Progressive

What $40 million buys

Andrew Lam
-
5

OPINION I am a diehard and devoted follower of the round-ball. Basketball. If the game did not exist, I wouldn’t spend a minute — hot or cold — planted in front of telly, save the half hour my kids and I watch the new Regular Show. I have no idea who wins the beauty contests or who is villain or hero on reality TV, couldn’t ID you the hit sitcom star of today, don’t know and don’t care.

For this reason, I am intimately aware of the massive anti-Prop 29 campaign waged by the tobacco companies (their target audience is male and of a certain age).

Prop. 29 narrowly lost last Tuesday, almost entirely due to the $40 million plus poured into its defeat from out of state interests, specifically RJ Reynolds.

Without that money, Prop. 29 passes easily, a no-brainer. A dollar-a-pack tax to raise $735 million a year for cancer research, with the secondary effect of smoking reduction (the costlier cigarettes are, the more likely one will quit — also, despite the misinformation, a raised tax on cigarettes doesn’t lead to bootlegging, as is Internet myth).

But at least a half dozen times per NBA playoff game, a grave looking woman in a medical outfit came on the air to warn us of the incipient dangers of this horrible idea — a new bureaucracy, new taxes (well, duh), money going out of state — relentless repetition of talking points ramrodded down the throats of the viewer.

I am told that Lance Armstrong made a pro-29 spot. Never saw it and now, I never will.

In most instances, I would have opposed Prop. 29 myself. I dislike sin taxes. I dislike the idea that one person’s poison is more pernicious than another when less than 15 percent of our state smokes and a much higher percentage is overweight. But the pounding of the tobacco industry — a far more diabolical and lethal group of parasites than even the lowliest dope dealer (but legal, of course and subsidized by the taxpayer) planted enough doubt in the minds of semi-interested sports fans to send a well-meaning and job creating piece of legislation onto the shoals of defeat.

This event, coupled with the Koch family’s purchase of the Wisconsin recall, signals the possible death knell for American democracy. The fact that money is speech and corporations are people has been codified into law doesn’t change the reality that said sentiment is gibberish intended to consolidate a permanent plutocrat class that, on any whim, can simply bury their opposition in an avalanche of half truths and outright lies.

If you own the megaphone, the transmitter, and the mouth, we are not equal — if you are heard and I am not, no one ever hears my side. And that’s where we’re going.

The saddest moment in all of this was taking a trip to a liquor store the other day with my kids to get some sodas and hearing the owner’s justification for supporting No on 29 — “this will wipe me out.” When I pointed out that maybe soon he could sell marijuana in the place of cigarettes when it becomes legal, he turned pale and exclaimed “I don’t want that shit in here”.

Marlboro’s and Jack Daniels, ok. The chronic, no.

And that’s the mindset in America’s most progressive state. I wasn’t made for these times at all.

Johnny Angel Wendell is a talk show host at KTLK-AM1150 and KFI-AM640 in Los Angeles and an American roots musician

Hospital standoff

Andrew Lam
-
2
Hospital standoff

steve@sfbg.com

The controversial and long-awaited proposal by California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) to build a 550-bed luxury hospital atop Cathedral Hill and to rebuild St. Luke’s Hospital has finally arrived at the Board of Supervisors — where it appears to have little support.

So far, not one supervisor has stepped up to sponsor the deal, and board members say it will have to undergo major changes to meet the city’s needs. “There are still a lot of questions that remain,” Sup. David Campos told us, citing labor, housing, community benefits, and a long list of other issues that he doesn’t believe CPMC has adequately addressed. “It tells me there’s still more work to be done.”

CPMC, which is Sacramento-based nonprofit corporation Sutter Health’s most lucrative affiliate, has been pushing the project for almost a decade. Its advocates have subtly used a state seismic safety deadline for rebuilding St. Luke’s — a hospital relied on by low-income residents of the Mission District and beyond — as leverage to build the massive Cathedral Hill Hospital it envisions as the Mayo Clinic of the West Coast.

But the project’s draft environmental impact report shows the Cathedral Hill Hospital would have huge negative impacts on the city’s transportation system and exacerbate its affordable housing crisis. And CPMC has been in a pitched battle with its labor unions over its refusal to guarantee the new jobs will go to current employees or local residents and be unionized. There are also concerns with the market power CPMC will gain from the project, how that will affect health care costs paid by the city and its residents, and with the company’s appallingly low charity care rates compared to other health care providers (see “Lack of charity,” 12/13/11).

CPMC had refused to budge in negotiations with the Mayor’s Office under two mayors, for which Mayor Ed Lee publicly criticized the company’s intransigence last year. But under pressure from the business community and local trade unions who support the project, Lee cut a deal with CPMC in March.

That development agreement for the $2.5 billion project calls for CPMC to pay $33 million for public transit and roadway improvements, $20 million to endow community clinics and other social services, and $62 million for affordable housing programs, nearly half of which would go toward helping its employees buy existing homes.

While those numbers seem large, community and labor leaders from San Franciscans for Healthcare, Housing, Jobs and Justice (SFHHJJ), which formed in opposition to the project, say they don’t cover anywhere near the project’s full impacts. And given that CPMC made about $180 million in profit last year in San Francisco alone — money that subsidizes the rest of Sutter’s operations — they say the company can and should do better.

“This is about standing up to corporate blackmail,” SFHHJJ member Steve Woo, a community organizer with the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, told us.

 

PIVOTAL PROJECT

CPMC is perhaps the most high-profile project the board will consider this year, one that will impact the city for years, so the political and economic stakes are high.

The Planning Commission voted 5-1 on April 26 to approve the deal and its environmental impact report, citing the project’s economic benefits and the looming deadline for rebuilding St. Luke’s. The Board of Supervisors was scheduled to consider the appeal of that decision on June 12 (after Guardian press time), but activists say supervisors planned to continue the item until July 17.

In the meantime, the board’s Land Use Committee has scheduled a series of hearings on different aspects of the project, starting June 15 with a project overview and presentation on the jobs issue, continuing June 25 with a hearing on its impacts to the health care system. Traffic and neighborhood impacts would be heard the next week, and then housing after that.

Calvin Welch, a progressive activist and nonprofit affordable housing developer, said the project’s EIR makes clear just how paltry CPMC’s proposed mitigation measures are. It indicates that the project’s 3,000 new workers will create a demand for at least 1,400 new two-bedroom housing units. Even accepting that estimate — which Welch says is low given that many employees have families and won’t simply be bunking with one another — the $26 million being provided for new housing construction would only create about 90 affordable studio apartments.

“We’re going to end up, if we want to house that workforce, subsidizing CPMC,” Welch told us.

Compounding that shortcoming is the fact that the Cathedral Hill Hospital is being built in a special use district that city officials established for the Van Ness corridor — where there is a severe need for more housing, particularly affordable units. The SUD calls for developers to build three square feet of residential for every square foot of non-residential development.

“That would require building 3 million square feet of residential housing with this project,” Welch said. “We don’t think $26 million meets the housing requirement for this project, let alone what was envisioned by this [Van Ness corridor] plan.”

SFHHJJ is calling for CPMC to provide at least $73 million for affordable housing, with no more than 20 percent of that going to the company’s first-time homebuyer assistance program. That assistance program does nothing to add to the city’s housing stock and critics call it a valuable employee perk that will only increase the demand for existing housing — and thus drive up prices.

But the business community is strongly backing the deal, and the trade unions are expected to turn out hordes of construction workers at the hearing to make this an issue of jobs — rather than a corporation paying for its impacts to the community.

“After a decade of discussion, debate and compromise, the city’s departments, commissions, labor, business and community groups all agree on CPMC,” San Francisco Chamber of Commerce President Steve Falk wrote in a June 8 e-mail blast entitled “Message to the Board of Supervisors: Don’t Stand in the Way of Progress.”

“The fate of our city’s healthcare infrastructure now lies solely with the Board of Supervisors,” the Chamber says. “When it comes time to vote, let’s insist they make the right choice.”

Yet it’s simply inaccurate to say that labor and community groups support the deal, and both are expected to be well-represented at the hearings.

 

CARE FOR WHOM?

Economic justice issues related to health care access and costs are another potential pitfall for this project. SFJJHH activists note that no supervisors have signed on to sponsor the project yet — which is unusual for something this big — and that even the board’s most conservative supervisors have raised concerns that the city’s health care costs aren’t adequately contained by the deal.

“There’s a significant amount of dissatisfaction with the deal, even among conservatives,” SFJJHH member Paul Kumar, a spokesperson for the National Union of Healthcare Workers, told the Guardian.

On the progressive side, a big concern is that CPMC is proposing to rebuild the 220-bed St. Luke’s with only 80 beds, which activists say is not enough. And even then, CPMC is only agreeing to operate that hospital for 20 years, or even less time if Sutter’s fortunes turn around and the hospital giant begins losing money.

CPMC Director of Communications Kathryn Graham, responding by email to questions and issues raised by the Guardian, wrote generally and positively about CPMC and the project without addressing the specific concerns about whether housing, transportation, and other mitigation payments are too low.

On the jobs issue, she wrote, “Our project will create 1,500 union construction jobs immediately—and preserves and protects the 6,200 health care professional jobs that exist today at the hospitals. Currently, nearly 50 percent of our current employees live in San Francisco. During the construction phase of this project, we are committed to hire at least 30 percent of workers from San Francisco. We will create 500 permanent new jobs in just the next five years—200 are guaranteed to be local hires from underserved San Francisco neighborhoods. We don’t know where you got the ridiculous idea that our employees must reapply for jobs at our new hospitals. That is incorrect.”

Yet CPMC has resisted requests by the California Nurses Association and other unions to be recognized at the new facility or to agree to card-check neutrality that would make it easier to unionize. And union representatives say CPMC has offered few assurances about staffing, pay, seniority, and other labor issues.

As one CNA official told us, “If they aren’t going to guarantee jobs to the existing employees, those are jobs lost to the city.”

“We’re giving Sutter a franchise over San Francisco’s health care system for 30 to 40 years, so we should ensure there are basic worker and community protections,” Kumar said.

Welch and other activists say they believe CPMC is prepared to offer much more than it has agreed to so far, and they’re calling on the supervisors to be tougher negotiators than the Mayor’s Office was, including being willing to vote down the project and start over if it comes down to that.

“They make too much money in this city to just leave town,” Welch said of CPMC’s implied threat to pull out of San Francisco and shutter St. Luke’s. “It’s bullshit.”

Mayor Lee’s business tax reform will include new revenue

Sasha Cuttler
-
30
Mayor Lee’s business tax reform will include new revenue

Mayor Ed Lee has acquiesced to labor’s demand that the business tax reform measure being negotiated for the November ballot raise tens of millions of dollars in new revenue, rather than being revenue-neutral as Lee and business leaders had previously insisted, according to Guardian sources in both the business and progressive communities who are involved in the ongoing negotiations.

As we previously reported, SEIU Local 1021 had demanded that the measure – which must be submitted to the Board of Supervisors by Tuesday – raise $30-50 million in additional revenue to prevent cuts to city services and to recapture money the city lost when the largest downtown corporations sued the city in 2001 to invalidate its gross receipts tax. If not, the union threatened to qualify a competing ballot measure that would raise the money, something neither side wants.

Sources say the Mayor’s Office has agreed to structure the tax to raise at least $25 million in new revenue, and some believe they will settle on $30 million, which is being supported by the big technology companies and is probably enough for labor to sign onto the deal.

But a complicating factor is the fact that Lee’s representatives are simultaneously negotiating another ballot measure to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that will also need to generate revenue, most likely through an increase in the real estate transfer tax, something the commercial landlords are opposing.

The business community has opposed any tax increases, but it is split between the big technology companies who helped elect Lee and more traditional businesses, including the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) companies that all observers say are likely to get hit with a higher tax burden whatever the outcome of the current negotiations.

There is an urgency to get this deal done now because of the fast-approaching deadline to introduce ballot measures to the board, and the fact that under state law revenue measure can be passed with only a simple majority of voters only in presidential election years.

 

Mecke joins crowded District 5 supervisorial race

Sasha Cuttler
-
26
Mecke joins crowded District 5 supervisorial race

Progressive activist Quintin Mecke jumped into the District 5 supervisorial race today, echoing gentrification concerns raised this week by the Guardian and The New York Times and promising to be an independent representative of one of the city’s most progressive districts, a subtle dig at Sup. Christina Olague’s appointment by Mayor Ed Lee.

“The City is at an economic crossroads. As a 15 year resident of District 5, I cannot sit idly by while our City’s policies force out our residents and small businesses, recklessly pursuing profits for big business at whatever cost,” he began a letter to supporters announcing his candidacy, going on to cite the NYT article on the new tech boom that I wrote about earlier this week.

“What we do next will define the future of San Francisco; the city is always changing but what is important is how we choose to manage the change. One path leads to exponential rent increases, national corporate chain store proliferation, and conversion of rent-controlled housing. The other path leads to controlled and equitable growth, where the fruits of economic development are shared to promote and preserve what is great about this City and our district,” Mecke wrote.

Mecke came in second to Gavin Newsom in the 2007 mayor’s race and then served as the press secretary to Assembly member Tom Ammiano before leaving that post last week to run for office. Mecke joins Julian Davis and John Rizzo in challenging Olague from her left, while London Breed and Thea Selby are the leading moderates in a race that has 10 candidates so far, the largest field in the fall races.

Although he never mentioned Olague by name, Mecke closed his message by repeatedly noting his integrity and independence, a theme that is likely to be a strong one in this race as Olague balances her progressive history and her alliance with the fiscally conservative mayor who appointed her.

“Politics is nothing without principles; and it’s time now to put my own principles into action in this race,” Mecke wrote. “District 5 needs a strong, independent Supervisor. I am entering this race to fight for the values that I believe in and to fight to preserve what is great about District 5 and the city. I have brought principled independence to every issue I’ve worked on and that’s what I’ll continue to bring to City Hall.”

In an interview with the Guardian, Mecke said he sees the campaign as a “five-month organizing project” to reach both regular voters and residents of the district who haven’t been politically engaged, including those in the tech sector. He’d like to see the perspective of workers represented in discussions about technology, not simply the narrow view of venture capitalist Ron Conway that Mayor Lee has been relying on.

“Local politics needs new blood,” Mecke said, “it needs to hear from these people.”

It’s the money, stupid

Zelda Bronstein
-
10
It’s the money, stupid

If you want to know what American politics looks like in a post-Citizens United world, check out the June 5 elections.

It’s not that this specific court case played a role in all of the key races — the tobacco industry could have spent $47 million to defeat a cigarette tax with or without Citizens United — but around the country, you saw the role that big money played in literally altering the political landscape.

Take Wisconsin. The national news media twist on this will call it a test of Obama’s field campaign and a referendum on labor, but it was really all about money. Walker and his big-biz allies raised $30 million, a lot of it through barely-regulated super PACs, and outspent Tom Barrett by more than 7-1.

In California, Prop. 29, which would have put a $1 tax on each pack of cigarettes to pay for cancer research, was way ahead in the polls, and I was pretty sure it was going to win handily — how can you vote against a tax on a product that kills people to fund a cure for the disease it causes? Prop. 29 had a 30-point lead a couple of months ago.

Then came the blitz — $47 million in TV ads, funded by a couple of big tobacco companies. The ads were classics of the type — misdirection and confusion aimed at getting people to vote No. And it worked: Prop. 29 is going down to a narrow defeat.

In San Francisco, Prop A, with little money and not much of a campaign, never had a serious chance. But the flood of Recology money made sure it never got even 25 percent of the vote (although if you asked people, outside of the campaign, whether the garbage contract should be put out to bid, most of them would say yes).

I think Recology money had an impact on the Democratic County Central Commitee, too; Recology paid for a lot of slate cards that promoted a lot of more moderate candidates. The company also paid for progressive slate cards (the Milk Club etc.), and I haven’t counted them all, but in the end, slate cards matter in the DCCC and they may have made the difference.

The local election was so low-turnout that it’s hard to draw any serious conclusions from it. But overall, money carried the day June 5 — and that’s a scary message.

 

Wage theft task force approved

-
24

The Board of Supervisors June 5 voted unanimously to create a wage theft task force. The task force will make recommendations to city departments concerning the prevention and correction of wage theft in the city.

Wage theft refers to employers paying less than their employees are due, and can include not paying extra for overtime, not allowing breaks, confiscating tips, and paying less than minimum wage. A 2010 study of labor conditions in Chinatown restaurants conducted by the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) found that some 76 percent of employees did not receive overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours in a week, and roughly half were not being paid San Francisco’s minimum wage.

The industries where wage theft is prominent range from restaurants and retail to domestic work. 

Approval of the task force is a step forward for groups like CPA that have been working to combat wage theft for years. It builds on the wage theft prevention ordiance, passed last July. The ordinance doubled the fine for employers who retaliate against workers that seek recourse for wage theft, and enhanced the power of the cit’s Office of Labor Standards and Enforcement (OLSE).

The Progressive Workers Alliance- a coalition of CPA, Young Workers United, the Filipino Community Center and others- advocated for the task force and helped bring in dozens of supporters to the meeting. 

Workers who suspect that their employers have violated local labor laws often come to these groups for help. Between the OLSA and advocacy groups, the people following up with these claims see a widespread problem. According to Shaw San Liu of the CPA, there are “probably hundreds if not thousands coming forward every year, and there are many more who don’t.” 

“There have been experiments in coordinating with the City Attorney and with the health department to revoke food permits,” said Liu. 

She hopes “the task force will build off these successful examples and see how we can expand them to a more comprehensive strategy.”

 

Supervisors dominate DCCC race, but key newbies join them

Sasha Cuttler
-
5

“I just stopped by on my way to finish campaigning,” Sup. David  Campos told me at the Bike Coalition’s 20th Annual Golden Wheel Awards (more on that tomorrow), the first in more than a majority of the Board of Supervisors at the event.

Campos was campaigning for reelection to the Democratic Party County Central Committee (DCCC) and the polls were still going to be open for almost two more hours. Perhaps he could still reach the one in four registered SF voters who bothered to weigh in on this lackluster election.

“There was nothing really on the ballot that excited voters,” Campos said. “Hopefully November will be different.”

Tonight’s returns — for leadership of a local Democratic Party that hopes for more  voter engagement in the fall races — showed that Campos and fellow supervisors David Chiu, John Avalos, and Scott Wiener expectedly topped the pack, with Bevan Dufty, who moved from the board to the Mayor’s Office this year, in fifth place. And longtime former legislator Carole Migden’s sixth place fininish in the 14-seat eastside DCCC race helped show that it was mostly about name recognition.

But there were a couple of first-time candidates in the winning field: Matt Dorsey and Zoe Dunning, who finished 8th and 12th respectively. Both played key roles in recent LGBT politics: Dorsey as the City Attorney’s Office spokesperson during the same-sex marriage saga of the last eight years, Dunning as a poster lesbian in ending the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

“I think Zoe and Matt are the ones to watch,” DCCC member Alix Rosenthal told me at the Buck Tavern as she celebrated her reelection, after campaigning hard for both the progressive and women’s slates.     

Unprompted, Dorsey returned the recognition when I stopped by his party down the street at Churchill. “Alix and Rafael [Mandelman, who organized the progressive slate and finished 10th, right after Sup. Malia Cohen] ran other things, so it’s apples and oranges,” Dorsey humbly said of the two former Dist. 8 supervisorial candidates he bested, when I asked about his strong finish.

Dorsey ran an aggressive campaign, targeting high-turnout precincts and working hard to get the full spectrum of political endorsements (and posting all his answers to each group online), what he called “Moneyball politics.” And it translated into an impressive finish for a freshman candidate but longtime politico.  

“Right now, I’m looking to get back to the gym after a year and a half of campaigning,” said Dorsey, the spokesperson for the mayoral campaign of City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who was at the party, along with District Attorney George Gascon. 

Dorsey and his fellow Guardian/progressive slate members did better in Eastside Dist. 17 than Westside Dist. 19, taking 10 of 14 seats compared to four of 10, leaving a near-equal balance with the moderate Democrats once the seats of elected officials are factored in.

But if the spirits count for anything, Dorsey told me he ran especially hard to earn the seat that outgoing DCCC Chair Aaron Peskin appointed him to when long progressive activist Michael Goldstein died last year.

“Knowing that it was his seat,” Dorsey said, “motivated me to work harder.”

40 percent reporting: Not a lot of change

Zelda Bronstein
-
0

Witrh 40 percent of the precincts reporting, there’s been very little change in the results, which is surprising: Typically the absentees don’t reflect the election-day turnout. But Prop. A is still going down by huge margins, Prop. B is still winning (and at this point, that one’s probably in the bag, striking a blow against the privatization of public resources and offering a vote of no-confidence in the direction of the city’s Rec-Park department).

It appears likely that there will be an expensive November race for Assembly in D19, with the downtown-funded (but otherwise unknown) Democrat Michael Breyer who ran an almost-Republican campaign heading for a second-place finish against Assessor Phil Ting.

And there’s no change in the results for the DCCC.

I’m a little surprised (and disappointed) that Gabriel Haaland, a longtime incumbent, isn’t making the cut this time, and I’m surprised (and pleased) that newcomer Justin Morgan, a public-health physician, is still in the top 14 on the East Side. Zoe Dunning and Matt Dorsey, two very visible LGBT leaders (she on DADT, he on same-sex marriage) are running strong; Dorsey’s in the progressive camp, and Dunning, a former military officer, is more conservative. School Board member Hyrda Mendoza isn’t making the cut, either, which is odd for a citywide elected official.

At this point, it appears that theSF Democratic Party will be a more conservative organization than we’ve been used to over the past four years. At most, the progressives will have 14 or 15 votes out of 32 (24 elected and eight ex-officio). There are plenty of reasons for that, among them the retirement of some longtime progressive members (Aaron Peskin, Jane Morrison, Milton Marks); the redistricting that created a West Side district very few progressives could compete in — and the move by the more conservative elements of the party to run a slate that included Dufty and Cohen.

Things could still change; I could be wrong. But I don’t think I am.

Early SF results: No on A, Yes on B

Zelda Bronstein
-
5

The first results just got posted, and it’s a fairly large number of votes. More than 60,000 people voted by mail, and there’s enough to draw a few conclusions.

Prop. A, the measure that would have required competitive bidding for the city’s garbage contracts, is dead, losing in the early absentees 77-23. No surprise that it’s losing; getting 23 percent of the vote with no campaign to speak of up against the full might of Recology’s money and political connections is actually pretty impressive.

Prop. B, the Coit Tower measure, is winning, 55-45, which is a good place to be at this stage. I’d say it’s time for the Yes on B camp to start celebrating.

The DCCC early returns show a lot of what we expected — the elected officials and incumbents are doing well. David Chiu is in first, beating Scott Wiener, who is beating John Avalos. For what it’s worth.

After that, it’s Bevan Dufty, David Campos, former Sup. Leslie Katz and former state Sen. Carole Migden.

Interestingly, Matt Dorsey, an appointed incumbent facing the electorate for the first time, is ahead of Sup Malia Cohen. Rafael Mandleman, Zoe Dunning, Alix Rosenthal, Petra DeJesus, and Justin Morgan finish out the top 14 on the East Side.

Those are the early absentees, and the difference between Morgan and incumbent Gabriel Haaland, now in 18th place, is just 800 votes. So it will change.

Right now, the progressives have 9 of the 14 seats on the East Side, but only 4 of the 10 on the West Side, which won’t be enough to elect a progressive chair and ensure good endorsements in the fall. But the margins are so thin and it’s so early we can’t call it yet.

On the West Side of town, Assessor Phil Ting is comfortably in the lead for the 19th Assembly District, but newcomer Michael Breyer, a conservative Democrat who spent a ton of money, is edging Republican Matthew Del Carlo by two points, setting up the possibility that Ting will have to raise money and face off against Breyer in November.

Two things to watch for in CA

Zelda Bronstein
-
1

There are two things that could be really significant around the state tonight (and no, I’m not talking about which liberal, balding Jewish man wins the primary in the San Fernando Valley, which will almost certainly be replayed in the fall). There’s a real chance that, thanks to redistricting, the Democrats could pick up enough seats to win a super-majority in the state Senate — meaning they could pass new taxes despite GOP recalcitrance. And while it’s unlikely that the Dems will get a two-thirds majority in the Assembly, there are a few Republicans out there who are starting to question the Grover Norquist line.

So what happens if, say, both houses approve an oil-severance tax or a restoration of the vehicle license fee? Will the Guv, who insisted in his campaign that he’d accept “no new taxes without a vote of the people” going to veto it? Seriously — is Jerry Brown going to veto an oil-severance tax?

Then there’s the Second Congressional District, where corporate Dem Jared Huffman is almost certainly going to come in first — but Norman Solomon, who is way closer politically to outgoing Rep. Lynn Woolsey, has a good chance of coming in second and making it to the November election. In which case the North Coast will see a classic fight between the left and the center of the Democratic Party, in one of the most progressive districts in the country — and it will attract national attention.

By the way: I’ve been checking out so many blogs tonight that I can’t remember where I saw this, but: The huge turnout in Wisconsin indicates that sharp political distinctions, clear-cut lines and hard fights, improve voter turnout. These cautious, don’t-take-risks pols shouldn’t be surprised that hardly anyone wants to vote for them.

SEIU deal could undermine progressive coalition

Zelda Bronstein
-
1
SEIU deal could undermine progressive coalition

I stumbled on the oddest deal on a union-gossip website, but I’ve checked it out and it’s really happening — and it could be a total trainwreck for progressive politics in San Francisco.

The deal, still in draft form, is an “agreement on political unity” between SEIU Local 1021, one of the most progressive unions in the state and part of the voice of the left in San Francisco, and SEIU-UHW, a much more moderate union that has been taken over by the international. (One example of the tension between the two: Local 1021 has been and remains a strong supporter of Sup. John Avalos, and UHW leader Leon Chow is challenging him in District 11, something that even Randy Shaw, who increasingly disagrees with my politics, finds distasteful.) UHW has attacked the hotel workers union and split with most of the rest of labor around CPMC.

The way the deal would work is this: Both unions would choose a candidate. If they disagreed, the head of the international, Mary Kay Henry, would appoint a mediator to essentially break the tie. That person could unilaterally “direct the joint endorsment of one candidate.”

It would be a radical change — for the first time, the members of Local 1021 would cede final control of their endorsements to the international.

Ed Kinchley, a co-chair of Local 1021’s political action commitee, told me he finds the proposal troubling. “I’m not at all interested in having the international have a say in who we endorse,” he said. “Decisions about endorsements should be in the hands of our members.”

He said he’s all in favor of trying to find areas of agreement between the two SEIU locals — “but do I want to have something enforced on us if we can’t agree? No.”

The agreement specificially exempts the Avalos-Chow race and it calls for UHW to endorse Eric Mar and David Campos. Campos is basically unbeatable, so that doesn’t matter. The nod from UHW to Mar will be helpful to him.

But overall, this could dilute the progressive force of one of the most important voices in local politics. Local 1021 is more than just a city employee union; it’s a part of the progressive coalition, part of the left in this town. Forcing a joint endorsement with a union that is distinctly not part of the progressive coalition can only undermine Local 1021’s historical role.

And it’s odd; as the Stern Burger with Fries blog puts it:

If you’re Local 1021, why would you sign this deal? Local 1021 is a big political player in San Francisco with lots of members, money and foot soldiers. [UHW leader Dave] Regan has shown again and again that he’s hostile to the priorities of Local 1021’s members. Basically, he’s bedded down with the business community. So, if you’re [Local 1021’s Roxanne] Sanchez, why would you agree to this so-called “unity” deal? It hands over control of Local 1021’s political destiny to Regan and some SEIU bureaucrat in DC. Plus, when push comes to shove, everyone knows that [International head] Mary Kay Henry is going to back Regan over Sanchez. If Local 1021 accepts this deal, they’re basically declaring unilateral disarmament as far as their political future.

I couldn’t reach Sanchez and her phone isn’t taking messages. But I spoke with Chris Daly, the former supervisor and now Local 1021 political director, who told me he wasn’t there when the deal was negotiated. But he said “we’ve had many internal discussions on this” and that “the policy of speaking with one voice makes sense.”

When I told him I thought this was a progressive fumble, he said: “I disagree with your analysis.”

The proposal is scheduled to come before the SEIU 1021 COPE June 7.

Bikes and business, a new and evolving union in SF

Sasha Cuttler
-
3

Building Owners and Managers Association of San Francisco (BOMA) is being honored by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition at next week’s annual Golden Wheel Awards, recognizing BOMA’s help earlier this year in passing a city law requiring commercial landlords to let workers bring their bikes indoors or another secure bike parking area.

It is a strange and noteworthy honor for BOMA, a downtown force that is usually at odds with SFBC and progressive political entities, including opposing an effort to pass similar bikes-in-buildings legislation a decade ago. But this time, BOMA was an early partner on legislation sponsored by progressive Sup. John Avalos, an indicator of just how much the politics surrounding urban cycling have changed in recent years, particularly in San Francisco.

In the city where Critical Mass was born 20 years ago this fall – since then exported to dozens of cities around the world, globalizing urban cyclists’ demand for the equal right to use roadways often built mainly for automobiles – the bicycle has moved from the preferred mode of rebels, children, and the poor into a mainstream transportation option recognized even by the suits in the corner offices.

“They’re responding to a market demand. They see lots of employees looking for bike access in their buildings,” San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Lean Shahum said BOMA.

It was a point echoed by John Bozeman, BOMA’s government and public affairs manager and a regular cyclist. “Ten years ago, our members didn’t see it as something their tenants were asking of them,” Bozeman told us. “With the rise of young workers coming into our buildings, there was a greater demand for better bike access.”

But there are different ways of looking at this switch, which could undermine the progressive movement in San Francisco as SFBC increasingly adopts a more neoliberal approach of reliance on corporate support, rather than relying primarily on the political strength of their 12,000-plus members. For example, the Sunday Streets road closures that SFBC helped initiate are sponsored by a long list of corporations looking to improve their public image, including Bank of America (whose representative recently joined SFBC and city officials at a press conference announcing an expansion of the program), California Pacific Media Center, and Clear Channel, and in the past PG&E and Lennar.

“It reflects that bicycling sells real estate, and that’s a recent trend in hip, tech-focused cities,” says Jason Henderson, a San Francisco State University geography professor now finishing up a book on the politics of transportation, which explores these shifting dynamics.

The relationship with and dependence upon the business community could diminish SFBC’s willingness to champion bold reforms to our transportation system, such as congestion pricing charges for cars entering the city core during peak hours or demanding public transit mitigation fees of downtown corporations.

“On the other hand, it’s helping legitimize the bike as a legitimate form of transportation when the power elite accept it,” Henderson said.

Whatever the case, SFBC decision to honor BOMA with an award – which will be presented on the evening of June 5 during an event at the swank War Memorial Building – represents a new and evolving political dynamic for San Francisco.

“San Francisco has become a very different place in terms of embracing bicycling,” Shahum said. “There is a strong understanding that biking is good for the economy.”

Housing and highrise offices

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

EDITORIAL It's something of a civic shame that the only way San Francisco can build a new transit terminal is to sell a private developer the rights to stick a 1,070-foot highrise office tower on public land. In fact, it's a sad statement on the city, state, and local government: Once upon a time — and it wasn't the long ago — tax dollars collected through a progressive system paid for major infrastructure projects.

But there's no easy way to raise $4 billion in tax money for the Transbay Terminal — even though it ought to be seen as part of the high-speed rail project, and the federal and state government ought to be picking up the tab. So San Francisco ambles forward, selling land and lease rights to the highest bidder.

In this case, Gerald Hines of Houston won the right to build the largest highrise west of the Mississippi on property owned by the Transbay Joint Powers Authority. There are all sorts of drawbacks to the deal — among other things, it will cast shadows on a number of city parks, all the way to Portsmouth Square in Chinatown. Like any massive office complex, it will put pressure on Muni, on city streets, on police and fire and other city services — and no commercial office building ever pays its fair share of that burden. And since in this case the major recipient of the money from the project will be the TJPA, the city's General Fund will suffer.

Oh, and the building is ugly.

Meanwhile, city planners want to increase height limits all around the Transbay Terminal and allow hundreds of units of new (luxury) housing and more commercial office space. It's going to be a new highrise neighborhood, complete with a rooftop park and a few little patches of ground-level open space, which won't get a whole lot of sun, particularly in the morning and evening.

And at this point, there's been very little focus on what ought to be the defining issue of this and the other major developments on the city's planning horizon, and that's affordable housing.

This city has a terrible jobs-housing mix. The vast majority of the people who currently work in San Francisco can't afford to buy a house here, and many of them can only rent if they pay for more than the federal standard of one-third of their income for housing. So people who work in hotels and restaurants and city, state and federal offices and hospitals and even financial district companies wind up living far from the city and commuting. Nobody thinks that's a sound environmental policy.

And this kind of full-scale rezoning and development will only make it worse. According to the City Planning Department, the Hines project will pay about $27 million into the city's affordable housing fund, enough to pay for maybe 60 or 70 housing units. That won't even begin to cover the need created by the thousands of employees who will fill that tower. The market-rate housing on the site will almost certainly be beyond the reach of most San Franciscans, and probably many of the office workers who fill the Hines building. And only 35 percent of the new housing — at maximum — will be affordable.

San Francisco has to get a grip. The city can't keep allowing more high-end housing and highrise office space without a plan to meet its housing needs. We're glad to see the mayor talking about a $50 million a year fund, but that will barely meet existing needs; it can't possible keep pace with new development.

So before the supervisors rush ahead to approve this ambitious new downtown district, they need to ask Hines, and the TJPA, and any other developer who comes along, how it intends to meet the demonstrated need for affordable housing that these projects will create — and demand a much higher level of payment that what's currently on the city's books.

Vibrators! Aliens! Cops on the edge! New movies are here!

Sue Vaughan
-
0
Vibrators! Aliens! Cops on the edge! New movies are here!

As we all breathlessly count the days — nay, milliseconds — until the June 1 release of Piranha 3DD, there’s still plenty to gnaw on this Memorial Day weekend. Chernobyl Diaries screens tonight (i.e., the night before it opens) which is usually not a great sign, but it’s likely critic-proof anyway (even for me, someone who’s not entirely opposed to the idea of a new genre: nuclear-meltdown-sploitation! Sit down, 1979’s China Syndrome. This one’s got screaming teens and spooky spooks!) Er, anyway … check back tomorrow for my review of that one.

Meanwhile, apply your brain and/or sense of social justice while watching Michael Glawogger’s final entry in his “globalization trilogy,” Whores’ Glory (Dennis Harvey’s review here), or adjust your popcorn levels accordingly for these other recommends:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkEw3mWs86g

Hysteria Tanya Wexler’s period romantic comedy gleefully depicts the genesis of the world’s most popular sex toy out of the inchoate murk of Victorian quackishness. In this dulcet version of events, real-life vibrator inventor Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) is a handsome young London doctor with such progressive convictions as a belief in the existence of germs. He is, however, a man of his times and thus swallows unblinking the umbrella diagnosis of women with symptoms like anxiety, frustration, and restlessness as victims of a plague-like uterine disorder known as hysteria. Landing a job in the high-end practice of Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), whose clientele consists entirely of dissatisfied housewives seeking treatments of “medicinal massage” and subsequent “parosysm,” Granville becomes acquainted with Dalrymple’s two daughters, the decorous Emily (Felicity Jones) and the first-wave feminist Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal). A subsequent bout of RSI offers empirical evidence for the adage about necessity being the mother of invention, with the ever-underused Rupert Everett playing Edmund St. John-Smythe, Granville’s aristocratic friend and partner in electrical engineering. (1:35) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Lynn Rapoport)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyaFEBI_L24

Men in Black III Why not? It’s been ten years since Men in Black II (the one where Lara Flynn Boyle and Johnny Knoxville — remember them? — played the villains), Will Smith has barely aged, and he hasn’t made a full-on comedy since, what, 2005’s Hitch? Here, he does a variation on his always-agreeable exasperated-guy routine, clashing with his grim, gimlet-eyed partner Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones, and in a younger incarnation, a spot-on Josh Brolin) in a plot that involves a vicious alien named Boris (Flight of the Conchords’ Jermaine Clement), time travel, Andy Warhol, the moon (as both space-exploration destination and modern-day space-jail location), and lines that only Smith’s delivery can make funny (“This looks like it comes from planet damn.”) It’s cheerful (save a bit of melodrama at the end), crisply paced, and is neither a must-see masterpiece nor something you should mindfully sleep through if it pops up among your in-flight selections. Oh, and it’s in 3D. Well, why not? (1:42) Everywhere. (Cheryl Eddy)

Polisse Comparisons to The Wire are not to be tossed around lightly, but when the Hollywood Reporter likened Polisse to an entire season of the masterpiece cop show packed into a single film, it was onto something. Director, co-writer, and star Maïwenn (the object of desire in 2003’s High Tension) hung out with real officers serving in Paris’ Child Protection Unit, drawing inspiration from their dealings with pedophiles, young rape victims, negligent mothers, pint-sized pickpockets, and the like (another TV show worth mentioning in comparison: Law & Order: SVU). But Polisse (the title is deliberately misspelled, as if by a child) is no simple procedural; it plunges the viewer directly into the day-to-day lives of its boisterous characters, who are juggling not just stressful careers but also plenty of after-hours troubles, particularly relationship issues. Between heart wrenching moments on the job (and off), the unit indulges in massive cut-loose episodes of what amounts to group therapy: charades, dance parties, and room-clearing arguments, most of which involve huge quantities of booze. Watching Polisse is a messy, emotional, rewarding experience; no wonder it picked up the Jury Prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. (2:07) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Film Listings May 23-29, 2012

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, and Lynn Rapoport. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock at www.sfbg.com. Complete film listings also posted at www.sfbg.com.

OPENING

Chernobyl Diaries A group of young tourists visit the nuked-out husk of Chernobyl in this spook flick written and produced by Paranormal Activity series creator Oren Peli. (1:26)

Hysteria Tanya Wexler’s period romantic comedy gleefully depicts the genesis of the world’s most popular sex toy out of the inchoate murk of Victorian quackishness. In this dulcet version of events, real-life vibrator inventor Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) is a handsome young London doctor with such progressive convictions as a belief in the existence of germs. He is, however, a man of his times and thus swallows unblinking the umbrella diagnosis of women with symptoms like anxiety, frustration, and restlessness as victims of a plague-like uterine disorder known as hysteria. Landing a job in the high-end practice of Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), whose clientele consists entirely of dissatisfied housewives seeking treatments of “medicinal massage” and subsequent “parosysm,” Granville becomes acquainted with Dalrymple’s two daughters, the decorous Emily (Felicity Jones) and the first-wave feminist Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal). A subsequent bout of RSI offers empirical evidence for the adage about necessity being the mother of invention, with the ever-underused Rupert Everett playing Edmund St. John-Smythe, Granville’s aristocratic friend and partner in electrical engineering. (1:35) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

Keyhole Guy Maddin’s latest is a loose — very loose — take on Homer’s Odyssey, among other elements tossed into a fragmentary whole. Loose enough to keep 30s gangster Ulysses Pick (Jason Patric) traveling no further than between rooms in his decrepit former home. He arrives there with an inept gang, a “drowned” girl (Brooke Palsson) who sure doesn’t act like she’s already dead, a gagged kidnapping victim (David Wontner) who turns out to be his own son — our protagonist is slipshod in the realm of family responsibilities, to say the least — and a powerful desire to see his estranged wife (Isabella Rosellini), who is less than enthused. Already on the premises is the latter’s elderly father, kept naked and chained to her bed for reasons unknown. Impulsive random screwings, killings that immediately give rise to ghosts, an electric chair powered by exercycles, Udo Kier, and other miscellaneous weirdness dots the progress of this phantasmagorical, free associative work — though it’s a lot less fun than that may sound. Maddin is in an experimental mood here (working for the first time in digital, for one thing), and it’s difficult to say just what he’s aiming for, or whether he succeeds. The handsome, cluttered, black-and-white results do ultimately cast a certain spell, but this may be a reliably idiosyncratic director’s least fully realized stab at dream logic and semi-new personal terrain since Twilight of the Ice Nymphs 15 years ago. (1:34) Roxie. (Harvey)

Men in Black 3 Usually movies screw up when casting the younger version of a character, but Josh Brolin as a young Tommy Lee Jones does kinda make sense. (1:42) Four Star, Presidio, Shattuck.

Polisse Comparisons to The Wire are not to be tossed around lightly, but when the Hollywood Reporter likened Polisse to an entire season of the masterpiece cop show packed into a single film, it was onto something. Director, co-writer, and star Maïwenn (the object of desire in 2003’s High Tension) hung out with real officers serving in Paris’ Child Protection Unit, drawing inspiration from their dealings with pedophiles, young rape victims, negligent mothers, pint-sized pickpockets, and the like (another TV show worth mentioning in comparison: Law & Order: SVU). But Polisse (the title is deliberately misspelled, as if by a child) is no simple procedural; it plunges the viewer directly into the day-to-day lives of its boisterous characters, who are juggling not just stressful careers but also plenty of after-hours troubles, particularly relationship issues. Between heart wrenching moments on the job (and off), the unit indulges in massive cut-loose episodes of what amounts to group therapy: charades, dance parties, and room-clearing arguments, most of which involve huge quantities of booze. Watching Polisse is a messy, emotional, rewarding experience; no wonder it picked up the Jury Prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. (2:07) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Whores’ Glory See “Far From Heaven.” (1:59) Lumiere, Shattuck.

ONGOING

Battleship During idle moments before the action revs up, the aliens start menacing, and the deadly razor balls-cum-air mines start rampaging, wrap your noggin around these random brainwaves: can Taylor Kitsch be any better named? Is it possible for Alexander Skarsgård’s glassy eyes to get any deader? Where are all the Hawaiians, Asians, and people of color in this white-bread vision of Hawaii? All matters to puzzle over in this toy franchise hopeful directed by ex-Chicago Hope regular Peter Berg. The 2007 Transformers is the best this gung-ho hybrid of up-with-the-military “Army of One” commercial and alien invasion flick — with plenty of blow-’em-up-real-good explosions and a dab of J-monster movies, but the writing never quite rises to the occasion. Here, an international group of navy folk and their ships are convening in Hawaii for playful war games, though the exercises turn somewhat more serious when alien vessels splash down in the middle of the fun —and some mild, no-investment family drama: Alex (Kitsch) is the screw-up younger brother of stony-faced naval man Stone (Skarsgård) and courting the daughter (Brooklyn Decker) of the fleet commander (Liam Neesom), who seems to hate his guts. The ultimate battle with space invaders, however, promises to turn that all around, as Alex is forced to sailor up and lead crew mates like Rihanna and work with former opponents like Captain Nagata (Tadanobu Asano). Here, at least, in the shadow of Pearl Harbor, U.S. and Japanese naval dudes can heal the wounds of World War II and bond in battle against the last unimpeachable interstellar villains who couldn’t give a rat’s ass if you say “I sunk your battleship.” But Berg’s muddled direction doesn’t help when it comes to piecing out the chronology and balancing assorted perspectives in this latest effort to equate militarism with the games big and little kids play. (2:11) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Chun)

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

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (1:42) Albany, Marina, Piedmont, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki.

Bully Anyone who’s ever been a kid on the wrong side of a bully — or was sensitive and observant enough not to avert his or her eyes — will be puzzling over the MPAA’s R rating of this doc, for profanity. It’s absurd when the gory violence on network and basic cable TV stops just short of cutting characters’ faces off, as one blurred-out bus bully threatens to do to the sweet, hapless Alex, dubbed “Fish Face” by the kids who ostracize him and make his life hell on the bus. It’s a jungle out there, as we all know — but it’s that real, visceral footage of the verbal (and physical) abuse bullied children deal with daily that brings it all home. Filmmaker Lee Hirsch goes above and beyond in trying to capture all dimensions of his subject: the terrorized bullied, the ineffectual school administrators, the desperate parents. There’s Kelby, the gay girl who was forced off her beloved basketball team after she came out, and Ja’Maya, who took drastic measures to fend off her tormenters — as well as the specters of those who turned to suicide as a way out. Hirsch is clearly more of an activist than a fly on the wall: he steps in at one point to help and obviously makes an uplifting effort to focus on what we can do to battle bullying. Nevertheless, at the risk of coming off like the Iowa assistant principal who’s catching criticism for telling one victim that he was just as bad as the bully that he refused to shake hands with, one feels compelled to note one prominent component that’s missing here: the bullies themselves, their stories, and the reasons why they’re so cruel — admittedly a daunting, possibly libelous task. (1:35) Smith Rafael. (Chun)

The Cabin in the Woods If the name “Joss Whedon” doesn’t provide all the reason you need to bum-rush The Cabin in the Woods (Whedon produced and co-wrote, with director and frequent collaborator Drew Goddard), well, there’s not much more that can be revealed without ruining the entire movie. In a very, very small nutshell, it’s about a group of college kids (including Chris “Thor” Hemsworth) whose weekend jaunt to a rural cabin goes horribly awry, as such weekend jaunts tend to do in horror movies (the Texas Chainsaw and Evil Dead movies are heavily referenced). But this is no ordinary nightmare — its peculiarities are cleverly, carefully revealed, and the movie’s inside-out takedown of scary movies produces some very unexpected (and delightfully blood-gushing) twists and turns. Plus: the always-awesome Richard Jenkins, and in-jokes galore for genre fans. (1:35) Metreon, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Dark Shadows Conceptually, there’s nothing wrong with attempting to turn a now semi-obscure supernaturally themed soap opera with a five-year run in the late 1960s and early ’70s into a feature film. Particularly if the film brings together the sweetly creepy triumvirate of Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and Helena Bonham Carter and emerges during an ongoing moment for vampires, werewolves, and other things that go hump in the night. Depp plays long-enduring vampire Barnabas Collins, the undead scion of a once-powerful 18th-century New England family that by the 1970s — the groovy decade in which the bulk of the story is set — has suffered a shabby deterioration. Barnabas forms a pact with present-day Collins matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer) to raise the household — currently comprising her disaffected daughter, Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz), her derelict brother, Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), his mournful young son, David (Gulliver McGrath), David’s live-in lush of a psychiatrist, Dr. Hoffman (Carter), and the family’s overtaxed manservant, Willie (Jackie Earle Haley) — to its former stature, while taking down a lunatic, love-struck, and rather vindictive witch named Angelique (Eva Green). The latter, a victim of unrequited love, is the cause of all Barnabas’s woes and, by extension, the entire clan’s, but Angelique can only be blamed for so much. Beyond her hocus-pocus jurisdiction is the film’s manic pileup of plot twists, tonal shifts, and campy scenery-chewing by Depp, a startling onslaught that no lava lamp joke, no pallid reaction shot, no room-demolishing act of paranormal carnality set to Barry White, and no cameo by Alice Cooper can temper. (2:00) California, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

The Dictator As expected, The Dictator is, yet again, Sacha Baron Cohen doing his bumbling-foreigner shtick. Said character (here, a ruthless, spoiled North African dictator) travels to America and learns a heaping teaspoon of valuable lessons, which are then flung upon the audience — an audience which, by film’s end, has spent 80 minutes squealing at a no-holds-barred mix of disgusting gags, tasteless jokes, and schadenfreude. If you can’t forgive Cohen for carbon-copying his Borat (2006) formula, at least you can muster admiration for his ability to be an equal-opportunity offender (dinged: Arabs, Jews, African Americans, white Americans, women of all ethnicities, and green activists) — and for that last-act zinger of a speech. If The Dictator doesn’t quite reach Borat‘s hilarious heights, it’s still proudly repulsive, smart in spite of itself, and guaranteed to get a rise out of anyone who watches it. (1:23) California, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Elles Graphic sex scenes distinguish this otherwise fairly unremarkable tale of Anne (Juliette Binoche), a magazine writer whose blah life (sure, she has a luxurious apartment, but it’s populated by a distant husband, a sullen teenager, and a younger son who’d rather interface with technology than humans) becomes even more unbearable when she begins a new assignment: an article on college students who moonlight as call girls. The always-reliable Binoche brings depth to her role as a bored woman who finds herself unexpectedly titillated by her close brush with dirty thrills, but her eventual rebellion is anti-climactic after all that naughty build-up. Elles does plenty to earn its NC-17 rating, but filmmaker Malgoska Szumowska could’ve titled it Ennui instead. (1:36) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Eddy)

First Position Bess Kargman’s documentary follows a handful of exceptional young ballet dancers, ranging in age from 10 to 17, over the course of a year as they prepare for the Youth America Grand Prix, the world’s largest ballet scholarship competition. Those who make it from the semifinals (in which some 5,000 dancers aged 9 to 19 perform in 15 cities around the world) to the finals (which bring some 300 contestants to New York City) compete for scholarships to prestigious ballet schools, dance-company contracts, and general notice by both the judges and the company directors in the audience. The film’s subjects come from varied backgrounds — 16-year-old Joan Sebastian lives and studies in NYC, far from his family in Colombia; 14-year-old Michaela was born in civil war-torn Sierra Leone and adopted from an orphanage by an American couple in Philadelphia; 11-year-old Aran, an American, lives in Italy with his mother while his father serves in Kuwait. The common threads in their stories are the daily sacrifices made by them as well as their families, whose energies and other resources are largely poured into these children’s single-minded pursuit. We get a vague sense of the difficult world they are driving themselves, in nearly every waking hour, to enter. But the film largely keeps its focus on the challenges of preparing for the competition, offering us many magnificent shots of the dancers pushing their bodies to mesmerizing physical extremes both on- and offstage. (1:34) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Rapoport)

The Five-Year Engagement In 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, viewers were treated to the startling, tragicomic sight of Jason Segel’s naked front side as his character got brutally dumped by the titular perky, put-together heartbreaker. In The Five-Year Engagement, which he reunited with director Nicholas Stoller to co-write, Segel once again sacrifices dignity and the right to privacy, this time in exchange for fake orgasms (his own), ghastly hand-knit sweaters, egregious facial-hair arrangements, and various other exhaustively humiliating psychological lows — all part of an earnest, undying quest to make people giggle uncomfortably. Segel plays Tom, a talented chef with a promising career ahead of him in San Francisco’s culinary scene (naturally, food carts get a cameo in the film). On the one-year anniversary of meeting his girlfriend, Violet (Emily Blunt), a psychology postgrad, he asks her to marry him in a meticulously planned, gloriously botched proposal scene coengineered by Tom’s oafish friend Alex (Chris Pratt), little realizing that this romantic gesture will soon lead to successive frozen winters in the Midwest (Violet gets offered a job at the University of Michigan), loss of professional stature, cabin fever, mead making, bow-hunting accidents, the titular nuptial postponement, and other, more gruesome events. The humor at times descends to some banally low depths as Segel and Stoller explore the terrain of the awkward, the poorly socialized, and the playfully grotesque. But Segel and Blunt present a believable, likable relationship between two warm, funny, flawed people, and, however disgusted, no one should walk out before a scene in which Violet and her sister (Alison Brie) channel Elmo and Cookie Monster to elaborate on the themes of romantic idealism and marital discontent. (2:04) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Rapoport)

Footnote (1:45) Opera Plaza.

Girl in Progress (1:30) SF Center.

God Bless America Middle-aged office drone Frank (Joel Murray) is not having a good day-week-month-year-life. His ex-wife is about to happily remarry; his only child is a world-class brat who finds father-daughter time “boring;” his neighbors are a young couple who only get more loudly obnoxious when politely asked to keep the noise down. When that and insistent migraines keep Frank awake night after night, the parade of pundit and reality stupidities on TV only turn his insomnia into wide awake fury. Then he’s fired from his job for unjust reasons — on the same day he gets a diagnosis of brain cancer. Mad as hell, not-gonna-take-it-anymore, he impulsively decides to make a “statement” by assassinating a viral-video poster child for “entitlement.” This attracts admiring attention from extremely pushy, snarky teen Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), who appoints herself Bonnie to his reluctant Clyde. They drive around the country bestowing “big dirt naps” on other exemplars of what’s wrong with America today, including religious hate mongers, rude moviegoers, and the purveyors of American Idol-type idiotainment. Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait’s latest feature as writer-director has its head in the right place, and so many good ideas, that it’s a pity this gonzo satire-rant runs out of steam so quickly. Aiming splattering paintball gun at the broadest possible targets, it covers them with disdainful goo but not as much wit as one would like. Plus, Barr’s hyper precocious smart mouth is yet another annoying Juno (2007) knockoff — never mind that she counts Diablo Cody among her (many) pet peeves. If God Bless winds up closer to Uwe Boll’s Postal (2007) than, say, Network (1976) in scattershot impact, it nonetheless almost makes it on sheer outré audacity and will alone. A movie that hates everything you hate should not be sneezed at; if only it hated them with more parodic snap, thematic depth and narrative structure. (1:44) Lumiere. (Harvey)

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

The Hunger Games Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is a teenager living in a totalitarian state whose 12 impoverished districts, as retribution for an earlier uprising, must pay tribute to the so-called Capitol every year, sacrificing one boy and one girl each to the Hunger Games. A battle royal set in a perilous arena and broadcast live to the Capitol as gripping diversion and to the districts as sadistic propaganda, the Hunger Games are, depending on your viewpoint, a “pageant of honor, courage, and sacrifice” or a brutal, pointless bloodbath involving children as young as 12. When her little sister’s name comes up in the annual lottery, Katniss volunteers to take her place and is joined by a boy named Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), with whom she shares an old, unspoken bond. Tasked with translating to the screen the first installment of Suzanne Collins’s rabidly admired trilogy, writer-director Gary Ross (2003’s Seabiscuit, 1998’s Pleasantville) telescopes the book’s drawn-out, dread-filled tale into a manageable two-plus-hour entertainment, making great (and horrifying) use of the original work’s action, but losing a good deal of the narrative detail and emotional force. Elizabeth Banks is comic and unrecognizable as Effie Trinket, the two tributes’ chaperone; Lenny Kravitz gives a blank, flattened reading as their stylist, Cinna; and Donald Sutherland is sufficiently creepy and bloodless as the country’s leader, President Snow. More exceptionally cast are Woody Harrelson as Katniss and Peeta’s surly, alcoholic mentor, Haymitch Abernathy, and Stanley Tucci as games emcee Caesar Flickerman, flashing a bank of gleaming teeth at each contestant as he probes their dire circumstances with the oily superficiality of a talk show host. (2:22) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Rapoport)

Indie Game: The Movie Much like the film business, the video-game biz is mostly controlled by a few huge companies with thousands of employees, hell-bent on ensnaring as many of the billions of dollars spent on games annually as possible. And then, as James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot’s documentary explores, there are the little guys, who are “not trying to be professional” or produce glossy content for the masses. Instead, these individuals (or pairs) take advantage of the miracle of digital distribution to follow their own visions and create their own games. The best-case scenarios — illustrated by San Francisco indie developer Jonathan Blow and his hugely successful Braid — can reap enormous creative and financial rewards, but getting there — as the struggles facing the creators of Super Meat Boy and Fez plainly attest — can be a mentally and physically draining process, filled with frustration and self-doubt, exacerbated by the taunts of haters online. A thoughtful, artfully-shot peek at one tiny corner of a behemoth industry, Indie Game also offers a surprisingly tense, raw look at some very bright minds struggling to triumph on their own terms. (1:36) Roxie. (Eddy)

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

Marley Oscar-winning documentarian Kevin Macdonald (1999’s One Day in September; he also directed Best Actor Forest Whitaker in 2006’s The Last King of Scotland) takes on the iconic Bob Marley, using extensive interviews — both contemporary (with Marley friends and family) and archival (with the musician himself) — and performance and off-the-cuff footage. The end result is a compelling (even if you’re not a fan) portrait of a man who became a global sensation despite being born into extreme poverty, and making music in a style that most people had never heard outside of Jamaica. The film dips into Marley’s Rastafari beliefs (no shocker this movie is being released on 4/20), his personal life (11 children from seven different mothers), his impact on Jamaica’s volatile politics, his struggles with racism, and, most importantly, his remarkable career — achieved via a combination of talent and boldness, and cut short by his untimely death at age 36. (2:25) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Marvel’s The Avengers The conflict — a mystical blue cube containing earth-shattering (literally) powers is stolen, with evil intent — isn’t the reason to see this long-hyped culmination of numerous prequels spotlighting its heroic characters. Nay, the joy here is the whole “getting’ the band back together!” vibe; director and co-writer Joss Whedon knows you’re just dying to see Captain America (Chris Evans) bicker with Iron Man (a scene-stealing Robert Downey Jr.); Thor (Chris Hemsworth) clash with bad-boy brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston); and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) get angry as often as possible. (Also part of the crew, but kinda mostly just there to look good in their tight outfits: Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye and Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow.) Then, of course, there’s Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) running the whole Marvel-ous show, with one good eye and almost as many wry quips as Downey’s Tony Stark. Basically, The Avengers gives you everything you want (characters delivering trademark lines and traits), everything you expect (shit blowing up, humanity being saved, etc.), and even makes room for a few surprises. It doesn’t transcend the comic-book genre (like 2008’s The Dark Knight did), but honestly, it ain’t trying to. The Avengers wants only to entertain, and entertain it does. (2:23) Marina, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Monsieur Lazhar When their beloved but troubled teacher hangs herself in the classroom — not a thoughtful choice of location, but then we never really discover her motives — traumatized Montreal sixth-graders get Bachir Lazhar (Fellag), a middle-aged Algerian émigré whose contrastingly rather strict, old-fashioned methods prove surprisingly useful at helping them past their trauma. He quickly becomes the crush object of studious Alice (Sophie Nelisse), whose single mother is a pilot too often away, while troublemaker Simon (Emilien Neron) acts out his own domestic and other issues at school. Lazhar has his own secrets as well — for one thing, we see that he’s still petitioning for permanent asylum in Canada, contradicting what he told the principal upon being hired — and while his emotions are more tightly wrapped, circumstances will eventually force all truths out. This very likable drama about adults and children from Quebec writer-director Philippe Falardeau doesn’t quite have the heft and resonance to rate among the truly great narrative films about education (like Laurent Cantet’s recent French The Class). But it comes close enough, gracefully touching on numerous other issues while effectively keeping focus on how a good teacher can shape young lives in ways as incalculable as they are important. (1:34) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

The Pirates! Band of Misfits Aardman Animations, home studio of the Wallace and Gromit series as well as 2000’s Chicken Run, are masters of tiny details and background jokes. In nearly every scene of this swashbuckling comedy, there’s a sight gag, double entendre, or tossed-off reference (the Elephant Man!?) that suggests The Pirates! creators are far more clever than the movie as a whole would suggest. Oh, it’s a cute, enjoyable story about a kind-hearted Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) who dreams of winning the coveted Pirate of the Year award (despite the fact that he gets more excited about ham than gold) — and the misadventures he gets into with his amiable crew, a young Charles Darwin, and a comically evil Queen Victoria. But despite its toy-like, 3D-and-CG-enhanced claymation, The Pirates! never matches the depth (or laugh-out-loud hilarity) of other Aardman productions. Yo ho-hum. (1:27) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

Safe The poster would be slightly more on-point if its suave thug of a star, Jason Statham, were hiding behind the scrunched-faced Catherine Chan rather than the other way around — because at times it’s tough to see this alternately enjoyable and credibility-taxing action flick as more than some kind of naked play for the Chinese filmgoer. Jamming the screen with a frantic kineticism, director-writer Boaz Yakin seems to be smoothing over the problems in his vaguely stereotype-flaunting, patchy puzzle of a narrative with a high body count: the cadavers pile like those in an old martial arts flick — made in Asia, it’s implied, where life is cheap and spectacle is paramount. Picking up in the middle, with flashbacks stacked like firewood, Safe opens on young math prodigy Mei (Chan) on the run from the Russian mafia. A pawn and virtual slave of the Chinese mob, she holds a number in her head that all sorts of ruthless crime factions want. To her rescue is mystery man Luke Wright (Statham), who has had his own deadly tussle with the same Russian baddies and is now on the street and on the verge of suicide, believe it or not. It’s tough to wrap your head around the fact that any of Statham’s rock-hard tough guys could possibly crumble — or even have a sense of humor. You’ll need one to accept the ludicrous storyline as well as the notion that a jillion bullets could be fired and never hit his superhuman street-fighting man. (1:35) Metreon. (Chun)

Think Like a Man (2:02) Metreon.

Titanic 3D (3:14) Metreon.

21 Jump Street One of the more pleasant surprises on the mainstream comedy landscape has to be this, ugh, “reboot” of the late-’80s TV franchise. I wasn’t a fan of the show — or its dark-eyed, bad-boy star, Johnny Depp — back in the day, but I am of this unexpectedly funny rework overseen by apparent enthusiast, star, co-writer, and co-executive producer Jonah Hill, with a screenplay by Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) co-writer Michael Bacall. There’s more than a smidge of Bacall’s other high school fantasy, Project X, in the buddy comedy premise of nerd (Hill’s Schmidt) meets blowhard (Channing Tatum’s Jenko), but 21 Jump Street thankfully leapfrogs the former with its meta-savvy, irreverent script and har-dee-har cameo turns by actors like Ice Cube as Captain Dickson (as well as a few key uncredited players who shall remain under deep cover). High school continues to haunt former classmates Schmidt and Jenko, who have just graduated from the lowly police bike corps to a high school undercover operation — don’t get it twisted, though, Dickson hollers at them; they got this gig solely because they look young. Still, the whole drug-bust enchilada is put in jeopardy when the once-socially toxic Schmidt finds his brand of geekiness in favor with the cool kids and so-called dumb-jock Jenko discovers the pleasures of the mind with the chem lab set. Fortunately for everyone, this crew doesn’t take themselves, or the source material, too seriously. (1:49) Metreon. (Chun)

What to Expect When You’re Expecting You needn’t direct what you know, but the first major misstep in this ensemble comedy was tapping a man, Kirk Jones (2005’s Nanny McPhee), to helm. Apparently Nicole Holofcener, Nancy Meyers, and Nora Ephron were too busy — busy making films not based on self-help bestsellers. Instead, What to Expect shows how marginal women can be to certain Hollywood blockbuster decision makers. On the surface, it’s all about the gals and their experiences, as an array of women from somewhat different, if pretty uniformly bourgie, walks of life — fitness star Cameron Diaz, baby store owner Elizabeth Banks, food truck chef Anna Kendrick, and trophy wife Brooklyn Decker — all find themselves knocked up. The odd woman out, surprisingly, is the boho photog played by Jennifer Lopez, who aspires to nest with a baby adopted from Ethiopia. But despite the frantic efforts of Banks, who shoulders the comedy burden here with hormones gone wild and gassy, and the climax, which should choke up all present and wannabe moms, the women are consistently upstaged by the bros, primarily the “Dudes Group” of dads headed up by Chris Rock and Thomas Lennon. Unlike the far-too-prominent, shruggable storyline involving an expectant father and son (Dennis Quaid and Ben Falcone), that crew gets the funniest, and perhaps most perceptive lines, in a baldly patriarchal play to the fellows forced into the cineplexes. Can’t the ladies catch a break, even as their waters are breaking? (1:50) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Where Do We Go Now? With very real, deadly sectarian conflict on their doorstep, a group of Lebanese village women are making it up as they go along in this absurdist, ultimately inspiring dramedy with a dash of musical. Once sheltered by its isolation and the cheek-to-jowl intimacy of its denizens, the uneasy peace between Muslims and Christians in this small town threatens to shatter when the outside world begins to filter in, first through town-square TV broadcasts then tit-for-tat jabs that appear ready to escalate into violence. So the village’s women conspire to preserve harmony any way they can, even if that means importing a motley cadre of Ukrainian “exotic” dancers. What results is a post debauchery climax that almost one-ups 2009’s The Hangover — and a film that injects ground-level merriment and humanity into the headlines, thanks to director, co-writer, and star Nadine Labaki (2007’s Caramel), who has a gimlet eye and a generous spirit. (1:40) Opera Plaza. (Chun) *

 

Julian Davis announces for supervisor in the key battleground district for progressives (5)

-
29

Julian Davis, a widely known progressive activist and organizer in San Francisco since 2002, declared Tuesday  his intention to run for supervisor in District 5, the city’s most liberal district and a battleground district for progressives seeking to regain control of the Board of Supervisors.

He joins eight other challengers to Sup. Christina Olague, appointed by Mayor Ed Lee to replace former Sup. Ross Mirkarimi. He was considered by many to be  the board’s most reliable progressive. He succeeded Matt Gonzales, a strong progressive.  The battle will center on which candidate will be the most reliable progressive vote–Olague,  whose votes are being carefully watched by progressives, or by one of her challengers.

Davis, a Bay Area native,  is a graduate of Brown University and UC Hastings College of the Law, where he graduated magna cum laude. He has worked in government and non-profit and legal sectors on community development, civil rights, social justice, public power, and environmental causes. He has worked on several candidate and ballot measure campaigns including John Avalos for mayor (20ll), Jane Kim for supervisor (2010), Prop H (2008), Clean Energy Act.) He also led a succeesful campaign in 2007 to free journalist Josh Wolf from federal prison for refusing to reveal sources in a demonstration he was covering.

“I was drawn to San Francisco by the creative energy and culture of the city–by what makes this place so special,” Davis said. “Over the past l0 years, I’ve devoted myself to developing healthy communities. I’m running for supervisor to keep the city a vibrant home for the every day people that make San Francisco real.”  b3

 

 

 

 

State of debate

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
11
State of debate

yael@sfbg.com

On May 24, a panel of three Jewish activists and authors from the Bay Area will discuss the historical figures and ancestors that inspire their work today. The event was originally scheduled to take place at the Jewish Community Library, operated by the Bureau of Jewish Education (BJE), which is largely supported by the Jewish Community Federation (JCF, or “the Federation”).

Leaders at the BJE canceled the event in January after discussions about its content with organizers of the panel, who then found another venue: Congregation Sha’ar Zahav. That seemed like a harmless turn of events that has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at least not directly.

But with the current state of discourse in the Bay Area’s Jewish community, just beneath the surface are complex dynamics that raise issues of censorship, bonds forged by religion, whether certain criticisms of Israel should be off-limits, and a battle for the hearts of minds of Jews in the diaspora.

Anti-war activist Rae Abileah has found herself at the middle of this battle. She is on the panel to discuss her great uncle Joseph Abileah, an Israeli pacifist who was charged and tried in 1949 after he refused to join the army as part of Israel’s mandatory military service.

Abileah is a member of Code Pink who is outspoken about her opposition to the Israeli occupation in Palestine. The panel is meant to discuss decades-old work, not the current state of affairs domestically or in Israel, but Abileah’s inclusion made it too political for some.

In March, the panelists — which also include Julie Gilgoff and Elaine Elinson — and event organizer Diana Scott wrote an open letter to the Jewish Community Library saying, “We find it particularly troubling that an act of censorship has occurred at the Library — an institution that it supposed to be a symbol of open thought in learning in the Jewish Community.”

David Waksberg, the director of the BJE who was instrumental in the decision-making process, said it was nothing of the sort. “We had very honest, productive, and respectful discussions about why the program wasn’t for us,” he told me.

The letter concludes: “We seek to make clear that Federation policies, designed to foster the appearance of Jewish solidarity by shutting down the vital exchange of ideas in the Jewish community, are divisive and intolerable. They are also ultimately ineffective in suppressing dissent, and, paradoxically, undermine the values and mission of some of our most cherished Jewish institutions.”

“The Jewish Community Federation didn’t tell us whether or not to do this program,” Waksberg insists. “They didn’t pressure us one way or another.”

The open letter also discusses funding guidelines, adopted in 2010 by the Federation. The guidelines restrict funding for events that “endorse the BDS (boycott-divestment-sanctions) movement or positions that undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel.”

 

DELEGITIMIZING ISRAEL?

The guidelines have meaning beyond these specific circumstances. They represent a conflict in what counts as diversity of opinion, what counts as dissent, and the incredibly loaded concept of “delegitimizing Israel.”

The guidelines were a response to a controversial 2009 screening of Rachel, a documentary on the life of Rachel Corrie, a 24-year-old who was killed when she stood in front of a bulldozer on its way to level a Palestinian home. The film was screened at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival followed by speaker Cindy Corrie, Rachel’s mother. The film-going crowd yelled and booed, and the Federation threatened to quit funding the festival.

The next year was declared by some Jewish leaders to be the Year of Civil Discourse. The Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), the self-described “central public affairs arm of the organized Bay Area Jewish Community,” organized a year of programming and discussion, with an aim to “elevate the level of discourse in the Jewish community when discussing Israel.” The J Weekly, the magazine of the Jewish Bay Area, reported that “[organizers] agree that the Year of Civil Discourse was a success,” though these organizers acknowledged their work was far from over.

Indeed, the controversies rage on. Two months before the Year of Civil Discourse officially ended Dec. 13, the Museum of Children’s Art in Oakland canceled an exhibit, “A Child’s View from Gaza”, that would have showcased drawings by Palestinian children, after pressure from Jewish organizations.

The director of the JCRC, Doug Kahn, became a spokesperson against the exhibit, butting up against groups like the Middle East Children’s Alliance and Bend the Arc (formerly Progressive Jewish Alliance). In March, an event that would have featured author and journalist Peter Beinart lost support after the JCC of the East Bay learned that one of the event’s moderators was on the board of Bend the Arc. Add this panel to the mix, and the six months since the Year of Civil Discourse ended have proven how taboo topics like BDS and Israeli violence in Palestine remain volatile.

BDS in particular has emerged as an untouchable issue. The campaign is a result of a 2005 Palestinian call for boycott and divestment from Israeli companies, and economic sanctions on Israel. BDSmovement.net, which provides news and background information regarding BDS efforts, lists three goals to the protest: “Ending [Israel’s] occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall; recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”

The campaign has seen effects worldwide. Abileah has organized to promote BDS, in particular working to get Bay Area stores to stop carrying Ahava, skin-care products made in what she calls an illegal Israeli settlement in Palestine.

The BDS campaign is “a tried and true nonviolent tactic to get the Israeli government to uphold international law,” Abileah told me. “We decided to be in solidarity.”

But some Jewish leaders feel BDS goes too far.

“The term delegitimizing Israel refers to the intent to eliminate the Jewish and democratic State of Israel by portraying it as an illegitimate nation,” Kahn wrote in an email. “The boycott/divestment/sanctions movement’s leadership has made clear that this is their ultimate agenda and one of the movement’s explicit objectives would achieve that aim resulting in a dire threat to nearly half of the world’s Jewish population that lives in Israel.”

BDS is mentioned several times in the Federation funding guidelines, and stands out as the only specific example of what it means to “undermine the legitimacy of the state of Israel.”

 

ISOLATE THE EXTREMISTS

But organizations like the Federation and the JCRC aren’t the only ones interested in the path that Israel-Palestine discourse among Bay Area Jews takes. The Reut Institute, a think tank based in Tel Aviv, “has been committed to responding to the assault on Israel’s legitimacy since 2008,” according to the introduction to its 2011 report: “San Francisco as a Delegitimization Hub.”

The report ranks San Francisco and London among the “few global hubs of delegitimization.” It also warns of the dangers of San Francisco in particular as top-delegitimizing city, noting “the role of the San Francisco Bay Area as a generator and driver of broader trends, or as a hub of social experiments…What won’t pass in San Francisco won’t pass anywhere else, and what happens in San Francisco doesn’t stay in San Francisco.'”

San Francisco gets this attention from Reut because of dissent within its Jewish community, which the institute calls globally unparalleled. “While in London delegitimization is being promoted primarily by groups that are not part of the Jewish community…an increasing number of Jews in the San Francisco Bay Area have become ‘agnostic’ towards Israel, and are fueling the delegitimization campaign.”

The report’s authors, Reut’s “national security team,” do not spend much time explaining what “delegitimizing Israel” means. When it does, BDS again stands out as one of the only concrete examples. According to the report, in the Bay Area “the number of individuals who are willing to stand up for Israel is declining while others have been fueling the delegitimization campaign, many times unintentionally, by engaging in acts of delegitimization — namely, actions or campaigns framed by their initiators as a reaction to a specific Israeli policy, which in practice aim to undermine Israel’s political and moral foundations. Examples include support for the BDS movement and the 2010 Gaza Flotilla,” a protest in which ships full of supporters and cargo tried to make it to Palestinian land in violation of an Israeli embargo.

The report labels those looking to delegitimize Israel “extremists.” It warns, however, that those questioning Israel’s policies, when rebuked by its “tradition defenders,” may be swayed into trusting the extremists. It therefore advocates a “broad tent approach,” advising that Jews in the Bay Area initiate a “community-wide deliberation” with an “aim to…drive a wedge between the extremists and those who principally support the legitimacy of Israel’s existence regardless of policy agreements.”

It’s important, according to the report, to make sure that supporters of BDS are seen as “extremists.” The “broad tent” is supposed to contain all Jews, with a diversity of opinions — except those supporting BDS and other acts of “delegitimization.” In light of this goal, the report praises the Federation’s funding guidelines and the Year of Civil Discourse.

“Through the funding guidelines drafted by a JCRC-JCF Working Group…the San Francisco Bay Area has set the standard nationally as the first American Jewish community to develop guidelines delineating red lines that go hand-in-hand with the broad tent approach,” Reut reports. “Additionally, we regard the Year of Civil Discourse…led by the JCRC, as important best practices that could be emulated in other places.”

 

ORTHODOXY

The Bay Area’s left-leaning Jewish organizations may be influential, but under such a hot spotlight, they tread carefully. Congregation Sha’ar Zahav is one such organization. Last year, the synagogue surveyed its members to test opinions on Israel.

“In general, the survey shows that we have a liberal left-leaning congregation,” said Terry Fletcher, a member of Sha’ar Zahav who now heads a committee created to follow up on the survey results. “People tend to blame, shall we say, both sides of the conflict, both Israelis and Palestinians, somewhat equally.”

Fletcher’s committee has organized events and discussions in the wake of the survey since January. “One idea was that we would start with something non-controversial,” Fletcher told me. “But we couldn’t think of anything that everyone on the committee considers non-controversial.”

The programming has featured discussions on evolving relationships with Israel and questioned their nuances. But Fletcher says they haven’t been able to venture into BDS territory.

“I would love it if we could get to a place where we could actually address that,” Fletcher reflected. “And we would want to do it from a balanced perspective. But it’s such an emotional issue.”

There are practical concerns as well. According to Fletcher, the Federation gives a small amount of funding for scholarships for Sha’ar Zahav’s religious school. The money that funded Fletcher’s committee’s programming came from Sha’ar Zahav’s general fund, when there was enough of it. She says that the committee is now operating without a budget due to tight finances. Even so, if the committee’s programming were to breech the Federation’s funding guidelines, it might put the program in jeopardy.

“To me, that’s what’s so problematic about these guidelines,” Fletcher said. “The guidelines are saying, if you want money from us, we have restrictions on what your organization can do. Even though our programming is not funded by the Federation, because it funds something completely unrelated, it could get cut.”

Fletcher also questions that paradigm of “delegitimizing Israel.”

“I think this is a term that people who defend Israel use to label people who criticize Israel in a certain way,” she said. “Many of us would answer that it’s Israel’s own policies that are delegitimizing Israel in the eyes of the world. I don’t find it a useful term.”

Sha’ar Zahav will be hosting the Reclaiming Jewish Activism panel. Davey Shlasko, a member of the congregation who helped facilitate the new arrangement, thinks the concern about Abileah’s associations were misplaced.

“I think it is unfortunate that the predicted objection to Rae’s other work was enough of a concern to cancel an event that is actually about drawing inspiration from our ancestors,” Shlasko told me via email.

But it’s in looking back at history that the panel acquires so much meaning. “It is safe to say that living in the United States, Jews have never been more empowered, safe, and connected to the community they live in,” mused one source, who wished to remain anonymous. “It is inevitable that with such success, the need to band together changed. The group identity changes. Sometimes it’s that fight, that need to rally together, that keeps the group intact.”

For Abileah, “the event will be Jewish activists talking about our ancestors.” She’s upset about the event’s cancellation, but not surprised.

“For a lot of Jewish people it can be challenging to speak out against this issue because you don’t know where your friends stand on this, or your synagogue or even your family,” she said. “There are a lot of people who we say are PEP: progressive except Palestine. My family and community have been supportive, but I’ve gotten hate mail and threats of violence.”

“It sounds like these Jewish institutions that are censoring have so much power, like they’re the mainstream Jewish voice. But I think the majority of Jewish Americans want a resolution to the conflict and are opposed to the occupation,” she said.

And how does she think Joseph Abileah would react to this situation? “I’d like to think that he would be shocked and hurt by it,” she said. “It’s sad to see so much fracture in the Jewish community over this issue.”

The battle of 8 Washington

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
-
24
The battle of 8 Washington

tredmond@sfbg.com

More than 100 people showed up May 15 to testify on a condominium development that involves only 134 units, but has become a symbol of the failure of San Francisco’s housing policy.

I didn’t count every single speaker, but it’s fair to say sentiment was about 2-1 against the 8 Washington project. Seniors, tenant advocates, and neighbors spoke of the excessive size and bulk of the complex, the precedent of upzoning the waterfront for the first time in half a century, the loss of the Golden Gateway Swim and Tennis Club — and, more important, the principle of using public land to build the most expensive condos in San Francisco history.

Ted Gullicksen, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, calls it housing for the 1 percent, but it’s worse than that — it’s actually housing for the top half of the top half of the 1 percent, for the ultra-rich.

It is, even supervisors who voted in favor agreed, housing the city doesn’t need, catering to a population that doesn’t lack housing opportunities — and a project that puts the city even further out of compliance with its own affordable-housing goals.

And in the end, after more than seven hours of testimony, the board voted 8-3 in favor of the developer.

It was a defeat for progressive housing advocates and for Board President David Chiu — and it showed a schism on the board’s left flank that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. And it could also have significant implications for the fall supervisorial elections.

Sup. Jane Kim, usually an ally of Chiu, voted in favor of the project. Sup. Eric Mar, who almost always votes with the board’s left flank, supported it, too, as did Sup. Christina Olague, who is running for re-election in one of the city’s most progressive districts.

At the end of the night, only Sups. David Campos and John Avalos joined Chiu in attempting to derail 8 Washington.

The battle of 8 Washington isn’t over — the vote last week was to approve the environmental impact report and the conditional use permit, but the actual development agreement and rezoning of the site still requires board approval next month.

Both Mar and Olague said they were going to work with the developer to try to get the height and bulk of the 134-unit building reduced.

But a vote against the EIR or the CU would have killed the project, and the thumbs-up is a signal that opponents will have an upward struggle to change the minds of Olague, Kim, and Mar.

 

DEFINING VOTES

The 8 Washington project is one of a handful of defining votes that will happen over the next few months. The mayor’s proposal for a business tax reform that raises no new revenue, the budget, and the massive California Pacific Medical Center hospital project will force board members to take sides on controversial issues with heavy lobbying on both sides.

In fact, by some accounts, 8 Washington was a beneficiary of the much larger, more complicated — and frankly, more significant — CPMC development.

The building trades unions pushed furiously for 8 Washington, which isn’t surprising — the building trades tend to support almost anything that means jobs for their members and have often been in conflict with progressives over development. But the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union joined the building trades and lined up the San Francisco Labor Council behind the deal.

And for progressive supervisors who are up for re-election and need union support — Olague and Mar, for example — defying the Labor Council on this one was tough. “Labor came out strong for this, and I respect that,” Olague told me. “That was a huge factor for me.”

She also said she’s not thrilled with the deal — “nobody’s jumping up and down. This was a hard one” — but she thinks she can get the developer to pay more fees, particularly for parking.

Kim isn’t facing re-election for another two years, and she told me her vote was all about the $11 million in affordable housing money that the developer will provide to the city. “I looked at the alternatives and I didn’t see anything that would provide any housing money at all,” she said. The money is enough to build perhaps 25 units of low- and moderate-income housing, and that’s a larger percentage than any other developer has offered, she said.

Which is true — although the available figures suggest that Simon Snellgrove, the lead project sponsor, could pay a lot more and still make a whopping profit. And the Council of Community Housing Organizations, which represents the city’s nonprofit affordable housing developers, didn’t support the deal and expressed serious reservations about it.

Several sources close to the lobbying effort told me that the message for the swing-vote supervisors was that labor wanted them to approve at least one of the two construction-job-creating developments. Opposing both CPMC and 8 Washington would have infuriated the unions, but by signing off on this one, the vulnerable supervisors might get a pass on turning down CMPC.

That’s an odd deal for labor, since CPMC is 10 times the size of 8 Washington and will involve far more jobs. But the nurses and operating engineers have been fighting with the health-care giant and there’s little chance that labor will close ranks behind the current hospital deal.

Labor excepted, the hearing was a classic of grassroots against astroturf. Some of the people who showed up and sat in the front row with pro-8 Washington stickers on later told us they had been paid $100 each to attend. Members of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, to which Snellgrove has donated substantial amounts of money in the past, showed up to promote the project.

 

BEHIND THE SCENES

But the real action was behind the scenes.

Among those pushing hard for the project were Chinese Chamber of Commerce consultant Rose Pak and community organizer David Ho.

Pak’s support comes after Snellgrove spent years courting the increasingly powerful Chinatown activist, who played a leading role in the effort that got Ed Lee into the Mayor’s Office. Snellgrove has traveled to China with her — and will no doubt be coughing up some money for Pak’s efforts to rebuild Chinese Hospital.

Ho was all over City Hall and was taking the point on the lobbying efforts. Right around midnight, when the final vote was approaching, he entered the board chamber and followed one of Kim’s aides, Matthias Mormino, to the rail where Mormino delivered some documents to the supervisor. Several people who observed the incident told us Ho appeared to be talking Kim in an animated fashion.

Kim told me she didn’t actually speak to Ho at that point, although she’d talked to him at other times about the project, and that “nothing he could have said would have changed anything I did at that point anyway.” Matier and Ross in the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Ho was heard outside afterward saying “don’t worry, she’s fine.”

Matier and Ross have twice mentioned that the project will benefit “Chinatown nonprofits,” but there’s nothing in any public development document to support that assertion.

Chiu told me that no Chinese community leaders called him to urge support for 8 Washington. The money that goes into the affordable housing fund could go to the Chinatown Community Development Corp., where Ho works, but it’s hardly automatic — that money will go into a city fund and can’t be earmarked for any neighborhood or organization.

CCDC director Norman Fong confirmed to me that CCDC wasn’t supporting the project. In fact, Cindy Wu, a CCDC staffer who serves on the city Planning Commission, voted against 8 Washington.

I couldn’t reach Ho to ask why he was working so hard on this deal. But one longtime political insider had a suggestion: “Sometimes it’s not about money, it’s about power. And if you want to have power, you need to win and prove you can win.”

Snellgrove will be sitting pretty if 8 Washington breaks ground. Since it’s a private deal (albeit in part on Port of San Francisco land) there’s no public record of how much money the developer stands to make. But Chiu pointed out during the meeting, and confirmed to me later by phone, that “there are only two data points we know.” One is that Snellgrow informed the Port that he expects to gross $470 million in revenue from selling the condos. The other is that construction costs are expected to come in at about $177 million. Even assuming $25 million in legal and other soft costs, that’s a huge profit margin.

And it suggests the he can well afford either to lower the heights — or, more important, to give the city a much sweeter benefits package. The affordable housing component could be tripled or quadrupled and Snellgrove’s development group would still realize far more return that even the most aggressive lenders demand.

Chiu said he’s disappointed but will continue working to improve the project. “While I was disappointed in the votes,” he said, “many of my colleagues expressed concerns about height, parking, and affordable housing fees that they can address in the upcoming project approvals.”

So what does this mean for the fall elections? It may not be a huge deal — the symbolism of 8 Washington is powerful, but if it’s built, it won’t, by itself, directly change the lives of people in Olague’s District 5 or Mar’s District 1. Certainly the vote on CPMC will have a larger, more lasting impact on the city. Labor’s support for Mar could be a huge factor, and his willingness to break with other progressives to give the building trades a favor could help him with money and organizing efforts. On the other hand, some of Olague’s opponents will use this to differentiate themselves from the incumbent. John Rizzo, who has been running in D5 for almost a year now, told me he strongly opposed 8 Washington. “It’s a clear-cut issue for me, the wrong project and a bad deal for the city.” London Breed, a challenger who is more conservative, told us: “I would not have supported this project,” she said, arguing that the zoning changes set a bad precedent for the waterfront. “There are so many reasons why it shouldn’t have happened,” she said. And while Mar is in a more centrist district, support from the left was critical in his last grassroots campaign. This won’t cost him votes against a more conservative opponent — but if it costs him enthusiasm, that could be just as bad.

Green presidential candidate seeks to energize the disenfranchised

Sasha Cuttler
-
6
Green presidential candidate seeks to energize the disenfranchised

After participating in last weekend’s Green Party presidential debate against Roseanne Barr in San Francisco, which we cover in this week’s paper, frontrunner candidate Jill Stein stopped by the Bay Guardian office to chat about her hopes for progressive change in this tumultuous political year.

“The political-corporate establishment should not be given a pass in the voting booth,” the Massachusetts physician told us. “Four more years of Wall Street rule is what we get if you give them your vote.”

She ticked off a litany of bipartisan failures from the Democratic and Republican parties, from reforming Wall Street and narrowing the wealth gap to seriously addressing climate change and this country’s wasteful wars, and said people are fed up and want fundamental reforms.

“The rebellion is in full swing, you just don’t hear about it from the press,” she said. “With the exception of the Bay Guardian, we don’t have a press. We have an o-press and a re-press.”

This is Stein’s first run for national office, but she already faced off against presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the 2002 Massachusetts governor’s race, garnering just 3.5 percent of the vote but winning praise in the Boston Globe for her debate performance. She thinks both Romney and Obama are vulnerable this year, although she said, “I’m not holding my breath that we’re going to win, but I’m not running to lose.”

Her plan is to wage an aggressive grassroots and social media campaign to capitalize on the discontent most Americans feel with both major political parties, and to hopefully catch enough fire to reach 15 percent support in national polls, the threshold for getting into the presidential debates. “If we can get into the debates, we can really change things.”

To get there, Stein plans to reach out to a wide variety of groups on the left and across the spectrum, including supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which she toured last year, visiting 25 encampments across the country, most of them populated by people wary of modern electoral politics.

“When I go to Occupy, I go to support them and not ask for their support,” Stein said, saying that she understood their belief that the electoral system is broken, but that it’s important to participate in it as part of a multi-pronged movement for social change that includes presidential politics. “Can we beat back the predator without have an organization? No, we need a party.”

She thinks the Green Party best represents the values of disenfranchised Americans and has the best vision for where this county needs to go, and she said, “We’re finding all kinds of networks are really getting energized and promoting us.”

‘Reclaiming Jewish Activism’: easier said than done

-
0

This article has been updated

A panel in which three local activists will talk about how their Jewish ancestors inform their present-day work seemed harmless enough. But in the Bay Area’s friction-prone Jewish community, its cancellation has led the organizers to write a letter in protest and accusations that one of the area’s biggest funders of Jewish events, the Jewish Community Federation (JCF), is participating in McCarthy-style censorship.

The panelists- Julie Gilgoff, Elaine Ellinson, and Rae Abileah- are all authors and activists. Bend the Arc (formerly the Progressive Jewish Alliance) and the Workmens Circle organized the event. They planned to hold the panel in the Jewish Library, run by the Bureau of Jewish Education (BJE), which funds most of its grants and programming through the JCF.

In late January, the Library cancelled the panel. It will now be held at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav.In an open letter to the Library, the event organizers write, “six decades after McCarthyism’s assault on progressives and their values, we reassert that censorship by association is dangerous and unconscionable.”

David Waksberg, CEO of the Bureau of Jewish Education, said that the BJE didn’t want to suppress the event all together. “In the end we decided not to do it with the understanding that they would be going forward at another location,” he said.

“I don’t know how it’s censorship when you agree, you guys go have your meeting, just don’t have it at my place. How is that censorship? No one’s telling them they can’t speak,” Waksberg said.

“The program involves two authors who have written about activism domestically,” Waksberg explained, “and another individual who has been involved with BDS related to Israel.”

BDS-  the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign that activists throughout the world have used as a protest against the Israeli occupation in Palestine- is at the center of the conflict, right beside Rae Abileah.

Abileah will take part in the panel to discuss her great uncle, Joseph Abileah, an influential Israeli peace activist and war resister in the 1940s. 

“I grew up in the Bay Area Jewish community,” Abileah told us. “I was part of the Diller Teen Fellowship,” a program BJE puts on, “where we had Jewish gatherings, trainings and meetings.”

She’s also outspoken in her opposition to Israeli occupation in Palestine.

Abileah works for CODEPINK Women for Peace and Jewish Voice for Peace. She has travelled to Gaza CODEPINK in 2009 for a Gaza Freedom March with participants worldwide. She has also organized BDS campaigns.

“In 2005 the Palestinian civil society called for BDS as tried and true nonviolent tactic to get the Israeli government to uphold international law. We decided to be in solidarity,” said Abileah. She has since organized to spread a boycott of Ahava products, “Dead Sea beauty products made in an illegal settlement in the West Bank.”

According to Abileah, “several stores in the Bay Area have stopped carrying it.”

Abileah says she is proud to support nonviolent forms of protest like BDS and hunger striking, noting the lengthy hunger strike undertaken by Palestinian prisoners that ended just yesterday.

The hunger strike was successful. Israel agreed to prisoners’ demands to end solitary confinement (for 19 prisoners), allow more family visits, and to free some of those held in “administrative detention,” or imprisonment without trial, although the demand to end administrative detention was not met.

BDS has had successes worldwide as well. And it has become a controversial issue in the Bay Area.

Waksberg said, “we were concerned this would be an event that would have a lot of people yelling at each other.” This would not be unprecedented.

The ongoing rift is possibly best exemplified by the controversy surrounding the 2009 screening at the SF Jewish Film Festival of Rachel, a documentary about the life of 24-year-old Rachel Corrie. Corrie was killed in 2003 when, as part of a campaign to stop Israeli settlements, she stood in front of a bulldozer on its way to demolish a Palestinian family’s home.

The showing of the film, as well as the festival board’s decision to invite Corrie’s mother to speak after the film, sparked outrage. A portion of the audience booed and hissed at supportive references to the Israeli government.

Largely in response to that event, the JFC rewrote its funding guidelines in 2010. The guidelines outline a policy of not funding organizations that promote violence, attempt to “proselytize Jews away from Judaism” or work on “undermining the legitimacy of Israel.”

The idea of fighting for or against “Israel’s legitimacy” is invoked often but is vague- what exactly does it mean to oppose Israel’s “legitimacy” or “right to exist”? In In the guidelines, one thing seems to clearly do so: BDS campaigns.

In the guidelines’ section on “potentially controversial Israel-related programming,” the types of programs “not consistent with JCF’s policy” has three bullet points, all singling out support for BDS as unacceptable. The programs that are inconsistent are ones where the “overall experience” “endorse or prominently promote the BDS movement,”  “Individual programs that endorse the BDS movement or positions that undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel,” and co-sponsoring public programs featuring supporters of BDS.

The open letter states that “The Federation’s 2010 revised funding guidelines, which prohibit grant recipients from associating with organizations and individuals who oppose its strong support for Israel, apparently triggered the cancellation.”

Wakberg says that these guidelines didn’t play a role in the BJE’s decision to drop the Reclaiming Jewish Activism panel.

“The JCF didn’t tell us whether or not to do this. This was our decision about what we thought was right for the library,” he said.

“There was going to be an event,” Waksberg said, “and there is going to be an event.”

Yes, the event will go on. But so, it seems, will tensions in the Bay Area’s Jewish community.

Localized Appreesh: Wild Hunt

Tony Robles
-
1

Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.

The essence of Oakland’s Wild Hunt could summed up thusly: doomy, progressive metal that perches in the cerebral cortex during a waking nightmare. A ghoulish nightmare from which you don’t necessary wish to wake. It’s black magic behind fluttering eyelids.

Along with more traditional metal riffs, there are drawn-out, heavy breakdowns that lend easily to slow, deliberate head banging, blended with modern hypnotic ambiance that gives it that dream-like quality. It doesn’t hurt that drummer-vocalist Harland Burkhart sounds like he’s growling underwater. I’ve seen Enslaved noted as a point of reference here, and agree with that assessment.

So now you need to hear it, right? Well, you’ve chased it down and speared it. The quartet’s debut album, Before the Plane of Angles, which was mixed by Laudanum’s Salvador Raya and mastered by Justin Weis (Hammers of Misfortune, Ludicra), is out now on Kemado. And the album release show is this weekend at El Rio.

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

I caught up with the Wild Hunt in that unsettling space between wake and sleep. Here’s what Burkhart had to say:

Band name origin: “Wild Hunt” refers to the ancient European myth of a phantasmal cavalcade of dead folks seen madly flying through the sky, usually around Yuletide. There are a variety of different versions of the legend; some believe the Norse god Odin leads the pack, others believe King Arthur, others believe Ronald McDonald.

Band motto: You got fourteen cent?

Description of sound in 10 words or less: Heavy, melodic, dreamlike. At times jarring, at times tranquil.

Instrumentation: Two guitarists, one bassist, one drummer/vocalist.

Most recent release: Before the Plane of Angles (Kemado Records, 2012)

Best part about life as a Bay Area band: Being situated in such a hotbed of creative activity.

Worst part about life as a Bay Area band: Paying rent.

First album purchased: For me, possibly Oingo Boingo, Only a Lad.

Most recent album purchased/downloaded: Allseits, Hel.

Favorite local eatery and dish: Southie has become my lunchtime destination. That dang fried rock shrimp sandwich has changed my life, tell you what.

Wild Hunt
With Giant Squid, Black Queen
Sat/19, 10pm, $8
El Rio
3158 Mission, SF
(415) 282-3325
www.elriosf.com

1...202122...83Page 21 of 83

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