San Francisco

Beyond the Ford severance scandal

Andrew Lam
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0

Supervisor John Avalos and state Senator Leland Yee, who are both running for mayor, picked up on a populist issue last week, blasting away at Muni for paying outgoing chief Nathaniel Ford a whopping $384,000 severance. “With $384,000,” Yee’s website lamented, “the entire city of San Francisco could park free of charge for three days. Muni could be entirely free for a whole day. We could stripe seven miles of new bike lanes.”

In reality $384,000 is a fraction of Muni’s budget — less than half of 1 percent. And it’s a trivial amount compared to what CEOs get in the private sector — Peter Darbee, whose firm killed eight people and wiped out a neighborhood, walked away with $35 million when he left Pacific Gas and Electric Co. in disgrace.

But this is exactly the sort of deal that infuriates the public. When the cost of parking meters and tickets keep rising, and Muni’s on-time performance lags, why is the guy in charge, who’s leaving in part because he isn’t doing the job, getting such a nice golden parachute, courtesy of the taxpayers?

In the end, there’s not a lot Yee or Avalos can do about it. For one thing, the decision was made not by the supervisors but by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Beyond that, SFMTA had only limited choices — Ford has an employment contract. And it’s hard to fire someone in the middle of a term of contracted employment without buying out at least part of the deal.

That’s the larger issue here, one that the mayoral candidates ought to be talking about. Why does the head of Muni get a special employment contract? The heads of the Police Department and Fire Department don’t get one. In fact, most department heads don’t get contracts specifying a term of office and including severance pay.

Those contracts can be expensive — Susan Leal got $400,000 when she was dismissed as head of the SF Public Utilities Commission. Arlene Ackerman got $375,000 when she left the San Francisco Unified School District.

No rank-and-file city employees get severance if they’re fired for cause (or if they negotiate a resignation to avoid disciplinary action). City department heads shouldn’t either.

We understand why school superintendents and Muni managers want those sorts of deals: If you work for a political agency, there’s always a chance that the people who hired you will be gone at some point and you’ll be working for people with different visions and political positions. But none of these department heads are paupers — they’re well paid, and, like anyone who takes a management job, they know that their job security depends on performance.

It’s akin, in a much more limited way, to what’s been happening in the private sector, where the top people get compensation that vastly exceeds what even the people immediately below them get. Muni’s assistant general managers don’t get employment contracts with golden parachutes.

San Francisco needs a city policy on special employment contracts — and rules barring excessive severance pay for management-level employees. The supervisors ought to ask the budget analyst for a report on which city employees have contracts, what they call for, and how they compare to what similar-level employees without contracts are paid. There should be hearing on this and legislation that clears up what is now an expensive — and disheartening — hodgepodge of private deals.

 

On the hook

Andrew Lam
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4
On the hook

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Unique Roberts squared back her shoulders and recalled what it was like when she first moved to San Francisco from East Oakland more than a decade ago. A tall, 33-year-old African American transgender woman with piercing eyes and a charming smile despite gaps of missing teeth, Roberts said she performed as a showgirl at clubs like Harvey’s and the Pendulum in the Castro. In those exciting days, “I fell in love with this boy, and he was an addict,” she explained. “I thought that if I did it, it would keep our relationship together.”

She recalled how awful her boyfriend felt when he found out she was using, telling her, “You don’t know what you’re doing to yourself.” He departed for Texas several years later, but addiction stuck with her as a way of life.

She says she’s tried to kick the habit, but it’s wrapped up in a battle against depression stemming from the loss of loved ones. Roberts was wearing one of the bright orange sweatshirts issued to inmates at San Francisco County Jail. She landed there after being arrested in April for allegedly selling a tiny rock of crack, weighing just 9/100s of a gram, to an undercover narcotics officer. According to the police report, the cop offered her $20 for it — but based on National Drug Intelligence Center street-value estimates, that amount is only worth about $2.50.

Roberts may go by the first name Unique, but her lawyer Tal Klement, who works for the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, is fond of saying her case is hardly unique at all. She was one of several people arrested in the Tenderloin that day after interacting with the same plainclothes officer.

It was part of a coordinated sweep known as a buy-bust, a common practice under which an officer may pose as a homeless person, a clueless outsider, or a dope-sick fiend to lure people into selling crack, pills, meth, heroin, or marijuana. Once a transaction is made, a team of officers awaiting the signal immediately closes in and arrests the seller.

As of June 20, there were at least 109 open buy-bust cases in San Francisco. Based on defendants’ rap sheets, 92 percent had prior drug-use histories, according to a tally conducted by the Public Defender’s Office.

The officers posing as buyers — who often earn overtime — use street lingo, know which drugs can be obtained at which intersections, and sometimes offer higher prices than the accepted street value. Attorney Anne Irwin, also a public defender, is critical of the practice, saying it’s an expensive tactic that’s makes for easy arrests — because the money is irresistible to addicts who think they’re getting an opportunity to convert a personal stash into more drugs.

In a lean budget year, “they’re cutting social services left and right, and these are the very services that could help the addicts get off the street,” Irwin noted. She’s skeptical that the strategy stems the flow of substantial quantities of drugs.

Police Chief Greg Suhr, who said he participated in buy-busts for years as a narcotics officer, credits the tactic for helping to eradicate a rampant open-air drug market on Third Street in the Bayview, and says it can help prevent drug-related violence.

Klement, however, condemns it as a “war on crumbs,” saying it ensnares far more addicts than serious dealers and often ends up unnecessarily pinning felony convictions onto low-level offenders.

 

NUMBERS GAME

Buy-busts usually involve around eight officers, according to an average calculated by the Public Defender’s Office based on open cases, but have involved as many as 14 and as few as three. There’s the decoy buyer, who sometimes dresses in grimy sweatpants, goes without shaving, or dirties his face to look like a street addict in desperate need of a fix. There’s a “close cover” officer who follows the decoy, plus an arrest team that is also sometimes in plainclothes. Beforehand, officers will photocopy cash — usually $20 bills — to document the serial numbers so that the same marked city funds can be used as evidence once recovered from arrestees. Busts can happen within minutes of one another, and a single shift may net five or six arrests.

Irwin says the people snared aren’t typical drug dealers — certainly not big-time players. But they’re charged as dealers — and in many cases wind up branded as felons, with severe legal penalties such as multiyear prison sentences.

While the police department is able to show on paper that it’s brought hundreds of drug dealers into custody — and the district attorney can point to a boost in the conviction rate thanks to the program’s efficiency — Irwin says the amounts being peddled are tiny.

“In traditional narcotics operations, they cultivated snitches, used surveillance, and obtained search warrants” to go after major dealers, Irwin said. With buy-busts, “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Everyone agrees that we need cops on the streets to help keep us safe … But do we want to be paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for this?”

Sharon Woo, chief assistant of operations for the San Francisco District Attorney, told the Guardian that “we charge based on the conduct of the individual.” Woo went on to say that the DA tried to “exercise appropriate discretion” on a case-by-case basis when individuals are selling to support an addiction or due to being in dire financial straits.

Sometimes individuals are ushered into alternative programs such as drug court or a Back on Track program for first-time offenders, Woo said. And while the DA typically includes charges that make defendants ineligible for probation under state law if they have prior convictions for selling crack-cocaine — a discretionary practice that has drawn criticism from public defenders — Woo observed that “it doesn’t mean that’s how cases resolve.”

Police forces in nearly every major metropolitan area practice buy-busts, said Frank Zimring, a law professor at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law specializing in criminal justice issues. Yet he described the practice as costly and noted that paying overtime for it “makes what would ordinarily be a very expensive operation into a more expensive operation.”

Cost estimates for the entire program are tough to pin down. It costs $130 per day to house each prisoner in the county jail, amounting to more than $14,000 per day if all of the defendants with pending cases are in custody. If an average of eight officers per bust were paid $60 an hour each to spend six hours conducting a buy-bust, the current caseload represents more than $300,000 in officer pay — a conservative estimate — and that’s before lawyers in the offices of the public defender and district attorney are paid to prosecute and defend the suspects in court.

But no matter how you add it up, it’s a lot of money.

Suhr told the Guardian that apprehending street-level offenders occasionally leads officers to bigger fish. “Sometimes you get a low-level person, or a buyer if you will … if that same person would say, ‘But I know this guy and he has guns and he’s a big dealer and whatever.’ That is a good way to get to those bigger people.”

“We’ve never seen that happen in practice,” Klement countered.

One of Irwin’s clients, a homeless man, was charged with selling narcotics after he scraped out the contents of his pipe to sell 1/1,000th of a gram of crack to an undercover officer for $20. In a rare twist, the case was ultimately settled on a misdemeanor possession of narcotics.

Inspector Robert Doss, who served as the decoy in that case, has earned substantial amounts of overtime while going undercover to buy drugs, according to a court transcript. In 2009 Doss earned $35,488 in combined overtime and “other pay,” which includes time spent testifying in court, according to a San Francisco Chronicle database of municipal salaries.

 

ON THE STREET, OFF THE STREET

The Tenderloin is frequently targeted for buy-busts, with 65 percent of open cases as of June 13 having taken place in that neighborhood. The Haight ranked second, with nearly 12 percent of cases, and the Mission followed with 10 percent. Shortly after District Attorney George Gascón was sworn into his prior post as police chief in 2009, he announced a concerted effort to clean up the Tenderloin, and Klement maintains he’s seen a surge in cases stemming from buy-busts there ever since.

Drug dealing in the Tenderloin often makes the news as a source of frustration to merchants and residents. “You try and explain to the people of San Francisco that it’s okay for people to have open-air drug markets right in front of their stores,” Suhr said.

Yet Klement maintains that what is essentially a quality-of-life crime should not be treated as a felony. “There’s a lot of pressure from people who are invested in businesses [in the Tenderloin] who would love to see that neighborhood become the next Hayes Valley,” he said. “But what they don’t realize is that people are paying with prison for that agenda.”

Once someone has been labeled a drug dealer in the eyes of the law, he said, it becomes more difficult for them to access drug treatment — not to mention get a job, qualify for a student loan, or find housing.

Roberts’ case nearly went to trial. If convicted, she could have been sent to prison for a minimum of three and a maximum of 17 years due to extra penalties from prior convictions. On the eve of the trial, however, the case was settled on a possession charge for a year in jail, a rare outcome. Klement was hoping to have her placed in a treatment program.

Asked if she knew of others swept up in undercover operations, Roberts gave a wry chuckle and gestured to the jail corridor behind her, indicating that nearly everyone there had been taken down in similar fashion. Klement noted that the targets of the buy-busts are almost exclusively people of color, saying, “You walk into the holding cell and you think you’re in Alabama or Mississippi, not San Francisco.”

In an editorial on the subject that he wrote a couple years ago, Klement noted that by contrast, predominantly white middle class people with a fondness for illegal drugs are rarely targeted because they aren’t the ones selling drugs on the street. “The hard truth is that the police ignore most of the middle class drug use and dealing occurring out of private homes in every neighborhood or other public venues in the city — bars, nightclubs, concert halls. More drugs are being transported to Burning Man as we speak than will probably be seized during Gascón’s entire crackdown.”

For Klement, it’s just another symptom of a broken system. “A lot of these people are repeat players because we don’t have the right interventions at the right time,” he said. “We don’t understand addiction.”

 

Yearbook of heartbreak and outrage

Andrew Lam
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0
Yearbook of heartbreak and outrage

news@sfbg.com

The giant commemorative AIDS ribbon that was up on Twin Peaks during the first half of June has been taken down, but the 30th anniversary of the epidemic, and how it changed San Francisco, is still reverberating throughout the city.

“It was like paradise,” Mark Ottman said as he guided me through the high-ceiling lobby, quiet as a library, of Union Bank on 400 California St. “For a few years. Then things got really scary.”

Ottman, the vice president of personal trust and estate services at the bank, recalled arriving in the city in 1981 as a 22-year-old Montana transplant. That year, the gay newspaper the Bay Area Reporter published the word AIDS for the very first time.

Although the paper has been at the forefront of reporting gay news for its 40 years — from White Night Riots of the 1970s through the Lavender Sweep of the 1990s, the Bowers vs. Hardwick decision through the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal — the way it straightforwardly handled the heartbreak of AIDS and the outrage that followed has become its lasting legacy.

“This was not stuff that was shown on the nightly news,” Ottman continued. “The B.A.R. was three or four months ahead in covering AIDS. In that sense, it was really the leader.”

This month, those with a thirst for history will need to look no further than newsprint. Union Bank’s LGBT Alliance has commissioned a retrospective exhibit highlighting the Bay Area Reporter’s coverage of the gay and lesbian community.

When the B.A.R. started in 1971, founders and friends Paul Bentley and Bob Ross had the intention of making it more than just a gossipy guide to bars and bathhouses. The newspaper focused on serious local news — even recruiting Harvey Milk as a political columnist.

“The founders weren’t journalists,” said Rick Gerharter, the longtime freelance photographer who curated the photo- and front page-filled exhibit at Union Bank. “But as the paper grew, it certainly became more professional.”

In 1981, when AIDS first appeared, the B.A.R. had no choice but to undergo a journalistic coming of age as it struggled to be first and be fair covering the mysterious disease that had begun to mow down gay men.

 

UNEASY EARLY AIDS COVERAGE

Yet the newspaper was not immune to the confusion and uneasiness that enveloped the community during the early days of the “gay cancer.”

“Me and my boyfriend both laughed — it must be another Anita Bryant plot against homosexuals,” said Robert Julian, recalling his first response to talk of the “gay-related immunodeficiency” or GRID.

“Gay people are united by sexual orientation, not genetics,” said Julian. Initially, the former B.A.R. entertainment editor and author of But the Show Went On: San Francisco 1987-1988 had his suspicions, thinking that a “physical ailment confined solely to gay people was a practical impossibility.”

It didn’t take long before the B.A.R. began reporting on the latest research, medical resources, and information about financial services available to the hundreds of gay men in San Francisco who had contracted the HIV virus.

Once researchers discovered that AIDS was being transmitted sexually, public opinion divided. Then-Mayor Diane Feinstein and Director of Public Health Mervyn Silverman wanted to close the bathhouses, but some members of the gay community considered this a violation of personal rights.

“There was this repression around gay people and sex, this hysteria around bathhouses,” said Gerharter. And the B.A.R. was hesitant to feed into that frenzy at first. “When it was clear what was really happening, how this thing was being spread around, then it clicked — and the paper really jumped to the forefront of covering what had tuned into an epidemic.”

 

STEAMY BATHHOUSE DEBATE

The paper not only began to cover the AIDS crisis extensively, but did it with an editorial slant that fostered debate in the community. Paul Lorch, then-managing editor, became a prominent voice arguing to keep the bathhouses open. Bathhouses don’t give you AIDS; unprotected sex gives you AIDS, Lorch expressed in strongly-penned editorials. Sometimes he even answered back to Letters to the Editor.

“Lorch and the publishers didn’t believe closing the bathhouses would solve it,” said Wayne Friday, who took over the paper’s political column after Harvey Milk was assassinated and continued it for 27 years. “But no one had an alternative. Diane [Feinstein] would call me at 5 a.m. asking me what we should do about this thing.”

The community was split. Some, including Friday, believed that the bathhouses were a public health hazard while others accused Feinstein of scapegoating. “Those people were being selfish and foolish,” Friday said. “Closing the bathhouses saved lives.”

In 1984 the San Francisco Health Department asked for a court order forbidding renting out private rooms in bathhouses. Without the luxury of privacy, most closed within months. “San Francisco became a blueprint of how to handle AIDS on the city level for the rest of the country,” Friday said.

 

OBITUARIES KEPT SAD TALLY

During this time, the B.A.R. was also keeping a more morbid type of tally: the obituaries. Each week the paper published two pages — 30 to 50 obituaries — until 1998.

“When you picked it up, it was the first thing you turned to,” Gerharter said. “It was just a name and a face. Maybe you recognized the person. Maybe someone you tricked with.”

In 1989, art director Richard Burt became so overwhelmed by the number of obituaries that had been turned in to the B.A.R. within the first 10 months that he wanted to convey the sinking feeling in the pages of the paper. The Nov. 16 issue included a four-page collage of everyone who had passed away due to AIDS that year. Just a name and a face.

“It was heartbreaking,” Julian said, “to see my friends and lovers pictured there.”

Through the efforts of Tom Burtch and the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society, a massive searchable online database of B.A.R. obituaries since 1979 was launched in 2009 (www.leifkerdesigns.com/olo/index.jsp).

During his tenure at the paper, Julian chose not to cover AIDS, feeling that the point of entertainment news was to distract away “from the soul-crushing presence of the grim reaper stalking our neighborhoods.”

Though AIDS was a heavily political newsbeat, Friday removed himself from covering it for different reasons. “I knew every elected official. I sat in on all the City Hall meetings about the bathhouses,” Friday said. “But I just couldn’t do it every week. It was too damned personal.”

“Thinking about turning the page to those obituaries even now is making me shiver,” Ottman said. “It’s like a high school reunion, except you don’t know which half made it.”

 

COVERING THE RISE OF ACTIVISM

The B.A.R. was also instrumental in covering the various political and protest actions that accompanied the disease, including the bloody police sweep of ACT-UP protesters the Castro and the Stop AIDS Now or Else blockade of the Golden Gate Bridge, both in 1989.

Gerharter remembers the blockade. “They arranged it for the morning commute. And thank God it was foggy or else the surveillance cameras would have stopped us.”

Gerharter would often be trusted with information about an upcoming demonstration and be the only photographer allowed to tag along. “You can document history better when you become a part of it. You get closer to the people — they’re not posing,” he said. “It was our job to be advocates and watchdogs.”

After consistently seeing the tragedy of AIDS on the front page for almost a decade, the B.A.R. became more active itself, inciting its readers to action. “We’d read the B.A.R. to find out about the rallies were happening so we could skip work and take a road trip to Sacramento,” Ottman said. “The Chronicle would never cover that.”

When the fight against AIDS became a war, the B.A.R.’s writers often felt like they had become war correspondents, complete with all the outsize personality conflict and drama of the classic stereotype.

“[Bob] Ross was a nightmare boss, a pain in the ass, and complete rageaholic,” Julian said of B.A.R.’s often conservative cofounder, who died in 2003. “But he was committed to keeping the paper and us running.”

THE BAY AREA REPORTER 40TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBIT

Through June 30, 9 a.m.–5 p.m.

Union Bank Main Branch

400 California, SF

 

Lust for Life: The true meaning of Gay Christmas

Andrew Lam
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22
Lust for Life: The true meaning of Gay Christmas

Yeah, Pride’s got its problems – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be epic

Every year without fail, my friends and I talk about how June is Gay Christmas in San Francisco. We pronounce it like it has to be capitalized and ends with an exclamation point. Sometimes I even sing the words a little — “Gaaay Christmas! La-la!” — like the holiday comes complete with its own carols. 

Sometimes I say “Gay Christmas” with a hint of irony and sarcasm. I bitch every year about how the Pride parade in San Francisco has become a big corporate conglomeration (not unlike Actual Christmas, right?). I bitch about how Pride has become an expensive and boozy festival celebrating the worst, most consumerist, most assimilationist parts of queer culture. I bitch about how Pride is a festival that has amazing roots and history and import, but at least in San Francisco, it has lost its way. That Pride has morphed from being a glittering and debauched radical celebration of queer love and life into a hokey tourist trap designed to sell rainbow key chains and pink triangle tea towels. 

The disgusting thing is that it is dangerous to hold a Pride festival in most parts of the world, even in other parts of the U.S. (have you seen what’s been happening in Texas lately, let alone in Uganda or Russia?). I’d like to think that when our brethren in other places are seriously RISKING MURDER to march down a city block and declare their queerness and gender variance, those of us in the privileged position of living in the queer Oz would be doing more to help them out. I’ve dedicated my life to queer activism, but I’m implicating myself here, too: not knowing how to help in situations that are so desperate and scary can feel hopeless and overwhelming, and the whole mess just ends up making me cynical about Pride in the Bay Area. 

I will probably always be cynical about the big corporate festival on Sunday, but the rest of June in San Francisco is a privilege to experience, a wonder to behold if you chill out and count your blessings and get some perspective. So in that spirit, I wanna tell you about my best Pride – what Pride can be like when you’re inspired and enthused, when everything feels alive and shimmering. 

Pride 2008 was my best Pride. I was 25 and newly, deeply, madly, stupidly in love. The kind of love that pumped my heart up so big I thought it was going to expand like a balloon and fill my entire ribcage. The kind of love where I threw all responsibility and caution to the wind. 

I took the week off work to stay home and fuck my new long-distance girlfriend. I didn’t say that to my job, of course, I said “my girlfriend is visiting from Oregon for Pride,” but I’m fairly sure my supervisor knew what I’d be doing when I asked for the vacation time (it was a queer non-profit). Me and this girlfriend have since broken up (in classic dyke fashion, we’re friends and artistic collaborators now). But the memory of the Pride week we spent together still makes me grin.

We had eight days together, and we made the most of it. We rolled around in my bed, in alleyways, in parks. One night she threw me up against a fence by the UC Extension school at the bottom of Hayes Valley, slipped her hand up my skirt in full view of all those cars and pedestrians. 

But eventually the San Francisco summer evening fog won out, and we made our way back to my apartment to warm up. Aside from public sex, we ventured out of my bed for the following: Take-out Thai food on my couch, pancakes at It’s Tops (the preciously tiny 1930s art-deco diner), a movie at Frameline, the last Queer Open Mic hosted by Cindy Emch, the Trans March, the Dyke March, and a porn shoot. 

I’m amazed that she and I managed to get so much done, fucking as much as we did. For queer people in love during the gayest week of the year, we were extremely productive. Our productivity was probably bolstered by the fact that we didn’t sleep much. We’d crash out at five a.m. after having sex for hours, and then we were up again at 10, but we wouldn’t manage to actually remove ourselves from each other or my room till two in the afternoon. We’d roll out of my bed hungry and bleary-eyed, covered in the salt of each other’s come and sweat, utterly and deliriously fuck drunk. 

So we’d shower together, lather up our hair and skin with her rose castile soap. Sometimes the smell of rosewater still makes me think of her. Then it would be time to put on sexy outfits and go off on another adventure.

It was a magic and manic way to spend Pride, getting lost in my best girl, my sweetest butch, the smartest kindest hottest person I’d ever met. (Falling in love makes me prone to hyperbole.) It makes me feel radiant, brilliant, witty, and drop-dead gorgeous, it makes me feel like I can change the world in one fell swoop. 

And me and my girl, we were gonna start a revolution together. We shot a scene for her porn movie that week, the movie that would become Doing It Ourselves: The Trans Women Porn Project – which is actually a revolutionary project, the first and only film of it’s kind: a porn movie made by, for, and about trans women and their partners. I was fucking a total genius, and I was thrilled and proud to have her on my arm. “Yeah, that’s right!” I felt like shouting to every single passer-by, “My girlfriend is BAD ASS, and so am I!”

My girl bought me bondage rope the exact color of the magenta streaks in my hair. She’d picked it out for me before she came to San Francisco, carefully looking for just the right the color for me. That week was like waking up every morning and opening up a present. It was like Christmas, goddammit! Every day was an adventure! There was a hot girl in my bed! There were awesome friends to hang out with who told us what a cute couple we were! There was pad thai and French toast with nutella & bananas to eat! Fences to get thrown up against! Movies to see! Marches to march in! Porn to shoot! Spin the Bottle to be played in Dolores Park! Could life get more amazing?! I felt Crazy With Love!, like all my emotions had to be capitalized and end with an exclamation point. Suddenly Gay Christmas made a lot of sense.

That Saturday we marched in the first ever Femme Sharks and Sea Creature Allies contingent in the San Francisco Dyke March. Forty femmes paraded down 18th Street wearing hot pink fake-satin fins on their heads and backs, fins that were cobbled together with cotton balls and staples, precariously taped to us with Scotch tape or tied to us with yarn. People carried signs: “THE IMF CAN KISS MY DORSAL FIN!” “FEMME SHARKS CAN FUCK YOUR ASS AND CHANGE YOUR OIL!” We chanted: “FEMME SHARKS WANT JUSTICE – AND WE WANNA GET BANGED!” And when she and I got home, she tied me up with the magenta rope she’d bought just for me. Afterwards, we spooned and moped about the fact that she was leaving the next day.

Falling in love over Gay Christmas made the original intent of Pride feel real to me – the glitter, the fun, the exhausted exhilaration, and that feeling of being absolutely enthralled with how brilliant and awesome we are, how much we can accomplish as a community when we put our big, pumped-up, loved-up hearts to it. 

So, reader, for this Gay Christmas, I wish that for you. I hope that you fall in love, and I don’t just mean with a sweetheart. I mean I hope that you feel love with your whole body and heart. Love a political movement, an art piece, yourself. Put on your best duds. Treat your lover or yourself to some rope, a cockring, a strap-on that matches your hair or your signature eyeshadow. Eat some chocolate-chip pancakes at an art deco diner and make sure to ask for extra whipped cream. Stay up till 5 in the morning having sex or masturbating. Above all, remember how fabulous and brave and bad-ass you are, and celebrate it.

Gina de Vries is a queer writer, performer, activist, writing instructor, cultural worker, and native San Franciscan. She has a long history doing political organizing and arts work within queer, trans and gender-variant, and sex worker communities, and has performed, taught, and lectured everywhere from chapels to leatherbar backrooms to the Ivy League. She’s currently pursuing her master in fiction writing at SF State, where she’s working on a book. Find out more at www.ginadevries.com and queershoulder.tumblr.com.

Some families don’t flee San Francisco

Zelda Bronstein
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19
Some families don’t flee San Francisco

I hate to admit, I take this a little bit personally, all this stuff about how families are fleeing San Francisco and how it might be better to live in Omaha or Louisville. Cuz I have a family and we aren’t leaving. And neither are my friends and neighbors. There are plenty of us who think that San Francisco is a great place to raise kids.


Some of the stories in the recent Chron article are laughably unrepresentative:


For Kearsley Higgins, raising a baby in San Francisco was idyllic. She and her husband owned a small two-bedroom house in the Castro, she found plenty of activities for her daughter, Maya, and made friends through an 11-member mothers’ group.


Now as the mother of an almost 4-year-old, with a baby boy due in September, Higgins has left. A year ago, she and her husband, a digital artist, bought a four-bedroom home with a large backyard in San Rafael. Maya easily got into a popular preschool and will be enrolled in a good public elementary school when the time comes.


Nice: One-income family buys a four-bedroom home in Marin. I’m afraid that’s not the market most of us are in.


The statistics are real:


New census figures show that despite an intense focus by city and public school officials to curb family flight, San Francisco last year had 5,278 fewer kids than it did in 2000.


The city actually has 3,000 more children under 5 than it did 10 years ago, but has lost more than 8,000 kids older than 5.


But the reasons have a lot more to do with the cost of housing than with anything else. The lack of affordable housing for families — and frankly, none of the new market-rate condos the city is allowing offer much of anything to people with kids — drives people to the cheaper suburbs. And in this economy, it’s not as if they just quit their jobs. No: They commute, long distances — and when you have kids, it’s hard to rely on marginal public transportation. What happens if you’re at work in SF and your kid gets really sick at school in Brentwood? Are you going to spend all afternoon trying to get there on BART and buses? No — you’re hopping in the car, by yourself, and driving 80 miles an hour to the school site.


Which means that building dense, expensive, small condos in San Francisco is the opposite of sustainable planning or green building. Sustainable planning means preserving existing affordable family housing and building housing for the San Francisco workforce. San Francisco is doing none of that. Density isn’t smart growth if the housing doesn’t work for people who work in the city. It’s dumb growth.


End of rant.


What I started off to say was that some of us are very happy living in the city. I’m more than happy with our public schools (McKinley and Aptos so far). I really like the idea that my son can get home from school by himself, on Muni — and can go to his martial arts class on Muni, and can walk to music lessons and bike to the park, and when he’s 16 we won’t even have to talk about a car. I love the fact that my kids are growing up with people who are very different from them — and that ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religion, sexual orientation and all the other things that were such a big deal when we were growing up are utterly irrelevant in their circles. They have friends who come from two-dad families, two-mom families, single-parent families, single grandparent families, rich families, poor families, black familes, Asian families, Latino families, families where the parents speak no English … it’s all a big Whatever. It’s San Francisco.


The city is full of cool, fun stuff to do. It’s full of fascinating people and neighborhoods. My kids experience stuff every day that the suburban folks with their big back yards won’t see in a lifetime. It’s not all positive — we see homeless people on the streets, and we give them money and talk about why people are homeless. But it’s real and it’s life and I’m not taking my family and running away.


So there.      




 

Editorial: Beyond the Ford severance scandal

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Supervisor John Avalos and state Senator Leland Yee, who are both running for mayor, picked up on a populist issue last week, blasting away at Muni for paying outgoing chief Nathaniel Ford a whopping $384,000 severance. “With $384,000,” Yee’s website lamented, “the entire city of San Francisco could park free of charge for three days. Muni could be entirely free for a whole day. We could stripe seven miles of new bike lanes.”

In reality $384,000 is a fraction of Muni’s budget — less than half of 1 percent. And it’s a trivial amount compared to what CEOs get in the private sector — Peter Darbee, whose firm killed eight people and wiped out a neighborhood, walked away with $35 million when he left Pacific Gas and Electric Co. in disgrace.

But this is exactly the sort of deal that infuriates the public. When the cost of parking meters and tickets keep rising, and Muni’s on-time performance lags, why is the guy in charge, who’s leaving in part because he isn’t doing the job, getting such a nice golden parachute, courtesy of the taxpayers?

In the end, there’s not a lot Yee or Avalos can do about it. For one thing, the decision was made not by the supervisors but by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Beyond that, SFMTA had only limited choices — Ford has an employment contract. And it’s hard to fire someone in the middle of a term of contracted employment without buying out at least part of the deal.

That’s the larger issue here, one that the mayoral candidates ought to be talking about. Why does the head of Muni get a special employment contract? The heads of the Police Department and Fire Department don’t get one. In fact, most department heads don’t get contracts specifying a term of office and including severance pay.

Those contracts can be expensive — Susan Leal got $400,000 when she was dismissed as head of the SF Public Utilities Commission. Arlene Ackerman got $375,000 when she left the San Francisco Unified School District.

No rank-and-file city employees get severance if they’re fired for cause (or if they negotiate a resignation to avoid disciplinary action). City department heads shouldn’t either.

We understand why school superintendents and Muni managers want those sorts of deals: If you work for a political agency, there’s always a chance that the people who hired you will be gone at some point and you’ll be working for people with different visions and political positions. But none of these department heads are paupers — they’re well paid, and, like anyone who takes a management job, they know that their job security depends on performance.

It’s akin, in a much more limited way, to what’s been happening in the private sector, where the top people get compensation that vastly exceeds what even the people immediately below them get. Muni’s assistant general managers don’t get employment contracts with golden parachutes.

San Francisco needs a city policy on special employment contracts — and rules barring excessive severance pay for management-level employees. The supervisors ought to ask the budget analyst for a report on which city employees have contracts, what they call for, and how they compare to what similar-level employees without contracts are paid. There should be hearing on this and legislation that clears up what is now an expensive — and disheartening — hodgepodge of private deals.

 

Our Weekly Picks: June 22-28, 2011

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WEDNESDAY 22

DANCE

Hard Core: Getting Raw

Finding your identity is tough unless you are a vegetable. Asserting your identity — going against mom and dad — can be tough. However, if who you are and who you want to be goes against societal norms, be prepared to fight for your life. People have died doing it. It’s what the Queer Arts Festival is all about: paying tribute to and celebrating being “out there.” It’s most appropriate that hip-hop — street-born, street-nourished — is part of this yearly event. Hard Core: Getting Raw is a multimedia show put together by Josh Klipp and members of the Freeplay Dance Crew in which each artist (Klipp, Liz Angoff, Kevan Arrington, Hana Azman, and Molly Tsongas) tells a story about a journey undertaken. (Rita Felciano)

Wed/22–Thurs/23, 8 p.m., $15

Garage

975 Howard, SF

(415) 518-1517

www.brownpapertickets.com


THURSDAY 23

EVENT

Manic D Press showcase

In concert with this month’s Pride festivities, the recently relocated Modern Times Bookstore hosts a reading to spotlight luminaries from the queer independent scene. Many affiliated artists stop by, none of whom are exclusively tied to the literary scene but many of whom are pursuing a more experimental approach instead The night features poet Daphne Gottlieb (author of nine books), zinester Larry-Bob Roberts (he’s been called “the Stephen Colbert of queer culture”), badass trans musician-performer Lynn Breedlove, and performance artist extraordinaire Alvin Orloff. With such an eclectic collection of artists of the queer community gathered in one space, the night looks to be a classy, entertaining classy bookend to the flashier parties and parades to come. (David Getman)

7 p.m., free

Modern Times Bookstore

2919 24th St., SF

(415) 282-9246

www.mtbs.com


EVENT

Mara Hvistendahl

On glimpsing the title of Science magazine correspondent Mara Hvistendahl’s new book Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, I immediately thought what any reasonable boy-crazy person would: yeeeeesssss! Because in the meat-marketplace of a society burdened by a capitalistic priapism, the more infinite the choices, the better. But as usual, first impressions are incomplete. Join Hvistendahl as she explains the repercussions of selective sex abortion and the resulting 160 million women missing from Asia. How is this imbalance tweaking entire nations, and what does the West have to do with it (aside from having invented the ultrasound)? Can I get some ladies here? (Kat Renz)

6 p.m., $5–$15

World Affairs Council Auditorium

312 Sutter, Suite 200, SF

(415) 293-4600

www.itsyourworld.org


FRIDAY 24

PERFORMANCE

I Love Being Me, Don’t You?

A cherished comedian, singer, actress, gay deity, and recent Sarah Palin pummeler, Sandra Bernhard comes to town with a new show and new songs from a new album (both show and album are called I Love Being Me, Don’t You?) as well as dependably cutting observations about the world as such — all in time for Pride. Judging by reports from New York City’s sold-out Town Hall appearance, Bernhard — also working on a new musical with Justin Vivian Bond titled Arts and Crafts — flourishes trademark comedic and vocal chops while keeping outspoken, outrageous, and just plain out. (Robert Avila)

Fri/24–Sat/25, 7 p.m., $45–$75

Marines’ Memorial Theatre

609 Sutter, Second Floor., SF

(415) 771-6900

www.marinesmemorialtheatre.com


MUSIC

Brainfeeder Records Showcase

Started in 2008, the Brainfeeder label has essentially the same musical genetics as its founder, Flying Lotus: bass, hip-hop, electronic, things that go bleep-bloop, and jazz (all with a distinctively experimental bent). Following performances in New York City and L.A., Flying Lotus and a collection of labelmates will be bringing a showcase to 103 Harriet. Of particular interest will be 20-year-old Austin Peralta, a composer and jazz keyboardist who has drawn comparisons to McCoy Tyner and Chick Corea. His album, Endless Planets, has a sense of continuity with the forward elements of the genre (that seemed in part to stall outside of Japan in the ’70s) modernized for the 21st century. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Flying Lotus, Thundercat, Austin Peralta, Teebs, and Strangeloop

9 p.m., $22.50

103 Harriet, SF.

(415) 431-1200

www.1015.com


EVENT

“World’s Ugliest Dog Contest”

Festival season has arrived, and if the tie-dye at the Haight Ashbury Street Fair and the impending smolder of the Queer Tango Fest (June 29-July 3) hasn’t yet reminded you of the all-consuming special-ness of the Bay Area, I hereby announce the entrance of the ugly dogs. Yes, the Sonoma-Marin Fair was the birthplace of the snaggle-toothed, wonky-tailed trend of funky puppy adulation that has since made its way from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno show to Europe and back again. The day culminates in the crowning of another freaky furry friend (the 23rd annual!), but get to the fair early to enjoy dog training lessons, treat demonstrations, and, oh yes, the rest of the pig-and-pie county fair action. (Caitlin Donohue)

6 p.m. (fair hours, noon–midnight), $8–$15

Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds

175 Fairgrounds, Petaluma

www.sonoma-marinfair.org


FILM

San Francisco United Film Festival

As per its mission statement, the San Francisco United Film Festival draws from an impressively varied pool of films for its third year in the city. From Bhopali, a somber look at the 1984 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, to The Dead Inside, a zombie-centric musical (the first?), there are strong indicators that the oft-used mantra “something for everyone” is apropos. Documentaries are the meat of this year’s selection and provide some of the more outstanding picks. Eat the Sun examines the practice of sun-gazing, or staring directly into the sun for prolonged periods of time in the belief that this will provide miraculous sustenance, and Superheroes dives mask-first into the world of real-life costumed vigilantes. Superheroes particularly holds promise as a crowd favorite as director Michael Barnett follows avengers Mr. Extreme on patrol and in their daily lives. Super! (Cooper Berkmoyer)

June 24–30, $10.75 (all-film pass, $25–$50)

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.theunitedfest.com/sanfrancisco


SATURDAY 25

MUSIC

San Francisco Free Folk Festival

What better place than a middle school to host a wholesome folk festival? San Francisco’s 35th annual Free Folk Festival features music, dance, and art performances, workshops, and jam sessions for toddlers, teens, 20-somethings, and tried and true folks of any age. The festival provides a great opportunity to fine-tune your Gypsy jazz guitar, pennywhistle, left-handed mandolin, and countless other highly specialized instruments in hour-long workshops throughout the day. If listening and dancing are more your thing, there’ll be storytelling, Moroccan dance, jug band swing, and Bohemian national polka sessions galore. It seems no pocket of culture around the world will go untapped. On the off chance that you think something’s been overlooked, there’s a plain old open mic, too. (Getman)

Sat/25–Sun/26, noon–10 p.m., free

Presidio Middle School

450 30th Ave., SF

www.sffolkfest.org


MUSIC

“Rites of Massive”

Opulent Temple, the SF-based Burning Man camp that has been rocking the playa since 2003, is going big again on Treasure Island, drawing in a wide variety of Burning Man DJs, sculptures, performers, art cars, and music lovers. After filling Building 180 two years ago for its Massive Cox party featuring DJ Carl Cox, OT is moving to the larger Hangar 3 space for Rites of Massive (playing off this year’s Burning Man art theme “Rites of Passage”). Internationally acclaimed headliners DJ Dan, Christopher Lawrence, and Elite Force join notable local DJs on six stages, with burner sound collectives Distrikt, Symbiosis, and others joining the Opulent Temple hosts. Get ready to go big. (Steven T. Jones)

9 p.m.–4 a.m., $30–$50

Hangar 3, 600 California

Treasure Island, SF

www.opulenttemple.org


MUSIC

Cibo Matto

They’ve become hyperactive again. Prior to Cibo Matto’s split in 2001, the duo of instrumentalist Yuka Honda and singer Miho Hatori were responsible for some of the most infectious and bizarre sweet, sweet music of the 1990s. Based in New York City, Cibo Matto had a tendency to be mistaken for a J-Pop band at first listen, in part because of a consistent, aforementioned energy level, but in truth it skipped across the musical spectrum with a complete disregard for genres. The trip-hopping of “Sugar Water.” The ray-gun blap rap of “Working for Vacation.” The tropicalia version of “About a Girl.” Reunited for a Japanese benefit and now a small tour, the band is reportedly working on a new album. (Prendiville) With Chain Gang of 1974

9 p.m., $25

1025 Columbus, SF

(415) 474-0365

www.bimbos365club.com


SUNDAY 26

FILM

“Sand Up Your Vortex”

Since beach dreams rarely come true ’round these foggy, windy parts, why not ditch the S.P.F. and stuff your wild bikini at the Vortex Room instead? Tonight’s quadruple feature kicks off with Roger Corman’s 1957 Attack of the Crab Monsters (nukes made ’em giant; human flesh makes ’em hungry); Jack Curtis’ 1964 The Flesh Eaters (contains Nazis, beatniks, and — again — gruesomely gourmet human flesh); Monster from the Surf (1965), perhaps best explained by its alternate title, The Beach Girls and the Monster; and Nate Watt’s 1961 The Fiend of Dope Island (“He took everything and everyone he wanted!”), which is firmly ensconced on my list (along with 1976’s Shriek of the Mutilated and 1981’s Make Them Die Slowly) of all-time best movie titles. (Cheryl Eddy)

7 p.m., $5

Vortex Room

1082 Howard, SF

www.myspace.com/thevortexroom 


The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

 

Stage Listings

Maria Poblet
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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks. 

 

OPENING

The Book of Liz Custom Made Theatre, 1620 Gough, SF; www.custommade.org. $10-29. Previews Fri/24-Sat/25, 8pm; Sun/26, 7pm. Opens Tues/28, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through July 31. Custom Made Theatre performs David and Amy Sedaris’ comedy about an unconventional nun.

BAY AREA

A Raisin in the Sun Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear, Mtn. View; (650) 254-1148, www.thepear.org. $15-30. Previews Thurs/23, 8pm. Opens Fri/24, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through July 10. Lorraine Hansberry’s classic play comes to life on the Pear Avenue Theatre stage.

Working for the Mouse La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk; www.impacttheatre.com. $10-20. Opens Thurs/23, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sun, 8pm. Through July 8. Trevor Allen revives his hit solo comedy about working at Disneyland in this Impact Theatre and Black Box Theatre co-production.

 

ONGOING

All Atheists Are Muslim Stage Werx, 533 Sutter, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. $20. Runs Sun, 7pm. Through July 10. Zahra Noorbakhsh returns with her timely comedy.

Assassins Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.roltheatre.com. $20-36. Thurs/23-Sat/25, 8pm (also Sat/25, 2pm). Whether the world truly needed a Sondheim musical about the joys of political assassination or not is debatable, but as long as there is one it might as well go for the gusto. Brought to you by Ray of Light Theatre, the folks behind last year’s production of Jerry Springer the Opera, Assassins imbues society’s greatest misfits with quirky relatability. From Joel Roster’s hangdog portrayal of Leon Czolgosz (McKinley’s assassin) to Lisa-Marie Newton’s frazzled Sara Jane Moore (attempted to off Ford), Danny Cozart’s foul-mouthed, Santa Claus-suited, Samuel Byck (out for Nixon) to Gregory Sottolano’s loopy Charles Guiteau (bagged Garfield), the solid cast examines the assassination impulse in a breezy, borderline goofy manner. The production takes a more somber tone when Lee Harvey Oswald (Michael Scott Wells) takes the stage, encouraged by John Wilkes Booth (Derrick Silva) to turn a presumptive suicide attempt into one of assassination, while the other assassins beg him to legitimize their dark impulse through his action. The pacing works best when at its most frenetic, though Silva’s Booth, a pokerfaced elder statesman, lends an air of balancing gravitas. But the true stars of the show might well be the ultra-tight, eight-person house band playing a wide variety of American musical styles from the last 150 years, confidently directed by David Möschler.(Nicole Gluckstern)

Assisted Living: The Musical Imperial Palace, 818 Washington, SF; 1-888-88-LAUGH, www.assistedlivingthemusical.com. $79.59-99.50 (includes dim sum). Sat-Sun, noon (also Sun, 5pm). Through July 31. Rick Compton and Betsy Bennett’s comedy takes on “the pleasures and perils of later life.”

Fighting Mac! Thick House Theatre, 1695 18th St, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.therhino.org. $15-30. Opens Fri/10, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through July 3. Theatre Rhinoceros performs John Fisher’s play about real-life queer British general Hector MacDonald. “Fury Factory 2011” Various venues and prices; www.brownpapertickets.com. Through July 12. Over 30 Bay Area and national companies participate in this bi-annual theater festival.

Indulgences in the Louisville Harem Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, SF; 1-800-838-3006, www.offbroadwaywest.org. $20-40. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through July 30. Two spinster sisters find unlikely beaux in Off Broadway West Theatre’s production of John Orlock’s play.

Much Ado About Lebowski Cellspace, 2050 Bryant, SF; www.sfindie.com. $25. Fri/24-Sun/26, 8pm. SF IndieFest and the Primitive Screwheads perform a Shakespeare-inflected take on the Coen Brothers’ classic film.

The Pride New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; (415) 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $24-40. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through July 10. New Conservatory Theatre Center performs the West Coast premiere of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s love-triangle time warp drama.

Risk is This…The Cutting Ball New Experimental Plays Festival EXIT on Taylor, 227 Taylor; (800) 838-3006, www.cuttingball.com. Free. Fri/24-Sat/25, 8pm. Cutting Ball Theater closes its 11th season with a festival of experimental plays, including works by Eugenie Chan, Rob Melrose, and Annie Elias.

The Stops New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness; 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $24-40. Wed/22-Sat/25, 8pm; Sun/26, 2pm. New Conservatory Theater Center presents a musical comedy set in San Francisco.

A Streetcar Named Desire Actors Theatre, 855 Bush; 345-1287, www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed/22-Sat/25, 8pm. Actors Theatre of San Francisco presents the Tennessee Williams tale.

*Vice Palace: The Last Cockettes Musical Thrillpeddlers’ Hypnodrome, 575 10th St; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $30-35. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through July 31. Hot on the high heels of a 22-month run of Pearls Over Shanghai, the Thrillpeddlers are continuing their Theatre of the Ridiculous revival with a tits-up, balls-out production of the Cockettes’ last musical, Vice Palace. Loosely based on the terrifyingly grim “Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe, part of the thrill of Palace is the way that it weds the campy drag-glamour of Pearls Over Shanghai with the Thrillpeddlers’ signature Grand Guignol aesthetic. From an opening number set on a plague-stricken street (“There’s Blood on Your Face”) to a charming little cabaret about Caligula, staged with live assassinations, an undercurrent of darkness runs like blood beneath the shameless slapstick of the thinly-plotted revue. As plague-obsessed hostess Divina (Leigh Crow) and her right-hand “gal” Bella (Eric Tyson Wertz) try to distract a group of stir-crazy socialites from the dangers outside the villa walls, the entertainments range from silly to salacious: a suggestively-sung song about camel’s humps, the wistful ballad “Just a Lonely Little Turd,” a truly unexpected Rite of Spring-style dance number entitled “Flesh Ballet.” Sumptuously costumed by Kara Emry, cleverly lit by Nicholas Torre, accompanied by songwriter/lyricist (and original Cockette) Scrumbly Koldewyn, and anchored by a core of Thrillpeddler regulars, Palace is one nice vice. (Gluckstern)

What Mamma Said About Down There SF Downtown Comedy Theater, 287 Ellis, SF; www.sfdowntowncomedytheater.com. $15. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through August 20. Sia Amma returns with her solo comedy.

Wish We Were Here New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness, SF; (415) 861-8972, www.nctcsf.org. $20-32. Thurs/23-Sat/25, 8pm. Slacker meets genie in this Michael Phillis comedy.

BAY AREA

Care of Trees Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk; (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org. $17-26. Thurs/23-Sat/25, 8pm; Sun/26, 5pm. E. Hunter Spreen’s Care of Trees, which is receiving an inventively bold world premiere production in Shotgun’s capable hands is at once ambitious yet unsatisfying. The basic plot — “girl meets boy then turns into a tree &ldots; sort of” — is a quirky premise full of untapped potential. With so many possible interpretations of Georgia’s (Liz Sklar) unique predicament, the one that seems most predominant is an unwitting critique of the banality of the self-realization movement. “If I don’t do &ldots; what I see as right, then I’ll be lost to myself,” she tells her understandably frustrated husband Travis (Patrick Russell), as she abruptly shuts off her empathy-meter and bids him to do the same. During isolated pockets of dramatic tension, Georgia is stabbed in an altercation with a tree-hugger, suffers a series of violent seizures, is shuttled off to a battery of clueless doctors, and granted an audience with a Peruvian shaman, yet the underlying significance of actually turning into a tree, is barely explored, certainly never understood. Sklar and Russell turn in standout performances as the forest-crossed lovers, and the canopy of Nina Ball’s inventive set soars, but overall this Tree could stand to develop some stronger roots. (Gluckstern)

Down a Little Dirt Road Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant, Berk; www.justtheater.org. $15-30. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 5pm. Through July 3. A naturalistic family portrait twists itself into a supernatural love knot in Erin Marie Bregman’s first full-length play Down a Little Dirt Road, directed by Molly Aaronson-Gelb. Dad (Anthony Nemirovsky), an earthquake researcher, has moved his family to Parkfield, Calif. for work, but Mom (Lisa Morse) is not with them. Did she die in a plane crash on September 11? Did she vanish into another dimension? Daughter Alice (Alona Bach) has plenty of theories to share, each more earnestly improbable than the last. She is also plagued with recurring nightmares, an unsettling trait she shares with her father. Together they dream of wandering, lost, in a shadow realm, gradually revealed to hold the shade of the missing mother, trying desperately to get back to her daughter while a menacing authority figure (Ryan Tasker) tries to literally pry her memories away. Alona Bach delivers a guileless, pitch-perfect performance as Alice, and her relationship with her stage parents is comfortable and genuine. Berman is clearly playing with the convention of the family-oriented horror story, much like the referenced Roald Dahl classic The Witches, but the ghostly elements prove somewhat problematic in terms of staging and clarity, and while there are a few moments with some serious spine-tingling potential, the overall effect is somewhat flat. (Gluckstern)

East 14th: True Tales of a Reluctant Player Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Aug. 7. Don Reed’s hit solo comedy receives one last extension before Reed debuts his new show (a sequel to East 14th) in the fall.

*Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; (415) 388-5208, www.marintheatre.org. $32-53. Thurs/23-Sat/25, 8pm (also Sat/25, 2pm); Wed/22 and Sun/26, 7:30pm (also Sun/26, 2pm). Marin Theatre Company performs Albee’s most divisive play, an erotic thriller-cum-comic allegory.

Let Me Down Easy Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $17-73. Thurs/23-Sat/25, 8pm (also Sat/25, 2pm); Wed/22, 7pm; Sun/26, 2pm. Anna Deavere Smith performs her latest solo show.

Metamorphosis Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; (510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org. $10-55. Tues, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through July 17. Aurora Theatre Company performs a terrifying yet comic adaptation of Kafka’s classic by David Farr and Gísli Örn Gardarsson.

[title of show] TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro, Mtn View; (650) 463-1960, www.theatreworks.org. $24-42. Wed/22, 7:30pm; Thurs/23-Sat/25, 8pm (also Sat/25, 2pm); Sun/26, 2 and 7pm. TheatreWorks performs a new musical about musicals by Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen. 

 

Rep Clock

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Schedules are for Wed/22–Tues/28 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double and triple features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

BALBOA 3620 Balboa, SF; www.balboamovies.com. $20. “Opera, Ballet, and Shakespeare in Cinema:” Rigoletto, performed by Placido Domingo, Sat-Sun, 10am.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-10. “Frameline 35: San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival,” Wed-Sun. Visit www.frameline.org for complete schedule and ticket information. Stonewall Uprising (Davis and Heilbroner, 2010), Tues, 7. Free screening.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $10.25. The Tree of Life (Malick, 2011), call for dates and times. The Trip (Winterbottom, 2010), call for dates and times. Coppelia, performed by the Bolshoi Ballet, Thurs, 7 and Sun, 1. This event, $18. Buck (Meehl, 2011), June 24-30, call for times.

“FILM NIGHT IN THE PARK” This week: Creek Park, 451 Sir Francis Drake, San Anselmo; (415) 272-2756, www.filmnight.org. Donations accepted. Breakfast Club (Hughes, 1985), Fri, 8; National Velvet (Brown, 1944), Sat, 8.

FOUR STAR 2200 Clement, SF; www.lntsf.com. $10. “Asian Movie Madness” •The Host (Bong, 2006), and Yang Zean (1979), Thurs, call for times.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100, rsvp@milibrary.org. $10. “CinemaLit Film Series: Music and Nostalgia:” The Blues Brothers (Landis, 1980), Fri, 6.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. “Japanese Divas:” Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953), Wed, 7; Dragnet Girl (Ozu, 1933), Fri, 7; Sisters of the Gion (Mizoguchi, 1936), Fri, 9; Street of Shame (Mizoguchi, 1956), Sat, 8:45. “The Cult of the Kuchars:” “8mm Films by George and Mike Kuchar,” Thurs, 7; Weather Diary 1 (George Kuchar, 1986), Sat, 6. “Secession from the Broadcast: The Internet and the Crisis of Social Control,” lecture by Gene Youngblood, Sat, 3:30. “Arthur Penn: A Liberal Helping:” Little Big Man (1970), Sun, 5:30; Night Moves (1975), Sun, 8:10.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994; www.redvicmoviehouse.com. $6-10. “Midnites for Maniacs:” •The Purple Rose of Cairo (Allen, 1985), Wed, 2, 9:15, and Broadway Danny Rose (Allen, 1984), Wed, 7:15. Single film, $7; double feature, $10. Forgetting Dad (Minnich, 2009), Thurs, 7:15, 9:25. The Warriors (Hill, 1979), Fri-Sat, 7:15, 9:20 (also Sat, 2, 4:15). Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune (Bowser, 2011), Sun-Tues, 7:15, 9:20 (also Sun, 2, 4:15).

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. “Frameline 35: San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival,” Wed-Thurs. Visit www.frameline.org for complete schedule and ticket information. Making the Boys (Robey, 2009), Wed-Thurs, 7:30, 9:30.

SUBTERRANEAN ARTHOUSE 2179 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 540-7185, www.brownpapertickets.com. $10. “Innovative California Dance Films,” Fri, 8:30.

“TEMESCAL STREET CINEMA 2011” 49th St at Telegraph, Oakl; www.temescalstreetcinema.com. Free. Trust (Kelly and Yamamoto, 2010), Thurs, 8:45. With music by Ash Reiter at 8pm.

TOP OF THE MARK InterContinental Mark Hopkins, One Nob Hill, SF; www.topofthemark.com. Free. Bullitt (Yates, 1968), Tues, 7:30. YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. Oki’s Movie (Hong, 2010), Thurs, 7:30; Sun, 2.

Film Listings

Maria Poblet
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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Peter Galvin, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Johnny Ray Huston, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For first-run showtimes, see Movie Guide.

FRAMELINE

The 35th San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival runs through Sun/26 at the Castro, 429 Castro, SF; Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk; Roxie, 3117 16th St., SF; and Victoria, 2961 16th St., SF. For tickets (most films $9-$15) and complete schedule, visit www.frameline.org.

OPENING

Bad Teacher Cameron Diaz don’t need no education. (1:29) Shattuck.

Buck This documentary paints a portrait of horse trainer Buck Brannaman as a sort of modern-day sage, a sentimental cowboy who helps “horses with people problems.” Brannaman has transcended a background of hardship and abuse to become a happy family man who makes a difference for horses and their owners all over the country with his unconventional, humane colt-starting clinics. Though he doesn’t actually whisper to horses, he served as an advisor and inspiration for Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998). Director Cindy Meehl focuses generously on her saintly subject’s bits of wisdom in and out of a horse-training setting — e.g. “Everything you do with a horse is a dance” — as well as heartfelt commentary from friends and colleagues. In the harrowing final act of the film, Brannaman deals with a particularly unruly horse and his troubled owner, highlighting the dire and disturbing consequences of improper horse rearing. (1:28) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Sam Stander)

Cars 2 Owen Wilson, Larry the Cable Guy, Michael Caine, and others give voice to the autos in this spy-themed Pixar sequel. (1:52) Balboa, Shattuck.

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop seems less of a movie title and more like a hushed comment shared between one of the many hangers-on during the filming of the “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny On Television Tour.” Throughout 23 cities’ worth of footage, O’Brien seethes, paces, sweats, yells and beats dead jokes so hard that they spring back to life, as he is wont to do.

At this point, the Leno/Coco drama is a bit stale — at least in internet time — but the documentary is a fascinating comedian character study nonetheless. It may be hard to sympathize with a man nursing a bruised ego as he cashes a $45 million dollar check, but it’s easy to see that he’s one of the best late night hosts (temporarily off) the air. Split primarily between clips of O’Brien performing songs on stage with a myriad of celebrity guests and bemoaning how exhausted and frustrated he is, Can’t Stop derives most of its hilarity from the off-the-cuff comments that pepper Conan’s everyday conversations. (1:29) Lumiere, Shattuck. (David Getman)

Oki’s Movie See review at www.sfbg.com. (1:20) Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

*Viva Riva! Gritty, riveting, and even heartbreaking, Viva Riva!, the first Congolese feature film to get distribution in the states, is much like its small-time crook of an anti-hero, Riva (Patsha Bay Mukuna) — in love with life and prepared to laugh in the face of death when it comes knocking. Director Djo Tunda Wa Munga’s African Movie Academy Award winner tumbles with the grimy details of its Kinshasa, Congo, backdrop, and rarely stumbles. A mere foot soldier in a sprawling crime world, Riva has seized his chance at breaking into the big time, with a score of stolen gasoline, and has returned home. His eyes are on an unlikely prize, Nora (Marie Malone), the well-guarded moll of a Kinshasa gangster. As Riva stalks his lithe prey, he’s tailed by the ruthless Angolan crime boss he’s crossed (Hoji Fortuna) and a local military commander under the thug’s thumb (Marlene Longage). As sexy and violent as a contemporary noir, and as familiar as a folk tale unraveled round a campfire, Viva Riva! holds your attention with all the bruised bravado of its Stagger Lee-like protagonist, catching you in with the way the gorgeous Nora undulates at an outdoor gathering at one moment, then squats in the dirt to take a piss at the next. (1:36) Lumiere, Shattuck. (Chun)

ONGOING

*L’Amour Fou Pierre Thoretton’s documentary L’amour fou opens with two clips of men bidding farewell. The first, from 2002, is of the French-Algerian couturier Yves Saint Laurent announcing his retirement in a moving and emotional speech worthy of his favorite writer Marcel Proust. The second is of Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent’s longtime business partner and former lover, eulogizing his departed friend at the designer’s memorial service six years later. Thoretton’s film is suffused with goodbyes, many tender and candid, some portentous and rehearsed. To be sure, L’amour fou is a touching portrait of the powerful and tempestuous bond between Saint Laurent and Bergé, a bond that lasted close to five decades and resulted in one of the great empires of 20th century fashion. But it is also, alongside David Teboud’s two 2002 YSL documentaries, another entry in the hagiography of Saint Laurent, one cannily steered by Bergé as much as by Thoretton. Well-spoken and charming, Bergé still comes off as the punchy entrepreneurial foil to Saint Laurent’s dazzling but fragile genius. He can be both hyperbolic (praising Saint Laurent’s gifts) but also forthcoming (discussing the designer’s demons). Former muses Loulou de la Falaise and Betty Catroux are also interviewed, but this is clearly Bergé’s show. (1:43) Opera Plaza. (Sussman)

The Art of Getting By The Art of Getting By is all about those confusing, mixed-up and apparently sexually frustrating months before high school graduation. George (Freddie Highmore) is a trench coat-wearing misanthrope — an old soul, as they say — whose parents and teachers are always trying to put him inside a box and tell him how to think. He finds a kindred sprit in Sally (Emma Roberts) who smokes and watches Louis Malle films. Hot. Heavily scored by the now-ancient songs of early ’00s blog bands, it may all sound like indie bullshit but this one has charm and wit despite its post-trend package. Like a sad little crayon, Highmore is a competent Michael Cera surrogate du jour. Writer-director Gavin Wiesen embraces hell of clichés, but he suitably sums up a generational angst along the way. The film may not always feel real, but it does have real feeling. Look out for great performances from Blair Underwood and Alicia Silverstone. (1:24) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Ryan Lattanzio)

*Beautiful Boy Save the children, but pity the parents. Director-cowriter Shawn Ku’s Beautiful Boy is one of two recent films concerning parents of kids who go on school killing sprees, and it’ll get potentially shortchanged due to the forthcoming We Need to Talk About Kevin‘s head-turning cast and its Hitchcockian literary source material. Still, Beautiful Boy shines in its own humble way, by dint of its quiet sense of integrity and refusal to pander. The bone-deep unhappiness suffusing the family concerned was present long before 18-year-old college student Sammy (Kyle Gallner) picked up a gun, killed more than a dozen people, then took his own life. Surviving parents Kate (Maria Bello) and Bill (Michael Sheen) already kept separate bedrooms under the same roof and led separate lives, with Bill pasting an unsettling grin on for work and Maria relentlessly pushing to make everything all right, neither noticing the barely perceptible warning signs that their only son was succumbing to despair. Belying its title, Beautiful Boy is less focused on the desperate youngster than on the adults attempting to cope with the horror he’s wrought — not necessarily cleaning up after him or picking up the pieces, but somehow finding their way through their own explosive responses. Bolstered by fine performances by Bello and Sheen, it’s yet another installment in the post-9/11 cinema of trauma — this time, attempting to imagine the unimaginable and to comprehend a kind of healing. (1:40) SF Center. (Chun)

*Beginners There is nothing conventional about Beginners, a film that starts off with the funeral arrangements for one of its central characters. That man is Hal (Christopher Plummer), who came out to his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) at the ripe age of 75. Through flashbacks, we see the relationship play out — Oliver’s inability to commit tempered by his father’s tremendous late-stage passion for life. Hal himself is a rare character: an elderly gay man, secure in his sexuality and, by his own admission, horny. He even has a much younger boyfriend, played by the handsome Goran Visnjic. While the father-son bond is the heart of Beginners, we also see the charming development of a relationship between Oliver and French actor Anna (Mélanie Laurent). It all comes together beautifully in a film that is bittersweet but ultimately satisfying. Beginners deserves praise not only for telling a story too often left untold, but for doing so with grace and a refreshing sense of whimsy. (1:44) Embarcadero, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*Bill Cunningham New York To say that Bill Cunningham, the 82-year old New York Times photographer, has made documenting how New Yorkers dress his life’s work would be an understatement. To be sure, Cunningham’s two decades-old Sunday Times columns — “On the Street,” which tracks street-fashion, and “Evening Hours,” which covers the charity gala circuit — are about the clothes. And, my, what clothes they are. But Cunningham is a sartorial anthropologist, and his pictures always tell the bigger story behind the changing hemlines, which socialite wore what designer, or the latest trend in footwear. Whether tracking the near-infinite variations of a particular hue, a sudden bumper-crop of cropped blazers, or the fanciful leaps of well-heeled pedestrians dodging February slush puddles, Cunningham’s talent lies in his ability to recognize fleeting moments of beauty, creativity, humor, and joy. That last quality courses through Bill Cunningham New York, Richard Press’ captivating and moving portrait of a man whose reticence and personal asceticism are proportional to his total devotion to documenting what Harold Koda, chief curator at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, describes in the film as “ordinary people going about their lives, dressed in fascinating ways.” (1:24) Opera Plaza. (Sussman)

Bride Flight Who doesn’t love a sweeping Dutch period piece? Ben Sombogaart’s Bride Flight is pure melodrama soup, enough to give even the most devout arthouse-goer the bloats. Emigrating from post-World War II Holland to New Zealand with two gal pals, the sweetly staid Ada (Karina Smulders) falls for smarm-ball Frank (Waldemar Torenstra, the Dutchman’s James Franco) and kind of joins the mile high club to the behest of her conscience. The women arrive with emotional baggage and carry-ons of the uterine kind. As the harem adjusts to the country mores of the Highlands, Frank tries a poke at all of them in a series of sex scenes more moldy than smoldery. This Flight, set to a plodding score and stuffy mise-en-scene, never quite leaves the runway. Not to mention the whole picture, pale as a corpse, resembles one of those old-timey photographs of your great grandma’s wedding. These kinds of pastoral romances ought to be put out to, well, pasture. (2:10) Opera Plaza. (Lattanzio)

*Bridesmaids For anyone burned out on bad romantic comedies, Bridesmaids can teach you how to love again. This film is an answer to those who have lamented the lack of strong female roles in comedy, of good vehicles for Saturday Night Live cast members, of an appropriate showcase for Melissa McCarthy. The hilarious but grounded Kristen Wiig stars as Annie, whose best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) is getting hitched. Financially and romantically unstable, Annie tries to throw herself into her maid of honor duties — all while competing with the far more refined Helen (Rose Byrne). Bridesmaids is one of the best comedies in recent memory, treating its relatable female characters with sympathy. It’s also damn funny from start to finish, which is more than can be said for most of the comedies Hollywood continues to churn out. Here’s your choice: let Bridesmaids work its charm on you, or never allow yourself to complain about an Adam Sandler flick again. (2:04) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

*Cave of Forgotten Dreams The latest documentary from Werner Herzog once again goes where no filmmaker — or many human beings, for that matter — has gone before: the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, a heavily-guarded cavern in Southern France containing the oldest prehistoric artwork on record. Access is highly restricted, but Herzog’s 3D study is surely the next best thing to an in-person visit. The eerie beauty of the works leads to a typically Herzog-ian quest to learn more about the primitive culture that produced the paintings; as usual, Herzog’s experts have their own quirks (like a circus performer-turned-scientist), and the director’s own wry narration is peppered with random pop culture references and existential ponderings. It’s all interwoven with footage of crude yet beautiful renderings of horses and rhinos, calcified cave-bear skulls, and other time-capsule peeks at life tens of thousands of years ago. The end result is awe-inspiring. (1:35) SF Center, Shattuck. (Eddy)

*The Double Hour Slovenian hotel maid Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport) and security guard Guido (Filippo Timi) are two lonely people in the Italian city of Turin. They find one another (via a speed-dating service) and things are seriously looking up for the fledgling couple when calamity strikes. This first feature by music video director Giuseppe Capotondi takes a spare, somber approach to a screenplay (by Alessandro Fabbri, Ludovica Rampoldi, and Stefano Sardo) that strikingly keeps raising, then resisting genre categorization. Suffice it to say their story goes from lonely-hearts romance to violent thriller, ghost story, criminal intrigue, and yet more. It doesn’t all work seamlessly, but such narrative unpredictability is so rare at the movies these days that The Double Hour is worth seeing simply for the satisfying feeling of never being sure where it’s headed. (1:35) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Green Lantern This latest DC Comics-to-film adaptation fails to recognize the line between awesome fantasy-action and cheeseball absurdity, often resembling the worst excesses of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies. A surprisingly palatable Ryan Reynolds stars as Hal Jordan, the cocky test pilot who is chosen to wield a power ring as a member of an intergalactic police force called the Green Lantern Corps. He must face down Parallax, an alien embodiment of fear, who appears here as a chuckle-inducing floating head surrounded by tentacles. Peter Sarsgaard is effectively nauseating as Hector Hammond, who becomes Parallax’s crony after he is transformed by a transfusion of fear energy. The acting is all over the map, with Blake Lively’s blank-faced love interest caricature as the weakest link, and the effects are hit-or-miss, but scenes featuring alien Green Lanterns should please fans, and you could probably do worse if you’re looking for an entertaining popcorn flick. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Stander)

The Hangover Part II What do you do with a problematic mess like Hangover Part II? I was a fan of The Hangover (2009), as well as director-cowriter Todd Phillips’ 1994 GG Allin doc, Hated, so I was rooting for II, this time set in the East’s Sin City of Bangkok, while simultaneously dreading the inevitable Asian/”ching-chang-chong” jokes. Would this would-be hit sequel be funnier if they packed in more of those? Doubtful. The problem is that most of II‘s so-called humor, Asian or no, falls completely flat — and any gross-out yuks regarding wicked, wicked Bangkok are fairly old hat at this point, long after Shocking Asia (1976) and innumerable episodes of No Reservations and other extreme travel offerings. This Hangover around, mild-ish dentist Stu (Ed Helms) is heading to the altar with Lauren (The Real World: San Diego‘s Jamie Chung), with buds Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Doug (Justin Bartha) in tow. Alan (Zach Galifianakis) has completely broken with reality — he’s the pity invite who somehow ropes in the gangster wild-card Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong). Blackouts, natch, and not-very-funny high jinks ensue, with Jeong, surprisingly, pulling small sections of II out of the crapper. Phillips obviously specializes in men-behaving-badly, but II‘s most recent character tweaks, turning Phil into an arrogant, delusional creep and Alan into an arrogant, delusional kook, seem beside the point. Because almost none of the jokes work, and that includes the tired jabs at tranny strippers because we all know how supposedly straight white guys get hella grossed out by brown chicks with dicks. Lame. (1:42) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer Try not trying so hard, Judy Moody. The tween paperback fave gets an OTT makeover for the cineplex, as director John Schultz and company throw as many bells, whistles, silly new slang, kooky gruesome colors, CGI twinkles, sing-along subtitles, and zany hijinks into the mix as possible, in vain hope of keeping kiddie eyeballs from drifting. Bright-eyed redhead Judy Moody (Jordana Beatty) — think Pippi Longstocking, only way more annoying — is stuck at home for the season, sans most of her pals and parentals, scuttling her plans for a Not Bummer Summer filled with weirdly competitive thrill points (her very own invention) and pointless faux adventures (ditto). Her cute, arty, wack-eee Aunt Opal (Heather Graham) offers some diverting solace, but the summer seems to find its groove only after Judy slimily co-opts younger bro Stink’s (Parris Mosteller) obsession with Bigfoot. Lovers of visceral kid stuff will appreciate Judy and mob’s affection for pee and puke references — too bad the entire enterprise just reeks of very bummer desperation. (1:31) 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Kung Fu Panda 2 The affable affirmations of 2008’s Kung Fu Panda take a back seat to relentlessly elaborate, gag-filled action sequences in this DreamWorks Animation sequel, which ought to satisfy kids but not entertain their parents as much as its predecessor. Po (voiced by Jack Black), the overeating panda and ordained Dragon Warrior of the title, joins forces with a cavalcade of other sparring wildlife to battle Lord Shen (Gary Oldman), a petulant peacock whose arsenal of cannons threatens to overwhelm kung fu. But Shen is also part of Po’s hazy past, so the panda’s quest to save China is also a quest for self-fulfillment and “inner peace.” There’s less character development in this installment, though the growing friendship between Po and the “hardcore” Tigress (Angelina Jolie) is occasionally touching. The 3-D visuals are rarely more than a gimmick, save for a series of eye-catching flashbacks in the style of cel-shaded animation. (1:30) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Stander)

*Making the Boys In 1968 The Boys in the Band revolutionized Broadway and opened a lot of minds by being a hit play (and film) about NYC homosexuals. Yet on the cusp of “Gay Liberation” and for many years thereafter, much of the actual gay community hugely objected to author Mart Crowley’s fictive portrait of its ‘mos as insular, shallow, classist, bitchy, and guilt-ridden. It was (as interviewee Edward Albee notes here) a picture ideally suited to straight Broadway audiences who lined up to see queers rendered pitiful if still identifiably human. Crayton Robey’s absorbing documentary chronicles the bumpy road of Boys and its creators — Crowley never had another hit, floundering until he moved into TV series scripting. The cast of the 1970 movie version, directed by William Friedkin (one year before The French Connection, followed by The Exorcist), saw their big break turn into a virtual industry blacklisting. Exceptions were unimpeachably heterosexual thespians Laurence Luckinbill and Cliff Gorman, who only “played” gay. This engrossing document recalls a work that trailblazed, was rejected as politically correct, then re embraced as an important touchstone in gay visibility and self-empowerment. (1:33) Roxie. (Harvey)

Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson plays Gil, a self-confessed “Hollywood hack” visiting the City of Light with his conservative future in-laws and crassly materialistic fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams). A romantic obviously at odds with their selfish pragmatism (somehow he hasn’t realized that yet), he’s in love with Paris and particularly its fabled artistic past. Walking back to his hotel alone one night, he’s beckoned into an antique vehicle and finds himself transported to the 1920s, at every turn meeting the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Dali (Adrien Brody), etc. He also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a woman alluring enough to be fought over by Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Picasso (Marcial di Fonzo Bo) — though she fancies aspiring literary novelist Gil. Woody Allen’s latest is a pleasant trifle, no more, no less. Its toying with a form of magical escapism from the dreary present recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), albeit without that film’s greater structural ingeniousness and considerable heart. None of the actors are at their best, though Cotillard is indeed beguiling and Wilson dithers charmingly as usual. Still — it’s pleasant. (1:34) Albany, Balboa, Embarcadero, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Mr. Popper’s Penguins (1:35) 1000 Van Ness.

*My Perestroika Robin Hessman’s very engaging documentary takes one very relatable look at how changes since glasnost have affected some average Russians. The subjects here are five thirtysomethings who, growing up in Moscow in the 70s and 80s, were the last generation to experience full-on Communist Party indoctrination. But just as they reached adulthood, the whole system dissolved, confusing long-held beliefs and variably impacting their futures. Andrei has ridden the capitalist choo-choo to considerable enrichment as the proprietor of luxury Western menswear shops. But single mother Olga, unlucky in love, just scrapes by, while married schoolteachers Lyuba and Boris are lucky to have inherited an apartment (cramped as it is) they could otherwise ill afford. Meanwhile Ruslan, once member of a famous punk band (which he abandoned on principal because it was getting “too commercial”), both disdains and resents the new order just as he did the old one. Home movies and old footage of pageantry celebrating Soviet socialist glory make a whole ‘nother era come to life in this intimate, unexpectedly charming portrait of its long-term aftermath. (1:27) Balboa. (Harvey)

Submarine (1:37) Opera Plaza, SF Center.

*Super 8 The latest from J.J. Abrams is very conspicuously produced by Steven Spielberg; it evokes 1982’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial as well as 1985’s The Goonies and 1982’s Poltergeist (so Spielbergian in nature you’d be forgiven for assuming he directed, rather than simply produced, the pair). But having Grandpa Stevie blessing your flick is surely a good thing, especially when you’re already as capable as Abrams. Super 8 is set in 1979, high time for its titular medium, used by a group of horror movie-loving kids to film their backyard zombie epic; later in the film, old-school celluloid reveals the mystery behind exactly what escaped following a spectacular train wreck on the edge of their small Ohio town. The PG-13 Super 8 aims to frighten, albeit gently; there’s a lot of nostalgia afoot, and things do veer into sappiness at the end (that, plus the band of kids at its center, evoke the trademarks of another Grandpa Stevie: Stephen King). But the kid actors (especially the much-vaunted Elle Fanning) are great, and there’s palpable imagination and atmosphere afoot, rare qualities in blockbusters today. Super 8 tries, and mostly succeeds, in progressing the fears and themes addressed by E.T. (divorce, loneliness, growing up) into century 21, making the unknowns darker and the consequences more dire. (1:52) California, Empire, 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*13 Assassins 13 Assassins is clearly destined to be prolific director Takashi Miike’s greatest success outside Japan yet. It’s another departure for the multi-genre-conquering Miike, doubtless one of the most conventional movies he’s made in theme and execution. That’s key to its appeal — rigorously traditional, taking its sweet time getting to samurai action that is pointedly not heightened by wire work or CGI, it arrives at the kind of slam-dunk prolonged battle climax that only a measured buildup can let you properly appreciate. In the 1840s, samurai are in decline but feudalism is still hale. It’s a time of peace, though not for the unfortunates who live under regional tyrant Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki), a li’l Nippon Caligula who taxes and oppresses his people to the point of starvation. Alas, the current Shogun is his sibling, and plans to make little bro his chief adviser — so a concerned Shogun official secretly hires veteran samurai Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho) to assassinate the Lord. Fully an hour is spent on our hero doing “assembling the team” stuff, recruiting other unemployed, retired, or wannabe samurai. When the protagonists finally commence their mission, their target is already aware he’s being pursued, and he’s surrounded by some 200 soldiers by the time Miike arrives at the film’s sustained, spectacular climax: a small village which Shinzaemon and co. have turned into a giant boobytrap so that 13 men can divide and destroy an ogre-guarding army. A major reason why mainstream Hollywood fantasy and straight action movies have gotten so depressingly interchangeable is that digital FX and stunt work can (and does) visualize any stupid idea — heroes who get thrown 200 feet into walls by monsters then getting up to fight some more, etc. 13 Assassins is thrilling because its action, while sporting against-the-odds ingeniousness and sheer luck by our heroes as in any trad genre film, is still vividly, bloodily, credibly physical. (2:06) Bridge, Shattuck. (Harvey)

The Tree of Life Mainstream American films are so rarely adventuresome that overreactive gratitude frequently greets those rare, self-conscious, usually Oscar-baiting stabs at profundity. Terrence Malick has made those gestures so sparingly over four decades that his scarcity is widely taken for genius. Now there’s The Tree of Life, at once astonishingly ambitious — insofar as general addressing the origin/meaning of life goes — and a small domestic narrative artificially inflated to a maximally pretentious pressure-point. The thesis here is a conflict between “nature” (the way of striving, dissatisfied, angry humanity) and “grace” (the way of love, femininity, and God). After a while Tree settles into a fairly conventional narrative groove, dissecting — albeit in meandering fashion — the travails of a middle-class Texas household whose patriarch (a solid Brad Pitt) is sternly demanding of his three young sons. As a modern-day survivor of that household, Malick’s career-reviving ally Sean Penn has little to do but look angst-ridden while wandering about various alien landscapes. Set in Waco but also shot in Rome, at Versailles, and in Saturn’s orbit (trust me), The Tree of Life is so astonishingly self-important while so undernourished on some basic levels that it would be easy to dismiss as lofty bullshit. Its Cannes premiere audience booed and cheered — both factions right, to an extent. (2:18) California, Embarcadero, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*The Trip Eclectic British director Michael Winterbottom rebounds from sexually humiliating Jessica Alba in last year’s flop The Killer Inside Me to humiliating Steve Coogan in all number of ways (this time to positive effect) in this largely improvised comic romp through England’s Lake District. Well, romp might be the wrong descriptive — dubbed a “foodie Sideways” but more plaintive and less formulaic than that sun-dappled California affair, this TV-to-film adaptation displays a characteristic English glumness to surprisingly keen emotional effect. Playing himself, Coogan displays all the carefree joie de vivre of a colonoscopy patient with hemorrhoids as he sloshes through the gray northern landscape trying to get cell reception when not dining on haute cuisine or being wracked with self-doubt over his stalled movie career and love life. Throw in a happily married, happy-go-lucky frenemy (comic actor Rob Brydon) and Coogan (TV’s I’m Alan Partridge), can’t help but seem like a pathetic middle-aged prick in a puffy coat. Somehow, though, his confused narcissism is a perverse panacea. Come for the dueling Michael Caine impressions and snot martinis, stay for the scallops and Brydon’s “small man in a box” routine. (1:52) Albany, Clay, Smith Rafael. (Devereaux)

*Trollhunter Yes, The Troll Hunter riffs off The Blair Witch Project (1999) with both whimsy and, um, rabidity. Yes, you may gawk at its humongoid, anatomically correct, three-headed trolls, never to be mistaken for grotesquely cute rubber dolls, Orcs, or garden gnomes again. Yes, you may not believe, but you will find this lampoon of reality TV-style journalism, and an affectionate jab at Norway’s favorite mythical creature, very entertaining. Told that a series of strange attacks could be chalked up to marauding bears, three college students (Glenn Erland Tosterud, Tomas Alf Larsen, and Johanna Morck) strap on their gumshoes and choose instead to pursue a mysterious poacher Hans (Otto Jespersen) who repeatedly rebuffs their interview attempts. Little did the young folk realize that their late-night excursions following the hunter into the woods would lead at least one of them to rue his or her christening day. Ornamenting his yarn with beauty shots of majestic mountains, fjords, and waterfalls, Norwegian director-writer André Ovredal takes the viewer beyond horror-fantasy — handheld camera at the ready — and into a semi-goofy wilderness of dark comedy, populated by rock-eating, fart-blowing trolls and overshadowed by a Scandinavian government cover-up sorta-worthy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009). (1:30) Lumiere. (Chun)

*X-Men: First Class Cynics might see this prequel as pandering to a more tweeny demographic, and certainly there are so many ways it could have gone terribly wrong, in an infantile, way-too-cute X-Babies kinda way. But despite some overly choppy edits that shortchange brief moments of narrative clarity, X-Men: First Class gets high marks for its fairly first-class, compelling acting — specifically from Michael Fassbender as the enraged, angst-ridden Magneto and James McAvoy as the idealistic, humanist Charles Xavier. Of course, the celebrated X-Men tale itself plays a major part: the origin story of Magneto, a.k.a. Erik Lehnsherr, a Holocaust survivor, is given added heft with a few tweaks: here, in an echo of Fassbender’s turn in Inglourious Basterds (2009), his master of metal draws on his bottomless rage to ruthlessly destroy the Nazis who used him as a lab rat in experiments to build a master race. The last on his list is the energy-wrangling Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), who’s set up a sweet Bond-like scenario, protected by super-serious bikini-vixen Emma Frost (January Jones). The complications are that Erik doesn’t ultimately differ from his Frankensteins — he pushes mutant power to the detriment of those puny, bigoted humans — and his unexpected collaborator and friend is Xavier, the privileged, highly psychic scion who hopes to broker an understanding between mutants and human and use mutant talent to peaceful ends. Together, they can move mountains—or at least satellite dishes and submarines. Jennifer Lawrence as Raven/Mystique and Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy/Beast fill out the cast, voicing those eternal X-Men dualities — preserving difference vs. conformity, intoxicating power vs. reasoned discipline. All core superhero concerns, as well as teen identity issues — given a fresh charge. (2:20) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

 

Psychic Dream Astrology: June 22-28

Maria Poblet
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Happy Homo Pride, San Francisco. May your gayest dreams come true!

ARIES

March 21-April 19

You have everything you need within you to make the right choices, Aries. Let go of attachments that unnecessarily limit you and keep your vision affixed on where you want to be in your relationships. Trust your gut.

TAURUS

April 20-May 20

Things may not be where you want them to be, sweet Bull, but that’s just the Universe’s way of getting you to change. Take motivation from what’s not working in your life to create much needed adjustments.

GEMINI

May 21-June 21

Don’t pile stuff on top of crap, Gemini. Release your gloomy feelings by taking care of your saddened heart before you start to try and create new securities. Mourn what’s lost before you move on to the next thing.

CANCER

June 22-July 22

As changes develop all around you, you need to stop horoscopin’ and get copin’! Predicting the future won’t absolve you of the work you need to do. Quit worrying and get constructive. The future will come; make it a good one.

LEO

July 23-Aug. 22

This week it’s high time you were decisive. Take responsibility for how you are behaving and make sure it lines up with what you actually want. Stop making excuses and start (wo)man-ing up, Leo.

VIRGO

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

If you gauge your success solely based on the approval of others, this is gonna be a hard week, Virgo. Figure out what you want and be brave enough to go for it — one step at a time.

LIBRA

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

Invest in the quality of your relationships this week, Libra. Mend the seams of your old connections and strengthen the foundations of your new ones. Your future self will super-appreciate it.

SCORPIO

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

Deal with your anxieties by focusing on all the things you’re grateful for, no matter how small or big they are. You are going in the right direction, so don’t let your worries trip you up. Redirect your attention to the good stuff.

SAGITTARIUS

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

It’s time that you deal with the foundations of your own welfare. It’s all about paying your bills on time, eating right, and returning your phone calls. Think about improving your quality of life from the ground up this week.

CAPRICORN

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

You are in a spiritual doorway, Capricorn, and you’re simultaneously leaving something behind and moving toward something new. For best results, be open to doing things differently from the way you’ve been doing them in them in the past.

AQUARIUS

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

You’re okay, but that doesn’t mean you don’t hurt. Take care of yourself by feeling your feelings this week, even if they suck. You are just about to move into a new phase; don’t bring your old heartaches with you.

PISCES

Feb. 19-March 20

Your circumstances are changing and it’s time to get ready for something new to enter into your life. Get a clear vision of what you want from your relationships so that when it comes, you’ll be certain to recognize it.

 

Jessica Lanyadoo has been a psychic dreamer for 16 years. Check out her website at www.lovelanyadoo.com or contact her for an astrology or intuitive reading at (415) 336-8354 or dreamyastrology@gmail.com.

Alerts

Maria Poblet
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ALERTS

 By Jackie Andrews

 

THURSDAY, JUNE 23


Radical Women meeting

Attend this round-up of radical women and LGBTQ organizers who work hard to improve their communities to fight against racism, sexism, homophobia, and labor exploitation. Tonight there will be a light summer supper followed by a discussion and brainstorming session inspired by the “It Gets Better” campaign — a national group that provides hope for queer youth around the country. Collaborate with like-minded people who want to make change happen at home and help hammer out a plan to translate the mission of the “It Gets Better” campaign to our local queer community’s needs.

6:15 p.m., $7.50

New Valencia Hall

625 Larkin, SF

(415) 864-1278

www.radicalwomen.org

 

Medicare for all

Many progressives around the country are less than enthusiastic with the current administration’s reform on health care, which they see as a sellout to corporate interests. The San Francisco chapter of the Progressive Democrats of America presents this public forum on the topic, where Don Bechler, a tireless organizer for single-payer healthcare since 1994, and clinical psychologist Stephen Berman will discuss just how close we are to having a truly universal healthcare.

7 p.m., free

Unitarian Universalist Center

Martin Luther King Room

1187 Franklin, SF

(415) 776-4580

www.pdaamerica.org

 

SATURDAY, JUNE 25


People’s Movement assembly

Attend this community forum and planning session for next year’s East Bay Social Forum — inspired by the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit last June where more than 20,000 diverse people came together to build strong progressive movements for housing, health, justice, education, immigration, ecology, and peace.

9:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m., free

Lutheran Church of the Cross

1744 University, Berk.

(510) 848-1424

www.eastbaysocialforum.org

 

TUESDAY, JUNE 28


Clean Air Act

Find out how the Clean Air Act, signed into law by President Nixon in 1970, is the U.S.’s most important and successful law for controlling air pollution and why it is our best hope in curbing climate change. If used effectively, it could significantly reduce greenhouse gases to a level deemed safe by climatologists. Learn how the Clean Air Act works, what kinds of threats it faces from Congress, and how it can be used to protect the planet and our future.

7–10 p.m., free

Unitarian Universalists’ Hall

1744 University, Berk.

(510) 841-4824

www.bfuu.org 

 

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 437-3658; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

Suhr sounds open to Portland-style FBI terrorism taskforce resolution

Mary Magee
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When the Guardian sat down with SFPD Chief Greg Suhr last week, it was shortly after the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved Julius Turman as the next Police Commissioner. Turman’s appointment means the Commission, which provides civilian oversight of SFPD’s policies and procedures, now has seven members, once again, and thus can get on with addressing important outstanding issues, including what to do about the FBI’s hitherto secret agreement around SFPD officers assigned to the FBI’s terrorism taskforce.


At issue is an agreement with the FBI that then SFPD Chief Heather Fong signed in March 2007, but the Police Commission never reviewed. Further complicating the issue is the fact that in December 2008, the FBI introduced looser surveillance guidelines that appear to clash head-on with SFPD’s tighter surveillance policies, which require reasonable suspicion before any spying can be approved.


During Suhr’s first few weeks as Chief, the Police Commission and the Human Rights Commission held a joint hearing on the FBI’s hitherto secret agreement with the SFPD. And during that meeting, Suhr introduced a new bureau order which clarified that, under Suhr’s command, SFPD surveillance policies trump the FBI guidelines.


But civil rights advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Asian Law Caucus, continued to raise concerns. And evidently Suhr has listened to them. During our interview, Suhr told me that he met with ACLU’s John Crew, and Crew explained that Suhr’s new bureau order is only a temporary solution.


“It’s only a remedy as long as I am Chief,” Suhr explained, noting that the ACLU wants to sit down and review the matter and see if there is a way to tighten any loopholes,


“And if we can’t reach accord with the FBI, then we’ll talk about how to move forward with a Portland-style resolution,” Suhr said, referring to a recent decision by the Portland city council in Oregon not to sign the FBI’s agreement, and instead draft its own resolution to better define the terms and conditions under which local officers can participate in the FBI-led joint terrorism taskforce.


Asked what he thought about the FBI’s decision not to send a representative to address community concerns at the joint hearing of the San Francisco Police Commission and Human Rights Commission, Suhr replied, “I don’t think they [the FBI] thought it would be productive,” adding that his talks with Stephanie Douglas, the FBI Special Agent in charge of the terrorism taskforce, have been very “productive” so far.
 


 

Keep San Francisco odd!

Zelda Bronstein
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Keep San Francisco odd!

The Redistricting Commission maps will be finalized in the next few weeks, and the big news for San Francisco is the loss of a state Senate seat. (That, and the fact that the Assembly and Senate may both become more centrist, thanks to the new lines and the top-two primary system.) You can check out the maps here.


There’s not a lot anyone can do about the loss of the Senate seat; the population growth in California is in the Central Valley and the Southland. But there’s another story that San Franciscans need to pay attention to, and it’s all about numbers. Odd and even numbers.


Here’s how it works:


San Francisco now has two senators, Leland Yee and Mark Leno. Leno represents the East side and Marin, Yee the West side and parts of San Mateo. Leno’s district is Number 3; Yee’s is Number 8.


Yee’s term runs until 2014, Leno’s until 2012.


The commission hasn’t put numbers on all the new districts yet. But the way the law works, if the new Senate district has an even number, then Yee stays in office — reopresenting his current district — until 2014 (unless he gets elected mayor), Leno’s gone in 2012 and can’t run for the new seat until 2014. Which means for two years, half of San Francisco has no representation in the state Senate.


On the other hand, if the district gets an odd number, Leno runs again in 2012 for what will be his seat, Yee either gets electred mayor this fall (in which case there’s a special election for his seat) or he stays in office until 2014 (when he would be termed out anyway) and for the next three years, San Francisco still has two senators.


Remember that among Leno’s East side constituents are a disproportionate number of people of color, low-income people and LGBT people. That simple decision — on a seat number — could cut them out of representation.


For the record: This isn’t about Leno vs. Yee. If we had to choose one of the two of them for our state Senator, I suspect I’d go with Leno — but that’s not going to happen. It’s Yee AND Leno or Yee alone.


And it’s not about saving Leno’s seat, either. If he gets the bad number, he’ll find something else to do — Gov. Brown needs help, Nancy Pelosi’s going to retire soon, the filing deadline for the mayor’s office isn’t until August … if you like Leno, he’ll still be around. If you don’t like him, he’ll still be around.


It’s a question of the better deal for the city, and an odd number is clearly the better deal. The commission is having a hearing at Fort Mason June 27, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., so it might be worth showing up and saying: Keep San Francisco odd!


 


So an even-number designation screws the poorer half of San Francisco — and an odd-number designation hurts nobody.

Tonight: Freedom of information panel on press passes

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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A few articles have been published over the past year or so about the availability of press passes in San Francisco, spurring a slew of questions: Who gets them? Why are they needed? What are the laws surrounding media access? And what are the rules governing the local process of issuing press badges, anyway?

To sort it out, the Freedom of Information Committee of the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists is organizing a panel discussion today, June 21, at the San Francisco Public Library. It’s not intended to be a debate, but an informational session for journalists and other interested parties to clear up some of the misconceptions surrounding press passes. Panelists will include Lt. Troy Dangerfield of the San Francisco Police Department’s Media Relations unit, Acting City Administrator Amy Brown, Attorney David Greene of the First Amendment Project, and Chris Roberts, a reporter who has covered controversy surrounding press passes before.

The panel will be held at 5:30 p.m. at the San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St., in the Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room, located on the Library’s lower level. (Enter at 30 Grove Street, proceed down stairs to the lower level.)

Pedaling out in front: Bike Music Festival 2011 shows us what it takes

Andrew Lam
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Pedaling out in front: Bike Music Festival 2011 shows us what it takes

Chilling in the middle of Saturday evening traffic in the Stanyan-Kezar intersection doesn’t seem like a situation engineered to produce warm fuzzy feelings. But the aggressive honk cloud of surely confused, possibly perturbed automobiles behind me mattered little – I was digging too much on the tandems, trailers, and trees rolling past me on two (and three, holler back trikes!) wheels. 

In a way, that was all part one of the Bicycle Music Festival organizers, Paul “Fossil Fool” Freedman’s plan. Freedman (who we profiled in our recent Bike To Work issue), co-founder Gabe Dominguez, the Rock the Bike crew, and a superhuman pack of volunteers, staged the fifth year of their outdoor festival on June 18. Once again, it was completely pedal-powered, from the stage to the smoothies.

The fest started out in Golden Gate Park, in a concave field near Stowe Lake. But it was no day in the park to implement, this plan. 

At the festival’s peak, 12 in-shape attendees, pumping away on bikes hooked up to electrical generators, were needed to keep the tunes going. A flashing LED stick and a multi-colored tube holding a floating soda can were used to monitor the voltage being produced. 

When I hopped aboard for my turn to pump up the jams, I was surprised to find that the levels being generated by the bikers weren’t always enough to keep the music moving. In fact, during the second-to-last set of the night (when temperatures were dropping rapidly and a tired crowd had begun to disperse), rapper Ashel Eldrige lost power momentarily.

Periodically, a core volunteer held up a handmade “PEDAL” sign. To, you know, make people pedal harder. 

This would cause a meltdown in many event organizers — but then, Freedman’s not your typical event organizer. “I think it’s cool that it works that way,” he said in a phone interview with the Guardian.

“We’re used to things being ‘on.’ I think it’s a cool message that if you don’t show up, we’re not going to be able to have our festival.”

For Freedman, the Bicycle Music Festival is more about the journey. In fact, it was his favorite part of Saturday. After an already full day featuring female Latin rock vocalists, pedal-churned ice cream, mass instances of square-dancing, and a solid chunk of klezmer, it was time to pack it all up and head to the next location – Showplace Triangle, an intersection in Potrero Hill that has been converted into a temporary community plaza by urban sustainability group Rebar. There, the second half of the lineup would commence, including tunes from the California Honeydrops and an aerial acrobatist who’d cavort from a hoop attached to Freedman’s infamous tree-on-a-bike, El Arbol.

Around six p.m., volunteers had racked up all stage equipment (including the Ginger Ninjas, a three piece band who re-stationed itself on the stage after it had been securely affixed to the back of a three wheeled trike), all the bike-powered smoothie machines, and lineup posters. The hundreds of biking music lovers at the fest had also boarded their bikes, and we all looked on in awe at the bike mechanic flaunting of the laws of physics that was being performed. 

I had volunteered to help out as a “turn marshall” on the ride so that my fellow partiers could cruise without fear of being crushed by an impatient commuter, so I was up at the front of the pack near the more complicated endeavors. 

“This isn’t the first time that you’re… doing this, right?” I asked Mark Sullivan, the brave soul who had been selected (while he was out of the room, he told me) to tote the live music across town. “Well, we’ve done it. Maybe not with all the equipment, but yeah…” I made a mental note not to ride in front of the band bike going down a hill. 

Off we went, the music playing, and random spurts of cheering erupting as they are wont to do in such mass bike rides. I detached on Stanyan street to cork traffic and watch the parade of bikes and music and festival. It was a welcome break in my day – and gave me those aforementioned warm fuzzies to be doing something for the fun. But for reports on the rest of the ride we’ll have to turn to Freedman: 

“I was really praying for Mark when he was climbing the hill in East Mission. If he had stopped, the trailer would have fallen over. I had an amazing view because I was up high on the tree, but I couldn’t help, so I was just watching him. Then I was praying the brakes would be sound going down the hill.”

Halfway through the ride, at Duboce Park, the second act took the stage: opera singers from the San Francisco Conservatory. 

“People were leaning out of windows, it was real street theater,” says Freedman. “Opera doesn’t have a strong beat, but the audio was excellent, and the way [the sound] was echoing off of buildings – it didn’t hurt the song. One singer would give the rock sign after each track ended and everyone would cheer.”

Looking back on the day, its organizer is proud, but convinced that it’s just the beginning. “I don’t think we nailed it like we could have. I’m very grateful for where we are right now, but it can only get better.”

Even more important that the audio quality, Freedman looks forward to growing the people portion of the Bike Music Festival – partially for selfish reasons (he’d like to be able to dance more next year). 

Christopher Drellow is Freedman’s neighbor. Saturday was his first major role in one of the bike music productions – he rode a heavily loaded bike and trailer from his home in the Mission to both concert locations, and then home at the end of the day. He started out concerned about the heavy load he was toting, but as the day progressed, got sucked into the endless possibilities of bike cargo. 

“Because at that point it seemed clear that, well fuck it, it can clearly be done. I even invited passengers onto the load because suddenly [I] became interested in what can’t be done on these things — like, at what point will this fail? Or call it my hubris, that’s fine too.”  

All told, he was bike-musicking from nine a.m. to three in the morning, which gave him ample time to reflect on what it meant to power over 15 musical acts for a daylong party.

“I guess primarily what I’ve been thinking about has been BMF indicating a kind of proof that transitioning off fossil fuel driven machines will not be easy. And that it will be totally doable.”

All the hustling, all the saddle sores – these are the real cost of powering a festival. Somewhat akin to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent, much ballyhooed decision to eat only the animals that he killed personally, one has to wonder if people would party the same way if they knew what it cost in fossil fuel to bring the beat back (and back, and back).

Or maybe low-emission festivity would just mean a shift in what we think of as a celebration. “ People pitch in their different skills and talents and energy and love,” says Freedman. “We need positive examples of that to reaffirm our faith in living together in a city. There are advantages to living in a tight space, you can pull things off that you can’t do in car culture suburbia.”

Says Drellow: “It’s something of a time-honored tradition for people to cling to the assumption that something is impossible until someone else goes out and does it. Seeing the work done is something people kind of need. And okay, perhaps there are circumstances where bicycles are not the solution. But they seem to work pretty damn well beyond our common understanding of them. So I guess that’s what Paul Freedman is doing.”

 

Rock the Bike is working on the first NYC bike-powered music festival this weekend. (Freedman told us it’ll have the “most amazing” pedal-powered sound yet.) If you’re East Coastin’, check it out. The crew will be back in SF to perform at the July 10 Great Highway Sunday Streets and the July 31 SF Marathon.

 

Feinstein gets box of toy soldiers, as Obama prepares to announce troop draw down

Mary Magee
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As Obama prepares to announce a troop drawdown this week, Peace Action West’s political director Rebecca Griffin delivered a box of thousands of toy soldiers, each attached to a petition for a swift withdrawal of U.S troops from Afghanistan, to Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s San Francisco office on Monday afternoon. Unlike many Democratic senators, Feinstein has not publicly demanded a rapid drawdown.

Griffin said the goal of collecting the messages, attaching them to toy soldiers and delivering them to Feinstein was to draw attention to the organizing that is happening to end the war, which reportedly is costing $2 billion a week. Many of the messages attached to the soldiers came from folks with family in the military.

A representative from Feinstein’s office accepted the delivery in the foyer of the Post Street building where Feinstein’s office is located. But Feinstein continues to support deferring draw down timetables to Gen. David Petraeus, based on comments she made on MSNBC that her press secretary Tom Mentzer referred the Guardian to on Monday, when we asked if Feinstein supports a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Asked by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, what Obama should do, perhaps this week, when he makes a decision as to how quickly to draw down, Feinstein said Monday that she had had a brief discussion with Petraeus. [Obama nominated Petraeus last June to succeed General Stanley McChrystal, after McChrystal was fired for comments he made to Rolling Stone magazine, which included dismissing the counter terrorism strategy that Vice President Joe Biden was advocating as “shortsighted,” saying it would lead to a state of “Chaos-istan” and showing a lack of respect for civilian leadership. Petraeus intends to retire in September, and Obama plans to nominate him as the next CIA director.]

“What General Petraeus said is, ‘Look, I will give him several options. I may make a recommendation. And then the President will decide,’” Feinstein told MSNBC. “My own view is that this right now is a primarily—should be a military decision.”

Feinstein noted that she is bothered by Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s reaction. [Presumably, Feinstein was referring to comments Karzai made on the weekend, when he stated that the Nato-led coalition forces are “here for their own purposes, for their own goals, and they’re using our soil for that.” Last month, Karzai threatened to denounce the coalition as occupiers if they did not stop attacks on Afghan homes, after an airstrike killed civilians, many of them children.]

“I’m really very bothered by President Karzai’s reaction to it,” Feinstein told MSNBC. “That is negative to our troops over there. You know, our people have died essentially so that his country might be secure. I think this is a real problem: to have a President of a country that you are trying to help to stabilize, to get rid of al Qaeda, to see the Taliban doesn’t take over the country, and to receive a comment like that from the President of the country. But I think the President will make a decision—we can all guess, but none of us really know—to begin removing the troops. How big, I can’t say.”

Feinstein’s comments came shortly after Obama’s Sec of Defense Robert Gates acknowledged that the U.S is negotiating with the Taliban—an acknowledgement that only came after President Karzai publicly said that the US is in talks with the Taliban.

Asked if she’d like to see a more rapid withdrawal than the 5,000 troops originally suggested, and if she thought with Osama bin Laden’s recent death, and with al Qaeda diminished in Afghanistan, there’s a justification to begin drawing down more rapidly, Feinstein said, “There is a justification,” but she left viewers with a question.

“I don’t want to see what has been a turnaround, in the words of Petraeus, ‘still fragile’ destroyed,” Feinstein said. “I think there have been major inroads made in Afghanistan. Particularly in the south and now the plan is to go east. So that to me is the crux of the decision. How do you begin a significant rollback of troops without destroying the forward momentum that has been made by the surge?”

It’s been 18 months since Obama first ordered a surge of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan. And even if he withdraws the surge, there would still be about 70,000 American troops on the ground. And according to the Department of Defense’s website, there are currently 1.425 million active service members in the U.S. military.

Those statistics brings us back to Peace Action West’s Rebecca Grifffin, who noted during Monday’s action that because there is no draft, there is more of a disconnect from and less of an outcry about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then there was about Vietnam. “Because there is no longer a draft, the public is not as touched, as they were by Vietnam,” she said.

As of Dec. 2010, there were 103,700 coalition soldiers in Afghanistan, according to DoD numbers. This means Obama has sent an additional 72,300 soldiers to Afghanistan since Dec. 2008, when Bush left office. Obama has significantly reduced troop levels in Iraq—drawing down their numbers from 178,300 in Dec. 2008 to 85,600 in Dec. 2010—but though there is a large military presence still in place, folks are fretting about the safety of those remaining troops as they try to pack up and leave Iraq in the coming years.

So far, there have been 4,408 military deaths in Operation Iraqi Freedom, which began March 19, 2003, 36 military deaths in Iraq’s Operation New Dawn, which began Sept. 1, 2010, and 1,590 deaths in Afghanistan’s Operation Enduring Freedom, which began Oct. 7, 2001.

That’s 6.034 deaths in total–a huge loss in terms of the families and communities that have been impacted by these soldiers’ deaths.

And then there are the 11,722 soldiers who were wounded in Afghanistan, the 31, 928, wounded in Operation Iraqi Freedom and the 172 wounded in Iraq’s Operation New Dawn, And that’s not factoring in the impact and cost of dealing—and not dealing–with post-traumatic stress disorder. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, 50,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars received a new PTSD diagnosis between 2002 and 2008, but fewer than 10-30 percent, particularly under 25-year-old males, completed a course of treatment sessions.

So, members of Congress are increasingly hearing from their constituents about the impacts of soldiers who were killed, maimed and/or are suffering from PTSD, especially as the recession threatens to translates into cuts to benefits and programs for veterans. And following the May 1 U.S. raid that led to Osama bin Laden being killed in Pakistan, there has been a big uptick in congressional support for a withdrawal, according to Griffin who spends a fair amount of time in Washington, D.C.

“A lot of people are using the raid as their starting point,’ Griffin said, pointing to the House of Representatives May 26 vote, where a measure which would have required Obama to develop an exit strategy for the war in Afghanistan with a clear end date and report back to Congress, only narrowly failed, winning 42 more votes than a similar amendment last year, and with a score of Republicans siding with the Democrats.

And in mid- June 16, a bipartisan group of senators wrote Obama, urging him to use his self-imposed July troop draw down deadline as an opportunity to begin a “sizable and sustained” draw down of troops that puts the U.S. on a path toward removing all regular combat troops from the country. But while a third of the Senate spoke out in that letter, and its signatories included Dem leaders Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, and Barbara Boxer, and a host of moderate Democrats and Republicans, it did not include Feinstein.

U.S. military officials have voiced concern that a rapid withdrawal of troops could undercut gains in southern Afghanistan, a traditional Taliban stronghold. And Feinstein certainly seems to share those worries. “It took 10 years and for the first time we now have a turnaround,” Feinstein, who is the Chair of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, told reporters earlier this month. “I would like to not telescope what we are going to do; wait and see a little bit more about what happens. I think it’s important candidly to keep all our options open.”

In face of comments like this, Griffin and Peace Action West’s field organizers have spent the last two months collecting toy soldiers and messages to attach to them, with the help of an online outreach effort that they launched in May.“Part of it is to create a physical reminder of the public’s opposition to war. People talk about wanting their family members to come home, Griffin said, pointing to the handwritten messages that are attached to each toy soldiers. “Some politicians are saying, ‘Give them a little more time.’ But the casualties are going up each month, and last month was the deadliest for Afghan civilians on record. So, while Defense Secretary Gates, who is very invested in his counter insurgent strategy, is doing his farewell tour, the troops are asking, do we get to come home sooner because Osama bin Laden is dead?”

Griffin observed that DoD statistics show that double and triple amputations due to IEDs (improvised explosive devices) have increased, and that PTSD levels continue to rise as veterans return, yet it’s not clear that at-risk veterans are getting the help they need.

“There’s been a perception shift about Afghanistan,” Griffin continued, noting that it’s been going on for almost a decade, and that pressure from the public and Congress will make it more difficult for Obama to not follow suit.

But while Griffin is clearly against the war in Afghanistan, she believes there are alternative ways for the U.S. to be productively engaged. These include playing a role in regional diplomacy with Iran, Russia and Iraq, helping facilitate political negotiations with Afghan, and partnering with the Afghan people on development projects that help.

“But that does not include giving money to the military to build stuff because then it becomes a Taliban target,” Griffin explained.

Noting that Sen. Boxer has suggested drawing down the troops by 30,000 and Congressmember Barbara Lee has advocated reducing the troops by 50,000, Griffin believes that Obama’s July decision is very important in terms of setting the debate about when we are going to get out of Afghanistan entirely.

‘Will it be 2014, or much longer?” Griffin asked.

She believes the coming election season will help tip the balance, especially since recent polls show the American public supports a troop withdrawal, especially in the wake of the Osama raid. “But if there aren’t strong actions, it will fester and will risk getting bogged down,” she said, warning folks that they also focus on making sure that reduced military budgets don’t translate into cuts to veterans benefits and pay. “

A lot of people who are uncomfortable with what’s going on, don’t know what to do,” Griffin said, explaining that she is looking for people who want to end the war, and is urging them to visit Peace Action West’s website to learn about things that they can do,that they feel comfortable with. “We want people to know that even though it might seem hopeless, there’s a lot they can do.”

And with that Griffin shared with me a list of some of the reasons Californians gave when asked why they want to end the war:

“My nephew wants to come home.”

“I want my friend to be able to raise his son.”

“My ex-boyfriend never came back alive from Iraq. He was even against the war. And America is generally unhappy (to be mild) about our ‘fight’ still going on.”

“I want my legs back.”

“I have a good friend who is just back from Afghanistan and is suffering from PTSD. He is 22 years old. Stop doing this to young people.”

“If we can’t afford Medicare, then we can’t afford bombs.”

“Because my brother has been deployed several times and he has a family at home.”

“Stop because my son is in there for six years.”

“My brother has been to Iraq three times. The first time he was in the army for six months. We train football players longer than that.”

“My 21-year-old grandson was just sent with his army unit to the front lines in Afghanistan. Every day we wonder if he will come home alive and uninjured. And for what? Why does the U.S. have to police the entire world?”

All good questions and reasons as Obama prepares to tell the nation how many soldiers he plans to withdraw in July–and when the rest of them and their families can expect to see them come home….

Suhr: SFPD Tasers not a priority

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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0
Suhr: SFPD Tasers not a priority

Asked on June 17 for an update on a San Francisco Police Department bid to research and implement the use of Tasers, Police Chief Greg Suhr indicated that it was on the back burner for now.

“I know that the Tasers and all were a huge discussion in prior administrations,” Suhr said. “I think right now with everything else that we have going, and especially with budgetary constraints right now, that in all honesty we really haven’t gotten to that yet.”

Among community concerns surrounding Tasers earlier this year were fears that adopting the so-called nonlethal weapons would overshadow a parallel effort to improve police responses to calls involving the mentally ill.

Asked about progress on the implementation of Crisis Intervention Training (CIT), a program advocated by Police Commissioner Angela Chan to train officers to better respond to calls involving the mentally ill, Suhr noted that he backed CIT and had taken preliminary steps to improve the department’s response in those situations.

“Within the first week that I was here, we put in a new policy and a procedure where every single mentally ill call is to be treated as a mini-critical incident, so a sergeant responds, takes charge of the scene, a little perimeter is set up, and unless that person is a danger to someone other than themselves, we wait. It’s basically a slowdown,” Suhr explained.

Community advocates championed CIT as an important step forward in the wake of the Jan. 4 shooting of Randal Dunklin, a wheelchair-bound, mentally ill man who was brandishing a knife outside the city’s Department of Public Health building. Dunklin allegedly stabbed an officer and suffered a nonfatal gunshot wound to the groin after he had tossed the knife.

Does Newsom lose his seat on the DCCC?

Zelda Bronstein
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41
Does Newsom lose his seat on the DCCC?

Does Gavin Newsom live in San Francisco anymore? No, according to the Chron — and if that’s true, than he’s no longer a member of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee. Any constitutional officer who is a member of the Democratic Party is automatically a member of the county commitee in the county where he or she resides; Newsom, of course, never shows up for the meetings, but he gets to send a proxy. (He has two alternatives, John Shanley and Warren Hinckle.) In a letter to Newsom dated June 16, DCCC Chair Aaron Peskin asks Newsom to clarify his residence: “if you are in fact a Marin County resident, you would no longer be a member of the SFDCC and would instead be a member of the Marin Democratic County Central Committee.”

Peskin told me he hasn’t heard back from the Lt. Guv. I haven’t heard back from him or his standard press flak, Peter Ragone, either.

Civil rights advocates say S-Comm reforms are spin, part of bigger FBI biometric tracking plan

Mary Magee
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23
Civil rights advocates say S-Comm reforms are spin, part of bigger FBI biometric tracking plan

In face of mounting criticism nationwide, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced today changes to its Secure Communities (S-Comm) deportation program. These changes include protections for domestic violence victims, and immigrants who are pursuing legitimate civil liberties protections. They give more discretion to ICE prosecutors, create a new detainer form that stipulates in multiple languages that arrestees cannot be detained under an ICE hold for more than 48 hours, except on holiday weekends. The form also requires local law enforcement to provide arrestees with a copy, which has a number to call if they believe their civil rights have been violated. The agency also said it will provide civil rights training related to its S-Comm program at the state and local level.

Immigrant and civil rights advocates said the announcement shows that the administration acknowledges that there are serious problems with S-Comm’s design and implementation. But they charged that the announced reforms fall far short of the S-Comm moratorium that an increasing number of advocates and lawmakers, including California Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, have demanded.

And some advocates expressed concern that the feds’ insistence on expanding S-Comm, in which fingerprints taken by local law enforcement agencies are automatically shared with federal and international databases, is proof that the program is the first step towards rolling out a much larger program called the Next Generation Identification (NGI) initiative.

Under the NGI, the FBI plans to phase-in the deployment of a host of new biometric interoperability capabilities to state and local law enforcement agencies within the next five years. And NGI likely won’t be limited to non-citizens and undocumented immigrants, suggesting that US citizens charged with a crime will also find that once their fingerprints are taken, law enforcement agencies will immediately compile a huge and internationally interconnected dossier on them, regardless of whether they are innocent of the charges.

Civil rights advocates also worry that local enforcement agencies’ participation in S-Comm will become inevitable because S-Comm is simply the first of a number of biometric interoperability systems being brought online by the NGI.
In other words, S-Comm is just the first of many additional information systems that are being made available to local law enforcement agencies to fully and accurately identify suspects in their custody.

And, according to the FBI/CJIS’s own documents, the feds have adopted a three-part strategy to deal with jurisdictions that do not wish to participate:
1.    Deploy S-Comm to as many places as possible in the surrounding locale, creating a “ring of interoperability” around the resistant site.
2.    Deploy S-Comm selectively to state correctional system facilities, permitting identification of Level 1 offenders who may have been arrested and sentenced in the non-participating jurisdiction,
3.    Ensure that the jurisdiction understands that non-participation does not equate to non-deployment.
In other words, though a local law enforcement agency is technically free to shut off, or ignore, the receipt of records related to the fed’s fingerprint-matching capabilities, the feds are already warning local law enforcement agencies that local officers may find themselves “deprived of substantive information relating to an arrested subject’s true identity, place of origin, and other pertinent data of significant law enforcement value.”

Ammiano, who is the author of California’s TRUST Act, which would allow local governments to opt out of S-Comm, said: “Today’s announcement by ICE is simply window dressing. How many more innocent people have to be swept up by the ironically named Secure Communities program before the Obama administration will change course? Talking about the need for comprehensive immigration reform is not an excuse for continuing with a flawed, unjust program that is having tragic consequences for communities across the country. It is time for a moratorium on S-Comm pending a real review of the program not just PR spin from ICE.”

Professor Bill Ong Hing, immigration law expert at the University of San Francisco, stated, “The fact is, under our Constitution, immigration is a federal responsibility. Neither a state like Arizona, nor the federal government itself, can force local governments to act as immigration agents. Such measures compound the injustices of our deeply broken immigration system – and public safety and local resources are among the first casualties.”

And the Asian Law Caucus, the ACLU of California, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, the California Immigrant Policy Center, and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network released the following joint statement:  “We are deeply disappointed by the inadequacy of the Administration’s response to the mounting body of evidence that the ‘Secure’ Communities program is damaging public safety and ensnaring community members. The painful stories of domestic violence victims and other innocent community members facing deportation thanks to S-Comm underscore that the program has simply gone off the rails. While today’s announcement acknowledges that problems exist with the program, the measures outlined by the Administration are a far cry from workable solutions these problems. To announce “reform” before review is an exercise in politics, not policy. The administration should suspend the program and wait for the Inspector General report in order to develop fair and transparent policies.” 

“Before vital relationships between local law enforcement and immigrant communities are furthered damaged, before more domestic violence victims, street vendors, family members, and workers who are merely striving for the American dream are swept up for deportation, S-Comm must be reigned in,” the coalition continued. “For the sake of public safety and transparency, we need real solutions. We strongly support California’s TRUST Act, which sets safeguards the federal government has failed to implement and allows local governments out of S-Comm, and we continue to call for a national moratorium on this fundamentally flawed program.”

In recent weeks, Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts, have either pulled out or refused participation in the program while numerous local governments have sought a way out of a deportation dragnet that harms public safety and has operated with no transparency or local oversight. And Ammiano’s TRUST Act, which also sets basic standards for those jurisdictions that do want to participate in S-Comm passed the state Assembly in May and the Senate Public Safety Committee this week.

During today’s press conference, ICE Director John Morton told reporters that “it makes sense to prioritize resources. We don’t have enough resources to remove everyone who is here unlawfully.”

But when the Guardian asked if the reforms address the community criticisms that S-Comm was rolled out as a way to catch serious criminals, but has been largely used to deport non-felons, Morton maintained the S-Comm has always focused on serious criminal offenders, but was never limited to that.
“We remove felony offenders at a higher rate than are convicted in the general population,” he stated. ‘But federal law does not provide that you can come here unlawfully and then commit crimes other than violent crimes.”

True, but local law enforcement agencies have repeatedly observed that you break vital trust with immigrant communities if they believe that contact with police, including  being arrested for crimes they did not actually commit, or arrests for very low-level misdemeanors, will lead to deportation.

“This feels like a non-announcement, and it’s far from reform,” said B, Loewe of the National Day Laborers Organizing Network. “You don’t put a collar around a snake and call it a pet.”

And SF Police Commissioner Angela Chan, a staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, said the reason ICE and the FBI, “are so crazy for S-Comm is because it’s the first step in a much bigger loop that will include citizens and non-citizens alike.”

NDLON and the Asian Law Caucus are part of the coalition that is calling on the Obama administration to publicly oppose and terminate all programs that create partnerships between state and local law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security; halt the development of the vast data gathering infrastructure that houses S-Comm, and inform the public of the current scope and purpose of its data collection and dissemination activities; and allow state and local jurisdictions to opt-out of S-Comm.

After today’s press conference, ICE issued a press release stating that through April 30, 2011, more than 77,000 immigrants convicted of crimes, including more than 28,000 convicted of aggravated felony (Level 1) offenses like murder, rape and the sexual abuse of children were removed from the U.S. after identification through S-Comm.

“These removals significantly contributed to a 71 percent increase in the overall percentage of convicted criminals removed by ICE, with 81,000 more criminal removals in FY 2010 than in FY 2008,” ICE stated. “As a result of the increased focus on criminals, this period also included a 23% reduction or 57,000 fewer non-criminal removals.

ICE also observed that the agency currently receives an annual congressional appropriation that is only sufficient to remove a limited number of the more than 10 million individuals estimated to be in the U.S. unlawfully. “As S-Comm is continuing to grow each year, and is currently on track to be implemented nationwide by 2013, refining the program will enable ICE to focus its limited resources on the most serious criminals across the country,” ICE stated.

ICE further noted that it is creating a new advisory committee that will advise ICE on ways to improve S-Comm, including recommending on how to best focus on individuals who pose a true public safety or national security threat.  This panel will be composed of chiefs of police, sheriffs, state and local prosecutors, court officials, ICE agents from the field and community and immigration advocates.  The first report of this advisory committee will be delivered to the Director of ICE within 45 days.

ICE Director Morton also issued a new memo that directs the exercise of prosecutorial discretion to ensure that victims of and witnesses to crimes are properly protected. The memo clarifies that the exercise of discretion is inappropriate in cases involving threats to public safety, national security and other agency priorities.

And ICE and the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) have created an ongoing quarterly statistical review of the program to examine data for each jurisdiction where S-Comm is activated to identify effectiveness and any indications of potentially improper use of the program. “Statistical outliers in local jurisdictions will be subject to an in-depth analysis and DHS and ICE will take appropriate steps to resolve any issues,” ICE stated.
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BYO Flair: A guide to this weekend’s festival explosion

Andrew Lam
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BYO Flair: A guide to this weekend’s festival explosion

If there is one thing I know about festivals it is this: the gear you pack can leave you hydrated, hip and happy — or break you down to a sunburned, schlubby hunk of bad vibes. (It’s true – shoddy preparation for Reggae on the River 2006 left me stranded in the psych tent with disoriented girlfriend during the Ziggy and Damian Marley concert. Clearly, a hipper fedora would have solved everything.) 

This weekend plays host to a freakishly large share of summer festivals, so consider this your guide to happy cavorting in the sun. Cups, caps, frocks, and foods: here, friends, are our picks for best festie flair.  

Sierra Nevada World Music Festival

The perfect weekend campout for those that can’t handle the crushing crowds of the more commercial festivals this summer. Even the little things (children) will appreciate the open-minded approach to beautiful noise here.

Bring: Consider SNWMF a three-day immersion program in getting loose. Translation: you need costumes. If you’re heading up from San Francisco, we’ve got the perfect sartorial layover for you. Sebastopol’s Funk & Flash vintage store is far enough removed from the big city that its stock hasn’t been picked to all hell by the club kid set, so festie-bound you can benefit from its racks of flowery skirts, and tons of sparkle. Go, do you! 

Fri/17-Sun/19, $60-150

Boonville Fairgrounds

CA-128, Boonville

www.snwmf.com

 

Juneteenth Festival and Parade

The website proclaims this celebration of African American heritage to be the largest gathering of blacks in Northern California, but it remains to be seen whether you’ll fixate on the cultural signifcance while attending the event itself: with an impressive classic car show and three-on-three basketball tournament, all the historical reflection might have to wait until after the festival. 

Bring: No brainer accessory: a hat from Hats of the Fillmore, an independent business that’s been holding it down on Fillmore’s main drag for years. High quality at surprisingly low prices, you can don one of these lids to fit in perfectly with the jazzy milieu of SF’s traditionally black neighborhood. 

Sat/18 11 a.m.-7 p.m., free

Fillmore and Geary, SF

www.sfjuneteenth.org

 

Alameda Sailing Festival

Hey Muffy, take a break from hating on the impending America’s Cup to catch a day of boating buoyancy. The Encinal Sailing Foundation will be providing turns on the high seas for a “nominal” fee, and there will be seminars on “pilates for sailors,” boating to Mexico, and how to get your captain’s license. Afterwards, we know some great places to get drunk in Alameda!

Bring: This really goes for every fest on the list, but possibly the most important piece of flair is a fun, functional backpack to hold your water (flask), sunscreen, cell phone, and snacks. We love the Brooklyn Circus’ BKc satchels – but for the moment you’ve gotta special order them from New York. That’s fine, this ain’t the last weekend of the summer! The store’s preppy style (without the snooty WASP-y supply chain behind it) would be divine if you’re looking to drop some dough on a nice sailing fest outfit. 

Sat/18 10 a.m.-8 p.m., free

Encinal Yacht Club

1251 Pacific Marina, Alameda

www.summersailstice.com


Bicycle Music Festival

You read our profile on Fossil Fool, so you know all about the current trend towards bike-fueled culture fun. According to all the volunteers that have been standing near Mona Caron’s bike mural behind the Church Street Safeway for the past few days, this fest will be the perfect spot to enjoy the zeitgeist. Saddle up for awesome tunes, and community-building bike rides between concert sites. 

Bring: Hedgehog mug from Gravel and Gold so you can (chicly, adorably) reap the benefits of the fest’s pedal-powered smoothie maker. It also comes in rabbit, fyi. The calories you consume in said smoothies work doubletime — once you’re done drinking, take your turn powering the generator for the drinks or one of the music stages yourself.

Sat/18 noon-11:25 p.m., free

Various locations, SF

www.bicyclemusicfestival.com


Berry Festival

You know this sun isn’t going to last past 4th of July, so now is the perfect time to up your antioxidant intake and arm the old immune system against “summer” colds. CUESA and the Ferry Building farmers market is holding this day of loving for berry season – sample the treats available in the market stalls and let chef Daniel Clayton of Nibblers Eatery and Wine Bar show you how to whip up some healthy, hearty grub with the juicy little devils. 

Bring: a nice navy sweatshirt from Mollusk for the Bay breezes and inevitable tayberry stains. 

Sat/18 11 a.m.-1 p.m., free

Ferry Building, SF

www.cuesa.org


California Big Time Indian Gathering

The Ohlones are hosting their first gathering of Native peoples in their ancestral lands in two centuries. Come to learn more about real SF locals through dance, rituals, and craft exhibitions.

Bring: Mocs that slip off easy – you’re not gonna want a layer of separations between the well-manicured lawns of Yerba Buena and your soles. 

Sat/18 noon-11 p.m., free

Yerba Buena Gardens

Howard between Second and Third St., SF

www.worldartswest.org


North Beach Festival

Sure, the neighborhood street fests all start to look the same after awhile. But there are good parts of that same: family-friendly musical acts, artery-busting festie food, and an excuse to run amok in the streets. The North Beach incarnation has been going for 56 years, and manages to sneak a couple unique facets into the standard cruise-shop-eat formula SF has perfected. 

Bring: your kitty cat companion for the yearly St. Francis of Assisi animal blessings. Also, a flirty, locally made frock from NooWorks is totally Maria from West Side Story – perfectly for the neo-Catholic-in-the-summertime vibe you’ll be channeling. 

Sat/18-Sun/19 10 a.m.-6 p.m., free

Washington Square Park

Union and Columbus, SF

www.northbeachchamber.com

 

Northern California Pirate Festival

Never underestimate the amount of people willing to drop serious time and dime on dressing up in period costumes. You’ve seen the Renaissance fairs and the Dickens Christmas Fair – now it’s time to peep the pirates. Two very full days of pirate entertainers and replica boats (not to mention squadrons of pirate clothing vendor booths) await you if you be brave enough to cross the seas to Vallejo. 

Bring: Your 826 Valencia designer spyglass, for scurvy-watching of course. 

Sat/18-Sun/19 10 a.m.-6 p.m., free

Vallejo Waterfront

Mare Island Way (near the ferry terminal), Vallejo

www.norcalpiratefestival.com

 

Picklewater Free Circus Festival

As we mentioned in last year’s profile of our favorite free circus troupe, Circus Bella, nothing quite highlights the magic (and eccentricity) of this city quite like catching a high-flying aerial act smack dab in the heart of downtown. Picklewater is taking over Union Square for the third year in a row this weekend, and we suggest you head down — if only to catch the amazed gaze of the throngs of tourists that’ll be on hand to remind you that yes, your city is freakin’ amazing. 

Bring: Your medical marijuana card, and attending accoutrements. 

Sun/19 2-4 p.m., free

Union Square

Post and Powell, SF

www.jewelssf.org

 

Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings at the Stern Grove Festival

The 74th season of this green glade’s free concert series kicks off with a killer show from the queen of throwback soul. 

Bring: The Stern Grove scene struts more with its picnic spread than by any accessory or fly outfit. A retro basket (check Goodwill, people are always ditching picnic baskets) will be a useful score, and in terms of snack to make (they must be homemade!), peep our favorite new vegan cooking blog, The Vegan Stoner. It’s perfect, even if you had to self-medicate your hangover before you started prepping for the journey out to the Sunset.  

Feat. Ben L’Oncle Soul

Sun/19 2 p.m., free

Stern Grove

19th Ave. and Sloat, SF

www.sterngrove.org

 

Mission Street mural unveiling

But why spend all your time at the big events? Artist Aaron Lawrence is holding an al fresco event of his own – pulling the dropcloth off the work he and muralist Rocky Villanueva did on a new apartment building on Mission. He’s making a party of it, so get there early if you want to get down on the free burritos provided. 

Bring: Tapatio, tall can Tecate. Bring two cans, share them. 

Sun/19 2-5:30 p.m., free

Mission between 18th and 19th St., SF

Facebook: Sunday Mural Reveal Party

 

The naughty list: Sex on screen at the SF International LGBT Film Fest

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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22
The naughty list: Sex on screen at the SF International LGBT Film Fest

Relationships, emotions and identities? Yada yada yada. The San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival may explore all the complicated bits of queerness but lest we forget that this festival is dedicated to a community centered around sexual preference. Who wants to see some hot, artsy gay sex on the big screen? If your hand is waving high in anticipation (among other body parts) you won’t be disappointed when you see what this year’s festival has hot on the reel.

Romantic and handholding gay characters will be a dime a dozen throughout the 10 days of films, which is awesome and wonderful in itself, but eventually all those homo chick-flicks might start to make your mouth water for something a bit more juicy. Gay porn is always a couple blocks or clicks away, but the independent, inspiring, adventurous, and beautiful varieties are much harder to get your lubed hands on. The unique visions of filmmakers from around the globe will be represented during the festival’s 35th year anniversary and if you time it right, you could probably find yourself pleased in public for a consecutive week and a half. Some are provocative, some sexually explicit, and others just have a lot of enjoyable visuals. Here are some steamy recommendations to provoke that scandalous theater hard-on and maybe even a Pride-ful romp with a fellow film-fester. 

Longhorns

longhorns

It’s Texas in 1982 when frat-boy Kevin and openly gay student Cesar become schoolmates. Kevin needs a little “help” and Cesar comes through with a helping hand. These study-buddies always end their homework and a well-deserved round of handjobs– lots of them. 

 

Community Action Center

cac

No dialogue. Just sex. Metallic bodies, gender-queer, paint splashing, fruit bashing, blood-red wooden dildos, witches, and dungeons will flash before your eyes in a series of shocking shorts. The performers were encouraged to go “hog wild” in this cinematic orgy and the results look dirty. 

 

I Want Your Love

want_love

Recreational sex always sounds like a good idea when booze does the convincing. Besties Jesse and Brenden decide to give it an arousing go, but predictably end up with sticky emotions. 

 

LA Zombie

la zombie

One word: wound fucking with prosthetic alien cocks. This sexy horror flick will get your adrenaline pumping all night.

 

May I Please Have Another

may_i_please

This series of six kinky shorts runs the gamete with a guitar-slaying transexual dominatrix, a queer leather family who sends off their bratty brother with a proper beating, the scenes behind International Mr. Leather, arousing poems, and surprising sexual encounters. 

 

Weekend

weekend

This extended one-night stand gets complicated as Russell and Glen get high, have loads of awesome sex, and chat for hours. Passionate and honest, it may be a love story but it’s also got enough skin to keep you perky. 

 

Three

three

From the director of Run Lola Run, Germany’s Tom Tykwer explores bisexuality and human motivation through three test subjects: Simon, Hanna, and Adam. The erotic chaos is a complete mind-fuck that will send you to bed with dripping dreams. 

 

SF INTERNATIONAL LGBT FILM FEST

Thurs/15 – Sun/26

Times, locations and ticket prices vary

Check the schedule and get tickets in advance at www.Frameline.org

 

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