predators had allowed itself to have a little more fun with its uniquely skilled characters (the yakuza guy does have a nice, if culturally-stereotyped, swordplay scene); there’s also an underdeveloped "plot twist" involving the presence of the decidedly un-badass Topher Grace among the human prey. But all is forgiven when Laurence Fishburne turns up as Crazy Old Dude Who’s Been Hiding Out With Predators a Little Too Long. Fishburne’s presence also adds to the heart-of-darkness vibe the movie seems vaguely interested in conveying. (1:51) (Eddy)

Ramona and Beezus (1:44)

*Restrepo Starting mid-’07, journalists-filmmakers Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger spent some 15 months off and on embedded with a U.S. Army platoon in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, a Taliban stronghold with steep, mountainous terrain that could hardly be more advantageous for snipers. Particularly once a second, even more isolated outpost is built, the soldiers’ days are fraught with tension, whether they’re ordered out into the open on a mission or staying put under frequent fire. Strictly vérité, with no political commentary overt or otherwise, the documentary could be (and has been) faulted for not having enough of a "narrative arc" — as if life often does, particularly under such extreme circumstances. But it’s harrowingly immediate (the filmmakers themselves often have to dive for cover) and revelatory as a glimpse not just of active warfare, but of the near-impossible challenges particular to foreign armed forces trying to make any kind of "progress" in Afghanistan. (1:33) (Harvey)

Salt Angelina Jolie channels the existential crisis of Jason Bourne and the DIY spirit of MacGyver in a film positing that America’s most pressing concern is extant Russian cold warriors, who are plotting to reestablish their country’s pre-glasnost glory via nuclear holocaust and a Dark Angel–style army of spy kids. Jolie plays CIA agent Evelyn Salt, a woman who can stymie the top-shelf surveillance system at work using her undergarments and fashion a shoulder-mounted rocket out of interrogation-room furniture and cleaning supplies. These talents surface after Salt is accused of being a Russian operative in league with the aforementioned disturbers of the new world order and takes flight, with her agency coworkers (Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor) in hot pursuit. What ensues is a vicious and confounding assault on the highest levels of the U.S. government, most known rules of logic, and the viewer’s patience and powers of suspending disbelief. Salt’s off-the-ranch maneuverings are moderately engaging, particularly in the first leg of the chase, but clunky expository flashbacks, B-movie-grade dialogue, and an absurd plotline slow the momentum considerably. (1:31) (Rapoport)

The Secret in Their Eyes (2:07)

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Socially awkward science nerd Dave (Jay Baruchel) toils away on his suspiciously elaborate NYU physics project, unaware that he’s about to have a Harry Potter-style moment of awakening. Enter Balthazar (Nicolas Cage), a centuries-old, steampunky sorcerer who believes Dave to be "the Prime Merlinian" — i.e., the greatest conjurer since Merlin himself. (Literally) rising from ashes to provide conflict are fellow sorcerers Horvath (Alfred Molina) and Morgana (Alice Krige); signing on for romantic-interest purposes are Monica Bellucci and newcomer Teresa Palmer. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice spins off Disney classic Fantasia (1940) in only the loosest sense, though there is a scene of dancing brooms. The bland Baruchel’s rise to fame continues to mystify, but at least Cage and Molina seem to be having a blast exchanging insults and zapping each other around. (1:43) (Eddy)

South of the Border After a prolific career of dramatic films steeped in political commentary, Oliver Stone drops the pretext. South of the Border is his Michael Moore moment, a chance for the filmmaker to make a direct and focused documentary in which his bias is readily apparent. Stone travels to South American nations and meets with their political leaders, men and women — including Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa — who have long been considered enemies of the United States. His goal is to show that they are not ruthless dictators but rather democratically elected representatives of their country, cast in a negative light by a mainstream media with ulterior motives. Stone’s rapport with these politicians is intimate: at one point, he plays soccer with Morales. Even if you’re skeptical of his assertions, you can at least appreciate the unique perspective South of the Border offers. As a film, it’s somewhat slipshod, not nearly as glossy as a Moore production. But provided you’re willing to fill in the blanks, it’s a captivating and well-intentioned endeavor. (1:18) (Peitzman)

*Stonewall Uprising On the night of June 28, 1969, police embarked on what they thought would be a routine raid on a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, the sleazy, Mafia-run Stonewall Inn. The ensuing three days of rioting — during which mostly young men and drag queens accustomed to being marginalized and hauled off to jail stood their ground and fought back — became what historian Lillian Faderman has called "the shot heard round the world" for LGBT activism: a spontaneous expression of street-level outrage that fueled the birth of a movement. Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s solid documentary Stonewall Uprising takes a "just the facts, ma’am" approach to this historic flashpoint that makes for an information-packed, if at times dry, 80 minutes. Working around the paucity of photographic documentation of the actual riots (itself a testament to the marginalization of homosexuality in the late 1960s), Davis and Heilbroner make extensive use of period news footage and photography, reenactments, and most important, the first-person testimonies of who those who witnessed and participated in what one interviewee terms "our Rosa Parks moment." The filmmakers’ contextual groundwork is as impressive for its archival research as it is repetitive in its message: pre-Stonewall life was hell. The documentary becomes more nuanced as it zeros in on reconstructing the first night of rioting via eyewitness accounts. (1:22) (Sussman)

*Toy Story 3 You’ve got a friend in Pixar. We all do. The animation studio just can’t seem to make a bad movie — even at its relative worst, a Pixar film is still worlds better than most of what Hollywood churns out. Luckily, Toy Story 3 is far from the worst: it’s actually one of Pixar’s most enjoyable and poignant films yet. Waiting 11 years after the release of Toy Story 2 was, in fact, a stroke of genius, in that it amplifies the nostalgia that runs through so many of the studio’s releases. The kids who were raised on Toy Story and its first sequel have now grown up, gone to college, and, presumably, abandoned their toys. For these twentysomethings, myself included, Toy Story 3 is a uniquely satisfying and heartbreaking experience. While the film itself may not be the instant classic that WALL-E (2008) was, it’s near flawless regardless of a viewer’s age. Warm, funny, and emotionally devastating—it’s Pixar as it should be. (1:49) (Peitzman)

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse The only person more bored by the Twilight franchise than I am is Kristen Stewart. In Eclipse, the third installment of the film series, she mopes her way through further adventures with creepily obsessive vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson). Look, you’re either sold on this star-crossed love story or you’re not, and it’s clear which camp I fall into. Besides, Eclipse is at least better than New Moon, the dreadful Twilight film that preceded it last year. But the story is still ponderous and predictable — Eclipse sets up a conflict and then quickly resolves it, just so it can spend more time on the Bella-Edward-Jacob love triangle. (As if we don’t know how that ends.) Then there’s the unfortunate anti-sex subtext: carnal relations are cast as dirty, wrong, and soul-destroying. I’m not saying we should be encouraging all teenagers to have sex, but that doesn’t mean we should make them feel ashamed of their desires. And what parent would approve of Eclipse‘s conclusion? Marrying your first boyfriend at 18 — not always the best move. (2:04) (Peitzman)

*Winter’s Bone Winter’s Bone has already won awards at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, but it’s the kind of downbeat, low-key, quiet film that may elude larger audiences (and, as these things go, Oscar voters). Like Andrea Arnold’s recent Fish Tank, it tells the story of a teenage girl who draws on unlikely reserves of toughness to navigate an unstable family life amid less-than-ideal economic circumstances. And it’s also directed by a woman: Debra Granik, whose previous feature, 2004’s Down to the Bone, starred Vera Farmiga (2009’s Up in the Air) as a checkout clerk trying to balance two kids and a secret coke habit.

Drugs also figure into the plot of the harrowing Winter’s Bone, though its protagonist, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), is faced with a different set of circumstances: her meth head father has jumped bail, leaving the family’s humble mountain home as collateral; the two kids at stake are her younger siblings. With no resources other than her own tenacity, Ree strikes out into her rural Missouri community, seeking information from relatives who clearly know where her father is — but ain’t sayin’ a word. It’s a journey fraught with menace, shot with an eye for near-documentary realism and an appreciation for slow-burn suspense; Lawrence anchors a solid cast with her own powerful performance. Who says American independent film is dead? (1:40) (Eddy)

RecPark boots child care program to make money

Sasha Cuttler
-
4
RecPark boots child care program to make money

San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Commission voted July 15 to let an expensive private preschool displace a free, 38-year-old City College parenting class that included guided activities for children. College officials and neighborhood groups understand the desire to make money from rent at the Laurel Hills Playground clubhouse, but they’re upset about how little notice and community input was involved in the decision.

“On the face of it, they wanted to lease this property and they didn’t really care what the public thought,” City College Trustee John Rizzo told the Guardian. “They cared so little about the public that it was too late once they were notified.”

The commission approved a two-year lease for Language in Action, a preschool offering nine-month terms immersing two to five year olds in Spanish and Mandarin. Tuition ranges from $1,000 — for two hours per day, two days per week — to $14,000 for full day, five day per week instruction, according to the company’s website.

“People want to call it privatization. I think that’s an offensive word. I would rather call it revenue generating for site appropriate uses and recreation,” Recreation and Park Commission President Mark Buell said at the July 15 meeting. “It’s a reality.”

City College Child Development and Family Studies Department Chair Kathleen White told the Guardian that she feels torn by the position of having to compete with other child care services. “I never want to stand in the way of child care, this is my department,” she said. “We all want the same thing. We want parenting classes and we want child care. There should be plenty of places in the Park and Rec [Department] to do both.”

Freelance San Francisco writer Ellen Lee, who used to attend City College’s child observation class with her toddler, told the Guardian there were attributes of the program that she would miss, although she hopes to enroll her child in the Language in Action preschool.

“It’s the little things,” she said. “I learned new songs that I could sing to her at home. They gave out handouts every week on different child development issues — how to deal with temper tantrums and that kind of thing. The teacher was always available to talk with us.” Lee wrote an article on the termination of the class at Laurel Hill here.

The Recreation and Park commission elected to evict the City College class in favor of a tenant that could pay $1,500 per month for use of the clubhouse. Laurel Heights neighborhood groups expressed some interest in fundraising to save the class and help City College pay the rent, but the process happened too quickly to mobilize during a term when the school has cancelled summer classes and almost no faculty are on campus, White said. The community college is prohibited by state law from charging tuition for non-credit courses like the parenting class and is facing a $12 million deficit.

“We’re in as dire straights as Park and Rec is,” White told the Guardian.

 

City College Trustee Chris Jackson, who is running for the District 10 seat on the Board of Supervisors, told us the college combated its dire budget deficit by cutting salaries at the top, a tactic he recommended for both the Recreation and Park Department and San Francisco as a whole. He suggested bringing middle and upper management positions to the level they were 10 years ago, saving jobs for entry-level workers and free public programs like the City College class.

 

“When you start charging and raising fees for some of these public programs, especially in working class neighborhoods like District 10, people start dropping out of them, and you create a recipe for disaster,” he said.

Rizzo spoke to what he called a disturbing trend of privatization and fees the Recreation and Parks Department has adopted while attempting to close its own budget deficit.  The Board of Supervisors voted in May to allow the department to charge a $7 admission to non-resident visitors at the Golden Gate Park Botanical Gardens. Threesixty theater’s production of Peter Pan in Ferry Park has turned the once free park into a fenced-in, fee-charging venue.

“The public is kicked out and private interest comes in,” Rizzo said.

SunCal threatens to sue, as Alameda votes to kick out base developer

Mary Magee
-
0

It took until 1 a.m. for the Alameda City Council to vote 4-0 (councilmember Lena Tam abstained) to deny SunCal’s “modified optional entitlement application,” and take the first step towards ending its four-year relationship with SunCal, an Irvine-based developer that planned to build 4,800 homes, a 60-acre sports complex, a ferry terminal, parks, schools and offices at the former Alameda Naval Air Station, which accounts for one-third of this island city.

Along the way, SunCal threatened to sue, a move that elicited boos from the 200 or so people crammed into Alameda’s City Hall chambers for the showdown.
“We are entitled to go to the end of the road on this thing,” SunCal attorney Skip Miller said. “If not, we will be in court seeking very substantial damages.”
The vote came after City staff cited a long list of concerns, including fears that the project would cause traffic congestion, lacked solid financial backing and would not deliver on jobs.

“We think there are a lot of risks, “ Alameda deputy city manager Jennifer Ott said.
Local unions expressed support for the plan, as did some environmental advocates, while opponents attacked SunCal’s poor financial record and voiced concerns about how thousands of new residents would block the island’s underground tubes, which are the only way to exit the ibase-side of the island, other than a ferry terminal,

The city council’s vote came five months after 85 percent of Alameda residents voted against excluding SunCal from the island’s ban on multi-unit housing. Since then, the relationship between the city and the developer has become increasingly hostile, city staff reported. The move leaves the city wide open to offers from other developers, although staff said at this point they have no plan to hire another master developer for the abandoned base.

 

 

Hotel Fairness Initiative qualifies for fall ballot

Sasha Cuttler
-
10
Hotel Fairness Initiative qualifies for fall ballot

By Brittany Baguio

The Department of Elections has announced that the Hotel Fairness Initiative was approved for the November ballot. Labor and community groups last week turned in 10,544 signatures, a little more than the required 7,168 signatures needed to put an initiative on the ballot. The Department of Elections did a sample of 500 signatures to check the validity and reported that 478 of the 500 signatures sampled were valid, resulting in a 95.6 percent accuracy rate.

The Hotel Fairness Initiative would increase revenue by imposing a 2 percent hotel tax on San Francisco hotel rooms temporarily for 4 years, with an average surcharge of $3 per hotel room per night, and close loopholes that let some visitors avoid paying the hotel tax. The hotel tax is currently 14 percent. According to the Controller’s Office, if the Hotel Fairness Initiative passes, it is expected to raise $25 million a year in revenue.

The hotel tax is one of five measures proposed to help close the budget deficit, which we discuss in more detail in this week’s paper. Mayor Gavin Newsom has also placed a measure of the ballot to also close the loopholes that lets airline employees and those who book hotels online avoid paying hotel taxes, as the Hotel Fairness Initiative would also do, but it includes a provision that would invalidate the hotel tax if his measure gets more votes.

Supporters of the Hotel Fairness Initiative claim that online booking companies and airline companies have been using corporate loopholes that have cost the city about $6 million per year. In total, online booking companies have escaped paying $70 million in hotel taxes through its loophole of taking the hotel tax out of a portion of the money the hotel receives, rather than the total amount the customer pays.

For example, Internet booking companies would charge customers $200 for a room and then pay the hotel $170. Internet booking companies argue that the hotel tax comes from a portion of $170, instead of $200. Similarly, airlines have avoided paying hotel taxes by renting blocks of rooms for its flight crews and claiming that airline companies are protected by the Permanent Resident Exclusion law. This law was originally intended to help the homeless and states that individuals who occupy a room for at least 30 days are tax exempted. However, airlines have been taking advantage of this law by moving different flight crews in and out of their hotel rooms rather than an individual person occupying the room for 30 consecutive days that is implied by the law.

Opponents of the Hotel Fairness Initiative, such as the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Hotel Council, contend that the hotel tax would hurt tourism to San Francisco as well as cause job cuts. In a press release, Steve Falk, President & CEO of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce said, “This misguided effort will discourage travel to San Francisco, hurt our city’s largest industry, and eliminate many of the union jobs the Labor Council seeks to protect. Raising city revenue at the expense of hotels and hospitality workers is not the answer to the city’s fiscal problems.”

A Hotel Council press release states that “the Hotel Fairness Initiative will lead to 7.3 jobs lost for every million dollars in revenue gained.” If this is true, about 182 jobs could be lost as a result of this initiative, offset by the city being able to save many public sector jobs and services with the revenue. The hotel industry already fluctuates in the number of positions available as a result of the market. According to California Labor Market Info’s latest data, the average amount of hotel jobs lost per month in 2009 was 143 jobs.

Although the Hotel Council and the Chamber of Commerce claim that the initiative would eliminate jobs, one of the biggest supporters of the hotel tax is UNITE HERE LOCAL 2, a union of hotel workers. UNITE HERE representative Ian Lewis emphasized that opponents of the issue are conveniently ignoring the lack of fairness in current hotel booking practices. “Hotel workers live in San Francisco,” Lewis told the Guardian, “We’re taxpayers like everyone else. We are in a severe budget crisis and everyone needs to carry their fair share.”

Community groups, retirees, and hospital workers all volunteered their time to collect signatures supporting the Hotel Fairness Initiative. Community groups such as UNITE HERE collected 1700 signatures, Keep the Arboretum Free collected 1000, and a collection of nonprofit groups collected more than 4000. With the efforts of these community groups, the coalition was able to collect an estimated 15,000 signatures.

Family health advocate for the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, Bobbi Lopez, said she found that those who signed the petition saw the hotel tax as a necessary step in closing the budget deficit, “They understood that the necessity of fighting the cuts, particularly the cuts to MUNI, to parks, and to hospitals,” Lopez told us, “I think that they were getting the idea that in desperate budget times, we need a temporary solution and long term solution and that’s exactly what the Hotel Fairness Initiative is.”

Community groups remain optimistic that this grass roots effort will pass. Brenda Barrows, a health care provider at San Francisco General Hospital, told the Guardian, “My hope is that in November it passes and the city’s financial situation gets better so that people who live in the city don’t have to suffer and also people who work for the city don’t have to suffer.”

Lopez told us she thinks that the initiative will pass if there is an ongoing effort on the issue. “We want to remind folks that this is just the beginning and now we have to embark on a long term campaign,” Lopez told us, “so it’s really about sustaining the energy that we had on June 1 when we kicked off and reminding folks that its going to necessitate all the same volunteers to work together and make it reality.”

 

Our Weekly Picks: July 14-20, 2010

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

WEDNESDAY 14

MUSIC

Sean Bonnette

Sean Bonnette is the guitar player for Andrew Jackson Jihad, the band that proved punk rock sounds better unplugged. He’s been with the group since its inception in 2004, and along with his comrade-in-arms Ben Gallaty, has spent the last six years writing hilariously irreverent lyrics, cutting a swath through the country’s basements, parks, and concert halls, and slowly pushing folk-punk into the mainstream consciousness. Bonnette’s solo show promises to be a showcase of the loveliest, messiest, raggedy-ist tunes this side of Neutral Milk Hotel and a reminder that, 924 Gilman’s financial woes notwithstanding, DIY’s not dead. (Zach Ritter)

With Kepi Ghoulie and Gnarboots

9 p.m., $8

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(414) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

 

MUSIC

Bardot A Go Go

In America, Bastille Day is the only day of the year where Francophiles, if they’re not storming a prison, can revel in their obsession en masse. With drink specials and a night of decadence that would make Louis XIV’s wife blush, the Rickshaw Stop offers its very own discotheque. If Austin Powers and Marie Antoinette put their wits together and threw a party, Bardot A Go Go would be it. With swinging ’60s pop — Serge Gainsbourg, France Gall, and the titular femme fatale, to name a few — and its very own go-go girls, this long-standing shindig stares hipsters in the face and dares to ask the unaskable: Parlez-vous francais? So put down your Balzac, put on a beret, and get the hell down to Fell. (Ryan Lattanzio)

8 p.m., $7

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

 

THURSDAY 15

VISUAL ART

Japanese Art Kite Show

What could be better than a Matt Furie painting? Well, maybe a Matt Furie painting on a kite. Furie is one of 21 artists contributing sky-ready works to “Japanese Art Kite Show,” a group exhibition co-curated by Shoko Toma and Yukako Ezoe that brings together kites by 21 artists from Japan and the Bay Area. Bay Area residents from the Hamamatsu City prefecture in Japan have taken part in the Berkeley Kite Festival for the past five years, while Hamamatsu kites — created with washi and rice glue — date back at least 450 years. The kites here vary in size and utilize hemp for string. On Naoki Onodera’s kite, stars evoke another historical marker: the Kanrun Maru’s journey across the Pacific from Japan to the U.S. 150 years ago. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Through July 29

5:30 p.m., free

Chandler Fine Art and Framing

170 Minna, SF

(415) 546-1113

www.chandlersf.com

 

COMEDY

Zane Lamprey

Do you like to go out drinking? Me too! Oh, and so does Zane Lamprey, host of Three Sheets, a TV show that’s survived the move to three different channels as Lamprey travels the world exploring fine libations, drinking games, and hangover cures. With the future of the show uncertain — again — Zane has taken to the streets with the “Drinking Made Easy Comedy Tour,” a celebration of all things alcoholic. No one can fault you for not knowing about Three Sheets, it’s had a hell of a time staying on air. But show me a San Franciscan who doesn’t look happier with a drink in their hand, and I’ll show you a liar. (Peter Galvin)

8 p.m., $29.50

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.livenation.com

 

MUSIC

Mary Gauthier

The story of Mary Gauthier’s rise in the ranks of musicians — a career she chose at the ripe age of 35 after stints as a teenage runaway, substance abuser, philosophy major, café manager, and restaurant owner — is full of lucky breaks and an almost charmed trajectory. Yet her first year of life, spent in the charity wards of St. Vincent De Paul, was far removed from the good fortunes of her eventual transformation to masterfully frank folk lyricist and guileless performer. In The Foundling, her sixth album, Gauthier chronicles her own history from birth date to birthright, searching for answers and finding only more questions. Her Café Du Nord appearance, however, answers our question: When’s Mary Gauthier going to come back around? (Nicole Gluckstern)

With Peter Bradley Adams

8:30 p.m., $20

Café Du Nord

2174 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

 

MUSIC

Sextreme Ball

It’s been 15 years since the Lords of Acid-My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult Sextacy Ball Tour stomped across the continent. But since sex, drugs, and mass murder have never really gone out of style, this summer’s reprise is far from feeling dated. Maybe it’s just the humidity, but there’s an almost palpable electric charge in the air — could it be the promise of a) tissue-throbbing, groin-grinding beats b) the cheerfully lewd lyrics of classics such as “Mr. Machoman” or creepier implications of “Sex on Wheels” or c) the prospect of catching latest Lords of Acid chanteuse Lacey Conner in a leather-clad catfight? I’m going with d) all of the above. (Gluckstern)

9 p.m., $23

DNA Lounge

375 11th St, SF

(415) 626-1409

www.dnalounge.com

 

FRIDAY 16

DANCE

Run for Your Life! and Gadung Kasturi

Run for Your Life! … it’s a dance company! and Gadung Kasturi Balinese Dance and Music are unlikely bedfellows, but trust Dudley Brooks — he knows how to make a match. After all, he is “sleeping” with both of them. Run for Your Life! is his long-running comedy-dance theater company; Gadung Kasturi is a classical Balinese dance company whose music Brooks has performed for more than 20 years. How he keeps the two identities apart is anybody’s guess. Stylization is what keeps him going. His comedy, often with puppets, is smart, hilarious, and musical. Included in this program are the LOL-worthy Les Sillyphides, Cirque du So Little, and Roaring ’20s, Mafioso-inspired The Soldier’s Tale. Gadung, with eight-year old Chandra Ayu Davies — who blew everyone away at this year’s Ethnic Dance Festival — offers the new Nyapuh Jagat. Watch for Brooks, he’ll be hammering away in the gamelan orchestra. (Rita Felciano)

Through Sat/17

8 p.m., $18

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St., SF

(415) 273-4633

www.brownpapertickets.com

 

MUSIC

Antibalas

Afrobeat keeps growing and mutating, revitalizing club music and giving indie rock a much-needed groove. Twelve years into since their summertime birth, Brooklyn’s Antibalas can be seen and heard as true veterans of the sound, with ties to two generations of the Kuti legacy. At the same time, afrobeat is the base from which the group — who worked with producer Tortoise’s John McEntire on 2007’s Security — reach deep into other genres. Antibalas plays out often enough to have seen the world and then some, and one of its most recent songs, “Rat Race,” suits the current socioeconomic moment. Prepare to dance. (Huston) With Sway Machinery

9 p.m., $23

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

1-888-233-0449

www.gamhtickets.com

 

DANCE

Post: Ballet

Choreographer and dancer Robert Dekkers is making himself known in the dance world for seamlessly merging contemporary and classical movement styles. The name of his new SF-based contemporary ballet company, Post: Ballet, says it all. Much like his stylistic sensibility, the words Post: Ballet imply an affiliation with and departure from the conventions of classical ballet. The company’s inaugural performance, Concert One, features classically-trained, versatile ballet dancers in a series of innovative and thought-provoking works. Dekkers’ fierce choreography — along with live music by SF composers Daniel Berkman and Jacob Wolkenhauer, as well as the engaging music of Grizzly Bear, Steve Reich, and Department of Eagles (to name a few) — will keep those who ordinarily fall asleep at the ballet wide awake. (Katie Gaydos)

Through Sat/17

8 p.m., $25

Cowell Theater

Fort Mason Center

Marina at Laguna, SF

www.postballet.org

 

VISUAL ART

David Byrne and Dave Eggers

Former Talking Head David Byrne and McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers are no strangers to other disciplines of art. Both have dabbled in screenwriting and visual art outside their respective fields of popular music and prose fiction. Now SF’s Electric Works is hosting simultaneous galleries by the two Renaissance men. Byrne’s exhibition shares the name “Arboretum” with his 2006 book of branching diagrams. Eggers’ “It Is Right To Draw Their Fur” treats more animate subjects — animals, to be exact. As it happens, Eggers studied art before switching to writing novels, so these grease pencil drawings are hardly the work of a naïf. Judging from their past works and unconventional worldviews, Byrne and Eggers ought to complement each other well. (Sam Stander)

Through Aug. 21

6 p.m., free

Electric Works

130 Eighth St., SF

(415) 626-5496

www.sfelectricworks.com

SATURDAY 17

FILM

Little Shop of Horrors

Midnight movies are alive and well in San Francisco, and the Landmark Theatres are active participants in the historic cult tradition. For the next month, the Bridge plays host to a “Rocksploitation”-themed midnight program, featuring local cinephile band Citizen Midnight playing pre-show music for a variety of rock-inspired flicks. This week the series features Frank Oz’s incredibly campy 1986 musical remake of Little Shop of Horrors starring Rick Moranis and Steve Martin. Check back in the coming weeks for Brian De Palma’s gothic rock opera Phantom of the Paradise (1974) and an uncut version of David Lynch’s 1990, Palme d’Or-winning, Elvis-fueled Wild at Heart. (Stander)

Midnight, $10

Bridge Theatre

3010 Geary, SF

(415) 668-6384

www.landmarkafterdark.com

 

FILM/MUSIC

Psycho with the San Francisco Symphony

The symphony’s probably the last thing you’d associate with a shower scene. (Although if we’re talking porn here, maybe you missed Wet ‘n Wagner or Rusty Tromboners 2: Spit Valves Under Spray Heads.) It’s definitely the last place you’d expect to hear the stabbing “EE! EE! EE! EE!” of the shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) to pop up — unless you’ve an ear for esoteric snatches of Webern. But Bernard Herrmann’s fiendishly clever orchestral score for this mother of all classic slashers is catnip for the adventurous San Francisco Symphony, which will be performing it in full as the 50-year-old flick unfurls above them in all its chocolate-syrup-spattered glory. Expect expert deployment of sinister ostinato and hair-curling counterpoint throughout. Don’t forget to invite Mom. (Marke B.)

8 p.m., $30–$70

Davies Symphony Hall

201 Van Ness, SF

(415) 864-6000

www.sfsymphony.org

 

SUNDAY 18

MUSIC

New Pornographers

Have you been craving propulsive choruses? Hunting for hummable harmonies? Longing for a variety of vocalists? Seek no further — Canada’s foremost power pop supergroup, the New Pornographers, is now touring on behalf of its fifth album, Together. Their continued togetherness is a bit unexpected, since members Neko Case and Dan Bejar (of Destroyer) have full-blown careers of their own. But the New Porn engine keeps chugging along, a full-fledged entity rather than a side project. The latest record is perhaps their most bombastic yet, but they haven’t sacrificed the diversity of lyrical voices that makes them consistently worthwhile. They’re supported at Oakland’s Fox Theater by local concern the Dodos as well as sometime-Yeah Yeah Yeahs member Imaad Wasif. (Stander)

With Dodos and Imaad Wasif

7:30 p.m., $27.50

Fox Theater

1807 Telegraph, Oakl.

www.thefoxoakland.com

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

Film listings

David Talbot
-
0

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

ANOTHER HOLE IN THE HEAD

The seventh Another Hole in the Head Film Festival runs July 8-29 at the Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF; and Viz Cinema, New People, 1746 Post, SF. For tickets (most shows $11) and schedule, visit www.sfindie.com.

OPENING

Inception Christopher Nolan takes a break from the Bat-Director’s Chair to helm this Leonardo DiCaprio thriller about futuristic mind crimes. (2:30) Marina, Presidio.

*Let It Rain Well-known feminist author Agathe Villanova (writer-director Agnès Jaoui) is taking a rare break from her busy Paris life, visiting her hometown to see family, vacation with boyfriend Antoine (Frédéric Pierrot), and do a little stumping for her nascent political career. But despite the ever-picturesque French countryside as background, all is not harmonious. Antoine complains Agathe’s workaholism (among other things) is killing their relationship, particularly once she agrees to be time-consumingly interviewed for film about "successful women" by shambling documentarian Michel (coscenarist Jean-Pierre Bacri) and local Karim (Jamel Debbouze). Her married-with-children sister Florence (Pascale Arbillot) is having a secret affair with Michel, but seems more focused on old resentments springing from Agathe being their late mother’s favorite. Karim — son of the family’s longtime housekeeper (Mimouna Hadji) — bears his own grudge against the clan and brusque, officious Agathe in particular. Being happily wed, he’s further bothered at his hotel day job by his attraction to co-worker Aurélie (Florence Loiret-Caille). These various conflicts simmer, then boil over as the documentary shooting goes from bumbling to disastrous. In 2004, Jaoui delivered a pretty near perfect Gallic ensemble seriocomedy in Look at Me. This isn’t quite that good. Still, her seemingly effortless skill at managing complex character dynamics, eliciting expert performances (including her own), and weaving it all together with insouciant panache makes this a real pleasure. The problem with Agnès Jaoui: she’s so good it chafes that (acting-only gigs aside) she’s made just three films in ten years. Pick it up, girl! (1:39) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*[Rec] 2 See "666-ZOMB." (1:24) Lumiere.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Socially awkward science nerd Dave (Jay Baruchel) toils away on his suspiciously elaborate NYU physics project, unaware that he’s about to have a Harry Potter-style moment of awakening. Enter Balthazar (Nicolas Cage), a centuries-old, steampunky sorcerer who believes Dave to be "the Prime Merlinian" — i.e., the greatest conjurer since Merlin himself. (Literally) rising from ashes to provide conflict are fellow sorcerers Horvath (Alfred Molina) and Morgana (Alice Krige); signing on for romantic-interest purposes are Monica Bellucci and newcomer Teresa Palmer. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice spins off Disney classic Fantasia (1940) in only the loosest sense, though there is a scene of dancing brooms. The bland Baruchel’s rise to fame continues to mystify, but at least Cage and Molina seem to be having a blast exchanging insults and zapping each other around. (1:43) (Eddy)

South of the Border After a prolific career of dramatic films steeped in political commentary, Oliver Stone drops the pretext. South of the Border is his Michael Moore moment, a chance for the filmmaker to make a direct and focused documentary in which his bias is readily apparent. Stone travels to South American nations and meets with their political leaders, men and women — including Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa — who have long been considered enemies of the United States. His goal is to show that they are not ruthless dictators but rather democratically elected representatives of their country, cast in a negative light by a mainstream media with ulterior motives. Stone’s rapport with these politicians is intimate: at one point, he plays soccer with Morales. Even if you’re skeptical of his assertions, you can at least appreciate the unique perspective South of the Border offers. As a film, it’s somewhat slipshod, not nearly as glossy as a Moore production. But provided you’re willing to fill in the blanks, it’s a captivating and well-intentioned endeavor. (1:18) (Peitzman)

Spring Fever Shot surreptitiously and chock full of gay sex, Chinese director Lou Ye’s latest film isn’t likely to earn him any additional slack from Chinese government censors (his 2006 film, Summer Palace, got him banned from filmmaking for five years after he failed to preview it before it screened at Cannes). Using hand-held cameras, public settings, and natural lighting, Lou follows Wang Ping (Wu Wei), who’s been having a passionate, messy affair with travel agent Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao). Things get more complicated when the snoop Wang’s wife hires to follow her closeted husband winds up pursuing the two men in ways he never imagined. What Spring Fever lacks in continuity and psychological depth, it makes up for with sexual candor and a genuine frisson of risk, given the secretive conditions under which it was made. That thrill doesn’t quite last through the film’s duration, but as a document of defiance Spring Fever is commendable. (1:56) Four Star. (Sussman)

Standing Ovation Atlantic City teens form a song-and-dance troupe in this High School Musical-style family film. (1:48)

ONGOING

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo Opening with the humid buzz of crickets and the probings of bug aficionados in the thick of a forest, first-time documentarian Jessica Oreck puts Japan’s fascination with insects under the microscope. Preferring to let the images and interview subjects speak for themselves, she turns a lens to young children who clamor to buy sleek, shiny, obsidian beetles, as well as the giant big city gatherings of insect collectors — events that likely are less than familiar to western audiences. Oreck’s intent is to get at the ineffable attraction behind such astonishing sales as that of a single beetle for $90,000 not so long ago, and to that end, she weaves in looks at insect literature and art, visits to Buddhist temples, and historical factoids about, for instance, the first cricket-selling business in the early 1800s. (1:30) Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*City Island The Rizzo family of City Island, N.Y. — a tiny atoll associated historically with fishing and jurisdictionally with the Bronx — have reached a state where their primary interactions consist of sniping, yelling, and storming out of rooms. These storm clouds operate as cover for the secrets they’re all busy keeping from one another. Correctional officer Vince (Andy Garcia) pretends he’s got frequent poker nights so he can skulk off to his true shameful indulgence: a Manhattan acting class. Perpetually fuming spouse Joyce (Julianna Margulies) assumes he’s having an affair. Daughter Vivian (Dominik García-Lorido) has dropped out of school to work at a strip joint, while the world class-sarcasms of teenager Vinnie (Ezra Miller) deflect attention from his own hidden life as an aspiring chubby chaser. All this (plus everyone’s sneaky cigarette habit) is nothing, however, compared to Vince’s really big secret: he conceived and abandoned a "love child" before marrying, and said guilty issue has just turned up as a 24-year-old car thief on his cell block. Writer-director Raymond De Felitta made a couple other features in the last 15 years, none widely seen; if this latest is typical, we need more of him, more often. Perfectly cast, City Island is farcical without being cartoonish, howl-inducing without lowering your brain-cell count. It’s arguably a better, less self-conscious slice of dysfunctional family absurdism than Little Miss Sunshine (2006) — complete with an Alan Arkin more inspired in his one big scene here than in all of that film’s Oscar-winning performance. (1:40) Four Star. (Harvey)

Cyrus It’s tempting to label Mark and Jay Duplass’ Cyrus as "mumblecore goes mainstream." Yes, the mumblecore elements are all there: plentiful moments of awkward humiliation, characters fumbling verbally and sometimes physically in desperate attempts to establish emotional connections, and a meandering, character-driven plot, in the sense that the characters themselves possess precious little drive. The addition of bona fide indie movie stars John C. Reilly, Catherine Keener, and Marisa Tomei — not to mention Hollywood’s chubby-funny guy du jour, Jonah Hill — could lead some to believe that the DIY-loving Duplass brothers (2005’s The Puffy Chair, 2008’s Baghead) have gone from slacker disciples of John Cassavetes (informally known as "Slackavetes") to worshippers at the slickly profane (with a heart) altar of Judd Apatow. But despite the presence of Apatow protégé Hill (2007’s Superbad) in the title role, Cyrus steers clear of crowd-pleasing bombast, instead favoring small, relatively naturalistic moments. That is to say, not much actually happens. Mumblecore? More or less. Mainstream? Not exactly. Despite playing a character with some serious psychological issues, Hill comes off as likeable. Unfortunately the movie is neither as broadly comic nor as emotionally poignant as it needs to be — the two opposing forces seem to cancel each other out like acids and bases. (1:32) Empire, Sundance Kabuki. (Devereaux)

Despicable Me Judging from the adorable, booty-shaking, highly merchandisable charm of its sunny-yellow Percocet-like minions, Despicable Me‘s makers have more than a few fond memories of the California Raisins. That gives you an idea of the 30-second attention-span level at work here. Thanks to Pixar and company, our expectations for animated features are high, but despite the single lob at Lehman Brothers aimed toward the grown-ups, the humor here is pitched straight at the eight and younger crowd: from the mugging, child-like minions to the all-in-good-fun, slightly quease-inducing 3-D roller-coaster ride. Gru (Steve Carell) is Despicable‘s also-ran supervillain — a bit too old and too unoriginal for a game that’s been rigged in the favor of the youthful, annoyingly perky Vector (Jason Segel), who’s managed to swipe the Giza Pyramids and become the world’s number one bad dude. When Vector steals away the crucial shrink ray needed for Gru’s plot to thieve the moon, the latter pulls out the big guns: three adorable orphans who have managed to penetrate Vector’s defenses with their fund-raising cookie sales. It turns out kids have their own insidiously heart-warming way of wrecking havoc on one’s well-laid plans. Filmmakers Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud do their best to exploit the 3-D medium, but Avatar (2009) this is not. Nor will many adults be able to withstand the onslaught of cute undertaken by all those raisins, I mean, minions. (1:35) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Chun)

*Exit Through the Gift Shop Exit Through the Gift Shop is not a film about the elusive graffiti-cum-conceptual artist and merry prankster known as Banksy, even though he takes up a good chunk of this sly and by-no-means impartial documentary and is listed as its director. Rather, as he informs us — voice electronically altered, face hidden in shadow — in the film’s opening minutes, the film’s real subject is one Thierry Guetta, a French expat living in LA whose hangdog eyes, squat stature, and propensity for mutton chops and polyester could pass him off as Ron Jeremy’s long lost twin. Unlike Jeremy, Guetta is not blessed with any prodigious natural talent to propel him to stardom, save for a compulsion to videotape every waking minute of his life (roughly 80 percent of the footage in Exit is Guetta’s) and a knack for being in the right place at the right time. When Guetta is introduced by his tagger cousin to a pre-Obamatized Shepard Fairey in 2007, he realizes his true calling: to make a documentary about the street art scene that was then only starting to get mainstream attention. Enter Banksy, who, at first, is Guetta’s ultimate quarry. Eventually, the two become chummy, with Guetta acting as lookout and documenter for the artist just as the art market starts clambering for its piece of, "the Scarlet Pimpernel of street art," as one headline dubs him. When, at about three quarters of the way in, Guetta, following Banksy’s casual suggestion, drops his camcorder and tries his hand at making street art, Exit becomes a very different beast. Guetta’s flashy debut as Mr. Brainwash is as obscenely successful as his "art" is terribly unimaginative — much to the chagrin of his former documentary subjects. But Guetta is no Eve Harrington and Banksy, who has the last laugh here, gives him plenty of rope with which to truss himself. Is Mr. Brainwash really the ridiculous and inevitable terminus of street art’s runaway mainstream success (which, it must be said, Banksy has handsomely profited from)? That question begs another: with friends like Banksy, who needs enemies? (1:27) Lumiere. (Sussman)

Get Him to the Greek At this point movie execs can throw producer Judd Apatow’s name on the marquee of a film and it’s a guaranteed blockbuster. It’s hard to say whether this Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) spin-off benefits from the Apatow sign of approval or if it would be better off standing on its own, but it definitely doesn’t benefit from comparisons to its predecessor. Russell Brand returns as the British rock star Aldous Snow, and Jonah Hill, playing a different character this time, is given the task of chaperoning the uncooperative Snow from London to LA in 48 hours. Despite a great cast, including a surprisingly animated P. Diddy, the story is pretty bland and can’t match the blend of drama and comedy that Marshall achieved. Of course, none of that matters because the movie execs are right: if you like Apatow’s brand of humor, you’re going to have a good time anyway. (1:49) Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio. (Peter Galvin)

*The Girl Who Played With Fire Lisbeth Salander is cooler than you are. The heroine of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling book series is fierce, mysterious, and utterly captivating: in the movie adaptations, she’s perfectly realized by Noomi Rapace, who has the power to transform Lisbeth from literary hero to film icon. Rapace first impressed audiences in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009), a faithful adaptation of Larsson’s premiere novel, and she returns as Lisbeth in The Girl Who Played With Fire. The sequel, as is often the case, isn’t quite on par with the original, but it’s still a page-to-screen success. And while the first film spent equal time on journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), The Girl Who Played With Fire is almost entirely Lisbeth’s story. Sure, there’s more to the movie than the hacker-turned-sleuth — and the actor who plays her — but she carries the film. Rapace is Lisbeth; Lisbeth is Rapace. I’d watch both in anything. (2:09) Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Peitzman)

*The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo By the time the first of Stieg Larsson’s so-called "Millennium" books had been published anywhere, the series already had an unhappy ending: he died (in 2004). The following year, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo became a Swedish, then eventually international sensation, its sequels following suit. The books are addicting, to say the least; despite their essential crime-mystery-thriller nature, they don’t require putting your ear for writing of some literary value on sleep mode. Now the first of three adaptive features shot back-to-back has reached U.S. screens. (Sorry to say, yes, a Hollywood remake is already in the works — but let’s hope that’s years away.) Even at two-and-a-half hours, this Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by necessity must do some major truncating to pack in the essentials of a very long, very plotty novel. Still, all but the nitpickingest fans will be fairly satisfied, while virgins will have the benefit of not knowing what’s going to happen and getting scared accordingly. Soon facing jail after losing a libel suit brought against him by a shady corporate tycoon, leftie journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) gets a curious private offer to probe the disappearance 40 years earlier of a teenage girl. This entangles him with an eccentric wealthy family and their many closet skeletons (including Nazi sympathies) — as well as dragon-tattooed Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), androgynous loner, 24-year-old court ward, investigative researcher, and skillful hacker. Director Niels Arden Oplev and his scenarists do a workmanlike job — one more organizational than interpretive, a faithful transcription without much style or personality all its own. Nonetheless, Larsson’s narrative engine kicks in early and hauls you right along to the depot. (2:32) Four Star, Lumiere, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Grown Ups In order of star power, Grown Ups casts Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, and David Spade as five fortysomething friends who reunite to attend the funeral of their high school basketball coach, and play catch-up over a long weekend together at a cabin by the lake. If you’re expecting five of America’s biggest comedy stars to form like Voltron and make the most hilarious movie of the year, you’ve got a sad day coming. Grown Ups is never the sum of its parts, it’s about on par with Sandler’s other producing/starring affairs, and probably features a lot of the same jokes. People fall in poop and little kids say cute things designed to make audiences awww, but history has shown that’s exactly what a popcorn viewer is looking for. By these standards, Grown Ups is a perfectly summer-y movie. (1:42) 1000 Van Ness. (Galvin)

*I Am Love I Am Love opens in a chilly, Christmastime Milan and deliberately warms in tandem with its characters. Members of the blue-blood Recchi family are content hosting lavish parties and gossiping about one another, none more than the matriarch Emma (Tilda Swinton). But when prodigal son Edoardo befriends a local chef, Emma finds herself taken by both the chef’s food and his everyman personality, and is reminded of her poor Soviet upbringing. The courtship that follows is familiar on paper, but director Luca Guadagnino lenses with a strong style and small scenes acquire a distinct energy through careful editing and John Adams’ unpredictable score. Swinton portrays Emma’s unraveling with the same gritty gusto she brought to Julia (2008), and her commitment to the role recognizes few boundaries. You’ve probably seen this story before, but it has rarely been this powerful. (2:00) Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Galvin)

*Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work Whether you’re a fan of its subject or not, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s documentary is an absorbing look at the business of entertainment, a demanding treadmill that fame doesn’t really make any easier. At 75, comedian Rivers has four decades in the spotlight behind her. Yet despite a high Q rating she finds it difficult to get the top-ranked gigs, no matter that as a workaholic who’ll take anything she could scarcely be more available. Funny onstage (and a lot ruder than on TV), she’s very, very focused off-, dismissive of being called a "trailblazer" when she’s still actively competing with those whose women comics trail she blazed for today’s hot TV guest spot or whatever. Anyone seeking a thorough career overview will have to look elsewhere; this vérité year-in-the-life portrait is, like the lady herself, entertainingly and quite fiercely focused on the here-and-now. (1:24) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

John Rabe John Rabe (Ulrich Tukur) was the Oskar Schindler of Nanking: A man who, under discreetly opportunist pretenses, attempted to keep the Chinese in a safety zone from the Japanese in the late 30s. Steve Buscemi plays Robert Wilson, a surly American doctor. He’s to Tukur as Ben Kingsley was to Liam Neeson in 1993’s Schindler’s List, but without the nuance or iconic chemistry. Tukur is understated, bordering on uninteresting, and Buscemi is just over-the-top. Unlike Spielberg’s film, John Rabe grants us little access to the stories of civilians. The film is so preoccupied with people of power and those like Rabe, couched in a world of privilege, that the film lacks an emotional, human center. It’s impossible to feel much of anything because we’re never asked to feel, nor are we ever asked to endure any especially difficult scenes. Even the occasional rain of hellfire isn’t as wallop-packing as it ought to be. (2:14) Four Star, Presidio. (Ryan Lattanzio)

The Karate Kid The most baffling thing about The Karate Kid is its title: little Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) never actually learns karate. He practices kung-fu, an entirely different form of martial arts — you know, from a different country. There’s something obnoxious and absurd about the misnomer: the film seems to suggest that if you’ve seen one Asian culture, you’ve seen them all. That aside, it’s not a bad movie. Smith is mostly pretty likeable, and there’s a definite satisfaction to seeing him grow from bullied weakling to kung-fu star. And Jackie Chan gets to exercise his dramatic chops — he even gets a crying scene! But Karate Kid is a "reboot," the preferred term for the endless stream of unnecessary remakes Hollywood keeps churning out. You can’t help but think about the superior 1984 version. Jaden Smith is no Ralph Macchio, Jackie Chan is no Pat Morita, and kung-fu is no karate. Don’t even get me started on the "jacket on, jacket off" crap. Which, if you say it quickly, sounds a little adult for a PG movie. (2:20) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Peitzman)

*The Kids Are All Right In many ways, The Kids Are All Right is a straightforward family dramedy: it’s about parents trying to do what’s best for their children and struggling to keep their relationship together. But it’s also a film in which Jules (Julianne Moore) goes down on Nic (Annette Bening) while they’re watching gay porn. Director Lisa Cholodenko (1998’s High Art) co-wrote the script (with Stuart Blumberg), and the film’s blend between mainstream and queer is part of what makes Kids such an important — not to mention enjoyable — film. Despite presenting issues that might be contentious to large portions of the country, the movie maintains an approachability that’s often lacking in queer cinema. Of course, being in the gay mecca of the Bay Area skews things significantly — most locals wouldn’t bat an eye at Kids, which has Nic and Jules’ children inviting their biological father ("the sperm donor," played by Mark Ruffalo) into their lives. But for those outside the liberal bubble, the idea of a nontraditional family might be more eye-opening. It’s not a message movie, but Kids may still change minds. And even if it doesn’t, the film is a success that works chiefly because it isn’t heavy-handed. It refuses to take itself too seriously. At its best, Kids is laugh-out-loud funny, handling the heaviest of issues with grace and humor. (1:47) Bridge, SF Center. (Peitzman)

*Knight and Day A Bourne-again Vanilla Sky (2001)? Considerably better than that embarrassingly silly stateside remake, though not quite as fulfilling as director James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma (2007) rework, this action caper played for yuks still isn’t the most original article in the cineplex. But coasting on the dazzling Cheshire grins of its stars, Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, reunited for the first time since Sky, you can just make out the birth of a beautiful new franchise. Everygirl June Havens (Diaz) is on her way to her sister’s wedding when she collides-cute at the airport with Roy Miller (Cruise). After killing the passengers and pilots on their plane, he literally sweeps her off her feet — thanks to some potent drugs. Picture a would-be Bond girl dragged against a spy-vs.-spy thriller semi-against-her-will — grappling with the subtextual anxiety rushing beneath all brief romantic encounters as well as some very justifiable survival fears. Can June overcome her trust issues? Is Roy the man of her dreams — or nightmares? Mangold and company miss a few opportunities to have more fun with those barely teased out ideas, and the polished, adult-yet-far-from-knowing charisma of the leads doesn’t quite live up to sophisticated interplay of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, or even the down-home fun of Burt Reynolds and Sally Field, but it’s substantial enough for Knight and Day to coast on, for about 90 minutes tops. (2:10) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

The Last Airbender There must be some M. Night Shyamalan fans out there. How else does one explain the fact that he keeps making movies? And yet, most of his post-Sixth Sense (1999) work has ranged from forgettable to downright reviled. His latest disaster is sure to fall into the latter category: in The Last Airbender, he takes a much-loved Nickelodeon cartoon and transforms it into an awkwardly paced, poorly acted mess. Woefully miscast Noah Ringer stars as Aang, the avatar with the power to end the Fire Nation’s dominion. Along with his friends, siblings Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) and Katara (Nicola Peltz), Aang must — oh, just watch the damn show. For newcomers, the film is as confusing as Shyamalan’s equally self-indulgent Lady in the Water (2006). For fans of the TV show, The Last Airbender is nearly unbearable, condensing the entire first season into one film by removing the humor, the heart, and the complexity of the characters. There’s no twist here — we expect Shyamalan to disappoint, and he does. (1:34) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

Micmacs An urge to baby-talk at the screen underlines what is wrong with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film: it is like a precocious child all too aware how to work a room, reprising adorable past behaviors with pushy determination and no remaining spontaneity whatsoever. There will be cooing. There will be clucking. But there will also a few viewers rolling their eyes, thinking "This kid rides my last nerve." It’s easy to understand why Jeunet’s movies (including 2001’s Amélie) are so beloved, doubtless by many previously allergic to subtitles. (Of course, few filmmakers need dialogue less.) They are eye-candy, and brain-candy too: fantastical, hyper, exotic, appealing to the child within but with dark streaks, byzantine of plot yet requiring no close narrative attention at all. The artistry and craftsmanship are unmissable, no ingenious design or whimsical detail left unemphasized. In Micmacs, hero Bazil (Dany Boon) is a lovable misfit who lost his father to an Algerian landmine, then loses his own job and home when he’s brain-injured by a stray bullet. He falls in with a crazy coterie of lovable misfits who live underground, make wacky contraptions from junk, and each have their own special, not-quite-super "power." They help him wreak elaborate, fanciful revenge on the greedy arms manufacturers (André Dussollier, Nicolas Marié) behind his misfortunes, as well as various human rights-y global ones. So there’s a message here, couched in fun. But the effect is rather like a birthday clown begging funds for Darfur — or Robert Benigni’s dreaded Life is Beautiful (1997), good intentions coming off a bit hubristic, even distasteful. (1:44) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Predators Anyone who claims to be disappointed by Predators has clearly never seen parts one and two in the series; all three are straight B-movie affairs (though 1990’s Predator 2 takes everything oh-so-slightly over the top. Gary Busey’ll do that). And if you’ve seen either of the recent Predator-versus-Alien flicks, Predators should feel like a masterpiece. Nimród Antal directs under the banner of Robert Rodriguez’s production company, which explains the presence of Danny "Machete" Trejo in the cast. Adrien Brody stashes his Oscar in a safe place to star as Royce, a well-armed mercenary who awakes to find himself in free fall, plummeting into a strange jungle along with other elite-forces types (including Brazilian Alice Braga, playing an Israeli soldier). It doesn’t take long before Royce realizes that "this is a game preserve, and we’re the game." I wish Predators had allowed itself to have a little more fun with its uniquely skilled characters (the yakuza guy does have a nice, if culturally-stereotyped, swordplay scene); there’s also an underdeveloped "plot twist" involving the presence of the decidedly un-badass Topher Grace among the human prey. But all is forgiven when Laurence Fishburne turns up as Crazy Old Dude Who’s Been Hiding Out With Predators a Little Too Long. Fishburne’s presence also adds to the heart-of-darkness vibe the movie seems vaguely interested in conveying. (1:51) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Restrepo Starting mid-’07, journalists-filmmakers Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger spent some 15 months off and on embedded with a U.S. Army platoon in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, a Taliban stronghold with steep, mountainous terrain that could hardly be more advantageous for snipers. Particularly once a second, even more isolated outpost is built, the soldiers’ days are fraught with tension, whether they’re ordered out into the open on a mission or staying put under frequent fire. Strictly vérité, with no political commentary overt or otherwise, the documentary could be (and has been) faulted for not having enough of a "narrative arc" — as if life often does, particularly under such extreme circumstances. But it’s harrowingly immediate (the filmmakers themselves often have to dive for cover) and revelatory as a glimpse not just of active warfare, but of the near-impossible challenges particular to foreign armed forces trying to make any kind of "progress" in Afghanistan. (1:33) Clay. (Harvey)

The Secret in Their Eyes (2:07) Opera Plaza, Red Vic.

*Stonewall Uprising On the night of June 28, 1969, police embarked on what they thought would be a routine raid on a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, the sleazy, Mafia-run Stonewall Inn. The ensuing three days of rioting — during which mostly young men and drag queens accustomed to being marginalized and hauled off to jail stood their ground and fought back — became what historian Lillian Faderman has called "the shot heard round the world" for LGBT activism: a spontaneous expression of street-level outrage that fueled the birth of a movement. Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s solid documentary Stonewall Uprising takes a "just the facts, ma’am" approach to this historic flashpoint that makes for an information-packed, if at times dry, 80 minutes. Working around the paucity of photographic documentation of the actual riots (itself a testament to the marginalization of homosexuality in the late 1960s), Davis and Heilbroner make extensive use of period news footage and photography, reenactments, and most important, the first-person testimonies of who those who witnessed and participated in what one interviewee terms "our Rosa Parks moment." The filmmakers’ contextual groundwork is as impressive for its archival research as it is repetitive in its message: pre-Stonewall life was hell. The documentary becomes more nuanced as it zeros in on reconstructing the first night of rioting via eyewitness accounts. (1:22) Lumiere. (Sussman)

Touching Home Hometown boys (Logan and Noah Miller) make good in this based-on-a-true-story tale of identical twins who must divide their time at home between training for major league baseball and looking after their alcoholic father. The brothers, who also wrote and directed the film, aim for David Gordon Green by way of Marin, but fall short of mastering that director’s knack for natural dialogue. Ed Harris is, unsurprisingly, compelling as the alcoholic father, but the actors in the film who are not named Ed Harris tend to contribute to the script’s distracting histrionics. Touching Home has some amazing NorCal cinematography, and I could see how family audiences might enjoy its "feel bad, then feel good" style of melodrama. But while it’s awkward to say that someone’s real-life experiences come off as trite, there are moments here that feel as clichéd as a Lifetime movie. (1:48) Smith Rafael. (Galvin)

*Toy Story 3 You’ve got a friend in Pixar. We all do. The animation studio just can’t seem to make a bad movie — even at its relative worst, a Pixar film is still worlds better than most of what Hollywood churns out. Luckily, Toy Story 3 is far from the worst: it’s actually one of Pixar’s most enjoyable and poignant films yet. Waiting 11 years after the release of Toy Story 2 was, in fact, a stroke of genius, in that it amplifies the nostalgia that runs through so many of the studio’s releases. The kids who were raised on Toy Story and its first sequel have now grown up, gone to college, and, presumably, abandoned their toys. For these twentysomethings, myself included, Toy Story 3 is a uniquely satisfying and heartbreaking experience. While the film itself may not be the instant classic that WALL-E (2008) was, it’s near flawless regardless of a viewer’s age. Warm, funny, and emotionally devastating—it’s Pixar as it should be. (1:49) Empire, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse The only person more bored by the Twilight franchise than I am is Kristen Stewart. In Eclipse, the third installment of the film series, she mopes her way through further adventures with creepily obsessive vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson). Look, you’re either sold on this star-crossed love story or you’re not, and it’s clear which camp I fall into. Besides, Eclipse is at least better than New Moon, the dreadful Twilight film that preceded it last year. But the story is still ponderous and predictable — Eclipse sets up a conflict and then quickly resolves it, just so it can spend more time on the Bella-Edward-Jacob love triangle. (As if we don’t know how that ends.) Then there’s the unfortunate anti-sex subtext: carnal relations are cast as dirty, wrong, and soul-destroying. I’m not saying we should be encouraging all teenagers to have sex, but that doesn’t mean we should make them feel ashamed of their desires. And what parent would approve of Eclipse‘s conclusion? Marrying your first boyfriend at 18 — not always the best move. (2:04) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*Wild Grass The premise of Wild Grass, Alain Resnais’ loopy new film, could have come straight from Nancy Meyers: an older married man finds a single, middle-aged woman’s wallet. He returns it but can’t stop thinking about her. She, in turn, is intrigued by his attentions. Both are surprised by the connection they feel growing between them, one which they nevertheless have difficulty articulating. When they finally meet, sparks fly. That purloined wallet, along with the romcom set-up, aren’t the only MacGuffins in Resnais’ Wild ride, which uses Christian Gailly’s novel L’ Incindent as a rough guide for its careening tour of the irrational courses that desire can lead us down. The man and woman in question are Georges, an embittered writer with a possibly dark past, and flame-haired Marguerite, a dentist and part-time aviatrix, both played to neurotic perfection by longtime Resnais regulars André Dussollier and Sabine Azéma. Resnais’ attempt to translate what he has called the "musicality" of Gailly’s prose has resulted in a frenetic everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach that tries to visually approximate Georges and Marguerites’ every internal monologue, fantasy, and increasingly risky instance of impulsive behavior, throwing in some knowing winks to classic Hollywood cinema for good measure. It’s a mess, to be sure (there are even two endings!). But like Mr. Magoo, the 87-year-old Resnais, as if by some unseen hand, steers clear of complete disaster. There hasn’t been a Gallic car crash this delightful to watch since Godard’s famous pile-up in 1967’s Week End. (1:44) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Sussman)

*Winter’s Bone Winter’s Bone has already won awards at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, but it’s the kind of downbeat, low-key, quiet film that may elude larger audiences (and, as these things go, Oscar voters). Like Andrea Arnold’s recent Fish Tank, it tells the story of a teenage girl who draws on unlikely reserves of toughness to navigate an unstable family life amid less-than-ideal economic circumstances. And it’s also directed by a woman: Debra Granik, whose previous feature, 2004’s Down to the Bone, starred Vera Farmiga (2009’s Up in the Air) as a checkout clerk trying to balance two kids and a secret coke habit.

Drugs also figure into the plot of the harrowing Winter’s Bone, though its protagonist, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), is faced with a different set of circumstances: her meth head father has jumped bail, leaving the family’s humble mountain home as collateral; the two kids at stake are her younger siblings. With no resources other than her own tenacity, Ree strikes out into her rural Missouri community, seeking information from relatives who clearly know where her father is — but ain’t sayin’ a word. It’s a journey fraught with menace, shot with an eye for near-documentary realism and an appreciation for slow-burn suspense; Lawrence anchors a solid cast with her own powerful performance. Who says American independent film is dead? (1:40) Embarcadero. (Eddy)

REP PICKS

*Beyond the Doors and Bigfoot This double bill in the middle of the Vortex Room’s conspiracy-focused schedule of Thursday screenings offers musings on some favorite 1970s subjects for paranoid speculation. "Our assignment: neutralize the three Pied Pipers of rock n’ roll music," recalls a government operative near the beginning of Larry Buchanan’s Beyond the Doors. Upset at Vietnam protests and drug culture, President Nixon hits on the logical solution: Jimi, Janis and Jim (Morrison) must die. Made in 1984, this late effort by Southern cheesebagger Buchanan followed three decades of such titles as Naughty Dallas (1964), Zontar: The Thing from Venus (1966), Mars Needs Women (1967), and The Loch Ness Horror (1981). Having achieved modest box-office success with his tabloid-tenored 1976 take on Marilyn Monroe, Goodbye Norma Jean, Buchanan applied the same delicate brushstrokes to this dramatized imagining of what really happened to acid rock’s martyred holy trinity. Actor "discoveries" Gregory Allen Chatman (Hendrix), Riba Meryl (Joplin), and Bryan Wolf (Morrison) were, not entirely surprisingly heard from again, though the various approximations of those musicians’ sounds could be worse. In the second half of the Vortex Room bill, John Carradine helps helps various bikers, rednecks, and cops investigate the abduction of underdressed white-meat babes which Bigfoot (or rather, several Bigfoots … or is that Bigfeet?) kidnaps to chain up in a cave so that they might squirm and scream in their bikini briefs. (The original ad line was "Breeds with anything.") Leading victim is 1950s starlet Joi Lansing, a Mormon-raised Monroe wannabe whose prior career highlights were a brief run on The Beverly Hillbillies, bits in studio features and leads in Z-grade films like the glorified ’67 country-music concert compendium Hillbillies in a Haunted House. This being a 1970 drive-in feature (by Robert F. Slatzer, who’d made the rather stupendously bad 1967 Hellcats), naturally a biker club rides to the eventual rescue, pitting one group of hairy primitives against another. Add Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) star Haji, Elvis bodyguard Del "Sonny" West, some hoary Hollywood veterans, and lesser Mitchum family members, and you’ve got one weird time capsule. Thurs/15, 8 p.m., $5, Vortex Room, 1082 Howard, SF; www.myspace.com/thevortexroom. (Harvey)

Buyer beware of Candlestick-Shipyard project

Mary Magee
-
0

Board President David Chiu has introduced five amendments to the city’s Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment proposal. All five are a good start, but longtime observers question if they are too little, too late, in the face of intense lobbying by a city and a developer intent on getting project approvals before a new Board and possibly a new mayor occupy City Hall in January 2011.

Chiu’s amendments address key concerns with the city’s proposed redevelopment plan, and they come as the Board prepares for its July 13 hearing into three separate appeals of the project’s final EIR certification, as well as amendments to the Bayview Hunters Point and Shipyard redevelopment plans.

Two of Chiu’s amendments seek to address concerns about the clean-up of radiologically impacted waste at Parcel E-2 on the shipyard, and environmental impacts of a proposed bridge over Yosemite Slough.

Chiu’s other three amendments seek to finance the expansion of the Southeast Health Center, create a workforce development fund and analyze the feasibility of providing public power, including natural gas at the site.

But while all five amendments are welcome, some observers worry they do not fully address concerns about the project’s sustainability, financing and infrastructure.  But before we get to those concerns, let’s review Chiu’s five amendments in greater detail:

1. The Parcel E-2 amendment.
This amendment declares that the Board’s adoption of CEQA findings for the project “shall not in any way imply support of a cap for Parcel E-2.” 

As such, this amendment is a critical step towards insisting that the parcel get completely cleaned up, not just capped, as the Navy is currently proposing. On the other hand, it’s not a watertight demand to excavate and haul away all contamination from this parcel, which is the cleanup alternative that many in the community would prefer..

Instead, Chiu’s Parcel E-2 amendment declares that the U.S. EPA, California EPA and the Navy, “should pursue the highest practicable level of cleanup for Parcel E-2.”
And that the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency “should not accept the property unless and until that cleanup is satisfied.”

It also establishes that the Board shall conduct a hearing regarding final cleanup strategies for Parcel E-2 before a final remedy is selected, urges the U.S. EPA, California EPA and the Navy to participate in such a hearing, and further establishes that the Board shall conduct a separate hearing prior to any transfer of Parcel E-2 to Redevelopment.”

(There was some question as to why the Board was saying “should” in some parts of this amendment, and “shall” in others. The reason I heard was, you can’t force the Navy to do anything, but you can urge them, and you certainly can refuse to accept the property, if it is not cleaned up a city’s requirements.But this needs to be clarified.)

2. The Yosemite Slough Bridge amendment
Chiu notes that the city’s EIR for the project analyzed a non-49ers-stadium alternative that “includes an approximately 41 ft. wide bridge spanning the Yosemite Slough which is limited to bike, pedestrian and transit use.”
“However, in the event the San Francisco 49ers elect to build a new stadium on the shipyard site, the project will include a bridge spanning Yosemite Slough that is wider than 41 ft. across to accommodate game-day traffic,” Chiu’s amendment states.
(So, Chiu’s amendment doesn’t throw the bridge entirely out with the 49ers’ stadium, and that leaves environmental groups uneasy, afraid that the anticipated 25,000 new residents in the proposed development will subsequently push for legislation to allow for a wider, car-accessible bridge.)

3. The Southeast Health Center amendment
Chiu’s Southeast Health Center amendment demands that the developer contribute $250,000 to the Redevelopment Agency for a needs assessment study regarding the need to expand the center and the ongoing health needs of local residents, and, to the extent such expansion is needed, to help pay for predevelopment expenses associated with this expansion.
The capital costs for expanding the center would be funded through a combination of  tax increment dollars, a $2 million Wellness Contribution paid by the developer, and the City’s ability to finance savings that would accrue to the Department of Public Health by moving from leased space into owned space at the expanded center.

4. The Workforce Development Fund amendment
Chiu’s amendment would modify language in the current community benefits agreement to require the developer to contribute $8,925,000 to a workforce development fund to be used for programs “designed to create a gateway to career development, fiirst for residents of District 10 and secondly for “at-risk job applicants.”
(A member of the public suggested that veterans be specified as “at-risk job applicants,” an idea D. 10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell seemed to support during yesterday’s July 12 Land Use Committee hearing, which was where Chiu introduced his five proposed amendments.)

 5. The Public Power amendment 
Chiu’s public power amendment notes that the SFPUC confirmed the feasibility of providing electric service to the shipyard sire, but requires the agency to update this study and include the Candlestick site and include “an analysis of the feasibility of providing natural gas to the project site.”

But will these steps be enough to ensure that the development actually delivers on its promises of thousands of jobs, and hundreds of affordable housing units,? And is a bridge really necessary across Yosemite Slough, if the 49ers go to Santa Clara as planned?

Long-term observers of the project point to the first phase of the project, which began on the shipyard’s Parcel A, as a warning of where things might end up.

“We approved the fast-tracking of Parcel A based on a bevy of assurances and enthusiastic endorsements from the best and brightest this administration has to offer,” said a source who wishes to remain anonymous. “But what has happened since then, and what are we to learn from this experimental test case?”

This source noted that recent maps of the shipyard show that Parcel A, which the Navy conveyed to the city in 2004, has since been carved up into several new pieces.

“How did Parcel A get divided into two areas that don’t even border one another?” my source asked.

The answer appears to be that sections of the shipyard, including Parcel A,  have since been renamed as new and separate parcels, after it was discovered that shipyard sewers on those parcels contained radiologically contaminated material.

One of these sewer lines, as indicated on recent project maps, leads from a site now known as Parcel UC-3, into the Bayview. In other words, it appears to lead off the shipyard site and into the surrounding community. If so, this raises concerns that shipyard contamination is no longer limited to the shipyard in the Bayview, and could be impacting residents and businesses that are not covered by the Navy’s clean-up commitments.

Either way, it seems that the Board could use an update on what happened on Parcel A, since it was conveyed, what’s the deal with UC-3, and other recently renamed parcels, before they consider an early transfer of the rest of the shipyard.

“How can we start Phase 2 of the project, when we haven’t completed Phase 1?” my source asked.

And since the Navy is still tasked with cleaning up the rest of the shipyard parcels, it would be helpful if the Navy updated the Board on what the Navy is proposing in its Records of Decisions for each of these parcels, including UC-3, before the Board votes on Phase 2 of the project.

My source also noted that since the project plans to use 100 percent recycled water at the site, it would be helpful to have an update as to how issues with sewer contamination and groundwater concerns might impact the project’s sustainability plans.

“These issues touch on half of the documents that make up the EIR, but are now obsolete, because of the issue of radioactive contamination on UC-3,” my source claimed.

And then there’s the question of fproject financing and who the developer for the project actually is, these days.

“The city’s exclusive negotiating agreement (ENA) was with Lennar, so who is CP Development and why do we have an ENA with them?” my source asked.”What happened to Lennar? And why would we be obligated to negotiate solely with this CP Development group?”

Now, hopefully the Board has greatly reassuring answers to all these questions, so that the community can rest assured that the supervisors really do understand the ramifications of a project that they are being asked to approve in what appears to be an awful hurry.

Yes, there are plenty of project supporters who keep on urging “no delays.” I understand their concerns. They want jobs, housing, parks and other promised community benefits. And I don’t blame them.

But it’s up to the Board to ensure that it doesn’t get rushed into approving a project that perhaps doesn’t guarantee any or all of these things. So, let’s keep asking questions so the Board of Supervisors doesn’t end up with buyer’s remorse, but instead can truly claim to having secured a deal that really helps all the folks who currently live and work in the city’s southeast sector. Stay tuned.

 

 

T

 

 

Riot awakening

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
Riot awakening

arts@sfbg.com

FILM On the night of June 28, 1969, police embarked on what they thought would be a routine raid on a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, the sleazy, Mafia-run Stonewall Inn. The ensuing three days of rioting — during which mostly young men and drag queens accustomed to being marginalized and hauled off to jail stood their ground and fought back — became what historian Lillian Faderman has called “the shot heard round the world” for LGBT activism: a spontaneous expression of street-level outrage that fueled the birth of a movement.

Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s solid documentary Stonewall Uprising takes a “just the facts, ma’am” approach to this historic flashpoint that makes for an information-packed, if at times dry, 80 minutes. Working around the paucity of photographic documentation of the actual riots (itself a testament to the marginalization of homosexuality in the late 1960s), Davis and Heilbroner make extensive use of period news footage and photography, reenactments, and most important, the first-person testimonies of who those who witnessed and participated in what one interviewee terms “our Rosa Parks moment.”

And what damning facts they are. Stonewall Uprising is most effective in its first half, when it vividly conveys the demonization and oppression queers regularly faced at a time when homosexuality was illegal in every state except Illinois. In one excerpted clip from a 1966 CBS investigative report that I’m sure Mike Wallace would just as soon have stricken from the record, the news anchor states matter-of-factly: “The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous.” In another clip, a Florida detective sternly warns a gym full of middle school students that should any of them act on their same-sex desires, “you will be caught.”

Davis and Heilbroner’s contextual groundwork is as impressive for its archival research as it is repetitive in its message: pre-Stonewall life was hell. The documentary becomes more nuanced as it zeros in on reconstructing the first night of rioting via eyewitness accounts. Howard Smith and Lucian Truscott IV, journalists for the Village Voice whose offices were nearby, remember fearing for their lives when they found themselves barricaded inside the bar with the police. But it is former police deputy Seymour Pine who emerges as the night’s unofficial antihero, having ordered his officers to hold their fire to prevent unnecessary bloodshed. Pine’s interview — as much a mea culpa as a performance of self-assurance by an elderly man that he is on the right side of history — is Stonewall Uprising‘s true revelation. 

STONEWALL UPRISING opens Fri/9 in Bay Area theaters.

On the Cheap listings

David Talbot
-
0

On the Cheap listings are compiled by Paula Connelly. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THURSDAY 1

Laborfest At venues throughout the Bay Area. Through July 31, visit www.laborfest.net for more information. Attend one of the many exciting events at this annual labor cultural, film and arts festival featuring talk, movies, walking tours, bike tours, book readings, discussions, and more. Most events are free or donation based.

FRIDAY 2

BAY AREA

Fuck the Fourth Sale AK Press Warehouse, 674-A 23rd St., Oakl.; (510) 208-1700. 4-10pm, free. Head down to the Anarchist Press warehouse and browse discounted shirts, DVDs, CDs, books, and more in dishonor of the 4th of July. AK Press collective members will be there offering companionship and complimentary refreshments.

SATURDAY 3

Fillmore Jazz Festival Fillmore between Jackson and Eddy, SF; www.sresproductions.com. Sat.-Sun. 10am-6pm, free. Groove to the sounds of live music, browse arts and crafts, enjoy food from the street vendors, and witness all sorts of new and classic talent from Bay Area performers at this weekend long street festival.

POSIBILIDAD, or Death of the Worker Dolores Park, 18th St. at Dolores, SF; (415) 285-1717. Sat.- Mon. 2pm, free. The San Francisco Mime Troupe is back with a new production about a small U.S. factory about to shut down and how the workers accidentally occupy the factory.

SUNDAY 4

FOURTH OF JULY CELEBRATIONS:

All American Concert Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park, 55 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, SF; (415) 831-5500. 1pm, free. The Golden Gate Park Band will perform music of all styles and eras from by American composers.

San Francisco Waterfront Celebration and Fireworks Aquatic Park, Jefferson at Hyde, SF; www.pier39.com. 3pm-9:30pm, free. Featuring live music on Pier 39 and fireworks launching from the foot of the Municipal Pier and barges in the bay starting at 9:30pm. To get there by public transit take the Cable Car, F, 9x, 10, 30, 45, 47, or 49.

BAY AREA

Anti- 4th of July Picnic Carmen Flores Park, 1637 Fruitvale, Oakl.; (510) 848-1196. 1-6pm, $5-$25 suggested donation. Attend this anti-4th of July BBQ and picnic where you can meet other revolutionaries and discuss strategies for putting a national campaign for revolution on the map. Bring a dish to share.

Berkeley Marina Celebration and Fireworks Berkeley Marina, 201 University, Berk; (510) 548-5335. Noon-10pm, free. Enjoy live music, performances, arts and crafts, massages, sail boat rides, and more culminating in a fireworks display off the end of the Berkeley Pier at 9:30pm.

East Bay Symphony and Fireworks Craneway Pavilion, Ford Point Building, Richmond; www.craneway.com. 5pm, free. Enjoy food vendors on the dock, and local jazz and gospel music, followed by a patriotic performance by the Oakland East Bay Symphony at 8pm, culminating in a grand finale fireworks display over the water at 9:15pm.

Frederick Douglass Day Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakl.; (510) 835-5348. 7pm, $15. Attend this alternative 4th of July celebration featuring excerpts from Frederick Douglass’ speech, selections from John Brown’s Truth, a musically improvised opera, the Frederick Douglass Youth Ensemble, Vukani Mawethu, and more.

Oakland Family 4th Jack London Square, Franklin at Water, Oakl.; www.jacklondonsquare.com. Noon-4pm, free. Featuring food, live music, wine bar, DJs, magician and jugglers, Kinetic Art’s Youth Circus Troupe, petting zoom, farmers’ market, bicycle rentals, and more.

Orinda Parade and Celebration Orinda Community Park, Orinda; www.orindaassociation.org. 7:30am-2:30pm, free. Featuring pancake breakfast, family activities, book sale, parade at 11am, and more.

Patriotic Picnic and Stereopticon Ice Cream Social Pardee Home Museum, 672 11 St., Oakl.; (510) 444-2187. Noon-4pm, $10. Pay homage to your grandmother at this costumed patriotic picnic and ice cream social featuring live rag time, croquet, lawn tennis, and more. Period dress (1890-1919) strongly encouraged.

San Jose Fireworks Celebration San Jose Municipal Stadium, 10 St. at Alma, San Jose; www.sjgiants.com. 7pm, $9.75. Enjoy 95.3 KRTY’s All American Country Music Jam followed by a fireworks display starting at 9:30 p.m. Watch for free from the San Jose State campus and neighboring parks.

San Ramon’s Picnic and Fireworks Central Park, 12501 Alcosta, San Ramon; www.sanramon.org. 1pm-10pm, free. Bring family and friends for an early evening picnic and stake out a spot for the fireworks display, which will be synchronized to music, at 9:30 p.m. Accompanying music can also be heard on 101.7 KKIQ radio.

Sausalito Parade and Fireworks Parade begins at 2nd and Main and ends at Dunphy Park, 10am, free; Dunphy Park picnic, Caledonia Street, 10am-5pm, free; Fireworks at Gabrielson Park, Sausalito, 6:30pm, free. Enjoy live music, food, dancing and family activities all day at Dunphy Park followed by fireworks off Spinnaker Point that will be visible from Gabrielson Park.

Summer Festival and Chili Cook-off Mitchell Park, 600 East Meadow Dr., Palo Alto; www.cityofpaloalto.org/recreation. Noon-5pm, free. With live Music, chili tastings, kids area, food and drink vendors, and more.

USS Hornet USS Hornet, 707 W. Hornet, Pier 3, Alameda; (510) 521-8448 ext. 282. 11am-10pm, $25. Celebrate Independence Day on board the USS Hornet and enjoy great views of all the Bay Area fireworks, live music from the ship deck, food, beer, and wine. Tours of the historic ship will be available throughout the day.

Fiscal solidarity

David Talbot
-
0
Fiscal solidarity

OPINION As Mayor Gavin Newsom prepares to skip town for the bleak limelight of Sacramento, he has left a resounding parting shot with massive budget cuts to those San Franciscans most in need of public aid: seniors, youth, homeless people, folks with mental illnesses, health clinic patients … the list goes on.

Newsom has balanced his final budget (and his campaign for lieutenant governor) largely on the backs of the poor, working-class, multiracial, and immigrant San Franciscans, as well as the nonprofits and city workers who deliver vital services.

The Newsom budget actually adds costs: by cutting services for the treatment and prevention of substance abuse and for youth crime prevention and supportive housing, for instance, it destabilizes lives and forces people right back into the treatment systems that are being cut — adding new human and fiscal costs.

"Every cut has a constituency," Newsom’s PR people say repeatedly. And that’s precisely what the mayor is counting on — that each "constituency" will fight on its own, for its own fiscal scraps. He’s wrong.

As members of a broad coalition of community and neighborhood-based organizations, labor unions, and civic leaders and residents across the city, we stand together in opposition to Newsom’s cuts-only budget and his attempts to divide "constituencies."

Fiscal solidarity means we recognize that an injury to one is an injury to all. "Constituencies" are in fact people whose lives cut across multiple budget line items. Cutting city parks is also a senior issue, as well as a youth issue. Closing mental health programs for the poor is not only an unnecessary moral outrage — it’s a public health and safety issue.

As members and supporters of unions and nonprofits, which are sometimes pit against each other in budget cut wars, we declare mutual support. The mayor’s cuts will mean drastically reduced services for those who need them most and deep staff cuts for city employees and nonprofit workers. We may work for different institutions under different budget line-items, but we’re fighting together as one community — one big "constituency."

Budget wars artificially divide communities that overlap and intermingle. Expressions of unity are put to the test by the budget "add-back" process that forces community groups to scuffle for scraps of cash — groups serving populations in critical need are set against each other, and whole communities are reduced to line-items.

We’re standing against fiscal wedge politics and demanding a real alternative. The budget must protect those most in need and be balanced by cutting first from the top instead of the bottom.

We are united for solutions — progressive tax measures on key wealth sectors that can and must pay their fair share to keep San Francisco the beautiful, thriving, diverse, and culturally rich city it is. We’re standing up for the city Newsom’s leaving, for the communities he’s cutting, and for progressive revenue — a tax to make downtown hotels pay their fair share, and a gross receipts tax on large businesses for starters.

Mayor Newsom: if you cut one of us, you cut us all.

This statement was signed by Christopher Cook, Budget Justice Coalition; Gabriel Haaland, SEIU 1021*; Gordon Mar, Jobs with Justice*; Eric Quezada, Dolores Street Community Services*; N’Tanya Lee, Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth*; Jennifer Friedenbach, Coalition on Homelessness; Guiliana Milanese, Jobs with Justice*; Christina Olague, Senior Action Network*; Sheila Tully, California Faculty Association, SF State*; Chelsea Boilard, Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth*; Joseph Smooke, Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center*; Carl Finamore, delegate, SF Labor Council*

* names for ID purposes only

Oakland joins the car-free “ciclovia” movement

Sasha Cuttler
-
2
Oakland joins the car-free “ciclovia” movement

Joining American cities including Portland, San Francisco, and New York in borrowing the temporarily car-free ciclovia concept pioneered in Bogota, Colombia, Oakland officials will clear the automobiles from the heart of the city this Sunday for its first Oaklavia event.

The city’s invitation to “come play in the streets of Oakland” from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. mirrors SF’s Sunday Streets call that brought thousands of people into the streets of the Mission District last Sunday, an event that will be repeated July 11 before moving to Great Highway Aug. 22 and the Western Addition Sept. 19.

“The heart and soul of a city is its pedestrians spaces,” former Bogota Mayor Enrique Penalosa, who started the trend, told the Guardian during a visit to San Francisco last year, emphasizing the value of borrowing space from cars to to create temporary parks, particularly in resource-strapped cities such as Oakland. “In a poor city, the inequality is felt most during leisure time,” he said. “My main concerns are equity and happiness and the way cities can contribute to those things.”

A tough choice for C.W. Nevius

Zelda Bronstein
-
9
A tough choice for C.W. Nevius

It’s no surprise the C.W. Nevius thinks the city has too many public services and that “some have to go.” Nonprofits that get city funds are an easy target. Some of them aren’t too good at paperwork, and have a hard time providing tangible evidence of results. (If you run a violence-prevention program for kids, and some of them still get in trouble, can you”prove” that the others didn’t because of your help? Of course not.) And there’s no doubt some waste and duplication of services in the system.

Some perspective: When I was on the Board of Trustees of Wesleyan University (as an elected member from the Wesleyan Progressive Alumni Network), I constantly complained about waste in the budget. I wanted to know why we spent so much money on dinners for the trustees (most of whom could well afford their own food and wine) when we were cutting ethnic studies programs and tightening up on financial aid. Colin Campbell, the president, gave me a very good answer:

In any $60 million budget, for any public or nonprofit organization, there’s going to be some waste. It’s unavoidale. And, he said, there are also going to be things that ought to be in the budget but aren’t.

(By my second year on the board, they did cut back on wine at lunch, which may have been due to my complaints but was more likely a result of too many of the older board members getting a little looped and falling asleep during the afternoon meetings.)

So yeah, there are things that could be eliminated in the current nonprofit system. There are also a lot of services that ought to be in the city budget, but aren’t.

C.W.:

There’s just one flaw in our civic personality.

Tough choices.

We’d rather not make them.

That’s correct, and it’s true for everyone in California, probably everyone in the United States. We want good schools, clean streets, nice parks, plenty of cops and firefighters .. and we don’t want to pay for it.

Taxes in this state, and in this country, are the lowest they’ve been in decades. State spending is back to early 1990s levels. State cuts have forced cities to take on more and more burdens.

So the tough choice isn’t whether we can afford to provide public services. It’s whether we have the courage to demand that the people who have seen their tax rates plummet while social problems skyrocket pay their fair share. How about that one, Chuck?

SCENE: Shannon and the Clams open up

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0
SCENE: Shannon and the Clams open up

 

A long version of the interview in the current issue of SCENE:

If I’m going to stay up late and go as deep as I can into the night, so far that I’m just about lost and in trouble, I want the sounds of Shannon and the Clams with me. The Oakland group’s album I Wanna Go Home (1-2-3-4-Go! Records) is packed with songs that have been there and will shine a light to lead you back into the day, while letting you have a sip or two and an adventure or three along the way. This is rock ‘n’ roll music, electric-charged by bassist Shannon Shaw’s wild wonder of a voice, guitarist Cody Blanchard’s flair for classic crooning and crying, and drummer Ian Amberson’s fierce reliability. See Shannon and the Clams live. You will believe.

SFBG Shannon, when did you start to sing for fun? What singers did you love as a kid? What kind of stuff forms what you’ve called a “rage cage,” and does singing help you break out of it?
SHANNON SHAW I have been making up songs since I could talk at the ripe age of two. The first song I remember in full came about because I was cast off to spend time in my room for being bad. There, I formed a rage cage (rage cage: an explosion of anger you can’t escape from) and sang a song that lasted the duration of my time out. The lyrics were something like: ‘I’m really a princess, and my mom doesn’t know because she’s evil, and I’m a princess, and my gramma is my real mom who is a queen and she loves me and lives in a castle…my castle, I’m a princess, where’s my castle?” Very sophisticated, eh? I think I was 4ish at the time.
My favorite singers growing up were definitely Roy Orbison, Kermit the Frog, the Mouse Girl from An American Tale, Mrs. Brisby from The Secret of N.I.M.H., Eric Burdon, George Strait, Les Claypool, Ronnie Spector, Shelley Fabares, the Supremes, and Connie Francis. I know it’s a strange combo, but it’s true.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndApsVCeM54

SFBG Did you all meet at California College of the Arts? What was that experience (meeting and being there) like?
CODY BLANCHARD Yeah, I met Ian and Shannon [during] my second year there. And me and Ian lived in a big house together with 5 people, but we were always really busy with school stuff, so we didn’t even hang out much. We used to have crazy gigantic parties there — that’s where Shannon and the Clams started playing as a band. I wasn’t in the band yet, but I would listen to them practice. 
IAN AMBERSON Cody and I used to live together, but we all joined forces by way of CCA. The music my peers introduced me to had a big impact on my knowledge and taste. CCA is so small that sometimes you form relationships and exchange ideas with people at a higher rate, just by your proximity to others in a context that attempts to promote creativity.

SFBG Cody, you sing an amazing song called “Warlock in the Woods.” Can you tell me a bit about the warlock?
CB The warlock was a child whose mother didn’t want him and ditched him in the forest and tied him up with tree roots. The roots started to grow around him and tell him their secrets and poison his mind. He sort of went into a cocoon of roots, then was released decades later, very mixed-up and manipulated by the dark spirits of the forest. He took a cave as his new home and was convinced that he must capture the hearts of young children and travelers in the woods and put them inside this amulet, which the trees had given him, in order to find his way home and to be free of the forest. In the end, he realizes that all the hundreds of hearts he has taken have done nothing for him and he was still living in a cave, lost in the woods, and that he was tricked by the evil forest into doing their bidding.
I like to write songs about fantastical stuff these days, weird little stories set to song. That’s my favorite kind of song; one that tells a tiny story that you are easily able to follow just by listening.

SFBG What is your favorite item of clothing right now?
CB A rope belt.
SS A ripped-up white Adam Ant V-neck T-shirt that Seth of Hunx and His Punx gave me. While I was on tour with them in France I saw him wearing it one day and said, “I love Adam Ant, I need your shirt.” He took it off of his back and handed it to me. What a good friend! He stood there, nearly naked as a jaybird, to give me the shirt of my dreams. I wear it every Friday night if you ever wanna see it.

SFBG Whose sense of style do you admire?
CB The members of the Lollipop Guild — you know, from The Wizard of Oz. We represent the Lollipop Guild!
SS A really pleasant pie-baking mother of the ’50s, mixed with an ’80s skateboardin’ bad boy.

SFBG What do you like and not like about Oakland?
CB I love that’s it’s not too big or too busy, not overwhelming. All of the neighborhoods are really small and you can find a totally hip fancy neighborhood and then walk a few blocks and be in some scary warehouse district full of abandoned hot dog stands. I like that it’s kind of like San Francisco’s more relaxed little brother. Less freaks here, more quiet — less happening, but still tons of cool stuff. I like a place that doesn’t have too much going on.
I love that there is crazy scary Ghost Town and West Oakland, but then there’s also the Oakland hills with amazing parks like Tilden and Joaquin Miller. I generally wish there were more trees and foliage. I thrive on fauna, and I grew up in a very woodsy suburb. I love the Berkeley Bowl — I guess that’s in Berkeley.
One thing I’m on the fence about is gentrification. On one hand, I don’t like burned-out neighborhoods, but on the other, I hate really expensive stuff and excess and money as an oppressive force. And I know all that stuff is catering to people like me. It makes me feel mixed-up and bad. It sort of destroys the charm of a more naturally evolved neighborhood.
IA Oakland is just a great hub. It sort of feels like being in the middle of a giant cultural sample platter. Having places like Berkeley and San Francisco nearby is nice, while not having to live in those more demanding environments.

SFBG Where do you like to go out at night? 

CB I love movie theaters so much. Usually they’re too expensive, though. My favorite thing is when a theater plays an old movie. I’ve seen Blade Runner, El Topo, The Thing, Jurassic Park, Maximum Overdrive and a bunch of other stuff in the theater. I also love to go to the video store and rent movies. It’s way more fun than Netflix or something, because it’s impulsive and you’re not sure what to get and all these other movies or snacks can catch your eye. Or I love to be around a BBQ or a campfire. My parents have a fire pit. And if there can be fireworks too, then it’s my #1 dream. Or bicycling through the empty night. Or being in a car or a train going across the country, staring out the window.

SS If I had my choice, I would hang out in a wooded area by some railroad tracks with a boombox and a bike.I used to hand out at this old Sunsweet prune factory by train tracks in an old deserted part of downtown Napa. I loved it so much. It was super overgrown with weeds, and surrounded by foliage and abandoned factories. There was a little campfire area nearby and a perfect place to sip on a Friday night sneaky flask. I think I like the feeling of being kind of like a hobo, waiting to hop a train, or camping all hidden in the middle of town. I like having freedom and privacy outside. Part of why Oakland is so rad.

SFBG Shannon, your brothers were at one of your recent shows. What’s it like to have them in the audience?
SS Lucky for me they come to most of my shows. I like them a lot. They are giant and hilarious and love to shake it. They both walk around and seem to have these magic invisible love vests on at all times. It’s really nice to see them dancing around and making people happy.

SFBG Cody, why do think there have been so many great songs about crying?
CB Umm, well crying is something you do instinctively as a baby, and you do it all the time. I guess you laugh and shit and barf a lot too. But maybe when people think of crying it brings them back to that primal state — baby times. It’s a very powerful, uncontrollable emotion. People are drawn to powerful things like that, like when a song has so much power over you it brings you back to a time when you had no control, crying. It is attractive because it is so powerful and so rare. And we try not to cry, so when there’s a song that lets us feel as if we are crying, maybe we love it because we miss that feeling. Or maybe people just want to pretend they are babies. A song about crying might make you feel like a helpless baby, which can be fun. I like to do that. Like Muppet Babies.

SFBG How about death songs, doomed teenage romance or otherwise – do you have any favorites?
SS “Johnny Angel” by Shelley Fabares, “Earth Angel” by the Penguins, “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las, “Little Town Flirt” by Del Shannon, “I Think We’re Alone Now” by Tommy James and the Shondelles, “Last Kiss” by Ricky Nelson, “Patches” by Dickey Lee. So tragic. Listen to those lyrics — oh my!
CB I love “The Gypsy Cried” by Lou Christie as a doomed romance song. Mostly because the music is soooo great. But also because you don’t really get an answer in that song; the man goes to the gypsy to see what the future holds for his love, and the premonition is so sad and devastating that the gypsy can’t even speak, all she can do is cry.
“Snowman” by Diane Ray is awesome, it’s about building a snowman to replace your former lover. “Don’t Drag No More” by Susan Lynne includes death, and the hook and title are grammatically incorrect — that’s awesome.

SFBG Who are your favorite record producers, past and present?
CB I really love Joe Meek. Ian turned me on to him. Such a weirdo, and his stuff is so experimental for the time [when he was recording]. And he was crazy, which is double interesting, also gay and he couldn’t play any instruments or read notation. So I hear.
Also, Giorgio Moroder is incredible, both his crazy awesome stuff with Donna Summer and his solo stuff. I think he produced the theme for The Neverending Story.
Ennio Morricone is so awesome, such an experimental freak. Big influence. I so dearly love the music from Leon Schlesinger and Harman & Ising cartoons, MGM and Warner Bros. studios. Not sure who was in charge of the music.
Also, those Italian synth weirdos who did soundtracks for all those ’70s Lucio Fulci movies, like Fabio Frizzi and Claudio Simonetti.

SFBG Shannon, what were some of your wildest and favorite experiences on the road in Europe with Hunx and the Punkettes, and what were some of your favorite ones?
SS Probably full-group ghost hunting in underwear in Liege, Belgium, in this abandoned college where we had to sleep. Lots of screaming and giggling and inappropriate flashlight shining.
Also, maybe full-band nude sauna with King Khan and his wife and kids. Those Europeans are quite comfortable with nudity. ‘Twas hard for me, because I’m a former Mormon and a bit of a chunker if you haven’t noticed. In the end, no one gave a shit and it was fun! Glad I did it.
In Paris, we played along a canal that was basically a gypsy camp. Seth wore a banana hammock made of candy that broke at a very inconvenient time. Instead of helping him with his suddenly public family jewels, some demon of entertainment overtook me and made me tear the remaining candies off his bod and throw them to the audience. I think he thought it was funny.

SFBG If you could set up a dream bill packed with bands you’ve never played a show with, who would be on it? What place would be the venue?
SS Gene Pitney, Roy Oribson, Gem, Danzig, Lou Christie and the Tammys, and the Muppet Band.
CB Oh boy, Ennio Morricone, the Lollipop Guild, the Ramones, Devo, King Tuff, Best Coast, Mark Sultan, the Ooga Boogas, Pissed Jeans, the Seven Dwarves (from the Disney cartoon), Roger Miller, King Louie (from The Jungle Book), Motorhead, Jonathan Richman, the Monks and the Frogs.

SFBG Rollercoasters or haunted houses?

SS Haunted houses. Not the fake kind at fairs and stuff. Real ones.
IA Haunted houses. Our favorite is in the Enchanted Forest theme park in Salem, Oregon. It has lots of creepy automatons and surprisingly scary uses of compressed air to scar the crap out of ya.
CB Gosh, tough call. Haunted houses. They have more character and their creation and construction is a more nuanced art form I think. They’re longer and more entertaining and weird and freaky. Although I do love rollercoaster art more than almost anything. The glitter and lightbulbs and bold stripes and stuff. So wonderful, so American.

SFBG Hot dogs or hamburgers?
SS Hamdoggers, I think.
IA The process leading up to both is disgusting, but I really prefer a well-cooked brat over a patty of beef. Hot dogs are so much more mysterious, and have a pleasant snap to them.
CB Hamburger, no contest. Hamburgers are bigger and more filling and it’s easier to fit more cool toppings on them, like cheese and mayonnaise and avocado and pickles and onions and stuff. Although Pink’s Hot Dogs in LA makes me think twice about that statement. Also, vegetarian hot dogs taste like a garbage can, and vegetarian burgers come in all types of weird flavors and textures.

SFBG 45 record parties or drive-in double features?
SS Drive-in! I’ve never been to one. Somebody wanna give me a ride?
CB Drive-in for sure. I go to record parties all the time, but I never get to go to the drive-in because they are so rare these days. I love movies so much, and the drive-in is the ultimate movie experience. You’re outside in the magical summer night and you can do whatever you want in your car. It’s very nostalgic for me. I saw Honey, I Shrunk the Kids at a drive-in when it came out. I don’t think I’ve been to one since.

SFBG Have any of you ever had a curfew, and if so, did you break it? Do you like staying up late at night, and if so, why?
SS Our curfew system at both houses was crappy and confusing. My mom only had one if she was mad or awake, so most of the time me and my brothers would stay under the radar because she went to bed so early.
My little brother Paddy and I would sleep way deep out in our field with our dogs at night when it was hot in the summer. We would wait until we were sure Mom was passed out and then go sneak around in the country with sticks to hit stuff, or dig holes, or whatever hilbilly kids do. And at my dad’s house the curfew was always conveniently right before Are You Afraid of the Dark? came on Nickelodeon or X-Files started. He hates “scary stuff” so much. He didn’t want me and my bros exposed to it because he saw the original Mummy in the ’50s when he was little and is still scarred from it.
CB Yes, I had a curfew, and yes, I broke it constantly. I got grounded once because me and my neighbor friends camped in my backyard with a bunch of TVs and video games and Doritos and 2-liter Cokes and we got bored and snuck out of the yard and ran around the neighborhood, hid from cars, and climbed on the roof of the junior high. When we came back to go to sleep, my parents were waiting and came out with flashlights. A flashlight in your face is so disturbing. We got grounded from each other for a month.
I like the late night and early morning equally. The only thing I don’t like about the late night is that you will probably miss the early morning. Both times are really quiet and there are certain things that are off-limits, like calling people and going to the store. It limits your activity in a fun way. You have to find something weird to do. Someone once told me that there’s a theory that, since more people are asleep at night, there’s less “psychic energy” flying around at night, and so your mind feels different, quieter, more focused. I’m not sure, but I like to believe it.

SFBG It’s perfect that you’ve performed at the Stud. Etta James used to sing there, and  Shannon’s vocal on “Troublemaker” reminds me of her. Do either of you ever feel the presence of ghosts or artists or people you love when writing or performing a song? Who would you most like to join you on stage?
IA I think it would be really awesome to jam with Dick Dale or maybe the piano stylings of Zombies-era Rod Argent.
CB I don’t think think about songwriting enough to feel that. Or maybe I think about it too much. I like to think about Marc Bolan when I sing some new thing to myself. He seemed so enchanted and magical and possessed by some uncontrollable musical spirit. I like to think part of his ghost is inside me, like maybe just the ghost of his hair or something. Or I like to think at least that his ghost likes what I’m singing, and he can hear me through all the noise of the astral plane, because we are alike somehow. I would most like to share a stage with Marc Bolan. We would dress like psychedelic elves and do duets.
SS Roy Orbison is totally my #1, Gene Pitney is my #2, Frankie Valli is my #3, the Beach Boys are my #4, Danzig is my #5.
What would I give to do a show with Roy O.? I don’t think I coild ever have enough gold, doubloons, or talent to sign with him or his ghost. He was so special and unique and genuine. You can feel his troubles and pain like they’re yours when you listen. Earthshattering heartache and longing is his forte.

SFBG What are the Clams up to these days? Are you recording a new album? Can you tell me about some of your new songs?
IA We should be recording our new stuff soon, but soon might mean in several months. We are playing with the Pharmacy and Guantanamo Baywatch at Pissed Off Pete’s on 25th. That will be a show worth going to.
CB We’re getting a bunch of material ready for a new album. We have a 7″ of some really old awesome stuff coming out on Southpaw Records, it’s called “Paddy’s Birthday” and it’s so good.
We’re trying to lay off playing so much, we overwork and distract ourselves doing so many shows, although it seems like Oakland loves it when we play two parties a week. We love them!
We’re spending some money on recording equipment. The new stuff has some Buddy Holly-type poppy sparse hop jump fun songs and some dark scary Disney soundtrack haunted forest type stuff, like “Teddy Bear’s Picnic.” Also a lot of ballads like we’ve always done, but they’re vocally weirder, lots of weird doo-wop yelps, Muppet singing and Morricone primal yowling. We’re trying to finally perfect some powerful Everly Brothers/girl group-style harmonies. And we’re experimenting with some super-evil-sounding ’80s punk thrash stuff. I can’t wait to record ’em!


Newsom and his commissioners just love Candlestick/Shipyard report

Mary Magee
-
4

 Text by Sarah Phelan, photos by Luke Thomas

Today, I’m dedicating Michael Franti’s  “Say hey, (I love you)” to the entire Redevelopment Commission and the four Planning Commissioners who approved the City’s final Environmental Impact Report plan for Lennar’s Candlestick/ shipyard development. I’m doing so, not because I love these commissioners, who are  all mayoral appointees, but because they all seem to love everything about the final report, despite ongoing concerns about building a bridge over an environmentally sensitive slough, taking park land for luxury condos and unresolved questions about the Navy’s cleanup of the shipyard.(Yes, the EIR doesn’t address the toxic cleanup, but does it make sense to approve it before the Navy has completed its cleanup assessment plan?)

I’m also dedicating Franti’s bubbly soul-lifting song to Planning Commissioners Christina Olague. Kathrin Moore and Hisashi Sugaya for refusing to rubberstamp the final EIR or the related CEQA findings. Thanks guys for having some moral backbone!

Mayor Gavin Newsom, presumably tweeting while leaving town again on the Lt. Governor campaign trail, hailed yesterday’s rubberstamping process as a critical milestone.
“This is a major milestone for our efforts to transform the shipyard from an environmental blight to a showcase of jobs, affordable housing, parks and green-technology investment for the Bayview and our entire City,” Newsom said in a press release. “The approvals of the EIR and Redevelopment Plan reflect the years of hard work, rigorous study and extensive community involvement invested in revitalizing our City’s Southeastern Waterfront…our progress today is a testament to their leadership and commitment to thoroughly cleaning up the Shipyard so we can forge ahead towards a new vision for Hunters Point.”

One of the key points to emerge from last night’s hearing is the bifurcated nature of the process, which yesterday let the city push the EIR certification through, before the Navy completes a related EIS (environmental impact statement) about the cleanup on the shipyard—including areas of land where Lennar hopes to develop homes if the 49ers leave.

Fog City Journal’s Luke Thomas told me today that during public comment, the Nation of Islam’s Minister Christopher Muhammad called the commissioners “paid prostitutes” and “political whores” and said there would be a “political earthquake” if the commissioners go forward with EIR. 

“However, I don’t think he understood that the EIR and the EIS (which deals with the toxic cleanup) are two separate documents,” Thomas said, accurately noting that the joint commission was only voting on the EIR yesterday.

(According to Thomas, the Minister also promised that coalition of activists that would dog Newsom up and down the State during his campaign for Lt. Governor to expose Newsom’s record, so expect more fireworks along the campaign trial this summer.)

Another key fact to emerge from yesterday’s hearing was the lack of public comment on the part of almost all the candidates running to replace D. 10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell, whose district includes this massive development. Only Kristine Enea, Tony Kelly and Espanola Jackson spoke on the record—with Enea in favor of the plan with amendments, and Kelly and Jackson opposed as things currently stand.

Now, you’d think that everyone running in this race would be eager to show D. 10 constituents (and beyond) that they were at the meeting, not only silently tracking, but also publicly expressing their opinions. And while it’s true that Marlene Tran and DeWitt Lacy filled in speaker cards, Chris Jackson showed up during the proceedings, and Lynette Sweet got ushered into the press box by Sup. Bevan Dufty, none of these D. 10 candidates got their thoughts in the public record. Now, no doubt Cedric Akbar, Bill Barnes, Isaac Bowers, James Calloway, Malia Cohen, Ed Donaldson, Marie Franklin, Rodney Hampton Jr., La Vaughan Moore, Geoffrea Morris, Steve Moss, Jacqueline Norman, Nina Pickerrell, Dwayne Robinson, Diane Wesley Smith, Eric Smith, (and the many others rumored to be running) had their reasons for not being there, and I’d be happy to hear all about it from all of them between now and the November election.

But it doesn’t instill confidence in candidates when they won’t say in public what they are only too willing to say off the record. So, kudos to Enea, Kelly and Jackson for taking that leap and refusing to act like politicians before they have even been elected.

“So much of it was shocking but not surprising,” Tony Kelly told me today, after he recovered from last night’s meeting which lasted until 2 a.m. ‘Everyone knew there would be a snappy 4-3 decision by the Planning Commission on the stuff that mattered. And in a way, I can see why the mayoral appointees on the Commission would decide that they would leave it to the elected officials on the Board to stop this plan. But there was zero excuse for the lameness of the Redevelopment Commission [who are all mayoral appointees]. Still, it showed what the Planning Commission [which today consists of four mayoral appointees, and three Board appointees] must have been like  before it was reformed [and still consisted solely of mayoral appointees].”

“It was heartbreaking to see the endless parade of Bayview Hunters Point residents saying, ‘I need a job,’ or ‘ I need to live in a new house,’ as they argued in favor of certifying the project’s final EIR, despite all the flaws,” Kelly acknowledged.

Still, as Kelly points out, the city could have pushed to acquire foreclosed housing in D. 10 so residents in substandard public housing could be relocated into decent units now, instead of having to stay at least another five years, or longer, in rat, cockroach and sewage inundated units, under Lennar’s plan.

Kelly also notes that the city could have used the Redevelopment Agency’s “massive power” to do stuff up and down Third St, where unemployment is especially visible.

“Having done planning elsewhere, this plan [for Candlestick and the shipyard] is like planning on Mars,” Kelly said. ‘This is a bigger badder version of 555 Washington.”

Last but not least, Kelly voiced concern that a couple of peaker plants will be built within Lennar’s project area.
.“There are going to be two combustion turbines generating steam heat, but not electricity within the project boundaries,” Kelly clarified. “That means they don’t have to register as a power plant, but they will be generating greenhouse gases. The only difference is they won’t be generating electricity.”

So, now the charade of approvals heads to the Port Commission, which has got some folks asking whether Port Commissioner Stephanie Shakofsky, another Newsom appointee should recuse herself , given that her non-profit is clearly such a fan of the project.

 

 

1...161718...30Page 17 of 30

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org