San Francisco

Ghosts of sit-lie past

Zelda Bronstein
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5
Ghosts of sit-lie past

Is sit-lie a case of not learning from our mistakes?

An interesting bit of history that for the most part failed to enter the debate over the ordinance is that San Francisco enacted a similar ban on sitting and lying  in public spaces in the late 1960’s (PDF).

Inspired 40 years later by the same neighborhood, the current sit-lie law is a legislative throwback. Back then, Haight Street was a center of controversy as hippies began to arrive in droves – hanging out, singing, dancing and generally occupying the sidewalks. Some business and property owners were apprehensive over the rapid changes to the neighborhood.

The Board of Supervisor enacted the ordinance, which made it a crime to “willfully sit, lie or sleep in or upon any street, sidewalk or other public place,” with a unanimous vote in 1968. Violation carried a fine of up to $500 and a maximum jail sentence of six months.

Then-Mayor Joseph L. Alioto, who signed the ban into law, told the San Francisco Chronicle the ordinance “will not be used to discriminate against any group or person.” His promise echoes the claims of contemporary proponents of sit-lie.

But police used the law to target not only hippies but also gay men in the Castro. The predictable reality of selective enforcement galvanized popular resistance.

Over the next decade, the ACLU sued and managed to overturn parts of the law. “[The original laws] were being used unjustly by the police against people who were considered undesirable,” said Alan Schlosser, legal director of the ACLU, who has been working for the organization since 1976. They were used against Hippies in the Haight, they were used in the Castro and the Tenderloin against the prostitutes.”

Political pressure from a wide coalition, which included Harvey Milk, convinced the board to rescind the ordinance in 1979. In fact, one of Milk’s signature campaign issues was stopping police harassment of gay people.

The current law does avoid some of the pitfalls of the old one. The ban only applies to sitting and lying down; the sixties-era law referred to the obstruction of public space. Police are now required to issue a warning, and the punishment for violation is significantly lower. Neither distinction, however, alters the fundamental problem of sit-lie.

The ordinance criminalizes an extremely common behavior, which is in itself harmless. The most vulnerable members of our society depend on public space and are inevitably the most susceptible to getting in trouble into the crosshairs sit-lie enforcement.

Queer activists are once again leading the effort against unfair and unwise regulation of public space. We reported April 11th that self-proclaimed “angry queers” installed handmade benches on city streets as a form of protest art. Likewise, this upcoming May 22nd, which is Milk’s birthday, Queers for Economic Equality Now (QUEEN) will be coordinating sidewalk events against sit-lie in San Francisco and Berkeley.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca who organizes with QUEEN, said “for me it is so thrilling to see two cities doing something against sit-lie and invoking Harvey’s name.”

 

Drinking al Frisco

Andrew Lam
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0
Drinking al Frisco

ruggy@yelp.com

RUGGY’S YELP Lately the weather around San Francisco has been more akin to what you’d expect in a city like San Diego. Or San Antonio (remember Pewee, there’s no basement in the Alamo!). Or heck, even San Felipe, Mexico.

Feel free to insert your own tropical “San” destination as a point of comparison, but the fact remains: we’ve been as spoiled as a Kardashian sister in an NBA locker room over the last couple of weeks with this delicious abundance of California sunshine. When those warm days and nights take hold in our usually mild metropolis, the low hanging fruit for al fresco assimilation frequently ends up being Zeitgeist. But believe it or not, that’s not the only gunslinger in the Wild West of outdoor indulgence.

Looking to take a break from slugging bloody marys among a sea of tight-jeaned counter-culturalists? Check out a few of these lesser-known destinations for exoteric irrigation.

 

JONES

Taking up residency in an area of town better known for its seedy rathskellers and nondescript, shadowy tap rooms lies one of the most impressive open air asylums in town. With enough room to play a round of jai alai with every last member of the Polyphonic Spree, Jones is easily the most sprawling rooftop deck you’ll find anywhere in this seven-by-seven-mile playground. Featuring nibbles by Ola Fendert of Oola fame, the menu includes everything from fried chicken and waffles and Humboldt Fog pizza to lighter fare of seasonal soups, steamed mussels, and ambrosial salads, accompanied by an array of beer, wine, and specialty cocktail selections. Jones does channel a bit of the fist-pumping Ruby Skye scene at times, but don’t let a few spray-tanned fashionistas deter you from one of the best hangs under the stars for a balmy, cloudless night.

620 Jones, SF. (415) 496-6858, www.620-jones.com

 

PASSION CAFÉ

This relative newcomer to the skids sits high above the curbs of the Sixth and Market interchange with a cozy garden setting ripe for an extended stopover any time of day. While pigeons fight over discarded bones from nearby Louisiana Fried Chicken and free-spirited drifters engage in heated debates with various inanimate objects, dive into a chilled glass of pinot grigio or a frothy pint of Lagunitas IPA (beer and wine only here) while devouring French-inspired treats like artisan fromage and meaty baguette sandwiches. While most menu selections don’t necessarily give Thomas Keller a run for his money, the croque monsieur is not to be missed if you know what’s good for ya.

28 Sixth St., SF. (415) 437-9730

 

SPORK

In the space where the parking lot for the KFC that previously called this space home once stood is a finger-lickin’ good outdoor veranda, perfect for throwing back a few adult libations in the heart of the Mission. Few are aware of Spork’s hidden bucolic surroundings, so if it’s date night and you’re looking to impress your boo with an under-the-radar retreat, it will do the trick nicely.

And it ain’t no parking lot ambiance, either. The vintage record player that spits out tunes in the corner makes for a easefully hip aura perfect for tipping back a gaggle of hard-to-pronounce barley-malted bevies. In the event temperatures dip a little beyond your comfort level, the crew will gladly fire up the heatlamps to ensure that your goose bumps don’t get too out of hand. (Of course you could always take the opportunity to keep your dining companion warm with some old-fashioned 98 degree body heat, but we’ll leave that up to you, player.)

1058 Valencia, SF. (415) 643-5000, www.sporksf.com

The raffish Ruggy Joesten is senior community manager at Yelp.com.

 

Campos urges Lee to implement entire due process law

Mary Magee
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12

Text by Sarah Phelan. Photographs by Luke Thomas


After the Guardian broke the news that Mayor Ed Lee was planning to only partially implement Sup. David Campos’ due process legislation, we headed to City Hall to witness Lee announce his partial shift during question time. And afterwards, Lee told reporters that he spent the months since he was appointed reviewing the policy and talking with leaders in the city’s juvenile justice departments.


“I looked at the difference between youth with family here and youth who did not,” Lee said, noting that his decision to let youth that have family here to have their day in court is in keeping with his policy of focusing on family reunification and getting families more involved.


Lee stressed that youth with family here will still need to be enrolled in school and not be repeat offenders in order to have their day in court.


“It will be decided upon on a case by case basis,” he said.


Lee said he has had conversations with the federal government and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) about the policy shift. “We have discussed this,” Lee said. “And we did get a very strong feeling that the federal government is a bit confused.”


Asked how far he is willing to go to defend this latest policy shift, Lee said, “I’ll take that up as it comes. President Obama is struggling with immigration right now.”


Reminded that his predecessor Mayor Gavin Newsom refused to implement any aspect of Campos’ due process legislation, even though a super-majority of the Board passed the ordinance in 2009, Lee said, “I don’t compare myself with the former mayor.”


Asked what percentage of immigrant youth that end up getting booked are “unaccompanied,” Lee said he did not have those statistics. “Check with Siffermann,” he said, referring to the head of the city’s Juvenile Probation Department.”


Lee’s announcement was met with mixed reviews among immigrant advocates.


Civil rights groups applauded Lee’s decision to immediately begin implementation of Campos’ legislation, which was passed in November 2009, restores due process for immigrant youth in the city’s juvenile justice system and ensures that innocent youth are not torn from their families for deportation.  But they also expressed disappointment that Lee will only be implementing the policy for youth who have immediate family here, and not for unaccompanied youth.  And they all urge him to fully implement what they described as Campos’ “duly-enacting, common-sense law so that all innocent youth receive protections.”


They noted that implementation of Campos’ broadly-supported law, which has been endorsed by over 70 organizations, had been stalled until today due to former Mayor Newsom’s refusal to enact the law. 


Under Newsom’s direction, Juvenile Probation reported over 160 youth to ICE at the point of arrest, prior to the youth receiving due process, based only on a juvenile probation officer’s “reasonable suspicion” that a youth is undocumented. 


Civil rights advocates note that Newsom’s problematic policy was responsible for tearing innocent youth from their families and spreading fear among immigrant residents around coming forward to cooperate with police, either as witnesses or victims of crime.  


And they observe that the policy that Juvenile Probation Department has been enforcing since the summer of 2008, and which involved reporting youth for life-altering deportation at arrest, went well above and beyond any obligations under federal law. 


They noted that, as a cadre of legal scholars, including University of San Francisco Law Professor Bill Ong Hing, have repeatedly made clear, there is no requirement imposed on city officials under federal law to ask about immigration status or to report individuals suspected of being undocumented.”


Ana Perez, executive director of Central American Resource Center, agreed.“While we appreciate Mayor Lee taking action to finally begin implementation, we are concerned that he is only implementing the policy for accompanied youth and not for youth who may be unaccompanied because they are trafficked to this country, are orphans, or are escaping persecution.”


“I’m certain it’s not for all youth,” Pérez continued. “So, it’s a small win. But what about the kids who are victims of human trafficking? The fact is we spent so much time developing a policy that was approved by a majority of the Board. So, this is bitter sweet.”


Asked what became of the criminal grand jury investigation that then US Attorney Joe Russoniello initiated in 2008, when Mayor Gavin Newsom was running for governor, and news first broke that the city was accompanying youth who weren’t here with family back to their home country, Pérez suppressed a snort. “It seems that was a bunch of empty threats to try and get the city to move to a more conservative position,” she said. “It’s been a whole new day with Obama.”


Angela Chan, staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus said that Juvenile Probation’s prior policy of reporting innocent youth exacerbated the impact of a broken federal immigration system on local immigrant families. “We appreciate that Mayor Lee has taken this long awaited step forward because he values family unity and due process for youth,” Chan said. “However, we ask that the Mayor not exclude unaccompanied youth from receiving due process protections.”


Patricia Lee, managing attorney in the Juvenile Unit at the Public Defender’s Office also supported the demand for complete implementation of Campos’ legislation. “If you want the immigrant community to feel safe enough to cooperate with police and probation, then those agencies should not be viewed as representatives of immigration,” she said. “My clients and their families are scared of probation, they are scared of police. Selective implementation of the due process policy for only accompanied youth and not to unaccompanied youth does not solve this problem.” 


And Charles Washington, the Muni bus driver and longtime San Francisco resident, whose wife and 14 year old son were almost separated from him as a result of the prior Juvenile Probation policy, expressed concern that the policy would only be implemented for some youth. “I’m glad to see Mayor Lee is doing the right thing by implementing the due process policy,” he said. “However, he should not leave any youth, especially those who are most vulnerable, behind.”


Sup. Campos applauded the Mayor for implementing the policy while expressing disappointment that it is only partial implementation. As Campos’ stated during the Board meeting, but after Lee had already left, “This body enacted that law and that law needs to be respected.  It is not up to the executive branch to second guess the legislative branch.” 


Sup. Eric Mar added that he supports full implementation for all youth.


 And Sup. Jane Kim, who asked the Mayor during the Board’s Question Time about his plans for implementation, stated, “My hope is that he will commit to full implementation of this policy.”


But in the end, the burden fell on Campos to explain why partial due process is unjust. “This is a good first step, but it doesn’t go far enough,” Campos explained. “As I understand it, the decision Mayor Lee has taken is, that if you are a minor, and are accused of a felony, you will be given due process if you have family here. But if you are charged with a felony, but don’t have family here, then you will not be given due process. Let me begin by thanking Mayor Lee for at least taking one step in the right direction. That said, we still will not have full compliance with a law that was duly enacted by this body. Full compliance means giving every child that interacts with the juvenile justice system due process. So, {Mayor Lee’s first step] is simply not sufficient.”


Campos noted that when mayors are sworn in, they agree to uphold laws that the Board enacts. “So, the law needs to be respected,” Campos said. “It’s not up to the executive branch to second guess the legislative body. That second guessing can only be done by the courts. Therefore, we, once again, ask the mayor of San Francisco to comply with full implementation.”


Noting that a bedrock of the U.S.’ justice system is the principle that we are innocent until proven guilty, Campos said that if the mayor does not fully implement the law, as approved by the Board, “There’s a very real possibility that children that we are reporting [to ICE for possible deportation] are not guilty of what they have been accused of. So, once again, I ask the mayor to reconsider his opinion.”


Campos also noted that there are already procedures in place, within the existing juvenile justice system, to ensure that “we do not have individuals released who should not be.”


After the meeting, Campos noted that the format for the Board’s question time with the mayor currently leaves something to be desired: an opportunity for the Board to reply.


“It would be better if it would allow for some exchange, though obviously, we don’t want it to be a ‘gotcha’ game. But at this moment, it’s too rigid.”


 Asked who drafted the current Question Time format, Campos replied, “Board President David Chiu.”

Ass backward

Maria Poblet
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2
Ass backward

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS The good news is that my asshole itself is just fine. It took me almost three days to convince the imbecilic network of Kaiser phone reps that no, it weren’t hemorrhoids, you’re going to have to actually fucking see me. Apparently my $350 a month isn’t enough to warrant them having a look at my ass once every six years. Let alone sticking a finger in it.

“Probably hemorrhoids,” they said. “Someone will call you.” Which they didn’t, so I called back, and back. Five, six times.

And they said hemorrhoids.

The fifth or sixth time they said hemorrhoids I said, “You don’t understand. I haven’t been constipated since the late 1970s. Constipated people call me from across the country. To chat! Just talking to me makes them have to use the bathroom. I’m serious, it’s what mothers love about me. I get all the poopy diapers, and they get a regular baby. One mother called me — you’re going to love this — I was on vacation, and her kid hadn’t pooped since I left. Could she please just put him on the phone with me, maybe the sound of my voice would loosen him up. Which it did. And now you’re trying to tell me I have a hemorrhoid? Do you know who you’re talking to? Trust me. I wish I were sexy, like everyone else in the world. But I’m not. I’m good for something else: eating with, and talking shit. And yes, the two go hand in hand. As it happens, you probably-entirely-blameless representative of a crock-of-shit company, even what little sexy I am is mostly my mouth and my asshole, so can we please get this taken care of please, because I don’t get a lot of love as it is, and my lover is visiting from New Orleans in a week. Plus I’m afraid to eat hot sauce, which is my muse and antidepressant. So …”

“I’ll have someone call you,” they said.

And, you know, eventually, someone did. My old Rohnert Park doc, who is a superhero, must have called San Francisco (after talking with me) and explained that the crazy lady they’d been ignoring, losing in the system, and silencing with red tape really was the world’s Most Regular Person — seen in a strictly gastroenterological light — and was more likely to be carrying the seed of an alien civilization in her asshole than a hemorrhoid.

I don’t know if those would have been her exact words. But finally, after being in pain for nearly 60 hours — sitting, standing, walking, lying down — and 24 hours after the onset of general achiness and chills (possible symptoms of systemic infection, by the way), I was able to make an appointment!

It took the doctor less than 30 seconds to determine what I’d been trying to tell them for two days. It wasn’t a hemorrhoid. It was an abscess or cyst or something, and it was infected. He put me on antibiotics and went to get someone to cut me.

And it was she, my cutter, who put her finger in and said that, yes, my ass was fine.

I’d been trying to tell people that for days, and in a larger sense, for years and years. “Thank you,” I said.

My whole right cheek was red and swollen and incredibly painful to the touch, but she decided not to cut me for two days. I’d have argued otherwise, but I was already an hour late for dinner.

Luckily it was with Mr. Wong, my patientest of friends.

Over Korean fried chicken (or KFC) at Red Wings, just a hop, waddle, and short 38 ride down Geary, I related my Bukowskiesque ordeal, complaining about Kaiser much as I have just done toward you.

Minus the chicken, which was pretty not-all-that-half-bad — at least the fried. Mr. Wong got his roasted, with garlic and herbs, and I tasted it: dry dry dry.

“Well, look at it this way,” Mr. Wong said, chomping chicken. “At least you have health insurance.”

True. And at the end of a week when two of my aunts died, I have my overall health, and life. But honestly, between an infected abscess and the health care provider I pay to take care of such — er — bumps in the road, I don’t know which is the bigger pain in the ass.

RED WINGS

Daily: 5 p.m.–2 a.m.

3015 Geary, SF

(415) 422-0012

Beer and wine

MC/V

 

The underground

Maria Poblet
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0
The underground

arts@sfbg.com

Compilations often serve two purposes, sometimes at the same time: they can be brief introductions or exhaustive overviews. The San Francisco label Dark Entries just released BART: Bay Area Retrograde, a collection of local, underground music from the early ’80s, which feels like a bit of both. Representing local bands — from Danville to Palo Alto, Berkeley, and SF — that gravitated toward an alienated, synth-driven sound, it’s a meticulously curated snapshot that feels complete in itself, but is also a primer for the minimal synth revival. With many songs verging on 30 years old, label owner and DJ Josh Cheon and co-curator Phil Maier have compiled tracks that were un- or little- known in their own time but now sound very much of the moment.

There are many names for the variety of styles represented across BART‘s 11 songs — synthpop, post-punk, and cold, minimal, or new wave are only the most common. But nearly half of the songs are complete obscurities — four are previously unreleased and two appeared only in small, self-released editions — and the compilation as a whole is difficult to pin down. These are artifacts from a lost era, our local contribution to an international group of artists who created music that was bound to be marginal, faced with intense rock chauvinism and Reagan-era optimism.

BART kicks off with three songs (Nominal State’s “Middle Class,” Batang Frisco’s “Power,” and Necropolis of Love’s “Talk”) that sound like a blueprint for the current renaissance of icy analog futurism by groups like Xeno and Oaklander, Staccato du Mal, and The Soft Moon. But curveballs like Wasp Women’s No-Wave-y “Kill Me” and The Units’ peppy ode “Mission” alleviate the future-shock claustrophobia and put the compilation in a category of its own — it’s as much a love letter to the Bay Area’s taste for the goofy and willfully weird as an archival release.

There’s a sense of playfulness that’s immediately apparent in the presentation. Eloise Leigh’s eye-popping jacket design is satisfyingly heavy on pink, blue, and yellow, and comes as a six-panel fold-out poster rather than a standard cardboard pocket, suggesting it would prefer wall space rather than a slot on the shelf. Comprising liner notes from the Guardian’s Johnny Ray Huston and band data on one side and Dr. Art Nuko’s painting Getting Bombed in San Francisco on the other, BART the consumer object feels like something that belongs nowhere so much as Valencia Street’s overflowing vintage zine store, Goteblüd. And while the music contained on the vinyl within can be dark and brooding like “Talk,” or abrasive and fractured like Standard of Living’s “N.F.A.,” the most memorable songs, to me, are the frothy ones: Danny Boy and the Serious Party Gods’ parody-of-a-parody “Castro Boy,” and the above-mentioned “Mission.” The former riffs on Zappa’s “Valley Girl,” but ups the raunch with ad-libs about fisting, while “Mission” builds up to its irrepressible chorus with verses celebrating the unassailable pleasures of being high and eating burritos. Even if you aren’t already a minimal synth nerd, BART is a fun album.

With its variety of styles and lyrical themes, BART holds together not only because there’s a high baseline of quality, but also because of the built-in context. In addition to the design, a lot of work clearly went into finding and collaborating with these long-defunct bands, from securing unheard demos to listing the synth models used for each track. It’s a meticulously assembled record, a guided experience that points out what is so unsatisfying about downloading some lost classic from a sharity blog and deleting it, unlistened to, months later. Its local focus also sets it apart from the compilations that helped define minimal wave, although it contributes to that canon as well.

As the underbelly of an underground dominated in the retelling by figures like Chrome, Flipper, and The Residents, BART‘s new audience lives in a skewed world, where technology provides us with nearly endless opportunities to connect, where analog synths are revered for their warmth and character, and where the Mission is gentrified. Yet faced with an excess of information every time we make a decision, the rough edges of this serious, cynical music offer opportunities to disconnect from the endless demands of the present. The past will always have the advantage of seeming coherent, but BART‘s biggest success is in the way it captures the innovative, corrosive energy of its time. * *

 

Heavy times

Maria Poblet
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2
Heavy times

arts@sfbg.com

Sometimes it takes leaving a place to appreciate it. This past weekend, I went to Los Angeles. Once back in San Francisco, I walked from my apartment in SoMa by the freeway to my afternoon job at an elementary school in the Mission. I put on my headphones, pressed play, and the high-pitched wail that opens the Sandwitches’ recent release Mrs. Jones’ Cookies (Empty Cellar Records) woke me up.

The sky was endlessly azure. The sun was hitting my back as the cool breeze rushed at me, creating temperate perfection. It would be an understatement to say that the Sandwitches complemented this moment, because the music indeed heightened it. What was a routine walk felt new.

With doo-wop and old country influences, the band’s first full-length release, 2009’s How to Make Ambient Sadcake (Turn Up Records), seems to emerge from the 1950s. On Mrs. Jones’ Cookies, there are moments that sound even older, such as “Miracle Me” with its folk vibrato and flute solo, suggestive of a song for Gold Rush pioneers. then there are songs, like the slow-brewing “Black Rider,” that place the Sandwitches within the SF rock movement happening now. (The group’s Grace Cooper and Heidi Alexander were also former back-up singers for the Fresh & Onlys, which is where the pair originally met, and have released songs with Sonny Smith for his 100 Records project.) I feel that the Sandwitches’ music is from my era, but that the members have lived rich past lives. In this sense, their music is timeless.

Mrs. Jones’ Cookies‘ opening track “In The Garden” sings of forever love, narrating a tale of devotion, with images of diamonds and a locket held to the chest. “Heidi [Alexander], Roxanne [Brodeuer, the group’s drummer], and I can probably all agree that most of our song lyrics come from personal experiences,” explains vocalist-guitarist Grace Cooper, “most always experiences with guys.” On the spirited “Summer of Love,” Cooper and Alexander harmonize a romance story steeped in heated weather metaphors. The song climaxes after the two-minute mark, when the ladies’ vocals peak.

Before I left for L.A., I went to the Eagle Tavern’s second-to-last rock show, where I was able to squeeze to the front for the band’s opening set. Even more than when they fill my San Francisco-world via earbuds, the Sandwitches spellbind live. Cooper and Alexander seem to swing their jaws back and forth to create the complicated harmonies, challenging ranges, and intricate interweaving of their voices that set them apart.

“I’ve always sung a lot, ever since I was a kid,” Alexander says when asked about the Sandwitches’ unique vocals. To fight away the fear of loneliness, she sang show tunes and Joni Mitchell “as loud as I could.” After the vocal climax on “Summer of Love,” the song’s rhythm changes, a compositional surprise that’s executed with grace.

“My Heart Does Swell” is a heartbroken tale of lost love — “I’ve been wasting all my time/ Banging my head against a decorated wall of blame” — with a toy piano solo. “I try my best not to be totally obvious when I’m writing about a relationship,” Cooper adds. “I try to use a lot of fancy imagery and analogies to confuse people.”

The arrestingly gorgeous “Joe Says” talks about a man who says “impossibly beautiful things” and is “in love with every ounce of me.” But there’s an aching ambiguity to the relationship because he also “is out there doing something” and “never did believe in magic.” The song’s last line is “Joe says he has every intention of coming back to me,” but the listener does not know how this story ends.

I live down the street from the Eagle Tavern, which is near where my walk began. While I was away in L.A., the Eagle shut its doors. Most movements or institutions have limited life spans. The Eagle may return as it was, or become something new. “We all love the Eagle and are very sad to see it go,” Alexander says. “It felt good [to play there one last time] even though [the closure is] such a shitty thing. It is the end of a really good era.” 

 

The fun side of bikes

Maria Poblet
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3
The fun side of bikes

steve@sfbg.com

Paul Freedman, a.k.a. the Fossil Fool, is a singer-songwriter and builder of elaborate art bikes who lives in San Francisco’s Mission District. Since 2001, when he decided to apply his Harvard University education to building custom bikes, accessories, pedal-powered products, and mobile sound systems, Freedman created Fossil Fool and Rock the Bike to sell his creations and provide a platform for his performances and alternative transportation advocacy work.

But anyone who’s watched Freedman build and ride his creations — such as his latest, El Arbol, a 14-foot fiberglass tree built around a double-decker tall bike with elaborate generator, sound, and lighting systems and innovative landing gears — knows this is a serious labor of love by an individual at the forefront of Bay Area bike culture. We caught up with him recently to discuss his work and vision.

SFBG How did Rock the Bike start?

FOSSIL FUEL I was working at a shop in Berkeley and I decided to make my first bike music system, which I called Soul Cycles. So I had that other job at a bicycle nonprofit, which is cool, and that was the first impetus. I did two innovative things with my first bike music system: I put the controls on the handlebars, which I’d never seen anyone do, and I put speaker back-lighting to make the speakers look nice at night. I used a really nice CFL fluorescent lamp, and I started playing around with those and it looked great, so that was our first product for those first three or four years.

SFBG What was going on in the larger culture at the time that led you to believe your interest in bikes and technology was going to be fruitful or make an interesting statement?

FF I care deeply about biking and a lot of the people I was with did too, but I felt like the bicycle advocacy scene was not very effective when it came to actual outreach. I felt like the thing that had been really formative for me was this person-to-person interaction, in my case by hanging out with the guys who started Xtracycle, and going on quests to get ingredients for dinner and riding late at night with the music systems on the tour. I felt like those experiences were what made bicycling appealing, but the bike advocacy scene was using guilt trips and telling people you should ride a bike because you’re too fat and you should ride a bike because there’s too much traffic. And I felt like we needed to shift that mindset and really start focusing on the fun aspects of biking and the social aspects to grow the scene.

SFBG Do you feel like it has, and what effect do you think it had on those who weren’t already riding bikes?

FF I think it’s moving that direction. Even within traditional bike advocacy groups, those people are starting to really focus on their events and creating community, in a good way, and challenging themselves with doing so. And I think that’s really positive.

SFBG Your timing also dovetailed with heightened green awareness — with a push for renewable energy, concerns over peak oil, and things like that.

FF Yeah, I feel that transportation choices are the main thing people need to examine about their lives with respect to their impact on global warming. And that’s not just a feeling, that’s the consensus of the Union of Concerned Scientists. They say that if you want to have an impact on the planet, positive or negative, the first thing you should consider is your transportation habits. So that means flying, it means driving, and everything else. I don’t think it’s really beneficial to focus on what people need to do with a car, like they need to drop their kids off. It’s more important how people do the optional things with cars like the trips to Tahoe, and the flights to Mexico. It’s those optional things I want to focus on, which is why I’m so interested in Sunday Streets, which is like the antidote. It’s this thing you can do here, that you can walk and bike to, that’s as fun as driving to Tahoe.

SFBG Through your technology and design work, it also seems like you’re showing a broad range of what people can do on a bike, with lots of cargo or a whole performance stage setup. Do you think design is convincing people that bikes are more versatile that they thought they were?

FF Oh yeah, I think that would be a really beneficial outcome of this work. By riding through town with our music gear, of course people are going to look at that and think, oh yeah, I could probably go to Rainbow Grocery and buy a bunch of food for my household on a bike. So it would be a great outcome if people would make that connection.

SFBG Is there anything about San Francisco that makes people here more receptive to your message?

FF San Francisco is a very tight city geographically. It’s not like Phoenix. The blocks are pretty short here and the distances are pretty short here, and you can ride year-round here, which is not true in Boston where I grew up.

SFBG The focus on technology and design here also probably helps, right?

FF Oh, for sure. This is an awesome place to be prototyping and doing funky mechanical, electrical art. There’s a lot of support for it. There are places like Tap Plastics for learning about fiberglass. There are lots of electronics stores that serve the Silicon Valley tech developer communities. You can buy stuff there that’s helpful. You can learn about Arduino [an open source microprocessor] at Noisebridge. There are a lot of resources for doing interactive art here or for doing bicycle-related projects. There are a lot of welders here.

SFBG Where do you think we are on the arch with this stuff — the beginning, the middle? — in terms of gaining wider acceptance of biking as an imperative and an option for anyone?

FF I think there’s an important generational shift underway, and I don’t know whether it’s my focus on bikes that leads me to meet all these kinds of people, but it feels like I’m meeting more people these days that are going to pick their next city or their next neighborhood based on how it is to bike there. They’re bringing it up in conversation, it’s not me. So it seems like people are really considering what their daily life is going to be like and how the community feels, and biking is one of the symbols of a whole swath of other beneficial things. They know that if they see a bunch of bikes when they visit a place, then there’s probably a lot of other cool stuff like music, arts, farmers markets. Those kinds of things are sort of linked together, and the bike is the key indicator. So there’s been this generational change of thought. The idea that having a bigger, faster car is better, I just don’t think that’s popular with these people. They no longer believe it.

SFBG It’s having cooler bike.

FF It’s having cooler bike and being able to use it and not have to step into the stress of car culture if you can avoid it.

SFBG What’s your next step?

FF One of the really positive things for me has been the Rock the Bike community, with its roadies, performers, musicians — all types of people who are on our e-mail list. So I can just say, I need three roadies for a three-hour performance slot and there’s going to be a jam at the end, so bring your instruments. That’s an awesome thing and it’s just going to improve, so I think the community will grow as we continue do gigs where we have fun and the people have fun.

In terms of my own art, this tree [gesturing to his El Arbol bike] has been my focus for the last year or two, and it’s not done yet. It has to look undeniably like a tree. It looks like a tree, but with a light green bark that you really don’t see in nature, so that has to change. I want it to have brown bark, but I still want it to do beautiful things at night with translucency. And I want it to have a true canopy of leaves, so that when you’re far away from it at Sunday Streets and you’re wondering whether to go over there, you’ll see a tree. Not just a representation of a tree, but I want them to be like, how the hell did he ride a tree over here?

SFBG Why a tree?

FF I don’t know. You get these ideas, and you start drawing them and can’t shake them. There are all sorts of reasons why trees are interesting. They are gathering points.

SFBG And you’re doing some very innovative design work on this bike, such as the landing gear.  

FF The roots. Yeah, that’s never been done before. Through the course of doing the project, people would send me tips and interesting things, and one guy sent me a link to a photo of tall bikes being used in Chicago in the early 1900s as gas lamp lighting tools, and they were very tall. I’d say 10 to 12 feet tall, and they were tandems, so there was a guy on top and a stoker on the bottom providing extra power, and they didn’t have landing gears. So they would ride from one lamp to another and hold the lamp as they refilled it. And I just love that story because if you were growing up in Chicago, and you saw these gas lamp people coming by in the early evening to turn the lights on, and if you were a little kid trying to fall asleep or whatever, that would have an indelible mark on your childhood, and that whimsical quality is what I’m going for. That should be part of what it’s like to grow up in the Mission District in 2011.

SFBG How does that fit into the other cultural stuff that you’re also bringing to the bike movement, the music you’re writing, design work, the style, and the events that you’re creating?

FF Sometimes I wish it wasn’t so multipronged. I would clearly be a better performer and musician if it was the only thing I did, so I apologize to all my fans for not putting 100 percent into the music. But I put 100 percent into the whole thing, including creating bikes and running Rock the Bike, which is a business.

SFBG But are you doing all these things because you find a synergy among them?

FF It’s the fullest expression of who I am.

SFBG Where do you see this headed? What will Rock the Bike be like five years from now?

FF I would like to see the quality of our entertainment offerings steadily improve to the point where people genuinely look forward to it, and not just to the gee-whiz aspect of look what they’re doing, but just for the feeling of being there. So I’d like to challenge ourselves with the quality of the music, how it is to be engaged in the setup process — because I think the setup is cool, with biking to the event and engaging in the transition to a spectacle, where every step along the way is part of the show. I like that idea. I’d like to challenge ourselves to be a carbon-free Cirque du Soleil, a show that is slamming entertainment and they bike there and pedal-power everything: the lighting, the sound, the transportation. And I want the performers to be just as good.

SFBG Are there people in other cities doing similar things?

FF The Bicycle Music Festival is spreading to other cities, which is cool. I think there are going to be over a dozen bicycle music festivals this summer. In terms of people doing really inspiring work with bike culture or this kind of mobile art, you definitely see some amazing things at Burning Man. That’s probably one of the best venues for this type of art. But I can’t think of another city where people are doing all of this. I’m part of a group on Flickr called Bicycle and Skater Sound Systems, and there’s nothing on that whole group that I see as being on this level. I don’t know why.

SFBG When you ride a cool custom bike down the street, the reactions it elicits from passersby is just so strong and happy. What is that about?

FF It’s a reaction to an expression of personal freedom. People light up when they see you expressing yourself, and a part of them thinks, oh yeah, that would be fun, I’d like to express myself. And there are just so many ways to express yourself and be human — and that’s something that we need to remind ourselves because, in many ways, our personal freedoms are declining and there’s more surveillance.

SFBG And people might take that spark and do any number of things with it.

FF One of the very cool things about bicycle art is that it’s mobile. So you ride your bike and you might turn heads a couple dozen times a day. I ride this tree, and if it’s in the full mode where it’s 14-feet tall and there’s music on, and I’m going from here to Golden Gate Park, I’d estimate that 500 people see it. There’s probably no other art form you can do that with. I can’t think of any other that’s like that. So it’s a really cool art form. Those people aren’t paying you, but you shared art with them, and it’s a good way to get exposure. It’s a great way for a lot of people to see your art.

SFBG With your mobile, pedal-powered stages, you’re also demonstrating green ways of powering even stationary art.

FF It is an interesting time for pedal power. I feel like there’s a turning point that’s maybe beginning in the field of events with how they’re powered. I think there are going to be a lot more people who are going to festivals in the coming years who are looking at the diesel generators and saying, ‘My summertime festival experience is being powered by diesel.’ And I think there are going to be a lot of people seeing that and wanting to do something else.

SFBG Have the technologies for how much juice you’re able to get out of pedal power been advancing since you’ve been working on it?

FF Yes, it’s truly impressive right now, particularly if you’re putting that juice into music because we have very efficient generators where there’s no friction interface anymore, nothing rolling on the tire, it’s all just ball bearings rolling on the hub. Then we put that power into these new modified amps, and they have a DC power supply now, as opposed to an AC power supply, so we don’t have to put the power into an inverter. So the net sum of that is one person can pedal-power dance music for 200 people, which is pretty amazing and inspiring.

SFBG And the battery technology is also improving, right?

FF Yeah, the batteries are what you use for the mobile rides, and that’s getting better. If you’ve been to a bike party, it’s just incredible how many good, loud sound systems there are right now. It’s a very kinetic art form, although I wish people would focus more on the visual aspects of their system, because I feel like there’s a trend to get big and loud fast. But I wish there were more people doing the work that Jay Brummel is doing, where he doesn’t just want to ride on a bicycle, so he turned his bike into a deer and he steers by holding the antlers.

SFBG But there has been some push-back from the police. Have you gotten many tickets?

FF Well, I got tickets for riding up high on this quadracycle. There is a law against riding tall bikes in California. It says you shouldn’t ride a bicycle in such as manner as to not be able to stop safely and put your foot down. Obviously you can’t put your foot down on a tall bike.

SFBG The fact that you have landing gears on your bike didn’t make a difference?

FF Well the officer didn’t take it seriously, but the court sided in my favor. The judge was flipping through photos of the landing gear the entire trial — he couldn’t stop flipping through them. And he asked, ‘How do you get on? Where do you step?’ So I was like, ‘Well, you step here, you step there, and you swing.’ It was pretty fun. 

BICYCLE MUSIC FESTIVAL

Saturday, June 18

11 a.m.–10 p.m., free

Various locations, SF

www.rockthebike.com

www.fossilfool.com


 

The night has a thousand eyes

Maria Poblet
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0
The night has a thousand eyes

arts@sfbg.com

Cheap genre films targeted for the drive-in or grindhouse aside, very few truly independent features were made in the U.S. before the 1960s, and those that were made seldom found an audience. As a result, most were soon forgotten — in rare instances rediscovered decades later, like the recently restored docudramas On the Bowery (1957) and The Exiles (1961), about Skid Row denizens in New York City and Los Angeles. Foreign films had a tiny theatrical circuit (albeit usually playing in cut and dubbed form), experimental ones none at all.

It was predictable, then, that a movie straddling pretty much all the above categories should have found no welcoming niche in the complacent 1950s. Elliot Lavine’s latest retrospective of noir and noir-ish oldies at the Roxie Theater, “I Wake Up Dreaming 2011,” is subtitled “The Legendary and the Lost,” terms that both apply to the film that kicks off the two-week series.

To paraphrase recent San Francisco International Film Festival guest Christine Vachon, behind every independent feature there’s a war story. Dementia (1955) is a good example of one little film that fought and lost — on every front save artistically, and perhaps in posterity.

Even by today’s standards, with our greater tolerance for “dark” and arty material, it’s an unclassifiable, commercially doomed proposition: an hour-long B&W nightmare in which an unstable young woman wanders empty urban streets, bounces from pimp to john to jazz club, commits acts of violence (or maybe just hallucinates them), and at the end simply disappears into the cosmos. (The opening and closing shots actually are of starry infinite space.)

Oh, and there is no dialogue, just a score by noted American composer George Antheil that uses wordless vocals by Marni Nixon (who later secretly provided the vocals for the famous leading ladies of 1956’s The King and I, 1961’s West Side Story, and 1964’s My Fair Lady) as a sort of human theremin. This very curious amalgam of noir, avant-garde, lurid potboiler and silent expressionism at various times brings to mind everyone from Roger Corman to Roman Polanski and Maya Deren. It was the first and last film for John Parker, about whom very little is known — save that he must have been gravely disappointed by the long road Dementia took to nowhere. (He would have been even more disappointed had he known years later his associate producer and cast member Bruno VeSota claimed Parker didn’t know what he was doing, and that he himself did most of the writing and half the directing.)

Shot in 1953 Los Angeles, Dementia was asking for it on many levels, with content not only bizarre and uncommercial but often downright offensive by the standards of the era. Its paranoid, unpredictably mood-swinging heroine (Adrienne Barrett, billed only as “The Gamine” — not exactly the ideal description for this character) wanders alone through the city’s squalid underbelly. A flashback to her childhood — staged in a cemetery, with living-room furniture amid gravestones — reveals mom was a sluttish harpy killed by a boozed and abusive dad, who was then stabbed by guess who.

Handed over to a fat “Rich Man” (VeSota) by a slick sleazeball (Richard Barron as “The Evil One”) who picks her up on the street, she stabs him too, pushes him out a penthouse window, and saws off his hand when it won’t let go of a telltale necklace. Pursued by cops, she ducks into a club where the jivey sounds of Shorty Rogers and His Giants suddenly turn her into a sleek chanteuse (albeit one we don’t hear) alongside bongos and hopheads. All this is shot with considerable noirish panache by William C. Thompson, who as Ed Wood’s regular cinematographer made some completely ridiculous films (notably 1959’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, with its own atmospheric cemetery scenes) look much better than warranted.

Barely releasable at 61 minutes, the completed film then found that threadbare length was the least of its problems. Shown to a succession of censorial boards, it was repeatedly deemed too unhealthy for public viewing, prompting critiques like “indecent, inhuman, lacking in moral and spiritual values, could incite to crime” and “grist for the Communist mill.”

Finally after over two years and 11 screenings of different edits for New York State’s board, it was cleared with an “adults only” stamp. Double-billed with a documentary about Picasso in A Unique Program of Psychology and Art, advertised as “the first American Freudian film,” it opened on one 1955 Manhattan screen to little notice. (However Parker’s friend, the great, soon-to-be late director Preston Sturges did call it “a work of art,” strangely noting “it stirred my blood, purged my libido.”)

Two years later Parker’s producer sold the movie — now cut to 56 minutes, with pasted-on purple narration spoken in spookhouse tones by then-unknown Ed McMahon — for rerelease as Daughter of Horror. Again it flopped, although in 1958 it would gain pop culture footnote status when a clip was used as what the onscreen audience is watching when they’re attacked by amorphous sci-fi monster The Blob.

It was as Daughter that the movie started gaining a little admiration in recent years, getting a boost from Re/Search’s first Incredibly Strange Films volume and finally a DVD release (with both versions) from Kino. Taken as good, bad, or just daft, it remains unique.

Other highlights in the Roxie’s “Dreaming” program include Dementia‘s co-feature, Robert Siodmak’s terrific 1944 noir mystery Phantom Lady; actor director Robert Montgomery’s 1947 Mexican anti-holiday Ride the Pink Horse, a sort of hard-boiled cinematic Under the Volcano; and a number of exceedingly rare lesser-known titles. Certainly the campiest of them are contained on May 23’s bill: 1956’s The Violent Years, a girl-gang movie featuring the inimitable dialogue stylings of the aforementioned Mssr. Ed D. Wood, and Dance Hall Racket, an unbelievably amateurish 1953 cheapie whose stars are none other than pre-fame Lenny Bruce and his stripper wife Honey. Inspirational line: “Big deal! I kill a guy and that makes me a criminal?!” 

I WAKE UP DREAMING 2011: THE LEGENDARY AND THE LOST!

May 13–26

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

 

Fully loaded

Maria Poblet
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0
Fully loaded

arts@sfbg.com

There is such a thing as festival fatigue, but you’d do well to forget it with the ambitious programs ruling the 16th Street corridor this weekend. The Roxie launches Elliot Lavine’s latest dive into film noir’s deep end, while down at the Victoria San Francisco Cinematheque caps its spring season with the second annual Crossroads festival, a veritable bonanza of experimental cinema. I haven’t seen many of the 50-odd works being shown, but the quality of the ones I have makes me think that I wouldn’t trade Crossroads for Cannes.

The fest opens Thursday, May 12 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with the culminating presentation of “Radical Light,” the epic panorama of local alternative cinemas that has lined Cinematheque and the Pacific Film Archive calendars since September 2010. This evening showcases rarely screened works by “Radical Light” mainstays (the Bruces Baillie and Conner, Gunvor Nelson, Scott Stark) as well as the premiere of a new film by Will Hindle, whose topsy-turvy Chinese Firedrill (1968) was one of the gems of a recent program at the museum.

Opening night includes at least one city symphony (Timoleon Wilkins’ Chinatown Sketch), a form expanded upon in several subsequent Crossroads shows. Jeanne Liotta’s aptly titled Crosswalk transcribes an Easter street processional in Loisaida, a Latino enclave of New York City. Liotta, an ambitious filmmaker who ranges over the history of science and the nature of belief, will be at the Victoria Friday, May 13 for the film’s West Coast premiere. Also showing is her beautiful condensation of stargazing, Observando el Cielo (2007).

The scientific method also informs closing night feature, The Observers, a recording of the recorders who gauge the famously extreme weather atop Mount Washington, as well as Saturday, May 14’s “Observers Observed” program. The latter spotlights Get Out of the Car, Thom Andersen’s termite tour of multilingual Los Angeles. In only 33 minutes, Andersen gives us a resonant culture container, looking back at what’s been lost and imagining how it might yet change form.

When Andersen holds out a photograph of what was in front of the landscape that is, he seems to refer to the nested frames of Gary Beydler’s elegant time lapse film, Hand Held Day (1975). You can judge for yourself as that earlier film is included on the same program. Other highlights across the weekend include an evening dedicated to Bay Area maverick Robert Nelson, Ben Russell’s latest consciousness-raising Trypp, a hand-cranked projection performance by Alex MacKenzie, and short films by master collagist Lewis Klahr and some guy named Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I could go on, but you should get going. 

CROSSROADS

Thurs/12–Sun/15, $10 (festival pass, $50)

SFMOMA, 151 Third St., SF

Victoria Theater, 2961 16th St., SF

www.sfcinema.org

 

New resonance

Maria Poblet
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0
New resonance

arts@sfbg.com

The the sleek, the sublime, and the serendipitous hold each other aloft in Smuin Ballet’s spring concert, which runs at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through this coming weekend and then moves to Walnut Creek (May 20-21) and San Mateo (May 25-29). Artistic Director Celia Fushille’s job is to hang on to the Michael Smuin fans and bring in new audiences wanting to see other approaches to choreography. She’s on the right track. Overall, the program, with Cho-San Goh’s much praised, little seen Momentum, the premiere of Amy Seiwert’s Requiem, and Smuin’s bonbon To The Beatles, made for a well balanced, decently performed evening of contemporary ballet.

Seiwert faced what looked like an impossible task: choreographing one of Western music’s sublime choral works, Mozart’s unfinished Requiem. The piece is burdened with all kinds of rigmarole about authenticity, a mysterious visitor, and his connection to Mozart’s death. Additionally, this is a deeply religious, apocalyptic piece of music about the “days of wrath” and a “just and avenging God,” an alien language for many 21st century listeners.

Wisely, Seiwert stayed on the human level. Her stoic Requiem explores the inexorable journey toward death in a manner that is profoundly respectful of the music. She may, however, have restricted herself too much emotionally. creating a chasm between music and dance. Particularly toward the end, when she was trying to approximate a suggestion of transcendence, the choreography didn’t quite convince. Alexander V. Nichols’ design of columns of light and glimpses of an unseen space — and a body being grasped by unseen hands — seemed almost too overt.

Mozart’s Requiem is dramatic, even operatic; Seiwert’s is a quiet meditation on the process of dying — as influenced by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief, which the choreographer claims as an inspiration. In the end Seiwert returns her dancers to the beginning to start the process anew.

Despite what probably is a mismatch between music and dance, Seiwert’s accomplishment is considerable. Her Requiem is a quietly brave and thoughtful interpretation of a great piece of music. She expertly worked with a vocabulary that included a resonant use of the upper body and a gestural language for the arms that sometimes approximated hieroglyphs. Movement motives returned and metamorphosed into rich textures. A sense of loss and loving support pervaded the multiple drops, supports, and lifts. It all started with Erin Yarbrough-Stewart spreading her arms to raise the crumbled performers to begin the dance.

Goh was a Singapore-born choreographer who died of AIDS at 39, in 1987, in the middle of what had been a highly successful career. Some had great hopes for him as “the next Balanchine.” So it was good to see his Momentum, set to Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Flat — notable for its highly percussive piano writing — quite ignored by the choreography.

Set on two primary and three secondary couples, Momentum is striking for the way its liquid and spacious design suggests an ensemble much larger than the mere 10 dancers who keep leaping from the wings. The lead couples smoothly glide in and out of the ensemble, suggesting quasi-egalitarian rather than hierarchical relationships. The costumes — shiny white unitards with black sashes for everyone — enhanced Momentum‘s democratic aspirations. The nonstop work thrives in an attractive windblown environment in which a circle evaporates into duets and men and women confront each other across space only to hook up with each other again. Symmetry and mirror imaging — traditional structural procedures — abound, though Goh often tries to hide them. It’s all very attractive — very balletic, very contemporary — though not very exhilarating.

Yarbrough-Stewart and Jonathan Powell, a fine addition to the company this season, danced the allegro duet; newcomer Jane Rehm, a lovely refined dancer, paired with Travis Walker for the adagio. Momentum‘s choreography is highly exposed — all the time. It would benefit from a more refined performance.

Smuin’s take on the Beatles is slight. It shows the choreographer’s second love, show business, and was an opportunity for the dancers to shine in soft-shoe routines (Powell and Shannon Hurlbut), high kicks (Rehm), tap (Hurlbut), and acrobatics (Yarbrough-Stewart). Former San Francisco Ballet dancer Jonathan Mangosing, however, was a smash in his louche rendering of “Come Together.” 

SMUIN BALLET

Wed/11–Fri/13, 8 p.m.; Sat./14, 2 and 8 p.m.;

Sun./15, 2 p.m.; $20–$62

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

 

Garbage shuffle

Maria Poblet
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1
Garbage shuffle

sarah@sfbg.com

The Department of Public Health has scheduled a May 13 hearing to review allegations that Recology subsidiary Sunset Scavenger overbilled for trash collection at a condominium building for years, resulting in $84,544 in excess charges, erroneously charged the building commercial rates, and is refusing to make a full refund. Recology counters that the building’s managers oversubscribed, and the company gave a three-month refund as a show of good faith, but considers additional refunds punitive.

The hearing should interest the 21 percent of San Francisco residents who own units in condominium buildings. According to the Assessor-Recorder’s Office, 42,478 of the city’s 200,409 recorded parcels are now condominiums, with 3,192 registered as live/work, 38,300 as market rate, 980 as below-market rate, and 958 as commercial condo parcels as of fall 2010.

This struggle between ratepayers and Recology, which controls almost all aspects of the city’s $275 million-a-year waste stream, seems emblematic of the problems that can arise when a monopoly is only partially regulated by local officials (the city does not have oversight of commercial collection rates) and then only in a labyrinthine process.

DPH’s May 13 hearing comes three weeks after the Board’s Budget and Finance Committee voted to wait until July before deciding whether to award the city’s next landfill disposal contract to Recology. And it hits 18 months after the Department of the Environment, which derives half its budget from Recology’s rates, first tentatively awarded the city’s landfill contract to the San Francisco based garbage giant.

Since then critics have questioned how Recology got its monopoly, whether the arrangement benefits rate payers, and whether it makes environmental sense to haul the city’s trash all the way to Yuba County, as Recology is proposing.

In February, the budget and legislative analyst recommended that the city replace existing trash collection and disposal laws with legislation that would require competitive bidding on all aspects of the city’s waste collection, consolidation, and recycling system.

The analyst also recommended requiring that refuse collection rates for residential and commercial services be subject to board approval, noting that competitive bidding could result in reduced refuse collection rates (see “Garbage curveball,” 02/8/11).

“The latest report says that the current system has been in existence since 1932 and let’s put it out to competitive bid,” said budget and legislative analyst Harvey Rose.

A 2002 report by Rose noted that the city has no regulatory authority over commercial refuse rates. “Instead, commercial rates are subject to agreements between the permitted and licensed refuse collectors and individual commercial producers of refuse, commercial tenants and building owners,)” the report stated.

Rose’s report also found that commercial building owners often pay commercial refuse fees to Recology, so tenants don’t know how much they are paying. “Normally, if tenants occupy such buildings for commercial purposes, the commercial refuse fees are passed on to the tenants as part of the overall rent and operating costs. As a result, it is likely that many commercial tenants do not know how much they are actually paying for commercial refuse collection,” the report found.

It also noted that when the analysts attempted to complain about commercial refuse collection and commercial refuse rates (“for audit procedure purposes”) and to inquire how to lodge a complaints with the city, there was “nobody to call.”

Fast-forward nine years, and Golan Yona, who sits on the board of the Alamo Square Board Homeowners Association, which represents 200 residents in a 63-unit building on Fulton Street, claims the city gave him the run-around when he complained that, over a four-year period, Recology subsidiary Sunset Scavenger billed his building to pick up two, two-yard compactor containers three times a week but only picked up one. “Each time one of the bins is being put out for collection, the second bin is connected to the trash chute,” and thus not in service for pickup, Yona said.

But Recology claims that HSM Management, the company the homeowners association hired to manage its building, “oversubscribed” for waste collection. Recology also notes that the commercial rate the association paid resulted in the building being charged a lower monthly cost, but that Sunset recognized this as an “internal error” and therefore is not pursuing collection of the undercharged amounts.

Recology spokesperson Adam Alberti characterized the disagreement as “a pretty simple billing dispute,” even as he claimed that HSM sometimes put two bins curbside.

“Recology has been providing a level of service that was not fully utilized,” Alberti said. “They had two bins and were only setting out one, though there were numerous times throughout the year when they set out two bins.”

Alberti said the responsibility lies with the condo group, which opted for that level of bin service. “At some point they called to discuss ways to reduce their bill, at which point Recology suggested they reduce their service to one bin. At that point, the homeowners association sought compensation,” he said.

“No, this is based on actual consumption,” Yona told the Guardian, claiming that Sunset has no problem charging extra if buildings put out extra bins.

Alberti claims it’s “far more common” for buildings to oversubscribe. “They plan for peak times,” he said. “As a good faith gesture, the company sought to come to terms with the customer — but they weren’t able to do so.”

DPH’s Scott Nakamura confirmed that rate hearings are rare in his department. “This is the first time in 30 years that I have heard of a dispute like this going to the DPH — and I’ve been working here more years than I’d like to admit,” he said.

Based on his experience and Rose’s 2002 report, Yona suspects that the reason for this lack of hearings lies with a lack of process — not a lack of complaints.

Yona held up a flow chart that depicts 17 contacts he had with City Hall in a five-week period as he tried to find out how collection rates are set, how homeowners can determine what their building should be paying, and how they can register complaints.

These included calls to the City Attorney’s Office, Department of Public Works, Department of Public Health, and the DPH’s offices of Environmental Health and Solid Waste.

As a result of his persistence, Yona discovered that the city’s refuse collection and disposal ordinance, adopted Nov. 8, 1932, stipulates that DPH’s director can revoke the license of any refuse collector “for failure in the part of the refuse collector to properly collect refuse, or for overcharging for the collection of same, or for insolence toward persons whose refuse he is collecting.”

In a complaint submitted to DPH director Barbara Garcia on behalf of Alamo Square Board HOA, Yona wrote: “We would like to note that our attempts to talk to the right authority in City Hall have met so far with difficulty. The seriousness of the matter requires intervention of the highest authority in City Hall.” 

Preserving preservation

Maria Poblet
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0
Preserving preservation

EDITORIAL San Francisco has a terrible record preserving its past. In the past 50 years, so many parts of the city’s history have been demolished, bulldozed, flattened, or destroyed in the name of development. The number of landmarks that are gone vastly exceeds the number of buildings or landscape features saved by historic preservation laws.

So when Sup. Scott Wiener called a hearing May 2 to discuss possible changes in the city’s historic preservation policies, it got a lot of neighborhood activists nervous. And for good reason. In a city where developers always seem to call the shots, where blocking a bad project is a difficult and expensive process, anything that removes a weapon from the quivers of the neighborhoods is potentially dangerous.

And coming in the wake of a 6-5 February vote at the board to appoint an unqualified, pro-development candidate to the Historic Preservation Commission, there’s a disturbing trend here. And the supervisors should be careful not to dismantle the protections that the 2008 ballot measure, Proposition J, put in place to protect the city’s history.

Wiener assures us he’s not out to gut preservation — he supported Prop. J and doesn’t think that the preservation movement has gone too far. “I just want to make sure that we are taking into account other policy priorities,” he said.

Wiener pointed to a few potential situations where historic preservation could get in the way of improvements to transportation and streetscapes. The street lights along Van Ness Avenue might have to be removed to make a bus rapid transit lane work — and some people might consider them historic structures. Pedestrian safety improvements along Dolores Street might require minor changes in the tree-lined median, which is not a landmark but potentially could be. He’s looking at changes in the City Planning Code provisions dealing with historic preservation — and potentially, with the way the Planning Department applies the California Environmental Quality Act.

There are always times when preservation conflicts with progress, and there will always be dubious uses of preservation law. But overall, in the course of many, many years, the pendulum has swung far in the other direction: historic preservation has been trumped again and again by the greed and political power of developers and the construction industry. And even well-meaning attempts to adjust city law will almost certainly become loopholes for more destruction.

Almost everything good in this city, from the cable cars to the Presidio, has been threatened with extinction at some point. Battling to save the city’s treasures is a full-time occupation.

There are ways to balance preservation against valid public policies like the need for affordable housing (almost never blocked by preservationists) and street improvements (one anti-bicycle character delayed new bike lanes for years, but not on the grounds of historic preservation). But there has to be a clear line: no changes or loopholes aimed at helping private, for-profit developers. Nothing that limits the ability of neighborhood groups to stop the destruction of city history.

The problem in San Francisco is not too much historic preservation, it’s that we allow too much to get lost. That’s why Wiener needs to tread lightly on this ground — and his colleagues have to make sure he doesn’t go too far. 

 

Editor’s notes

Maria Poblet
-
8
Editor’s notes

tredmond@sfbg.com

I’m tired of stories about poor San Francisco landlords. Because residential landlords in San Francisco have a great gig — and almost none have any right to complain about it.

The latest tale appeared in The New York Times May 1, with a longer version in the Bay Citizen the same day. It involves Wayne Koniuk, who owns a building on Divisadero Street. He has a shop where he makes prosthetic devices and two units upstairs.

Koniuk inherited the building from his father. He cleared out one of the units and moved in one of his sons. Now he wants to evict the tenant in the remaining unit — Robert Murphy, a senior citizen and retired union worker living on a fixed income — so he can move in his other son. Turns out that’s not easy. Koniuk is upset, and the Times presents his case: after all, Koniuk owns the building. Why can’t his children live there?

It’s an interesting question that drives a lot of passions in this town (the Bay Citizen has almost 100 comments on the story; my blog post on the subject has 65). And it gets to the heart of what rent control and regulations on property and land use are about.

See, by law — and public policy — the fact that Koniuk owns the building and Murphy rents is largely irrelevant. A long-term tenant in a protected class (in this case, someone over 60) who pays the rent on time every month and has created no nuisance has a right to stay there, except in limited circumstances. Yes, that’s an infringement on the “ownership” right of the landlord — but those rights are already strictly limited. I own a house — but not the right to demolish it, or the right to build a second unit in the basement and rent it out, or the right to add three stories to the top, or the right to turn it into a gas station or a Burger King. I knew those things when I bought the place — and if I didn’t, I should have. In San Francisco — a dense city with tight zoning laws and a legally certified housing crisis — property owners have limited rights.

They also have low property taxes (under Prop. 13), and the value of their investments keeps rising. Not a bad deal at all.

When you buy, or inherit, a building with a tenant who qualifies for protection under the city’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance, you don’t have the right to raise the rent more than a certain percentage every year. And you don’t have the right to evict the person, except for what the law calls just cause. (Just cause, by the way, typically does allow eviction to move in a relative — but it’s harder if you’ve already done one such eviction and if the tenant is a senior or disabled.)

Koniuk has a place to live (in Belmont); both his sons have places to live. They are, by definition, better off than Murphy, who is facing the prospect of no place to live at all. I’m not shedding any tears for the poor landlord. 

 

Boxed out

Maria Poblet
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5
Boxed out

rebeccab@sfbg.com

The Board of Supervisors is gearing up to revisit whether telecommunications giant AT&T should be permitted to install 726 new metal boxes on city sidewalks for a communications network upgrade, without completing an environmental impact review.

At an April 26 meeting, the board spent several tedious hours listening to concerns such as whether the boxes would attract graffiti or clutter the sidewalks, and debated the finer points of whether the project could legally be considered exempt, ultimately resolving to take up the issue again May 24.

Meanwhile, a small cadre of tech-savvy San Franciscans has seized on this debate as an opportunity to drum up enthusiasm for an alternate vision of a citywide communications future, one with faster connection speeds that wouldn’t necessarily be controlled by the AT&T and Comcast duopoly.

At the meeting, AT&T California President Ken McNeely, dressed in a sharp suit, trumpeted the company’s proposed upgrade, part of a new system called U-verse. “This is the largest single upgrade to the San Francisco local phone network in more than a century,” he said. “Our network will provide the next-generation IP technologies that San Francisco needs to provide if it wants to continue to attract the best and brightest in the region.”

Yet Rudy Rucker, bearded and clad in a camouflage T-shirt, sounded a different note. “The U.S. is No. 30 in the world in Internet speed,” he said. “The boxes are not the way to go. What we need to do is rework the entire infrastructure of how we do communications in the city. We’re relying on copper lines. We need to pull all those out, recycle the copper, and put in fiber-optic cable.” Rucker is a cofounder of MonkeyBrains, an independent Internet service provider (ISP) based in San Francisco.

AT&T’s U-verse upgrade would enable it to offer connection speeds three times faster than current service — but not nearly as fast as what fiber proponents envision. Several members of the tech industry interviewed by the Guardian cautioned that another AT&T upgrade might be necessary after less than a decade to keep pace with technological advancement. At that point, it’s anyone’s guess whether those boxes would continue to be useful. AT&T did not respond to a query from the Guardian.

SPEED FREAKS

When it comes to Internet speeds, the United States trails Asia and some European countries. “We’ve fallen from first place,” said Ashwin Navin, who founded several tech startups including a file-sharing company called BitTorrent. “It’s really put our software and technology industry at a disadvantage.”

According to a website that compares connection speeds using data compilation, California ranks 23rd in the nation, while San Francisco doesn’t even clear the top 30 cities nationwide, Navin noted.

Yet much faster connection speeds are possible — even commonplace — in countries such as Japan and Singapore. “Right now, the average download speed in San Francisco is something around eight megabits,” explained Dana Sniezko, who’s emerged as a tech activist since creating a website called SF Fiber, which calls for a neutral, open, affordable community fiber network. “What U-verse is going to offer is about three times that. Something like fiber can offer service that’s 1,000 megabits [called a gigabit], or even much larger than that. Fiber allows you to really have a huge capacity for the future.”

Put in practical terms, Sniezko said, the difference between a connection speed of eight megabits and a gigabit amounts to downloading a full-length feature film in 90 minutes, versus several seconds. And since fiber also can deliver faster upload speeds, it opens the door to new possibilities. “It lets individuals potentially come up with really innovative and creative ideas,” Sniezko said. “If you wanted to have your own streaming TV channel from your house, you could. Or anything, really.”

Fiber already exists under San Francisco city streets — but most places lack the direct connections to homes or businesses, so the capacity is not realized. The city’s Department of Technology and Information Services (DTIS) convened a study in 2007 for developing the infrastructure to create a full-fiber network, deeming fiber “the holy grail of communications networking: unlimited capacity, long life, and global reach.”

Since then, progress has been slow. AT&T’s new system would also be based on fiber, but information would still travel to homes or offices over copper phone lines, resulting in slower speeds than a direct connection could supply.

On a recent afternoon, MonkeyBrains cofounder Alex Menendez scrambled up a ladder leading from his small Potrero Hill office space to show off some rooftop antennas and laser devices. There was a clear view from the flat, sunny roof to the office building the laser was pointed at, many blocks away. Secured to a hand-built metal stand, the gadgets were part of the company’s high-speed Internet network, which counts KQED among its roughly 1,000 subscribers.

Menendez was explaining how his small company is able to use these microwave devices in combination with fiber-optic cables to provide high-speed Internet by leapfrogging from node to node throughout San Francisco.

Menendez said he didn’t feel strongly one way or another about AT&T’s metal boxes. “But it raises a more interesting issue: what’s the 50-year-down-the-line solution? There’s much better technology out there. It could be super-affordable, with a wide-open, massive amount of bandwidth.”

But, he added, it won’t happen without the support of local government.

MISSED CONNECTIONS

The City and County of San Francisco owns an underground fiber-optic network spanning more than 110 miles, used mostly for municipal and emergency purposes. AT&T has its own fiber — and with a history going back more than a century in San Francisco, it also has a lock on the market.

AT&T owns underground cables, copper phone lines, and rights-of-way, making it necessary for small market players to interface with the corporation and pay fees. This makes it difficult for local ISPs to compete on any meaningful scale. “They have the right to trench the street,” Menendez explained. “We don’t.”

Mendendez and others are looking at micro-trenching as a possible way around this. Last summer, Google hosted an event at its Mountain View headquarters called the Micro-trenching Olympics (“A very Google-y thing to do,” according to a company representative speaking in a YouTube video) to find out which contractor could best slice a one-inch wide, nine-inch deep trench in a parking lot and install fiber-optic cable inside. The idea behind micro-trenching is that it’s fast and minimally disruptive — and best of all, it doesn’t interfere with existing infrastructure, so there’s no need to pay a fee to AT&T, or any other company.

Some in the tech community are hoping it will signify a new and efficient way to link fiber-optic cable directly to homes and businesses, ultimately resulting in the kind of Internet speed that would let you download a movie in less than ten seconds. With micro-trenching, there would be no need for utility boxes.

Navin, Mendendez, and several others have talked up the idea of micro-trenching a small area in the Mission District to bring fiber-optic, high-speed Internet to an entire neighborhood. Yet their early conversations with the city’s Department of Public Works suggest that it may be a slow process. “They were like, ‘What is this?'” Menendez recounted. “There’s no established permitting process.”

Meanwhile, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu recently asked DTIS to examine the possibility of leasing excess capacity on city-owned dark-fiber infrastructure, which is currently in place but not being used. This could boost bandwidth for entities such as nonprofits, health care facilities, biotech companies, digital media companies, or universities, Chiu said, while bolstering city coffers. “There are many places in town that need a lot more bandwidth, and this is an easy way to provide it,” he said.

Sniezko noted that other cities have created open-access networks to deploy fiber. “This is really effective because it’s a lot like a public utility,” she explained. “The city or someone fills a pipe, and then anyone who wants to run information or service on that pipe can do so. They pay a leasing fee. This has worked in many places in Europe, and they actually do it in Utah. In many cases, it’s really cool — because it’s publicly owned and it’s neutral. There’s no prioritizing traffic for one thing over another, or limitation on who’s allowed to offer service on the network. It … creates some good public infrastructure, and also allows for competition, and it sort of revives the local ISP. Chiu’s proposal is a little bit in that vein, it sounds like. But he hasn’t released a lot of details on it yet, so we’re still looking.”

Visit www.sffiber.info for more info

 

The rise of bike culture

Maria Poblet
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6
The rise of bike culture

steve@sfbg.com

San Francisco has quickly peddled back into the front of the pack among bicycle-friendly U.S. cities, regaining the ground it lost during a four-year court injunction against new bike projects that was partially lifted in November 2009 and completely ended last June.

Since then, the streets of San Francisco have been transformed as the city completed 19 long overdue bike projects, including 11 miles of new bike lanes, 40 miles of “sharrow” shared lane markings, and hundreds of new bike racks. The city’s first physically separated green bike lanes on Market Street are now being extended, and new ones are being added on Alemany and Laguna Honda boulevards.

“The crews are out on Market Street right now filling in the new green bikeway,” San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Director Leah Shahum told us on May 6. “Far and away the No. 1 encouragement to getting people to bike is to make sure they feel safe.”

But it isn’t just bike lanes and other infrastructure that are causing bicycling to blossom in San Francisco. Bike culture is also exploding in myriad ways, including events such as the San Francisco Bike Party and Rock the Bike shows we profile in this issue, as well as the popularity of the monthly neighborhood street closures of Sunday Streets.

At the most recent Sunday Streets in the Mission District on May 8, Valencia and 24th streets were packed with thousands of people riding bikes, skating, and walking, or engaged with activities — in streets usually dominated by cars — such as yoga, art projects, shopping, and dancing.

“It’s a celebration. It’s not about confrontation anymore, it’s about bringing people along with a more expanded idea of how we can use public space,” Sunday Streets Coordinator Susan King told us at the event.

She said Sunday Streets has helped bridge the gap between families and the bicycling and skating communities, as well as cutting across classes, cultures, and communities. The response to the event has been phenomenal, she noted, and she hopes to see a similar momentum leading up to the next Sunday Streets event on June 12 in the Bayview.

“The Bayview event is really important to us because we have extraordinary support from the Bayview merchants and they want to get more involved with the bicycling community,” King said.

The earnest work of SFBC, SFMTA, and other entities that have helped expand the bicycling infrastructure in San Francisco, bringing safe cycling opportunities into every neighborhood, has in turn allowed organic expressions of bike culture to flourish.

From hipsters on their colorful fixies to anarchists riding tall bikes, from old-school Schwinns to cargo-laden Xtracycles, from elaborate art bikes to simple bike trailers with amazing sounds systems, from old white guys in Spandex to the young black kids on custom scraper bikes, from the hardcore bike messengers to the tourists on rental bikes, from Critical Mass defiance to Bike Party celebration, the streets of San Francisco are brimming with bike culture diversity. And the only commonality, the only one that’s really needed, is a simple appreciation for pedal power.

“We need to get the message out that biking is fun — and that’s happening,” Smith said. “We need a paradigm shift, and I think we’re really on the cusp of that.”

BIKE TO WORK DAY

Energizer commute stations open:

Thurs/12 7:30–9:30 a.m. and 5–7 p.m., free

Check map on page 28 for locations

Bike From Work party and fashion show

Thurs/12 6–10 p.m., $5 SFBC members/$10 nonmembers (or join at the door and get in free)

DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF

www.sfbike.org

Kids on bikes

Maria Poblet
-
0
Kids on bikes

news@sfbg.com

To meet San Francisco’s policy goal of having 20 percent of all vehicle trips made by bicycle by the year 2020, advocates and officials say the city will need to make cycling more attractive to the young and old, from age 8 to 80. But there are some built-in challenges to getting more school children on bikes, even if there has been some recent progress, as demonstrated during the Bike to School Day in April.

“I see more and more middle and high school teams out there,” Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, said of the group rides to and from school that parents have been organizing.

According to a 2009 David Binder poll, seven out of 10 residents in San Francisco use a bicycle (this includes regular commuters and once-a-year riders) and last year’s city count of bike ridership from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s annual report saw a 58 percent increase in the number of cyclists on the road. At any given time during regular business weekday hours, some 9,210 riders pedal through the streets, according to last year’s results.

Children account for some of that increase, as demonstrated by the Bike to School Day event and its 3,000 riders — the most ever. Shahum attributes some of the increase to the new separated bikeways on Market Street, Alemany Boulevard, and Laguna Honda Boulevard, which allow children and their parents to feel safer. “When the bikeway was introduced, the numbers increased — there is growing demand.”

Programs like the Department of Public Health’s Safe Routes to School and SF Unified School District’s Student Support Services Department are helping to raise awareness of the improvements to encourage more cycling by young people.

Safe Routes to School Project Coordinator Ana Validzic said cycling is often more convenient than driving to school, particularly given the difficult parking situations at schools. Martha Adriasola, a committee member for the program, said parents and students also are attracted by the increased physical activity from cycling.

But a large portion of San Francisco’s grade school-bound population has yet to join the pedal revolution. Adriasola mentioned several reasons that prevent children from biking, including getting to schools on hills or far from home as well as the lack of bike storage at schools.

“There used to be a lot of concern about where to keep the bicycles,” Adriasola told the Guardian. But that’s changing thanks to a recent grant from the Department of Sustainability will provide bike racks for students at all schools in the district.

“That was one of the missing pieces,” Shahum said of the bike racks. “The district understands that it is good for the city for folks to ride their bikes.”

With new racks lining the campuses, the question remains whether there will be enough riders to fill them. Efforts to improve diversity in the school system and parent preferences for certain schools mean many kids travel across town to school.

Gentle Blythe, SFUSD’s executive director of public outreach and communications, said that last year the school board modified its school selection system to encourage more students to attend their local schools by resolving ties between applicants based on whether the applicant lives in the school’s attendance area. Currently, Blythe said, three out of every four applicants list a school that is not the one closest to their home as their first choice.

According to SFUSD’s 2010 fall enrollment maps, which show all the district’s elementary schools and compares them to the students’ residences, most of the 72 schools have as many students traveling from across the district as those living within a mile of the campus. Parker Elementary in North Beach is such an example, with an almost equal number living inside and outside the neighborhood, including some who live as far away as Visitacion Valley.

With such a long way to ride, it’s difficult for parents and those concerned with safety to feel comfortable allowing children to ride. But Shahum believes it’s still possible. SFBC’s Connecting the City project advocates for safe, cross-town bikeways throughout the city, which could draw more children onto the streets.

Shahum noted that bicycling increased dramatically even when there was a court injunction barring new bike projects. “Imagine the change we can expect when the changes do come,” she said.

She also said that events such as Sunday Streets, the monthly carfree streets events, are attracting families and encouraging them to start cycling together. So the answer to encouraging more youth cycling may be to make the streets safer and more inviting for everyone.

“We hope, through the Connecting the City vision, to see people riding on cross-town bikeways — for everyone from 8 to 80.” she said. 

Bedbugs and pickpockets: a non-travelers tale

Andrew Lam
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3

I am a hotel aficionado. I wrote my undergraduate thesis in a New Haven hotel lobby, watching the light fade from pink to orange to a deep purple-blue each night, sometimes not leaving until the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass began to brighten with the morning.


Some of my favorite places in San Francisco are hotels: I love their bars and cafes, awash at all hours with a tide of voices bubbling forth in languages I don’t understand. I love the scale and grandeur of the marble foyers and reams of upholstery. I love making up stories about the passers-by: this one with jetlagged eyes and too much eyeliner; that one walking an unwieldy assortment of shopping bags like too many dogs; the last, an anachronism with a cigar and seersucker.


Like the airport bar, hotels hold all the romance of a moment suspended: an alternate reality, set apart from the day-to-day. Of course, most people associate traveling with a whole set of very real hassles – from which, I found out yesterday, my little non-vacation vacations are not immune. I experienced some authenticity along with all that atmosphere: in the lush upholstery, bedbugs, and among the tides of travelers, at least one very skilled pickpocket.


Picture me: a steaming pot of Earl Grey, settling into a sofa, the sun slanting through the gauzy drapes. No sooner have I unfolded my laptop and set Pandora to supply the elevator music (embarrassing but true) than I feel a tickle on my neck. Absentmindedly, I brush it away, and there – sitting right there on my hand – is an impudent, shameless, full-grown bedbug.


I’d like to point out that I am not a paranoid person. But the bedbug’s reputation precedes him, and the tales of horror are too overwhelming to take lightly. Bedbugs, parasites that snack on human blood, can survive temperatures that dip below freezing and soar above 100 degrees. They can go months without feeding – some say more than a year. More than enough to warrant my jumping, yelping reaction.


I smushed the bug, heart racing, and looked for the nearest escape. But simply running away would not do. Instead, I needed to assess my situation.


I put Mr. Bug in a Ziploc bag (despite a thorough smashing, he waved jauntily as I sealed him shut) and began to examine the couch. Bedbugs particularly like seams, corners, rolls in the fabric, and cording. If an infestation is severe, piles of cast-off skins and small white eggs can be found in little caches. The bugs also leave dark brown droppings dotted over areas where they have recently fed.


My search didn’t reveal much, but adults – flat, rusty-brown, and about the size of a pencil-eraser – generally hide during the day. Nymphs range from .5-4mm – easily small enough to hitch a ride on clothing, shoes, luggage, or hair without arousing suspicion. Once they reach their new home, they will burrow into the cracks around baseboards, to say nothing of the raging party they will have in mattresses.


The thing about bed bugs is that they can come from anywhere. Even if a hotel is scrupulous about maintenance, any person who walks in and sits on a couch can bring them and transfer them to the next person. Females lay eggs continuously (300 in a lifetime) so a lone straggler is enough to start an infestation.


So, I did what any sane and sensible person in my position would: I politely informed the hotel staff that I had found the dreaded critter, and then I got the heck out. I had the urge to tear off my clothes and burn them, but I settled for locking myself in the bathroom of the hotel next door and performing a careful inspection. I would need to wash my clothes in hot water and dry on “high” when I got home – a good policy for all travelers, especially if they’ve received suspicious bites on their trip. Suitcases should also be thoroughly inspected and vacuumed.


I said good-bye to Mr. Bug and threw him out in his sealed Ziploc – never throw out infested items (such as vacuum bags used to clean buggy furniture) without sealing them first – and sighed, secure in the knowledge that I’d sufficient precautions.


I settled down with a new pot of Earl Grey in my new hotel, ready to regain my earlier calm. It was a bustling lobby of tiny tables overflowing with a tipsy happy-hour crowd. Hotel happy hours are another reason I love this city’s hospitality industry: the bartenders are less hassled than at the typical neighborhood watering hole, and the people-watching is far better.
After a happy few hours (during which I switched from plain tea to G&T), I had finished a pile of work and was ready to pack up. I bid adieu to the bartender and looked for my pocketbook to leave a tip.


It was gone.


For the second time that day, I found myself groveling on the floor, lifting up couch cushions, and sweeping through curtains. I wished I’d had enough to drink to call the whole thing a hallucination, but by the time I found myself riffling the leaves of the potted plants, I had to admit that my wallet was not going to reappear.


I dumped out my purse (which is really just a canvas shoulder bag) I realized my phone was gone, too. Both had been in the bag, which had spent the last couple hours hanging on the back of my chair. This, obviously, was a huge mistake.
In all that cheery hustle and bustle, I’d been totally hustled. I have to hand it to my assailant – who, I’ll deduce from the $800 Nordstrom splurge, was a woman. She managed to get both items out of my possession without my noticing a thing. Of course, I did her a huge favor by favoring an open-style bag without a zipper or other closure. I love that my laptop and other sundries fit in the loose sack, and Ms. X loved that it enabled her to take a quick trip to Saks.


In just a few hours, Ms. X loaded a total of $6,000 of charges onto my Merrill Lynch Visa. To their credit, the folks at Chase Bank didn’t let the same thing happen to my debit card – when I called the hotline, a representative read me a list of fraudulent charges they had denied. Five minutes and a few identifying security questions later, I was slated to receive a new card in the mail.


It may seem obvious, but if your wallet is stolen, the absolute first order of business is to cancel your cards – even if means spending, as I did, the hours of 12 a.m. to 3 a.m. on the phone with a series of outsourced Visa workers. Word to the wise: it’s far easier to call your bank directly than deal with your credit card company. Like most US banks, Merrill Lynch has a 24-hour customer support line, and if I’d dialed it rather than the number I found on the Visa website, I’d have bypassed a long painful process. Furthermore, only my bank was able to tell me what charges had been made, and what I will need to do to reverse them.


And then there’s the police report: it’s a pain, especially because fraudulent charges mean you must appear at the station in-person, rather than filing online or by phone. But it’s also crucial in case you have troubles down the road with your bank, credit card company, or someone who wants to pretend they’re you. Reports are kept on file, and copies may be requested at a later date.


Verizon received an A+ for swiftly cutting service to my cell phone, switching me back to my old dumb-as-a-brick phone, and automatically crediting charges for my no longer needed data plan. By then, it was 4:00 a.m. The next day, I would need to tackle the new driver’s license, the new student ID, and the new keys. But first, I needed a good night’s sleep – in my own non-vaction home, in my bed bug-free bed.

Mayor Lee to partially implement Campos’ due process ordinance

Mary Magee
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1
Mayor Lee to partially implement Campos’ due process ordinance

Today at question time, Sup. Jane Kim will ask Mayor Ed Lee what his plan is to implement a due process ordinance that Sup. David Campos authored and a super majority of the Board approved in 2009, prohibiting the Juvenile Probation Department from reporting undocumented youths at the time of arrest. And according to an anonymous source, Lee will say he has decided to implement the policy, if the youth in question are “accompanied,” which means they have family here.

Immigrant advocates say Mayor Lee should be commended for his leadership in implementing the due process policy to keep immigrant families together. But they believe that Lee needs to go the whole way. “Immigrant and civil rights groups are adamant that the policy must be implemented for all youth, accompanied and unaccompanied, and this has to be immediately,” our source said. “The due process policy does not discriminate between these two groups and the policy cannot be selectively enforced.”
 
As Kim planned to point out during the Board’s question time, voters approved San Francisco’s Sanctuary City Ordinance in 1989. That ordinance prohibits our Police Department and local government officials from assisting in the prosecution of immigration enforcement unless it is required under federal or state law.

In 2009, the Board, under Campos’ leadership, passed-by a supermajority-a clarification to that ordinance to prohibit local law enforcement from reporting undocumented youths unless they are convicted of a felony. To date, this ordinance has not been followed by the City.

But in a May 9 memo to the city’s Probation Department personnel, Juvenile Probation Department Chief Probation Officer William Siffermann and Assistant Chief Probation Officer Allen Nance wrote that since revising JPD’s policy 8.12 nearly three years ago [per Mayor Gavin Newsom’s instructions], they have closely monitored JPD’s implementation of its protocols.

And after considering all perspectives and after careful review, they have decided to “modify our existing policy in a manner that aligns our Departmental policies more closely with the values inherent within San Francisco’s Sanctuary City ordinance, without compromising our balanced commitment to public safety and the best interests of the minor.”

“Effective immediately, San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department notices to the federal authorities of minor/persons booked on felonies who are suspected of being undocumented AND are accompanied (lives with a verifiable parent, guardian or blood relative in the immediate Bay Area and is enrolled in school) will be made only upon a felony adjudication, upon apprehension on an outstanding warrant, or upon issuance of a new warrant following release from custody pending adjudication,” the JPD memo reads. “Minor/persons booked on felonies who are suspected as being undocumented, AND are verified adults or unaccompanied by any verifiable parent, guardian or blood relative residing in the Bay Area, whether or not enrolled in school, will continue to be reported to the federal authorities upon determination of this status.”

“Policy 8.12 will continue to ensure that all suspected undocumented minors booked and convicted of committing a felony will continue to be reported to the federal authorities,” the JPD memo continues. ‘While the Department will neither assist nor interfere with the federal authorities’ overwhelming duties and responsibilities related to the enforcement of immigration laws, we will continue to honor their lawful detainers regarding suspected illegal immigrants.”

“We are confident that your uniform compliance with this policy adjustment will continue to reflect the Department’s interest and your professional commitment to preserving families while we discharge all of our many duties that protect public safety,” the JPD memo concludes.

Our Weekly Picks: May 11-17, 2011

Maria Poblet
-
0

WEDNESDAY 11

PERFORMANCE

“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!”

Studio Gracia artist-in-residence Bianca Cabrera employs her saucy cabaret style in orchestrating a series of lusty hump days in May. On Wednesday evenings this month, Cabrera performs among “contemporary dance, cover bands, showgirls, cowgirls, and boygirls,” plus “drinking and feasting.” Guest performers for this week’s installment, themed “Camp Songs,” include the Fossettes, Hailey Gaiser, Rasa Vitalia, LevyDance, and Serpent and the Rainbow. Come back the following Wednesdays for “May I be Frank?” and “Dance off! Hands On!” Like a huge airy living room with a dance floor, bar, and comfy couches, Studio Gracia is ideal for salon-type performance gatherings like these. Hedonists welcome. (Julie Potter)

Wed/11, May 18, and May 25, 9 p.m., $10

Studio Gracia

19 Heron, SF

(206) 293-6630

www.studiogracia.com


FRIDAY 13

MUSIC

The Cars

Assuming we all just go ahead and overlook the Ric Ocasek-less, Todd Rundgren-fronted cash cow absurdity that was the New Cars, 2011 marks the first legitimate Cars reunion in more than two decades. With the original lineup intact (minus bassist-vocalist Benjamin Orr, who lost a battle with pancreatic cancer in 2000), the Boston new wave and synthpop innovators have even managed to record an album of all new material. Move Like This is surprisingly solid not just in its execution, but in its avoidance of the trappings of modern trend piggybacking that can often afflict older bands trying to regain relevance. Instead, the group has gone the tasteful route and made an album that perfectly adheres to the style, instrumentation, and production of its classic work. (Landon Moblad)

8 p.m., $49.50

Fox Theater

1807 Telegraph, Oakl.

(510) 302-2277

www.thefoxoakland.com


MUSIC

Peter Bjorn and John

There are some things I will never get sick of. Peanut butter and jelly, for instance: if stuck on an uninhabited, heretofore uncharted island I hope that the coconuts are full of that slightly salty, sweet combination. I want to unabashedly say the same about the other PB&J, but there was a period where “Young Folks” became so oversaturated that just hearing someone whistle made me wish I were marooned. But let’s be honest, someone had to write that song, and the Swedes went for it then as much as now, saying on their cowbell-smacking recent single “You can’t, can’t count on a second chance. A second chance will never be found.” (Ryan Prendiville)

With Bachelorette

9 p.m., $26

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com


EVENT

“Go Go Mania!”

All right all you hip cats and crazy chicks — you know you’re still out there — it’s time to grab your dancin’ shoes, slick back your hair, and get ready for a blistering blast from the past tonight at “Go Go Mania!”, a show featuring seductive burlesque set to the rollicking sounds of live rockabilly. The lovely ladies of San Francisco’s Devil-Ettes will strut their stuff; Burlesque A Go Go with La Chica Boom, Kellita, and Kiki Bomband dazzle the eyes; and a who’s who of excellent musicians including Deke Dickerson, Los Shimmy Shakers, Royal Deuces, and more provide the sultry soundtrack. (Sean McCourt)

8 p.m., $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com


DANCE

Body Evidence

Choreographer Opiyo Okach presents a work-in-progress showing of his latest solo, Body Evidence — offering an opportunity to engage with the artist in an informal setting and learn about his creative process. Currently working in Kenya and France, Okach’s influences trace back to mime and physical theater training in London, as well as memorable exchanges with legendary Senegalese and French choreographer Germaine Acogny. Okach demonstrates simplicity and elegance through his improvisation style, which examines the role of the body in shaping 21st century global culture and the power of the individual. The artistic director of the first contemporary dance company in Kenya, Okach continues to be a dance leader for the country. (Potter)

Fri/13–Sat/14, 8 p.m., $10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org


MUSIC

Prizehog

After a long five days of work, what’s your preferred Friday night: rocking out or zoning out? Noisy, sludgy, even ambient at times, Prizehog satisfies both. Formed in 2006, the San Francisco foursome resides in the realm of the low and weighted, where droning heaviness is prerequisite. Headliner Diesto, hailing from our sister city Portland, Ore., is similarly massive, having been compared more than once to the uncompromisingly experimental band, the Jesus Lizard and the deep, dark Eyehategod. This show will be the whole bill’s second performance of the evening (following an earlier set at an Oakland café), and just might, or might not, be Prizehog’s first LP release show. (Kat Renz)

With Diesto and Attitude Problem

9:30 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com


PERFORMANCE

CubaCaribe Festival

The sizzling CubaCaribe Festival has become a growth industry. It has jammed Dance Mission Theater with enthusiastic back-talking crowds for the last six years. Now the three-weekend event is expands to the East Bay while also increasing the range of its programming. This year it includes spoken word artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Jacinta Vlach’s urban Liberation Dance Theater. The first weekend at the home base in the Mission is dedicated to Haitian-influenced dance and choreography from the New York City-based Danis “La Mora” Pérez’s Oyu Oro and Collete Eloi’s El Wah Movement. The following week offers a kaleidoscopic diaspora mix, and as is the tradition, the last weekend focuses on CubaCaribe artistic director Ramon Ramos Alaya’s own choreography, including the deeply felt 2005 La Madre. (Rita Felciano)

Fri/13–Sat/14, 8 p.m.; Sun/15, 7 p.m., $12–$24

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St., SF

May 20–21, 8 p.m.; May 22, 3 p.m., $10–$24

Malonga Casquelourd Theater

1428 Alice, Oakl.

May 26–28, 8 p.m., $12–$24

Laney College Theater

900 Fallon, Oakl.

www.cubacaribe.org


SATURDAY 14

MUSIC

Man Man

Philadelphia’s Man Man is one of the more unabashedly fun bands to operate under the often gaudy guise of “experimental rock.” Mashing up some Rain Dogs-era Tom Waits with bits of Balkan street folk, 1950s doo-wop, and carnival punk, the four-piece somehow manages to craft a recognizable sound despite the eclecticism in its influences. But Man Man’s real strength is never losing sight of song structure and its knack for strong vocal hooks. Stylistic left turns that may initially seem jarring quickly begin to start making sense, as ringleader Honus Honus propels the band’s high-energy live shows with his piano playing and suitably hoarse vocals. The band is touring in support of its new album, Life Fantastic, which it recorded with Mike Mogis from Bright Eyes and Monsters of Folk. (Moblad)

With Shipa Ray and Her Happy Hookers

9 p.m., $18

Bimbo’s 365 Club

1025 Columbus, SF

(415) 474-0365

www.bimbos365club.com


SUNDAY 15

MUSIC

“Vocal Alchemy”

Interdisciplinary performer Meredith Monk joins forces with the eight-member Bay Area women’s vocal arts ensemble, Kitka, in performance. For their first concert together, Monk, a pioneer in extended vocal technique, and Kitka, known for its haunting ancient and contemporary-sounding vocal effects, perform a program of Monk’s trailblazing work, which includes the world premieres of Phantom Voices and Quilting, the West Coast premieres of selections from Quarry, Volcano Songs, American Archeology #1: Roosevelt Island, and The Politics of Quiet, and excerpts from Atlas, Book of Days, Facing North, impermanence, and The Games. Monk’s work invites you to hear the amazing capabilities of the voice. Get ready for an evening of distinct and astonishing sound. (Potter)

7 p.m., $36–$41

Jewish Community Center of San Francisco

Kanbar Hall

3200 California, SF

(415) 292-1200

www.jccsf.org FILM

 

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Walt Disney’s 1954 film adaptation of Jules Verne’s classic novel 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is a classic in its own right. It’s a picture from the days when the Disney studio pushed the envelope of filmmaking with innovative special effects and visual design — the Nautilus and giant squid among the iconic images — but added a magical mix of a great story and a stellar cast as well. James Mason’s performance as the intensely driven and disturbed Captain Nemo remains the standard for all other portrayals, and Kirk Douglas clearly enjoyed playing the swingin’ and singin’ (“Whale of a Tale!”) harpooner Ned Land. And who can forget his fine, flippered female companion Esmerelda? Not every sea lion gets wined, dined, and serenaded by Hollywood royalty! (McCourt)

2 and 6:40 p.m., $7.50–$10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com


MUSIC

Saviours

Local metal darlings Saviours have been diligently writing the band’s fourth full-length record, says vocalist-guitarist Austin Barber. The band is debuting at least half its new songs along this balls out, week-long West Coast tour, a road test to get ready to record next month. Barber called the new tracks “epic and doomy — we pulled back the reins a little bit,” compared to the blatantly thrashy Accelerated Living (Kemado, 2009). Note that it’s an evening show, and Eli’s hardly hesitates to sweep everyone out by 10:59 p.m. (And yeah, there’s an Elbo Room show on Monday, but don’t you love Eli’s back patio?) Regardless, heed Barber’s warning: “The other bands are sick, so get there early.” (Renz)

With Midnight, Lightning Swords of Death, Archons

6 p.m., $10

Eli’s Mile High Club

3629 Marin Luther King Junior Blvd., Oakl.

(510) 350-7818

www.elismilehigh.com

Also Mon/16

9 p.m., $10

Elbo Room

647 Valencia, SF

(415) 552-7788

www.elbo.com


MONDAY 16

MUSIC

“Magic 8-Ball Tour with A-Trak, Kid Sister, Gaslamp Killer, and Jeffrey Paradise”

Half of Kanye West’s success has been in picking collaborators. (The other half is their agreeing to work with him.) West certainly scored a coup bringing A-Trak into his entourage as tour DJ in 2004. Already an honorary member of Invisibl Skratch Piklz, A-Trak had won a DJ World Championship by age 15. Now he’s at the center of the New York City party scene, with the Fool’s Gold label and Armand Van Helden production collab Duck Sauce. (Their song “Barbra Streisand” will either make them your savior or the Antichrist.) This will be a relatively intimate (insane) show for the arena DJ. (Prendiville) With Sleazemore, Eli Glad, and Shane King

8 p.m., $25

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

 

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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. 

THEATER

OPENING

Candide of California 1620 Gough; www.custommade.org. $10-28. Previews Fri/13-Sat/14, 8pm. Opens Tues/17, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through June 4. Custom Made Theatre presents this modernized version of the Voltaire tale, which was a hit at the SF Fringe Festival.

Risk is This…The Cutting Ball New Experimental Plays Festival EXIT on Taylor, 227 Taylor; (800) 838-3006, www.cuttingball.com. $20-50. Opens Fri/13, 8pm. Runs Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through June 25. Cutting Ball Theater closes its 11th season with a festival of experimental plays, including works by Eugenie Chan, Rob Melrose, and Annie Elias.

BAY AREA

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear Avenue, Mtn View; (650) 254-1148, www.thepear.org. $15-30. Previews Fri/13, 8pm. Opens Sat/14, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through May 20. Pear Avenue Theatre presents an adaptation of Mark Twain’s novella.

OPEN. Central Stage, 5221 Central, Richmond; (800) 838-3006, www.raggedwing.org. $15-35. Previews Thurs/12, 8pm. Opens Fri/13, 8pm. Runs Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through June 11. Ragged Wing Ensemble presents a new Bluebeard-inspired play written and directed by Amy Sass.

ONGOING

Absolutely San Francisco Alcove Theater, 414 Mason; 992-8168, www.absolutelysanfrancisco.com. $32-50. Check for dates and times. Open-ended. Not Quite Opera Productions presents a musical.

*Caliente Pier 29, The Embarcadero; 438-2668, www.love.zinzanni.org. $117-145. Wed-Sat, 6pm; Sun, 5pm. Open-ended. Ricardo Salinas, cofounder of famed Mission-born radical Latino comedy trio Culture Clash, penetrates the velvet enclave of Teatro ZinZanni, taking the helm for its latest Euro-style dinner-cirque cabaret show. Under Salinas’ inspired direction, the evening plays as a revolt by brown-hued kitchen and wait staff against a ruthless takeover by, what else, a Chinese conglomerate. Multiculti clashes ensue, with the underdogs led by a brother-sister team played charmingly by ZinZanni regulars Christine Deaver and Robert Lopez, and with much expert repartee and physical humor neatly enveloping characteristically stunning feats of acrobatics and circus arts that leave forkfuls of grub hovering before slack-jawed mouths. I don’t know how many actual kitchen staffers out there can afford the ticket price (though it does come with a tasty five-course meal in addition to a first-class show), but the blend of Salinas and company’s shrewd if subdued social commentary and big-heated Latin-fueled humor—not to mention the exquisite musical numbers featuring guest star Rebekah Del Rio—lead to something altogether harmonious. (Avila)

Cancer Cells The Garage, 975 Howard; 518-1517, www.975howard.com. $15. Fri-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through May 22. Performers Under Stress and directors Geoff Bangs and Scott Baker offer this well-conceived program of late Pinter works, a total of nine plays and poems intelligently arranged and unevenly but in some cases vibrantly performed (especially in the case of One for the Road) in a fleet 90-minute evening. With the titular poem, written as the esteemed playwright was undergoing chemo (and recited here with somewhat unnecessary emotion by Valerie Fachman), a telling definition of cancer cells arises: “They have forgotten how to die/ And so extend their killing life.” Given the unbridled political nature of the work that follows—including the devastatingly stark (yet ever articulate to the point of being unexpected) dramatic vocabulary of Mountain Language, a compact depiction and rumination on state-sponsored genocide—those cancer cells grow out of their literal referent into a literary metaphor for the warping, perverting, and devastating consequences of supreme, unchecked power and its Olympian delusions. Pinter’s late works, written with a pronounced urgency in the face of ever-widening war and genocide, advance his shrewd and potent ability for exposing the obscenity beneath the shell games of language as deployed by power in pursuit of its imperial and totalitarian aims. (Avila)

Devil/Fish 2781 24th St; www.cirquenoveau.com. $26. Fri-Sat, 7pm; Sun, 6pm. Through May 22. Cirque Noveau presents a story involving aerial performance, acrobatics, and more.

Eleanor EXIT Theatre, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $10-25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 28. Though it seems fitting that a two-and-a-half-hour long epic about historical diva and queen Eleanor of Aquitane should debut at EXIT Theatre’s DIVAfest, Dark Porch Theatre’s production of Eleanor lacks the charisma of its muse. A confused tangle of unnecessary subplots and under-developed characters, Eleanor tries to fit in an 800-year-old grudge match, a thwarted celestial ascension, political chicanery, assassination, adultery, an existential chess game, a crusade, medieval grrrl power, and the quest for the holy grail into a single show, with decidedly mixed results. On the one hand, Alice Moore as the titular queen is a delicious blend of regal and calculating, and Nathan Tucker as her equally conniving consort, Henry II, makes a surprisingly vital and robust king. The design elements are strong, and Dark Porch Theatre’s trademark live music and physical-movement interludes are cleverly arranged. But on the downside, Eleanor also displays what is gradually becoming another one of DPT’s trademarks, an overly convoluted script in need of major tightening in focus. Playwright/director Margery Fairchild needs to sacrifice a good chunk of bit-player intrigue, and rely more on the strength of her iconic queen, to move the action to an endgame more rewarding than this version’s anti-climactic exile to eternal oblivion. (Gluckstern)

*Geezer Marsh, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Thurs, 8pm; Sat, 5pm; Sun, 3pm. Through July 10. The Marsh presents a new solo show about aging and mortality by Geoff Hoyle.

Hugh Jackman, in Performance at the Curran Theatre Curran Theatre, 445 Geary; (888) 746-1799, www.shnsf.com. $40-150. Tues-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 2 and 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through May 15.The shout that went up the moment he came onstage was enough to let you know this entertainer could do no wrong with this audience. But perhaps just to be on the safe side, Hugh Jackman immediately began courting the 1700 people packed into the Curran from the front rows to the balcony, speaking to many individually, embracing one or two, bringing some onstage, or just flashing them his leading-man smile. Jackman’s limited and exclusive San Francisco engagement, courtesy of producer Carole Shorenstein Hays, wasn’t my cup of tea, or whatever they drink Down Under, but devotees of the Aussie star from Hollywood (X-Men) and Broadway (The Boy from Oz) got the love-fest they wanted. And the multifaceted actor is all pro, likeable and impressive even amid the cheesier aspects of a throwback form: a song-and-dance varietal in an old-school showbiz vein, featuring much personal and professional reminiscing, joking around (including tussles with his personal trainer [Steve Lord] over a dancing prohibition in the buff-up period before his next Wolverine pic), musical routines, and somewhat incongruous medleys backed by an 18-piece band (under direction of Patrick Vaccariello) and flanked by Broadway talents Merle Dandridge (Rent, Spamalot, Aida) and Angel Reda (Wicked). (Avila)

Loveland The Marsh, Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm. Through June 4. Ann Randolph’s popular one-woman show about a misfit returning to Ohio from L.A. extends its run.

*Lucky Girl EXIT Studio, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $10-25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 28. Honey (Cheryl Smith) talks about “the shoes” first, the shoes repeatedly, against even her analyst’s power to retain a common interest in the footwear of her attacker. Why should she so concern herself with this detail of the man who assaulted her, wounding her in ways too subtle and deep to measure—unless through the wayward precision of the poetical imagination some measure might actually be taken. That is the force and beauty of Lucky Girl, a notable new stage adaptation by Tom Juarez of poet Frances Driscoll’s 1997 collection, The Rape Poems, which premieres as part of Exit Theatre’s DIVAfest 2011. Juarez crafts an engagingly dynamic and delicate narrative arc from Driscoll’s thematically joined but otherwise disparate poems, gorgeously formulated verses that delve into a devastating subject with an unexpected range of humor, insight, and compassion. This supple range is acutely grasped and exquisitely interpreted by Smith, whose gripping performance (keenly directed by Kathryn Wood) eschews anything remotely sentimental for a complex and moving portrait of the enduring aftermath of terror. (Avila)

A Most Notorious Woman EXIT Stage Left, 156 Eddy; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $10-25. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through May 28. The axiom “well-behaved women seldom make history” comes to mind when watching a reenactment of the strange but true tale of the meeting between renegade pirate “queen” Grace O’Malley and Queen Elizabeth I. Both exceptionally powerful women in their day, they must surely have found some novel comfort in the presence of the other. Christina Augello plays both divas for DIVAfest with swashbuckling verve in Maggie Cronin’s historical drama, A Most Notorious Woman. Also inhabiting several bit characters along the way, Augello infuses Grace with a matter-of-fact, workaday groundedness, while her Elizabeth is all fuss and neuroses, chattering away to “Leicester” on a thoroughly modern cell-phone while plotting political intrigues. Watching Augello shift between the two strong-willed characters is the production’s greatest pleasure, along with some clever set and costuming flourishes courtesy of John Mayne and Laura Hazlett. There are some awkwardly-paced attempts at shadowplay which interrupt the overall flow, and the presence of an omniscient narrator, a sea-queen wrapped in kelp, is a puzzling distraction, but as staged history lessons of ill-behaved women go, Notorious is both informative and entertaining. (Gluckstern)

Party of 2 — The New Mating Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter; (800) 838-3006, www.partyof2themusical.com. $27-29. Fri, 9pm. Open-ended. A musical about relationships by Shopping! The Musical author Morris Bobrow.

The Real Americans The Marsh MainStage, 1062 Valencia; 282-3055, www.themarsh.org. $25-50. Fri, 8pm; Sat, 8:30pm (also July 10, 17, and 24, 2pm). Through July 24. Dan Hoyle’s popular show about city and small-town life, directed by Charlie Varon, continues its run.

Secret Identity Crisis SF Playhouse, Stage 2, 533 Sutter; 869-5384, www.un-scripted.com. $10-20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through Sat/14. Un-Scripted Theater Company presents a story about unmasked heroes.

Shopping! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter; (800) 838-3006, www.shoppingthemusical.com. $27-29. Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. A musical comedy revue about shopping by Morris Bobrow.

Silk Stockings Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson; 255-8207, www.42ndstmoon.org. $24-44. Wed, 7pm; Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm; Sun, 3pm. Through May 22. 42nd Street Moon presents a Cole Porter production.

A Streetcar Named Desire Actors Theatre, 855 Bush; 345-1287, www.actorstheatresf.org. $26-38. Wed-Sat, 8pm. Through June 4. Actors Theatre of San Francisco presents the Tennessee Williams tale.

Talking With Angels Royce Gallery, 2901 Mariposa; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. $21-35. Thurs-Sat, 8pm. Through May 21. A play by Shelley Mitchell set in Nazi-occupied Hungary.

*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)

BAY AREA

Cripple of Inishmaan Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Berkeley Campus, Berk; (510) 642-9988, www.calperformances.org. $68. Wed/11-Fri/13, 8pm; Sat/14, 2 and 8pm. The Irish theater company Druid presents a send-up of rural Irish life, written by Martin McDonagh.

Disassembly La Val’s Subterranean, 1834 Euclid, Berk; www.impacttheatre.com. $10-20. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (through June 11). Impact Theatre presents the world premiere of a dark comedy by Steve Yockey.

East 14th – True Tales of a Reluctant Player The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. Sat, 8:30pm; Sun, 7pm (except Sat/14, 8pm). Through June 18. Don Reed’s one-man solo show extends its run.

Lady With All the Answers Center REPertory Company, Lesher Center for the Arts, Knight Stage 3 Theatre, 1601 Civic Center, Walnut Creek; (925) 943-SHOW, www.centerrep.org. $45. Thurs-Sat, 8:15pm; Sun, 2:15pm. Through Sun/15. Center REPpresents Kerri Shawn’s one-woman play about Ann Landers.

Not a Genuine Black Man The Marsh Berkeley, TheaterStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Thurs, 7:30pm. Through June 16. Brian Copeland’s solo show about Bay Area history continues its successful run.

Passion Play Live Oak Theatre, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 649-5999, www.aeofberkeley.org. $10-15. Fri-Sat, 7pm (also Sun/15, 2pm). Through May 21. Actors Ensemble of Berkeley presents the West Coast premiere of a time-travel play by Sarah Ruhl.

Three Sisters Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk; (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-73. Check for dates and times. Through May 22. Berkeley Rep presents a new version of Chekhov’s 1901 play by Sarah Ruhl (In the Next Room, Eurydice), directed by Les Waters. The language sounds generally and pleasingly modern in the mouths of the titular Prozorov sisters—Olga (Wendy Rich Stetson), Masha (Natalia Payne), and Irina (Heather Wood)—although the production is rather traditional in staging (period set by Annie Smart, and corresponding costumes by Ilona Somogyi). We follow the restless siblings and their flock of soldier-admirers through a handful of years in their provincial town, where their late father was an elite military officer. In this period, the dashing officer Vershinin (Bruce McKenzie) brings a spark of new life—especially to the unhappily married Masha—and stokes the sisters’ ultimately unanswered desire to return to their beloved Moscow. The production breathes a good deal of life into the play, whose half-foolish and heartbreakingly funny characters so palpably exude a complex set of longings and misplaced desires, but it labors under an initial stiffness and a somewhat jagged set of performances. (Payne’s twitchy Masha, for instance, whose features maintain throughout a look of unwelcome surprise, feels incongruent at times). Some of the more moving turns concentrate here in the supporting characters, including James Carpenter as Chebutykin, the fawning old doctor who has forgotten all he used to know; Thomas Jay Ryan as Tuzenbach, the self-conscious Russian of German descent desperately smitten with Irina; and Alex Moggridge as the sisters’ much put-upon, feckless, alternately gentle and petulant brother, Andrei. (Avila)

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show The Marsh Berkeley, Cabaret, 2120 Allston Way, Berk; (800) 838-3006, www.themarsh.org. $8-50. Through July 10. The Amazing Bubble Man performs.

PERFORMANCE

Bay Area Black Comedy Competition Paramount Theatre, 2025 Broadway, Oakl; www.blackcomedycompetition.com. Sat/14, 8pm. $25-45. Don “D.C.” Curry hosts the finals of the competition

Boars Head Cafe Royale, 800 Post; 641-6033. Mon/16, 7:30pm. Free. SF Theater Pub revisits Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays.

Cabaret Lunatique Pier 29 on the Embarcadero; 438-2668, www.love.zinzanni.org. Sat/14, 11:15pm. $25-25. Teatro ZinZanni’s cabaret presents “Celebrate the Mission,” the third of nine performances focusing on specific neighborhoods.

The Devil-Ettes Present…Go Go Mania! Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell; 861-2011, www.devilettes.com. Fri/13, 9pm. $10. A night of burlesque and rock.

DIVAfest EXIT Theatre, 156 Eddy; 673-3847, www.theexit.org. Through May 28. Check for times and prices. Plays and performances by women artists, including Maggie Cronin, Christina Augello, Margery Fairchild, and Diane DiPrima.

Gods of San Francisco Shotwell Studios, 3252 19th St; Fri-Sat, 8pm (through May 21). $15-20. Ko Labs presents a one-act musical about a mother and daughter in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake.

Gustafer Yellowgold’s Infinity Sock Show Park Library,1950 Page; 355-5656, www.sfpl.org. Thurs/12, 11am. (Also Bernal Heights Library, 500 Cortland; 355-5663, www.sfpl.org. Thurs/12, 3:30pm.) Free. A free performance that is part of a two-week residency.

Katya Takes You Home Jewish Theatre, 470 Florida; www.russianoperadiva.com. Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Tues/17, 8pm; Sun/22, 4pm). Through May 22. $20-30. Katya Smirnoff-Skyy presents an original cabaret.

SF Merionettes Synchronized Swimming Show Balboa Pool, 51 Havelock; (206) 240-0488, www.sf-merionettes.org. Sun/15, 5pm. $10 (suggested donation). The team of swimmers from eight to 17 holds an exhibition of 2011 routines.

Theatresports and Improvised Noir Bayfront Theater, Fort Mason Center; 474-6776, www.improv.org. Fri-Sat, 8pm (through May 28). $17-20. BATS Improv Theatre presents competition and noir performances.

Lilias White Fairmont Hotel, Venetian Room, 950 Mason; 392-4400, www.bayareacabaret.org. $45. The singer pays tribute to Cy Coleman with “My Guy Cy.”

Words and Voices: Litquake Tribute to Gertrude Stein Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission and 3rd; 543-1718, www.ybca.org. Tues/17, 12:30pm. Free. One of 90 events at this year’s Yerba Buena Gardens Festival.

Yale Glee Club Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter; 771-6900, www.marinesmemorialtheatre.com. Sat/14, 8pm. $75-125. The club is joined by Darren Criss and the SFGC Alumnae Chorus for a performance benefiting No Bully and YouthAware.

BAY AREA

Alameda Children’s Musical Theatre Altarena Playhouse, 1409 High, Alameda; (510) 521-6965, www.acmtkids.org. Fri/13, 7:30pm; Sat/14, 2 and 7:30pm. $7-13. A production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Sara Kraft.

DANCE

CubaCaribe Festival Dance Mission, 3316 24th; 273-4633, www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/13-Sat/14, 8pm; Sun/15, 7pm. $10-24. A program including performances by Colette Eloi’s El Wah Movement and Danys Pérez’s Oyu Oro.

Copious Dance Theater Z Space, 450 Florida; www.copiousdance.org. Fri/13-Sat/14, 8pm; Sun/15, 5pm. $18. The company brings four works to the stage, including Portals of Grace, Little Voices, and Secret’s Lament.

Luminous Connections Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon; 695-5720, www.sfsota.org. Fri/13-Sat/14, 8pm. $14-24. San Francisco School of the Arts Pre-Professional Dance Program presents a dance concert, under the direction of Elvia Marta.

Moveable Feast The Garage SF, 975 Howard; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. Wed/11, 8pm. $10-20. Tanya Bello’s Project. B. presents a full-evening show.

Smuin Ballet Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission; 978-2787, www.ybca.org. Wed/11-Fri/13, 8pm; Sat/14, 2 and 8pm; Sun/15, 2pm. $20-62. Smuin Ballet presents a spring program, including choreography by Choo-San Goh, Amy Seiwert, and Michael Smuin.

BAY AREA

Company C Contemporary Ballet Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek; (925) 943-SHOW, www.lesherartscenter.org. Fri/13, 8pm; Sat/14, 2 and 8pm. $15-40. The company presents three world premieres.

Savage Jazz Dance and Napoles Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts Theatre, 1428 Alice, Oakl; (800) 838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com. Thurs/12-Sat/14, 8pm. $5-25. The companies present “Gonzo,” which includes three world premieres by Savage Jazz Dance Company. 

Rep Clock

Maria Poblet
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Schedules are for Wed/11–Tues/17 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.

ALAMEDA THEATRE 2317 Central, Alameda; www.projectyouthview.org. $5-99. “Project YouthView 2011: The Power of Youth in Film,” youth film festival, Thurs, 6:30.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $5-6. Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah (Triplett, 2011), Wed, 8. “Other Cinema:” Works by Melinda Stone, Greg Gaar, Enid Baxter Blader, Michael Rudner, and more, Sat, 8:30. “OpenScreening,” Thurs, 8. For participation info, contact ataopenscreening@atasite.org.

BALBOA 3620 Balboa, SF; www.balboamovies.com. $20. “Opera, Ballet, and Shakespeare in Cinema:” Don Quixote, Sat-Sun, 10am; May 18, 7:30. Performed by the Bolshoi Ballet.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. Regular programming $7.50-10. “Faye Dunaway Double Feature:” •Puzzle of a Downfall Child (Schatzberg, 1970), Wed, 2:55, 7, and Eyes of Laura Mars (Kershner, 1978), Wed, 4:55, 9. 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963), Thurs, 2:30, 5:15, 8. “Midnites for Maniacs: Whitey Can Rock Too:” •Rock N’ Roll High School (Arkush, 1979), Fri, 7:20; The Blues Brothers (Landis, 1980), Fri, 9:30; and Out of the Blue (Hopper, 1980), Fri, 11:59. All three films, $12. •The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Leone, 1966), Sat, 1, 6:15, and Aguirre, The Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972), Sat, 4:20, 9:30. •20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Fleischer, 1954), Sun, 2, 6:40, and Clash of the Titans (Davis, 1981), Sun, 4:25, 9:05.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-15. Potiche (Ozon, 2010), call for dates and times. The Princess of Montpensier (Tavernier, 2010), call for dates and times. Queen to Play (Bottaro, 2009), call for dates and times. The Double Hour (Capotondi, 2010), May 13-19, call for times. Project Happiness (Sorenson, 2011), Sun, 6:30.

FOUR STAR 2200 Clement, SF; www.lntsf.com. $10. “Asian Movie Madness:” •Deaf Mute Heroine (Wu, 1971), Thurs, noon, 3:50, 7:40, and Pursuit (Wong, 1980), Thurs, 1:55, 5:45, 9:35.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100, rsvp@milibrary.org. $10. “CinemaLit Film Series: Elizabeth Taylor, Tribute to a Star:” Suddenly, Last Summer (Manckiewicz, 1959), Fri, 6.

NINTH STREET INDEPENDENT FILM CENTER 145 Ninth St, SF; www.superastig.com. $20. Rakenrol (Henares, 2011), Fri, 7.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. Programming resumes June 10.

PHOENIX HOTEL 601 Eddy, SF; www.disposablefilmfest.com. Free. “Disposable Film Festival Bike-In Summer Tour,” Wed, 7:30.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994; www.redvicmoviehouse.com. $6-10. Bukowski: Born Into This (Dullaghan, 2003), Wed, 2, 7, 9:20. Cointelpro 101 (Marks, 2010), Thurs, 7:15, 9:15. The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee “Scratch” Perry (Higbee and Lough, 2011), Fri-Sun, 7:15, 9:20 (also Sat-Sun, 2, 4). Dead Man (Jarmusch, 1996), May 17-18, 7, 9:25 (also May 18, 2).

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. Brian Eno 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell to Earth, Wed, 7. “SF 24 Hour Film Race 2011,” Thurs, 7. Stake Land (Mickle, 2010), Thurs, 7, 9:30. “I Wake Up Dreaming 2011: The Legendary and the Lost!:” •Dementia (Parker, 1955), Fri, 6:40, 9:45, and Phantom Lady (Siodmak, 1944), Fri, 8; •Street of Chance (Hively, 1942), Sat, 2:15, 6, 9:30, and Ministry of Fear (Lang, 1944), Sat, 3:45, 7:45; •The Spiritualist (Vorhaus, 1948), Sun, 2:30, 5:45, 9:15, and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (Farrow, 1948), Sun, 4, 7:30; •C-Man (Lerner, 1949), Mon, 6:30, 9:45, and Guilty Bystander (Lerner, 1950), Mon, 8; •Once a Thief (Wilder, 1950), Tues, 6:15, 9:45, and The Great Flamarion (Mann, 1945), Tues, 8.

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 151 Third St, SF; www.sfcinema.org. $10 (festival pass, $50). “Crossroads, Program 1: Radical Light: Cinematheque at 50,” Thurs, 7.

SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY McKenna Theatre, Creative Arts Bldg, 1600 Holloway, SF; www.creativearts.sfsu.edu. $5-10. “51st Film Finals,” Fri, 7.

VICTORIA 2961 16th St, SF; www.sfcinema.org. $10 (festival pass, $50). “Crossroads, Program 2: Featured Artist: Jeanne Liotta,” Fri, 7; “Program 3: The Chilling Montage of Crimson Repression!”, Fri, 9; “Program 4: Observers Observed,” Sat, noon; “Program 5: Two Roads Developed,” Sat, 2:30; “Program 6: Crossroads Honoree: Robert Nelson,” Sat, 4:30; “Program 7: Apparent Motion: Celebrating the Art of Projection,” Sat, 8; “Program 8: Playback,” Sun, 2:30; “Program 9: The Realms of Transience…,” Sun, 2:30; “Program 10: The Observers (Goss, 2011), Sun, 7:30.

VIZ CINEMA New People, 1746 Post, SF; www.legacyfilmfestivalonaging.org. $11. “Legacy Film Festival on Aging,” Fri-Sun.

VORTEX ROOM 1082 Howard, SF; www.myspace.com/thevortexroom. $5 donation. •Scarlet Street (Lang, 1945), Thurs, 9, and Scream Baby Scream (Adler, 1969), Thurs, 11. YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. In a Glass Cage (Villaronga, 1987), Thurs and Sat, 7:30; Sun, 2.

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