Review

Czech it out

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REVIEW An attractive 30-something woman with a face hardened by rough times — most recently the 2002 Prague flood pretty much ruining her Prague home — Marcela (Anna Geislerova) is raising two children under precarious circumstances. Marriage to Jarda (Roman Luknar) is discordant, despite their volcanic sex, in large part because she objects to his paying the bills by running a chop shop. She’s already left the with the kids — albeit due to her son’s severe allergy to their digs’ post-flood moldiness — when Jarda steals the wrong guy’s car and gets his whole operation busted by police. With the breadwinner in jail, what’s Marcela to do? Move in with her crazy religious mother in-law (Emilia Vasaryova)? Nope. Stay with her own mother (Jana Brejchova) and the latter’s very creepy diabetic boyfriend (Jiri Schmitzer) in their cramped apartment? Yes, until something better comes along. Which, surprisingly, it does in the form of Czech-Italian vintner Benes (Josef Abrham), whose stolen car triggered Jarda’s arrest. He’s that staple of 1930s screwball comedies so seldom encountered since, in real or cinematic life: the suave older man who’s single, rich, lonely, and genuinely concerned over our underclass heroine’s welfare. This conceit might seem overly contrived in lesser hands than those of director Jan Hrebejk and scenarist Petr Jarchovsky (of prior foreign-language Oscar nominees 2000’s Divided We Fall and 2004’s Up and Down). But their excellently crafted and performed seriocomedy — with its frank yet funny sexual randiness — never feels less than credible. In a classically warm yet ironic, ambitious yet intimate, absurdist yet realistic Czech cinema fashion that Hrebejk and Jarchovsky will hopefully torch-carry well into the 21st century.

Beauty in Trouble opens Fri/28 in Bay Area theaters.

Take the red pill

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PREVIEW/REVIEW After a foray into the spirit-swindling zines and quilts of Olivia Plender that provide the other highlight of Berkeley Art Museum’s latest installment in the MATRIX series, it’s best to venture into the exhibition’s darkened back room, sink into a beanbag chair, and soak up the kinetic collage animation of Martha Colburn. Those beanbags, so different from the hard, backless blocks that art spaces and artists usually offer as places to sit, are an invitation to watch Colburn’s looping short film Myth Labs over and over — a worthwhile endeavor, since you could notice new things on your 20th dance with its blitz of religious, historical, commercial, and (oh yeah, before I forget) human imagery.

Rain clouds rain yet more rain clouds within just a single second-long burst of Myth Labs, which charts a tempestuous world where cops continually threaten to shoot whomever they encounter — cute kitties or Christ-like black men — in the face. Gunfire isn’t the only shooting going on, since the title of Colburn’s movie puns off of meth labs. The pairing of that literally explosive material with her animation is an apt one: as ever, her images erupt across the screen in rightward pans that no live action camera could capture. Beginning with battles between pilgrims and justifiably outraged and confused Indians, Colburn’s eight-minute version of American history is cinema as convulsive as its subject matter.

In an extension of the Berkeley Art Museum show, Pacific Film Archive is presenting a night with the artist and filmmaker. Though Colburn is most associated with Baltimore these days, it’s a homecoming of sorts, since she did time in the Bay Area in the 1990s, forging ties with fellow filmmakers at Other Cinema and collaborating since with Deerhoof. Spanning from 1995 to 2008, the hour-long program should be a decent representative look at the work of one of the best collage artists and animators in a post-Harry Smith world.

BENDING THE WORD/MATRIX 226 Through Feb. 8, 2009, free–$12. Wed.-Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft, Berk. (510) 642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

MARTHA COLBURN’S COLLAGE ANIMATIONS Tues/2, 7:30 p.m; $5.50–$9.50. Pacific Film Archive, 2575, Bancroft, Berk. (510) 642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Where’s the party?

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

The best time to hear AC/DC — besides during the obvious coked-out, high-speed cop chase — is at a party. At least this is my personal fave: during a party I’m throwing and controlling the music being played.

I love the part of the night when it is appropriate to put on the first AC/DC song, really loud. It has to be pretty late — when the strangers start filing in, cigarettes are being smoked everywhere, and the rules have been tossed out. People need to be drunk enough to dance to AC/DC, after all — and the first song has to be "It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll)."

The problem here is that once you start playing AC/DC, you have nowhere to go. You’ve reached the ceiling as far as loud rock ‘n’ roll music goes, from here you have to get into crazy metal or ubernoise in order to keep the bar set in the red. And if you play Pig Destroyer, even though the middle of the song might be awesome, awesome, awesome, by the time you get there, you’ve alienated almost everybody. So some restraint is necessary. I used to actually think about this while DJing parties and I eventually came up with the answer: what you do is play more AC/DC.

You start with Bon Scott-era stuff — a little "Jailbreak," "Beating Around the Bush," "Live Wire," and "Sin City" — then you drop Brian Johnson’s flat, cap-lidded bleat and the high-tech production of "Thunderstruck" on them. You’re now free to play "Safe in New York City," "Sink the Pink," anything — just stay away from "You Shook Me All Night Long," because you may as well play Bob Seger’s "Old Time Rock and Roll." And you gotta put on "Moneytalks" at some point.

AC/DC has a new album, titled Black Ice (Columbia). This is studio album 15 and is officially available for purchase either directly through the group’s Web site or at Wal-Mart. I didn’t get a promo copy of it and I don’t really shop at Wal-Mart much, except to get their spicy wings, which are fantastic, but I was able to hear some of the songs on YouTube, so I can give a somewhat informed review of the album. Like I said, I found the stuff on YouTube, but I didn’t watch the video for lead single, "Rock ‘n’ Roll Train," because, well, I love AC/DC, but even I have to admit that Angus Young wearing a school kid uniform as he approaches AARP eligibility is a little embarrassing.

I mean, the poor guy, he’s been duck-walking around the stage and over-performing for 40 years practically! Doesn’t it get to be like forced labor after a while? After, say, 30 years? Yipes.

Anyway here goes: the songs on Black Ice start with a bass line, then one guitar picks up the rhythm riff, then after exactly eight bars, the second guitar comes in, echoing the riff. Four bars pass, and the drums come in along with Brian Johnson screeching about women that could only have existed in the 1980s — "She’ll burn your eyeballs out," "she’s got it all," "she has two great danes on a leash," etc. Young peels off a blaring solo that erupts at exactly the right time, the chorus is repeated — peppered by "honey"s and "hey-hey"s from Johnson — and it all fades out. For my money, the tried-and-true formula works best on "Skies on Fire" and "Big Jack," which is about a guy who’s really got the knack and also never goes anywhere without a sack.

OK, the guys in AC/DC aren’t geniuses, and maybe they’ve been at it a little too long, but the formula still works, it always will, and Black Ice — like just about every one of their records — is not meant to be sat around with and listened to. The idea is to play it at parties, and you’re not supposed to look too closely at it. The idea is to let it wash over you. *

AC/DC

With the Answer

Tues/2 and Dec. 4, 8 p.m., $94.50

Oracle Arena

7000 Coliseum, Oakl.

(415) 421-TIXS

www.apeconcerts.com

Armed love

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW The struggle of young, white activists aspiring to the authenticity, confrontational stance, and street credibility of groups like the Black Panthers has generated some of the most enduring myths and storylines of the 1960s. Among these ’60s groups, perhaps the least documented is New York City’s mythical Motherfuckers, the "street gang with an analysis." Former Motherfucker and current Berkeley activist Osha Neumann’s colorful but uneven memoir Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (Seven Stories Press, 240 pages, $16.95) is the first book-length treatment of the so-called "group with the unspeakable name."

Much like the Diggers (members of the San Francisco Mime Troup who left the stage in 1966 to act out revolutionary change in the streets), the Motherfuckers got their start in art. In January 1967, Neumann attended a meeting for "Angry Arts Week," which called for Lower East Side artists to make politically engaged work against the war in Vietnam. There, he met anarchist painter Ben Morea. Morea and his art group Black Mask had been responsible for a series of actions that brought the heavy street vibe of the Black Panthers to the art world, including an announced "shut down" of the Museum of Modern Art that ended with riot cops ringing the museum. From Angry Arts Week evolved a new group with Morea and Neumann at its core that took its name from a poem by Leroi Jones.

A product of the tenements and rat-infested streets around Tompkins Square Park, the Motherfuckers roamed the Lower East Side in leather jackets, carrying knives and handing out manifestoes. Their political identity, worldview, and brutal tactics were all neatly encapsulated by their first action in January 1968. During a garbage strike in the Lower East Side, they gathered rotten trash from the streets and took it uptown to dump on the steps of Lincoln Center, where they handed out flyers that read, "We propose a cultural exchange: garbage for garbage." Similarly to the Diggers out west, UAW/MF operated a Free Store, and held regular free community feasts for hippies and dropouts. But the Motherfuckers also taught free karate classes; eventually, they stockpiled guns. As Neumann puts it today, "We didn’t fuck around."

Preaching "flower power but with thorns," the group’s politics of escalation anticipated today’s Black Bloc. At the October 1967 march on the Pentagon, while Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies were linking arms and chanting to "levitate the Pentagon," Morea and company tore down a chain-link fence, battled with federal marshalls, and fought their way inside. Although Neumann now mostly dismisses the Motherfuckers’ tactics as macho and ineffective, he skillfully evokes the paranoid, volatile time and place in which they made total sense. Unfortunately for the reader, the group disbands midway through the book, and the back half is devoted to deadly dull soul-searching about the meaning of the ’60s.

Assessing the Motherfuckers’ legacy, Neumann writes, "It is easy to dismiss (their) politics as nothing more than childish tantrums and to profess that a baleful acceptance of the status quo is more ‘mature.’ It is more difficult to disentangle, delicately, as one would a bird caught in a net, the genuinely radical and uncompromising elements in this politics from those which are self-defeating." Though Neumann never satisfyingly solves this challenge for readers or himself, perhaps that’s the point. The group that started out as artists ultimately ended where they began, leaving behind a myth with an irreducible riddle at its core that is perhaps best considered as art. *

Tyranny of the majority

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› steve@sfbg.com

When the California Supreme Court agreed last week to decide the legality of Proposition 8 — which a slim majority of Californians passed Nov. 4, taking from same-sex couples the marriage rights that the court had established in May — the debate shifted to a concept far older than that of gay rights.

Essentially, it will decide whether this is a case of the "tyranny of the majority," a phrase Alexis de Tocqueville coined in his classic 1835 book Democracy in America, drawing on a concept from the ancient Greeks that was the philosophical underpinning of the US Bill of Rights and the central paradigm of constitutional democracy.

The founding principle is that basic rights — such as the freedoms of speech, religion, and association — are not subject to majority approval and can’t be taken away by a simple popular vote. So the question now before the judges is whether the right to marry, which the court ruled had been unconstitutionally withheld from same-sex couples, is among those core rights.

"The whole notion of equal protection is to protect minority interests from the periodic discriminatory impulse of the majority," Robert Rubin, legal director for the Bay Area chapter of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, told the Guardian. "And [upholding Prop. 8] would turn that on its head."

‘CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS’


Even before the votes were counted election night, the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office and its counterparts in Santa Clara County and the city of Los Angeles were developing their challenge to the legality of Prop. 8, which they filed Nov. 5.

Both Prop. 8 proponents and the California Attorney General’s Office agreed that the high court should immediately take the case rather than let it rattle around the lower courts for months or years. "Review by this Court is necessary to ensure uniformity of decision, finality and certainty for the citizens of California," Attorney General Jerry Brown wrote to the court.

Brown had previously ruled that the roughly 18,000 marriages performed since May were legal and that Prop. 8 is not retroactive, something proponents of the measure dispute and which the Supreme Court also has agreed to decide in this case. But two of the three "issues to be briefed and argued," as the high court ruled Nov. 19, were more fundamental: "1) Is Proposition 8 invalid because it constitutes a revision of, rather than an amendment to, the California Constitution? (see Cal. Const., art. XVIII, 1-4) 2) Does Proposition 8 violate the separation of powers doctrine under the California Constitution?"

Narrowly framed, the first question asks whether the process of banning same-sex marriage in the constitution should have gone through the more cumbersome revision process, which involves winning a two-thirds vote in the California Legislature before submitting the measure to voters. And the second concerns whether the legislative branch of government (in this case, through a direct vote of the people) can legally override this decision by the judicial branch.

But more broadly framed, both questions go to the same basic issue: can a simple majority of voters take away rights from a protected minority group, one the judicial branch has already ruled is entitled to the same marriage rights as heterosexual couples? The implications of that answer are so profound that City Attorney Dennis Herrera, in a City Hall press conference after the court announced its decision, cast the matter as no less than a "constitutional crisis."

"The cases before the Supreme Court today are no simple rematch. To be candid, the principles implicated here are of far greater consequence than marriage alone," Herrera said. "In short, this case has gone beyond the simple issue of marriage equality. And no matter what your view of same-sex marriage is, it’s important to understand that the passage of Proposition 8 has pushed California to the brink of a constitutional crisis."

He then explained why.

"This measure sought to do something that no other constitutional amendment has ever done here in the state of California, and that is to strip a fundamental right from a protected class of citizens and in doing so, it did not merely undo a narrowly disfavored Supreme Court ruling. Its legal effect is nowhere [near that] simple or elegant. Rather, it upended a separation of powers doctrine deeply rooted in our system of governance. It trounced upon the independence of the state’s judicial branch and it eviscerated the most fundamental principle of our state’s constitution. And if allowed to stand, Proposition 8 so devastates the principle of equal protection that it would endanger fundamental rights of any potential electoral minority, even for protected classes based on gender, race, or religion. And it would mean a bare majority of voters could enshrine any manner of discrimination against any unpopular group, and our state constitution would be powerless to disallow it," Herrera said.

That’s why he said 12 cities and counties have joined this suit — including Los Angeles and Alameda counties, which were not part of the original same-sex marriage case — along with supporting roles being played by the NAACP, the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, the Asia Pacific American Legal Center, and California Council of Churches.

There is some irony to the Council of Churches’ involvement given that religious groups, particularly the Catholics and Mormons, provided the backbone of financial and volunteer support for the Yes on 8 campaign. Yet the council argues that Prop. 8 is an attack on religious freedom.

"It is kind of ironic, and I don’t they they’re paying attention to the big picture, to be honest with you," Eric Isaacson, attorney for the Council of Churches, told the Guardian. "But history tells us that religious groups are often the victims of such persecution."

He cited laws that have taken rights from Jews in many countries and instances of majorities in the United States going after Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons, a group driven from state to state by discriminatory mobs until they finally settled in Utah to enjoy religious freedom.

Beyond the historical and precedent-setting nature of the case, the council’s executive director Rick Schlosser told the Guardian that Prop. 8 discriminates against Episcopal, Unitarian, and other churches that believe all people have the right to marry.

"We work on a lot of religious freedom issues and there’s a huge number of churches that support the right of people to marry," Schlosser said. "There are a lot of churches that think it’s their religious duty to perform same-sex marriages."

CONFLICTING TRADITIONS


Frank Schubert, who managed the Yes on 8 campaign, scoffs at attempts to frame this debate around larger constitutional issues: "This is simply about marriage and what the definition of marriage will be."

He called the chances of overturning the measure "minuscule," and said, "the constitution belongs to the people." Rather than an initiative upsetting constitutional traditions, Schubert blamed the Supreme Court for reinterpreting marriage: "It’s the first time in California that rights that did not exist were granted on a narrow court decision and the people corrected that."

Yet the traditional gender structure of marriage is now in conflict with traditions of equal protection and separation of powers, something same-sex marriage advocates say needs to be the subject of a concerted public education campaign.

"There is a major civics education to be undertaken," Rubin said, recalling how he was also criticized publicly in 1994 for his role in winning a restraining order against Proposition 187, which sought to withhold government services from undocumented immigrants. "Yet the notion that protecting minority interests is not subject to popular will is not that hard to understand."

Maybe, but some constitutional law scholars say the formulation is not quite that simple. "The notion that a majority can’t take away a minority group’s rights, that just isn’t true," said UC Berkeley’s Boalt School of Law professor Jesse Choper. He takes a less philosophical view of the case, noting that California law explicitly allows the constitution to be amended, essentially however the people see fit, a process far easier than the one to change the federal constitution.

Choper said the specific question before the court is whether voters can remove same-sex marriage rights from the constitution. "And the answer is yes, if they do it properly," he said. That determination will come down to whether the judges believe this change is a mere amendment, or a more serious revision. Choper said the case law on that question isn’t well-established, but his reading of it is that plaintiffs face a real challenge in arguing that a simple change to the constitution — albeit a weighty one — requires the revision process. "It’s uphill," he said. "They’ll have to cut a new cloth."

But Herrera and his fellow plaintiffs don’t agree. While he characterized the coming legal battle as difficult and complicated, he expressed confidence in their ability to show that Prop. 8 changes core constitutional principles.

"That’s why I think this is a revision rather than amendment, because it would so radically change the balance of power and responsibility between our branches of government," Herrera said.

Santa Clara County Attorney Ann Ravel, who joined Herrera’s press conference, agreed, stepping up the podium to say, "Let me just add something to that. If this is not a case of revision, it’s hard to imagine any case that the court might find there to have been a revision, and there have been some."

While Choper may not agree with the plaintiffs on how the court will decide the equal protection questions, he does agree that the outcome could have serious implications for minority rights and the ability of voters to target disfavored groups. "If they can do it to this minority, they can do it to other minorities," Choper said.

Rubin said the religious groups pushing Prop. 8 are being short-sighted: "What they may like today when they have 51 percent of the vote, tomorrow they may be on the 49 percent side and may not like that basic rights come down to majority rule."

And that’s why the issue gets elevated to the larger question of whether this is a case of tyranny of the majority, something that could become an issue for the federal courts, which is likely to see cases challenging whether lax California standards on precedent-setting initiatives might run afoul of bedrock principles in the US Constitution.

"Yes of course you could challenge it in the federal court," Choper said. "If Prop. 8 stands, someone will bring a case about whether discrimination against gay marriages violates the equal protection clause of the federal constitution."

Herrera said he doesn’t want to go there yet, but he left that door open in response to a question from the Guardian: "Are there potential federal issues down the road that could be raised or discussed? It’s no secret that’s potentially there, but at this point, I don’t think that’s something that we’re going to focus on."

THE LONG VIEW


While the judges and lawyers in this case may focus on narrow legal concepts and definitions, Herrera is seeking to present the case in a far grander context.

"Equal protection under the law is what separates constitutional democracy from mob rule tyranny and it is a principle that reaches back eight centuries to the Magna Carta and it has guided the founding of our nation and our state," he said. "So I understand that on same-sex marriage, the emotions on both sides run high, but it’s important to understand the legal stakes are even higher. The cases before the high court today are no longer about marriage rights alone. They are about the foundations of our constitution. And as citizens we share the blessing of a common jurisprudence, and I refuse to accept that it is beyond us to find common ground in its enduring and deeply American principles: equality under the law, separation of powers, and an independent judiciary."

Ravel reinforced Herrera’s perspective, telling reporters, "The Supreme Court is going to decide, as Dennis said, a question that goes to the very foundation of our democracy and that will also impact every city and county in the state. The court has held, previously, that all couples have to be treated equally when it comes to the important institution of marriage. A majority of voters can’t undercut the court’s role in protecting minorities in our society."

Essentially, this is no longer a case about same-sex marriage.

"The merits of the case are different than they were back in May. The fact of the matter is the California Supreme Court found there was a fundamental right to marry and that LGBT couples are entitled to that right. The issue here is should Prop. 8 be struck down because it was an improper amendment versus a revision," Herrera said. "So I think everybody is focused on the right issues." *

Past, present, future

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> johnny@sfbg.com

REVIEW As a programming move, the Roxie Theater’s decision to screen Rob Epstein’s classic 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk is both a no-brainer and a bit of casual brilliance. It’s a no-brainer because of Milk mania. It’s a little stroke of genius because this great documentary’s return, one week before the theatrical premiere of Gus Van Sant’s feature at the Castro, provides plentiful compare-and-contrast opportunities for all those wise enough to know that they need to see both. This isn’t the first time that the Roxie — which presented Tsai Ming-liang’s homage to movie theaters Goodbye, Dragon Inn during the Castro’s days of turmoil in 2004 — has chimed in like a smart kid brother.

Epstein’s movie is a classic partly because of its historical contents, but there’s a definite mastery to the way in which he assembles and presents that material — if today’s makers of stylized docs haven’t learned from his command, that command has at least influenced Van Sant. The Times of Harvey Milk doesn’t dig into day-to-day San Francisco politics with the same relish or perhaps even specificity of the Van Sant movie (which recalls Barbet Schroeder’s 1990 Reversal of Fortune in its affection for scenes of creative, energetic groupthink). But journeying through candlelight vigil and through riot, it remains the most dramatically powerful response to Harvey Milk. His life and death were the stuff of great drama as well as of history.

The time for The Times of Harvey Milk is now, once again: more than a number connects and separates Proposition 6 of Milk’s era with Proposition 8 today. Thanks to Epstein’s compassionate documentary eye, his talking heads are fully realized human characters, with a range of personalities: the fervor of Tom Ammiano, the gruff candor of union machinist Jim Elliot (who thought the police raids on gay bars were fine until he met Milk), the contemplative sadness and strength of Sally M. Gearhart. Other touches, such as Harvey Fierstein’s uncharacteristically stoic voice-over, are surprising. And Epstein doesn’t glorify or beatify Milk when presenting the relationship between Milk and Dan White — his look at their interactions shows the sharp, competitive edges of Milk’s humanism.

The 2004 anniversary edition of the Times of Harvey Milk DVD is a treasure trove of material providing greater insight into Dan White. But it’s important to revisit this movie outside of the isolated home box office. There are generations of people who, if they’ve seen it, have only seen The Times of Harvey Milk on video at home. Like the man at the core of its subject, Epstein’s documentary thrives in a public, theatrical setting. The events it collects and captures are still relevant to all the random people who will find themselves united by a decision to watch this movie in a cinema — people who will step outside of the Roxie into a city and a world not that different from the one where Harvey Milk died and lived, one that is demanding collective action, and his spirit, once again.

THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK

Opens Fri/21, $5–$10

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 431-3611

www.roxie.com


>>Back to the Milk Issue

Modern slavery

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REVIEW Just when his once-great muckraking documentaries seem to be running on fumes (1998’s Kurt and Courtney, 2002’s Biggie and Tupac, etc.), Nick Broomfield has reinvented himself as a narrative director — a role he previously tried and bombed at in 1989’s pretentious murder mystery Dark Obsession. Made before his terrific 2007 Iraq War docudrama, Battle for Haditha (which briefly played at the Roxie this year), but only released here now, Ghosts (2006) isn’t quite that film’s equal. But it’s still powerful and realistic. It oughtta be, since lead actor Ai Qin Lin reenacts her own real-life ordeal of traveling to England as an illegal Chinese immigrant worker. Lured by promised fat wages and unable to properly support her infant son at home in Fujian Province, she lands in the U.K. after travails that include being sealed in a packing crate. While not forced into the sex trade, she nonetheless becomes part of a modern slavery network said to encompass at least 20 million people worldwide. Her rough odyssey is just one, early titles tells us, among those of three million migrant workers who currently make up the drastically underpaid "bedrock" of Britain’s construction, service, and food industries. Despite some awkward moments, this is an entirely absorbing drama that draws on not only Ai Qin Lin’s story but also a horrifying, unrelated 2004 incident in which two dozen Chinese workers died in English coastal waters.

GHOSTS opens Fri/21 at the Roxie. See Rep Clock.

“Bill Jenkins”

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REVIEW The fewer direct descriptions of Bill Jenkins’ show at Jancar Jones Gallery the better. I went into the secret small space having liked Jenkins’ contribution to last year’s University of California MFA exhibition at Berkeley Art Museum. Jenkins’ meditative approach to objects seemed to journey through a door of perception that was opened by Alicia McCarthy in the same show — a door that called lazy voyeurism into question. Yet even with that experience in mind, Jenkins’ first solo show in SF pulled the floor out from under me. After entering the gallery, I spent my first moments realizing the limits of my expectations, in particular that mind-controlled urge to immediately be visually wowed by goodies. It isn’t that the objects Jenkins finds and recreates aren’t attractive, but that the depth of their presence isn’t obvious. The longer you look, the more you’re rewarded. The minimalism and austerity of Jenkins’ practice is uncharacteristically warm. He has somewhat of a kinship with McCarthy and the Bay Area painter Todd Bura in his understatement and his creative explorations of absence, of the relationships between things, and of how time creates objects as it erodes or destroys them. One Jenkins work that isn’t part of this show is a mirror covered in spray paint. Move from that spot of obscured reflection to areas of gray and off-white and you’re almost there, at the door of the room where these works reside.

BILL JENKINS Through Dec. 13. Thurs.–Sat., noon–6 p.m. Jancar Jones Gallery, 965 Mission, SF. (415) 281-3770, www.jancarjones.com

AG urges Supreme Court to review Prop 8

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California Attorney General Jerry Brown has urged the California Supreme Court to accept review of the legal challenges to Proposition 8 and promptly resolve “this matter of widespread concern.”

“Review by this Court is necessary to ensure uniformity of decision, finality and certainty for the citizens of California,” Brown wrote in a set of briefs that were filed with the Court today.

The AG’s recommendation comes on the heels of a weekend of anti-Prop. 8 protests nationwide, and less than two weeks after the City and County of San Francisco, the County of Santa Clara and the City of Los Angeles sued to invalidate Proposition 8, arguing that it“ intends to deprive gay and lesbian citizens of their fundamental right to marry in California.”

The speed of the AG’s response is further evidence that Prop. 8’s passage has brought the state to the brink of a constitutional crisis.

Typically, such matters are brought to lower courts before the Supreme Court hears the case. But as Brown argues, a stay, “would increase uncertainty related to marriages performed in California.”

“The constitutionality of the change created by Proposition 8 impacts whether same-sex marriages may issue in California and whether same-sex marriages from other states will be recognized here,” Brown wrote. “There is significant public interest in prompt resolution of the legality of Proposition 8.”

Brown also continues to maintain that “same-sex marriages performed between June 17 and November 4, 2008, remain valid and will be upheld by the Court,” according to a press release issued by his office today.

Brown’s request means the Supreme Court will consider taking up the matter at its Nov.19 closed session.

Legal insiders predict good news for same-sex marriage proponents if the Supreme Court decides to review Prop. 8, since this is the same Court that ruled on May 15, 2008 that banning same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.

If the state Supreme Court decides not to review the case, same-sex marriage supporters could pursue the case with the U.S. Supreme Court, or head back to the ballot box.

But, for now, all eyes are focused on the State Supreme Court and SF City Attorney Dennis Herrera.

As Herrera wrote the day after the November election, “If allowed to stand, Prop 8 so devastates the principle of equal protection that it endangers the fundamental rights of any potential electoral minority — even for protected classes based on race, religion, national origin and gender.”

With only 52 percent of voters supporting Prop. 8, Herrera further argued that the state Constitution’s equal protection provisions, “do not allow a bare majority of voters to use the amendment process to divest politically disfavored groups of constitutional rights.”

Harding theater: the show goes on

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HARDING THEATER — LIGHTS UP ON NEXT ACT
Richard Reineccius

The SF Planning Commission came through 7-0 for a full Environmental Impact Review on the Harding Theater on Thursday 11/13!

Commissioners almost universally criticized the staff recommendation for a “negative declaration” for the need for environmental review, and agreed with neighbors of the Divisadero building that there had been almost no public input.

No date was set for the beginning of hearings on the Harding, and staff said it would likely involve a hired consultant.

Community leaders who spoke included Joe Landini, Jim Bracken, Sheila Devitt, David Tornheim and more than a dozen others from the Western Addition/Panhandle/Haight neighborhoods, arguing that The Harding as a functioning arts venue will greatly enliven the Divisadero business strip, as the renovated Brava Theater Center has done for The Mission’s 24th Street.

Attorney Arthur Levy as the pro bono attorney for Friends of 1800, a non-profit preservation organization, had made the effective formal appeal on the basis that historic buildings being considered for major alterations must receive a full EIR under California law.

Prominent theater professionals and historic preservationists voiced concerns at the two hour hearing – including directors and advocates from Theater Bay Area, Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, Brava Theater, Magic Theater, Metro Theatre Center Foundation, the Garage Theater and The Independent nightclub.

—
Richard Reineccius was a founder of the SF Neighborhood Arts Program, and a long time advocate for arts facilities in communities. He, his ex-wife Brenda Berlin, and Doug Giebel founded the progressive Julian Theatre, performing in The Mission District and Potrero Hill from the 1960s to mid-90s.

Inspiring at 89

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REVIEW After the Company’s opening night performance on Nov. 7, 89-year-old Merce Cunningham took to the Zellerbach Hall stage in a wheelchair. With his impish smile still intact but otherwise looking frail, he spread his hands. That’s when I started to cry for the second time that week. It’s what happens when history unfolds before your eyes.

Cunningham is the single most important 20th century choreographer still alive — and still working. The opening concert of his company’s two-week residence showed why: imagination, buoyancy, and impeccable craft. Nowhere was this more evident than in the breathtakingly beautiful Suite for Five (1953-58), the company’s first group piece — its male roles originally realized by Cunningham himself and our own blithe spirit, Remy Charlip. As performed by Julie Cunningham, Holley Farmer, Daniel Madoff, Rashaun Mitchell, and Marcie Munnerlyn, the work was crystalline in its transparent clarity. Every unadorned gesture, every gazelle leap, and every pivoting turn filled the stage with radical purity. One can only fantasize about what the original audiences must have thought at a time when Martha Graham and Jose Limon still dominated concepts of modern dance. Only Balanchine could rival Cunningham.

In this context the other two pieces, eyeSpace (2006) and BIPED (1999), with many more resources and 40 years of dance-thinking behind them, seemed almost tame. EyeSpace was made with the iPod generation in mind. You could either bring your own, or borrow one in Zellerbach’s lobby. Mikel Rouse’s score was made of environmental sounds — mostly urban but also from nature — and you superimposed the sounds you could find at the moment. Cunningham’s urgent choreography had the quality of bouncing water drops on a hot griddle. A dozen performers popped off the floor, in and out of the wings, into unisons, trios, and off-kilter solos in this good if not spectacular late Cunningham.

The astounding BIPED juxtaposed the 13 company members with three "virtual" dancers, created with Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser’s motion-capture technology. Projected onto a scrim of ever-changing light beams, the work suggested a voluminous universe whose spatial dimensions expanded and contracted, dwarfing or putting into relief the glorious performers. In this third viewing, BIPED still felt too long, and Gavin Bryars’ textured score didn’t help. For the metaphorically inclined, however, the piece’s pulsating sense of presence suggests nothing less than a physical universe made up of light and energy.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company Fri/14–Sat/15, 8 p.m., $26–$48. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Berk. (510) 642-9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

The American imagination

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> amanda@sfbg.com

REVIEW If you’re one of the 200,000 San Franciscans who voted for Barack Obama, maybe you’re staring at that map of red and blue states wondering, "How could 56 million people vote for John McCain? Why is there still this incredible swath of crimson belting our country?"

Similar questions have been burning in the minds of liberals since the 2000 election. In 2005, San Francisco resident Rose Aguilar turned them into a quest: "One night, after spending several hours online, sending articles to friends who were probably sick of me barraging them with e-mails and practically falling over political books and magazines I had yet to open, I realized it was time to leave my comfort zone. I needed to turn off my computer and get out into the streets to find out why people vote the way they do and find out if we’re as divided as we’re led to believe."

Red Highways: A Liberal’s Journey into the Heartland (PoliPoint Press, 221 pages, $15.95) is the result of Aguilar’s six-month road trip through reliably red states to ask people why they identify with one party over another, or vote for certain candidates, or don’t vote at all.

Aguilar, the host of Your Call, a public interest radio show on KALW, kept her mic keyed up and conducted hundreds of interviews as she and her boyfriend, Ryan, traveled by van through Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Montana. Some of these talks are with the hotel employees and restaurant owners one might typically encounter on a cross-country road trip. But Aguilar and her partner also venture to places they wouldn’t normally go — places that are mainstays in the lives of many Americans. Malls and churches provide the setting for much of the narrative, but the duo also attend their first gun show, chill out at a water park, and take in a bull-riding event. Nearly every experience is charged with politics — even at Oklahoma’s Bullnanza, Aguilar discovers riders who are heavily sponsored by the US Army.

Aguilar’s easy prose style, no doubt fine-tuned by her daily radio conversations, makes this part-travelogue, part-political inquiry a quick read, with a fine balance of visual observation, first-person anecdote (she outlines the challenges of roadside dining when you’re a vegan), and political fine-tuning. Aguilar discovers that most people like to talk about politics, but feel they shouldn’t. In Kerrville, Texas, she meets two closet Democrats, one who is a registered Republican because there are never any Democrats on the local ballot.

The phenomenon of closeted politics recurs as Aguilar travels deep into red state territory. She also criticizes the media for failing to adequately portray America’s nuances. "We breathe the same air, we live under the same political system, we’ve probably seen the same television and news shows, and most of us grew up going to public schools," she writes. "Yet because we might vote differently once every four years, we find ourselves stereotyped in the national media and separated by red and blue borders."

While exposing the impact of political peer pressure, Aguilar also encounters jarring social inconsistencies — billboard advertisements for strip clubs compete with signs for mega-churches throughout Dallas. With an awareness of such juxtapositions, she seeks a deeper truth in her talks with gay conservative environmentalists in Montana, Republican funders of local Planned Parenthood chapters, and a pro-war Texas vegan. Their tales make her book an important piece of evidence on America’s political complexity. Red Highways uncovers a country full of fierce individuals prone to herd mentality.

Aguilar finds islands of unquestionable compassion. Speaking with churchgoer Bob Bartlett after a service at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian church in Austin, she asks him: ‘I noticed that this is a progressive church. What does that mean exactly?‘

‘It means we’re open to everybody’s thoughts and we’re open to everyone, no matter what your nationality is or what your religion is or what your sex is. We like all of it.’

"CNN or MSNBC should send a reporter here to challenge stereotypes by doing a segment about religious Republicans who attend progressive churches in conservative-leaning states. This one wasn’t hard to find. There must be others," she concludes.

In a Sept. 29, New Yorker article revisiting Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, a collection of essays written more than 50 years ago, Louis Menand wrote, "A key perception in The Liberal Imagination is that most human beings are not ideologues. Intellectual coherence is not a notable feature of their politics. People’s political opinions may be rigid; they are not necessarily rigorous. They tend to float up out of some mixture of sentiment, custom, moral aspiration, and aesthetic pleasingness."

Menand goes on to point out that such assumptions need critical attention. Perhaps now, as the country decompresses from two years of campaigning that resulted in the election of the first black president to lead this diverse, complex, and deeply wounded populace, as people who voted Republican are already speaking about their pride in this historic moment, and as political commentators are already talking about the "purpleness" of the country and blurring of hard lines between states and political stances, writers and reporters like Aguilar will start to look more closely at who we really are. Red Highways deserves a place in the library of modern political Americana.

Rap-erations

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Even if the rest of the "change" he’s been promising remains elusive, Barack Obama’s resounding electoral win is already change — and of a profound kind — given its undeniable impact on racial consciousness among African Americans, Americans at large, and no doubt people around the globe. Of course, nobody thinks racism disappeared overnight Nov. 4. If anything, the day marks an opportunity for a reinvigorated dialogue on the complexities of race and racism in the 21st-century United States. Dan Wolf’s vigorous and inviting stage adaptation of Bay Area author Adam Mansbach’s 2005 novel, Angry Black White Boy, might seem like an ideal instance, but in fact, although very entertaining, it rehearses a fairly familiar angle without moving much beyond it.

Mansbach’s satirical but searching story concerns a white Jewish suburban hip-hop enthusiast, Macon Detornay (played appealingly by Wolf), whose guilt-tinged identification with African American culture and corresponding aversion to the white mainstream has him uneasily straddling two worlds, eventually bringing them into comically dramatic collision. Macon’s guilt stems partly from a great-grandfather who, as a professional baseball coach, tormented the only black athlete who dared to hold his own on an all-white team.

Macon’s familial history is also, along with hip-hop, his bridge to dorm-mate and fellow Columbia University freshman Andre (played with laidback poise by Myers Clark), whom Macon arranges to live with after learning that Andre is the great-grandson of the same ballplayer his own ancestor victimized. Andre is bemused but generous in the face of Macon’s attempt to make amends. More skeptical is Andre’s friend Nique (a potent Tommy Shepherd, also supplying the fine original music and soundscape). But Macon, a part-time cab driver, earns street cred when he begins robbing his fares (white dudes played by fourth ensemble member Keith Pinto) at the first sign of idle middle-class racism, becoming a notorious outlaw his victims improbably recall as black. The three new friends form the Race Traitor Project to capitalize on Macon’s ironic celebrity, organizing a "day of apology" wherein white America confronts its racist demons. Naturally, things don’t go as planned, and the pressure brings latent tensions surrounding Macon’s fraught identity to a boil.

While wisely concentrating on the ample humor in a story that’s a bit contrived even for satire, director Sean San Jose and cast (all but Clark are members of hip-hop group Felonious) propel the action through a fluid, combustible mixture of music and movement, with sharp choreography from Pinto. But as staged, the themes are less than provocative, in part because the other characters remain subordinated to Macon’s limited perspective, itself almost too "black and white." Nevertheless, the cohesive, versatile ensemble and Wolf’s sympathetic approach translates, under San Jose’s attentive direction, into an engaging theatrical hybrid, whose punctuations and rhythms carry their own share of emotional content and cultural meaning.

ANGRY BLACK WHITE BOY

Through Nov. 23

Thurs.-Sun., 8 p.m., $15–$25

Intersection for the Arts

446 Valencia, SF

www.theintersection.org

Money is power

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› amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY While the latest public power proposal was soundly defeated at the polls, the apparent failure of a pair of electricity generation initiatives backed by Mayor Gavin Newsom and Pacific Gas & Electric Co. is fueling an existing plan to create more city-owned energy projects.

Proposition H, which would have moved the city toward 100 percent renewable energy by 2040 and allowed public power to help meet that goal, lost Nov. 4 by more than 20 percentage points. PG&E spent a record-breaking $10.3 million against the measure, or more than $53 per vote as of the Nov. 10 tally.

For that kind of money, said campaign finance expert Bob Stern of the Center for Government Studies, "they could have taken every voter out and bought them an expensive meal." But, he said, that’s a pittance for a company like PG&E. "They knew spending $10 million was going to save them a bunch of money."

Two days after the election, PG&E announced a 9 percent increase in year-to-date profits over last year, boosted partly by a 6 percent rate increase PG&E implemented Oct. 1, which it argued was needed to cover the increased cost of natural gas.

Prop. H would have moved San Francisco away from volatile fossil fuel prices, although the city is still hoping to procure 51 percent of its energy needs from renewables by 2017 through the community choice aggregation (CCA) program.

Meanwhile a plan to retrofit the Mirant Potrero Power Plant is looking shakier since Nov. 4, when the Board of Supervisors tabled legislation that would have authorized the Mayor’s Office and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to negotiate the deal.

Prior Land Use and Economic Development committee hearings showed that retrofitting the plant to run on natural gas instead of diesel may not be as technologically or economically feasible as suggested in a report commissioned by Mirant (see "Power possibilities," Nov. 5).

But a recent report on CCA outlines ways the city may be able to procure the baseload energy demand required by the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) without retrofitting Mirant or building new peak-demand fossil fuel plants (known as "peakers"), as city officials originally proposed.

The report by Local Power, the lead CCA consultant hired by the city, suggests that the SFPUC’s current plan to upgrade natural gas steam boilers in large downtown buildings can be modified to capture waste heat and turn it into energy, a process known as cogeneration.

The city Department of the Environment has already identified 106 MW of potential energy — about the same amount Cal-ISO is requiring the city to have on hand for energy reliability. Although this isn’t renewable energy because it’s capturing wasted gas heat, "it’s really clean, good quality brown power," said Paul Fenn of Local Power, noting that it makes use of something that is currently being wasted.

Local Power’s draft report, which lays the groundwork for what the city needs to do before 2010 to make CCA work, also disputes the conclusions of a tidal power feasibility study conducted for the SFPUC. In July, URS Corp. reported that tidal power in the Golden Gate would cost between 80 cents and $1.40 per kW-hour and only generate a little over 1 MW of power. "We do not consider a tidal power project located in the vicinity of the Golden Gate to be commercially feasible at this time," the report states.

Local Power contends that URS undervalued the potential energy by using computer modeling rather than actual tidal data and overlooked the strongest area for building an underwater turbine. It also failed to account for public financing at a lower interest rate, which would make city-owned tidal power much cheaper.

"We are confident you can get 10 MW," Fenn said. "The whole thing was modeled on PG&E ownership."

Local Power recommended the city get actual tidal data from the best spot and run the numbers again. "The ocean is the ultimate energy resource for San Francisco," said Fenn, who compared the challenge of constructing this kind of infrastructure to the Hoover Dam.

Newsom, who opposed Prop. H but still claims to support CCA, remains committed to tidal power. "Mayor Newsom supports advancing a tidal project at the mouth of the bay," his spokesperson, Joe Arellano, wrote in an e-mail.

The rollout of CCA is expected in 2010, when the city issues a request for proposals from companies interested in building or supplying energy. Several companies have already responded to a request for information. CCA is slated to include a 150 MW wind farm, 31 MW of solar, 103 MW of local distributed generation, and 107 MW of efficiency technologies. Funding would come from $1.2 billion in renewable energy bonds that have already been approved.

Local Power’s report includes concrete actions the city can take, including a plan to finally make Hetch Hetchy power available to citizens, a recommendation that the wind farm be built in the Delta for easy access to the Transbay Cable — a new 400 MW, 59-mile transmission line between Pittsburg and San Francisco that’s scheduled to be completed in 2010 — and urging the city to petition the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for so-called public good charges collected from ratepayers that currently go to PG&E’s energy efficiency programs.

"We’re trying to put ideas on the table for the RFPs," said Fenn, who stressed that the city should make it as easy as possible for CCA to get underway, a goal that will require a lot more cooperation between departments. For example, the report outlines several hindrances to getting renewable energy up and running, from permit hassles to delayed interconnections to PG&E’s grid.

"Where we see problems in the city for permitting and zoning, we can seek to change them now," Fenn said.

That chance may come soon. The Land Use and Economic Development Committee is hearing legislation Nov. 12 to require conditional use permitting for all power plants greater than 10 MW. Though the legislation originally targeted the Mirant plant, the Planning Department, in its review of the draft legislation, suggested that all power plants be subject to the additional review. Sup. Aaron Peskin, who sponsored the legislation with Sup. Sophie Maxwell, suggested the change wasn’t appropriate. "It just means more public process."

But, Fenn said, "To set standards based on pre-CCA era is at this point confusing. Like [Sup.] Ross [Mirkarimi] said, the CCA program should be the unifying principle of energy policy in San Francisco. Integrating all the pieces is indeed the entire secret of making all the parts perform better so that we can achieve the required meet-or-beat-PG&E-rates outcome."

Mirkarimi told us the program could obviate retrofitting Mirant or pursuing the peakers. "CCA still has not been taken seriously enough by the SFPUC or the Newsom administration."

Doomed balloon

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REVIEW Quantum of Solace begins with the taut energy of an over-inflated balloon, picking up where Casino Royale (2006) left off with an arrestingly shot car chase on a crowded Italian highway. At first, the air leaks out as a trickle; a fistfight on a collapsing scaffold intercut with a bareback horse race establishes Daniel Craig’s Bond as the jockey astride a steed of international chaos, and the expected litany of double-cross and intrigue unfolds with practiced but forgettable verve.

Soon wayward bullets and even more wayward dialogue punch holes in the balloon, and the hiss is almost audible as all the excitement and fun begins to leak out of the movie. Overhyped screenwriter Paul Haggis plods away with execrable emotional grand narratives of revenge, love, and betrayal that have no place in a Bond film. French actor Mathieu Amalric does his best as a tousled sociopath masquerading as an environmental crusader, but by the time his eeeevil plan is revealed, it’s hard to care. Newcomer Olga Kurylenko is serviceably sultry as the requisite arm-candy, but one wonders why the producers went all the way to Moscow to cast a Russian model to play a Bolivian secret agent. As for the title, it still doesn’t make sense.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE opens Fri/14 in Bay Area theaters.

Quiet strength

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REVIEW Gray skies, "Silent Night" plucked on kayagum, indoor ice-skating at the candy-financed mall/amusement park Lotteland, negotiating slippery mandoo with slick metal chopsticks, and girls holding hands everywhere you look — those are my wintry memories of 1990s Seoul. Those cozily clasped lasses found strength — and safety from predatory dudes — in sisterhood, and the recurring gesture seemed to speak volumes about the quiet struggles of women in Korea’s stringently Confucian society. It finds its parallel in the muted ink washes on silk chiffon banners by Jung Jungyeob that dangle gently from the lofty ceiling of Mills College Art Museum as part of "The Offering Table: Women Activist Artists from Korea." Traced in watery outlines, Jung’s women are unobtrusive, almost ghostly beasts of burden, lugging shopping bags through hazy city streets. She flags the barely visible.

In keeping with the museum’s continuing strategy of shedding light on art by women here and abroad — witness 2007 shows like "Take 2: Women Revisiting Art History" — "The Offering Table" focuses on the seldom-seen work of Seoul women artists, namely the seven who belong to Ipgim (Exhaled Air) collective, which notably collaborated with the Guerilla Girls at the Busan Biennale in 2004. A slender but invaluable catalog gives the history of art in Korea by and for women, and offers some background on pieces such as Rhu Junhwa’s reworkings of traditional munjado folk painting, or letter painting. Rhu plays off traditional forms while feminizing the Chinese ideograms that describe hidebound virtues like filial piety and propriety. For me, the works that seem to break with propriety are the ones that resonate. Two standouts: Je Miran’s "Million Years Pillow" series — composed of pillow ends paired with texts hinting at the hopes, fears, rage, and passion poured into the embroidery by countless muffled women — and Yoon Heesu’s iconic Offering, in which gold-hued bowls of red thread flow up toward the ceiling like blood lines extending into an unseeable future.

THE OFFERING TABLE: WOMEN ACTIVIST ARTISTS FROM KOREA Through Dec. 7. Tues., Thurs.–Sat., 11 a.m.–4 p.m.; Wed., 11 a.m.–7:30 p.m.; Sun., noon–4 p.m. Mills College Art Museum, 5000 MacArthur, Oakl. Free. (510) 430-2164, www.mills.edu/museum

My call with Rose Aguilar

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By Amanda Witherell

redhighways11.11.08.jpg

Local KALW “Your Call” radio show host Rose Aguilar has written a fascinating account of her six-month road trip through four “red” states interviewing people about their lives and asking them why they vote the way they do. The book, Red Highways, details her interviews and interactions she meets and reveals Aguilar as the kind of reporter who is drawn to apparent contradictions and keeps her microphone on way past the sound byte responses. She and her boyfriend, Ryan, attend a progressive church in Dallas and dine with a pro-war vegan; interview a Republican turned Democrat because of domestic violence in Mississippi; have a close encounter at a gun show in Oklahoma City; and talk with gay, Republican environmentalists in Montana.

The book was published just before the election and I gave her a call today to get her thoughts on Barack Obama’s win, hear some stories that were left out of the book, and talk about how the media could and should be reporting from the real American perspective.

We’ll be publishing a review of Red Highways in Wednesday’s paper, but in the meantime, Aguilar is reading tonight, November 11, at 7:30 p.m. at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way. You can find other author events here.

rose11.11.08.jpg

Here are some excerpts of my interview with her:

CFAC: Court did its job on Prop. 8

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By Peter Scheer

Although its name did not even appear on the ballot, the California Supreme Court was perhaps the state’s biggest loser in Tuesday’s historic elections. The voters’ narrow approval of Proposition 8 effectively reverses the high court’s controversial decision earlier this year, which extended the right to marry to same-sex couples.

The court knew the risks. The statute it declared unconstitutional in In re Marriage Cases was itself the result of a statutory state ballot initiative in 2000. In overturning that assertion of popular will, the court no doubt realized it was setting the stage for a further confrontation in which opponents of gay marriage would try to override the court’s decision through the initiative process, this time amending the state constitution.

Critics will say that Chief Justice Ron George’s Supreme Court is guilty of overreaching – that, by interceding in a political and cultural struggle, the court has suffered a loss of prestige and
institutional authority. But while it’s clear, in hindsight, that the George court miscalculated the depth of opposition to gay marriage in the blue state of California, that does not mean the court’s landmark decision in In re Marriage Cases was a mistake.

For one thing, California’s gay-marriage battle is not over. Proposition 8 is still subject to challenge under the U.S. Constitution for, among other things, its selective cancellation of a
previously granted substantive right. Although a decision founded in federal law would be subject to review in the U.S. Supreme Court, there is no certainty the federal high court would elect to decide the case – or, if it did, that it would end up sustaining Proposition 8.

Proposition 8 is also subject to challenge under the California Constitution, even though the proposition is itself a constitutional amendment. This is so because, although the voters can, through the initiative process, add language to the constitution, it is the responsibility of the California Supreme Court to interpret new constitutional language – and, where necessary, to reconcile it with other, equally valid yet potentially conflicting, constitutional directives.

In the latter category is the most important aspect of In re Marriage Cases: the George court’s decision to analyze legal classifications based on sexual preference under the same rigorous standard of “strict scrutiny” usually reserved for classifications based on race, religion or ethnicity. This portion of the court’s decision is not altered by Proposition 8, and it will be front and center in any litigation against Proposition 8 under state law. While the courts can’t void Proposition 8 on this basis, applying strict scrutiny to Proposition 8’s language is likely to yield a prohibition against gay marriage that is much weaker than the measure’s authors and
supporters intended.

But even if the state Supreme Court takes neither of these paths, leaving Proposition 8 intact (at least until a new electoral majority, in another ballot initiative, repeals it), the court is to be applauded for attempting to resolve a pressing social question – whether to allow gays and lesbians to marry – that the other branches of government had proved incapable of addressing.

In this area and others, it falls to the George court to fill a widening governance gap created by a Legislature that is paralyzed by political divisions and a governor who, despite Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s forceful personality, has little real power compared with other chief executives. (Imagine a federal government in which the attorney general and other top executive branch officials are not appointed by, or answerable to, the president.)

When elected representatives don’t act, the people do, taking the law into their own hands through ballot initiatives, Proposition 8 being only the most recent major example. In this process of direct democracy, an assertive, even activist, Supreme Court is necessary to guard against excesses and to protect the rights of groups disfavored by the majority.

It was in this capacity that the George court, to its credit, issued its decision in In re Marriage Cases, establishing a constitutionally based right to same-sex marriage. Although Proposition 8 is clearly a setback for the court, the damage done to the court’s authority, while considerable, will not be permanent.

===
Peter Scheer, a lawyer and journalist, is executive director of the
California First Amendment Coalition, www.cfac.org.

Bill Berkson

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Bill Berkson’s poetry is a tortoise-and-hare countryside — no one’s watching the clock, although it’s lunchtime in early fall. When you read his poems, you say, "They’re doing it for me, I’ll do it for them." His life in art (first as a self-described "kid on the scene of the first New York School," later as a sleeper cell in the New York–Bolinas "axis of poetry evil") could be signified by a freshly minted tarot card: Collaboration. See the new magic of this year’s Bill (Gallery 16 Press, 45 pages, $25), with Colter Jacobsen’s great two-way mirror drawings and Berkson’s fugitive lines spun in juvenile detective silk. Bring your own tightwire.

A teenage crystal hanging by a thread — or as he puts it, a "human blood medallion" — spins through Berkson’s folio. An alphabet of poets and artists from Ashbery to Guston to Waldman to Warsh shows up in his prism, ricocheting light — "a puzzling brightness" open at all points where points leap into the second dimension. "Bands of distracted emotion snap" their fingers to a Hart Crane tune: "I have no system / but there is a motor," Berkson writes in the 1973 Angel Hair collection Recent Visitors, "primitive / American / sophisticate." And yet: "I insist on the poem having its own life, its own existence," he explains over the phone during a recent visit to Los Angeles, where his son Moses Berkson’s photography is on view at Constant Gallery.

What about Berkson’s art writing? His reviews read more like travelogues, with an equivalent claim to autonomy. In 2003’s The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings (Qua Books), he gives form to "the parallel text" through a string of dispatches from inside paintings. The poet’s eye becomes a 360-degree liquid camera unfreezing Franz Kline’s bridge spans: the paint is wet to us. Elsewhere, in reviews and in last year’s Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 2001-2006 (Cuneiform Press, 114 pages, $10), there’s a sweet-tooth accuracy of description — Wayne Thiebaud’s SF Victorians are "each a different pastel tone like those of Necco wafers" — paired with fluent shoptalk. It’s so much fun to be here.

"Functionally, art writing serves as commercial expository prose," Berkson explains. It’s often a portrait of the artist painting portraits of the market, and that’s why Berkson left it behind, mostly, for 15 years. (Artforum buttonholed him for monthly reviews in 1984. "Arrogant as ever," he explains, though at first it’s easy to mistake arrogant for elegant, "I thought I could make a little difference." Later: "I love to describe things — something that stays still…") Yes, for Berkson, "the sentences in a review turn up in a kind of order," but here comes the doozy: "Cracks in the order may show an alertness to, and duplicitous tolerance for, the actual chaos occurring in the mental space between the reviewer and the work."

What’s throwing all that heat called "actual chaos"? The birth of trust? Berkson’s pages are like starlit nights above the suburbs — to their own devices left, eyeing attic windows in Transylvania, they’re at home among "a host of secret, ephemeral, and often unspeakable perceptions." Best of all is their mysterious shimmer, which appears when an older writer gets replaced by a younger experience. A snapshot of Berkson’s out-of-body landscape as seen from the air: rivers of molten brass with tributaries of friendship bridged by action. Wonderful stuff. A great deal of valuable work. Fifty years of slow-dawning epiphany.

Vampire romance

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REVIEW If you see but one preteen vampire romance this year, make it Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. Rumor has it that Hollywood is looking to remake Alfredson’s adaptation of a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, with Cloverfield‘s Matt Reeves in the director’s seat. While Reeves might bring boffo box-office numbers, it’s safe to assume that he’ll either overlook or sledgehammer Alfredson’s sleight-of-hand talent for finding the art in pop iconography and vice-versa — areas where Alfredson rivals Bong Joon-ho. He brings fiery Carl Theodor Dreyer undercurrents to a Spielberg revenge of the nerds scenario, mining the dark heart of childhood with the same revelatory and musical assuredness that fellow Swedish director Lukas Moodysson (1998’s Show Me Love; 2002’s Lilya 4-ever) exhibited before falling into a digital black hole.

The story is simple: loner outcast Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) falls for Eli (the superb Lina Leandersson), a pale girl with a big secret. The pleasure of Let the Right One In resides in its flair for surprise, from the uncanny performances of the lead actors to humorous surreal motifs such as an enormous white poodle lapping at a plastic jug of blood abandoned in a forest. In one standout set piece with direct connections to the film’s title, Alfredson reverses the genuinely creepy window-tapping found in the original 1979 TV version of Salem’s Lot. Throughout, he explores the subversive age-spanning love scenarios in Lindqvist’s story with just the right amount of restraint, so that instead of provoking outrage, he unsettles assumptions. He’s not bad at executing decapitation and immolation scenes, either.

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN opens Fri/7 at Bay Area theaters.

“Relay”

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REVIEW Those of you who can remember them know that cassette tapes aren’t exactly sturdy. Forever getting tangled in car stereos or being left to bake on dashboards, during their commercial heyday they practically advertised their obsolescence — Maxell ads be damned. But anyone who has managed to wrest the audio from within a warped plastic shell knows that the metamorphosed sound can be strangely beautiful. Composer Daniel Basinkski has made a second career out of looping the death rattles from his magnetic tape archive, and Kevin Shields nearly bankrupted Creation Records while trying to make his guitars sound like so many corroded C-90 tapes.

Dan Nelson invokes the cassette’s history of planned obsolescence in "140 Ways to Make a Cassette Tape Unlistenable," his contribution to "Relay," a modest group show of sound-related art at the LAB. Nelson is no stranger to lists, as attested to by his handsome grimoire All Known Metal Bands (McSweeney’s, 300 pages, $22). Here, though, he catalogs his repeated and sometimes frustrated attempts at destruction rather than posterity. Lining the walls are vitrines and photographs displaying the remains of cassettes: encased in cement, mobster-style; wrapped in electrical tape; atomized from hammer blows; power-sawed in two. There are letters documenting Nelson’s attempts to send tapes over Niagara Falls and into outer space on a NASA rocket. Most hilariously, a missive to the Gagosian Gallery pleads for one of Nelson’s cassettes to be interred with Ed Ruscha when Ruscha passes on.

Nelson’s installation mines its laughs and its conceptual heft from a self-deprecatory stance: cassettes have long been declared a dead medium, despite whatever nostalgic eternal return may be planned by the Urban Outfitters cultural industrial complex. The ridiculous length to which Nelson is willing to pursue his mission only further underscores this fact. The flogging of a dead horse is rarely so much fun to watch.

RELAY Through Nov. 15. Wed.–Sat., 1–6 p.m. The LAB, 2948 16th St., SF. (415) 864-8855. www.thelab.org

No-brainer

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REVIEW The title of David Szlasa’s peculiar, compact, and appealing new work suggests one ready avenue of flight from a world gone mad, but in fact fantasies of escape take more than one form in My Hot Lobotomy, now up at CounterPULSE. And while escapism is exactly what the piece concerns itself with, the import is anything but apathetic or disengaged. A cheerfully quirky, Beckett-like duet wrapped in luxurious silences, snatches of recorded dialogue, short blasts of song and free-style dance, and a dreamy videoscape of environmental disintegration, My Hot Lobotomy is full of restive thought.

Like Szlasa’s installation-performance work on the atomic bomb, 2004’s GADGET, My Hot Lobotomy pokes at that psychic terrain joining the human capacity for denial with man-made catastrophe. In this case, the catastrophe is the rapid warming of the planet, which remains stubbornly just beyond the necessary concerted and rational response. But Lobotomy‘s approach is both more traditional and more oblique than the environmental strategy employed in GADGET, which had audiences wandering around a noisy club-like atmosphere enveloped by video projections and spotted with localized audio segments.

Quietly trained on the internal and external minutiae of its main character — a mute and semi-vegetative post-op named Joey (Erin Mei-Ling Stuart) — the play never feels crudely weighty or political, let alone like a piece of agitprop. Instead, it unfolds like a loopy, semi-looping trance, a restless and sardonic ditty, or a closet poem stashed away in Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Lobotomy‘s low-key faux naiveté bristling with caged energies and subversive instincts — much as Joey’s shiny turquoise sneaks, popping out from under a bland ensemble of sports coat and chinos, hints at dormant life beneath a numbed surface.

The play acts to slow us down almost immediately — almost as much as Joey, who does nothing for the first several minutes but stare back at us blankly from a chair in the center of the stage. This mirror effect, uncomfortably amusing, grows in significance when we learn that Joey — in shades of the Ramones — has given himself a homemade lobotomy. Well, you might ask, who hasn’t? Szlasa gives us plenty of space to ponder the question, gradually unfolding the method and motive behind Joey’s condition as we share in the meditative, vaguely bemused mood he projects.

It’s a knock at the door that disturbs this waking slumber. A guy (Spencer Evans) enters delivering a pizza, a slice of which Joey chews with silent satisfaction. The man then returns with a boombox and a cassette tape, careful to demonstrate to Joey how they go together. On the tape, Joey speaks to himself with prerecorded words of instruction, clarification, and encouragement. The delivery guy, we learn, has been paid in advance to bring all Joey will need in his new, streamlined life. Returning to the stage with a guitar, he also delivers something to the audience, at odd moments and even odd angles: a series of witty songs — variously contributed by Carrie Baum, Cody James Bentley, Sean Hayes, and Joshua Lowe — telling the story of Joey in terms that slyly critique what they describe.

The limited world Joey has structured for his new self — with its prerecorded, too certain insistence that everything is "gonna be really, really great" — eventually unravels among a clutter of pizza boxes and, more alarmingly, a series of fraught dreams, as the unstructured world outside, which appears as a video montage of global warming over a gentle cloudscape at the back of the stage, slips in with growing insistence. The increasing dissonance provokes another transformation in Joey, and another attempt to scurry for cover. It’s a rush of new life whose meaning may be ambiguous, but hardly empty-headed.

MY HOT LOBOTOMY

Through Nov. 2

Thurs.–Sat. and Nov. 2, 8 p.m., $25

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

1-800-838-3006

Exuberance with bite

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They once were distant from the excitement, 40 blocks beyond 82nd Street — a dividing line that Erik Gage dramatically refers to as the "Berlin Wall of culture" in Portland, Ore. He and his bandmates in White Fang grew up in the PDX ‘burbs round 122nd Street, starting a CD-R — or, rather, "CD-Gnar" — label in high school. As popular as they were round the cafeteria — they’d hop up on the tables and sing — the attention they’ve lately received is even more impressive: MTVnews.com, XLR8R, and Billboard have all knocked at Gage’s phone line, over which he gladly engaged with the Guardian shortly before the launch of the band’s national fall tour.

Of all the coverage, the write-up that Gage, now 19, seems most proud of is the review they got in The Oregonian, which gave their new Marriage Records debut, Pure Evil, an A-. "My girlfriend’s mom read it," he exclaims. His enthusiasm speaks to White Fang’s whole deal: if they can excite those right around them, whether the numerous friends’ bands Gage mentions or his lady friend’s mum, they’re happy. This earnest eagerness was particularly striking at their summer gig at the Lobot Gallery in Oakland, where a crowd of less than 10 got utterly whomped with a two-drummer, extra-intimidating lineup including second kit-man Chuck Hoffand. White Fang’s core membership — guitarist Kyle Wolfgang, drummer Jim Leslie, and Gage, who sings — have had several members pass through their ranks, lately counting six members for their touring group. Only one drummer this time out, but Gage promises it’ll be great.

"It still gets pretty damn crazy every show," Gage says, citing a gutter-punk fistfight at a recent house show as a particularly frenzied example of this. Fang used to be more mild-mannered, he explains, playing "twee-ish, K Records-type stuff," before they picked up electric guitars to channel their "African tribal drum music" influence for "Pterodactyl," a contribution to the guilty pleasures-themed Grown Zone comp on States Rights last year. "Twee-ish" has since given way to Pure Evil, with a freewheeling energy that takes mere moments to adore: "Breakfast" hobbles from Black Flag riffing into an exuberant, infectious three-chord collapse.

After the tour, they’ll record an LP titled Cheerful Poetry of the Cosmos for States Rights, and alongside Gage’s Gnar Tapes and Shit label, Fang will initiate a new imprint under Marriage’s wing: Chips, which will be dedicated to releasing split singles. Evil? More like pure genius.

WHITE FANG

With Mount Eerie, Thanksgiving, and Common Eider King Eider

Sat/1, 8 p.m., $8

Million Fishes Art Gallery

2501 Bryant, SF

www.clubsandwichbayarea.com

Xbox activism

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REVIEW The day after the last 2008 presidential debate, the stock market rollercoastered, however tenuously, to a high point, and oil prices plummeted. One would think those would be hopeful omens — on NPR, a woman interviewed on the street claimed lower gas prices were akin to a miracle. Yet the current ability to get the news the moment it happens — where would we be without e-alerts regarding daily Wall Street dramas? — has conditioned us to believe tomorrow might offer a radically different story. When OPEC calls an emergency meeting, and the US feds hold a global economic summit, who knows which side of the economic seesaw we’ll occupy at sunset?

Right now, you could say the economy is a form of conceptual art writ large, with real world implications. The numbers are based on shifts in mood and degrees of confidence, rather than anything you could really put your finger on (like cold hard cash). Apparently the idea that the earth’s thermostat is dialed up to a higher temperature is similarly conceptual. A surprising number of Americans — about 50 percent in a Pew Research Center poll taken last summer — believe there’s no such thing as global warming, and if there were, its causes cannot be scientifically determined. (Say bye-bye to the king penguin.)

Volatile situations have a way of generating free-floating cultural anxiety, and perhaps one of art’s jobs is to assuage it, or at least render it in unexpected terms and media. Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung’s Internet-based game project Gas Zappers does both. Using a colorful cast of characters wrested from online news outlets, it maintains a brash, interactive appeal as it tackles the implications of global warning and shifty petroleum economies. An animated digital collage, it takes two forms — a single-channel digital video, and a series of interactive computer games that can be viewed and played on a large flat screen monitor. It’s also accessible online.

The most attractive aspect of Gas Zappers‘ video version is its amped-up lucidity. Hung may be trafficking in environmental activism, but his vision of green takes on the gloriously corrosive hue of antifreeze. The piece is rendered in a color scheme you could describe as a toxic chemical rainbow. Art with social intent is often deemed didactic, but Hung steers clear of such charges with unabashed satire that plays like John Heartfield — the master of Hitler-hating WWII photomontage — meets South Park on YouTube.

Gas Zappers‘ appeal stems partly from the zeal with which Hung tosses cultural and political references. A polar bear, cast from its frozen habitat, navigates through a global landscape of energy issues — and celebrity spokespeople. Leonardo DiCaprio’s there, as is George W. Bush (as a barbecue grillmaster) and Al Gore (in a polar bear costume accessorized with Nobel bling). Al gags the prez on a compact fluorescent bulb and then sits on his face, issuing a forceful invitation: "Try my greenhouse gas, sucker."

Hung, who studied at San Francisco State University and showed an equally brash Internet-critique piece in Bay Area Now 3, is an artist of our moment. With this project, he has devised perhaps the perfect, time-filling, politically astute work for Berkeley tree-sitters — and those of us who wish we had the time and gumption to get up off our asses and make a difference.

GAS ZAPPERS

Through Feb. 8, 2009

Berkeley Art Museum

2626 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-0808

www,bampfa.berkeley.edu

www.gaszappers.com

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