Police

SFPD’s Capt. McDonough defends rogue cops

Sasha Cuttler
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15
SFPD’s Capt. McDonough defends rogue cops

The San Francisco Police Department has steadfastly tried to ignore back-to-back cover stories in the Bay Guardian and SF Weekly that detailed the campaign of harassment and brutality against nightclubs and parties in SoMa by a pair of undercover cops.

The fact that those two cops – SFPC Officer Larry Bertrand and state agent Michelle Ott – have reportedly been absent from the scene in recent weeks might indicate that the department has heeded the outcry and put a leash on them. But now, in the “Captain’s Comments” in today’s Southern Station Newsletter, Capt. Daniel McDonough – who, along with Commander James Dudley, is believed by nightlife advocates to be behind the crackdown – has issued a full-throated defense of the pair’s actions.

Despite the fact that those actions (including repeated and selective harassment of certain clubs, illegal property seizures, threats and retaliation against complainants, and unnecessary force) have resulted in multiple legal actions against the city, McDonough claims they have somehow prevented unspecified “problems” and “violence and disorder.”

That negative claim is impossible to prove or disprove, but it’s certainly true that it was the arrival of aggressive cops at a January party that we wrote about that precipitated the “violence and disorder” that night.

McDonough writes, in full: 

There has been a recent deluge of articles about Nightlife in the Southern District.  The articles particularly focused on two fine individuals, Officer Bertrand of Southern Station and Agent Ott of the Alcoholic Beverage Commission. (ABC) 

One thing the articles didn’t have to focus on was the amount of violence occurring in the District at the late night venues.  This I believe has been directly related to the good work of these dedicated Officers.  In conjunction with the members of Southern Station, Officer Bertrand and Agent Ott would regularly inspect nightclubs and bars to ensure compliance with laws and codes that have been enacted to have an orderly establishment and to also stop the rampant amount of unpermitted parties that would arguably cause problems.  Because of their diligence and professionalism the amount of violence and disorder has been reduced.  Establishments that routinely would have numerous calls for services started to take responsibility to handle the influx of people and establish security procedures.  The benefits reaped by the citizens of San Francisco by the actions of Officer Bertrand and Agent Ott are measured in the lack of homicides shootings and knifings that haven’t occurred because of their good work.  They are to be commended.  I would also like to thank all of those establishment owners who communicate to me their positive relationships with those two officers.

Community Meeting 

Wednesday April 21 2010 6pm

Community Room

South Beach Harbor Pier 40

Inside the squat

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Inside the squat

By Evan DuCharme

news@sfbg.com

Homes Not Jails (HNJ) has fought diligently for two decades to shed light on the economic disparity that exists in San Francisco, where the number of homeless people would fit almost perfectly into the supply of vacant homes.

So on a cold Saturday night, April 3, as I sit shivering in the back of a van waiting for my group’s turn to covertly enter a vacant house, I’m surprised at the calmness on some of the members’ faces. This group of eight is planning to enter and occupy apartments at 572 and 572A San Jose Avenue. And while only a few have been through this before, the rest make up for their lack of experience with a passion for the cause.

Around 2 a.m., the group somehow manages to enter the building without being caught, but it’s not easy. Between the drunken couple arguing on the street, the cops breaking up a bar fight nearby, and a neighboring couple who keep shining flashlights at the units, the group should never have made it in. But it does, and at the moment there’s no time to dwell on luck because there’s food and water to unpack, entrances to secure, and rooms to search, all while remaining perfectly silent and unseen.

Typically HNJ, a project of the San Francisco Tenants Union, conducts weekly searches it calls “urban exploring” in the hopes of finding useable vacant property to set up as a “squat” for people looking for a place to live rent-free. Every so often, its activism goes mainstream in the form of public occupations like this one, when the media is notified.

The immediate goal is to simply enter, secure, and occupy the apartment until noon the next day when a rally starting at 24th and Mission streets will march right in front of the building. Once there, they are supposed to let fly a couple HNJ banners while the rally outside features speeches, chants, and music by the Brass Liberation Orchestra.

But the catch is that the squatters cannot be seen before the rally arrives outside, otherwise their cover will be blown, they could be arrested, and the goal of shedding light on this waste of vacant housing will be ruined.

After attending HNJ meetings and events for a few weeks, I was allowed to follow the group into the apartment and report on their occupation from the inside as long as I protected the anonymity of those who wanted it. With that in mind, the group included Tim, one of the most experienced HNJ members; SFSU grad-student Aaron Buchbinder; Elihu Hernandez, a candidate for the District 6 seat on the Board of Supervisors; Matt, another experienced HNJ member; and local activists Carling, Scott, and a seventh member who asked to remain anonymous.

The building they targeted had strong symbolic value; it was where an elderly man was forced out by the landlord using the Ellis Act, which for the past decade has been the root cause of a large number of what the group sees as unjust and immoral evictions.

The Ellis Act was adopted in 1985 to give landlords the right to clear their rent-controlled buildings of tenants and get out of the rental business, expanding their previous rights to evict tenants through Owner Move-In (OMI) evictions, which allowed landlords and their immediate family members to oust renters.

Once a landlord invokes the Ellis Act, tenants in the building are given 120 days to move out, although seniors and those with disabilities must be given a year’s notice. Tenants are entitled to almost $5,000 each in relocation costs, or a maximum of almost $15,000 per unit. Seniors and those with disabilities get an extra $3,300 each.

After the building is vacated, it is usually taken off of the rental market for at least five years. During that time, the former tenants retain the right to reoccupy their old units at their original rent for 10 years. If the building is re-rented within five years, the landlord can only charge what the previous tenants were paying. These restrictions are attached to the deed and apply to subsequent property owners as well.

Although the restrictions were meant to discourage the eviction of tenants from rent-controlled units, they also have encouraged some property owners to keep buildings vacant while they wait for property values to increase or to re-rent their units at higher prices. If the landlord wants to convert, remodel, or add any additions to the property, they still must seek the city’s approval.

This landlord power is the primary reason HNJ chose to occupy 572 and 572A San Jose Avenue. A few years ago, the property was purchased by Ara Tehlirian, who sought to remodel it and live there himself, evicting 82-year-old Jose Morales in the process. Morales had been legally renting the property since 1965 and challenged his eviction in court.

Morales won when the judge ruled that it was illegal to evict him for the sole purpose of renovating the building for the new landlord. But Morales’ success was short-lived. Tehlirian invoked the Ellis Act, so Morales was no longer legally able to live in his home. When Tehlirian subsequently asked for permission to renovate his house as he had initially planned, the judge denied the request citing that landlords cannot invoke the Ellis Act for an OMI eviction.

One reason the Ellis Act is used so frequently traces back to the passage of Proposition G in 1998, which prevented the type of eviction initially tried on Morales. Prop. G requires landlords invoking an OMI eviction to move into the evicted tenant’s unit within three months of the eviction and to stay for a minimum of three years.

Furthermore, it limited such evictions to one person per building and banned them if a comparable unit was open in the building. Finally, and the reason cited in Morale’s case, it made permanent an existing law that was set to expire in June of that year that prohibited any OMI eviction of senior, disabled, or catastrophically ill tenants.

Tehlirian, like many others before him, decided to use the Ellis Act to bypass these OMI restrictions. Ted Gullicksen, director of the Tenants Union, said Prop. G had the unintended effect of encouraging property owners to clear their buildings of tenants, a requirement of Ellis Act.

“A vacant building is generally worth 20 to 30 percent more than a building occupied with tenants because the landlord can do whatever he wants with the units, including selling them or renting at market rate,” he told us.

So Morales was forced out of what remains a vacant building. This is why HNJ illegally occupied the property, arguing that trying to effect change through legal avenues is at times just as difficult as Morales’ individual struggle against the Ellis Act. It highlighted the human cost of property rights.

“People who keep vacant buildings for profit tend to be the same ones who donate money to political campaigns,” Tim said. Which is why he is resorting to a form of civil disobedience that is very likely to end with him in handcuffs.

Around 1 p.m. Sunday, April 4, the rally met in front of the property and the occupiers frantically rushed to hang banners and secure any entrance the San Francisco police might find. As the first drops of rain fell, the Brass Liberation Orchestra played, speakers including Gullicksen and Morales said a few words, and the Food Not Bombs organization supplied free food to occupiers and members of the rally.

After a few hours, the rally dispersed with much appreciation from those inside the apartment and what started as a group of seven SFPD squad cars dwindled to two. Tim, Elihu, Scott, Aaron, and Matt decided to remain in the building while the rest of us said goodbye and climbed out an open window.

The remaining members spent their second night in the building, but this time they didn’t have to be quiet. Supporters brought the group pizzas and a neighbor offered to supply water to the group as long as they didn’t mind if it came from her tap. They huddled in the same room playing cards and joking until Tehlirian and the SFPD made it through the front door, ending the occupation.

Each member was cited and released on the premises at 1:35 p.m. April 5 under penal code 602m for trespassing. Tehlirian stood by and observed while his lawyer, Zach Andrews, unsuccessfully pressed him to charge the group with breaking and entering. When the group dispersed, Tehlirian and a few members of the SFPD broke through a second door to gain access to the bottom level of the property.

When Tehlirian came out for a break, I tried to speak with him but he refused to answer my questions. Shortly afterward, I met up with the HNJ group at the Tenants Union and asked Tim if he thought they were successful in accomplishing their goals. “Not completely,” he said. “But we made the most with what we had.”

Tenants may not have the law on their side in many cases, but in a city that is two-thirds renters, they have each other. And for a few days, they had one more home. The group’s feelings seemed to be summed up by this quote on a HNJ pamphlet: “We are too valuable to live huddled in the rain, in the parks, in dangerous unhealthy shelters. Freezing, dying so that others can realize profits.”

RJD2’s music is a trip– even for him

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
RJD2’s music is a trip– even for him

Skip the Blockbuster run of predictable action flicks and let an RJD2 album call the shots. The record may spin, but your mind will cartwheel with scenes of drama, horror and thrill of your choosing. Allow the blaring horns to signal a wild chase, the sampled soul to spur images of a powerful protagonist and the hip-hop bass to conjure up a dreary, urban setting: the music of RJD2 –playing Wed/7 at The Independent–  is a mind-driven movie reel.

Ramble John “RJ” Krohn has been making music as RJD2 since 1993, switching up his perfectionist tainted DJ process by not only sampling everything from ’70s disco and movie themes, but by also using his own vocals and live instrumentation. Last year RJ took on the boss role and started his own label, RJ’s Electrical Connections, putting out his fourth and latest record The Colossus in January. 

Colossus begins with “Let There Be Horns“, its hot Latin drum beat, humming strings, tiptoeing chimes and heavy synths immediately filling my mind’s projector with images from an underground business deal. I imagined film flickering with shots of Miami mobsters, blaring brass begetting cash exchanges and the electric guitar solo warming of police presence. I heard the medley of Russian-style strings as an audible indication of a fight between the pastel suited-men and the story’s dirty antagonists. The synth seemed to indicate when life was good in palm-laden city and the sampled clapping at the song’s end wrapped up my vision with high hopes. 

Each song on Colossus has a similar, industrial, urban story for me; I see factory workers, trains, smog filled cities and lover’s quarrels each time RJD2’s beats play. Is this weird? Maybe my over-active imagination should get back in the closet? I was hoping that RJ himself would understand.

Talking over the phone from his Ohio home, RJ was enjoying a small window of free time by repairing a broken synth, which he admitted was “pretty nerdy.” Not as nerdy as my “visions”, I thought. I asked him questions about owning the label and other slightly boring items, flirting around what I really wanted to ask. I felt like a kindergarten student with my hand-up, squirming with a question. And then, I just blurted it out. 

SFBG: So…do you ever think of your music as a story? I tend to think of the sounds, instruments and samples as characters– interacting, meeting, fighting, making love? Antagonists and Protagonists in a movie scene. Do you think of it like that? 

RJ: (Giggle). I think of things in a similar manner, yes. 

SFBG: (Sigh of relief).

RJ: The fun of instrumental music for me is the intention of release. The arrangement of the song is the most important thing– how it progresses. The tension and the release. Building drama. The medium I work in is drama. Two things might be working with each other, or against each other, and thinking of them as characters or playing roles makes sense to me. There’s a relationship between the two parts: between the drums and the groove, the intro and the base of the song. The bridge, the breakdowns, each section– where they fall next to each other and the transitions between them. 

SFBG: So if not in story-writting mode, where does your head go when you put together your songs?

RJ: I like to let things unfold on its own accord. I don’t like to force it. I find it fun and interesting and rewarding to let it take me along for the ride. I’m not the kind of guy who starts with a blueprint, or gets lyrics, chords and melodies in their sleep– I’m in total awe of that. Almost all of the time I’m recording, it’s an exploratory project– I don’t know what I’m looking for, shooting for as I go. I like to get the sensation that the experience is like going along for a ride in someone else’s movie, trip or story. 

No need for a pill, puff or embarrassment– looks like everybody gets a free trip from RJD2’s music.

 

RJD2

Wed/7, 8pm, $20

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.the independentsf.com

 

Big Wheel + Big Hill = Big Fun

Sasha Cuttler
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1

After barely surviving a brush with city bureaucracy last year, Bring Your Own Big Wheel yesterday returned to the steep streets of San Francisco for its 10th year in a row, once again proving that incredible stupidity can be incredibly fun.

Hundreds of costumed participants riding Big Wheels and other plastic-wheeled kids toys braved driving rain to race in packs down steep and curvy Vermont Street on Potrero Hill, offering colorful crashes and zaniness galore and eliciting big dumb grins from both participants and spectators, who were there in roughly equal numbers.

And for such a crazy event with throngs of people, it was remarkably problem-free and required almost no police presence. Last year, after the SFPD threatened to cancel the event and arrest anyone riding Big Wheels, a citizens’ group (including many from the Burning Man world) stepped up to manage an event that has gotten exponentially larger since its early days on Lombard Street.

City officials including Neighborhood Services Director Mike Farrah brokered last year’s compromise and helped facilitate this year’s event, for which volunteers made all riders fill out waiver forms and get wrist bands to minimize the city’s liability. With minimal official involvement, this was crazy fun by the people, for the people, with what costs there were (such as Porta-potties) covered by passing the hat.

It was a great day to live in San Francisco.   

Unfortunately, print and still photography just don’t do this race justice, so check out this video from VidSF and the folks over at Mission Mission (but pay no attention to that first guy that correspondent Sunny Angulo interviews because he’s clearly insane) to get a sense of the action.

Momentum shifts against sit-lie

Sasha Cuttler
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Momentum shifts against sit-lie

Proponents of criminalizing sitting or lying on San Francisco sidewalks have seen their prospects of success steadily dwindle in the last week, starting with the creative and well-covered Stand Against Sit-Lie protests on March 27 and continuing through last week’s Planning Commission vote against the measure to yesterday’s debate on BBC’s The World, in which opponent Andy Blue clearly bested proponent Ted Loewenberg.

In fact, Blue and his grassroots band of progressive allies deserve tremendous credit for flipping the momentum on the issue away from the narrative pushed by Mayor Gavin Newsom, Police Chief George Gascon, and the reactionary Haight area property owners from Loewenberg’s Haight Ashbury Improvement Association.

While Newsom and Loewenberg tried to argue this was about giving police another “tool” to use against violent street ruffians, Blue and the progressives have correctly pointed out that the overblown examples proponents cite (ie hoodlums punching passersby, barricading businesses, and spitting on babies) are already illegal and that the law actually punishes the simple act of lounging in public.

That argument by progressives got strong support from a Planning Department report on how the sit-lie ordinance cuts against a variety of city policies and goals that promote open space and using sidewalks for more than just transportation, a view that the Planning Commission endorsed on a surprisingly lopsided 6-1 vote, with even Newsom’s appointees crossing him on the issue.

Few members of the Board of Supervisors have embraced the push for sit-lie, so it’s likely to be dead-on-arrival when the board considers it later this month, but Blue’s group isn’t taking any chances. Stand Against Sit Lie is planning another day of creative protest – with more sidewalk picnics, games, and maybe a return of Chicken John’s sidewalk hot tub – on April 24.

Newsom wants more authority for party-crashing cops

Sasha Cuttler
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Newsom wants more authority for party-crashing cops

At a time of rising concern about police crackdowns on San Francisco nightlife – including the use of unprovoked brutality, selective harassment, and punitive property seizures – it would seem a strange time to call for abolishing the Entertainment Commission and returning its authority to the San Francisco Police Department. But Mayor Gavin Newsom has now called for doing just that.

Newsom last week refused calls to get involved with mediating a nasty dispute between the SFPD and nightlife workers and advocates, who have filed claims and lawsuits against the city alleging improper police behavior, including a racketeering lawsuit and another lawsuit alleging police retribution against promoter Arash Ghanadan for complaining about mistreatment, for which Police Chief George Gascon is scheduled for a video deposition on April 8 (other depositions involving Gascon and the undercover partners Officer Larry Bertrand and ABC agent Michelle Ott will follow in coming weeks).

The police crackdown, the subject of recent cover stories in both the Guardian and the SF Weekly, has been underway for more than a year and nightlife advocates say it is reminiscent of the arbitrary police enforcement against disfavored clubs and parties in the late 1990s that led to the creation of the Entertainment Commission in the first place.

Making Newsom’s new stance even more puzzling, the commission has been responsive to the overhyped criticism of the commission by nightlife critics, some politicians, and the San Francisco Chronicle and Examimer. The commission voted last night to suspend Suede for shooting out front, a decision that Board of Supervisors President David Chiu (whose North Beach constituents have put pressure on him to rein in problem clubs) cast as a litmus test for the commission, and one it apparently passed. In addition, Commissioner Terrance Alan, who had been criticized for his conflicts of interest, last week announced that he will be stepping down from the commission when his term expires in June. 

“Isn’t anyone paying attention? It’s really got me baffled,” Alan said of the continuing calls to kill the commission. “I don’t know what this is about.”

He isn’t the only one. Commissioner Jim Meko, who had been critical of the commission’s industry-heavy makeup and reluctance to take aggressive action against problem clubs, told the Chronicle that turning permitting and enforcement over to the cops would be much worse.

Sen. Mark Leno, who as a supervisor created the commission back in 2002, agrees. He told us that he opposes the change proposed by Newsom.

“I strongly believe the original reasons for the creation of the commission, an inherent conflict in having the same body that enforces licensing to also issue those licenses, remains,” Leno told us.

Leno also noted that it was only in November that the Board of Supervisors voted to give the commission more authority to suspend the licenses of problem clubs, which they used with Suede, delivering the maximum penalty possible: a 30-day suspension.  

“If they just gave them additional authority, let’s give it a little time to work out before we talk about disbanding them,” Leno said. He also noted that it’s strange to see the mayor and supervisors criticizing the industry-heavy makeup of the commission considering that they’re the one who make those appointments: “That’s in the hands of the board and the mayor.”

Neither Chiu nor Newsom have returned our calls seeking comment, but several Guardian sources with long involvement in the conflict between the SFPD and the nightlife community say the cops – particularly hardasses like Commander James Dudley, who has often made comments critical of nightlife and its promoters — have long sought to have more power over nightclub, private parties, and the citizens who attend them.

But until there is a fair airing of and resolution to the trend of overzealous and belligerent enforcement actions by the SFPD, any move to give that agency more authority to kill the fun in San Francisco is likely to be met with heavy opposition.

 

UPDATE: David Chiu just got back to me, saying Newsom hadn’t consulted him before taking his stand and telling us, “I don’t agree that we need to abolish the commission.”

But as the supervisor from a sometimes-rowdy district that includes a couple of clubs where violence has occurred, Chiu does want to make some changes in how nightlife is governed in San Francisco, seeing a conflict between the Entertainment Commission’s role promoting nightlife and regulating it: “The Entertainment Commission has conflicting missions.”

Chiu said he would like to see nightclub permitting turned over to a body like the Interdepartmental Staff Committee on Traffic and Transportation (ISCOTT), which handles street closure permits and has representatives from several city agencies. It would exist alongside the Entertainment Commission, whose work Chiu said has become “overly politicized” in recent months.

At the same time, Chiu said, “I generally agree with” the Guardian’s coverage of the War of Fun, and said that he’s helped facilitate meetings with SFPD to deal with issues like the inappropriate police seizures of DJ’s laptops: “From my perspective, I want to make sure people’s civil rights aren’t being violated.”

But Chiu said the problem seems to lie more with the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control than the SFPD: “It appears the ABC has been inappropriately cracking down on the mainstream venues that are trying to do the right thing.”

Chiu said there isn’t a pressing need to act quickly on the Entertainment Commission issue and said that he would work with Leno on the solution, something Leno confirmed, telling us, “I have had some conversations with David Chiu and I’m going to get more involved.”

A very special piece of fan mail

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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7

The Guardian recently received a hostile letter in response to last week’s cover story, The New War on Fun, which spotlighted the aggressive tactics of two undercover officers at the center of a crackdown on San Francisco nightlife.

Unable to verify the author’s identity, we’ve withheld his name. As champions of free speech, however, we decided to give this writer an opportunity to share his opinion not just with the writers he seeks to attack, but a wider audience of readers, who undoubtedly also hold strong opinions. While this letter might amount to hot air from one individual whose opinion holds about as much sway as any internet troll creeping across the blogosphere, airing it can perhaps shed some light on the mindset of someone who would position progressive values — not to mention fun in San Francisco — squarely in the crosshairs. And it’s kind of funny, too.

The other thing is that the far right has touched off a great deal of discussion as of late, with its bizarro streak on full public display. Receiving a letter crammed with hate-filled speech while witnessing pockets of far-right extremists grab headlines, we thought it best not to ignore it, but to call attention to it.

Without further ado, here is the colorful opinion of one pissed-off Guardian reader, in mostly raw form. 

Dear MR Jones and MRS Bowe
I am writing to you about your story in the SF Bay Guardian Titled The New War On Fun. I think it is in bad taste the way you are putting down fine
officers like Larry Bertrand from the San Francisco police Dept And officer Michelle Ott from the Alcohol Beverage and Control these two officers are doing what they are paid to do and that is to protect the citizens of the city and County of San Francisco. And if they have to CRACK A FEW SKULLS OPEN TO DO IT SO BE IT. I wish this city had a few dozen more OFFICERS like Bertrand and OTTS. Then this city would be a much safer place to live. I mean if these promoters of theses events obey by the laws then everything would be fine but in my opinion these parties should not be allowed in the first place. For where ever A large Group of people gather and there is Booze present there bound to be trouble. and if these promoters are to STUPID to realize that then i say to bad for them if POLICE OFFICERS LIKE BERTRAND AND OTT HAVE TO BUST UP THE PARTY AND START DOING SOME HEAD BUTTING AND ARRESTING ALL THOSE INVOLVED all I can say to that is OH WELL MORE POWER TO THESE FINE EXAMPLES OF POLICE OFFICERS . Even if it means confiscating every piece of equipment there. And making a few arrest even better.

For I know that a lot of the people that attend these after hour events are MINORS and way under the legal drinking age. I know this for a fact for I have a good friend that use to be a bartender in one of these after hour clubs and he told me he has seen more teenagers in these clubs getting loaded to the gills. he told me that some of the other bartenders never asked to see there id’s they just took there money and gave them there drinks. My friend got reprimanded several times from the promoters of the event as well as his boss for asking for there ID’S. Look these places will let any one in if they just look older. OR they slip the Doorman a few bucks and he looks the other way. And all i can say about the Promoter’S AND THE OWNERS OF THE PLACES WHERE THESE PARTIES TAKE PLACE THEY SHOULD KNOW THAT FINE OUTSTANDING OFFICES LIKE LARRY BERTRAND AND MICHAEL OTT show up knowing there record for doing so is TOO BAD FOR THEM..

But on the other hand what can i expect from a LIBERAL YELLOW JOURNALISTIC RAG LIKE THE SF BAY GUARDIAN TO RUN A ONE SIDED PIECE OF TRASH STORY AND MAKING THE COPS LOOK LIKE THE BAD GUYS. AND MAKING THESE POOR PROMOTERS AND CLUB OWNERS AND PARTY GOER’S INNOCENT VICTIMS OF CIRCUMSTANCES. HELL THESE CLUB OWNERS ARE BREAKING THE LAW BY SELLING BOOZE TO UNDER AGE MINORS THEN THESE GUYS GET DRUNK AND THEN TRY TO DRIVE HOME WHERE SOME OF THESE IDIOTS BLOOD ALCOHOL IS WAY ABOVE THE LEGAL LIMIT. SO THEN THEY EITHER KILL SOME INNOCENT PERSON OR KILL THEM SELVES. AND ITS LIBERAL REPORTERS LIKE YOURSELVES AND THE BOARD OF STUPID-VISORS IN THIS CITY THAT AGREE TO THESE EVENTS.

If I were Mayor of this City I would call a press conference with every major news paper TV And Radio and make EXCELLENT EXAMPLES OF THESE TWO FINE OFFICERS. And to give them each a certificate of Merit and Valor in going beyond there call and line of duty. MR JONES AND MRS BOWE I bet you would be singing a different tune if someone you know and love got hurt or killed by someone who left one of these after hours events loaded with BOOZE and tried to drive home and got in to a wreck and killed themselves or killed or crippled an innocent person and that person could be someone you know. And then again knowing liberals like i do you might say oh-well they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I Emailed a copy of yourarticle To my Uncle who is a retired NY CITY Police OFFICER of 40 years. And he has several awards and medals for Valor and Bravery and for doing things beyond the CALL OF DUTY. He Said if these STUPID PROMOTERS tried that in HIS CITY not only would they be facing jail time and major fines. they might have a little accident on the way to the squad car and to the station-house. He did not say what kind of accident but knowing him it would be one they would not forget. For my uncle is also an ex UNITED STATES NAVY SEAL TRAINER. SO he knows how to inflect excruciating Paine on someone without leaving any signs of what happened. My Uncle hates these SOB’S who throw these types of parties for legal reasons and for personal reasons. and he got infuriated when he read your article. HE called your paper A PIECE of SHIT paper that he would not even let his bird CRAP ON.

but he said what do you expect from a STUPID CITY LIKE SAN FRANCISCO WHERE THE F—– PRACTICALLY RUN THE TOWN. AND WHERE MOST OF THE PEOPLE VOTED FOR THAT N—– OBAMA. AND THAT UGLY WITCH NANCY PELOSI. WELL IKE I SAID I HOPE THAT THESE
PROMOTERS AND CLUB OWNERS GET MORE THEN JUST A SLAP ON THE WRIST AND A FINE I SAY THAT THEY SHOULD BE TOSSED IN JAIL AND OR PRISON FOR WHAT THEY ARE DOING HOLDING THESE EVENTS AND LETTING MINORS IN TO THESE EVENTS AND LETTING THEM GET STONED. BUT THEN IF IT WERE NOT FOR LEFTIST MAGAZINES LIKE THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN THEY WOULD NOT GET ANY PUBLICITY AT ALL. AND IF THESE STUPID PROMOTERS AND CLUB OWNERS DON’T LIKE BEING FORCED TO OBEY THE LAW THEN LET THESE STINKING PROMOTERS AND CLUB OWNERS FACE THE FULL WRATH OF THE LAW . .

SO ALL I CAN SAY ABOUT YOUR ARTICLE IS IT IS A LEFT WINGED PIECE OF YELLOW JOURNALISM. THE SAME TYPE OF LEFT WINGED COMMUNISTIC PROPAGANDA THEY USE TO PUT OUT IN THE 60’S SO TAKE CARE YOU TWO PINKO COMMY AND TO YOUR LEFT WINGED COMMY PAPER YOU WRITE FOR. NO WOUNDER IT’S FREE NO ONE WOULD WANT TO BY IT. AND YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR YOUR PAPER BY LETTING SICK PROMOTERS OF PERVERTED PORNOGRAPHY ADVERTISE IN IT AND THESE SO CALLED DOPE DESPNCERIES WHO I THINK SHOULD BE ALL SHUT DONE PERMANENTLY AND THE PEOPLE WHO OWN THEM BE THROWN IN TO A MAXIMUM FEDERAL PRISON FOR AT LEAST 40 YEARS WITH NO CHANCE OF PAROLE.

SINCERELY,

[name withheld]

Lawsuit could expose SFPD-ABC collaboration

Sasha Cuttler
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43
Lawsuit could expose SFPD-ABC collaboration

Imminent legal actions against San Francisco, its Police Department, and the California Department of Alcohol Beverage Control could reveal whether a pair of undercover agents went rogue in harassing nightclubs and aggressively busting parties or whether they were acting at the direction of top officials.

Attorney Mark Webb – whose work on a racketeering lawsuit against the policing agencies was the subject of cover stories in the Guardian and the SF Weekly – told us that on Monday, he plans to file that racketeering claim against the city (which will then become a lawsuit if the city rejects it, as it routinely does) and a related lawsuit in Superior Court involving the rough, unnecessary arrest of bartender Javier Magallon and harassment of Mike Quan, owner of The Room, Playbar, and Mist. Narrated surveillance video associated with the case was posted on YouTube yesterday.

Central figures in the lawsuit are SFPD Officer Larry Bertrand and ABC agent Michelle Ott, plain-clothes partners in an aggressive crackdown on nightlife over the last year. Webb said he plans to immediately seek police records and communications and to depose Bertrand and Ott to try to determine who ordered the crackdown, why, and when higher-ups became aware of their aggressive tactics.

“I would like to know if Bertrand is being sent places or if he’s just a lone wolf, and the CADs will show that,” Webb said, referring to computer-assisted dispatch reports that track activities and communications involving individual officers. Those and other records that Webb can access through the court-ordered discovery process could finally shed light on what’s behind the crackdown.

Webb had sought to have Mayor Gavin Newsom mediate this dispute before the cases were filed, saying the racketeering lawsuit will be expensive and divisive, and all the nightlife community really wants is an end to the harassment and assurance that it wouldn’t restart once the media attention passes. And Webb did have conversations with top Newsom aide Mike Farrah and with Nicolas King, Newsom’s liaison to the SFPD, but neither indicated that Newsom was willing to get personally involved. Newsom spokesperson Tony Winnicker also told us Newsom preferred to let Police Chief George Gascon handle the matter.

So Webb said he now plans to move forward with litigation. “If they’re not answering the call at City Hall, let’s get into the arena,” Webb told us.

Webb is an experienced litigator who has won multi-million judgments and who started his career in New York City helping prosecute Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act cases against the mob, and now he plans to use RICO laws against what he says is a city-state enterprise to interfere with lawful nightlife activities in San Francisco.

“Webb gets it. It’s a weird mentality, the really good trial attorneys, and Webb is that,” said attorney Mark Rennie, who has spent decades working with the city’s entertainment industry and has helped advise Webb on the case.

Among the parties involved in the RICO claim are those involved in Webb’s other lawsuit against the city, as well as Club Caliente, its owner Maurice Salinas, Azul, its owner John Bauer, New York nightclub owners Phillipe Rieser and David Brinkley, Vessel, and Siobhan Hefferman, who was arrested by Bertrand and Ott at a private party. Others may be added soon.

Great American Music Hall, Slims, and DNA Lounge also claim to have been harassed by the ABC and have been involved in several meetings that led up to Webb’s lawsuit, but they’re not taking part in the lawsuit yet, partially because they fear retribution from the ABC.

“I probably would have jumped in, but I don’t want to walk into a hearing suing the ABC,” Slims and GAMH general manager Dawn Holliday told us, referring to Slims’ April 1 appeals hearing stemming from noise complaint citations triggered by one particularly cranky neighbor.

DNA Lounge, which has regularly documented the harassment campaign on its blog, decided to wait with the other two clubs before joining the suit. “We thought it was important to stand as a community and there were too many venues that were worried about retribution from the police or ABC if they joined the suit,” DNA general manager Barry Synoground told us. 

But Synoground said he’s anxious to see what Webb’s suit unearths, noting that Bertrand and Ott haven’t been visible in recent weeks as complaints against them went public, and saying he thinks Commander James Dudley and other top SFPD brass are really driving this crackdown: “We may have taken one of his tools off the street, but he’ll find another.”

Synoground said most SFPD officers are very professional and they have no problem working with them, but Bertrand and Ott have unnecessarily and aggressively interfered with their business. Holliday goes even further in praising the SFPD, saying she has a good relationship with Bertrand and everyone in Southern Station, blaming her clubs’ troubles on the ABC and the unwillingness of top city officials to stand up for them.

So the internal SFPD communications, and those between the city and the ABC, could prove revealing. “On April 17, I can send out subpoenas to the cops and I can take Bertrand’s deposition 30 days from Monday,” Webb said, citing statutory response periods.  

Webb expressed confidence in his case and said the police shakedowns and harassment fit well with the RICO statute, which has been used against a wide variety of enterprises over the years, including government agencies.

In fact, an American Bar Association book, “Civil RICO: A definitive guide,” by Gregory P. Joseph, seems to support Webb’s confidence. “Any person injured in his business or property by reason of a violation of Section 1962 of this chapter may sue therefore in any appropriate United States district court and shall recover threefold the damages he sustains and the costs of the suit, including reasonable attorney fees.’ This simple sentence has generated an avalanche of litigation,” the book begins.

It makes clear the intent of Congress that RICO laws “shall be liberally construed to effectuate the remedial purposes” of targeted individual seeking protection from harassment. A 1981 U.S. Supreme Court ruling (U.S. vs. Turkette) made clear even legitimate enterprises such as government agencies could be sued, and a 1994 ruling (NOW vs. Scheidler) settled a long dispute over whether the racketeering needed to be economically motivated, finding that it doesn’t.

Racketeering was defined by Congress as simply committing any of a long list of “predicate acts,” which include violence or the threat of violence, kidnapping (including false arrest), extortion, physical interference with business, malicious prosecution, and abuse of authority, all of which Webb says apply in his case. He is also reviewing the Guardian’s Death of Fun coverage from the last four years to find more examples of predicate acts involving the SFPD.

The hardest part of proving his case could be to show that it interfered with interstate commerce, although Webb said that’s met by efforts by Bertrand and Ott to prevent Rieser and Brinkley from transferring a liquor license from New York. But “Civil RICO” also said caselaw has established that “RICO requires no more than a slight effect upon interstate commerce,” citing the 1989 case U.S. vs. Doherty.

Like many who have had run-ins with Bertrand and Ott, Webb said he’s anxious to see what he finds in discovery: “What’s fascinating about this is you can uncover the whole system.”

A great sit-lie debate

Zelda Bronstein
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24
A great sit-lie debate

KPFA’s morning show had a great debate this morning around the sit-lie law, featuring Gabriel Haaland, a longtime Haight resident, and Ted Lowenberg, president of the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association. You can listen to it here.


In the discussion — nicely moderated by Brian Edwards-Tiekert — you could see the essential problem with the law emerging.


Haaland pointed out that blocking or obstructing the sidewalk is already illegal; so is aggressive panhandling, assault and all of the other behaviors Lowenberg complained about. Lowenberg’s response: Yes, that’s true, but it’s hard to arrest someone on those charges; you have to fill out paperwork. What we need is to give the police more discretion to use their judgment to make arrests when they think that’s what’s needed.


“The police need the immediate ability to respond without paperwork,” he said.


And that’s precisely what bothers a lot of us about this law.


The San Francisco police have a long history of abusing their “judgment” in cases involving marginalized populations. A lot of us don’t believe that arrests will be limited to violent bad actors — and we have many, many years of evidence to back us up.


Haaland pointed out that the last time a sit-lie law was enforced, in the 1970s when the cops wanted to crack down on the hippies on Haight Street, it wound up being used against gay men in the Castro. This time, it could be any of a wide range of people who wind up sitting on the sidewalks, for a lot of reasons.


Lowenberg kept talking about “street thugs” and complaining that the district attorney hasn’t prosecuted them when they’ve attacked people — in one case, gouging someone’s eyes and biting him. But attacking someone on the street is already illegal; does anyone really think that the D.A., and the law-enforcement model, will be any more effective with the new law in place?


It won’t — but that’s not the point. I think what Lowenberg and his allies want is to give the police more power, to let them “clean up the streets” as they see fit. It’s not about courts and prosecution; it’s about curbside justice. And that’s never worked well in San Francisco.


 

Sit, lie, stand and fight

Sasha Cuttler
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14
Sit, lie, stand and fight

A version of the following op-ed by Ben Rosenfeld ran in this week’s Guardian, edited for space reasons, and it’s generating quite a lively discussion here. He has asked us to post this extended dance mix of his piece, which offers more political context and gets into some of the issues raised in this weeks’ cover story, which is also generating heated debate. So here it is:

            This is a call out to creative, fun-loving San Franciscans: The mayor, the police chief, and their downtown cronies have declared war on our grassroots arts culture, and they are coming for your actual and conceptual space next. All that stands between the town you love and their vision of San Francisco as one big mercantile zone is a single vote progressive majority on the Board of Supervisors. But come November, they see the chance to take that away. The future they promise is already manifest in their many recent attacks on public and private gatherings, and their efforts to wrest the commons from the commoners.

            On Halloween 2009, the San Francisco Police, under their new chief, Los Angeles transplant George Gascón, shut down the Take Back Halloween Flashdance in front of the Ferry Building before DJ Amandeep “Deep” Jawa even arrived. Then they shut down several smaller street parties. (SFBG, 11/2/09) Their official reason—that organizers lacked permits—is what Bill Clinton famously termed an explanation, but not an excuse. The SFPD has a long history not only of tolerating unpermitted gatherings, but of re-routing traffic around and even escorting them. They are fully empowered to grant the equivalent of on-the-fly permits, a concept recognized in federal parks regulations. Applying for an actual permit is cumbersome, costly, anti-spontaneous, and reinforces the government’s view of itself as censor.

            Since Halloween, Chief Gascón’s force has been striking a mighty blow against crime by writing scores of open container citations to revelers in Dolores Park; fining or forcing the closure of SOMA clubs and bars for failing to conform to every fickle letter of the law; and sending undercover officers into warehouse and studio parties to bust them from within, sometimes violently, and without warrants. Their alpha party-crasher is a twitchy undercover cop named Larry Bertrand. He reportedly makes a habit of gratuitously attacking partygoers and vandalizing property, especially DJ equipment. One DJ wrote on a confidential email list: “I have been telling every DJ I know to run with their gear when your party gets busted [by Bertrand].” Not only has the chief failed to rein in Bertrand, but he wants to put a Taser in his hand, and in the hands of a rotten core of approximately 100 other officers whom the Chron found in 2006 are responsible for most citizen complaints, but whom the Department and this chief have systematically failed to discipline.

            Perhaps the most un-San Franciscan of all of Gascón’s initiatives is his demand for an anti-sit/lie ordinance, which would literally criminalize the very act of sitting or lying on certain public sidewalks at certain times. Never mind the fact that most violent crime is committed by people standing up and in striking range. Gascón appears to share the mayor’s philosophy that homelessness is just an aesthetic problem the rest of us should hose off our sidewalks. Not only is the idea just plain mean, it is anathema to San Francisco’s culture of compassion and broadmindedness, and its affirmative celebration of vibrant street culture. The danger is not that the police will arrest everyone who dares to take a load off or sit and sip a Snapple against the side of a building, but that they will enforce the law selectively according to their own purity tests, while robbing the rest of us of a diverse street scene that makes us all richer.

            To be sure, essential San Francisco has reasserted itself in the teeth of earlier culture wars, if in ever wealthier iterations. When Willie Brown stood in front of Critical Mass in 1997 and declared it illegal, riders blew by him like he was a grand prix flagman, and ridership surged from one or two thousand to five to seven thousand. What’s different this time are the demographics. San Francisco is richer than ever before, even at the height of the dot.com boom. Rents are through the roof. Everywhere, industrial warehouses and studios are drying up and concept industrial restaurants and bars are sprouting up. A new wave of young, hip residents has arrived seeking Dionysus, but they want no part of the political machinations under his robe. They are liberal, but they are not active. At least not yet. The mayor, the chief, and the norm core they serve are counting on our collective non-engagement. If we don’t band together—hipsters, activists, artists, and fun-loving folk all—we will watch the San Francisco we cherish slip away.

            On March 27, reclaim public space. Sit and lie on the public sidewalk. March and sing in the public street. Picnic on the pavement. Pop open a beer in Dolores Park. Do it without a permit. The Constitution is your permit. San Francisco’s heritage of artistic experimentation is your permit. Hell, the people telling you to get a permit flocked here because people like you marched around them in the first place and made this City a model of art and innovation for the world. Do it for them too. This is a defining moment. They are playing for keeps and so must we. Let’s bask in San Francisco’s ongoing heyday, not in quaint stories of the good times that used to be.

Harry Bridges: Working class hero

David Talbot
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0

He died 20 years ago this month, but I can still see him, a tall, wiry, gray-haired, hawk-nosed man. I can hear him.

I see him pacing restlessly back and forth behind the podium at union meetings, nervously twirling a gavel, puffing incessantly on a cigarette. I hear him calling on members, white, black, Asian, Latino, in the broad accent of his native Australia, actually encouraging debate and dissent.

He died in San Francisco at the age of 88 — Harry Bridges, co-founder and for 40 years president of one of the most influential organizations in this or any other country, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

Bridges often was irritating to the ILWU’s friends and foes alike. He was irascible and obstinate. But he was unquestionably one of the past century’s greatest leaders.

Bridges was not in it for money. His salary as union president was far less than he would have made had he remained a working longshoreman. Bridges was in it because of his unswerving belief in “the rank-and-file,” as he once told me, a naive and inquisitive young Chronicle reporter — “the working stiff, that’s who! Can you understand that?”

I understood, eventually. And though I and others sometimes harshly questioned Bridges’ specific notions of what was needed by working people, none could legitimately question his incredible commitment, skill and integrity.

“The basic thing about this lousy capitalist system,” Bridges declared, “is that the workers create the wealth, but those who own it, the rich, keep getting richer and the poor get poorer.”

Harry Bridges’ lifelong task, then, was to shift wealth from those who owned it to those who created it – a task he began in 1934, when he led his fellow longshoremen in a strike aimed at winning true collective bargaining rights from West Coast shipowners.

As Bridges’ biographer Charles Larrowe recalled, “The shipowners said ‘no,’ said it with tear gas vigilantes and billy clubs wielded by cops who thought they were in the front lines against a communist takeover. Up and down the coast, the waterfront was turned into a battlefield.”

Police bullets killed 10 men during the three-month-long strike that also prompted a four-day general strike in San Francisco. But the longshoremen ultimately got what they had demanded, most importantly, an end to the notorious system of job allocation known as the “shape-up. “

Previously, jobs were parceled out by hiring bosses in exchange for kickbacks from the longshoremen who lined up on the docks every morning clamoring for work. But after the strike, job assignments were made by an elected union dispatcher at a union-controlled hiring hall, using a rotation system that spread the work evenly among longshoremen. The victory was downright revolutionary, and had a profound impact on workers and employers nationwide.

Within two years, Bridges joined with Lou Goldblatt, the brilliant young leader of the warehousemen who worked closely with longshoremen on the docks. They brought the two groups together into a single powerful union. the ILWU, under the banner of the newly established Congress of Industrial Organizations — the CIO.

The union ultimately extended its jurisdiction to virtually all waterfront workers on the Pacific coasts of the United States and Canada and to workers in a wide variety of occupations in Hawaii.

Bridges and Goldblatt used their potent base to help lead drives by other CIO unions that spread unionization from the waterfront to many other industries throughout the West at a time when employers treated workers as chattel, giving them little choice but to accept near-starvation wages and whatever else the employers demanded.

For the ILWU, Bridges and Goldblatt drafted a union constitution that still is unique in the control it grants members. Many union constitutions give members very little beyond the right of paying dues in exchange for the services provided them by the union’s securely entrenched bureaucrats. But the ILWU constitution guarantees that nothing of importance can be done without direct vote of the rank-and-file.

No one can take ILWU office except through a vote of the entire membership; no agreement with employers can be approved except by a vote of all members; the union cannot take a position on anything without membership approval.

The ILWU helped set important precedents that enhanced the civil liberties of everyone through its strong opposition to those who tried to deny constitutional rights to Bridges and others by labeling them Communists. The union’s efforts included an eight-year-battle against attempts to deport Bridges to Australia that ended with a Supreme Court ruling that enabled him to become a U.S. citizen in 1945.

The ILWU under Bridges was an outspoken foe of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, even at a time when most other unions enthusiastically supported involvement. And members backed their opposition to oppressive regimes abroad by refusing to handle cargo bound for or coming from their countries.

Thanks in large part to Bridges, the ILWU also was one of the first unions to be thoroughly integrated racially, and otherwise has always been probably the country’s most socially conscious union. And its members, now including women, have long been among the most highly compensated workers in any field, while at the same time benefitting from labor-saving equipment that makes their work easier. The new equipment and methods on the docks have brought employers higher profits, which union negotiators have made certain they share with dock workers.
The ILWU used its employer-provided pension funds to finance construction of low-rent apartments in San Francisco’s St. Francis Square, an extremely rare example of what the union calls “cooperative, affordable, integrated working-class housing.”

Harry Bridges led the way to that and much more which benefited the working stiffs to whom he devoted his life — and many, many others. As a newspaper that once reviled him as a dangerous radical said on his death, “He sought the best of all possible worlds. This one is much better due to his efforts.” Boy, is it.

Dick Meister, formerly 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.

Can Newsom save SF parties?

Sasha Cuttler
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11
Can Newsom save SF parties?

Why won’t Mayor Gavin Newsom save San Francisco’s nightlife and culture? That question was raised toward the end of this week’s cover story on party-crashing cops, but it’s worth highlighting here because Newsom seem uniquely suited to the task of mediating this damaging dispute.

Newsom owned a restaurant and bar before being elected mayor with the strong support of the San Francisco Police Officers Association. The business community is one of his key constituencies, and he constantly talking about the need to promote tourism, which relies on our cultural vitality. He’s the most natural, logical bridge for this divide.

That’s why attorney Mark Webb, who represents several clubs and individuals who have been harassed by SFPD Officer Larry Bertrand, has explicitly been calling for Newsom to get involved.

“I really believe his involvement could help us get to a place of calm,” Webb said. “We have to stop this petty infighting and we have to embrace the cause, which is to make San Francisco’s nightlife an inviting environment.”

DNA Lounge, which is not part of Webb’s lawsuit but has been fighting against harassment by Bertrand and the ABC, also wants to see Newsom broker some peace talks. 

“Absolutely, Gavin certainly has the juice to deal with this problem and we would welcome his involvement,” DNA general manager Barry Synoground told us. “We don’t know why there is such vehemence against nightlife and entertainment…What kills me is we have a large group of responsible purveyors, but we’re not being treated as such. We’re being treated like criminals.”

But Newsom has resisted the call, with his press secretary Tony Winnicker telling us, “I wouldn’t rule it out, but the mayor has department heads for that reason,” saying he preferred for Police Chief George Gascon to tell with it. But the problem is this isn’t a police issue, it’s a political one.

DNA Lounge (which has reguarly blogged the crackdown) has highlighted how SFPD Commander James Dudley sees nightlife in the city: as a nuisance to be abated, rather than an important culture to be embraced and celebrated. Winnicker claims that Newsom understands this: “The mayor understands the importance of a vibrant nightlife.”

But that understanding hasn’t translated into official city policy. Attorney Mark Rennie, who handles permitting and compliance issues for about 40 nightlife and culture clients, said that San Francisco has become notorious for making life difficult for club owners and other purveyors of fun. 

“The city has always had this love-hate relationship with nightclubs. But it’s really bad now,” Rennie said, noting how welcoming other local cities are toward nightclubs, which are important economic drivers. “Berkeley gets it. Oakland gets it. I don’t know why San Francisco doesn’t get it.”

Which is strange because, of all people, Newsom should get it. He should understand the natural tension between certain elements of both the police and nightlife communities and, valuing them both, try to find a way to solve this problem. So whatdaya say, Gavin? After you’re done try to clean up the mess you created with the labor unions, how about stepping in to address a problem that is closer to your sweet spot?

 

Image by Luke Thomas/Fog City Journal

John Ross: The damaged spine of America

Zelda Bronstein
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2
John Ross: The damaged spine of America

 

I am on a low-rent book tour with my new cult classic El Monstruo – Dread & Redemption In Mexico City.  For the next three months, I will stumble across this land from sea to stinking sea probing the underbelly of Obama’s America.  The findings will be posted on these pages.


LAS CRUCES N.M. — The snow was already dusting the Organ Mountains fringing this high desert town, promising a hard winter further up the spine of Obama’s America. I ride the Mexican bus (officially doing business as the El Paso-L.A, Limousine Express) when I ply the back roads of the southwest. Greyhound, with its stern rules and regulations and surly drivers who threaten their cargos with summary expulsion for minor infractions, doesn’t much inspire me these days.  

 


With notable exceptions, Greyhound passengers are a harried and haunted bunch, riding the Big Dog from trouble to trouble, often with all their possessions stuffed into plastic garbage bags. In the cruelest of gestures, the Greyhound management has recently banned garbage bags as an instrument of luggage.  Zombie passengers on the Big Dog stare out at the distant horizon submerged in their worries or stab music into their ears to sever all human communication. No one talks to their fellow travelers anymore.

By way of contrast, the Mexican bus bubbles with chatter.  “Platicame!” (“Talk to me!”) my seatmates insist. The chitchat often gravitates towards work — where they have recently toiled, the job towards which they are headed. Wistful nostalgia for their families and pueblos down in Mexico are common ground. Rancheros belch from the speakers and the taste of tamales flavors the ride. It feels like going home.

Bus rides are an opportunity to reinvent oneself. I am usually the only gabacho on these long hauls through the rugged mountains and barren deserts of the southwest, but I speak colloquial, unaccented Mexican and who I really am excites curiosities. These days, my kuffiyah wrapped around my scrawny neck, I pass myself as an Arab from Mexico City hawking books from tank town to tank town, a plausible story — back home, Arabs are often stereotyped as itinerant peddlers.

North of Las Cruces, the Mexican bus is pulled into a Migra shed and the conversation modulates real quick. A blonde woman agent jumps on board and demands to see everyone’s documents. She studies the passports and green cards under the glare of her flashlight and then shines it into the eyes of the passengers to see who will blink first. One young man — he looks like a university student – is pulled off the bus and is never seen again. When the Mexican bus slides out of the shed, the chatter resumes — but with one less voice in the mix.

Clayton, a young Wobbly who used to run a bookshop down by the rail yards in Albuquerque that was mostly frequented by hobos looking for a little warmth in a cold winter world, is now teaching at a troubled middle school. Patrol cars are often parked out front and half the kids – 99.99% of who are “Hispanics” (read Mexicans) – have juvenile police records. Clayton asks me in to talk to the students, who have never seen a real author in the flesh.  

We hunker down in the library and I step into my Grandpa persona and tell tales of the Mexican revolution while Clayton projects portraits of the Great Zapata and Pancho Villa on the audio-visual screen. I recount how the two men met in a rural schoolhouse in Xochimilco, now a borough of Mexico City, in December 1914. For an hour the two sat in frozen silence until Zapata, unable to contain his bitterness, declares that Carranza, their rival, is “un hijo de puta!” The kids fall off their little library chairs in gales of Mexican mirth. Clayton frets for his job but the librarian apparently doesn’t understand Spanish.  

I show the kids my books. Helen, a boisterous tweener, grabs “Iraqigirl” from Clayton’s hand and announces she is taking it home. The next day, she returns it with a review: “this is the best book I have ever read.” Two boys sit at the round reading table with copies of “El Monstruo — Dread & Redemption In Mexico City” and “Murdered by Capitalism — 150 Years of Life & Death on the American Left” spread before them. They pour over the subversive pages all through the lunch hour. When we prompt them that we have to leave, they hide the books under their hoodies.

 “I don’t have it — check me out!” Salvador (not his real name) challenges. The librarian rushes over and promises the boys that she has just ordered the books on line for them. They will be here Monday morning.  “But this is only Thursday,” protests Manuel (not his real name.)  

Garfield middle school is the best stop so far on this monstrous book tour.

Attendance at public events in Albuquerque is sparse. A vegan spread at the Catholic Worker House drums up a dozen hungry souls, a presentation of “Iraqigirl” at the Peace & Justice Center eight, including an Iraqi woman who leaves early. I show “Corazon del Tiempo” (“Heart of Time”), the new Zapatista movie (it was previewed at Sundance) in a small room at the university – Weather veterano Mark Rudd and the remarkable investigator Nelson Valdez and a handful of starry-eyed students (“Corazon” is a love story) show up.  

 

I sorely miss my old pal Tilda Sosaya who fought doggedly for prisoners’ rights in the nearly wholly privatized New Mexico prison system for decades after her son was imprisoned for ten years for some dumb teenage caper. Last March, I wrote Tilda that I had been diagnosed with liver cancer and she wrote back that she had it too. The cancer took her quickly and now she is gone and her son is back in prison. We fight for justice but life in this lane is not very just.

I catch the day train up to Santa Fe to visit with the writer Chellis Glendinning. Chellis has lived for the past 18 years on a tiny plot in Chimayo, the land of miraculous dirt and a key distribution point for black tar heroin from Sinaloa and Nayarit — see her “Chiva – How One New Mexican Town Took On The Global Heroin Trade.” Now she is pulling up stakes and throwing in with Evo Morales. Her jeep flies a Bolivian flag and she is rushing to be in Cochabamba for the tenth anniversary of the landmark struggle against the privatization of that city’s water supply by the Bechtel Corporation. Adios companera — la lucha sigue y sigue y sigue!

I am back on the Mexican bus heading towards Denver. The riders get off at whistlestops like Las Vegas and Durango and Colorado Springs where they will do the dirty work of this country — walloping pots, washing cars, cleaning motel rooms, milking cows, shoveling their manure, keeping Obama’s America spic and span for the next paying customer at minimum wages if indeed they are not cheated out of them by unscrupulous contractors.  

When the guy across the aisle gets curious, I revive my new identity as an Arab peddler. “Donde esta tu mujer?” he asks (“Where is your wife?”) and I lie that she is in Iraq taking care of her people. “The Yanquis invaded her country and bombed her neighborhood…”  “Pobre gente,” he sympathizes.  Santiago (is that his real name?) is from Hidalgo de Parral, Chihuahua and says he is on his way to work the Colorado ski resorts where so many Mexicans slave for Senor Charlie these days. He knows all about exile.  

I am invited to deliver a pair of lectures at Denver University, Condoleezza Rice’s alma mater (her father was provost.)  Doug Vaughn, also a DU grad who went left at an early age, notices that I will be speaking at the same time as Cindy Courville, Condi’s roommate who followed her to the National Security Council and then became U.S. emissary to the African Union.

My talks are programmed for the Josef Korbel Center for International Studies. Josef Korbel was Madeline Albright’s father, to give you some assessment of my chances of winning converts here. Indeed, the students are polite and well-groomed, models of future CIA assets — in tracking down the announcement of Courville’s talk on a Korbel Center bulletin board, Doug encounters a CIA recruitment leaflet. The grad students have been forewarned they will be visited by a representative of the lunatic fringe and busy themselves with their e-mail under the pretext of taking notes.  

Academic acrimony flourishes in the Denver- Boulder axis.  Everywhere else in this land where my father croaked, the trials and tribulations of Ward Churchill and his ill-timed assault on the “little Eichmans” deconstructed in the Twin Towers conflagration went out with the fish wrap the next morning — but here in mile-high city, mention of Ward and Colorado AIM can still start a prairie fire. Although such Churchill accusers as the governor and the Colorado U president have long since resigned due, in fact, to other scandals after successfully silencing Ward, his detractors’ thirst for blood remains unsatiated.

Infused with the venom of the dearly departed Bellencourts (who Churchill once dissed as “Nebraska wigmakers”), Ernesto B. Vigil, author of an action-packed bio of Corky Gonzalez, the Denver-based Xicano founder of the Nation of Aztlan, is still brandishing the long knives. Ward Churchill is a fake Indian, Ernesto obsesses, a white guy whose claim to indigenousness is backed up by white people because white people only listen to white people.  White people think they know everything, he scoffs in a heated e-mail in which he disparages my whiteness a dozen times in as many lines.

Actually, I don’t give a rat’s ass if Ward Churchill is one/sixteenth Cherokee or not (the tribal government recently expelled all its black members) — Churchill remains the most lucid writer on American genocide in this benighted country.

Boulder is said to be the most over-regulated city in North America although white liberal enclaves like Madison Wisconsin and Arcata California could give Boulder a run for its money.  I accompany Joe Richey, a local alternative radio sleuth, to the Boulder dog pound to bail out his black lab “Yanqui” (as in “Yanqui! Go home!) “Yanqui” has been adjudged guilty of illicit dog-like behavior i.e. nuzzling a neighborhood garbage can.  

After Joe pays off the authorities and the mutt is released to his custody and properly admonished, we drive past a local dog park.  In a paroxysm of charitable intent, the Boulder City Council permits the homeless to encamp at night amidst the dog turds but they must be gone by daybreak when the pooches of the city’s housed residents take possession or risk a $100 fine. How the homeless, forced to bed down in dog shit nightly, can afford this astronomical sum is unclear. Such is what passes for compassion on the underbelly of Obama’s Amerikkka.

 

On my final day in Denver, Hank Lamport, a local schoolteacher who favorably reviewed “El Monstruo” for the Post, today the only daily in this formerly two-newspaper town, drives me out to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Rehabilitation Area. Until a few years ago, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal manufactured and stored deadly nerve gas, chiefly Serin — an occasional lost canister still spooks the wildlife.  The displays at the Visitors’ Center feature photos of workers filling “Honest John” missiles with the stuff. Napalm was also cooked up here. I study the glazed eyes of taxidermied foxes and coyotes and bald eagles and hastily bid adieu.

On the way out of town, we stop to worship the victuals in an Aurora, Colorado taco shop. Hank laments that when he first became a devotee of “Tacos y Salsas,” the clientele, uniformly Mexicanos, would greet him with a “buen provecho” (“good appetite” — a universal courtesy in the Spanish-speaking world) but now the customers have become so gringo-ized that the salutation is a lost art. Nonetheless, when we polish off our orders and head for the door, two working stiffs at the next table wish us each “buen provecho.”
  
It warms the cockles of my contused heart to know that such cultural resistance still percolates out here on the damaged spine of Obamalandia.

Next stop: the frozen, melancholy flatlands of the Great Midwest.  

John Ross and “El Monstruo – Dread & Redemption in Mexico City” (“gritty and pulsating” – NY Post) will be visiting Traverse City and Grand Rapids Michigan in the final week of March. You can catch them at the Headland Café in Chicago’s Rogers Park March 31st, Toronto’s Hoggtown April 1st-4th, and St. Louis Mo. April 7th.  

 

 

 

Viva, chicas

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Viva, chicas

SUPER EGO Your kiki, cross-eyed club correspondent just returned, ass-tanned and full of mescal, from Mexico D.F. You’d think with all the lithe, young emo Altinos running around the bright and trash-strewn apocalyptic neighborhoods, their anime hair-spikes poking through the eye-level smog, there’d be a hopping alternaqueer club scene. But no — although Marrakech mixed in some thrashy Mexi-core with retro-electro hits and Tom’s Leather Bar (no leather, but lots of opera and a surprise Dutch blowjob — don’t ask) served up bored go-gos so over it they surely must have been parodying the concept of bored go-gos. Tal vez no pensaron en esto. And El Viena brought some boot-kicking banda, bringing to mind our own outstanding La Bota Loca party, Saturdays at Oakland’s Club 21 (www.club21oakland.com).

Otherwise, it was wall-to-wall Gaga. I blame NAFTA. Still, the drag saved it. The regal, bodystockinged reinas of Butterflies had me choking on my free peanuts, singing along to Celia Cruz, and the heartfelt, ramshackle performances at Oasis floated on a sea of waved white hankies and tossed carnations. But the most magical moment happened at Club 33. Mexico City nightlife is in turmoil at the moment — a recent spate of violence has forced bars to close earlier than usual. So, at precisely 2 a.m., to avoid police attention, we were locked inside the tiny, dark, hipster-strewn 33, speakeasy-like, while a dead-on drag impersonation of ranchera legend Paquita La Del Barrio (who recently said she’d rather see a child die than be adopted by a gay couple, que?) crooned us into ethereal swoons beneath a dinky mirrorball. D.F. I love you.

 

SWEDISH INVASION

OK, I’m officially weirded out that Swedes are everywhere again. But hey, if they can Nordic-track the hip and the hop like rhymesters Looptroop, Adam Tensta, and Timbuktu and Chords then I’m all blue-eyed with it. They’ll be showing off the multicultural side of state socialism, with hyper-eclectic styles and jokester flair.

Thu/25, 9 p.m., $10. Club Six, 66 Sixth St., SF. www.clubsix1.com

 

THE NEW 7TH HEAVEN ROLLER DISCO

Rollerskating parties — CELLSpace’s Black Rock Roller Disco and Mighty’s Roller Disco have tackled them, nightlife-wise, to insanely popular and hilariously hip-bruising effect. Now Mezzanine tosses its sequined fedora in the rink, with glittering DJs Conor, Chris Orr, BT Magnum, and Jordan. Crack that whip.

Thu/25, 9 p.m., $5 entry/$5 skate rental. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

 

MOSSMOSS

Local quality techno whiz Alland Byallo’s Nightlight Music label (www.nightlight-music.com) has been hosting a primo monthly throwdown every fourth Friday at 222 Hyde, and the goodies keep coming — this month features a two-hour set by local blorpy stabber Mossmoss, whose playful glitches always pep my roll.

Fri/26, 10 p.m., $5. 222 Hyde, SF. www.222hyde.com

 

PRINCE LANGUAGE

If you missed DJ Greg Wilson at Triple Crown last week, I weep for you. The tasty, spooky rare funk, disco, global, soul, and New Wave re-edit wave keeps rolling over us, however. New York hottie Prince Language keeps it tight, chopped, and almost familiar — from Sharon Redd to the Rapture, Ahmed Fakroun to the Droyds.

Fri/26, 10 p.m., $8. SOM, 2925 16th St., SF. www.som-bar.com

 

TRANNYSHACK DAVID BOWIE TRIBUTE

Yes, we may have seen it all from the Trannyshackers — but trash drag can never really jump the Trannyshark. It’s foolproof! One of the club’s bloody jewels in its crown of regular tribute nights is this stardust fete, featuring, like, 40 queens and DJ Omar. (Watch for my favorite thin white drag, Kiddie.)

Fri/26, 10 p.m., $12. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.dnalounge.com

 

OTTER POPS

Gays: they are animals. Yet they’re so full of benefits. Combine your love of skinny, hairy queers with your yearning for philanthropy at this fuzzy shindig. Lightly furred cuties take the stage for a “Hot Otter Contest” (hopefully manscape-free), while $10 beer bust proceeds go to benefit the Marine Mammal Center. DJ Bus Station John helps you lick down to the stick. Purposes for porpoises? Positively.

March 27, 9 p.m., free. Lone Star Saloon, 1354 Harrison, SF. www.lonestarsaloon.com

 

STARGATE

If you haven’t checked out Temple’s sci-fi warper “Stargate-Portal Room” designed by artist Xavi, then this hyperdimensional celebration is calling out to you across the galaxy. Get alien with tech-breaks, acid crunk psych-heroes an-ten-nae, Deru, Lotus Drops, Phalanx, Drag’nfly, and dozens others.

March 28, 10 p.m., $5. Temple, 540 Howard, SF. www.templesf.com

Street view

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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37
Street view

By Skyler Swezy

news@sfbg.com

The Haight-Ashbury is out-of-control, according to some recent news reports and testimony by cops and other backers of the proposed sit-lie ordinance. They report street toughs brazenly smoking crack, blocking sidewalks, spitting on babies, and intimidating citizens with pit bulls.

As this story goes, dangerous thugs have replaced harmless beggars. They’ve gone from annoying to menacing, a change police say they’re helpless to address without legislation banning sitting or lying on sidewalks, which Mayor Gavin Newsom and Police Chief George Gascón introduced March 1.

Proponents and opponents have attended City Hall meetings and voiced their arguments in the media. The police, homeless rights advocates, Haight Street business owners, residents, Newsom, and columnists have spoken their piece. But what do the street kids, who haven’t been heard from in this debate, have to say for themselves?

So on March 19, I spent the day walking the Haight to get the perspective from the street, asking kids what they think is going on?

It’s 3 p.m. and I’m standing on the southwest corner of Central and Haight streets next to a Bob Marley mural painted on the side of a liquor store. A cop car cruises by. With no thugs or panhandlers in sight, I head toward Golden Gate Park along the south side of the street.

On the corner of Masonic and Haight, there are some well-kept teens perched against the wall of X-Generation. Clutching shopping bags, they are not panhandlers, but they sit on the ground because Haight Street doesn’t have benches, except for one on Stanyan facing the park.

These kids clearly aren’t the targets of this ordinance, so I move on to the notorious Haight-Asbury intersection, which is also devoid of vagabonds. An old woman and young boy, both well-dressed, squat in front of Haight Asbury Vintage, watching shoppers pass by.

Almost at the end of the block, outside a closed storefront, a scruffy young man is perched on a back pack holding a battered piece of cardboard that reads “SMILES/HAVE A NICE DAY!? OR NIGHT.”

“You have a beautiful smile,” he croons to passersby. Most stare straight ahead, some smile without making eye contact; a woman in her 30s asks to take his picture. Jay is 18, has a scarce beard and crust in the corners of his sleepy pale blue eyes. He is from Ohio and says he has been bumming on Haight and sleeping in the park for about three months. He hitchhiked to San Francisco because his sister is “a back-stabbing crack head, so I left.”

He doesn’t think panhandling has become more aggressive recently, but that business owners “just want to be asses.” He’s not much of a talker and more interested in smiles, so I leave Jay to his work.

On the next block I meet Kevin Geoppo, 31, cupping a handful of coinage, sitting on the window ledge of a storefront under renovation. Kevin says he’s a heroin addict who grew up in Orlando, Fla., and made his way to San Francisco years ago. He’s obtained an SRO and primary care doctor, but can’t get a job.

He sees both sides of the sit/lie law debate. “Those who sit and lie do cause a lot trouble, stir up energy that isn’t needed to [hurt] tourism, and [threaten] violence, so I can understand why this is being talked about,” he says.

At the same time, he is wary of how the police would use the law and at whom it would be directed. He doesn’t think things are getting worse, but he says the panhandling and menacing attitudes of some kids ebb and flow as different groups pass through the city.

“A lot of these yuppie, rich, bureaucrat people are trying to clean up everything because if you take a left or a right anywhere off Haight Street, it’s rich people living in those houses,” he says. I let him get back to business and proceed down the street.

I decide to drop into Aub Zam Zam cocktail lounge for a veteran bartender’s opinion. Owner Bob Harpe is behind the horseshoe bar, slicing limes and chatting with long-time Haight resident Paul Zmudzinski.

Harpe doesn’t have problems with aggressive or congregating street kids. “If you ask them to move and treat them with a general level of respect, they go on their way.”

He believes the rising number of homeowners in the neighborhood and businesses catering to a more affluent clientele are behind the recent uproar. “The rents on Haight Street have escalated dramatically, so boutique owners have to pump up their prices. Then you get more affluent shoppers who are turned off by the skuzzy-looking street kids coming through,” Harpe says. “The whole thing is kind of disgusting.”

Back outside, I head to the next block and come across Kasper who is “flying a sign” that reads “SEX!!! NOW THAT I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION, SPARE ANY $$$?”

He is a 33-year-old traveler who just landed back on Haight, having spent the last three weeks in Berkeley. He’s headed north to a 420 Rainbow gathering and then to Idaho for work. With combat boots, Army pants, and a neck tattoo, he’s a tough-looking guy with a soft-spoken voice.

“They don’t understand all the money they’ll lose. We panhandle money in the street and then spend it in the stores here,” Kasper says. “Those liquor stores rely on street people.”

He says many tourists come to the Haight to see people playing guitars, banging drums, and selling their hemp trinkets. And when it comes to instances of violence or aggressiveness, those are limited to a few of the community and could happen anywhere, regardless of a sit-lie law.

“These things are heavy,” he says nodding to his backpack. “To have to stand, hold your straps, and fly a sign to get something to eat is just ridiculous.”

McDonalds is the last establishment before Golden Gate Park, which serves as a three-mile squatter haven stretching to the Pacific Ocean. Beneath the golden arches, three guys are singing an improvised McDonalds song, but two busted guitar strings kills their burger ballad hustle.

The three agree to an interview and form a semicircle on the sidewalk. Stoney, 19, the guitar player, is wearing sunglasses, a backwards cap, and is heavily scarred on his arms and neck. “Are you against weed?” he asks, before hitting a pipe carved from a deer antler.

Angelo, 23, is a self-dubbed vagabond originally from Virginia. He just got out of jail for selling weed to a cop in the Tenderloin. Nick, 18, wears a mighty Afro and says almost nothing.

Two bike cops zip up and tell us to move it. “You’re blocking the sidewalk,” one cop says. Everyone stands up. “It’s not illegal yet, dude!” Stoney yells back toward the cops as we cross Stanyan to enter the park.

Stoney and Angelo agree with each other that lawmakers are focusing on the bad actions of a few to push all street kids off Haight. “We have the right to use the sidewalk just like anyone else,” Angelo says. “It’s crazy, man. We’re all just fuckin’ a bunch of cells put together, floating around a ball of fire in space.”

The sit-lie ordinance could be considered by the Board of Supervisors next month. For details on a March 27 citywide protest of the measure, visit www.standagainstsitlie.org.

The new War on Fun

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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46
The new War on Fun

news@sfbg.com

For several years, the Guardian has been running regular stories chronicling what we’ve dubbed the Death of Fun, a trend of official crackdowns and shakedowns on people who throw parties and festivals in San Francisco. In the last year, that trend has started to morph into an often brutal War on Fun, with a growing list of atrocities and casualties associated with this overzealous new approach to killing the city’s entertainment industry.

Why this is happening is baffling to those most affected: nightclub owners and workers, party promoters, DJs and VJs, fundraising activists, and people just out to have a good time without being harassed by a cop. But in recent months, we’ve learned much more about what’s happening and who the main perpetrators are.

Two undercover enforcers have been at the center of just about every recent case of nightclubs or private parties being raided without warrants and aggressively shut down, their patrons roughed up (see “Fun under siege,” 4/21/09) and their money, booze, and equipment punitively seized “as evidence” (see “Police seize DJs laptops,” 11/24/09) even though few of these raids result in charges being filed in court.

Officer Larry Bertrand of the San Francisco Police Department’s Southern Station and Michelle Ott, an agent with the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, are plainclothes partners who spend their weekends undercover, crashing parties, harassing disfavored nightclubs, brutalizing party-goers, and trying to send the unmistakable message that they’re in charge of San Francisco nightlife. Neither responded to our interview requests.

Isolated incidents of intolerant cops and NIMBY citizens who repeatedly complain about certain clubs or festivals has been a problem for years (see “Death of fun,” 5/24/06 and “Death of fun, the sequel,” 4/24/07). Top city officials have opted to cancel events such as Halloween in the Castro District rather than try to manage them better, and the nightlife community has tried to organize in defense of its interests (see “Fighting for the right to party,” 7/1/08) with mixed results.

But the personal War of Fun by Bertrand and Ott seems to have galvanized and united the nightlife and festival community like never before, leading to the creation of a new California Music and Culture Association and prompting threats of a federal lawsuit alleging the ABC-SFPD collaboration is a racketeering scheme designed to harass, disrupt, and extort people engaged in otherwise lawful activity.

The myriad horror stories associated with Bertrand and Ott have also finally begun to draw attention from the Mayor’s Office, which has quietly pushed the SFPD to rein in Bertrand and change its policies on raiding parties and seizing property. State Sen. Mark Leno also has gotten involved, brokering a March 12 meeting between club owners and Steve Hardy, director of ABC (which, in addition to cracking down on nightclubs — see “Busting bars,” 6/23/09 — has recently announced a campaign against fruit-infused liquor).

“They were going to see how they could unwind this a bit,” Leno told us, adding that he was “infuriated” by stories of abusive treatment of the public. “The fear that it spreads through the community is unacceptable.”

The question now is what Hardy, Mayor Gavin Newsom, and Police Chief George Gascón — who has ordered some crackdowns and wants greater authority to discipline problem officers — is going to do about it.

 

CHAOS AT A STUDENT PARTY

It was after midnight on Jan. 31 when Krystal Peak, a journalist with San Francisco State University’s Golden Gate Xpress, received a call from her managing editor. There was a commotion and a swarm of police cars outside a student party at Seventh and Minna streets near her home, and she was asked to investigate.

She came upon the aftermath of a melee between police and partygoers that had taken place after a fundraising event at a SoMa warehouse art space was upended. The benefit was organized to raise legal funds for students who staged a building occupation at the University of California at Berkeley, in defiance of budget cuts.

The event was clearly chaotic, and it’s hard to sort out exactly what happened and when. City officials say the partiers were throwing bottles and firecrackers at the police; people at the event say the cops started it all.

But the tales partygoers tell about the behavior of Bertrand and Ott, the undercover enforcers, are similar to a series of other stories involving the pair, stories published in the Guardian and elsewhere.

There had been multiple arrests by the time Peak arrived on the scene. Numerous witnesses asserted that things were going along without incident until a fire marshal arrived in response to a complaint, and in short order, two officers who’d been there in plainclothes for hours — Bertrand and Ott — began shouting, tackling people, and kicking in doors.

Police Chief George Gascón acknowledged that the department has been targeting underground parties. “We get a lot of resident complaints about it,” he said in a recent Guardian interview. “We’re talking about a lot of the underground parties, or the parties where the promoters are exceeding their authorities to a number of people.”

Several hundred attended this particular party. Of the 11 people arrested, eight were either detained or cited and released. None faced underage drinking or drug charges. At least five were charged with resisting arrest. One individual was charged with vandalism, two were charged with battery on an officer, and two detained for being drunk in public.

Peak began photographing the scene: busted-up chairs, uniformed officers guarding the entrance, police cars everywhere. She zoomed her lens to capture the wreckage inside. None of the uniformed officers seemed to have a problem with her — but when she spotted the undercover officers with exposed badges, that changed.

The cops broke through the door, yelling. “They said, ‘This is an investigation, you’re not allowed to be here.'<0x2009> she said. “We told them we were with the press.” They threatened to arrest her.

Shortly after, the plainclothes officers crossed in front of her to an unmarked car. She took another picture. Bertrand, a tall guy with a shaved head, allegedly turned and grabbed her arm, and both officers shouted at her. “[Ott] said to me, ‘Your flash has impeded my investigation,'” Peak recounted. She was cuffed and arrested on the spot, and her camera was confiscated.

She was cited for obstruction of justice, but the charges were dropped. And she got her camera back — but says the SD memory card, where all the photos were stored — was missing.

“I flipped [the camera] open … and found the SD card was missing,” she said. She asked Bertrand where it was. “He said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,'” Peak recalled. Bertrand, she recalled, then looked around at a group of officers watching the exchange, and announced, “This woman is refusing to leave. I’m going to have to re-arrest her.” Ott appeared, according to Peak, and insisted that there was no evidence the memory card had been in the camera in the first place.

“My camera will not ignite a flash unless there’s a memory card in there,” Peak explained. In the end, she left empty-handed — without photos of the undercover officers.

 

BUSTING DOORS

Earlier, when the party was in full swing, a 24-year-old California State University, Fullerton student visiting from Los Angeles says when the fire marshal entered, Bertrand flashed his badge, yelling at everybody to get out. “It was really aggressive from the get-go,” said the Fullerton student, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he had a pending legal case. “It’s very hard for me to describe the intensity to which this guy was busting down doors.”

Later, the young man from L.A. said, he was following people who left in a rush, and ran to catch up. “Shortly after, I felt a blow to the back right of my head,” he said. “My glasses flew off, and I was tackled to the ground. My forehead was being pushed straight into the ground and they were holding my hair. I kept repeating … please, I can’t see — I’m legally blind. I thought three or four officers were on top of me, and they were saying, ‘Fuck you, you little anarchist punk.'<0x2009>”

That’s when he said he felt a sensation like “a bunch of really intense bee stings on my left side, just above my hipbone.” He thought he was Tasered — and photos he showed us depict a skin burn. SFPD officers are not authorized to carry Tasers.

“It sounds like a stun gun, not a Taser gun,” Ken Cooper, a firearms and Taser instructor based in New York, noted when the incident was described to him.

When we shared the photos with SFPD’s media relations department, Lt. Lyn Tomioka noted, “I can tell you that we do not have any tool that would produce the type of wounds shown in the picture that you attached, or produce a stinging sensation.”

The L.A. visitor said he was delivered this explanation from an officer while in the holding cell: “One of your anarchist buddies must’ve had a Taser, ran over to you trying to get one of our officers, got you instead, and ran away.”

Cooper Brislain, a Web developer from Santa Cruz, told us his iMac was destroyed that night. A friend of the owners of the art space, he was there doing video mixing for the party, he explained. After the trouble started, he began carrying his computer and mixing equipment toward the door. “The uniformed officers were going to let me go. I told them, ‘I just came here to perform.’ They seemed OK,” he said. Then he encountered Bertrand.

“He … grabbed me by the collar, led me over toward the wall, and sat me down,” Brislain told us. He says Bertrand and Ott seized his computer. Brislain says no charges were filed against him.

The morning after, he found that his computer had been smashed up. His friends found it in pieces at the bottom of the stairs. To this day, he says he has not been able to retrieve his ID, which was seized that night. “I tried calling [Bertrand] on his extension to leave a message and never heard back,” he says. “They told me he probably wouldn’t return voicemails.” The District Attorney’s Office has a different perspective. D.A. spokesperson Brian Buckelew said the partygoers were drunk and “going nuts on police.” People were throwing firecrackers, he said. “It obviously got out of hand, and people were throwing bottles at police,” he said.

The student from L.A. allegedly shoved a female officer, Buckelew said. According to the report, he said, police officers were taking someone into custody, and he tried to pull them free.

Nevertheless, even Chief Gascón agrees that it’s not okay to destroy someone’s personal property. “If in fact the allegations were proven to be the case that an officer took somebody’s laptop and threw it down the stairs,” Gascón told us, “that would be inappropriate, and that officer would be sanctioned accordingly.” He noted that he met with an attorney from the Electronic Frontier Foundation about a recurring trend of officers — Bertrand in particular — seizing DJ laptops at underground parties. “We’ve met with them and we’ve agreed to actually tighten up the protocols in how this would be handled,” Gascón noted.

 

A RICO SUIT

The list of local nightclub clubs that have been recently targeted by Bertrand and Ott or subjected to ABC sanctions is long. It includes Great American Music Hall, Slim’s, DNA Lounge, Mist, Whisper, the Room, Vessel, Azul, Butter, and Club Caliente (which closed down after its mostly Latino customers were scared away by repeated raids).

“Using the now familiar pattern and ruse of ABC authority, these raids have been without warrant and without probable cause, under the pretext of finding liquor violations,” attorney Mark Webb wrote in a claim against the city, describing the harassment of Caliente owner Maurice Salinas and later adding, “Despite numerous raids, the invading officers [Bertrand and Ott] managed to ‘uncover’ a single infraction: one customer used his brother’s ID card, claiming he was over 21 to gain entry. For this reason, Mr. Salinas was cited and fined, bullied, intimidated, and yelled at on the spot.”

Webb said such behavior isn’t legitimate police work, but unlawful harassment. In fact, this experienced litigator said it’s far closer to the shakedowns and extortion rackets familiar to him from the start of his legal career in the late 1970s prosecuting organized crime cases in New York City.

That’s why he’s threatening to bring a novel lawsuit against the city and ABC under federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act, a law designed go after the mob, but which has since been adapted to target entities ranging from the tobacco industry to the Los Angeles Police Department.

Webb told us that interference with legitimate business operations, such as running a nightclub, is the essence of RICO suits. As part of the case, Webb plans to submit a surveillance video that shows Bertrand kneeling on the neck of bartender Javier Magallon from The Room and twisting his arm. Webb gave us a copy of the video.

Another element of making a RICO case is the use of intimidation and retaliation against those who complain — which was central to a March 17 SF Weekly story about promoter Arash Ghanadan being inappropriately singled out for arrest by Bertrand as retaliation for filing a complaint against the officer with the Office of Citizen Complaints.

Webb says he has a strong case that he intends to file soon, but that most of his clients just want the SFPD to rein in Bertrand and stop facilitating ABC actions. “I want to have a sit-down with Gavin Newsom,” Webb said. “I am calling on Mayor Newsom to come in and mediate what would be an expensive, divisive fight that will generate national interest … I think this thing can go way quickly without litigation.”

Newsom press secretary Tony Winnicker, who said Newsom has brought concerns about Bertrand to the chief’s attention, didn’t immediately embrace Webb’s offer. “The mayor would rather leave it to the chief,” Winnicker said.

So the question for Gascón is whether he’s willing to take on the cowboy cops within the SFPD’s ranks. After all, Bertrand is also on the San Francisco Police Officers Association Board of Directors.

The nightlife community is organized like never before and plotting its next move in fighting a war it didn’t initiate and barely understands. Whether that war continues now seems to be a question for the party crashers and their supervisors.

End the nightlife crackdown

David Talbot
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0

Harassing parties and clubs shouldn’t be a priority for a cash-strapped city’s police department

EDITORIAL Police Chief George Gascón has asked for more authority to crack down on rogue cops, and has vowed to clean up the small handful of bad actors who are giving the department an ugly reputation for violence and abuse. But before San Franciscans are going to trust the chief, he’s got to show some evidence that he’s serious — and cleaning up the mess that is Southern Station’s crackdown on nightlife would be a great place to start.

As Rebecca Bowe and Steven T. Jones report in this issue, the SFPD seems to be waging war on parties, clubs, and events, particularly in the SoMa area. And it’s not pretty. Undercover cops sneak into events then call in the troops, who make multiple dubious arrests and, according to widespread accounts, seize or destroy laptops and other DJ equipment and beat up and abuse participants.

It’s a pointless waste of law enforcement resources. In a city where a significant number of murders remain unsolved, where merchants complain about street-level crimes that could easily be addressed by foot patrols, and where the chief complains that he lacks the funds to address all the problems he’s facing, we can’t fathom why stopping nightlife is a top police priority. At the very worst, some participants and promoters might be guilty of holding an event without the proper permits — but nobody’s getting robbed, assaulted, or killed.

And the tactics used by the officers are needlessly violent, sometimes brutal. According to lawsuits and eyewitness accounts, SFPD officers have smashed laptops, kicked and beaten partygoers, and arrested people with little cause. A San Francisco lawyer is preparing to file a RICO Act lawsuit against the city, charging that the police are conspiring with state liquor-control officials to harass people engaged in lawful activity.

The policy directives behind this appear to come from Cdr. James Dudley, the former captain of Southern Station, and the officer most directly responsible for the crackdown is Larry Bertrand. Paired with an officer from the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, Bertrand attends parties in plain clothes, sometimes dressed as a raver.

Complaints about Bertrand and the crackdowns are piling up. We’ve been writing about it for months. SF Weekly picked up the story last week. There are complaints filed with the city’s Office of Citizen Complaints and lawsuits pending. The chief may not have known about the problems at the crime lab, but he has to be aware of what Bertrand is up to.

Gascón should direct Dudley and Bertrand to back off — to halt the undercover work, end the seizure of personal property such as laptops and DJ gear (it’s not a crime to own a computer or speaker system), and work with the clubs and the nightlife community to devise reasonable systems for dealing with permit issues. And he needs to do it publicly, to let San Franciscans know that he’s addressing the issue.

Mayor Gavin Newsom needs to get involved too, and make a clear public statement that harassing parties and clubs isn’t the top priority for a cash-strapped city’s police department.

Film listings

David Talbot
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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. The film intern is Peter Galvin. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide.

OPENING

Chloe See "Moore and Less." (1:36) Elmwood, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki.

Greenberg Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is 40, and you might think he’s going through a midlife crisis — if he hadn’t been in pretty much this same crisis for 15 years or more. Still very edgy and fragile after a nervous breakdown-sparked institutional stay, he’s holing up at the comfortable Hollywood home of a big-deal brother while the latter and family are on vacation in Vietnam. (The implication being that Roger is most welcome here when no one else actually has to endure his prickly, high maintenance company.) While in residence he reconnects with old friends including the ex-girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh) he dumped yet never quite got over — though clearly she did — and the ex-bandmate (Rhys Ifans) he burned by wrecking their one shot at a major-label deal. He also gets involved, kinda-sorta, with big bro’s personal assistant Florence (mumblecore regular Greta Gerwig), whose passivity and low self-esteem make her the rare person who might consider a relationship with someone this impossible. Like all Noah Baumbach films, especially the slightly overrated Squid and the Whale (2005) and vastly underrated Margot at the Wedding (2007), his latest pivots around a pathologically self-absorbed and insensitive protagonist who exasperates anyone unlucky or blind enough to fall into his or her orbit. Working from a story co-conceived by spouse Leigh, Baumbach’s script sports his usual sharp dialogue, penetrating individual scenes, and narrative surprises. But it also gets stuck in dislikable Roger’s rut, finding conflict easily but stubbornly resisting even the smallest useful change. For all its amusing and uncomfortable moments, Greenberg emerges a dual character slice with no real point. Neither Roger or Beth reward long scrutiny (least of all as a hapless potential couple), while the few screen minutes Ifans and Leigh get make you wish their roles had hijacked the focus instead. (1:40) Piedmont, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Hot Tub Time Machine At last, Crispin Glover returns to his time-travel movie roots! (1:55) California.

How to Train Your Dragon Yet another 3D cartoon for the kiddies. At least this one is about Vikings. (1:38)

*The Sun It may have taken five years for Alexander Sokurov’s The Sun (2005) to reach local theaters, but then the Russian master’s contemplation of Emperor Hirohito’s last days as Godhead is decidedly out of time. Painterly and slow like all Sokurov’s work, the film specifically follows his estranged reconstructions of Hitler’s retreat with Eva Braun (1999’s Moloch) and Lenin’s demise (2000’s Taurus). In August 1945, Hirohito broke with tradition by making a direct appeal to the Japanese people to end military operations; soon thereafter he renounced his divine rights. The Sun‘s elliptical narration intuits the emperor’s paled existence, and Issey Ogata’s lead performance, centering on a fish-out-of-water puckering of the lips, amply conveys the shuttered hours of a man who, in experience if not in fact, is not quite human. The muted use of available light and a disquieting sound design (faraway air-raid sirens yield to the barest brush of a finger) eschew historiography’s harsh glare, instead returning primal scenes of power to a dreamlike state of unknowing. Sokurov’s most hallucinatory effects are reserved for ashen views of firebombed Tokyo which float free from perspective or clear boundary; a brief fantasy in which fish-like warplanes spew apocalyptic destruction suggests the emperor’s childlike imagination and set the stage for his historical date with General MacArthur, realized by Sokurov less as a diplomatic breakthrough than a leaden twilight. (1:50) Shattuck. (Goldberg)

Waking Sleeping Beauty Hollywood history is full of epic rivalries, juicy scandals, multi-million-dollar mistakes, and triumphant comebacks. Sometimes, all of the above and more can be contained within a single studio, or even a single studio division, or even a single studio division during a finite number of years, as illustrated by this insidery peek at Disney’s animation division. The doc gives a bit of background, but focuses its attentions on 1984-1994, a ten-year span that saw the floundering department struggle through post-Walt, identity-crisis blues before blossoming into a rejuvenated powerhouse. Waking Sleeping Beauty director Don Hahn was a producer on the Oscar-nominated Beauty and the Beast (1991), so he’s uniquely positioned to tell the story as it unfolded, using home movies and countless interviews. High points include a glimpse of late composer Howard Ashman introducing his demo for the iconic Little Mermaid (1989) tune "Under the Sea" (it was Ashman’s idea to give the crab character a Jamaican accent), and plenty of dish on the legendary Jeffrey Katzenberg-Michael Eisner feud. (1:26) Embarcadero. (Eddy)

ONGOING

Ajami You may recognize the title of Yaron Shoni and Scandar Copti’s debut collaboration as one of five films nominated for a 2010 Academy Award in the Foreign Category. Though it didn’t bring home the grand prize, Ajami remains a complex and affecting story about desperation and its consequences in a religiously-mixed town in Israel. As we follow the lives of four of Ajami’s residents the narrative shifts perspective almost maddeningly, switching characters seemingly at the height of each story’s action. But once all of the stories fully intersect, the final product has the distinction of feeling both meticulously calculated and completely natural. I was most impressed to learn that Shani and Copti prepared their actors with improvised role-playing rather than scripts. By withholding what was going to happen in a scene before shooting, we are treated to looks of surprise and emotion on actor’s faces that never feel unnatural. Attaining such a level of realism may be Ajami‘s crowning achievement; it can’t have been easy to make a foreign world feel so familiar. (2:00) Shattuck. (Galvin)

Alice in Wonderland Tim Burton’s take on the classic children’s tale met my mediocre expectations exactly, given its months of pre-release hype (in the film world, fashion magazines, and even Sephora, for the love of brightly-colored eyeshadows). Most folks over a certain age will already know the story, and much of the dialogue, before the lights go down and the 3-D glasses go on; it’s up to Burton and his all-star cast (including numerous big-name actors providing voices for animated characters) to make the tale seem newly enthralling. The visuals are nearly as striking as the CG, with Helena Bonham Carter’s big-headed Red Queen a particularly marvelous human-computer creation. But Wonderland suffers from the style-over-substance dilemma that’s plagued Burton before; all that spooky-pretty whimsy can’t disguise the film’s fairly tepid script. Teenage Alice (Mia Wasikowska) displaying girl-power tendencies is a nice, if not surprising, touch, but Johnny Depp’s grating take on the Mad Hatter will please only those who were able to stomach his interpretation of Willy Wonka. (1:48) Castro, Empire, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*The Art of the Steal How do you put a price on something that’s literally priceless? The Art of the Steal takes an absorbing look at the Barnes Collection, a privately-amassed array of Post-Impressionist paintings (including 181 Renoirs) worth billions — and the many people and corporate interests who schemed to control it. Founder Albert C. Barnes was an singular character who took pride in his outsider status; he housed his art in a specially-constructed gallery far from downtown Philadelphia’s museum scene, and he emphasized education and art appreciation first and foremost. But he had no heirs, and after his death in 1951, opportunists began circling his massive collection; the slippery political and legal dealings that have unfolded since then are nearly as jaw-dropping as Barnes’ prize paintings. Philly documentarian Don Argott has a doozy of a subject here, and his skillful, even suspenseful film does it justice. (1:41) Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

The Blind Side When the New York Times Magazine published Michael Lewis’ article "The Ballad of Big Mike" — which he expanded into the 2006 book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game — nobody could have predicated the cultural windfall it would spawn. Lewis told the incredible story of Michael Oher — a 6’4, 350-pound 16-year-old, who grew up functionally parentless, splitting time between friends’ couches and the streets of one of Memphis’ poorest neighborhoods. As a sophomore with a 0.4 GPA, Oher serendipitously hitched a ride with a friend’s father to a ritzy private school across town and embarked on an unbelievable journey that led him into a upper-class, white family; the Dean’s List at Ole Miss; and, finally, the NFL. The film itself effectively focuses on Oher’s indomitable spirit and big heart, and the fearless devotion of Leigh Anne Tuohy, the matriarch of the family who adopted him (masterfully played by Sandra Bullock). While the movie will delight and touch moviegoers, its greatest success is that it will likely spur its viewers on to read Lewis’ brilliant book. (2:06) Oaks. (Daniel Alvarez)

Brooklyn’s Finest "Really? I mean, really?" asked the moviegoer beside me as the final freeze-frame of Brooklyn’s Finest slapped our eyeballs. Yes, that’s the sound of letdown, despite the fact that Brooklyn’s Finest initially resembled a promisingly gritty juggling act in the mode of The Wire and Cop Land (1997), Taxi Driver (1976) and Training Day (2001). Bitter irony flows from the title — and from the lives, loves, bad habits, pressure-cooker stress, and unavoidable moral dilemmas of three would-be everyday cops, all occupying several different rungs on a food chain where right and wrong have an unpleasant way of switching sides. Eddie (Richard Gere) is the veteran officer just biding his time till he gets his pension, all while comforting himself with the meager sensuous attentions of hooker Chantel (Shannon Kane). Sal (Ethan Hawke) is the bad detective, stealing from the dealers to fund a dream home for his growing family with Angela (Lili Taylor). Tango (Don Cheadle) is the undercover detective who has cultivated friendships with dealers like Caz (Wesley Snipes) and sacrificed his marriage for a long-promised promotion from his lieutenant (Will Patton) and his superior (Ellen Barkin, in likely the most misogynist portrayal of a lady with a badge to date). You spend most of Brooklyn’s Finest waiting for these cops to collide in the most unfortunate, messiest way possible, but instead the denouement leaves will leave one wondering about unresolved threads and feeling vaguely unsatisfied. In any case, director Antoine Fuqua and company seem to pride themselves on their tough-minded if at times cartoonish take on law enforcement, with Hawke in particular turning in a memorably OTT and anguished performance. (2:13) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

The Bounty Hunter There’s a real feeling of impotence in reviewing a movie whose ad was pasted on the side of the bus you took to the screening. This thing is determined to be seen, and that’s a true shame. Those who heed the call of the ubiquitous marketing campaign will have to sit through a dull parade of contrivances concerning a bounty hunter (Gerard Butler) whose latest catch is his court-skipping ex-wife (Jennifer Aniston). She’s a hotshot city journalist who’s forced to continue her investigation of a police cover-up while handcuffed to a car door and bickering with her old flame. The trajectory of the plot is obvious enough, but there’s so little chemistry between the two actors that the inevitable reconciliation practically constitutes a twist ending. Aniston saw fit not to whine her way through this role, which is something, but nothing nearly as complimentary can be said about Butler. He emotes in lurches, with the presence of a guy who’s not sure acting is the right direction for his life but still really wants to give it a go. If "This. Is. Sparta!" weren’t burned into my brain I would swear the man had never been in front of a camera before. (1:50) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Jason Shamai)

The Crazies Disease and anti-government paranoia dovetail in this competent yet overwhelmingly non-essential remake of one of George A. Romero’s second-tier spook shows. In a small Iowa hamlet overseen by a benevolent sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) and his pregnant wife (Radha Mitchell), who’s also the town doctor, a few odd incidents snowball into all-out chaos when a mysterious, unmarked plane crashes into the local water supply. Before long, the few residents who aren’t acting like homicidal maniacs are rounded up by an uber-aggressive military invasion. Though our heroes convey frantic panic as they try to figure out what the hell is going on, The Crazies never achieves full terror mode. It’s certainly watchable, and even enjoyable at times. But memorable? Not in the slightest. (1:41) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

Crazy Heart "Oh, I love Jeff Bridges!" is the usual response when his name comes up every few years for Best Actor consideration, usually via some underdog movie no one saw, and the realization occurs that he’s never won an Oscar. The oversight is painful because it could be argued that no leading American actor has been more versatile, consistently good, and true to that elusive concept "artistic integrity" than Bridges over the last 40 years. It’s rumored Crazy Heart was slotted for cable or DVD premiere, then thrust into late-year theater release in hopes of attracting Best Actor momentum within a crowded field. Lucky for us, this performance shouldn’t be overlooked. Bridges plays "Bad" Blake, a veteran country star reduced to playing bars with local pickup bands. His slide from grace hasn’t been helped by lingering tastes for smoke and drink, let alone five defunct marriages. He meets Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), freelance journalist, fan, and single mother. They spark; though burnt by prior relationships, she’s reluctant to take seriously a famous drunk twice her age. Can Bad handle even this much responsibility? Meanwhile, he gets his "comeback" break in the semi-humiliating form of opening for Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) — a contemporary country superstar who was once Bad’s backup boy. Tommy offers a belated shot at commercial redemption; Jean offers redemption of the strictly personal kind. There’s nothing too surprising about the ways in which Crazy Heart both follows and finesses formula. You’ve seen this preordained road from wreckage to redemption before. But actor turned first-time director Scott Cooper’s screenplay honors the flies in the windshield inherited from Thomas Cobb’s novel — as does Bridges, needless to say. (1:51) Piedmont, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Spoiler alert: nothing happens in Diary of a Wimpy Kid. That was OK when it was just a book—author Jeff Kinney’s illustrated novel works due in large part to his whimsical drawings and tongue-in-cheek humor. It’s a kids’ book, but it’s fun for adults, too. The same can’t be said for the film adaptation: Diary of a Wimpy Kid sticks close to its source material without the creativity necessary to make it work on the big screen. As in the book, Greg Heffley (Zachary Gordon) navigates the treacherous terrain of middle school, struggling to cope with an awkward best friend, a brutal older brother, and parents who just don’t understand. All the actors turn in solid performances — Gordon is a particularly good find. But there’s so little here to work with. The best that can be said about Diary of a Wimpy Kid is that it’s cute and mostly harmless: a pleasant diversion for young’uns, and a tolerable bore for the parents they drag along. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness. (Peitzman)

*An Education The pursuit of knowledge — both carnal and cultural — are at the tender core of this end-of-innocence valentine by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig (who first made her well-tempered voice heard with her 2000 Dogme entry, Italian for Beginners), based on journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir. Screenwriter Nick Hornby breaks further with his Peter Pan protagonists with this adaptation: no man-boy mopers or misfits here. Rather, 16-year-old schoolgirl Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a good girl and ace student. It’s 1961, and England is only starting to stir from its somber, all-too-sober post-war slumber. The carefully cloistered Jenny is on track for Oxford, though swinging London and its high-style freedoms beckon just around the corner. Ushering in those freedoms — a new, more class-free world disorder — is the charming David (Peter Sarsgaard), stopping to give Jenny and her cello a ride in the rain and soon proffering concerts and late-night suppers in the city. He’s a sweet-faced, feline outsider: cultured, Jewish, and given to playing fast and loose in the margins of society. David can see Jenny for the gem she is and appreciate her innocence with the knowing pleasure of a decadent playing all the angles. The stakes are believably high, thanks to An Education‘s careful attention to time and place and its gently glamored performances. Scherfig revels in the smart, easy-on-eye curb appeal of David and his friends while giving a nod to the college-educated empowerment Jenny risks by skipping class to jet to Paris. And Mulligan lends it all credence by letting all those seduced, abandoned, conflicted, rebellious feelings flicker unbridled across her face. (1:35) Oaks, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

*The Ghost Writer Roman Polanski’s never-ending legal woes have inspired endless debates on the interwebs and elsewhere; they also can’t help but add subtext to the 76-year-old’s new film, which is chock full o’ anti-American vibes anyway. It’s also a pretty nifty political thriller about a disgraced former British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) who’s hanging out in his Martha’s Vineyard mansion with his whip-smart, bitter wife (Olivia Williams) and Joan Holloway-as-ice-queen assistant (Kim Cattrall), plus an eager young biographer (Ewan McGregor) recently hired to ghost-write his memoirs. But as the writer quickly discovers, the politician’s past contains the kinds of secrets that cause strange cars with tinted windows to appear in one’s rearview mirror when driving along deserted country roads. Polanski’s long been an expert when it comes to escalating tension onscreen; he’s also so good at adding offbeat moments that only seem tossed-off (as when the PM’s groundskeeper attempts to rake leaves amid relentless sea breezes) and making the utmost of his top-notch actors (Tom Wilkinson and Eli Wallach have small, memorable roles). Though I found The Ghost Writer‘s ZOMG! third-act revelation to be a bit corny, I still didn’t think it detracted from the finely crafted film that led up to it. (1:49) California, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*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) Albany. (Harvey)

Green Zone Titled for the heavily-guarded headquarters of international occupation in Baghdad, Green Zone reunites director Paul "Shaky-Cam" Greengrass with star Matt Damon, the two having previously collaborated on the last two Bourne films. Instead of a super-soldier, this time around Damon just plays a supremely insubordinate one as he attempts to uncover the reason why his military unit can’t find any of Saddam’s WMDs. With the aid of the CIA, a Wall Street Journal reporter and a friendly Iraqi, Damon goes rogue in order to suss out the source of the misinformation. The Iraq War action is decent if scarce, but an overindulgence in (you guessed it) shaky-cam and political jargon cannot hide the fact that Green Zone‘s plot is simplistic and probably light on actual facts. Damon makes a fine cowboy-cum-hero, but the effectiveness of the mix of patriotism and Pentagon paranoia will vary based on your penchant for such things. Still, Green Zone moves fast enough that it remains worth a matinee for conspiracy thriller aficionados. (1:55) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Galvin)

The Hurt Locker When the leader of a close-knit U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal squad is killed in action, his subordinates have barely recovered from the shock when they’re introduced to his replacement. In contrast to his predecessor, Sgt. James (Jeremy Renner) is no standard-procedure-following team player, but a cocky adrenaline junkie who puts himself and others at risk making gonzo gut-instinct decisions in the face of live bombs and insurgent gunfire. This is particularly galling to next-in-command Sanborn (Anthony Mackie). An apolitical war-in-Iraq movie that’s won considerable praise for accuracy so far from vets (scenarist Mark Boal was "embedded" with an EOD unit there for several 2004 weeks), Kathryn Bigelow’s film is arguably you-are-there purist to a fault. While we eventually get to know in the principals, The Hurt Locker is so dominated by its seven lengthy squad-mission setpieces that there’s almost no time or attention left for building character development or a narrative arc. The result is often viscerally intense, yet less impactful than it would have been if we were more emotionally invested. Assured as her technique remains, don’t expect familiar stylistic dazzle from action cult figure Bigelow (1987’s Near Dark, 1989’s Blue Steel, 1991’s Point Break) — this vidcam-era war movie very much hews to the favored current genre approach of pseudo-documentary grainy handheld shaky-cam imagery. (2:11) Shattuck. (Harvey)

*The Last Station Most of the buzz around The Last Station has focused on Helen Mirren, who takes the lead as the Countess Sofya, wife of Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer). Mirren is indeed impressive — when is she not? — but there’s more to the film than Sofya’s Oscar-worthy outbursts. The Last Station follows Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy), hired as Tolstoy’s personal secretary at the end of the writer’s life. Valentin struggles to reconcile his faith in the anarchist Christian Tolstoyan movement with his sympathy for Sofya and his budding feelings for fellow Tolstoyan Masha (Kerry Condon). For the first hour, The Last Station is charming and very funny. Once Tolstoy and Sofya’s relationship reaches its most volatile, however, the tone shifts toward the serious — a trend that continues as Tolstoy falls ill. After all the lighthearted levity, it’s a bit jarring, but the solid script and accomplished cast pull The Last Station together. Paul Giamatti is especially good as Vladimir Chertkov, who battles against Sofya for control of Tolstoy’s will. You’ll never feel guiltier for putting off War and Peace. (1:52) Albany. (Peitzman)

*The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers For many, Daniel Ellsberg is a hero — a savior of American First Amendment rights and one of the most outspoken opponents of the Vietnam war. But as this documentary (recently nominated for an Academy Award) shows, it’s never an an easy decision to take on the U.S. government. Ellsberg himself narrates the film and details his sleepless nights leading up to the leak of the Pentagon Papers — the top secret government study on the Vietnam war — to the public. Though there are few new developments in understanding the particulars of the war or the impact the release of the Papers had on ending the conflict, the film allows audiences to experience the famous case from Ellsberg’s point of view, adding a fresh and poignantly human element to the events; it’s a political documentary that plays more like a character drama. Whether you were there when it happened or new to the story, there is something to be appreciated from this tale of a man who fell out of love with his country and decided to do something about it. (1:34) Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Galvin)

*Mother You can guarantee that a movie titled Mother is not gonna be a love fest, ever. And through the lens of The Host (2006) director-writer Bong Joon-ho, motherly love becomes downright monstrous — though altogether human. Much credit goes to the wonderful lead actress Kim Hye-ja as the titular materfamilias, who’s frantically self-sacrificing, insanely tenacious, quaintly charming, wolfishly fearsome, and wildly guilt-ridden, by turns. On the surface, she’s a sweetly innocuous herbalist and closet acupuncturist — happily, and a wee bit too tightly, tethered to her beloved son Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin). He’s a slow-witted, forgetful, and easily confused mop-top who flies into deadly rages when taunted or called a "’tard." When Do-joon is quickly arrested and charged with the murder of schoolgirl Moon Ah-jung (Mun-hee Na), Mom snaps into action with a panic-stricken, primal ferocity and goes in search of the killer to free her boy. But there’s more to Do-joon, his studly pal Jin-tae (Ku Jin), and Moon Ah-jung than meets the eye, and Mother discovers just how much she’s defined, and twisted, herself in relation to her son. Bong gives this potentially flat and cliched noirish material genuine lyricism, embedding his anti-heroine in a rural South Korean landscape like a penitent wandering in an existential desert, gently echoing filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman and Abbas Kiarostami and beautifully transcending genre. (2:09) Shattuck. (Chun)

Our Family Wedding America Ferrera and Lance Gross play a couple of lovebirds who must jump through some serious family hoops before they get married in the mostly serviceable Our Family Wedding. What begins as a dual Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, with the differences in each family’s traditions forcing complications and compromises, soon loses sight of its matrimonial plot as the focus steers towards a childish rivalry between the fathers. While it’s being marketed as a goofy comedy, the final product seeks a relatively sentimental tone, which makes the few slapstick moments — like a goat trying to rape Academy Award-winning actor Forest Whitaker — seem pretty inappropriate. Still, for some audiences the well-tread plot will act as comfort food: they fight, they make up, and it all ends in a big wedding where we watch the characters dance for damn near ten minutes. (1:41) 1000 Van Ness. (Galvin)

*A Prophet Filmmaker Jacques Audiard has described his new film, A Prophet, as "the anti-Scarface." Yet much like Scarface (1983), A Prophet bottles the heady euphoria that chases the empowerment of the powerless and the rise of the long-shot loner on the margins. In its almost-Dickensian attention to detail, devotion to its own narrative complexity, and passion for cinematic poetry, A Prophet rises above the ordinary and, through the prism of genre, finds its own power. The supremely opportunistic, pragmatically Machiavellian intellectual and spiritual education of a felon is the chief concern of here. Played by Tahar Rahim with guileless, open-faced charisma, Malik is half-Arab and half-Corsican — and distrusted or despised by both camps in the pen. When he lands in jail for his six-year sentence, he’s 19, illiterate, friendless, and vulnerable. His deal with the devil — and means of survival — arrives with Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), temporarily locked up before his testifies against the mob. Corsican boss Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup) wants him dead, and Malik is tagged to penetrate Reyeb’s cell with a blade hidden in mouth. After Malik’s gory rebirth, it turns out that the teenager’s a seer in more ways than one. From his low-dog position, he can eyeball the connections linking the drugs entering the prison to those circulating outside, as well as the machinations intertwining the Arab and Corsican syndicates. It’s no shock that when Cesar finds his power eroding and arranges prison leaves for his multilingual crossover star that Malik serves not only his Corsican master, but also his own interests, and begins to build a drug empire rivaling his teacher’s. Throughout his pupil’s progress, Audiard demonstrates a way with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment, and when Malik finally breaks with his Falstaffian patriarch, it makes your heart skip a beat in a move akin to the title of the director’s last film. This Eurozone/Obama-age prophet is all about the profit — but he’s imbued with grace, even while gaming for ill-gotten gain. (2:29) Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

Remember Me Ominously set in New York City during the summer of 2001, Remember Me, starring Robert Pattinson (of the Twilight series) and Emilie de Ravin (of TV’s Lost), pretty much answers the question of whether it’s still too soon to make the events of September 11 the subject of a date movie. Or rather, not the subject so much as the specter waiting just off-camera for its walk-on while brooding 21-year-old Tyler Hawkins (Pattinson) quotes Gandhi, gets into brawls, gets drunk, writes letters to his dead brother, and otherwise channels despondency and rage into various salubrious outlets. One of these is romancing (under circumstances severely testing the viewer’s credulity) de Ravin’s Ally Craig, grappling somewhat more constructively with her own familial tragedy. Ally is the sort of self-possessed, strong-willed young woman whose instincts, shortly after she’s been backhanded by her drunk father (Chris Cooper), tell her to placate and have sex with her drunk boyfriend when he comes home enraged after battling his own father (Pierce Brosnan). She is there to teach Tyler, through quirky habits like eating dessert first, what director Allen Coulter (2006’s Hollywoodland) wishes to teach us: that time is short and one must fill one’s life with meaningful actions — like throwing a fire extinguisher through a window to convince a classroom of tweens to stop bullying one’s little sister. The film is seeded with allusions to an impending catastrophe that feels less integrated than exploited. And it’s uncomfortable seeing the fall of the towers used to make the ground shake under a sweet, fairly depthless depiction of love and grief. (2:08) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Repo Men If you are considering going to see Repo Men you’ll need to go ahead and turn off your brain first — the guy who wrote it sure did. The script is jam-packed with contrivances and tonal inconsistencies, which is a shame because the plot had potential. In a near future when mechanical replacement organs are a reality, Jude Law plays Remy, an ex-soldier hired by the Union to find recipients that cannot afford their bills and repossess their artificial organs to return to the manufacturer. After a freak accident, Remy needs a replacement organ himself and when he can’t pay, the Union sends his childhood friend and ex-partner Jake (Forest Whitaker) to retrieve it. Repo Men is at its best when it embraces its cartoonishness, when the film is so stupid that it transcends the hodge-podge story and glows with goofy grotesque action. If you can, stick around ’til the climax that includes an Old Boy (2003) homage (rip-off) and one of the more laugh-out-loud ridiculous endings I’ve seen in a long time. But high-art, this ain’t. (1:53) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Galvin)

The Runaways In Floria Sigismondi’s tale of the rise and fall of a 1970s all-girl band, LA producer Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon) proclaims that the Runaways are going to save rock and roll. It’s hard to gauge the sincerity of this pronouncement, but you can certainly hear, in songs like "Cherry Bomb" and "Queens of Noise," how the band must have brightened a landscape overrun by kings of prog rock. Unfortunately, a handful of teenagers micromanaged by a sleazy, abusive nutcase proved not quite up to the task, though the band did launch the careers of metal guitarist Lita Ford (Scout Taylor-Compton) and, more famously, Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart). Sigismondi’s film entertainingly sketches the Runaways’ beginnings in glam rock fandom and gradual attainment of their own rabid fan base. We get Currie lip-synching Bowie to catcalls at the high school assembly, Jett composing "Cherry Bomb" with Fowley, glamtastic hair-and-wardrobe eye candy, pills-and-Stooges-fueled intra-band fooling around, and five teenage girls sent off sans chaperone on an international tour with substantial quantities of hard drugs in their carry-on luggage. What follows is less pretty: a capsule version of the band’s disintegration after the departure of bottoming-out 16-year-old lead singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning). In a film darkened by Currie’s trajectory, Jett’s subsequent success is a feel-good coda, but it’s awkwardly attached and emblematizes one of The Runaways‘ main problems. When the band begins to fall apart, the film doesn’t know which way to turn and ends up telling no one’s story well. (1:42) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Rapoport)

She’s Out of My League From the co-writers of the abysmal Sex Drive (2008), She’s Out of My League could be another 90-minute assemblage of gross-out humor, dick jokes, and unabashed homophobia. As it turns out, the latest offering from Sean Anders and John Morris is legitimately funny — far better than the trailer (and that half-assed title) would have you believe. The adorkable Jay Baruchel stars as Kirk, a hapless loser who finds himself dating bonafide hottie Molly (Alice Eve). Once you get past the film’s silly conceit — Kirk’s only "movie ugly," and personality goes a long way — you’re left with a surprisingly charming comedy. The characters are amusing and the wit is sharp. Not to mention the fact that She’s Out of My League offers a downright heartfelt message. There’s a sincerity here that feels genuine instead of just tacked-on: yeah, yeah, it’s about what’s inside that counts, but there’s more to it than that. Ignore the dreadful "jizz in my pants" scene, and the movie’s almost an old-fashioned romcom. (1:44) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Peitzman)

Shutter Island Director Martin Scorsese and muse du jour Leonardo DiCaprio draw from oft-filmed novelist Dennis Lehane (2003’s Mystic River, 2007’s Gone Baby Gone) for this B-movie thriller that, sadly, offers few thrills. DiCaprio’s a 1950s U.S. marshal summoned to a misty island that houses a hospital for the criminally insane, overseen by a doctor (Ben Kingsley) who believes in humane, if experimental, therapy techniques. From the get-go we suspect something’s not right with the G-man’s own mind; as he investigates the case of a missing patient, he experiences frequent flashbacks to his World War II service (during which he helped liberate a concentration camp), and has recurring visions of his spooky dead wife (Michelle Williams). Whether or not you fall for Shutter Island‘s twisty game depends on the gullibility of your own mind. Despite high-quality performances and an effective, if overwrought, tone of certain doom, Shutter Island stumbles into a third act that exposes its inherently flawed and frustrating storytelling structure. If only David Lynch had directed Shutter Island — it could’ve been a classic of mindfuckery run amok. Instead, Scorsese’s psychological drama is sapped of any mystery whatsoever by its stubbornly literal conclusion. (2:18) California, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The commons and commoners

David Talbot
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48
The commons and commoners

By Ben Rosenfeld


OPINION This is a call out to creative, fun-loving San Franciscans: the mayor, the police chief, and their downtown cronies have declared war on our grassroots arts culture, and they are coming for your actual and conceptual space next. The future they promise is manifest in their many recent attacks on public and private gatherings, and their efforts to wrest the commons from the commoners.

On Halloween 2009, the San Francisco Police, under their new chief, Los Angeles transplant George Gascón, shut down the Take Back Halloween Flashdance in front of the Ferry Building before DJ Amandeep "Deep" Jawa even arrived. Then they shut down several smaller street parties. Their official reason — that organizers lacked permits — is what Bill Clinton famously termed an explanation, but not an excuse.

The SFPD has a long history of not only tolerating unpermitted gatherings, but of rerouting traffic around and even escorting them. The cops are fully empowered to grant the equivalent of on-the-fly permits. Applying for an actual permit is cumbersome, costly, anti-spontaneous — and reinforces the SFPD’s view of itself as censor.

Since Halloween, Chief Gascón’s force has been striking a mighty blow against crime by writing scores of open container citations to revelers in Dolores Park; fining or forcing the closure of SoMa clubs and bars for failing to conform to every fickle letter of the law; and sending undercover officers into warehouse and studio parties to bust them from within, sometimes violently, and without warrants.

Perhaps the most un-San Franciscan of all Gascón’s initiatives is his demand for an ordinance that would literally criminalize the very act of sitting or lying on certain public sidewalks at certain times. Never mind the fact that most violent crime is committed by people standing up and in striking range.

Not only is the idea just plain mean, it is anathema to San Francisco’s culture of compassion and broadmindedness, and its affirmative celebration of vibrant street culture. The danger is not that the police will arrest everyone who dares to take a load off or sit and sip a Snapple against the side of a building, but that they will enforce the law selectively according to their own purity tests, while robbing the rest of us of the diversity and ferment which make us richer.

On March 27, reclaim space for art and innovation. Sit and lie on the public sidewalk! March and sing in the public street! Picnic on the pavement. Pop open a beer in Dolores Park. Do it without a permit. The Constitution is your permit. San Francisco’s heritage of artistic experimentation is your permit. Hell, the people telling you to get a permit flocked here because people like you marched around them in the first place and made this city inspiring. Do it for them too. This is a defining moment. They are playing for keeps, and so must we. Let’s bask in San Francisco’s ongoing heyday, not in quaint stories of what used to be.

Ben Rosenfeld is a lawyer in San Francisco.

End the nightlife crackdown

David Talbot
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5
End the nightlife crackdown

EDITORIAL Police Chief George Gascón has asked for more authority to crack down on rogue cops, and has vowed to clean up the small handful of bad actors who are giving the department an ugly reputation for violence and abuse. But before San Franciscans are going to trust the chief, he’s got to show some evidence that he’s serious — and cleaning up the mess that is Southern Station’s crackdown on nightlife would be a great place to start.

As Rebecca Bowe and Steven T. Jones report in this issue, the SFPD seems to be waging war on parties, clubs, and events, particularly in the SoMa area. And it’s not pretty. Undercover cops sneak into events then call in the troops, who make multiple dubious arrests and, according to widespread accounts, seize or destroy laptops and other DJ equipment and beat up and abuse participants.

It’s a pointless waste of law enforcement resources. In a city where a significant number of murders remain unsolved, where merchants complain about street-level crimes that could easily be addressed by foot patrols, and where the chief complains that he lacks the funds to address all the problems he’s facing, we can’t fathom why stopping nightlife is a top police priority. At the very worst, some participants and promoters might be guilty of holding an event without the proper permits — but nobody’s getting robbed, assaulted, or killed.

And the tactics used by the officers are needlessly violent, sometimes brutal. According to lawsuits and eyewitness accounts, SFPD officers have smashed laptops, kicked and beaten partygoers, and arrested people with little cause. A San Francisco lawyer is preparing to file a RICO Act lawsuit against the city, charging that the police are conspiring with state liquor-control officials to harass people engaged in lawful activity.

The policy directives behind this appear to come from Cdr. James Dudley, the former captain of Southern Station, and the officer most directly responsible for the crackdown is Larry Bertrand. Paired with an officer from the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, Bertrand attends parties in plain clothes, sometimes dressed as a raver.

Complaints about Bertrand and the crackdowns are piling up. We’ve been writing about it for months. SF Weekly picked up the story last week. There are complaints filed with the city’s Office of Citizen Complaints and lawsuits pending. The chief may not have known about the problems at the crime lab, but he has to be aware of what Bertrand is up to.

Gascón should direct Dudley and Bertrand to back off — to halt the undercover work, end the seizure of personal property such as laptops and DJ gear (it’s not a crime to own a computer or speaker system), and work with the clubs and the nightlife community to devise reasonable systems for dealing with permit issues. And he needs to do it publicly, to let San Franciscans know that he’s addressing the issue.

Mayor Gavin Newsom needs to get involved too, and make a clear public statement that harassing parties and clubs isn’t the top priority for a cash-strapped city’s police department.

 

Alerts

David Talbot
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0

alert@sfbg.com

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 24

"Lynching Then, and Lynching Now"


Attend this teach-in about the historic link between the death penalty and lynching in the U.S. Speakers include former and current death row prisoners, activists from the justice for Oscar Grant movement, a member of the Laney Black Student Union, and more.

7 p.m., free

Laney College

Room D200

900 Fallon, Oakl.

(510) 589-6820

Mammalian good


Train to become a volunteer at the Marine Mammal Center’s Education Department in the Marin Headlands in Sausalito. Learn how to greet visitors, talk to the public, and lead tours about the center’s seal and sea lion patients. Training consists of a series of Wednesday or Saturday four classes in April.

Wednesday classes 4/7, 4/14/ 4/ 21, and 4/28

Saturday classes 4/10, 4/17, 4/24, and 5/1

Fort Cronkhite

2000 Bunker Road, Sausalito

(415) 289-7361

FRIDAY, MARCH 26

Arundhati Roy


Attend this fundraiser for the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice, based in Kashmir, India. Author and human rights activist Arundhati Roy reads from her latest collection of essays, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. Roy will be introduced by Alice Walker.

7 p.m., $35

Mission High School

Auditorium

3750 18th St., SF

www.haymarketbooks.org

SATURDAY, MARCH 27

Immigration legal advice


Learn about the immigration services provided by API Legal Outreach from staff attorney Cindy Liou and get free legal advice on immigration questions such as petitioning for family members and how to naturalize (program in English and Mandarin Chinese).

2:30 p.m., free

Chinatown Branch Library

Community Meeting Room

1135 Powell, SF

(415) 355-2888

"Stand Against Sit-Lie"


Take part in this citywide celebration of public space and help stop SF Police Chief George Gascón’s proposal to criminalize sitting or lying on sidewalks. Just occupy a space on your nearest sidewalk and do what you love; barbecue, make music, do yoga, read, relax, make art, dance, play chess — anything!

Go to www.standagainstsitlie.org for information about how to educate others on the Sit/Lie Ordinance. Meet at 4 p.m. for an end of the day celebration at the Market/Castro plaza.

All day, free

A sidewalk near you

www.standagainstsitlie.org

SUNDAY, MARCH 28

Kids’ Clothing Swap


Exchange gently-used, unstained infant and toddler clothing for the size you need now and help support Help a Mother Out (HAMO), a local grassroots campaign to improve the lives of families in need, one diaper at a time.

2 p.m., $10 or a package of size 4–6 diapers or pull-up’s

Natural Resources

1367 Valencia, SF

www.helpamotherout.org

Uhuru Pies’ Delicious Revolution


Become a community organizer, baker, graphic artist, or socially conscious volunteer at this launch meeting for Uhuru Pies’ November 2010 bake sale fundraiser. The bake sale benefits the African People’s Education and Defense Fund, founded in Oakland in 1981.

10 a.m., free

World Ground Café

Backroom

3726 MacArthur, Oakl.

(510) 851-4492

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 255-8762; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

Project One’s mural community

Andrew Lam
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2

There’s a mural by my work I pass everyday that is visually astounding. It’s a super burner- a big, looping maze of letters, or maybe just design, that must represent in its whorls every color of the rainbow. It takes up the street side of a long building on a background of black-on-black fluer de lis design at Turk and Mason. Not to trivialize the sweet and sour roughness of ‘Loin life, but it gives the dope heads, the police cruisers and the general down-and-outery of the ‘hood an air of artistry. 

You don’t see color like that just anywhere.

Which was why it was so nice to put a face to the piece during my trip down to Project One gallery to check out their current show “Four Squared,” a collaborative project between Chor Boogie, Apex One, Jet Martinez, and David Chong Lee. Apex One (who spray painted the mural in the Tenderloin) was there putting up a fresh new entryway sign for the gallery, and we got the chance to chat on how the group partnership came to be.

“We all knew each other,” Apex, an SF native, tells me. In what sounds like a phone tree among soccer moms, the four creative graf art legends decided to create what now hangs in Project One- two huge murals, each made of 90 square foot pieces that gallery owner Brooke Waterhouse hopes will enable the younger art fans to buy a piece of the action. 

Check out “Foursquared” at Project One to see Apex One’s entry way design, pictured here mid spray

“I’ve been waiting to do that for awhile; have it set up so you can take a piece of the mural home with you,” says Apex. Painting largely simultaneously (check the vid here for installation shots), the artists created wall sized wonderlands that loosely relate their motifs to each other. A Boogie bird nestles on a Chong Lee design. It makes you wonder what would happen if street artists could drop the tag-on-tag wars forever and instead use their designs to augment the craft already on the wall in front of them. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Project One is also featuring individual works by each of the men on opposing walls from their group effort. They act as a stylistic key to the murals. Here, you can pick out Jet Martinez’s delicate cherry blossom sprigs- there, a lavender tag by Apex, its chunky and curved three dimensional form reminiscent of the architectural detailing on the Victorians he grew up amidst. Chor Boogie’s polychromed tiling work, Chong Lee’s eyeball studded Death Star.

It’s an engaging show to check out in the comfortable space at Project One, happy hour beer in hand. Nicer still? Well, for one, the fact that spring is here. More to the point, the fact that, somewhere, chances are that one of these guys is painting on a wall to beautify your walk to work. And for that, let’s give thanks.

 

“Four Squared”

through April 5th

Project One gallery

251 Rhode Island, SF

(415) 938-7173

www.p1sf.com

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