Review

“Who Got the Chickens” and “Love Can Build a Bridge”

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REVIEW/PREVIEW Although No. 43 has finally flown the coop back to Crawford, Texas, our country would do well to remember Faulkner’s famous words from 1951’s Requiem for a Nun: "The past is never dead. It’s not even past." The psychic damage from the Bush years runs deep, and will no doubt keep resurfacing. Maybe it’s the Texan atmospherics — the soundtrack of chirping crickets, the smell of sawdust, the strange manqués and photos of tumbleweeds — or the loose "one that got away" narrative that whistles through Stephan Pascher’s installation "Who Got the Chickens" that made me think of Bush.

The exhibit’s true empty center, though, is Donald Judd. Judd’s ghost is most present in Pascher’s sculptural centerpiece — an empty chicken coop, a few feathers the only trace left of its former occupant, that faces two gray wooden boxes in a Y-formation. The boxes nod to the concrete sculptures that dot Judd’s sprawling Marfa, Texas art ranch like unearthed giant sarcophagi, but Pascher’s mixed media assemblage is not as concerned with purity of form as Judd, the anti-minimalist minimalist who once opined that, "Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all." Pascher’s show practically calls Judd out on his prissiness — an accompanying short story finds Judd (here named James Dean) throwing hissy fits about bird shit on his sculptures — but it leaves the titular semi-question open and sidesteps anything as concrete as recrimination.

Kevin Killian and Karla Milosevich are perhaps less gracious toward Judd in their 2002 Poets’ Theater play Love Can Build a Bridge, which coincidentally is being restaged this weekend as part of BAM’s "Bending the Word/Matrix 226" exhibit. In Love, Judd (played brilliantly by the inimitable George Kuchar) is a Lear-like patriarch whose video will has left his extended clan — including country singers Naomi and Wynona, B-lister Ashley, and "illegitimate son" Judd Nelson — in disarray. I asked Killian over the phone if his characterization of Judd had any specific inspiration, and he recalled visiting curator David Whitney, whose Big Sur house had lots of furniture made by Judd. Looking at one such chair, Whitney said: "I can’t even stand to look at it or sit in it because he was the most hateful man I’d ever known." It looks like Bush isn’t the only wellspring of psychic damage deep in the heart of Texas.

WHO GOT THE CHICKENS Through Feb. 7. Tues.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Steven Wolf Fine Arts, 49 Geary, suite 411, SF. (415) 263-3677. www.stevenwolffinearts.com

LOVE CAN BUILD A BRIDGE Sat/31, 7 p.m., free. Pacific Film Archive Theater, 2575 Bancroft Way, Berk. (510) 642-1124. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

AG Brown’s flip flop will help pro-Prop 8 forces

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AG Jerry Brown’s decision to oppose Prop 8 in the Supreme Court will,
ironically, only help the pro-Prop 8 forces

By Peter Scheer

(Peter Scheer is executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, a non profit advocacy group.)

The California Supreme Court, in one of its most important cases, is
weighing a challenge to Prop 8, the constitutional amendment banning
gay marriage. If the Court upholds Prop 8, one of the people you can
blame is Attorney General Jerry Brown.

But wait a minute. Didn’t Brown make headlines recently by filing a
brief in the Supreme Court arguing that Prop 8 should be overturned?
Yes, he did. And that’s the problem.

In cases before the Supreme Court, it is the Attorney General’s job
to defend California’s laws unless they are so plainly invalid that
no plausible defense can be offered. However objectionable on moral
grounds, Prop 8 is not legally indefensible. Brown knows that. By
switching sides in the Supreme Court, the Attorney General ripped up
his job description–a political gambit that no doubt pleases his
supporters but, ironically, only makes it harder for the Court to
overturn Prop 8.

The California Supreme Court is in a tough spot in the Prop 8 case.
It went out on a limb a year ago to strike down a state statute
forbidding same sex marriage, ruling that the law violated
California’s constitution. Prop 8, which voters enacted by a margin
of 52% to 48%, responds directly to that controversial decision by
amending the state constitution, thereby removing–or attempting to
remove– the basis for the Court’s prior ruling.

The current Prop 8 case poses a test of the Court’s legitimacy, its
most valuable asset, at a crucial moment in its history. The Court is
the only institution of California government that is seen as able to
take on hard issues, to decide them in the public interest, and to
act decisively. Although its authority has never been greater, that
authority derives from the public perception that the Court is above
the political fray.

Should the Court strike down Prop 8–overriding an electoral majority
for the second time on the issue of same sex marriage–it must do so
for reasons that are seen as legitimate and legally convincing, even
though most Californians may disagree with the outcome. The Court
must avoid the appearance that it is asserting a political preference
disguised in legal principles. That is a tall order.

In this context the last thing supporters of gay marriage need
is a grandstanding attorney general who, by abandoning his assigned
institutional role, creates doubts about the fairness of the Supreme
Court proceeding and provides an opening for Prop 8 supporters to
argue that the case has been transformed from a legal to a political
contest in which victory goes to the most powerful interest groups.

Can the Court still overturn Prop 8 in a way that will not compromise
its legitimacy? I think so, although the best course at this stage
may be a ruling grounded in the US Constitution instead of the
California Constitution. Under a federal approach, Prop 8’s
problematic status as a state constitutional amendment loses
relevance: vis a vis the US Constitution’s equal protection
guarantee, Prop 8 is no different than any state statute or city
ordinance.

Deciding the case on the basis of the federal constitution also would
legitimize the Court’s ruling because application and interpretation
of federal law is part of its essential function in the original
federal judicial scheme. Legitimacy also comes from the fact that the
Court’s decision, if based on the federal Constitution, would not be
the last word, but would be subject to review by the US Supreme Court.

Of course, the availability of federal Supreme Court review is also
the main disadvantage of this strategy. Still, the US Supreme Court
might decline to review the case, leaving in place a ruling blocking
Prop 8. Or it could review it and surprise everyone with a decision
overturning Prop 8. (Don’t underestimate the influence of the Supreme
Court’s mostly liberal clerks on the gay marriage issue.)

Let’s just hope Jerry Brown keeps his distance from any further judicial
proceedings. With friends like Brown, Prop 8’s opponents don’t need
adversaries.
——
Peter Scheer is executive director of the California First Amendment
Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group. www.cfac.org

SF Weekly’s sleazy new deal

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By Tim Redmond

Village Voice Media, the owner of SF Weekly, has entered into a business deal with LikeMe.com, a weak competitor to Yelp. But already, the arrangement has generated controversy: The Seattle Altweekly The Stranger reports that many of the comments on this new site — comments promoted on the front page of the SF Weekly’s web site — are in fact promos for SF Weekly advertisers, written by SF Weekly ad staff. The Stranger notes:

The majority of Likeme’s reviews—which appear on 12 VVM websites, next to editorial content about the businesses—are written by ad representatives for VVM. The reviews, which are exclusively positive, focus on businesses that advertise in VVM papers.

For example, if you search for a review of Nick’s Crispy Tacos on the San Francisco Weekly’s site, a review from Likeme user LaraW is prominently displayed on the San Francisco Weekly’s page for the restaurant under the heading “The Inside Word on Nick’s Crispy Tacos.”

“If you’re looking for a great midweek activity that doesn’t cost a fortune, this is a great place to go,” LaraW gushes. “The crowd is always fun and the food is awesome.”

“Lara W” is actually Lara Weiss, the advertising coordinator for the San Francisco Weekly, where Nick’s Crispy Tacos advertises.

That’s pretty darn sleazy. Again, from the Stranger:

VVM isn’t the first company to engage in this practice, referred to by industry watchdogs as “astroturfing.” Companies such as Sony, Microsoft, and Philip Morris have all built fake grassroots campaigns to promote their own products or slam competitors.

“I think [VVM’s] first obligation is to be honest and transparent,” says Kelly McBride, ethics leader at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. “You lose your marketability when you allow people with an agenda to post. And clearly the ad reps have an agenda: They want to make their clients happy.”

McBride adds, “When you create the false impression yourself… that’s really, really bad. It’s inherently dishonest, and I’d think it undermines your credibility.”

So what’s up here? Well, I emailed everyone I could think of at the Weekly and VVM, starting with the top editorial guy, executive editor Mike Lacey, who never returns my calls or emails anyway, but what the hell. I also emailed Executive Vice President Scott Spear, Executive Associate Editor Andy Van De Voorde, Weekly publisher Josh Fromson and Weekly editor Tom Walsh. Only my old pal Andy got back to me; he sent along this link. The argument:

As with any new web product you create or partner with, you give it to your friends and family to test drive

Still seems awfully misleading, especially for a media company that loves to criticize everyone else’s ethics.

Fill her up

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW In the late 1990s, Mary Alice Fry, artistic director of the now defunct Venue 9, found a hole. She has been filling them ever since.

The January performance calendars at her theater and many other local small venues, she noticed, were empty. At the same time her curatorial experience had shown that women artists still had a harder time getting noticed than their male counterparts. "So many of them," Fry said, "struggle with multiple responsibilities of mortgages, children, two or three jobs, keeping relationships going." So she started the Women on the Way Festival, now in its ninth year, to create "a stepping stone" for local women performers.

After Fry lost her lease on Venue 9, she moved the Festival to the Shotwell Studios and to Joe Landini’s Garage. For reasons of practicality and availability, WOW’s lineup changes every night. The performers seem to enjoy what, to an outsider, looks like a complicated format. "They like sharing the stage and seeing each other’s work," Fry explained. "For them it’s about standards and not competition. These women are pumped up and work and scramble and always want to do more."

While this year’s 17 performers working in theater, the circus, comedy, and dance are mostly up-and-coming, WOW also invited at least two highly experienced artists. Molissa Fenley and Nina Wise have each been working for more than three decades apiece. Each will present a world premiere.

On opening night, Jan. 15, the Garage hosted two soloists and a quartet. While none of the three pieces broke revolutionary ground, each had that spark of effervescence that makes one want to see where these artists are going. They deserve a bigger audience than they got.

Ara Glenn-Johanson’s based her earthstepper on a 10th-century English poem, "The Wanderer." As a choreographer for herself, she proved to be rather heavy-handed as soon as she moved beyond a rather basic gestural vocabulary. But she is a strong, expressive vocalist — both live and in duets with herself on tape — and her solo became an intermittently moving meditation on loneliness and perseverance.

Gretchen Garnett’s Edited for Time needs more editing for time, but impressed the audience with the ambition, if not quite the realization, of a rigorously conceived study in formal structure. With an extended duet for Garnett and the beautifully expressive Leah Samson, the piece started with simple swaying motions and quickly evolved into patterns of elastic tension that would snap, only to be picked up again. Edited looked full of contradictions, pre-ordained accidents, and surprising repetitions. The other committed dancers were Becca Rufer and Chad Dawson.

Despite having what must be one of dance’s more convoluted titles, Pfannenstiel Incision Marks the Spot, Lenora Lee’s solo was a stark, tightly choreographed portrait of one woman’s fear and anguish about her own body — Pfannenstiel was the surgeon who invented the so-called bikini cut. With her feet planted as if nailed to the ground and her hands veering between tendrils and claws, Lee pulled, yanked, spread, and hung her guts inside out. Performed in silence, Pfannenstiel was small in scale, but it resonated in a big way.

WOMEN ON THE WAY FESTIVAL

Through Feb. 1

Thurs-Sun., 8 p.m., at the Garage, 975 Howard, and Shotwell Studios, 3252-A 19th St., SF

$15-$25

(415) 289-2000, 1-800-838-3006

www.ftloose.org

Night at the museum

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REVIEW American Conservatory Theater leads off its new season with a revival of John Guare’s rollickingly self-referential 1974 comedy, a madcap musical so quirky and of the moment in conception and mood that it comes shrouded in a sometimes dazzling, more often distancing veil of nostalgia.

New York playwright Bing Ringling (Brooks Ashmanskas) has received his first commercial production — after only several hundred attempts — in a dreary downtown theater haunted by an insane producer (Mary Birdsong) with a failure wish and a strong resemblance to a tottering Kate Hepburn. Shadowed by the billboard superstardom of movie actor and old neighborhood pal Tybalt Dunleavy (Stephen Derosa), Bing recoils from the scathing reviews of Etruscan Conundrum, leading to a desperate search for meaning that winds through his past, his parents’ couch, the home of his maniacal death-devouring composer (played to the hilt by an irrepressible Derosa), and finally to the dizzy heights of celebrity, from which old pal Tybalt (Derosa again) is preparing to sail down in one big swan dive. The point is not that dreams do come true, you see, but that they exist at all — and get in the way of real life.

Although Guare reworked the material for ACT’s revival, adding even more autobiographical touches as well as some bright if unexceptional new songs, Rich and Famous remains a hit-and-miss affair, with some flat notes and fewer high ones shaking up its middle register. The often overly broad humor has dated — though it can still work well, as in the scene with Bing’s obsessive, half-senile parents, played by Derosa and Birdsong. Moreover, the main character, while sympathetic, never becomes more than mildly interesting, which contributes to the sense of the intermissionless performance dragging on. Overall, the feeling is not unlike walking around inside a museum piece — which is just what happens in one vignette. But the play’s whimsy is so rooted in a specific moment, despite a stab at more timeless themes, that maybe that’s inevitable.

Rich and Famous is, however, expertly performed by a versatile four-person cast — including ACT’s priceless Gregory Wallace in a couple of scene-stealing flights — and directed with appropriately zany energy by John Rando. It’s also lovingly gussied up by scenic designer Scott Bradley in jazzy, period-evoking slashes of color, including set pieces drenched in the garishly comic shades of nightmares. All of which ensures Guare and Ringling’s one-ring circus is nothing if not a frenetically romantic spree. (Robert Avila)

RICH AND FAMOUS Through Feb. 8. Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., Jan. 21, and Feb. 4, 2 p.m. American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary, SF. $17–$82. (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org

Profiles of change

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› amanda@sfbg.com
Photos by Pat Mazzera

"Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America," President Barack Obama told US citizens on his Inauguration Day. "For everywhere we look, there is work to be done."

He’s not just cheering himself on — he’s asking his constituents to embrace what’s to come and to consider what more we can be as the individual moving parts of this incredibly complex country.

Even as far back as the Democratic National Convention, Obama turned his campaign slogan into a call to action. "All across America something is stirring. What the naysayers don’t understand is this isn’t about me — it’s about you."

That rang in the ears of people profiled below, who changed their lives in response to his call. That inspired other changes, suggesting that the effort to elect Obama is having a spillover effect on organizing at other levels — which may become a part of how US citizens respond to his actions in office.

Expectations are high for the changes he will order and already there’s indications of what’s to come, such as the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the end of the military’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy on homosexuality, and a commitment to action on climate change.

Many are eager to see more fundamental change in areas such as war, jobs, housing, energy, and transportation — areas we explore in this issue — as well as greater engagement between the White House and the grassroots groups that helped elect Obama.

In the profiles and stories that follow, the Guardian asks questions about what and who will change and how to move past a pithy slogan to trigger the transformation this country desperately needs.

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MARIA GOMES

Maria Gomes was committed to Obama from the beginning. "I signed up right after he announced," said this Menlo Park resident, who joined Silicon Valley for Obama and volunteered on the campaign.

Her first big assignment was in Iowa, where she spent 10 days campaigning before the caucus along with her husband and two teenage children. For Gomes, Obama’s Iowa win was a particularly powerful and pivotal moment. "I just realized the power of the volunteers and how awesome it was," she said. "It was clear to me after Iowa that he was going to win, so I just dove in."

Gomes, a 60-year-old lawyer, took an eight-month unpaid leave from her work as an immigration and dependency attorney for San Mateo County to devote herself fulltime to Obama’s campaign. It was the first time she devoted her life to get a politician elected.

"In fact, I [had] steered away from politics because I don’t really like politics," she said. "This was different. I really strongly felt the people carried this campaign. I canvassed with CEOs, doctors, young people … nobody took a back seat in this campaign. We did not take it lightly."

She and her husband served as precinct captains in California. After the primary, she coordinated volunteers and voter registration efforts for the general election. Gomes traveled to seven states in the months leading up to Nov. 4, spending Election Day working on voter protection in Las Vegas.

"I felt that the only way he was going to get elected was if people got in there. It wasn’t just going to happen," said Gomes, an immigrant from Cabo Verde, off the western coast of Africa.

And it’s not over for Gomes. Her whole family went to Washington DC for the inauguration, where she answered Michelle Obama’s call to volunteer on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Gomes has also signed up to work on Kamala Harris’ run for attorney general and she’s still active with her fellow workers at Silicon Valley for Obama.

"About a week after the election I went to a meeting for our field office. Five hundred people were there. We brainstormed how to stay involved in his campaign," she said. They ranked issues they’d like to see addressed by Obama and organized themselves into teams to work on messaging them to the new administration. "We received a survey from the national team…. The [Silicon Valley] team took the national survey and made it local, community by community. That’s the kind of movement that’s happening now. I’m sure it’s going on everywhere because the campaign wanted every state and every county involved." Her husband is now on the tech team and she’s doing fundraising work for the inauguration.

"It’s not over. Nothing has stopped," she said, adding that she believed this kind of organizing would be very present in the administration. "It’s going to be governed by the people. I plan to be involved for the next four years at whatever level I can. I still write e-mails to whoever I think can change something. I hope it will be transparent enough that we can still communicate to people higher up in the administration — all the way to Barack and Michelle Obama."

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AARON KNAPP

Aaron Knapp graduated from law school in 2002 and spent the subsequent six years working for big corporate law firms. By 2008, he began to feel that all of the major decisions in his life had been made based on money and materialism, an certain emptiness that changed suddenly at summer’s end.

"Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention was a real turning point for me," he recalled. "The change that I needed in my life was to join in this campaign that transcended the individuals."

He said he did what he always wanted to do: "I quit a job I don’t enjoy." Knapp went to work instead on the Obama campaign, spending about four months in Nevada. Putting Obama in office became too important to not give it his all: "I just wanted to make sure on November 4, I could say to myself I did everything I could."

On election night, with the feeling of victory rushing through him, there was also a kind of malaise, a feeling of "now what?"

"Our roles in the campaign were predetermined — there are a finite amount of things you do in a campaign. Make phone calls, gather data, knock on doors…. After the election, after we won…. What do we do now? Those predetermined roles are no longer set up for us," he said.

Knapp said it required some soul searching to find the next important thing to do: "The task is to get real specific."

He’s now writing a book and working to get the Employee Free Choice Act passed by Congress. The act would amend existing labor laws to make it easier for workers to create unions that are recognized by employers. In 2007, it passed in the House and failed in the Senate, but it was part of Obama’s platform during the primary season, and one of the reasons he garnered support from organized labor.

But, said Knapp, "It’s one of those things that’s being put on the back burner as we transition in this administration…. While Obama was championing this cause during the campaign, there’s no sign of it now."

The waning of enthusiasm for it is indicative of how Obama’s administration may start to handle some of those crucial campaign promises that drew so many people into his fold. That piqued Knapp’s interest and reminded him of the goals of his grandfather, an auto worker for Chevrolet during the 1940s, who passed away during Knapp’s first year of law school: "My grandfather always would plead with me to do whatever I could to get the labor laws back in order. So that’s an issue that’s really important to me."

Knapp also said that it’s important to keep the grassroots Obama movement alive by continuing to push crucial legislation that was part of his platform for change.

"It goes right to the controversial pieces of law and policy that he’s addressing," Knapp said. "If he’s able to keep this mobilization together, that will help him significantly in getting policies through."

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PAULI OJEA

Pauli Ojea, who’s about to turn 30 years old, says that she’s spent her entire adult life "voting for the loser" and advocating for change that’s been slow to happen.

A New Jersey native, Ojea came to California to work for the San Francisco Conservation Corps on environmental education programs. That lead to a position with Breast Cancer Action as a community organizer, where she found that hopeful efforts were often frustrated by political pitfalls.

Then, Ojea attended a 2004 event where she heard Van Jones speak about how a new green wave was coming and it needed to lift all boats. When a position opened with Jones’ new organization, Green for All, she applied to be a policy analyst for the Oakland-based green-jobs advocacy group.

In between the two jobs, she spent a week campaigning for Obama with her mother, a Spanish immigrant who groused that if he lost, she’d be spending more time back in Spain.

Ojea now works on federal green-jobs policy and climate change equity, and has already been deeply affected by the Obama election. "For most of my career in advocacy, there’s been this sense that we probably don’t want to work on federal policy because we’re not going to get anywhere," she explained. "I started at Green For All with Barack Obama elected as president and we’re actually putting a lot of resources into federal policy, and there’s this whole feeling like we’re going to get somewhere. That’s shifted for me. I imagine that for a lot of other environmental and social justice advocates, there seems to be a door opening."

She’s even more enthused after meeting with members of the Obama transition team who were tasked with a review of the Department of Energy. About 30 to 40 people, representing organizations including the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council as well as renewable energy business leaders and public officials doing energy work in different states, convened in Washington DC to discuss energy policy.

"I’ve been to a lot of public agency meetings and what usually happens is you have maybe an hour and a half of presentation from the agency and maybe a half hour for all the organizations and people trying to get in their piece," she said. "This was different. It was about a two-hour meeting and the whole time it was dedicated to hearing from the community, from businesses, from people with experience in energy efficiency. The transition team members were fully engaged, actually listening, asking questions, asking for clarifications if they didn’t understand something. They were really humble and they seemed really excited about what kinds of changes were possible. I’d never been part of a process like that."

Ojea sees more potential than ever for the activist community in the Obama administration. "It could provide more opportunity and open more doors for what your activism is about. There’s such a difference between being used to being on the outside of the fence, behind the barricade, screaming because it’s the only way to be heard. Is that going to change? Are we going to be inside the fence?"

She recalled Obama’s campaign observation that "change doesn’t come from Washington, change comes to Washington." She’s hoping the Obama team’s outreach will continue.

"We’re at a really strange and critical time," Ojea said. "As Van says, in America, in terms of the economy, the floor has dropped out from under us. But with the election of Obama, the ceiling has come off. There’s a lot of opportunity, and things could also go downhill. What are we going to do?"

“Three on a Match”

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REVIEW This 1932 pre-Code gem is a fine example of the era’s snappy Warner Bros. style and economical storytelling. Three women are reunited by chance years after being Manhattan grade-school classmates: goodhearted "bad girl" Mary (Joan Blondell) became a Broadway baby via reform school. Smart but poor valedictorian Ruth (Bette Davis, whose screen prospects were considered pretty wan at this point) became a humble stenographer. Product of privilege Vivian (Ann Dvorak) married childhood sweetheart Robert (Warren William) and is now the consummate socialite wife and mother. But she is bored, dissatisfied, and frigid, manifesting behavior we might now read as clinical depression. Despite "having everything," her nasty downward spiral becomes the film’s melodramatic engine.

Unexpectedly sparking with a genial rake, Vivian impulsively drops out of sight, slumming with her new amour (Lyle Talbot, future contributor to 1959’s Plan 9 from Outer Space) and his increasingly disreputable friends. (They include a very young, kinda cute Humphrey Bogart as a tuxedoed thug who snarls lines like "The heat’s on enough to curl yer shoe leather.") She tows along a young son whose best interests are not served by separation from daddy, mom’s blackmailing/kidnapping new gangster pals, and rampant cocaine abuse. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy (a rather neglected figure nonetheless key to a remarkable number of Hollywood classics, from 1931’s Little Caesar and 1932’s I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang to 1956’s The Bad Seed and 1962’s Gypsy), Three on a Match is utterly packed with incident at 64 hurtling minutes. Yet it’s so astutely handled one never feels nuance is given the bum’s rush. Blondell is delightfully hard-boiled, while Davis seems tentative (no doubt waiting for bigger and better things) in a wallflower role. But it’s Dvorak who dominates in a "fallen woman" histrionic workout. Trivia note: she attempted to have her WB contract nullified after learning the five-year-old (Frankie Darrow) playing her son was paid equally.

THREE ON A MATCH plays Fri/23 at the Mechanics’ Institute. See Rep Clock.

Preserving historic preservation

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By Tim Redmond

While most of us were glued to the inauguration in Washington, a significant battle has been brewing back at home over the city’s new Historic Preservation Commission. The commission was another of former Sup. Aaron Peskin’s parting gifts to the city, approved on the November 2008 ballot. It strengthens the city’s commitment to historic preservation and could become a powerful force against some of the most mindless acts of developers. It could, for example, have the authority to prevent the demolition of affordable rental housing in the name of pricey condos. It will certainly keep the city from allowing developers to bulldoze landmarks.

The mayor gets to appoint members to the panel, and the Board of Supervisors has to confirm those nominees. Most of the people Gavin Newsom has proposed are decent enough. But preservationists are up in arms over the nomination of Jonathan Perlman.

Perlman is an architect, but his critics say he utterly fails to meet the qualifications for the commission (PDF File). He’s well known in preservationist circles as the developer rep who sought to demolish the Harding Theater. The Harding is a historic building designed by the Reid Brothers. According to the organized, active group of Harding supporters:

the theater remains remarkably intact. In fact, the Harding is the most intact of the Reid Brothers theaters in San Francisco and still appears much as it did in the 1920s. The theater retains original seats and the fire curtain dating to the opening of the theater. The entrance, floor and aisle plan, balcony, proscenium arch, stage, and decorative ceiling remain intact, as well as significant plaster detail. The auditorium is unique in retaining an original sense of place from the “pre-talkie” days.

And yet, Perlman tried to argue that the place has little merit and that it was fine to turn it into condos. He wanted that done without even an environmental impact report. The Planning Commission and the supervisors have refused to go along.

Perlman refers to supporters of the Harding, who include the widely respected SF Heritage, as “obstructionists.” But as preservationist David Tornheim notes, “without the opponents’s ‘obstructionist tactics,’ the developer, with Mr. Perlman’s assistance, would have succeed in demolishing a certified historic building without environmental review.”

Peskin is lobbying against the nomination, which makes sense: Perlman’s record put him directly at odds with the intent of the new commission. The Rules Committee votes on this Jan. 22. It ought to be a no-brainer.

W. Kamau Bell did first Obama joke on Comedy Central, ‘Bell’ keeps on keepin’ on

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Bay Area comedian W. Kamau Bell is spreading the word that – he made history: as the first stand-up comedian on Comedy Central to make a joke about Barack Obama. Here’s what he says:

“Right as the year was ending I received a phone call from Comedy Central telling me that they discovered that I was the FIRST STAND-UP COMIC EVER do a Barack Obama joke on their network… WAAAAAAAAAAAAY back in 2005. Here’s the link to the actual clip AND an interview that they did with me. Check it out and leave some comments on the site if you’re feeling frisky.”

Feeling even friskier? Swing by Bell’s show at SF Playhouse – here’s the review by Guardian critic Robert Avila:

Wavves play GAMH, sign to Fat Possum

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wavves sml.jpg

Lots of news on Wavves front; for the Guardian review of Wavves, go here. This in from the Wavves publicity people:

“To avoid any potential confusion (and there is a lot of potential for confusion here) we’ll break this down for you nice and slow:

“* WAVVES has a self-titled debut album out now on the Woodsist label
“* WAVVES’ second album is called WAVVVES (notice the extra “V”)
“* Both albums have very, very similar covers
“* WAVVVES by WAVVES is being released on Fat Possum (not De Stijl, as we originally announced) on March 17, 2009

“Defiance”

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REVIEW A serious Holocaust movie like Edward Zwick’s Defiance has to start with archival footage. See, there’s Hitler, shouting in German. Say! Where did Zwick get shots of the Wehrmacht plundering the Bielski farm in Belarus? Oh, it’s fading into color — guess he filmed them himself. After the German invasion of Russia, the Bielski brothers took refuge in a nearby forest. They harassed Hitler’s supply line, provided shelter to fellow Jews, and generally defied things (Nazis, collaborators, Russians, each other). They led complicated but ultimately heroic lives, the kind that Hollywood distills into turgid cinematic pablum before slapping on a "based on a true story" title card. The times were rife with moral quandaries, difficult decisions, and summary execution. Zwick’s characters grapple with these thorny issues by shouting at each other, brow-furrowing, and brooding. If the Third Reich had declared war on central casting, the Bielskis would have been screwed: Daniel Craig is charismatic, but uncomfortable with leadership; Liev Schreiber is passionate, but too thirsty for revenge; Jamie Bell is meek and shy, but overcomes these defects. Harried by an acne-scarred traitor, they protect the socialist in Trotsky glasses, the avuncular rabbi who never thought they would amount to anything, and their three perfectly calibrated love interests. Take that, Nazis!

DEFIANCE opens Fri/16 in Bay Area theaters.

Martin Puryear

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REVIEW It’s exhilarating to see, upon entering the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s atrium, one of Martin Puryear’s most renowned works, Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996), installed with such noiseless bravura: the 36-foot sapling grows slender and seems to disappear even faster into space as it floats above the elevators. Puryear’s eloquent exercise in perspective and comment on Washington — and his philosophy of slow progress and steady struggle in the fight for racial equality — gathers even more resonance today, thinking of 2008’s lengthy political campaigns and the calls for sacrifice in the recessionary year ahead.

After the conceptual games of SFMOMA’s "The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now" and the almost-fetishized objects of "246 and Counting: Recent Architecture and Design Acquisitions," there’s a lot to surprise — and refresh — the eye in this Puryear retrospective. If "246" startles with its museum recontextualization of almost mundane gadgets like the iPhone, this survey accomplishes the opposite: it quietly brings a primal sense of wonder to the act of walking 360 degrees around sculpture that seems both familiar and alien, bearing all the humble hallmarks of functionality but amplified to the level of fine art. Engineers and architects, woodworkers and basket-weavers, Sea Ranch aficionados and even Olafur Eliasson buffs will find much to ponder at Puryear’s elegant intersection of the raw and the handmade, the organic and the geometric. What comes across clearly in this gradually, gently elucidating exhibit — in which Puryear’s works are displayed thematically rather than chronologically, culminating with an effect akin to a camera aperture slowly swiveling its nautilus eye wide open — is the respect the artist so clearly has for those who study and perfect a craft or trade. It’s as if Puryear has writ large the notion of making: lionizing the utilitarian (Some Tales [1975-78], Lever #3 [1989]) and making it big and beautiful, even witty (Pride’s Cross [1988], Sharp and Flat [1987]), almost Dada-esque in its cerebral and political provocations (Le Prix [2005], C.F.A.O. [2006-07]), and as ovoidally opaque and as fascinated with the negative space within as the surrounding space it so handsomely cuts, without (Maroon [1987-88], The Charm of Subsistence [1989]).

MARTIN PURYEAR Through Jan. 25. Mon–Tues, Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. $12.50, $8 seniors, $7 students, free for members and 12 and under (free first Tues.; half price Thurs., 6–8:45 p.m.). (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

Speed Reading

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A SLOW DEATH: 83 DAYS OF RADIATION SICKNESS

By NHK-TV "Tokaimura Criticality Accident Crew"

Vertical

160 pages

$19.95

It’s tacky to begin a review of a book about death by radiation poisoning by praising the design of its jacket. But I’m afraid I have to — John Gall’s art for A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness is unique in a gaze-snatching fashion. It combines hues of yellow and green, block patterns, and a news photo backdrop into an attractive, enigmatic, and faintly disturbing image that makes a browser wonder, "What exactly is inside this book?"

The answer is an account of a nuclear plant worker’s gradual demise after he was accidentally exposed to 20,000 times the maximum tolerable amount of neutron beam radiation. As some alleged environmentalists (including figureheads such as Al Gore) have begun touting the benefits of "non-carbon sources" of energy — an evasive way of saying "atomic power" — Hisashi Ouchi’s death comes across as an extreme cautionary tale.

Built from a television documentary about the nuclear accident, A Slow Death bluntly but compassionately renders Ouchi’s physical symptoms — which included massive skin loss — and the emotional impact his plight had on the doctors and nurses who treated him. The last extraordinary aspect of Ouchi’s story involves his heart, which persevered and remained relatively healthy while the rest of him demonstrated the impact of radiation — as the book puts it, "it continued living amidst the destruction of virtually every other cell in his body." (Johnny Ray Huston)

REFLECTION OF A MAN: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF STANLEY MARCUS

Photo selection by Allison V. Smith

Cairn Press

192 pages

$60

Sale signs at Macy’s and other businesses tend to suggest that the department store is a 20th-century phenomenon on its way down. But the department store had a great curator of sorts in Stanley Marcus, the Marcus in Neiman Marcus. An over-the-top extravagant collection of the businessman’s photography, Reflections of a Man might seem like a vanity project, but in fact it reveals a talented cameraman and, somewhat enticingly, the aesthetic point-of-view that might have gone into creating a popular chain of stores.

Dallas was Marcus’ home, and his version of the city wasn’t characterized by ugly American cowboy mentality so much as a love of beauty, parties, and profitable combinations thereof — he invented an annual Fortnight celebration as a way to boost sales during the slack period between back-to-school and the holidays. Oscar de la Renta’s brief forward to this monograph is a semi-flattering if fully affectionate account of Marcus’ unflagging success at making a sale. An old press pass reveals he wanted to be a photojournalist, but his public profession proved far more lucrative.

As for the photos, they are gorgeous, Popsicle-bright Kodachrome images of life in the South and abroad in Europe. Marcus had a terrific eye for patterns and repetitions, whether they came from cubic carpeting on the floor of a Paris fashion show or funny visual rhyming between Stetson hats and hanging lamps in a Houston restaurant. Christian Dior and Pucci pose with personality for Marcus, but his skill isn’t so much for portraiture as it is for the art of commerce, capturing the flair of couturiers as well as balloon and sponge vendors on the street. (Huston)

HOME: SOCIAL ESSAYS

By Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)

Akashic Books

282 pages

$15.95

THE HUNGERED ONE

By Ed Bullins

Akashic Books

192 pages

$14.95

I didn’t ask, so don’t tell me why queers have come to be the fashionable sacrificial stooges for pandering new Democratic presidents. For some overstanding on the matter, read Amiri Baraka’s intro to the most recent edition of Home: Social Essays, a collection he wrote between 1961 and 1966 as Leroi Jones. Anyone familiar with reprints of Jones’s autobiographical works knows that they afford Baraka with a chance to engage in scathing (and sometimes funny) multileveled assessments of his past writings and views. Here, he leaps right into a critique of his past use of the word "fag" that insinuates tribute (without naming names) to some of the strong, influential queers he’s worked with over the years. It’s a prescient genuine act, but characteristic — Baraka was calling Obama "slick" years ago at a City Lights reading.

Baraka also writes a preface for a reprint of Ed Bullins’ story collection The Hungered One, but it’s Bullins’ introduction that makes an impression, because of its open-ended refusal of readings that interpret (and thus restrict) the title tale as an allegory. The Hungered One is filled with pieces that do exactly what they set out to do — "An Ancient One," for example, perfectly renders a city scene that happens in front of my building every day of the year. But it’s that title story — more horrifying than anything a genre writer like Stephen King has imagined — that lingers. It’s as uncanny as a nightmare, and as real as human nature. (Huston)

Vive l’amour

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Stephanie Young edited the anthology Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 432 pages, $29), which attempted to take a snapshot of the Bay Area’s poetry scene while acknowledging the failure built into such a task. Her second book of poetry, Picture Palace (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 120 pages, $15), is not particularly concerned with choosing between various poetic modes and traditions. Picture Palace draws as heavily on pop culture as it does on theory to find its form and to subsequently understand form’s impact on content. In the process, Young escapes the lyric poetry/language poetry binary. (Or, to use a less geography-bound but equally contemporary axis, the flarf/conceptual poetry binary.)

As its title suggests, Picture Palace is heavily invested in movies. Young makes and unmakes icons as well as the minutiae of daily life. On the theoretical tip, she applies Gaston Bachelard’s thought in books like 1994’s Poetics of Space and 1987’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire to the act of walking around Lake Merritt. In terms of ideas and visual imagination, Picture Palace is best described as dense. Images and their aftereffects are at play, but the reader has to dig for the gratifying thrill of recognition; even when a pop-culture reference is spotted, it has a strange murky glimmer. Young is both recovering a shared experience and implanting a new one when she writes lines like "Tim Robbins with Tupac<0x2009>/ the one where they stabbed each other<0x2009>/ for treatment," in "Betty Page We Love You Get Up."

There are other funny moments (the most intense flashes of Sylvia Plath’s "Lady Lazarus" are condensed into the formula "Rising, ash, eat, air, etc."), yet the real thrill of Picture Palace comes from the way it jumps between different levels of knowledge, in the kind of epistemological recreation that brings us back to Bachelard. Young’s ability to portray, in tandem, the way her speakers routinely perceive the world and the way they are able to break with those perceptions, and the ways of knowing the world that those perceptions embody, reminds me of the libretti of Robert Ashley’s operas more than it does the work of other contemporary poets. Much like the titular protagonist of Ashley’s Now Eleanor’s Idea (2007), her poetry is haunted by an "end of the world feeling," but where that feeling prodded Now Eleanor to pursue investigative journalism focusing on New Mexico’s lowrider culture, the same feeling pushes Young’s speakers to ponder and deform images projected onto, or from, screens: "There was a superimposed face on my face and I gradually came to see my own belief that it could never change. In this way my face functioned as an image on film."

The overall effect — and this seems like an inaccurate phrase, given how much Young’s poetics depends on micro-effects, small calibrations, and reversals of thought — is similar to Lynne Tillman’s 2006 novel American Genius. By this I mean that both writers’ driving concern is finding new forms to convey new experiences; they each establish a voice that, in its neurotic precision, contains multitudes.

Blessed be

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What the hell is the Necronomicon? A figment of H.P. Lovecraft’s imagination? A demon-awakening tool foolishly deployed in the Evil Dead movies? A manifestation of Aleister Crowley’s magical powers? Or simply a good old-fashioned hoax?

For purposes of this review, Necronomicon (Ibis, 220 pages, $125) is none of the above. Assume, if you will, that it’s a tome based on Sumerian mythology, filled with line drawings and incantations. It’s bound in ominous black with silver lettering and a built-in ribbon bookmark — all the better to keep important verses ("The Exorcism of the Crown of Anu," perhaps) at your fingertips. It’s edited by the single-named "Simon," who has been on the Necronomicon beat since 1977. According to Wikipedia, Simon’s interpretation has sold nearly 1 million copies. According to his author bio, his best-selling whereabouts "have been unknown since 1984" — until this 2008 re-release, anyway.

The Necronomicon is a fearsome-looking addition to any bookshelf. It’ll definitely enhance any library lacking in new age creepiness. But, uh, one more time: what is it exactly? Fortunately, Simon doesn’t leave you dangling. This edition comes complete with a new preface (helpfully explaining the significance of a deluxe 31st anniversary volume, lest you think someone dropped the ball during an even-numbered year), as well as earlier prefaces and an introduction that discusses Lovecraft, Crowley, and occult history. There’s also a pronunciation guide (since when uttering the incantations, "a mistake may prove fatal"); and a solemn page-and-a-half warning that dicking around with the Necronomicon can have serious consequences. There’s no mention of having to cut off one’s hand and strap on a chainsaw in its place, but readers who are also movie buffs will nod knowingly.

OK, then the good stuff (purportedly ancient curses, rituals, spells, etc.) begins, kicking off with "The Testimony of the Mad Arab" and continuing into chapters like "The Incantations of the Gates" and "The Conjuration of the Fire God." Names dropped include Pazuzu, of Exorcist fame. Not everything’s gloomy though; instructions on how to "win the love of a woman" and "restore potency" are included, along with poetry that could pass for death-metal lyrics: "I will cause the Dead to rise and devour the living!" Cookie Monster that!

All right. I’m pretty close to mocking the Ancient Ones here. If you happen to see me coming down the street (you’ll know it’s me — just listen for the "fearful howlings of a hundred wolves"), you might want to scrape together the dough for your own Necronomicon, just for protection purposes. The price tag on Simon’s brand-new version suggests to me that demons might really be pulling the strings somewhere along the way.

New year, new pho

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Rang Dong happened out of anger. So don’t let any new age it’s-all-good hippie dips tell you that anger is not a constructive emotion. Without it I never would have been ranting about Pho 84 in the first place.

And Mod the Pod wouldn’t have heard me and wouldn’t have said, "What were you doing at Pho 84 when you could have been at Rang Dong?"

And I wouldn’t have said, "Rang Dong?"

Because, see, I’d never heard of it. It’s in Oakland Chinatown, at Webster and Eighth streets, right where Vi’s used to be, and it might be as good as Vi’s used to be, only better, because it’s still there.

Pod and the Attack have been on this place forever. And such is my trust in my buds’ buds … I’d have grabbed them up and gone right then, even though we’d all already eaten, except it was after 10 p.m. and everyone had to work in the morning. Oh, and Rang Dong closes at 9:30.

Not that I was going to get any sleep anyway, having just dropped over $30 with Deevee at Pho 84 for a bowl of soup and a bowl of bun, no drinks. And here’s the worst part: it wasn’t even good!

She had to pick all the catfishes out of her soup, and I — me, your simple-minded chicken farmer, L.E. for Loves Everything — left pork on my plate! When was the last time I left anything on my plate, let alone pork? Let alone grilled pork in a Vietnamese restaurant? But it was inedibly overcooked.

Just to be sure we weren’t having some weirdo shared hallucination or nightmare (Pho 84 having been pretty good to us in the past), I tried Deevee’s catfish and she tried my pork and we agreed that they both sucked ass. It’s one thing to raise your prices. Everybody does it. When the price goes up and the quality comes down … that’s just bullshit.

So Rang Dong. Next chance I got I gathered up all my West Oakland grillfriends — the Pod, the Attack, Deevee, and Kiz — and Kiz had a pal visiting from New York. So there were six of us, but me and the friend were the first ones seated, and she looked at me and said, "So you’re going to review this?"

"Well, I don’t want to jinx anything," I said. "I’m sure going to try. It’s kind of a New Year’s resolution sort of thing."

She gave me a look. "Wait," she said, "aren’t you a restaurant reviewer?"

"Fifteen, sixteen years," I said, proudly.

"And you’re going to try?" she said, still giving me still the same look.

"To write a restaurant review, yes," I said.

"So … your New Year’s resolution," she said (still the look), "is to do precisely what it is that you already do."

"For a living, yes." I said. "But I’m not making any promises."

The look. She’s a math teacher, turns out, and is rather accustomed to things adding up. Speaking of which: $9.95 + $6.55 + $7.50 + $7.50 + $7.95 + $9.95 + $10.95 = not a lot, really, for six people, especially compared to Pho 84, where hardly anything is under 10 bucks anymore.

And Rang Dong is many many times better. The raw beef salad was as good as any I’ve had anywhere. The thin slices of steak were actually raw, as in red. A lot of places give them too much of a citrus bath and they start to actually cook in it. I get a little turned off by browned "raw" beef.

The salt-and-pepper calamari was lightly breaded and perfectly fried, and I tasted some imperial roll out of someone’s bun, and that was perfectly fried too. The pho was fantastic, really flavorful. In fact, the only dish — out of seven — that I wasn’t absolutely gaga over was the lemongrass chicken. But it wasn’t bad. It was a matter of taste. Other people loved it.

See? So there wasn’t any chicken left on the plate at the end of the meal. And there wasn’t any grilled pork left on any of the plates either. Well, maybe just a little in Kizzer’s New Yorker friend’s bowl, but you better believe I was eyeballing it.

New favorite restaurant!

RANG DONG RESTAURANT

Daily: 10 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

724 Webster, Oakl.

(510) 835-8375

Beer and wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Losing the West

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› amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Our society can’t continue functioning the way it does. Exploiting the natural abundance of resources in the western United States, without balancing the needs of nature, has lead to the myriad environmental problems outlined in The American West at Risk, a book recently penned by Bay Area–based geologists Richard W. Hazlett, Jane E. Nielson, and Howard G. Wilshire.

A thorough survey of environmental issues related to forestry, water, agriculture, mining, road building, outdoor recreation, waste disposal, military testing, nuclear energy, and warfare, the book was written from the perspectives of scientists, but told in such a way that the science makes the case for preservation by driving home the point that everything the human race depends on comes from nature. Ultimately, the authors stress that the solution is homegrown. "Americans have to start caring about the survival of small communities, their local towns, and their local resources."

We caught up with Nielson and Wilshire by phone to discuss the book in anticipation of their visit to San Francisco this week.

SFBG It often seems like saving the world becomes an emotional or moral stance and less of a scientific one — or that’s how it frequently gets framed by opponents.

JANE E. NIELSON That’s right, and for no reason. Economics have become more important. One of the things we’re trying to say is the environment is the basis for our economic well-being.

SFBG Do you think that if people more fully realize that resources aren’t infinite, thriftiness will become more of the American lifestyle?

JEN It would be very desirable for people to realize that more, to have it taught in schools. How much time we have left to do that, I don’t know. I feel that once people do get an appreciation for the fact that life is going to be leaner, that the soil is really important, things can change very rapidly.

HOWARD G. WILSHIRE My pessimism is borne of the fact that they will have to respond quickly because we are on the brink of serious problems. Climate change is a big one and coping with that — the plans that are being endorsed now and pushed now by politicians and businesspeople — are that we’re going to have to find alternatives to cheap oil to keep on doing what we’re doing.

SFBG In the book you reveal a pattern of public commons being used to benefit a minority, whether its subsidies for big growers, cheap grazing rights, water rights for a handful of a farmers …

HGW It’s across the board.

SFBG How do we break these patterns of privilege, because it’s so ingrained it seems like an institutional problem?

JEN I have to tell you this is something that just sort of grew on us as we wrote the book. We knew about various subsidies, but the immensity of it and the pervasive pattern really only became clear as we progressed through the book.

SFBG It’s interesting that not only is there a pattern of subsidies, but they’re for a very small percentage of people.

JEN The whole history of land ownership in this country was intended to support the small person. The Homestead Act was supposed to give land to individuals, but most people failed at homesteading and there was no provision built in to prevent land from being gobbled up by big landowners.

SFBG So how can we flip this? Some of it is local, but for a lot of it these laws are federal.

HGW We have to take money out of the election system so we can get people free of monetary interest promoting their offices to do something useful. There are people who have the insight and the knowledge to know that we have got to stop this bleeding of our resources through subsidies.

The three authors will be reading and discussing the book Thursday, Jan. 8 at Books Inc. Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness Ave. The event begins at 7 p.m. More information can be found at losingthewest.com.

>>Read the full interview with the authors here

>>Read Amanda Witherell’s full review of the book here

Another BART police tragedy

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EDITORIAL The video isn’t the highest quality — it was taken on a cell phone — but it’s pretty simple to figure out what’s happening. A young man named Oscar Grant is lying on the ground on a BART train platform, surrounded by BART cops. His hands are behind him, and the police have him completely under control.

Grant was one of a group of young men who had been removed from the train and arrested after reports of a fight early in the morning on New Year’s Day. The other suspects are handcuffed; Grant is not, but in early footage, he has his hands in the air and appears to be cooperating. Witnesses on the scene say that’s what they saw — a young man doing what the police told him to do.

Then suddenly — shockingly — one of the officers reaches back and pulls his gun. He points the weapon at Grant, and fires, point-blank, from perhaps two feet away. The bullet entered Grant’s back, ricocheted off the concrete, and hit him again, in the chest.

It’s mind-boggling. It appears to violate so many standards of police conduct we don’t even know where to begin. Oakland lawyer John Burris, who is representing the Grant family, puts the first question pretty succinctly: "Why did he take his gun out?"

Let’s go a few steps further. Why did the BART officer, who has been identified only as a two-year veteran of the force, feel he needed to use lethal force on a suspect who was unarmed, was (at worst) guilty of fighting on a train, and was on the ground with two other cops on top of him? Why did the officer fire his gun at close range, with the prospect not only of hitting his colleagues but also of injuring bystanders? Why didn’t any of the other cops tell him to put the gun away? Why is the young father of a four-year old daughter dead?

We’ll add a few more: Why is BART still in full-on public relations-cover-up mode, acting as if the evidence is still unclear? Why is the name of the officer still a secret?

And why — why, as we’ve asked a dozen times over the past 15 years, do the BART police operate with absolutely no civilian oversight?

The structure of the BART police force is a recipe for disaster. BART’s general manager, (who is not an elected official and has no expertise in law enforcement) hires the BART police chief, who then runs a force with some 200 armed officers. There is no police commission, no police review board, not even a committee of the elected BART board designated to handle complaints against and issues with the BART police.

The BART board holds no regular hearings on police activity or conduct. There is no public forum where the chief is held to account. There is no procedure for complaints against BART officers to be heard and adjudicated by anyone except the BART police.

There is, in other words, no civilian oversight or accountability. This is unacceptable.

The killing of Oscar Grant isn’t an isolated case. Back in 1992, a BART cop pulled a shotgun and killed an unarmed man named Jerrold Hall. Hall wasn’t threatening the officer or anyone else. He was walking away. The shotgun pellets hit him in the back of the head. The officer, Fred Crabtree, was never subject to any discipline, and BART tried to cover up the whole thing (see "Lethal force," 12/9/92). In 2001, a BART cop shot an unarmed naked man who was seriously mentally ill (see "Gun crazy," 10/17/01).

The BART Board simply can’t let this continue. The board must immediately create a process for civilian oversight of the BART police, including a civilian monitor to handle complaints. The BART board must establish a permanent police oversight committee that meets regularly to hear public comments and monitor police practices. Every city that BART passes through, starting with San Francisco, should pass a resolution demanding accountability for the BART cops, and the state Legislature (which granted the BART police peace officer status in 1976) should pass a measure mandating that the BART police have civilian oversight proceedings.

We’re sick of this. How many more people have to die before BART gets its act together?

“The W. Kamau Bell Curve”

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REVIEW Standup comic W. Kamau Bell has reopened his frank, funny, and genuinely thoughtful one-man show at SF Playhouse, and it’s worth catching if you haven’t yet (I took in a recent performance at the Climate).

Subtitled "Ending Racism in About an Hour," Bell’s reflections on the recent election and Proposition 8, among other race-inflected personal and political matters still closer to home, are topical, to say the least, and run considerably deeper than the usual one-liners or simplistic oppositions of much race-based comedy. Meanwhile, Bell’s sure and charismatic stage presence, ready wit, and excellent comic timing ensure that the lines between scripted material, inspired tangents, and eager engagement with both the day’s headlines and his diverse audience remain all but seamless.

THE W. KAMAU BELL CURVE Opens Thurs/8. Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m. Through Feb. 28. SF Playhouse Studio Theater, 533 Sutter, SF. $25 (bring a friend of a different race, and get in two for one). www.wkamaubell.com

Lethal force

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Editors note: This story ran Dec. 12, 1992

The autumn air was crisp and clear in Hayward on the night the kid called Glasstop took a shotgun blast in the back of the head and died for the theft of a $60 radio.

It was just before 8 p.m., on Sunday, Nov. 15. The lights were on in the parking lot outside the Hayward BART station, where a six-car southbound train had arrived a few minutes earlier. About 50 passengers had gotten off, and some were still straggling into cars or waiting around for the next AC Transit bus.

Glasstop, a 19-year-old warehouse worker from Union City whose legal name was Jerrold Cornelius Hall, had ridden the train from Bayfair, one stop north, along with John Henry Owens, a 20-year-old unemployed custodian who lived in Oakland. The two young African American men were standing at the bus stop, not far from the station entrance, when Officer Fred Crabtree pulled into the parking lot in a BART police cruiser.

Crabtree was a white 16-year veteran of the transit police agency and a member of its elite Canine Corps. His partner was a highly trained German shepherd imported from a special obedience school in Germany. The dog trotted at Crabtree’s side as he approached Owens and Hall. The officer carried a loaded 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.

Crabtree was responding to a report of an armed robbery: Halfway between Bayfair and Hayward, a passenger had told the train operator that two black men had taken his Walkman personal stereo. The passenger said one of the robbers had a gun and described what they looked like; the trainman passed on the message, and the BART dispatcher passed it on again. Owens and Hall matched the third-hand description that came over Crabtree’s radio.

Within a matter of minutes, Hall was lying in a pool of his own blood, Owens was in handcuffs, and the parking lot was a mass of sirens and flashing red lights. Hall was pronounced dead shortly after midnight at Eden Hospital; Owens is still in the Alameda County jail. The police never turned up a gun.

And the man who reported the robbery disappeared without leaving his name.

That’s about all BART officials will say about the incident. They’ve clamped on a lid of secrecy that defies most normal local police procedures and violates the California Public Records Act. The San Francisco newspapers have almost entirely ignored the shooting, and there’s been little reaction from the East Bay community.

But an extensive Bay Guardian investigation has turned up a long list of troubling questions about the death of Jerrold Hall – and a long list of serious problems in an agency that has some of the most sweeping police powers in California, and some of the least civilian oversight.

Our investigation, based on a dozen interviews, a review of public records, and more than 50 pages of unreleased internal documents from the BART police and other local authorities, shows:

Officer Crabtree violated one of the most basic rules of modern law enforcement – and his own department’s written policy – when he fired a warning shot toward the suspect, potentially endangering the lives of passersby in the busy urban area. The nine .33-caliber pellets from that shotgun cartridge wound up in the side of a tree, about 4-1/2 feet above the ground.

BART’s own internal documents contradict the official claim that Hall was attacking or threatening Crabtree at the time of the shooting. Statements filed by several witnesses, and at least two BART police officers, suggest that Hall was more than 10 feet from the officer when the shots were fired, and was walking away. Medical records obtained by the Bay Guardian show that he was shot in the back of the head.

The shooting appears to violate nearly every modern police standard on the use of deadly force. In fact, the latest BART Police Operational Directive, dated July 22, 1987, states that guns may be fired only to prevent a suspect from killing or wounding another person, or to stop a suspected felon who is presumed to be armed and dangerous from fleeing and escaping arrest. But BART internal documents and other records obtained by the Bay Guardian provide little evidence to suggest that Hall fit either category.

Nevertheless, on Dec. 4, a BART Firearms Review Board, consisting entirely of BART police officers appointed by the chief, determined that the “use of lethal force in this instance was justified.” BART officials refuse to release the report or comment further on the findings.

The fact that Crabtree fired a gun to subdue Hall seems to undermine one of BART’s central reasons for the use of trained attack dogs. The dogs, BART officials say, are supposed to support officers in situations just like the one in question – to intimidate, and if necessary, pursue and immobilize a suspect when other backup isn’t available, and to attack immediately if an officer is under assault. Some law-enforcement experts, and many civil-rights advocates, question the use of dogs for that purpose – but all those contacted by the Bay Guardian agreed it was rather curious that Crabtree’s canine partner sat out this whole bloody incident.

Officer Crabtree is on administrative leave, with pay, pending the final outcome of an internal investigation. Owens is still facing robbery charges, despite the lack of a victim willing to testify against him. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for this week.

But the problems with the BART police go far beyond the arrest of John Owens and the death of Jerrold Hall. In fact, the Bay Guardian has learned:

BART’s Internal Affairs Division, which reviews citizen complaints against BART police officers, has investigated 162 cases in the past five years, 39 of them involving excessive use of force – and not a single charge was sustained. Law-enforcement observers say that’s an astonishing statistic, one that casts severe doubt on the department’s ability to control police abuse.

“I’ve never heard of any department with a rate of zero sustained complaints,” said John Crew, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Police Practices Project. “I can’t believe that none of those people had a single valid case.”

The BART Police Department has a written procedure for civilians filing complaints. A 1991 directive signed by Chief Harold Taylor states that every department employee should accept complaints by mail, by phone, or in person, and refer them to the watch commander or the Internal Affairs Division. But there’s nothing posted in any BART train or station to tell the public about the complaint process, no procedure for appealing a Police Department decision to a civilian review agency, and not much visible effort to inform BART employees about how to handle complaints.

The BART police use dogs for purposes inconsistent with many modern law-enforcement guidelines. Most local police agencies employ canines primarily to sniff out bombs and narcotics, or to search for dangerous suspects hidden in dark, confined areas. Berkeley has banned police dogs altogether. The BART police dogs are not trained to sniff out bombs or drugs, and are rarely involved in searches; the officers use the animals as standard backup, to intimidate and apprehend suspects in even fairly routine arrests.

The elected BART Board of Directors has demonstrated virtually no effective control over the BART police, and most board members don’t seem to know or care what their armed employees are doing with those badges, dogs, and guns.

None of the board members contacted by the Bay Guardian could even guess how many citizen complaints had been filed against the BART police since 1988, or what the outcome of the cases had been. None could explain the complaint procedure, or identify the person responsible for supervising internal investigations. Most didn’t know how the police chief was hired, or to whom he reported; some board members didn’t even know his name.

Several years ago, I asked Art Shartsis, a downtown lawyer who was then the BART Board president, if he knew who ran the BART police. His answer was unusually blunt, but entirely typical of the attitude board members show toward the force.

“I don’t know,” he told me. “I guess we must have a chief.”

A DAY AT THE MALL

Jerrold Hall was the son of Alameda Fire Department Captain Cornelius Hall, a retired Navy Reserve officer who lives with his wife, Rose and two other sons in a comfortable middle-class home in suburban Union City. Both of Jerrold’s brothers are in college, earning top grades; his aunt is the first black woman ever to serve on the Board of Trustees of Auburn University.

Jerrold, who graduated from high school in 1991 and was living with his parents, “had some problems, like a lot of kids these days,” his father told me. “But we hoped he’d outgrow them. He was a good kid, never into guns or killing or any of that sort of thing.”

On Sunday, Nov. 15, at about 2 in the afternoon, Hall met Owens at the Eastmont Mall in Oakland. According to a sworn statement Owens gave to the police, the two drank a few beers and part of a small bottle of E&J Brandy. Early in the evening, Hill invited Owens to his home, and they left the mall on an AC Transit bus to catch a BART train for Union City.

According to Owens and several other witnesses, Owens and Hill encountered a black man in his late 30s on board the train, and the man asked them if they wanted to buy one of the Walkmans he was carrying in a bag. When first questioned by police, at about 1:35 a.m., Owens said he declined the offer, went to another train car “where more girls were,” and met up with Hall again a few minutes later. At about 4:30 a.m., he made another statement, acknowledging that he was present when the friend he called “Glasstop” told the would-be salesman, “give me your Walkman.”

Several other witnesses on the train agreed that Hall had confronted the man, and walked away with a bag. None, including Owens, saw a gun.

However, the victim of what the BART police still call an “armed robbery” called the train operator on the intercom and said two men with a gun had stolen his Walkman. The operator, who never saw Hall or Owens, reported the incident, and it was relayed to BART police, who instructed the trainman to stop in Hayward, and, after a brief delay, to open the train doors. Hall and Owens left with about 50 others; according to the station attendant, they jumped the emergency gate and walked into the parking lot.

The police were able to find several eyewitnesses to the alleged robbery; however, other than Owens and Crabtree, who was the only police officer on the scene at the time, the internal report does not identify a single witness who actually saw the shooting.

An official Dec. 7 statement, written by BART Police Chief Harold Taylor at the request of the Bay Guardian and reviewed by BART’s legal department, notes that “witnesses disagreed as to the precise sequence of the next events.”

The internal BART police documents obtained by the Bay Guardian contain no formal statement or direct quotation from Crabtree; he apparently filed no written report. The reports were all prepared by other officers, who arrived at the scene after the shooting.

According to those reports, filed shortly after the incident, Crabtree approached Hall and Owens, who were standing near a bench in the parking lot’s bus-stop area, and ordered them to lie on the ground with their hands over their heads. Owens complied; Hall did not.

Hall, the reports state, “confronted and challenged Officer Crabtree, attempting to take Officer Crabtree’s shotgun from him at one point.” There is no mention of what the dog, who was trained to bite anyone who attacked Officer Crabtree, was doing at the time. BART officials refuse to elaborate, saying the incident is still under investigation.

However, one Bay Area dog trainer, who has trained police dogs, said it’s highly unlikely that a German shepherd of the sort imported by the BART police (see sidebar) would fail to respond in such a situation. “Dogs are very loyal and protective,” the trainer, who asked not to be identified, told the Bay Guardian. “These dogs are carefully bred and taught to attack anyone who physically endangers their human handler. Sometimes they overreact; they very rarely underreact.”

TO TAKE A LIFE

Owens told the police he “did not see the cop and Glasstop get into any physical fighting. They did not touch. They were just arguing.” After a few moments, Owens said, “Glasstop walked over to me and said we could go. So we started to walk away.”

Whatever the nature of the confrontation between Hall and Officer Crabtree, the police report and witness statements leave very little doubt that it ended with Hall walking away – and, as the internal police report states, “with Officer Crabtree retaining the shotgun.”

It’s also clear that some time, perhaps as much a minute or two, passed between the initial clash and the shooting – more than enough time for Hall and Owens to start walking away. During that period, the documents suggest, the passenger who had initially reported the robbery – and had not made any contact yet with police – suddenly ran out into the parking lot, pointed toward Hall and Owens and shouted, “That’s them.” Then the passenger fled.

Crabtree then ordered the two young men to halt again – and at that point, the statements get very fuzzy.

According to the official statement released Dec. 7 by BART, Crabtree “summoned his canine, but Hall resisted the dog.” A medical report filed by Alameda County emergency technicians who examined Hall after the shooting includes no mention of any dog bites or wounds of any sort other than those caused by the shotgun. A copy of the report, which has not been released, was obtained by the Bay Guardian.

Crabtree, the official BART statement continues, “fired a warning shot at a nearby tree. Hall continued to move toward the other suspect, and at one point turned and assumed a position which concealed his hands.”

The internal police report, however, states that Owens was the one who was “failing to keep his hands in view,” and who, in what the report described as “an effort to get rid of the evidence [Walkman],” put his hands into his pants pockets. At that point, the report states, Crabtree “used deadly force on suspect Hall.”

Owens said he responded immediately to the second command to halt, but that Hall kept walking away. When Owens heard the shots, he turned around, “and my partner was lying face down…. Then I heard all the cops coming with sirens.”

In fact, within a matter of minutes, at least three more BART police cars and a backup unit from the Hayward Police Department had arrived on the scene. Even if Hall, who by all accounts was walking, not running, had been attempting to “flee,” it’s unlikely he would have been able to get far.

And after an extensive search of the train, the tracks, the station, the parking lot, and everything else in the vicinity, the BART police acknowledge they were unable to find a gun.

Although the BART police initially insisted that Hall had been shot in the chest, and most of the news reports carried that statement unchallenged, even BART now admits that the shot struck the young man in the back of his head. His father, Cornelius Hall, never had any doubt.

“I’m a trained emergency medical technician,” he told the Bay Guardian. “I was in the hospital room when the nurse was washing down the body. I know what an entrance wound looks like, and my son was shot in the back.”

In Modern Police Firearms, a textbook on law-enforcement procedures, Professor Allen P. Bristow of California State University, Los Angeles, writes that deadly force should be used to stop a fleeing felon only when “he cannot be contained or captured” through other means. Further, Bristow notes, an officer considering deadly force should ask the following question:

“Is the crime this suspect is committing, or are the consequences of his possible escape, serious enough to justify my taking his life or endangering the lives of bystanders?”

The San Francisco Police Department guidelines on deadly force embody some of that same philosophy. “Officers shall exhaust all other reasonable means of apprehension and control before resorting to the use of firearms,” the Aug. 24, 1984, policy states. Officers are allowed to shoot at a dangerous, fleeing felony suspect “only after all other reasonable means of apprehension and control have been exhausted.”

San Francisco, like almost every other police agency in the Bay Area, and most in the country, strictly prohibits warning shots. So does BART: “Discharging of firearms [is] not allowable as a warning,” BART’s official weapons policy states.

The BART police are a bit more lenient than San Francisco on the use of deadly force to stop fleeing suspects. The officer must only believe that “the suspect is likely to continue to threaten death or serious bodily harm to another human being,” according to BART’s July 22, 1987, operational directive. Yet the directive also states that a firearm may not be used “when the officer has reason to believe … that the discharge may endanger the lives of passersby, or other persons not involved in the crime, and the officer’s life, or that of another person, is not in imminent danger.”

THE OPEN RANGE

Armed guards have patrolled BART trains and stations since the agency started running trains about 30 years ago. At first, they were simply known as “BART Security”; the officers had the authority to carry weapons and arrest suspects, but under state law, they weren’t members of a real police department. For the most part, that limited their authority to the confines of BART property.

In 1976, the state Legislature granted BART the authority to run a police department with jurisdiction and authority second only to the California Highway Patrol. BART officers now have full police powers, not only on their own turf, but in every one of the 58 California counties.

The department, headquartered near the Lake Merritt BART station, currently employs 151 sworn officers and nine dogs (see sidebar Page TK). An undisclosed number work undercover, in plain clothes, riding the trains and looking for crimes that range from fare evasion, “eating,” and “expectoration,” to assault, robbery, and rape. By far the most common crime, according to a BART police statistical breakdown for 1992, is “vagrancy”: 4,227 separate instances were reported by BART officers in the first 10 months of the year.

The BART Police Department has a $12 million annual budget, a fleet of patrol cars, and its own communications system. Officers earn salaries that Chief Taylor calls “competitive” with other departments in the Bay Area.

And at a time when California law-enforcement agencies are coming under increasingly strict civilian control, the BART police operate with nothing more than token oversight.

Chief Taylor reports to no commission, mayor, or city council. The department is administered by BART’s assistant general manager for public safety, who reports to the general manager, who reports to the board. BART spokesperson Michael Healy said the board plays no role in hiring or firing a chief, much less in disciplining police officers.

Former BART Board member Arlo Hale Smith said that in his term of office, the BART police chief rarely showed up for board meetings. “Even when we had something to discuss about the department – usually a labor-contract issue – the assistant general manager would come,” Smith explained.

Citizen complaints against the BART police are handled by the Internal Affairs Department, which is not a separate agency, as it is in many police departments, but a branch of the Detective Division, Taylor told the Bay Guardian.

That, some critics say, may explain why BART has the lowest possible rate of sustained complaints against its police officers. “There’s a very good reason for civilian agencies to handle complaints against the police,” said the ACLU’s John Crew. “People who have been abused by the police have a hard time trusting the same police department to do an honest investigation.”

Cornelius Hall, who is no stranger to government bureaucracy, said he ran into a stone wall when he tried to get some basic information about his son’s death from BART. “They wouldn’t even give me the police report,” he told the Bay Guardian. “The only way I can find out what happened to my son is to hire a lawyer and have it subpoenaed.”

Crew said he finds the situation “chilling.” He said he saw a “complete dearth” of civilian oversight in the BART administrative structure. “There’s no opportunity for meaningful public input, for hearings, for discussion of issues,” he continued.

“It’s not an acceptable situation. But under the circumstances, the members of the BART Board have an increased responsibility to ask questions and keep on top of their police department’s practices.”

In the case of Jerrold Hall, at least, that doesn’t seem to be happening. The shooting hasn’t been on the agenda for any board meeting since Nov. 15, and board members say they haven’t received any information about it from BART management.

And unlike Cornelius Hall, they haven’t even bothered to ask.

TO TELL THE TRUTH

The day after a BART police officer shot Jerrold Hall in the back of the head, transit agency spokesperson Mike Healy told reporters that Hall had been shot in the chest.

Not true.

Healy also told reporters that Hall had attacked Officer Fred Crabtree, and continued to attack him after Crabtree fired a warning shot.

Not true.

And Healy said that the warning shot was fired “over Hall’s head.”

Not true, either.

Healy freely referred to an alleged “armed robbery,” but he didn’t tell reporters that BART police had searched the entire area and never found a gun. He didn’t say that the alleged robbery victim had vanished without a trace, either.

So the public got a one-sided – and, as it turns out, largely inaccurate – picture of the incident. The press, taking Healy’s information at face value, portrayed Jerrold Hall as a violent, gun-wielding punk, shot in the act of attacking a cop.

“In some ways,” says Hall’s father, Cornelius, “that’s the saddest part of all.”

And while Healy finally put out a statement Dec. 7 acknowledging that some of his previous comments were in error, he did so only after a three-week barrage of questions from the Bay Guardian – and he never issued a word of apology to the Hall family.

It’s hard to blame Healy for the initial round of misinformation: In the heat of a bloody battle, the truth is often obscured. But Healy clearly knew, or could have known, within a few days after the incident that his official press statements had been wrong – that, for example, the medical reports showed Hall had been shot from behind. He could have called the reporters who were covering the story and let them know, or issued a new press release with updated information.

He could have tried to rescue some of what was left of the dead 19 year old’s personal reputation – and salvaged a bit of his own in the process. Instead, he fell back on the old BART strategy: When in doubt, stonewall. Then duck for cover, and hope it will all go away.

The BART Police Department may be the least-responsive law-enforcement agency I’ve seen since the discovery of the shredding machine in the White House basement. There is no press officer. The watch commanders, lieutenants, and captains refer all press calls to Chief Harold Taylor, who won’t come to the phone; his secretary refers the calls to the BART Public Affairs Office.

When I first called Healy Nov. 16 to ask about the shooting, he told me he hadn’t seen a police report, and didn’t know if one existed. He also said he didn’t know what the citizen complaint procedure was for the BART police, and had no idea if it was in writing. I filed a formal request for those and other records Nov. 17; under the Public Records Act, I had a legal right to a response within 10 days.

I let it slide to 15 days (holidays and all), then started calling Healy’s office. He was too busy to come to the phone at first, but after I harassed him for several hours, he told me that Chief Harold Taylor was handling my request, and that I should call him directly. Taylor wouldn’t come to the phone at all: He had an assistant tell me that Public Affairs was handling the request, and that I should call Mike Healy.

I spent another day trying again to reach Healy, who finally told me he wanted to set up an interview with Taylor – for Dec. 4, 17 days after I’d sent in a request for information most police agencies would probably have provided in less than an hour.

Chief Taylor showed up for the interview with a BART lawyer, who promised that the chief would fax me a statement of the facts of the shooting sometime later that afternoon. The brief, incomplete statement finally arrived three days later, around 3:30 p.m. Dec. 7, 21 days after my initial request. And BART officials still won’t release the full police report.

If I were a suspicious reporter, I’d wonder what they were trying to hide.

————

Deputy dog

In Philadelphia, the Inquirer revealed several years ago, police dogs attacked 358 people in the course of 33 months, leaving many of them scarred or maimed for life. In Los Angeles, the Times recently reported, the local K-9 Corps recorded more than a thousand bites in three years. In Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, trained German shepherds tore into a total of 375 legs, arms, and torsos in the course of their law-enforcement work.

In the past 10 years, canine corps scandals have tarnished the reputations of police departments all over the country and have cost taxpayers millions of dollars in lawsuits.

In Berkeley, however, police dogs have been banned since the early 1970s, when a City Council member named Ron Dellums responded to the brutal use of dogs against blacks in the South with a resolution abolishing the local canine corps. In San Francisco, dogs handle only a few very limited tasks.

But since 1990, the BART Police Canine Corps has been expanding into the sort of work that created such extensive problems in other American cities – a use for dogs that critics say has little justification.

“There are two basic rationales for using police dogs,” explained Richard Avenzino, director of the San Francisco SPCA, whose agency has worked with the local Police Department canine program. “One is for sniffing out explosives or narcotics. The other is for searches, mainly in enclosed spaces, where the dog’s sense of smell can aid in finding a hidden human suspect.

“But there’s also a perception that a snarling dog can intimidate people, which creates a lot more potential for trouble.”

The first BART Police canine corps dates back to the early 1970s. But the BART Board disbanded the program in 1975, after a police dog on a train in Philadelphia barked at BART Director John Glenn.

In 1990, Police Chief Harold Taylor restored four dogs to the force, saying they would be “a strong statement of police presence,” would deter violent crime, and could be used to help clear homeless people from trains and stations. In an interview last week, Taylor said the dogs, which now number nine, are used “to back up officers, in all their law-enforcement duties.”

The dogs, imported German shepherds, are bred and undergo Schützhund training at a special school in Germany, where they learn to attack on command. “The dogs only [understand] German,” explained Deputy Chief Kevin Sharp. “The officers learn to issue their commands in that language.”

Sharp said none of the BART dogs are trained to sniff out bombs or drugs and that they aren’t often needed for searches. In normal situations, he said, the dogs stay in the police car, with the window open, while the officer approaches a suspect. “They’re trained to jump out and attack without any command if they see that the officer is under assault,” he added.

ACLU Police Practices lawyer John Crew found that description alarming. “In other words,” he said, “we have dogs deciding on their own when to use what amounts to lethal force. That’s not a very good idea.”

Avenzino said the training methods used for such dogs “are, to put it mildly, controversial. A dog will do anything to please its owner; if you teach it to attack on command, it’s like loading a gun. In my opinion, it’s very dangerous.”

Jim Chanin, a Berkeley lawyer who has filed several lawsuits over attacks by police dogs, said he sees no good reason for BART to have a canine corps. “The problem is that these dogs are just trained to attack,” he explained. “You can’t use them to search for some kid lost in the BART tunnel.

“If there’s something the BART police do on a regular basis that requires the use of dogs, I certainly can’t see what it is.”

Chief Taylor told the Bay Guardian that dogs provide much less expensive backup than additional sworn officers. Berkeley Police Lt. Tom Grant said he agrees, to a point: “But then you have to pay out those big legal settlements if one of the dogs does something wrong.”

Gun crazy

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Editors note: This story ran Oct. 17, 2001

Bruce Seward imploded while riding an AC Transit bus.

It was 4 a.m. on May 28, 2001, and Seward was rolling through the darkness on the 82 line, headed south from Oakland toward Hayward. Hands clapped over his ears, Seward, a 42-year-old car salesman, rocked back and forth, vacilutf8g between sobbing and shouting. He was barefoot, according to witnesses.

Bus driver Anthony Ramsey heard Seward ranting, “They trying to kill me, they trying to kill me.”

“Shut up!” one passenger screamed. Another rider threatened to toss Seward off the bus.

Seward morphed, gaining some inner – momentary – calm. “Thank you, God, thank you, God, thank you, God,” he chanted.

A few weeks earlier Seward had jetted to Danville, Ill., for his mother’s 67th birthday; his mom and eight siblings didn’t notice any behavioral peculiarities. But now, quite publicly, the Oakland man’s synapses were misfiring.

At the end of the line, the Hayward BART station, Seward got off the bus. An hour later a veteran BART cop named David Betancourt found the rangy African American man outside the station, lying next to a Dumpster, naked and semi<\h>coherent. Betancourt, according to confidential police reports obtained by the Bay Guardian, grabbed Seward and shook him. “Are you OK?” the cop yelled.

“No,” Seward shouted, standing up. “No, it’s not OK.”

Betancourt, police reports indicate, says Seward then charged him. Yanking a can of pepper spray off his belt, the cop blasted the naked man in the face. The chemical spray did nothing.

Then, according to witnesses, Seward grabbed Betancourt’s 26-inch-long wooden nightstick. The officer – as he would later tell his superiors – began to fear for his life. Betancourt said he thought Seward would “beat [him] to death” with his own baton or attempt to disarm him and shoot him.

The cop drew his blued steel Glock and squeezed the trigger, dropping Seward with a single .40-caliber slug through the heart.

Seward’s demons are buried with him. Family members have few clues about why his mind melted down. They know he survived a similar psychotic episode in the early 1990s. And they know he went to see a psychologist two days before he died. It seems his relationship with an Oakland woman was collapsing; maybe the emotional turmoil had shattered him.

Betancourt, who has 20 years of law-enforcement experience, 8 of them with BART, emerged unharmed from the fatal skirmish; police records show the officer suffered no injuries. His career seems undamaged as well: Betancourt returned to active duty last week after probes by the BART police and the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office cleared him of any wrongdoing. The cop had been on paid administrative leave since the incident.

“It’s unfortunate that somebody died, but the officer was justified in using deadly force that morning,” Betancourt’s attorney, Leo Tamisiea, said.

BART police chief Gary Gee concurs. “I think he acted appropriately,” Gee told us. “The tussle that took place, the back-and-forth exchange – when it had no effect on [Seward] and the officer feared that he himself was going to suffer serious injury or death, he took the action he felt necessary.”

Regardless of BART’s official line, a key question remains: did Betancourt really have to kill Seward? It’s a question neither asked nor answered in the 90 pages of BART police reports leaked to this paper.

“My brother would still be alive today if the officer was doing his job correctly,” Michael Seward, 45, an Illinois state prison guard, told us. “I can’t see any justification for shooting an unarmed civilian.”

According to almost every major U.S. police department’s official guidelines – including those of the BART police – a cop can use deadly force only if the cop reasonably believes his or her life (or the life of another person) is in immediate jeopardy.

Did Betancourt truly think Seward was going to bludgeon him to death? And if so, was the cop making a realistic assessment of the situation? These questions, too, are unresolved by the investigations of BART and the D.A.’s Office.

The subway system has offered Seward’s family only fragmentary information about case number 01-22334. “The hardest part is that we’re not getting any help from the police department,” Michael Seward said. “I have not received an autopsy report on my brother. We’re trying to find out what actually happened, and the police have not been forthcoming in terms of giving us an accurate, detailed explanation of what happened.” The family is contemputf8g a lawsuit.

Lurking in the police documents leaked to this paper is one fairly startling fact: “Officer Betancourt’s duty weapon left the scene with him,” one chronology of the incident reads. Two hours after the killing, Betancourt turned the Glock over to investigators. “That’s totally against protocol,” said former Santa Monica cop Frank Saunders, a consultant on police practices. “In these cases, you’re supposed to take the officer’s weapon immediately.”

“I don’t know why there are time gaps in the reports,” BART spokesperson Mike Healy admitted.

For Samantha Liapes, director of Bay Area PoliceWatch, Seward’s death is symptomatic of a broader problem. “We’re very troubled by this: yet another example of unwarranted deadly force being used in a situation where someone was obviously in mental distress,” Liapes said. “The fact that the man was naked and clearly not carrying a life-threatening weapon makes the use of deadly force by the officer even more troubling.”

Two weeks after Seward was killed, San Francisco cops put 20-some bullets in another mentally ill man, Idriss Stelley, in a movie theater at Sony Metreon. Stelley, according to his mother, was brandishing a less-than-lethal, two-inch-long knife.

Beyond the specifics of the two cases, there’s a larger policy issue: are local cops getting the proper training in how to handle mentally ill people?

As required by state law, BART – along with most other Bay Area departments – gives new recruits six hours of schooling on the subject. “We are sensitive to the fact that there may be a need for additional training and are receptive to looking into it,” BART chief Gee said. “But I’m not so sure that even if Betancourt had gotten supplemental training on dealing with persons who are mentally ill, that it would have changed the outcome in this case.”

The chief could take a cue from San Jose, which has put 130 of its officers through a 40-hour training on mental health crisis calls.

Lt. Brenda Herbert, head of the San Jose Police Department’s Crisis Management Unit, runs the training program, which was launched in 1998. “What we’re trying to do is teach officers to talk someone down, rather than take them down physically,” Herbert says. “It’s a matter of teaching these officers what it means to be hearing voices, how to talk to someone who’s hearing voices, how to find out what the voices are saying so that you can take the necessary precautions.”

Seward is not the first person to bleed to death in the parking lot of the Hayward BART station. It was there, in 1992, that BART cop Fred Crabtree confronted Jerrold Hall, a 19-year-old African American. Hall, who was getting off a train with a pal, fit the description of a robbery suspect. Crabtree – armed with a baton, a can of pepper spray, a handgun, a shotgun, and an attack-<\h>trained German shepherd – told Hall to halt.

After a quick discussion Hall turned and walked off, his hands clearly visible. Crabtree ordered him to stop. When Hall failed to heed the command, the cop loosed the 12-gauge shotgun, blasting the young man in the back of the head.

As it turned out, no evidence was ever found connecting Hall to any robbery – and he was unarmed (see “BART Cops, 41-0,” 1/14/98).

BART came under public pressure to fire – or at least discipline – the officer. Politicians made noises about putting the subway system’s largely unaccountable 182-<\h>officer force under the supervision of a civilian review board.

Apparently unswayed by reason, BART officials did absolutely nothing, and eventually the public discontent tapered off. Crabtree remained on active duty until his own inglorious demise a few years later: the officer was found hanging from a noose in his home as porno tapes played on the TV.

Interviewed last week, Tom Radulovich, a member of the BART Board of Directors, said he’s pushing for more police oversight but at this point doesn’t have the votes on the nine-member board to pass any new rules. It may prove especially hard to muster those votes in the fear-<\h>laden post-Sept. 11 climate.

“The concern the [Seward killing] triggers for me is whether we’re doing enough to make sure things like this don’t happen,” Radulovich said.

It could be that David Betancourt really had no choice but to gun down Bruce Seward. Maybe it really was a kill-or-be-killed situation.

There is, however, another, more grim possibility: that the police culture at BART has changed very little in the last nine years. And the majority of the BART board doesn’t seem to care.

Top tendencies

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› johnny@sfbg.com

1. Sarabande (Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2008)

A masterful film was made in San Francisco by someone who doesn’t just live for the city, but does the city know it? Dorsky’s latest (along with the superb companion piece Winter) screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and was part of a retrospective at New York’s Anthology Film Archive, but as far as I know it has yet to have a public screening in his hometown, where he resides on the avenues that separate the filmmakers and film lovers of SF’s streets, and the Film Society in the Presidio. This summer, along with kino21’s Konrad Steiner, I put together a program devoted to Dorsky’s one-time peer and brother filmmaker of sorts, the late Warren Sonbert, whose revelatory explorations of editing and direct vision lead up — in far more frenetic and sprawling sense — to what Dorsky is doing today. Sarabande is the time and place where Dorsky’s devotional cinema reaches the sublime. This country priest of a film critic may be misreading the signs, once again, in making such a claim — but so be it.

2. The Exiles restoration (Kent MacKenzie, USA, 1961)

This night in the life of urban American Indians occupies a one-of-a-kind place and time. The title renders any description superfluous — what form of exile is stronger than the one discovered while drifting through a stolen home? MacKenzie’s movie, with the life-and-death tunnel vision of its gorgeous Weegee-inflected vérité cinematography, revealed a lost United States. Today it’s a haunting marker of a moment before this country’s commercial independent cinema went in countless stupid and phony directions, and of an area of Los Angeles that has vanished. People are rendered disposable. Lonely spirits continue to gather.

3. Wimbledon Men’s Final 2008: Rafael Nadal def. Roger Federer, 6-4, 6-4, 6-7 (5-7), 6-7 (8-10), 9-7

If you believe what you read and what you see, Raise the Red Lantern and Hero director Zhang Yimou’s production of the Beijing Olympics’ opening ceremony was the spectacle of the year — so dazzling it erased the torch’s troubled travels from what’s left of a collective memory. Television networks have it on rerun, art publications like Artforum can’t stop parsing and usually praising it. (It also garnered an excellent lengthy "movie review" in the magazine Cinema Scope.) Yet Zhang’s endlessly-rehearsed and prefabricated festivities paled in comparison to the marathon drama and dazzling finale of this year’s last match at Wimbledon. The spine-tingling aspect came from fate, not machination, as night crept into a stadium that doesn’t use lights, and the victor’s triumph gave way to an outrageous spontaneous ovation of flashbulbs. It didn’t hurt that Rafael Nadal is the sport’s version of his idol, Zinedine Zidane. Lil Wayne said it best: "I love his motivation and his heart is so big. He leaves it on the court."

4. The Juche Idea (Jim Finn, USA, 2008) and Light is Waiting (Michael Robinson, USA 2007)

Convulsive cinema is radical cinema, one of the reasons the gut-busting aspects of these two movies are vital. Finn’s look at Kim Jong-Il’s film theories (yes, "Dear Leader" is a film theorist with publications to his name) is uncannily timely, from its clips of North Korean stadium parades — shades of Zhang Yimou’s Beijing bombast — to its satirical insight that little separates dreaded (and oft-ridiculous) socialism from the broken-down ghost of late capitalism. Also, best use of ski jumps, rodents, and fly-face sculptures this year. Robinson finds a Satanic kaleidoscope within the fractured pixels of an episode of Full House, making the discovery roughly around the time one of the Olsen twins re-manifested as an angel of death. His statement for the movie still might be the definitive one: "Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive." Dying of laughter has rarely felt better.

5. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden, 2008)

The growing wave of top 10 raves and critic’s awards for Alfredson’s deeply subversive eternal preteen romance is a rare heartening aspect of this year’s feature film malaise.

6. California Company Town (Lee Ann Schmitt, USA, 2008), Viva (Anna Biller, USA, 2007), Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2008), and When It Was Blue (Jennifer Reeves, USA, 2008)


The heart of American cinema in 2008 is as wild and strong as these directors’ visions. Schmitt’s scorched-earth exploration of California’s abandoned past, closing with a final chapter on Silicon Valley that refreshingly breaks its own rules and throws down the gauntlet, is the timeliest movie in a year of ever-accumuutf8g economic disaster. Biller’s tribute to the bodaciously vivid soft-core fantasies of Russ Meyer and Radley Metzger couples enthusiasm with smarts with kinky results. It also features a character whose incessant cackling laughter practically becomes hallucinogenic. Reichardt starts off what could have been just another shaggy dog story by paying tribute to the Polaroid Kidd (she’s also sussed out the new depression), and allows her lead actress’s offscreen back story to silently color in a thousand shades of loss. In sync with Skuli Sverrisson’s incandescent score, Reeves’ movie makes love to nature. The past-tense in the title proves she’s looking ahead.

7. Wild Combination (Matt Wolf, USA, 2008)

In his feature debut, the talented 25-year-old Wolf chooses a documentary subject he has an affinity for, and Russell’s still-blooming musical legacy automatically gives the film a unique soulful beauty. While the pastoral and waterfront imagery is expected, Wolf’s humane insight as an interviewer is a wonder to behold. It results in one of the year’s most emotionally powerful films, when following the reticent Russell could have been futile. The final 10 minutes are a complete rebuke to all the idiotic discourse that rails against (and perhaps even for?) gay marriage.

8. Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK/Ireland, 2008) and Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA, 2008)


Is hunger sated by milk? Can milk alone get rid of hunger? Steve McQueen is the last art star with film director aspirations, and Gus Van Sant is a movieland auteur who always seems to look longingly at the art world’s white cubes. Both have made bio-dramas about political icons: McQueen speculates about the life and death of IRA leader Bobby Sands, while Van Sant, in case you haven’t heard, has realized his fascination with a certain trailblazing gay San Franciscan. Funny, then, that McQueen makes a riveting experimental work that devolves into a standard heroic final passage, while Van Sant crafts a traditional film in drag. In interview, McQueen told me that he thought of Hunger‘s standout confrontational scene as a bit like the 1982 Wimbledon final. (See, tennis is uniquely cinematic.) But his visceral perspective is most effective early on, when scarcely any words are spoken, and his oblique references to everyone from Jean Genet to Van Sant’s old love Alfred Hitchcock don’t seem merely precocious.

9. The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2008)

I may have enjoyed this movie because I know next to nothing about (and don’t give a damn about) Mickey Rourke’s misadventures. He arrived in my frame of vision as a modern-day American version of Jean Cocteau’s Beast, blinking out some perfectly round tears when he isn’t pulling staples out of his leathery salon-tanned hide. Look no further than the corrupt endgame of Hulk Hogan — better yet, try to avoid looking at it — for proof that such a figure suits the late-Bush era, though of course Rourke’s brawler has true working-class heart. A working class hero is something to be.

10. Manny Farber, 1917-2008

A lot of critics, ranging from musty well-off bores to young upstarts, wrote tributes to Farber upon his passing. But I have to wonder, who in the current era’s echo chamber of Web-bound opinion has actually learned from him? Ten years ago, there were at least a few voices (Chuck Stephens, Edward E. Crouse) whose writing carried traces of Farber’s spiky structures and wonderfully disorienting shifts in point-of-view. Now, I don’t see hear anyone with a voice like his, but more troubling, I don’t see newer generations of film critics picking up on the fact that he approached the medium as something other than a passive "entertain me" observer. Farber’s vision of film was anything but literal. He was, and is, an artist.

>>More Year in Film 2008

New news, old year

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

It’s been a crappy but interesting year in sex news, which, when you really think about it, could describe just about any year you care to look at. One of these stories is probably my favorite sex/science news ever, at least since we found out that female ejaculate comes from the bladder, not the tiny Skene’s glands along the urethra. Oh, and there was the study that showed that that men who identified as bisexual were not actually aroused by images of men having sex, and the correlation of lesbianism with finger-length ratios…

My first story is actually an old one (most of the datelines for it on the Web are from 2003), but it did just land on my desk again, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to report that performing fellatio does not reduce the risk of breast cancer by up to 40 percent in women who swallow at least twice a week. As Snopes.com points out, the presence of experts such as "Dr. Len Lictopeen" on the "CNN Health" page that makes the rounds ought to serve as a hint that the page was spoofed. Sorry, fellas.

So what else do we have? Medscape published a rundown of penis news titled "Penile Size and Penile Enlargement Surgery: A Review," which was mostly unstartling (urologists think surgeons should have a good reason before performing penis enlargement procedures, many men are dissatisfied with the results, etc.), but my favorite take-away was this one: after linear regression analysis, there was no statistical correlation between stretched penile length and shoe size. So now you know.

New Scientist published an article I wish I’d read back when I was answering phones at San Francisco Sex information, where questions about sex, calories, and weight loss (or gain, in the case of fellatio-performers who worried about calorie content) were common. "Nope, sorry," I’d assure them, "You’re not going to lose weight that way (300 calories an hour is an optimistic but common estimate), but it’s good for your general health, so off you go." But now it appears that prolactin, the hormone that not only induces lactation but promotes maternal feelings and rises after orgasms achieved during intercourse — although (apparently) not through other acts — may also play a role in maternal and paternal weight gain. And since prolactin levels rise after sex, some researchers are investigating the obvious conclusion: sex makes you fat. And while they don’t ask this question, I will: is "fat and happy" really such a bad thing, given the alternative?

Meanwhile, there actually is evidence that sex, especially morning sex, really is good for what ails you. Among many other and better-known benefits, it has been shown to raise levels of Immunoglobulin A,(IgA), the microbe-slaying antibody, and thus might help you fight infections.

All of this is well and good, but I’ve been remiss in not reporting sooner the headline that really captured my attention: "G-Spot Caught on Ultrasound! Elusive Organ’s Existence No Longer In Question!"

Not that I questioned it. I was (and still am) continually irritated, however, by the constant references in the media to the G-spot’s possible apocryphal-ocity. While merely insisting that something is there cannot make it so (I am, for instance, still an atheist), this denial of the lived and reported experience of millions of women (and many of their partners) is and was uniquely galling. But now we have this story, reported as a bit of a yay/boo/yay by our friend, New Scientist:

Yay: Emmanuele Jannini at the University of L’Aquila in Italy discovered clear anatomical differences between women who claim to have vaginal orgasms — triggered by stimulation of the front vaginal wall without any simultaneous stimulation of the clitoris — and those who don’t.

Boo: Apparently, the key is that women who orgasm during penetrative sex have a thicker area of tissue in the region between the vagina and urethra, meaning that a simple scan could separate the lucky "haves" from the "have-nots."

Yay: Even better, Jannini now has evidence that women who have this thicker tissue can be "taught" to have vaginal orgasms. Ultrasound scans on 30 women uncovered G-spots in just eight of them and when these women were asked if they had vaginal orgasms during sex, only five of them said yes. However, when the remaining three were shown their G-spots on the scan and given advice on how to stimulate it, two of them subsequently "discovered" the joy of vaginal orgasms. "This demonstrated, although in a small sample, the use of [vaginal ultrasound] in teaching the vaginal orgasm," Jannini says.

I knew it! I’ve been teaching for years and years that internal sensitivity is, or at least can be, a learned response. I don’t expect that ultrasound, which is expensive and literally invasive — if also harmless and painless — is going to become part of Everywoman’s sexual fulfillment tool-kit, but how cheering is it to have proof at last? Good news in a bad year, right?

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is teaching Sex After Parenthood at Day One Center (www.dayonecenter.com), Recess (info@recessurbanrecreation.com), and privately. Contact her at andrea@altsexcolumn.com for more info.

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