San Francisco

Article details bullying and retribution by the Mayor’s Office

Sasha Cuttler
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Article details bullying and retribution by the Mayor’s Office

People are talking about this article from Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle about how much three fall ballot measures will cost the city, but many progressives and political outsiders are more focused on the juicy details lower down in the article about the spiteful, bullying political tactics practiced by the Mayor’s Office these days.

Mayor Ed Lee and his top aides are said to be “fuming” that Sup. Scott Wiener and five of his colleagues placed a measure on the fall ballot that would give Muni more money as the city’s population increases — and that “the mayor’s office seems to be hinting that it will target programs important to the six supervisors who voted to place Wiener’s proposal on the ballot.”

The measure is retroactive to 2003, the last time Muni had an increase in its funding from the city General Fund, so it would mean an immediate funding bump of $20 million or more, which the mayor is disingenuousnessly casting as budget buster. Keep in mind this same mayor unilaterally ended Sunday meters this year, costing Muni about $10 million a year, and supports corporate welfare programs that cost the city $17 million last year.

This spiteful and retaliatory approach to public policy by Lee, the elected official with the most control over the city’s pursestrings, and his minions was also a big factor in Sup. Jane Kim’s capitulation to the Mayor’s Office on her housing balance measure. Sources tell the Guardian that affordable housing advocates were threatened with reduced city funding from the Mayor’s Office if they continued to push for Kim’s original measure.

The Chronicle article was based largely on a Controller’s Office memo claiming the three ballot measures — the Muni measure, a proposal to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2018, and reauthorization of the Children’s Fund — would be the “largest voter-directed increase in general fund spending in a single election in city history,” costing $104 million by 2018.

More than half of that is from the minimum wage increase, which will increase the city’s cost of contracting low-paid nonprofit workers to perform public services. But in this increasingly expensive city, does anyone really think $15 per hour is an unreasonable wage? Should the city itself be exploiting workers?

After the city recently slashed building and planning fees charged to developers, and in a city that continues to coddle big corporations and landlords rather than tax them fairly, the Mayor’s Office ire over policies that help low-wage workers and Muni riders is particularly telling of its values and priorities.  

Exposing PG&E’s other “cozy relationship,” with Mayor Ed Lee

Erica Hanna
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Exposing PG&E’s other “cozy relationship,” with Mayor Ed Lee

News outlets from Sacramento to Los Angeles are crowing about Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s alleged “cozy relationship” with the utlity that oversees it, the California Public Utilities Commission.

At least 41 emails obtained by the city of San Bruno reveal an intimate, friendly arrangement between the monopolistic power company and the regulators that are supposed to keep them in line. Where the public would expect a separation as hard and fast as church and state, the emails reveal a buddy-buddy relationship.

This is of no surprise to long-time Guardianistas, who may remember Rebecca Bowe’s cover story three years ago “The secret life of Michael Peevey, [5/11]” chronicling the CPUC president’s extravagant trips to Madrid, Spain and Germany with top energy officials, as well as other activities that may seem strange for an official who’s supposed to be a watchdog against PG&E malfeasance.

But if world-trekking trips to pricey hotels aren’t enough to raise eyebrows about the relationship between PG&E and its regulators, now we have suspicious emails to add to the pile.

As the San Jose Mercury News revealed:

In an April 2013 email, Carol Brown, chief of staff for Commissioner Peevey, wrote to PG&E executive [Laura] Doll and offered advice about how to handle one of the proceedings related to the San Bruno explosion. In the email, Brown said she had talked to one of the PUC administrative law judges about the matter.

“Send back a sweet note” to the PUC about the matter “and then wait for them to throw a fit” was part of Brown’s advice. Brown also said she was “happy to chat” about the matter with PG&E to help guide company officials through the PUC process.

Doll replied to Brown, “Love you. Thanks.”

Even Peevey himself emailed PG&E, offering them public relations advice. It’s like an umpire sneaking around between innings to coach a first-baseman — unseemly, and totally strange.

All of this should ring alarm bells in The City. The city of San Bruno obtained the emails through settlement of a lawsuit, which are now revealing potential corruption at top levels of the CPUC. But here in San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee flouts public records laws and, as we revealed, drafted a policy allowing him to delete his own emails.

There’s no way we can check what Lee is saying to PG&E in emails, making exposing any alleged “cozy relationship” much more difficult than PG&E’s alleged romance with the CPUC.

And the consequences for The City are very real, as well as potentially fatal. As we’ve covered before, there are PG&E pipelines aplenty in San Francisco (including one right along Bernal Hill). When San Bruno’s pipeline exploded, eight lives were lost and many more homes destroyed.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported last month (and as we’ve said for years), Lee already has suspiciously close ties with PG&E.

From the Chronicle:

However, multiple city officials say that Lee’s administration has consistently, and quietly, raised objections about legislation and policies that PG&E opposes. They also point to the utility’s charitable giving to the city and some of Lee’s pet projects as an example of how PG&E tries to exert its influence.

…

Critics of Lee’s relationship with PG&E extend from the political left to at least five current and former high-level city officials. In some cases, several of the sources said, that relationship appeared to be inappropriate. PG&E officials regularly went to the mayor’s office when they were unhappy with city staff members, said the sources, who requested anonymity because of their relationship with the mayor.

“They were in his office all the time, meeting with either the mayor or his staff, and seemed to directly intervene in city decisions,” said one official. “It isn’t normal for most businesses in the city to always have meetings with the mayor.”

Lee, in several interviews, dismissed the idea that he was doing PG&E’s bidding as “a little off base.”

“I look at PG&E like any other company in the city,” Lee said. “I don’t think I have any special relationship with them.”

But in the case of the mayor, we may never know how close he is with the utility, as long as his off-kilter public record laws allow him to delete any paper trail. The CPUC is discovering what Lee long ago learned from former-Mayor Willie Brown: The “E” in e-mail stands for “evidence.”

tearing up emails

Housing ballot measures would weaken city policy

Sasha Cuttler
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47
Housing ballot measures would weaken city policy

EDITORIAL Under the misleading guise of encouraging the development of more affordable housing in San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee and Sup. Jane Kim have sponsored a pair of fall ballot measures that actually weaken existing housing policy in San Francisco. It’s a ruse that shouldn’t fool politically savvy San Franciscans.

Lee has the authority to place his Build Housing Now measure on the ballot, although he may withdraw it under his backroom deal with Kim. But the Board of Supervisors should reject Kim’s City Housing Balance measure, a once-promising proposal that she last week made toothless and counterproductive. What she called a “compromise” was actually a capitulation to developers and the Mayor’s Office [Editor’s Note: The board was scheduled to consider Kim’s measure on July 29 after Guardian press time, which is why we posted this editorial early at sfbg.com, where print readers can check for an update].[UPDATE: The board unanimously approved the amended measure.]

Kim’s original measure called for market-rate housing developers to get conditional use permits and perform additional economic studies on their projects when affordable housing production falls below 30 percent of total production. She then weakened it with several exemptions, yet it was still a check against runaway development of luxury housing.

But her new measure, much like Lee’s, is little more than a wishful policy statement calling for the city to seek the goal of 33 percent of housing affordable by moderate income San Franciscans and below (usually defined as those making 120 percent of area median income or less) and 50 percent by the more vaguely defined “working middle class.”

While neither measure includes any enforcement or funding mechanism to help reach that goal, it’s noteworthy that the goals themselves weaken those the city set for itself in the Housing Element of the General Plan, which call for 60 percent of new housing construction to be affordable to those with moderate incomes and below. The board adopted an amended version of this Housing Element just last month.

This is politics at its very worst: Politicians claiming to be doing one thing in order to score points with voters and appear responsive to their concerns, while they actually do just the opposite and try to disguise that fact with disingenuous rhetoric.

Kim’s allies in the labor and progressive political communities tell us they’re disappointed in her capitulation at such a crucial moment in determining whether San Francisco becomes a city of the rich or whether it can retain its socioeconomic diversity.

We were also disappointed, although we weren’t surprised. There’s an ugly, money-driven brand of politics being practiced at City Hall these days, and Kim has repeatedly shown herself to be more concerned with her future political prospects than living up to the progressive values she has long espoused.

Tenants target Airbnb rentals before hearings on regulatory legislation

Sasha Cuttler
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56
Tenants target Airbnb rentals before hearings on regulatory legislation

As the San Francisco Planning Commission prepares for an Aug. 7 hearing on Sup. David Chiu’s widely watched legislation to legalize and regulate short-term apartment rentals through Airbnb and similar companies, the San Francisco Tenants Union tomorrow [Tues/29] launches a “citizen enforcement” campaign against these currently illegal rentals.

Seeking to highlight the fact that “hundreds of tenants have been evicted and thousands of rent-controlled apartments in San Francisco have been illegally converted to hotel rooms in violation of two San Francisco laws,” SFTU announced it will begin posting signs on illegally converted buildings to warn tourists that the rentals are displacing city residents.

The campaign starts tomorrow at noon at 1937 Mason Street, a three-unit building where SFTU says all tenants were evicted under the Ellis Act so the units could be rented out through Airbnb and other online rental services. It’s the latest step in SFTU’s campaign to highlight illegal conversions, filing more than 50 complaints with the city and threatening further legal action. [UPDATE: A senior Airbnb official told the Guardian that no Airbnb hosts have rented out units at this address. Gullicksen said the units were rented out through VRBO.com, an Airbnb competitor].

“San Francisco is facing a severe housing crisis with soaring rents and evictions,” said SFTU Director Ted Gullicksen said in a press release. “It’s intolerable that the City is tolerating thousands of illegal conversions and thus facilitating hundreds of evictions.”

Apartment rentals of less than 30 days have long been illegal under city laws, including Administrative Code 41A, in order to protect the city’s rental stock for permanent residents. SFTU worked with Chiu’s office in crafting legislation that would legalize short-term rentals in residential areas but set a number of conditions, including a requirement for hosts to register with the city and limit rentals to no more than 90 days per year.

Airbnb is headquartered in San Francisco, but it has long defied city law and refused to collect required transient occupancy taxes on its rentals even after the city definitely ruled they were owed. The company pledged to finally start collecting the taxes sometime this summer and it has sought to make over its scofflaw public image with new branding and outreach efforts.

But with the company facing similar criticisms of its business model in New York City, Berlin, and other cities with strong housing demand, San Francisco’s regulatory effort is expected to be a high-stakes and high-profile struggle that will ultimately be decided by the Board of Supervisors, probably sometime this fall.

Meanwhile, some enterprising young disrupters have decided use Airbnb and state laws protecting tenants to start squatting in the properties of some of their hosts, creating big legal headaches for the owners and payoffs for the squatters. And just because we at the Bay Guardian were the first newspaper to suggest this idea, we seek neither blame nor credit. 

How you can help the 1,900 Central American child refugees in the Bay Area

Erica Hanna
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12
How you can help the 1,900 Central American child refugees in the Bay Area

There are at least 1,900 child refugees in the Bay Area from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, according to federal immigration data. These teens and young children are fleeing gang violence, kidnapping, and countries that have the highest murder rates in the world.

“We need to keep in mind the reason why these children left,” Clarisa Sanchez, a legal representative at Catholic Charities CYO told us. “They didn’t want to leave their pueblos and small cities, they’re coming here by force.”

But this is not about the problem (which we covered in last week’s paper), this is about solutions. Though President Obama recently said he may create a refugee center in Central American countries, the kids who are here now still need help. When ICE holds refugees in Bay Area detention centers, nonprofit organizations offer legal support for these children and teenagers. Unfortunately, now the nonprofits are stretched to capacity.

Only 71 of the 800 new child refugees in San Francisco immigration court had an attorney, according to data from Syracuse University’s TRAC Immigration project.

The nonprofits needs are threefold, Sanchez and other nonprofit representatives told us: They need competent volunteer attorneys, funding to hire new attorneys, and counseling services for the children. Supervisor David Campos recently passed legislation to raise the funding for these needs, but still, volunteers and donations are needed.

Counseling is a luxury some of these nonprofits have been unable to provide, as they focus on legal support to keep the kids in the US.

“[The kids] have been subjected to gang violence and drug cartels,” Sanchez said. “They’ve been hunted down by gangs threatening to kill their family. They’ve been beaten bloody in the streets.”

“They need social workers, counselors,” she said, “who can treat them emotionally.”

Some of these kids and teens will find homes with relatives here in the Bay Area, but wait a year or longer for the legal process that may keep them here or send them back to violent home countries. Sometimes these kids flee specific threats, and going home means death.

Maria Viarta with the Central American Resource Center told us one of those stories.

“So there’s a young man, he came in about three or four weeks ago. He’s 17 years old,” she said. This teenager was from El Salvador. “He was kidnapped while he was trying to sell a snow cone, off the side of a freeway, by a bridge. They beat him pretty badly. He was able to escape, but they showed up at his house and threatened his grandmother because he was living with her. If she didn’t pay them the money they would kill him.”

He then crossed the border and was caught.

“He’s a kid, a scared kid,” she said. “Being in a country riddled with violence, your innocence gets taken away.”

Seeing children and teens fleeing violence every day, hearing their stories, and facing an ever-increasing caseload, many of the legal representatives helping these children are burning out.

“When you’re confronted by someone with compassion who holds your hand with a scary process most kids end up breaking down and asking for help,” Viarta said. When she asked the 17-year-old if he could go back home safely, she said, “He was very cold… all the kids say, ‘I don’t want to go back, if I go back I am sure I am going to die.’”

Sanchez said legal representatives and children needed counseling. “I’m not a therapist, I’m not a psychologist, I’m a legal representative,” she said. “I can help him on the legal side, and we’ll do everything we can, but I don’t have the tools to treat his trauma.”

Sometimes of these crucial providers don’t come back.

“I think often times in the legal immigration community we don’t talk about the burnout rate,” Sanchez told us. “It’s high.”

What’s needed:

Funding

Pro bono attorneys (preferably with grounding in immigration law)

Counseling services

Volunteers

Who you can contact to offer help:

Central American Resource Center

3101 Mission Street

415-642-4400

www.carecensf.org

Asian Law Caucus

55 Columbus Avenue

415-896-1701

www.asianlawcaucus.org

La Raza Centro Legal

424 Valencia St. Suite 295

415-575-3500

Catholic Charities CYO

180 Howard St., San Francisco

415-972-1313

www.cccyo.org

Legal Services for Children

415-863-3762

www.lsc-sf.org

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

1663 Mission St.

415-621-2488

www.aclusf.org

Landlord plaintiff in eviction fee case has history of tenant law violations

Sasha Cuttler
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Landlord plaintiff in eviction fee case has history of tenant law violations

San Francisco landlord attorneys filed a lawsuit on Thursday against San Francisco and five tenants in an effort to overturn Sup. David Campos’ new law requiring higher relocation assistance payments to tenants evicted under the Ellis Act, but the main plaintiff in the case may not be the helpless victim the suit purports him to be.  

Under the recently implemented measure, landlords must now pay the difference between their tenants’ current rent and the cost of “comparable” units for two years, as determined by the City Controller’s Office. Though many property owners haven’t been deterred by the measure, as evidenced by the Ellis Act evictions that continue to sweep the city, a group of landlords and their attorneys filed a lawsuit (Jerrold Jacoby et al. v. City and County of San Francisco, et al.) claiming the new law is unjust.

“The city has tried to change the rules on them,” said attorney Andrew Zacks, who represents the plaintiffs. “We don’t think that is allowed under the law.”

Jacoby, the lawsuit’s main plaintiff, is an 80-year-old property owner who, according to tenant attorney Joseph Tobener, is a “slumlord” who has mistreated his tenants and failed to adequately maintain his valuable rental property.

“He is in the business of landlording. That is all he does,” Tobener, who represents three of the five tenants being sued in the lawsuit, told the Guardian. “The lawsuit against the City only used Jacoby as plaintiff because he is a senior…They think this guy Jacoby, a slumlord, is a perfect plaintiff, but they misrepresent this story in their complaint.”

One of Tobener’s clients, Judith Barrett, is a 62-year-old single mother who teaches English at Galileo High School in San Francisco. She has lived in her current unit for 25 years, and she lives paycheck-to-paycheck.

Barrett, who Jacoby recently evicted using the Ellis Act, has been involved in protracted legal proceedings with her landlord in the past. Tobener said Jacoby and unit co-owner Jeanmarie Hryshko (Jacoby’s ex-wife) have collected more than $22,500 in illegal rent since October 2009, according to a ruling by the San Francisco Rent Board. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, according to Tobener, who said there was “much more prior” but that it extends beyond the statute of limitations.

Using a clause in the San Francisco Rent Board’s regulations, Jacoby claimed “financial hardship” when sued by Barrett over the illegal rent collection. “He tried to file a hardship exemption for the $22,500 at the Rent Board and he lost,” said Tobener, who also noted that Jacoby and Hryshko still owe Barrett an additional $8,000 because they executed the eviction before the reduced rent could cover the landlord’s debt to his tenants.

Barrett’s eviction, according to Tobener, was prompted by a lawsuit filed by tenants that claimed the landlords wouldn’t make “even the most basic repairs to the subject unit.” The lawsuit, which is still pending, claims that Jacoby and Hryshko have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, though they have an equity of $1.8 million on the two-unit property.

“That’s flat out untrue. There is a chronology that completely undercuts Mr. Tobener’s statement,” Zacks said, noting that aggressive moves by the tenants—specifically ”legal threats” from Tobener—ultimately resulted in the Ellis evictions. “This is exactly why we have the Ellis Act and why it’s an important right for property owners. The notion that [Jacoby] should have to pay $100,000 to stop being a landlord is not only unfair, it’s illegal by state law.”

The “aggressive moves” in question are chronicled in Tobener’s letter to David Wasserman, an attorney involved in the case. Tobener believes Jacoby and Hryshko have no intention of living together, and that they instead hope to rid their debt by evicting their rent-controlled tenants.

“If we are successful in proving that your clients have ulterior motives or are retaliating against the tenants, we will then file a wrongful eviction action against your clients,” Tobener wrote. “By now, I am sure your clients have wrongful eviction insurance. Perhaps they take comfort in the protections this insurance will provide them should they lose their unlawful detainer bid. But, what your clients may not know is that their insurance policy will not cover our largest seam of gold — the treble-damages penalties under the San Francisco Rent Ordinance for wrongful eviction.”

In the event of an unfavorable ruling, Zacks said he and his client don’t plan to remain complacent. “If the local judge agrees with the city,” he said. “We will appeal.”

Indeed, could be just the beginning of epic court battles between landlord and tenants advocates in San Francisco, where the hot housing market has triggered an eviction epidemic. The November ballot includes a tax on real estate speculation, which landlord groups have already threatened a lawsuit to challenge.

“Ellising a two-unit building is a real estate speculation play,” Tobener told the Guardian. “They are going to remodel and sell as TICs [tenants-in-common] to wealthy new owners. They cannot re-let the units, so they have to remodel and sell.”

 

Anti-war protesters rally against Gaza invasion and rising Palestinian death toll

Sasha Cuttler
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51
Anti-war protesters rally against Gaza invasion and rising Palestinian death toll

As the West Bank erupted today in a “day of rage” against Israel’s ongoing invasion of Gaza and its lopsided death toll during 18 days of combat with Palestinians, anti-war activists in the Bay Area have been holding daily protests outside the Israeli consulate in downtown San Francisco and preparing for what they hope will be a big demonstration tomorrow [Sat/26].

Anti-war activists will gather tomorrow at 1pm in Justin Herman Plaza (Market and Embarcadero) for a rally and march organized by the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition and other groups, including Arab Resource Organizing Center, Arab Youth Organization, and American Muslims for Palestine. The march will go up Market Street and circle around Union Square before returning to the starting point. 

“Israel receives $4 billion in ‘aid’ from the United States each year. This money is being used to commit war crimes against the Palestinian people in Gaza. We are demanding that all U.S aid to Israel be ended now! More than 200 people in Gaza have been killed and more than 1,500 have been wounded from Israeli bombs and missiles. This has to end!” ANSWER wrote in its call-to-protest, although The New York Times reports the Palestinian death toll is now at least 800, compared to 38 Israeli deaths.

During yesterday’s daily protest outside the Israeli consulate, from 4-5pm at 456 Montgomery Street, a Palestinian woman named Jaclyn told the Guardian that the US media is to blame for the relatively small number of protesters on the streets. Recent protests have been small compared to massive demonstrations lduring the buildup to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“The problem is the media, they don’t’ have the correct information. People are being brainwashed, frankly,” she told us.

Protester Russell Bates, who was holding a Palestinian flag that he says he’s been flying for the last 10 year in solidarity with Palestinians under Israeli occupation, noted that Gaza has been invaded by Israel three times in the last seven years, with lopsided death tolls in each conflict and yet continuing US financial aid.

“The US government Israel-occupied territory, for sure,” he said. “It’s unimaginable to me how people can remain quiet.”

The Rock gets mythological, ScarJo turns scary-smart, Woody’s tepid latest, PSH’s final role, and more: new movies!

Sue Vaughan
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The Rock gets mythological, ScarJo turns scary-smart, Woody’s tepid latest, PSH’s final role, and more: new movies!

In case you missed the cover of this week’s paper, the 34th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival kicked off last night and runs through Aug. 10 at an array of Bay Area venues. Get the whole schedule and info on tickets here; check out our commentary here and here. 

From the glittering (and otherwise) land of Hollywood, a raft of new releases also await. Read on for reviews of Hercules, Lucy, Magic in the Moonlight, A Most Wanted Man, and more!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHFkp5IpKNo

And So It Goes It’s not hard to scope out what the draw might be here for gray foxes like Diane Keaton and Michael Douglas when it comes to this Rob Reiner effort. The woman who so winningly wrapped her vocal cords around “Seems Like Old Times” in Annie Hall (1977) was obviously diverted from her Pinterest duties by the opportunity to sing her heart out on screen again (accompanied on piano by Reiner, a sad comic side dish). Meanwhile, Douglas gets to play a self-absorbed boomer who’s making up for neglecting the next generation — namely his son, an incarcerated addict — in a role that gives off a strong whiff of autobiography. Douglas’s Oren is doing his half-assed penance by caring for his stranger of a granddaughter Sarah (Sterling Jerins), a chore that he not-so-nicely foists onto the Keaton’s Leah. His character and turnaround of sorts, burnished by the triumph of a successful real estate transaction, is as mundane and unconvincing as a half-hour sitcom pivot. The colorless characterization and lame dialogue can probably be primarily attributed to As Good as It Gets (1997) writer Mark Andrus, who seems to be recycling bits of the latter’s title as well as stale chunks from sundry romantic comedies — though considering the missed opportunities and overall weak soup of And So It Goes, Reiner also appears to be chipping away at whatever reputation he has acquired. Is this really the same Reiner who made This Is Spinal Tap back in 1984? (1:35) (Kimberly Chun)

The Fluffy Movie Concert movie starring stand-up sensation Gabriel Iglesias. (1:41)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUM3V8Yh1EU

Hercules Dwayne Johnson is imposingly large indeed as the demigod of fabled strength. Going the Lone Ranger (2013) route of being winky-wink cynical about “the legend” while eventually buying into it anyway, here Herc is really just a 4th-century BC mercenary probably fathered by some random dude (as opposed to god-of-gods Zeus), and who with his merry band of sidekicks goes around fighting against pirates, pillagers, and such. These gigs are taken “for the gold,” but you know this Hercules wouldn’t be down fighting good people on behalf of bad people. When he’s hired to lead the citizens of Lord Cotys (John Hurt) against marauding hordes of alleged centaurs and extreme-wrestling-type beardos with green makeup led by Rhesus (Tobias Santelmann), the plot advances toward the expected training montages and battle sequences. But the plot thickens only when our don’t-call-us-heroes heroes begin to suspect they might have been misled into playing for the wrong team. Relegating a mythology-based tale’s magical aspects to dream sequences and trickery (spoiler: those aren’t real centaurs!), this adaptation of Steve Moore’s graphic novel is way less Clash of the Titans (1981/2010) and much more in the straightforward action realm of Troy (2004) and 300 (2006). It’s big and handsome, like its star, though not so debonair — the pedestrian screenplay doesn’t let him have much fun, while the supporting players allowed to smirk and deliver generally lame quips aren’t much compensation. Directed by Brett Ratner, Hercules is not the campfest of unintentional hilarity some may have hoped for. Neither does it have the content originality or stylistic personality to be memorable. Instead, it’s just pretty decent late-summer entertainment: Probably worth it if you’re craving 98 painless air-conditioned minutes, possibly not if you could really use those 12 bucks or so elsewhere in your life. (1:39) (Dennis Harvey)

I Origins Sci-fi film about a heartbroken biologist (Michael Pitt) whose research leads him to some deeply metaphysical places. (1:53)

Land Ho! “Ex-brothers-in-law set off on a road trip through Iceland, hoping to reclaim their youth” — that’s the studio-supplied elevator description that does accurately describe Land Ho!, but the film is about so much more than that. Jocular Mitch (Earl Lynn Nelson) is fond of inappropriate jokes, smoking weed, and pushing boundaries, while more reserved Colin (Paul Eenhoorn of 2013’s This is Martin Bonner) is dealing with a recent divorce after enduring the death of his first wife. A spontaneous trip to Iceland, funded by Mitch (who’s going through a senior-life crisis of sorts), takes the pair to Reykjavik dance clubs, spectacular geysers, hot springs, and lonely rolling moors, all the while bantering about life and love (and getting into more than one stupid argument, as old friends do). Without really innovating on the road-movie genre, writer-directors Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz manage to avoid any cute-geezer clichés (for those interested, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 2 comes out next year) in this low-key, personality-driven tale, which aims to please with vintage American-indie charm. (1:35) (Cheryl Eddy)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kqq2eBvGTY

Lucy Eurotrash auteur Luc Besson’s latest is a mostly fun action fantasy about a party girl (Scarlett Johansson) who runs afoul of gangsters in Taipei and ends up with a leaking packet of futuristic drugs sewn into her shapely stomach. Side effects include super strength and supernatural intelligence — insert pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo about tapping into 100 percent of one’s woefully underused brainpower, etc. etc. — which leads to some satisfying scenes in which Johansson’s Lucy flattens a hallway of cops with a single gesture, or filters through every phone conversation in the Paris metro area to find the one guy she needs to eavesdrop on. She’s also able to beam herself into electronic devices, a nifty trick that convinces kindly scientist Morgan Freeman to help download her magnificently advanced intelligence into a kind of living computer (shades of 2013’s Her and Under the Skin, except this time ScarJo’s wearing a really great dress). South Korean weirdo/superstar Choi Min-sik (2003’s Oldboy; 2010’s I Saw the Devil) is an inspired choice to play the vengeful kingpin intent on tracking down his runaway mule, and Besson adds some arty flair via nature-show footage and Cosmos-esque clips from beyond the infinite — though the film’s Big Ideas wobble precariously amid its other, mostly silly elements. (1:29) (Cheryl Eddy)

Magic in the Moonlight Woody Allen’s latest — after last year’s vodka-drenched Cate Blanchett showcase Blue Jasmine — offers a return to period romance á la 2011 smash Midnight in Paris. Instead of Owen Wilson time-traveling through the artsy 1920s, we get winsome 1920s clairvoyant Sophie (Emma Stone, 25 years old) falling for the skeptic who’s sent to debunk her, played by Colin Firth (who’s 53). Firth’s performance is easily the best part of Magic in the Moonlight; his Stanley Crawford is a theatrical conjurer famed for his yellowface act, in which he solemnly makes elephants disappear. Off-stage, he’s a self-proclaimed genius regarded by most who meet him as a pompous jerkface. When he’s summoned to the South of France to help a longtime friend and fellow magician (Simon McBurney) prove that Sophie — from humble origins, she’s grown fond of high-society living — is hoodwinking the fancy American family that’s taken her in, nothing unfolds as he expects. The whole exercise is lighter than meringue; it’d be passable as lesser Allen except for that obvious, comically huge age gap between the leads. He knows we disapprove, and he does not care. Are you trolling us, Woody? (1:40) (Cheryl Eddy)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYORzJ3e-Og

A Most Wanted Man Director Anton Corbijn’s film may not be the greatest John le Carré adaptation in recent years (see: 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), but it’s still a solid thriller, anchored by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s turn as Günther Bachmann, the once-bitten-but-not-yet-shy head of an top-secret branch of Germany’s FBI/CIA equivalent. Its task: spying on Hamburg’s Islamic groups, where the 9/11 attacks were planned, though the enemies that Bachmann faces come mostly from within the greater intelligence community, including his superiors. Never before has the phrase “the Americans have taken an interest” been so chilling, especially to a guy who is just trying to do his job, if only everyone else (including Robin Wright as one of those meddling Americans) would keep their sticky mitts off his delicately planned surveillance operations. There’s a forward-moving plot, of course, about a Chechen-Russian illegal immigrant with a huge inheritance who might be a terrorist (Rachel McAdams plays his human-rights lawyer), but could also serve a greater purpose by helping bring down an even bigger target. And while A Most Wanted Man‘s twists and turns, involving Willem Dafoe as a banker who becomes a reluctant player in Bachmann’s scheme, are suspenseful, Hoffman’s portrayal of a man trapped in a constant maze of frustration — good intentions cut off at every turn, dumping booze into his morning coffee, breaking up a bar fight, ruefully admitting “I am a cave dweller,” visibly haunted by past errors — is the total package, a worthy final entry in a career that ended way too early. (2:02) (Cheryl Eddy)

SF voters to weigh in on Beach Chalet turf war

Sasha Cuttler
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80
SF voters to weigh in on Beach Chalet turf war

A city project that would install artificial turf and stadium lighting at the Beach Chalet soccer fields at the west end of Golden Gate Park has survived numerous challenges over the last four years, including appeals to the California Coastal Commision and the courts. But this November, San Francisco voters will have the final say.

A citizens’ initiative that would block the project this week qualified for the ballot after turning in more than 16,000 signatures, collected by the Coalition to Save Golden Gate Park. Yet city officials and supporters of the project — including the City Fields Foundation, which has been installing artificial turf on playing fields around the city in recent years — aren’t taking any chances, creating a rival measure sponsored by six members of the Board of Supervisors.

Not only would the supervisors’ measure invalidate the citizens’ initiative if it gets more votes — it contains a so-called poison pill, an increasingly common electoral tactic — but it would make it more difficult to challenge future trail, playground, and playing field projects that would increase the number of users by 50 percent or more.
“We think it’s a terrible measure that disenfranchises voters all over the city,” Jean Barish, a spokesperson for the Coalition to Protect Golden Gate Park, told the Guardian. “It would give the Recreation and Park Department a lot more authority than they have now.”

Patrick Hannan, a spokesperson for the City Fields Foundation, worked with supervisors on the rival measure and he denies that it would limit citizens’ rights to challenge future projects.

“The legislation in no way curtails any kind of appeals process,” Hannan said. “It says you can’t pass a law to stop projects from going forward after they’ve been approved.”

But Hannan couldn’t cite any examples of approved projects being later stopped by legislation, and the vaguely worded measure doesn’t make clear whether it would preclude citizens from challenging approved projects by initiative or referendum.

Mike Murphy, the official proponent behind the iniative that seeks to stop the Beach Chalet project, said the intent of the supervisors’ measure seems to be to limit the public’s right to challenge artificial turf projects, which the city measure explicitly said city bodies “shall approve” if they increase playing time and have an approved environmental impact report.

He called on the supervisors sponsoring the measure — Sups. David Chiu, Eric Mar, Mark Farrell, Katy Tang, Scott Wiener, and London Breed — to remove their names before next week’s electoral deadline.   

“This is a highly politicized issue and it always has been,” Murphy said. “We need to refocus the debate not on why [the city needs more playing fields] but on what’s being done at this site.”

Opponents of the Beach Chalet project say articificial turf can be toxic and unhealthy and that it shouldn’t replace natural grass. But supporters of this and other artificial turf projects say that they substantially increase the available playing time on fields that are desperately need to keep up with demand, particularly by youth sports.

“Artificial turf is safe and this project is cleared to proceed,” Hannan said. “The question is whether the city wants to give more kids more fields they can use.”

He cited studies showing that because the artificial turf his group has installed on city-owned fields since 2011, available playing time on fields has increased by 30 percent: “That’s a direct result of our project.”

And now, voters will get their chance to weigh in on this ongoing, highly charged turf war. 

Carletta Sue Kay on strip clubs, literature, and dumpster-diving after art exhibits

Steven T. Jones
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6
Carletta Sue Kay on strip clubs, literature, and dumpster-diving after art exhibits

Not long after I sat down with Randy Walker, the male, non-performing ego of one of San Francisco’s most undefinable musical acts, vocal powerhouse Carletta Sue Kay (who performs at The Chapel this Fri/25), we talked a bit about college. Walker asked me the prerequisite questions about the social scene and my major, perking up at the sound of a humanities-centric discipline. I asked if he’d done the whole college thing. Walker chuckled, a glint in his eye, and said he had. “I went to Redlands College but didn’t graduate. Started out in Theater Arts, ended up switching over to English…but what are you really going to do with an English degree?”

As the conversation continued, however, Walker’s dismissal of the formal literary arts became increasingly incongruous with his mastery of language, the modern canon (from David Foster Wallace to Elizabeth McCracken), and allusion in his performances. The singer, whose music is a deft blend of Joplin-esque blues and far more cerebral and melodic existential examination, is anything but simplistic. As Walker’s mind opened up, we twisted and turned through a deliciously intellectual and sordid discourse about strip clubs, eccentric cousins, and the Swiss conceptual artist Thomas Hirschhorn. By the time we left the coffee shop, me with Carletta Sue Kay’s debut album Incongruent in hand, it was clear that Walker and his alter ego were far more complex (and hilarious) than the average wigged, pastichy, four octave-ranged singer-songwriter.

Carletta is a real person, says Walker. So was Walker’s last singing character, a plastic surgery-obsessed Belgian who Walker often presented with a variety of gauze pads and other bandages preferred by convalescents of cosmetic procedures. Both Carletta and the Belgian are Walker’s cousins (his last project was called Mon Cousin Belge). “While I was doing Mon Cousin Belge, I was writing songs at home that I thought needed to be sung by a girl. I thought, ‘I’m going to find some great female singers to record this stuff.’ But then I thought, ‘Hold on…’”

Carletta Sue Kay, Walker’s eccentric, ex-criminal cousin, was an ideal persona that he could put on to present his new works. “Carletta is a very troubled girl. She was involved with a guy and became very obsessed with him. She found out that this guy was sleeping with another girl and constructed a pipe bomb with the intent of killing him in his apartment.” Walker, clearly embracing the macabre underpinnings of the story, smiled and spoke with a bounce in his tone as he recounted her his cousin’s homicidal urges. “Well, they busted her and she went to prison. So the band became Carletta Sue Kay.” The more sorrowful of the band’s songs, which often focus on lost love and sadness, evoke the woeful tale. Now a free woman, the real Carletta has never agreed to see a performance by the band. “She’s completely chill with it. She’s a funny girl.”

The band’s inaugural performance is just as legendary as its naming. Mon Cousin Belge needed an opening act for a headlining gig at Bottom of the Hill, so Walker decided to unveil his new group. He crafted a Grecian arch, covered it in autumn leaves, sprayed it with glitter, and enlisted his friend, artist Greg Gardner, to create a cartoon rendering of his burgeoning alter ego on a piece of fabric curtain that hung down from the arch. “He drew a big fat naked girl. Her nipples were painted with pink glitter. They do the intro music (strum, strum) and I pull the curtain up to reveal myself standing there. The birth of Carletta!”

Throughout his contextualization of Carletta, Walker dropped hilarious one-liners and unexpected anecdotes about culture. I wasn’t surprised to hear The Magnetic Fields’ frontman Stephin Merritt’s name come up a few times, as Carletta Sue Kay has provided back-up vocals for several songs by the group. More surprising, however, was Walker’s invocation of Stephen Sondheim as a primary influence. And when a shirtless, seemingly inebriated man with an unruly mullet danced by in the front window of the café, Walker looked up and, without missing a beat, said, in questionably PC fashion, “It’s a character out of a James Fenimore Cooper book!”

While Walker sprinkled our conversation with bands, authors, and artists, his charisma was not so much in his prolific knowledge of and interaction with the art world, but rather how he used his experiences as a means of telling remarkably funny and compelling stories. In one such story, Walker told of his love for Thomas Hirschhorn’s installation “Utopia, Utopia = One World, One War, One Army, One Dress.”

The exhibit, which showed at the CCA Wattis Instiute of Art a few years back, included juxtapositions of camouflage wear in fashion and the military alongside globes with small camo-tinged tumors growing on them. “After the exhibition ended, they were tossing 80 percent of the work into the trash. So we’re like…dumpster dive!” After snatching nine of the globes used in the exhibition, Walker began to sell them off. “It’s ephemeral,” Walker retorted when I suggested that he was dealing in the conceptual art black market.

Walker informs his new songs, which he’s collecting for an upcoming record called Monsters (much of which he will sing on Friday), with a similarly diverse range of artistic interests as his stories. “It’s influenced by Hammer classic horror films — Creature from the Black Lagoon — anywhere from comical to kitschy, but always with a dark theme. But then it’s going to mixed with a lot of genuine sadness.” Stylistically, Carletta Sue Kay continues to move towards more piano-heavy, lyrical wandering in comparison to the high-octane blues of its initial incarnation. Walker is seemingly aiming, both in his tales and his music, for the intersection between poking fun at cultural elements and emotionally engaging with their deeper messages.

How we ended up talking about strip clubs I may never know (and I have a complete recording of the conversation). Seemingly, it branched out of a conversation about Walker’s boyhood home, Fontana, Calif., which he cited for its high methamphetamine rates and large Pentacostal population. Before we knew it, however, we were talking about a wide range of California strip clubs, from the sketchier SoCal ones that he saw as a younger man and more upscale ones like Mitchell Brothers. Walker, who is gay and has been with his partner for more than 20 years, goes with his straight friends seemingly as a means of understanding the culture and to have fun. His stories, however, soon entered surreal realms of aggressive strippers, extreme money-spending binges by his friends, and abstract deconstruction of the vibes inside various clubs.

Whatever the reason for the digression, it perfectly captured Walker’s unabashedly entertaining form of communication — simultaneously intellectual, pulpy, and laugh-out-loud funny. For a man with such powerful personae, Randy Walker is wholly himself. 

CARLETTA SUE KAY

With The Dead Ships and Titan Ups

The Chapel

777 Valencia, SF

www.thechapelsf.com

Will San Francisco voters give Muni more money to serve a growing population?

Sasha Cuttler
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56
Will San Francisco voters give Muni more money to serve a growing population?

Beating up on Muni and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is a perennial pastime for many San Franciscans, who will be given the opportunity to put their money where their mouths are this November. Will they be willing to give Muni the money it needs to serve its growing ridership, even at the cost of other city programs and priorities?

The Board of Supervisors yesterday [Tues/22] voted narrowly to place Sup. Scott Wiener’s Muni funding measure on the fall ballot. It would increase General Fund contributions to the SFMTA as the city population increase, retroactive back to 2003 when the current rate was set, giving the agency an immediate $20-25 million boost to serve the roughly 85,000 new residents the city has added since then.

“For too long City Hall has been slow to prioritize transit funding,” Wiener said in a press release. “We are a growing city, and we need to take firm steps to ensure that our transportation system keeps up with that growth.  Improving transit reliability and capacity and making our streets safer are key to that goal.”

While everyone says they support Muni — even David Looman, the proponent behind the Restore Transportation Balance initiative that seeks more SFMTA funding for cars, which will also appear on that ballot — Wiener has been the rare strong advocate locally for actually giving the agency more money.

Mayor Ed Lee created a $10 million hole in the SFMTA budget by demanding the repeal of charging for parking meters on Sunday this year, and then he dropped his support for a local increase in the vehicle license fee this year, prompting Wiener to introduce his Muni funding measure, which the mayor would have the authority to terminate if voters approve a VLF increase in 2016.

A $500 million general obligation bond transportation measure backed by Lee and the full Board of Supervisors will also appear on the November ballot, but it will go mostly to cover Muni’s capital needs, not the growing demands on its operating budget.

Wiener’s Muni funding measure yesterday barely got the six votes this charter amendment needed to qualify for the ballot: those of Wiener and Sups. London Breed, David Campos, David Chiu, Malia Cohen, and Jane Kim (Sup. John Avalos was absent).

In recent years, there’s been a rift in the city’s progressive coalition between environmental and transportation activists on one side and affordable housing advocates on the other, who sometimes battle over city funding they see as a zero sum game. So it will be interesting to watch how the politics surrounding this measure shape up going into the fall campaign season.  

More reviews from the SF Jewish Film Festival

Sue Vaughan
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30

If Instagram is anything to go by (read: it’s not), anyone can make a short film — just slap a filter on it and call it a day! Thankfully, the protagonists in Anywhere Else and Swim Little Fish Swim, two films featured in the 38th annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, work on creative projects that can pull their own weight — sans filters — even if the length exceeds 15 seconds from the sidelines. Short DIY clips, not integral to the plotlines, are interspersed throughout of each film and are a breath of fresh air, even if the overall film itself is a hit or a miss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynif8W-sto8

If you’re lucky enough to call yourself multilingual, you may have noticed that your personality seems to change when you speak in a different language (level of inebriation aside). With all these factors in mind, the odds of being misunderstood by others increase. This very notion permeates Anywhere Else, Ester Amrami’s first film — literally, as Noa (Neta Riskin), an Israeli graduate student in Berlin, gets her video project (documenting explanations of rich, untranslatable words in foreign languages) shot down by her advisor. 

Viewers, intrigued by linguistics or not, will have no trouble following the intricacies that accompany dialogue in the film, whether it’s in German, Hebrew, Yiddish, or English. At the same time, Noa unsuccessfully yearns for the security of “home” in both Germany and Israel. An impromptu trip back to Israel doesn’t help much, especially when her boyfriend Jörg (Golo Euler) visits. The film also tackles weighty issues such as disapproval of Noa and Jörg’s relationship (Noa’s grandmother lost her entire family in the Holocaust) and Noa’s brother’s unease about being a member of the Israeli army. 

Contrary to what Noa’s advisor thinks, untranslatable words are perfectly fine — who’s to say that the simple word “home” is sufficient enough to express the complex feeling of belonging? Anywhere Else ultimately and sentimentally proves that complicated problems don’t need complicated solutions.

At first glance, it’s a bit comforting to see that neither Swim Little Fish Swim‘s Leeward (Dustin Guy Defa) nor Lilas (Lola Bessis) have been hardened by the cynical realities of adult life. Leeward is a stay-at-home dad who entertains himself by jamming out on his toddler’s toys, while Lilas is a budding French artist on the brink of her twenties who crashes on Leeward’s couch in the dwindling days before her visa expires. While it initially seems as though Leeward still looks at the world in childlike wonder, the rose-colored glasses quickly shatter, and he becomes a hopelessly useless, naïve man and by far, the most annoying character in the film. The only thing his wife Mary (Brooke Bloom) can count on him to do is shirk his financial responsibilities. 

All in all, the sickeningly saccharine film is far too twee, distracting the viewer when Leeward and Lilas finally encounter adult life’s setbacks head-on. It’s stereotypically cute: The film is set in New York, Leeward insists on the hipster kid name “Rainbow” for his daughter instead of “Maggie,” Lilas totes around an old film camera that must be twice her age to record her new friends’ seemingly profound confessions, and Leeward struggles to avoid selling out as a musician. However, if you can muster through all of that, the Swim‘s ending is moderately satisfying, even if it is somewhat predictable.

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL

July 24-Aug. 10, most shows $10-$14

Various Bay Area venues

www.sfjff.org

Photo Gallery: Graffiti artists tagging in the sunshine at Precita Park

Erica Hanna
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1
Photo Gallery: Graffiti artists tagging in the sunshine at Precita Park

Normally the sound of 20 or so artists rattling and spraying aerosol cans would be quickly followed by the sound of sirens. But Sat/19 the fades went up with gusto. 

Artists tagged free standing art boards at Precita Park for the Urban Youth Arts Festival, an event that brings the ultimate underground art into a safe space. Attendees munched on burgers and listened to some good tunes at the festival, which is now in its 18th year.

Many of the street style murals paid homage to the Bay Area, from SF to Oakland. “We’re showing our love to the aesthetic of the community,” Xavier Schmidt, a 25-year-old organizer of the event and SF native, told us. One muralist hand painted a robot adorned in SF Giants and 49ers gear punching out a Google Glass-wearing Godzilla. 

“We’ve been doing this since 1987,” Schmidt said, speaking to the event’s roots. Even the event’s hosts, the Precita Eyes Muralists Association, have deep SF bonafides: they’ve been around since 1977.

“This is for solidarity, for community,” he said. “It’s a family event.”

Kids sprayed paint and played, adults kicked back and kvetched about youngsters, SF natives complained about tech employees, and many chowed down on burgers, hot dogs, and veggies donated by the local YMCA. Local musicians A-1 and Hazel Rose came out to play too, adding the head-banging element to the day. We’ve embedded one of A-1’s tracks below. Consider it your photo gallery soundtrack.

Names of the artists have been withheld because callin’ them out on the internet would be wack. All photos by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKpwI4aRAzM

image1

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This dude’s head was bangin’ as he sprayed. We’re not sure how he managed to make it look so good.

image2

This kid was super into it, which was hilarious.

image5

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A San Francisco robot takes down a Google Glass wearing tech-zilla.

image7

Hazel Rose performed a bombastic set that the crowd, below, felt all sorts of love for. 

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Oakland got plenty of love too.

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Xavier Schmidt, one of the event’s organizers, said this high schooler is a real up and comer in the graffiti scene.

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alienexperience

Some of the art boards were for everyone to paint, leading to some dooby-ous results. (Get it? Ha!)

homer

Mmmm, donuts. 

puppy


Foaming at the mouth

Michael Redmond
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2
Foaming at the mouth

culture@sfbg.com

THE WEEKNIGHTER There’s a series of photos of me at Mad Dog in the Fog (530 Haight St, SF. 415-626-7279) where I am an absolute monster. I’m dressed in a wretched, beer-stained Santa suit, I have Mickey Mouse ears on, and there’s also some kind of sparkly garland thing adorning my head. In most of the pictures I’m flipping off the camera and making ridiculous faces that usually include an Elvis type lip curl. I look unhinged. I look subhuman. Goddamn, I look like I’m having fun. It was SantaCon 2011.

One of the few things I remember about our pit stop at the Mad Dog was gurgling, “I didn’t know they had a backyard here!” as we stumbled out into it. Apparently they do have one. I feel like I may have found out where the bar’s name came from as well, but that was lost, just like my sense of personhood that day. There is nothing noble about being Oscar the Grouch-level trashed. The only thing you get out of it is a bunch of photos where you look like somebody Shrek wouldn’t even fuck.

Luckily for us, Mad Dog is used to having stark, raving lunatics, in colorful garb, wasted there in the middle of the day. In fact the Lower Haight pub just had a full month of it. Mad Dog in the Fog has long been a staple for any soccer fan in San Francisco. Whether it’s the World Cup or The English Premier League or even a Las Chivas game, Mad Dog lives and breathes soccer. The doors open at 7am every Saturday and Sunday, so people can come watch their favorite team shoot goals and take flops.

I was lucky that day in 2011 that Mad Dog doesn’t serve hard alcohol. I was in a state of saying “hell yes” to pretty much everything, and who knows what would’ve happened. This lack of hard alcohol is also a blessing to serious beer drinkers: It allows Mad Dog to serve more than 150 different kinds of beer from around the world, some of which are rare and hard to get.

In fact, Mad Dog is so supportive of your beer problem that it even lets you pour your own. Yes, you read that right. A few years ago the proprietors installed a TableTender, a system of two taps that stick out of the middle of a table. You and your pals then pour all the beer you’d like from said taps and a display keeps track of how much you drink. Afterwards you settle your tab with the bar staff. I’m pretty sure they were hiding the TableTender from me and my friends that day. I would’ve if I were them.

I’d like to say that after behaving like a Garbage Pail Kid at Mad Dog in the Fog I went home and slept it off, but that would be a lie. Just like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, I was a tenacious bastard and led my party of holiday revelers to a number of other bars after that. I eventually lost them all, of course, and ended up at a house party… I think. Honestly nothing else I did later that night exists because nobody, to my knowledge, took any more photos.

But to this day, every time I walk by Mad Dog in the Fog, even when there’s a line of 50 people waiting to get in to watch a sports game, I mutter to myself, “I didn’t know they had a backyard here!” and smile thinking about that weird day back in 2011.

Stuart Schuffman aka Broke-Ass Stuart is a travel writer, poet, and TV host. You can find his online shenanigans at www.brokeassstuart.com

 

Gorgeousness unbound

Michael Redmond
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0

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER If you were milling around the Asian Art Museum last Thursday evening, you might have seen a woman tumble — ever so slowly — down the Beaux-Arts building’s elegant flight of central stairs. Ringed by a crowd of onlookers and the second floor’s imposing colonnade, her limber form caressed the marble steps luxuriously as she cascaded beneath the elegant arched ceiling, entirely at her own pace, leaving behind her the unraveling, impossibly long train of her white and lavender gown.

Bystanders ruminated silently or chatted quietly, sipping cocktails, for the duration of Fauxnique’s 20-minute high-art pratfall, Beautility, as house music reverberated from DJ Hoku Mama Swamp’s station in the nearby lobby. Passing through the lobby, you would have seen mercurial artist Dia Dear offering free makeovers, while members of TopCoat Nail Art Studio applied lacquer to willing hands, in designs inspired by pieces in the museum’s current show, Gorgeous, built from the permanent collections of both the Asian Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Having at last landed on the first floor, in front of the shiny red and white speed demon parked there — German designer Hartmut Esslinger’s Prototype for Frog 750 motorcycle (1985), from the SFMOMA collection — Fauxnique (aka Monique Jenkinson) gathered up her enormous train and rushed up the stairs and out of sight.

Back in the lobby, you might also have caught sight of Nude Laughing, a peripatetic work by La Chica Boom (Xandra Ibarra), and followed the nude figure as she went by, dragging behind her a large nylon stocking filled with what appears to be hair and plastic breasts. You’d have ended up in an alcove on the first floor between several incongruent sculptures — including British artist Tracey Emin’s hot pink neon phrase-sculpture, Fantastic to Feel Beautiful Again (1997); a voluptuous, powerful, and headless stone torso of a female deity from southern India (1400–1600); and American Dan Flavin’s horizontal row of fluorescent colored beams, untitled (in honor of Leo at the 50th anniversary of his gallery) (1987).

In the company of these disparate pieces, the performer slips inside the giant nylon pouch — a Marilyn Monroe wig over her dark hair and atop her painted face, fake furs and sundry toy boobs pressed against her brown body — as she stretches the sheer fabric enveloping her, writhing in coquettish spasms, emitting artificial squeals of pleasure. A puissant abstraction, seriously unsettling and completely mesmerizing in her vaguely menacing flirtation with her audience, the figure eventually sheds her gauzy cocoon and, with a confident stride, disappears down a hallway, leaving behind some flotsam of costume pearls, wigs, and fur.

Headlining this promiscuous night of performance making — part of the museum’s seasonal Thursday night programming, which also featured work from queer punk drag artist Phatima Rude and drag duo Mona G. Hawd and VivvyAnne ForeverMORE — was art-band collective Nicole Kidman Is Fucking Gorgeous (John Foster Cartwright, Maryam Rostami, and Mica Sigourney). At about 8pm, NKIFG took over the regal upstairs chamber with its show, Fuck Gorgeous, a 45-minute incantation, exultation, and rumination on the elusive properties of art, celebrity, fashion, and existence — Nicole Kidman, for short — by three Goth punks with microphones and boundless insouciance.

With enormous projections of full moons looming over a small stage, John, Mike, and Mary engaged in welcoming speeches, banter among themselves, victory laps with streamers, occasional howling, extended ferocious lip-synched roaring, and worshipful mouthing of one truly insipid Oscar acceptance speech. Sound rose and fell, a cacophony of noise gave way to mumbled quips, focus blurred and shifted, bodies went slack, writhed on the dance floor, or bounded around the room. At one point, Mike’s address from the podium slipped from a kind of self-actualization seminar into an outright stab at mass hypnosis as he charged us all to “be Nicole!”

Nicole Kidman, their vessel, “both everything and nothing,” was not quite an object and not quite a projection. Like the other performances enlivening the spaces of the museum and the strange harmony of the artworks on display, Fuck Gorgeous was deeply ambivalent but committed to being in-between, both a come-on and a refusal. *

GORGEOUS

Through Sept. 14, $10-$15

Asian Art Museum

200 Larkin, SF

www.asianart.org

 

This Week’s Picks: July 23 – 29, 2014

Michael Redmond
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0

WEDNESDAY 23

 

 

Man or Astro-Man?

Auburn, Ala.’s Man or Astro-Man? has spent decades perfecting their sprawling surf-rock. Incredibly imaginative and extremely prolific, the group has recorded and toured tirelessly since early 1990s. Drawing diverse influences from the likes of Dick Dale and Link Wray, punk and new wave, and science fiction and a fascination with space and extraterrestrial life, Man or Astro-Man? take surf rock in directions and galaxies previously uncharted. Largely instrumental and entirely captivating, the band’s nine-album catalog is a musically-stunning journey through sound and space. Known for their high-energy live sets, often performed in space-suits complete with astronaut helmets with intricate sci-fi set pieces, musicians Star Crunch and Birdstuff will shred their way into your hearts. (Haley Zaremba)

With The Ogres, WRAY

8pm, $20

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

 

 

Cymbals

The cooler-than-thou French monologue on UK band Cymbals’s single “The End” might have you in the dark, but the intro’s melancholy melody should be instantly familiar to anyone who’s spent too many hours in a club. The faint, ringing tone stuck in ear the next day (or week), bringing back memories: “It’s the end of the night, you’ve been dancing too much. They’ve got to turn on the lights.” Smartly placed on a stellar album (The Age of Fracture) of arty synth-pop that’s in line with Metronomy, Passion Pit, and David Byrne, it’s a reminder that, for better or worse, some things don’t last as long as you want. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Astronauts, etc., The Wild Wild

8pm, $10-12

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

 

THURSDAY 24

 

 

CAM & Co. Productions’ Spring Awakening

Once a high school theater kid, always a high school theater kid. After receiving their hard-earned diplomas from San Francisco’s School of the Arts, some of the city’s most talented teens realized they couldn’t abandon the pool of talent at the school. So instead of embracing the idea of a deadbeat summer before college, the members created their own production company. Their conception of Spring Awakening is financed through an online fundraiser they created, and is completely driven by efforts from School of the Arts family members. Support up-and-coming youth theater while wondering why you couldn’t be as cool as them when you were 18. (Amy Char)

Through Sat/26

7:30pm, $20

Phoenix Theatre

414 Mason, SF

(415) 336-1020

www.phoenixtheatresf.org

 

 

 

FRIDAY 25

 

 

RAWdance

With a decade of distinguished work behind the company, RAWdance has every reason to celebrate. Ryan T. Smith and Wendy Rein collaborations draw you in with the integrity of a highly structural approach that yet yields works that resonate emotionally. Their newest piece seems tailor-made to the kind of intelligence that they bring to their work. Turing’s Apple explores both the genius of the British scientist Alan Turing and his tragedy when he came out as a gay man. It will be joined by the final version of Burns that the choreographers describe as Rorschach-test driven, and film-noir inspired. RAWdance will be joined by a guest artists Gretchen Garnett + Dancers in a trio, and a grief-exploring sextet, Nawala (“Lost”) by Tany Bello’s Project B. (Rita Felciano)

July 25-26, 8 pm. July 27, 7 pm. $25-30

Z Space

450 Florida St. SF

866-811-4111

www.zspace.org

 

 

 

This Must Be the Place: The End of the Underground 1991- 2012

Named for an excellent Talking Heads song, This Must Be the Place is an annual summer celebration of rock docs, exploring the birth, life, death, and (depending on whom you ask) near-constant rebirth of punk rock through iconic moments captured on film. This third installment, curator Mike Keegan has announced, will sadly be the Roxie’s last, so get to it. Friday’s ’90s-tastic triple bill sounds too fun to miss, with 1991: The Year Punk Broke (featuring live performances from Sonic Youth and their then-opener, Nirvana), Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies (featuring the never sober, always charming GG Allin, who was dead before the film finished shooting), and What’s Up, Matador? (featuring three-minute bursts of rarely seen excellence from labelmates Guided By Voices, Pavement, Yo La Tengo and more). Don’t forget your flannel. (Emma Silvers)

Through Sun/27, prices and showtimes vary

The Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

www.roxie.com

 

SATURDAY 26

 

 

CoffeeCon 2014

Cursed with the personality of an ogre if you skip your morning coffee? Once you’ve gotten a head start on your caffeine fix Saturday morning, head over to this art gallery — for one day only, it houses an interactive latte art exhibit (arguably just as creatively esteemed as postmodern paintings). The coffee festival features a plethora of other hands-on lessons, including one titled “How to Review Coffee,” and unlimited coffee samples, so you can sound like a pretentious — but educated — coffee snob while you pine over an obscure roast when you’re with your friends at Starbucks. Local bands perform live to simulate a hipster coffeehouse vibe. (Amy Char)

9am – 4pm, $15-$20

Terra Gallery & Event Venue

511 Harrison, SF

(415) 896-1234

www.terrasf.com

 

 

Fritz Montana

The spike in blues-rock appreciation that came with The Black Keys and their various contemporaries may be losing its luster — the Keys’ newest LP, Turn Blue, hardly lived up to their previous releases. But Fritz Montana shows that the blues are alive and well in San Francisco. A blistering three-piece band fronted by high-octane vocalist and guitarist David Marshall, won Live 105’s local band contest last October, which led to them opening for Kings of Leon, Queens of the Stone Age, and Vampire Weekend at the station’s Not So Silent Night. Fritz Montana’s first album, Scaredy Cat, is ready to drop, and the group has chosen the Rickshaw Stop as the spot for their release party. The group will play their new release, along with their celebrated 2013 EPs, and sell copies of their debut full-length hot off the presses. Fritz Montana may not be reinventing the wheel, but the band’s songs pulse with an energy and technical grace that bodes very well for their dreams of airwave domination. (David Kurlander)

$10-13, 9pm

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

 

 

 

Rick Springfield

One of the biggest surprises in Dave Grohl’s 2013 doc Sound City — about the legendary SoCal recording studio where Nirvana’s Nevermind and other iconic works were recorded — was the inclusion of 1980s hunk Rick Springfield, the General Hospital star turned pop singer. Turns out he recorded the 1981 album Working Class Dog there, thus gifting the world with Grammy-winning radio jam “Jessie’s Girl.” Springfield’s kept busy since his teen-dream days; aside from offering up Sound City memories, he wrote a memoir (2010’s Late, Late at Night) and now, a novel: Magnificent Vibration, about a curious man’s unconventional spiritual journey. Book Passage touts his appearance as “featuring a live musical performance,” so get those lighters ready. (Cheryl Eddy)

4pm, free

Book Passage

51 Tamal Vista, Corte Madera

www.bookpassage.com

 

 

SUNDAY 27

 

 

Waffle Opera

Waffle Opera, founded by a group of young local singers in 2012, has altered the glitzy opera house aesthetic using an unexpected prop: succulent, syrup-covered Belgian waffles. The company, which serves the treats after each of its shows, embraces a remarkably unpretentious approach to legendary works, using minimalistic sets and small houses to bring out the lyrical and musical subtlety of centuries-old classics. The group is presenting a concert version of Cosi fan tutte, the 1789 Mozart opera whose title translates roughly to “Women are like that.” An uproarious comedy about two Neapolitan officers who don disguises and try to woo each others’ fiancées to prove the inconstency of female affection. While still a archaic by the standards of contemporary gender politics, the women (spoiler alert) are presented as smart and capable; they quickly pick up their lovers’ plot, leading to a madcap phantasmagoria of mistaken identities and partially-broken hearts. Waffle’s semi-staged version highlights the soaring arias, clever quips, and intricate plot of Mozart’s funniest work. (Kurlander)

$15-$25, 3pm

Center for New Music

55 Taylor, SF

www.waffleopera.com

 

 

MONDAY 28

 

Andrew Jackson Jihad

In my mind, Phoenix’s Andrew Jackson Jihad is both the quintessential and the essential folk-punk band. With bitingly clever lyrics that toe the line between hilarious and heartbreaking, an unflinching confrontation of social justice issues and a willingness to examine and sing about their own privilege, Sean Bonnette and Ben Gallaty have created some of the most important and tenderly earnest albums in the folk-punk canon. The band’s unsteady, cracking vocals and mediocre musicianship lend a charming naivete, emotional sincerity, and accessibility to their music. The band’s frenetic energy and the fierce dedication of their fan-base make Andrew Jackson Jihad’s live shows a powerful experience. (Zaremba)

With Hard Girls, Dogbreth

8pm, $16

Slim’s

333 11th St, SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slimspresents.com


Wolfmother

Wolfmother came roaring out of Australia in the mid-aughts with its self-titled debut, which went five times platinum in the band’s home country and did well enough abroad to secure them a position as one of the Anglophone world’s most formidable touring acts. Combining a shameless love for ’70s hard rock (Led Zeppelin in particular) with the sharp hooks of stoner rock, the trio struck a chord with both the classic-rock and alt-rock crowds, and just about any guitarist born in the mid-’90s can likely remember learning one of their songs early on. Though the band only records sparsely, Wolfmother has remained a regular on the international touring and festival scene — a position that this year’s New Crown should secure. (Bromfield)

8pm, $28

The Fillmore

1508 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.thefillmore.com

 

TUESDAY 29

Hundred Waters

Hundred Waters are signed to Skrillex’s OWSLA label, but don’t expect big bass drops from this Florida crew. Rather, they trade in a “digital folk” style that offers an intriguing rural perspective to the retro-futuristic conversation currently taking place in underground electronic circles. Birds chirp in unison with drum machines; Blade Runner synths support Tolkienesque fantasias. At the front of it all is Nicole Miglis, a one-woman choir whose voice seems as perpetually omnipresent as the sun and the sky. Though this year’s The Moon Rang Like A Bell suggests pop ambitions lurking beneath their idiosyncratic exterior, the band is still one of the most unique and fascinating bands in the electronic universe — as well as one of the few that can truly claim to sound like nothing else. (Bromfield)

8pm, $14

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

Snap sounds

Michael Redmond
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1
Snap sounds

THE SOFT PINK TRUTH

Why Do The Heathen Rage? (Thrill Jockey)

How can you love music that hates you? Drew Daniel grapples with this question throughout his third album as The Soft Pink Truth, which seeks to reconcile his homosexuality with his love of black metal — a genre with a history of hatred and violence. His thesis: Black metal is already pretty gay. Why Do The Heathen Rage? consists of 10 disco covers of black metal songs, and in this context, the “blasphemers” and “fornicators” who inhabit these songs could easily be gay men as seen through a prejudiced lens. It’s a powerful thought, but it’s also kind of funny.

Why Do The Heathen Rage? is an admirable project, not least because Daniel is making himself a walking target for those who add to black metal’s hateful reputation. But it’s also a great listen. Humor is key to the album’s appeal, especially when Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner puts on her best diva voice to sing about penetration and desecration. But there are also some gorgeous moments — the slow house chord that surfaces at the end of “Sadomatic Rites” is nothing short of breathtaking. This is one of the most audacious experimental albums I’ve ever heard, and easily one of the year’s best albums.

KIWI TIME

It’s Kiwi Time EP (Granted Access)

There are a million indie pop bands in the world, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that most of them are just in it for the money. It’s increasingly rare to hear an indie pop band that sounds like it actually wants to play indie pop, and Kiwi Time is one of these. The San Francisco-via-Belarus quartet’s debut EP, It’s Kiwi Time, showcases a style that’s anything but original but nonetheless possesses a certain passion and respect for pop music history that’s all too rare in this field.

Opener “Butterfly” starts out sounding like a Spotify commercial, but the disco-esque vocals quickly lift the song to another plane. “Be My Love” uses the Beatles-pioneered trick of ending much faster than it should, and it’s a relief to hear a band use this tactic in a post-club era where songs often stretch far too long for anywhere but the dancefloor. Both of the album’s guitar solos are seamlessly integrated and lack any irony or tastelessness. Though It’s Kiwi Time is unlikely to elevate its creators above their countless ilk, it’s refreshing in that it fits as comfortably into the universal pop tradition as the indie-pop trend.

A SUNNY DAY IN GLASGOW

Sea When Absent (Lefse)

Shoegaze is one of those genres that seems spent if only because it’s easy to just slap the term on anything. Just as any garage band without a singer can be “post-rock,” any band with a shy vocalist and a lot of pedals can be “shoegaze.” Now more than a quarter of a decade after My Bloody Valentine dropped its debut, A Sunny Day In Glasgow is still pushing the style’s boundaries on their new Sea When Absent. The secret to the band’s success is viewing shoegaze as an approach rather than a genre, and as such, members are not picky about what they slather in reverb.

Rock, dance, hip-hop, and metal sounds swirl around in the maelstrom of this album, never settling but tearing by at thrilling speeds. Sea When Absent‘s kitchen-sink approach most likely owes to the fact that the band members mostly assembled this album via e-mail chain. (The slowed-down coughing at the end of “Double Dutch” suggests kind green buds may also have been involved, especially in tandem with the track’s name.) Though Sea When Absent is uneven and messy, it’s never dull — a rare quality in a genre that anyone with enough cash to blow on pedals can play.

Events: July 23 – 29, 2014

Michael Redmond
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0

Listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Selector.

WEDNESDAY 23

Mission Bay Hidden Water Walk Meet at CalTrain station (south side plaza), Fourth St at King, SF; www.laborfest.net. 10am, free. Walking tour of the rapidly-changing Mission Bay area. Part of LaborFest 2014.

James Nestor Mechanics’ Institute, 57 Post, SF; www.milibrary.org. 6pm, $15. The author discusses Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves.

“Taxi, Tech, and Rideshare” Redstone Building, 2940 16th St, SF; www.laborfest.net. 7pm, donations accepted. Forum and video screening on the subject of Uber and similar companies that are affecting the taxi industry. Part of LaborFest 2014.

THURSDAY 24

Tom Barbash Hattery, 414 Brannan, SF; www.booksinc.net. 7pm, free. The author discusses his work and writing, including Stay Up With Me, his recent short-story collection.

State of the City Forum Modern Times Bookstore Collective, 2919 24th St, SF; www.mtbs.com. 7-9pm, free. Discussion of gentrification issues with SF poet laureate Alejandro Murguia and community guest panelists.

FRIDAY 25

“Bike Design Project Reveal Party SF” PCH Lime Lab, 135 Mississippi, SF; www.oregonmanifest.com. 6-9:30pm, free. Check out next-generation bikes created by top designers and bike craftspeople at this reveal party, featuring custom-brewed, “bike-inspired” beer from Deschutes Brewery.

Gilroy Garlic Festival Christmas Park, Gilroy; www.gilroygarlicfestival.com. 10am-7pm, $10-20. Through Sun/27. Garlic is the pungent star of this annual food fair. Garlic ice cream gets all the press, but don’t sleep on the garlic fries, 2012’s most popular purchase (13,401 servings!)

Squeak Carnwath University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft, Berk; www.universitypressbooks.com. 6pm, free. The Oakland-based painter discusses her new book, Horizon on Fire: Squeak Carnwath Works on Paper, 1977-2013, containing over 90 images of her works from the past 35 years.

SATURDAY 26

Berkeley Kite Festival Cesar E. Chavez Park, Berkeley Marina. www.highlinekites.com. 10am-6pm, free. Through Sun/27. Because where else are you gonna see the world’s largest octopus kite?

Oakland 1946 General Strike Walk Lathan Square (meet at fountain), Telegraph at Broadway, Oakl; www.laborfest.net. Noon, free. Revisit key sites of Oakland’s historic “Work Holiday,” the last general strike ever to occur in the US. Part of LaborFest 2014.

“Off the Wall” Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission, SF; www.missionculturalcenter.org. 7:30pm, free. Mission Grafica hosts this closing reception for its current screenprinting and woodcut exhibition, with a silent auction of pieces from the archives.

Ohtani Summer Bazaar Berkeley Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple, 1524 Oregon, Berk; www.bombu.org. Today, 4-8pm; Sun/27, noon-5pm. Free. Japanese food is the focus of this two-day fest, with homemade Kushikatsu, sushi, teriyaki chicken, and other tasty treats. The temple is also known for its (American-style) chili.

Pedalfest Jack London Square, Broadway and Embarcadero, Oakl; www.pedalfestjacklondon.com. 11am-7pm, free. Celebrate biking at this festival, with bike-themed entertainment (“daredevils performing in a 30-foot Whiskeydrome”), “pedal-powered food,” a vintage bike show, bike demos, and more.

“Perverts Put Out! Dore Alley Edition” Center for Sex and Culture, 1349 Mission, SF; www.sexandculture.org. 8pm, $10-25. Readings by Jen Cross, Princess Cream Pie, Philip Huang, and others; hosted by Dr. Carol Queen and Simon Sheppard as a benefit for the CSC.

Vintage Paper Fair Hall of Flowers, Golden Gate Park, Ninth Ave at Lincoln, SF; www.vintagepaperfair.com. Today, 10am-6pm; Sun/26, 11am-5pm. Free. Huge vintage paper fair featuring antique postcards, prints, photography, Art Deco items, movie memorabilia, and more.

SUNDAY 27

LaborFest Book Fair Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission, SF; www.laborfest.net. 10:30am, free. Numerous authors share their labor- and union-themed books and this day of readings and discussions. Part of LaborFest 2014.

Up Your Alley Fair Dore between Howard and Folsom, SF; www.folsomstreetfair.com/alley. 11am-6pm, $7 suggested donation. Folsom Street Fair’s naughty little brother fills Dore Alley with leather-clad shenanigans.

TUESDAY 29

Christopher Pollock St. Philip’s Catholic Church, 725 Diamond, SF; www.sanfranciscohistory.org. 7:30pm, $5. San Francisco History Association hosts this talk by the author of Reel San Francisco Stories: An Annotated Filmography of the Bay Area. *

 

What she sees

Michael Redmond
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3
What she sees

cheryl@sfbg.com

SFJFF The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival opens July 24 with The Green Prince, a documentary based on the memoir of Mosab Hassan Yousef. The son of a founding member of Hamas, he worked as an undercover agent for the Israeli secret service for 10 years, sharing a profound trust with his Shin Bet handler. The closing night film is also a documentary about a conflicted childhood that paves the way for tough choices later in life — but if Little White Lie is also a personal story, it’s a far less political one.

It’s a thoroughly American story, telling the tale of filmmaker Lacey Schwartz, who was raised by her parents — both products of “a long line of New York Jews” — in the decidedly homogeneous town of Woodstock. All of Schwartz’s grade-school friends had light skin and straight hair, while Schwartz was dark, with coarse curls. Lovingly recorded snapshots and home movies of her Bat Mitzvah and other occasions suggest a happy young life, but the “600-pound gorilla in the room,” as one relative puts it, was that Schwartz did not look white, despite ostensibly having white parents. Once she reached her teenage years — and particularly after she enrolled in a high school that had African American kids among its population — she began to realize the go-to family explanation (yeah … that one Sicilian way back in the family tree …) was nothing but a flimsy excuse holding back a mountain of denial.

Now in her 30s, Schwartz has overcome years of identity confusion and is self-confidently assertive in a manner that suggests years of therapy (and indeed, we see footage of sessions she filmed for a student project at Georgetown, where she found a supportive community among the Black Student Alliance). Her parents, however, are not quite as psychologically evolved, although her mother — a pleasant woman who has nonetheless been content to spend her life surfing the waves of passive-aggression — eventually opens up about the Schwartz family’s worst-kept secret. The aptly-titled Little White Lie clocks in at just over an hour, but it packs in a miniseries’ worth of emotional complexity and honesty. Schwartz will be on hand at the film’s San Francisco and Berkeley screenings — the Q&As are sure to be lively.

Another, rather different tale of women using cameras in pursuit of the truth surfaces in Judith Montell and Emmy Scharlatt’s In the Image, a doc about Palestinian women who work with Israeli human-rights NGO B’Tselem. Group members, who include high school girls and middle-aged mothers, are given small video cameras to keep an eye on protests, harassment, and anti-Palestinian violence perpetrated by Israeli soldiers and settlers. (In one disturbing clip, we see a small child launch a giant spitball at the lens.) Able to capture footage in areas deemed off-limits to mainstream journalists, In the Image shows how B’Tselem brings investigative reporting to the front lines, and then to the world (thanks, YouTube). It’s also an empowering outlet for the camerawomen-activists, for whom career opportunities are otherwise as rare as are opportunities for artistic expression.

Women are also front and center in a number of SFJFF’s stronger narrative entries. Writer-director Talya Lavie won Best Narrative Feature and the Nora Ephron Prize at Tribeca for Zero Motivation, a pitch-black comedy about female frenemies jammed into close quarters while doin’ time in the Israeli Defense Forces. Most movies prefer to show soldiers in combat, and Zero Motivation does just that — if “combat” means fighting to avoid boring admin work, to achieve the highest score at Minesweeper, to fuck up the most extravagantly, or with staple guns. “There’s a war going on — get a grip!” a superior officer reminds self-centered slacker Daffi (Nelly Tager), and that’s more or less the only current-affairs statement uttered in a film that’s mostly concerned with the agonizing task of achieving responsible young adulthood.

Another coming-of-age tale unfolds in Hanna’s Journey, director and co-writer Julia von Heinz’s drama about a Berlin business-school student (Karoline Schuch) whose résumé is lacking in the sort of warm-fuzzy community service that’ll elevate her in the cutthroat job market. Her estranged mother, who works with a German group placing volunteers in Israel, proves unexpectedly helpful, and Hanna is soon winging her way to work with developmentally disabled adults in Tel Aviv, leaving her sleek wardrobe and yuppie boyfriend behind.

Hanna’s Journey has all the potential to be a pat story about a German woman coming to terms not just with her own life choices, but with complicated family history (hint: it involves World War II) only a trip to Israel can unearth. There’s also a conveniently hunky Israeli (Doron Amit) in the mix. But! Schuch, who resembles Jessica Chastain, brings authenticity to a character who morphs from superficial to soulful in what might otherwise seem like too-rapid time. She also benefits from a subtle, nicely detailed script, which avoids stereotypes and oversimplification, and is not without moments of wicked humor (“German girls are easy — it’s the guilt complex!”)

Less successful at achieving subtelty is For a Woman, writer-director Diane Kurys’ latest autobiographical drama. Here, she explores her parents’ troubled marriage, inspired by a photograph of an uncle nobody in the family wanted to discuss. The fictionalized version begins as Kurys stand-in Anne (Sylvie Testud) and older sister Tania (Julie Ferrier) have just buried their mother, who was long-divorced from the girls’ ailing father.

For a Woman takes place mostly in flashbacks to post-war Lyon, where young Jewish couple Léna (Mélanie Thierry) and Michel (Benoit Magimel) settle and have Tania soon after. Russia-born Michel is a devoted Communist, and he’s overjoyed — yet understandably suspicious — when long-lost brother Jean (Nicolas Duvauchelle) suddenly appears in France, having somehow escaped the USSR. Michel’s political paranoia blinds him to the fact that Léna — who married him to escape a death camp (he didn’t know her, but couldn’t resist her icy blond beauty) — is bored with her stay-at-home-mom life, and has taken an unwholesome interest in his mysterious little bro.

There’s more to the story than that, of course, but For a Woman never goes much deeper than a made-for-TV melodrama: entertaining in the moment, but ultimately forgettable. And even gorgeous period details (Michel’s car is to die for) can’t make up for a frame story that feels rather wan next to the film’s cloak-and-dagger main plotline. 2

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL

July 24-Aug. 10, most shows $10-$14

Various Bay Area venues

www.sfjff.org

 

Framing fame

Michael Redmond
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0
Framing fame

arts@sfbg.com

SFJFF Given the seemingly endless one-step-forward, two-steps-back nature of peace negotiations in the Middle East, it seems a fair bet that the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (July 24-Aug. 10) will never stop being among the most politically charged among umpteen annual Bay Area film festivals. But considerably older than the state of Israel — and all attendant controversies — is an aspect of Jewish history that reliably provides a counterbalance to the inevitable heavyweight documentaries and dramas. That would be the ubiquity of Jewish talent in popular entertainment, as performers, presenters, and in every other necessary role.

An old saw that never exactly went away but nonetheless has come back with a vengeance in our alleged post-racial era is that perpetual complaint of the envious, paranoid, and prejudiced that “the Jews run Hollywood.” While it’s true that the movie biz has always has employed a large number of Jewish people, anti-Semites have only themselves to blame for originating this state of affairs. It was the entertainment industry’s lack of respectability in its fledgling years that created an opening for an industrious and imaginative minority who were frequently discouraged from sullying more prestigious art forms with their participation. For decades (arguably even now) many stars, studio moguls, and others tried to downplay or entirely hide their ethnic identity; the silent era, in particular, was a hotbed of biographical revisionism among Hollywood players. Nonetheless, Jewish business, tech, design, and acting talents established deep roots in moviemaking well before Hollywood as idea or physical entity existed, precisely because flickers were initially viewed as a lowbrow novelty unfit for the higher working castes. A very sad microcosm of that semi-hidden Jewish industry presence’s early heights and depths is offered offered by David Cairns and Paul Duane’s multinational documentary Natan, about a hugely important yet lamentably overlooked figure in French cinema. Romanian-born Bernard Natan went from projectionist to cinematographer, producer, film laboratory owner, and more in the medium’s early days. An innovator in the use of sound, color, wide screen, and other techniques, he helped rebuild French film production whole in the aftermath of World War I (in which he volunteered for military service, despite not yet being a legal French citizen).

His extraordinary, tireless enterprise made him an ideal candidate to take over pioneering and powerful, but financially teetering, Pathé Studios in 1929. He virtually rescued it from ruin, while steering it successfully into the talkie era. But despite his efforts, Pathé went bankrupt at the height of the Depression in 1935. Natan was the designated fall guy because he’d used legally questionable means in an attempt to cover losses created largely by people and institutions outside his control. There was a strong whiff of then-increasingly-fashionable anti-Semitism to his pillory: He was accused not only of fraud, but of hiding his Jewish heritage, and of being a pornographer.

The latter charge was accepted with remarkable gullibility by historians until quite recently. But as this doc suggests, painting Natan as a predatory perv making potentially career-ending stag reels makes as little sense realistically as it makes great sense propagandically. (We also see how vague the resemblance is between him and the dude or dudes in “smokers” he’d said to have performed in.) That taint helped usher him to prison in Nazi-occupied France, then to an unrecorded demise at Auschwitz. Shamefully, as late as 1948 his estate was still being sued by an invigorated Pathé. Natan is a belated reclamation of a forgotten cultural giant’s abused reputation.

Whether or not he ever actually had anything to do with filmed erotica, Natan would have been amazed by the career of another cosmopolitan Jew launched just a few years after his life’s end. Wiktor Ericsson’s A Life in Dirty Movies pays bemused biographical homage to what Annie Sprinkle calls “the Ingmar Bergman of porn.” Joe Sarno’s micro-budgeted features targeting “the raincoat crowd” from 1962 onward were exceptionally moody, complex and tortured psychodramas focused on being “as hot as you could without showing anything.” He met his soul mate in aspiring off-off-Broadway actress Peggy, who “could discuss John Ford and Truffaut and Renoir” while juggling all the logistical and fiscal details he was naturally oblivious to as a genu-wine artist.

It’s hard now to imagine the mixed excitement and bewilderment that must have been experienced by 42nd Street grindhouse patrons as they witnessed the likes of 1962’s horrors-of-swingerdom melodrama Sin in the Suburbs, or 1967’s claustrophobic self-portrait-of-a-neurotic-artist All the Sins of Sodom. Strangely not glimpsed in this documentary is the artistic apex of Sarno’s color softcore career, 1972’s Pirandello-esque Young Playthings.

The marketplace soon muscled him into hardcore. He was unhappy enough chronicling graphic XXX action to seriously risk financial ruin — and Peggy, still very much the histrionic type, is seen here swanning about as protector of his legacy. It’s lovely when his unexpectedly big 2010 New York Times obit affirms at last to her that he’s “famous like everybody else,” just as he’d always hoped, and as her scandalized Establishment parents figured he’d never be.

Other features in this year’s SFJFF area focus less on impresarios than on performers. The festival’s Freedom of Expression Award goes to the subject of Theodore Bikel: In the Shoes of Sholem Aleichem. This is one of those occasional, simultaneously valuable and dubious documentaries that enlarge upon a well-traveled celebrity solo stage showcase (Sholem Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears). The 90-year-old Bikel has done Aleichem’s characters (especially Tevye the Dairyman) so much that the excerpts here feel worn into a groove that congratulates both veteran performer and veteran viewers who recognize bits they’ve already seen. Who can object? He’s like a tabby grooming itself, essential adorability undeniable.

But he never allows himself an unrehearsed moment in what comes off first as an awfully self-congratulatory self-portrait, and secondly as a workmanlike salute to the single greatest shaper of all American Jewish cultural tropes. Shoes is the kind of proud, way-back machine tribute that makes you feel like you’re watching its 12th pledge week replay. Why are the likes of Gilbert Gottfried and Dr. Ruth the principal interviewees here? Because everybody else has moved on, maybe. Aleichem will always be classic, but to what extent do contemporary US Jews recognize themselves in his worldview?

Other entertainers showcased in SFJFF 2014 include The Secret Life of Uri Geller: Psychic Spy?, about the Tel Aviv-born “spoonbender” phenomenon. This UK documentary assumes a campy, skeptical stance re: his paranormal fame, while actually providing evidence that he’s far from a fraud. Go figure. An even more swinging figure of the era is the subject of Quality Balls: The David Steinberg Story. The dapper latter epitomized smart, improv-based standup comedy on a national stage once he’d left Chicago’s Second City for TV — surviving the 1969 cancellation his edgily political material purportedly forced upon the hugely popular The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Those looking for an additional peek behind the comedic curtain might also check out documentary feature Comedy Warriors, about disabled Iraq and Afghanistan veterans taking the standup stage; Little Horribles: An Evening With Amy York Rubin, drawn from the popular online series; and thematic program “Jews in Shorts.”

Then there’s this year’s major excavation from the treasure-trove of forgotten US Yiddish cinema: 1938’s Mamele, in which late pixie queen Molly Picon plays a cheerfully suffering yenta Cinderella awaiting justice for her many sacrifices to a selfish family. She cooks, she cleans, she sings — what more do you want? Of course there’s a happy ending. 2

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL

July 24-Aug. 10, most shows $10-$14

Various Bay Area venues

www.sfjff.org

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