San Francisco

Congratulations, Dan Savage!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Congratulations to Dan Savage, editor of the Stranger in Seattle who writes a syndicated sex column called “Savage Love” for the Voice/New Times chain and other papers. I am toasting him once again with a Potrero Hill martini at our neighborhood local.

Dan performed heroically in the referendum on Bush, the war, and neocon policies. He helped knock out Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania with personal appearances in the state. He managed to get key endorsements into his column in the ll New Times papers that traditionally don’t endorse. He helped voters in Arizona (the non-endorsing Voice/New Times is headquartered in Phoenix) to be the first in the nation to reject a ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage. He kept a liberal and activist spark alive in his column in the Village Voice (and the other Voice papers purchased last fall by New Times and were therefore shut out of doing endorsements and strong election coverage. They were besides the Voice, the Minneapolis City Pages, Seattle Weekly, Nashville Scene, LA Weekly, and OC Weekly, all of whom traditionally did endorsements and strong election coverage until the sale to the Voice. The OC Weekly to its enormous credit did endorsements.)

Dan also wrote a typically useful op ed piece in today’s New York Times, titled “The Code of the Callboy” in which he explains why the callboy outed Ted Haggard, one of the most powerful evangelica ministers in the country. “Ultimately,” Savage wrote, “it was Ted Haggard’s hypocrisy–railing against homosexuality and campaigning against gay marriage while apparently indulging in sex romps with a gay escort–that prompted Mr. Jones to shove him out of the closet. The homophobia promoted by Mr. Haggard and other agents of intolerance, if I may use John McCain’s phrase (he’s not using it any more), undermined the callboy code of silence that Mr. Haggard himself relied on. Most callboys are gay, after all, and most are out of the closet these days.

“And while most callboys will continue to respect a code of silence where the average closet case is concerned, the Ted Haggards of the world have been placed on notice: You can’t have your callboy and disparage him too.”

Repeating: Dan, in this critical election, showed he had more real balls than MIke Lacey, the editor of the Voice/New Times papers.Dan, Keep it up, B3, savoring the ascendancy of San Francisco Values and Guardian editorial positions

PS: Repeating: The staffs of New Times papers have been long baffled by the New Times non-endorsement policy. And the staffs of the Voice and other Voice papers who had been endorsing and doing strong election coverage were particularly baffled when Lacey shut down their endorsement process this year without explanation. What are Lacey and the Voice/New Times afraid of? Of annoying their advertisers? Of giving up control to local chain editors who may be (gasp!) more liberal and activist than the gang in Phoenix? Are they worried that endorsements and strong political coverage would disclose just how cynical and out of touch Lacey and New Times are in their politics and in their view of the cities i n which they have papers? That chain-driven endorsements would expose the template that Voice/New Times uses in their papers? As always, I will send this blog and these questions to Lacey in Phoenix for comment. Stay alert.

By the way, MIke, what do you think of the election results? Will your papers be allowed to comment on them?

Is Mike Lacey for real? More on Mike’s massacre at the LAWeekly/Voice/New Times and the culture war at the LA Weekly
By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)

Lacey’s Wednesday night massacre. The LA Weekly’s Harold Meyerson says to all staffers on the l7 Voice/New Times papers: Don’t deviate from the template or you are out. Lacey publicly savages Meyerson.
By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)

The comments roll in on the search for endorsements in Village Voice/New Times papers? Is it a snipe hunt? Does San Savage or Mike Lacey have the real balls?
By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)

Dan Savage comes through in the clutch. The gay sex columnist endorses in his pre-election column in the Voice and other New Times papers, but the Voice and New Times papers do not endorse. Hurray for Dan Savage!!!
By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)

“NAN-CY! NAN-CY!”

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No on 85/Yes on F Election Party
by Ailsa Chang

The scene at Medjool Bar tonight is upbeat, confident and loud. This election party hosted by the San Francisco Labor Council and Medjool’s owner, Gus Murad, is the party for everyone who didn’t have a party: No on 85, Yes on F, supporters for Bob Twomey for School Board, State Assembly Candidate Fiona Ma.

Midnight reflections

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By Tim Redmond

The evening started out as a resounding victory for the national Democrats, a train wreck for California Democrats, and a defining night for San Francisco progressives. But the state results are getting a little tigher, and it now appears that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s huge victory won’t drag down every Democrat running for statewide office. John Garamandi may survive to be lieutenant governor (keeping far-right loon Tom McClintock out of that office). Jerry Brown will be the next attorney general, and Bill Lockyer the next treasurer.

And Prop. 90 seems to be sinking.

So all in all, a good night — except for Mayor Gavin Newsom, who must be sitting around wondering why none of the voters seem to want to do what he tells them to.

The near-certain defeat of Rob Black in District Six is a huge deal: It’s proof that a storng progressive with grassroots support and troops on the ground can beat back even a massive political assault by some of the most sophisticated and well-funded forces in the city. It’s also going to mena a few tough years for Newsom, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, SFSOS, Don Fisher and the rest of the anti-Daly gang: Daly has proven himself an effective politician, and he has never particularly liked it when jerks like these guys try to mess with him.

One of the more interesting aspects of this election was the money that Michela Alioto-Pier spent on ads for a race in which she had no real opposition — big, pricey, video ads on sfgate, for example. What’s that about? Well, part of what it’s about is that Mark Leno is in his last term in the state Assembly, and that seat will open up in two years, which means that in the spring of 2008, a Democratic primary contest will determine the next Assembly member from the east side of San Francisco. Tom Ammiano has already announced his candidacy. Bevan Dufty has loudly proclaimed that he won’t run. Is Alioto-Pier looking at that race?

If so, she’d probably have the support of the mayor — but from the looks of things tonight, that isn’t going to help much.

In fact, from the looks of things, Newsom needs to back away from the SFSOS types and try to make peace with the progressives if he wants to accomplish anything as mayor.

Goldies Music winner Gris Gris

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The incredible thing about discovering a genuinely good band is that it has the ability to throw your entire world out of whack.
The Gris Gris are cooler than your older cousin’s garage rock band, the one that first introduced you to a world outside of MTV. They’re grittier than that home-recorded cassette you bought at your first punk rock show, and they’re more revolutionary than the moment you realized it was OK to like the music that your parents listen to. They’re alchemists turning the sonic side of air into brilliant, vaporous gold that bleeds into the ear and makes us forget to be cynical.
That’s a huge feat in a music-saturated society where a spot on The O.C. or Volkswagen-advert ambiance defines a career. We forget to say, “Hey, this is totally informed by the early Stones.” We forget to say, “Remember Red Krayola? Remember ’60s psych-garage rock? These guys totally sound like that.” We forget to judge, and we just listen.
When Greg Ashley, the Houston-born multi-instrumentalist formerly of garage-revivalist outfit the Mirrors, moved to the Bay Area in April 2002, it was for a girl. Soon he teamed up with bassist Oscar Michel and drummer Joe Haener (both former members of San Francisco’s Rock and Roll Adventure Kids) and started fleshing out songs he had written in Texas. “The band just accidentally happened,” Ashley explains. In fact, when the trio first started playing shows together, they didn’t even have a name. “We used to play as the Mirrors,” he says, “just because I had records I could sell at shows.” Before long they were signed to Birdman Records (the label suggested that the band name themselves — pronto) and the Gris Gris became legit.
Playing house parties, warehouses, and dive bars and touring constantly, the Gris Gris may not be our biggest musical export, but with only two albums under their belts — 2004’s self-titled debut and last year’s For the Season (which includes newest member Lars Kullberg on keys) — the Oakland band is reshaping the Bay Area’s legacy.
Some of their songs are grating, deconstructed blues masterpieces dripping with the eccentric sensibilities of Syd Barrett or that guy you tripped over in the street this morning. They go down like the cough syrup that gets you through the winter — the one you’ve always secretly loved the taste of.
The Gris Gris startle. They remind us that there is beauty in grit. Their well-constructed lullabies numb you with drooping saxophones, tenderly shaken tambourines, hazy guitars, and gentle lyrics. The dragging gem “Mary #38” is probably the 38 billionth song to be written about some girl named Mary — but it is the only one you will ever need to know.
Much like a dust storm sweeping the countryside, gathering little pieces of the landscape wherever it touches down, the Gris Gris possess a topographical romance in their range. From the sparse desert tickled with succulents to lushly fertile forests, the band writes the frontier. After one listen you are stuck asking yourself, “Where the hell is there to go from here?”
Here is a band that operates with an antiquated ethos, from a time before anyone could sing with a straight face about lovely lady lumps and before painstakingly choreographed treadmill routines and entourages of Harajuku girls became entertainment. Back when the point of making music didn’t involve sounding like the band on the cover of last month’s NME. Once upon a time music could excite, terrify, confuse, and exhilarate. The Gris Gris are raising the dead, conjuring a time when that one song tugged at some buried thing in heart or head and made you feel like you had been missing out on something big. Who doesn’t love an epiphany every now and again? (K. Tighe)

Goldies Visual Art winner Chris Duncan

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Artist Chris Duncan came to Northern California for the Tahoe powder — and to get away from his routine in Delaware and his native New Jersey of catching hardcore shows every weekend and doing absolutely nothing else with his life. Duncan recalls he and a friend “snowboarded for a season, and it was rad and it was horrible at the same time. Every night it was the same party with the same 40 guys and three girls, so I started to stay in and draw.”
Since then, that need to draw a line between the fun but perhaps meaningless life of nightly parties and his own creative urges has led Duncan to San Francisco, where he moved in 1996 and spent the next years working, skateboarding, and attending California College of the Arts, where he began to find direction, to chart his own personal map to the color theory of Mark Rothko and Josef Albers, and to dip into sacred geometry, string theory, Eastern philosophies, and increasingly, simple nonfigurative forms. In his current work temporal strings converge, intersect, and radiate above needle-nose pyramids, shooting off across ceilings and traversing rooms. Flat works are stitched with ragged stars or painted with dark rays that explode above kaleidoscopic ziggurats.
“For me, it’s about dealing with being fully overwhelmed by humans, to be perfectly honest,” confesses Duncan, 32, kicking back in his tidy wood box of an Oakland studio, off the downtown-area railroad tracks. Dressed head to toe in black, tattoos crawling up his neck and down his arms to hands that jerk to punctuate a point, the artist is far from slick, but he exudes an amiable earnestness raving about his young daughter, Aya-mea Mourning. “I’m also completely amazed by people. People are fantastic and can do such great things. Look how far we’ve come — and the mirror image of that is look at what we’ve done.”
What has Duncan done? Perhaps he’s captured the zeitgeist, one that’s both physical and ethereal, give or take a planet. His SF gallerist Gregory Lind says, “Chris Duncan’s laboriously rendered works on paper and his intricate string sculptures seek to combine the spiritual with the scientific, which is compelling to me in this kind of dark period we find ourselves in today.”
Whether the artist’s pieces trace strings of energy or ecstatic explosions in some acid-laced map room, he’s found a way to tap some sort of fuel source for his numerous projects, including his striking grab bag of an art zine, Hot and Cold, in which he and Griffin McPartland showcase artists like Matt O’Brien, Chris Pew, and Jen Smith. They took a page from their own periodical to produce a catalog for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ 2005 exhibit “The Zine UnBound: Kults, Werewolves and Sarcastic Hippies.” Duncan has also curated exhibits as part of Keepsake Society, a site he maintains with ex-girlfriend Aki Raymer, and he is editing an anthology of “my first punk show” stories for AK Press.
“When I got older and found art making, I found a spot to do the things I saw happening as a teenager, with what all my friends were doing,” he says. “I began making zines and started curating, and in terms of how active and how DIY everything was in that [East Coast hardcore] scene, I found a place to put that to use when I got a little older. And this is the perfect city for that — there are so many examples of people doing it. It’s a nice blanket to be under.”
And speaking of blankets: Duncan will be stitching together a cosmic ray–embellished quilt of sorts in memory of his recently deceased 99-year-old great-grandmother for his forthcoming show at Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York City. Much like a handmade, toy- and goodie-bundled, affordable and accessible limited-edition art zine, the project embodies an aesthetic Duncan embraces. “We just totally outdo the last thing we did and totally overwhelm people. Things don’t exist like that anymore,” explains the artist. “Everything’s so not made by hand and so not giving in a way. I think with a little energy you can give a lot, and I think that’s really important.” (Kimberly Chun)

Goldies Visual Art winner Yoon Lee

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A good photograph captures an instant of life within a fraction of city space. The oft-awesome paintings of Yoon Lee — on display earlier this year in a solo show at the Luggage Store — condense seconds, days, and weeks of urban life into images of striking movement and color. Blurs from passing cars; a person glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye; the liquid shifts of Vampire Princess Miyu anime dreamscapes on a TV screen — these are a few of the everyday materials within Lee’s alchemy. Glimpsed as scaled-down versions on a computer screen, her pieces seem purely digital or neo-geo, but in person there is no doubt that her paintings are the result of a lengthy, meditative, and labor-intensive process.
“I know some artists who take a whole year to produce one piece, and I’m not up to that point,” Lee says over hot drinks at Farley’s on Potrero Hill. Her comic strip T-shirt and black leather motorcycle jacket reflect the mix of commercial color and rougher, real-life currents within her paintings. “My 8-feet-by-20-feet scale works usually take about six months. I start gathering images in my head and take photos. I make little sketches. I take things from comic books, newspapers, anything — I’m just an image scavenger.”
From there, Lee uses Illustrator or Photoshop to play with images and forms. “I use it as a mixing board to bring everything together and then edit, real fast,” she says, adding with a laugh, “in the old days you had to use canary paper and transparencies, then mess up and start all over again.” Actually, Lee’s “real fast” edits can last a month or two, but they are indeed quick in comparison to her painting process, a complex, kinetic, and at times astonishingly layered use of Golden acrylics. It’s there that she transmutes her gadget-fiend tendencies and love of shiny plastics into work that swirls with fierce ambivalence about those aspects of modern life and more.
For Lee, the frustration that comes from trying to translate computer compositions into flesh-and-blood paintings isn’t just worthwhile — it’s exactly what she’s seeking. “Sometimes I have to really invent a new process,” she says. “Every time I do a piece there’s something completely different I have to introduce or change so I can produce an effect that’s similar to the original sketch.” That kind of challenge has led Lee through many areas of study (philosophy and computer science, to name two) and fields of employment (she’s sold cars), though all the while she’s never lost focus on painting.
Someday a writer might explore and explain why op art has played such a major role in San Francisco art at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. Though Lee is part of an upcoming exhibition of San Francisco artists in Leipzig, Germany, curated by “Pierogi” Joe Amrhein, it’s debatable whether she is even influenced by the legacy of Sol LeWitt — or has a kinship with the LeWitt-loving Mission School artists who favor certain rainbow gradations. If her work shares some of their color schemes, its scale and sense of movement explode into a realm apart from the smaller cubic formations and prisms associated with recent Bay Area art. A casual viewer might note as much action as in a Jackson Pollock painting, a kid on the street might recognize an accidental kinship with graffiti. The artist herself names Julie Mehretu and Benjamin Edwards as partial guides.
Lee’s art is slick — but only in a literal sense. To put it another, more paradoxical way, her paintings are deceptively slick on the surface. Beneath the attractive gloss, that shininess that she enjoys and wants to share, are layers that you can get lost in — that is, when you aren’t arrested by the intensity of her observation. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Goldies Visual Art winner Tim Sullivan

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In his most recent San Francisco exhibition, at the cozy Little Tree Gallery in the Mission, Tim Sullivan managed to reanimate the late blond bombshell Jayne Mansfield. Mind you, he did it with a low-tech visual effect — a full-color glossy of the actress attached to a flat-screen monitor, a shifting blue sky visible through little almond-shaped slits in the eyes of the photograph. But the mixture of sublime pop (the elaborate media construct of Mansfield) with an almost metaphysical art reference is a key movement in Sullivan’s appealing photography, video, and sculpture. His work is an enticing combination of funky but effective tricks, sophisticated references, and an appreciation of comedic white-trash aesthetics.
Sullivan’s work often contains gracious nods to other artists. He’s made a hilariously perverse video-sculpture homage to Bruce Nauman’s mid-1960s Self-Portrait as a Fountain and devoted an entire exhibition at the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery to the influential Dutch-born conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, who toyed with a sad-sack persona and disappeared mysteriously while attempting to cross the Atlantic alone in a 13-foot boat. Sullivan, a striking figure with pale blond hair and dark horn-rim glasses, often appears in his own work, using self-portraiture to tangentially channel his artistic forebears. While there may be something postmodern about this strategy, you don’t have to know about contemporary art history to be captivated by his visual magic. For instance, you need only know about the 1960s-style power of Herb Alpert to appreciate Sullivan’s remake of the classic Whipped Cream and Other Delights album cover. Sullivan plays the babe, slathered in foam.
He’s also made a life-size horizontal photograph of himself seemingly levitating just above the floor against a backdrop of fabulously chintzy flecked wallpaper. It’s in lush color — the artist wears a crimson T-shirt, a color he favors, perhaps for its theatricality. The image appears at a key spot in an opening gallery in the California Biennial, a timely survey of 31 West Coast artists organized by the Orange County Museum of Art (through Dec. 31), and it’s had the effect of giving Sullivan, a San Francisco Art Institute grad, wider recognition — he reports that he sold out an edition of the photograph, and he doesn’t even have gallery representation. He was singled out in the Los Angeles Times’ review of the show, which dubbed him a purveyor of high-spirited “do-it-yourself special effects art.”
The OC show also includes a hilarious video called Magic Carpet Ride, a piece made at a Fisherman’s Wharf souvenir stand. In it Sullivan and his former teacher, the filmmaker (and Goldie Lifetime Achievement winner) George Kuchar, cavort on a roller coaster gondola. The pair exude goofball charm as they whiz over the Golden Gate Bridge past friendly drag queens. Kuchar is an instructive reference, as Sullivan also seems to dream in Technicolor. They also collaborated on a theatricalized reenactment of Chris Burden’s Shoot, the politicized 1971 gallery performance in which the Southern California conceptualist artist was shot in the arm with a pistol. The Sullivan-Kuchar version is set against an amber-hued commercial photomural of a tropical sunset. As a child of the Midwest, Sullivan expresses a continuing appreciation for and bemusement with the California dream. In another recent piece, he’s made fluorescent matchbooks emblazoned with regionally significant incendiary song titles, “California Dreaming” and “Running with the Devil” among them. This guy’s on fire. (Glen Helfand)

Goldies Film winner James T. Hong

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It’s rare when a filmmaker is able to match provocative themes with evocative imagery — and do it consistently. Addressing race and class issues in his arrestingly photographed works, James T. Hong is one such artist. His filmography includes Behold the Asian: How One Becomes What One Is (which won a Golden Gate Award at the 2000 San Francisco International Film Festival despite its labeling of dot-com-era San Francisco as “the white asshole paradise”) and Taipei 101: A Travelogue of Symptoms (Sensitive Version), an excoriation of white guy–Asian girl couples. (It’s a comedy, and a brutally funny one at that.)
“To tell you the truth, I’ve never thought anything I’ve ever done was very controversial,” Hong explains before allowing that the audience at the 2004 Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival, where Taipei 101 screened, included at least one person who threatened to fight him after the lights came up.
Not that Hong minds. One of his guiding principles as a filmmaker is “to make people think differently about a particular topic, whatever it’s about — to see it either in a new light or hear a voice that they themselves can’t express,” he says. “It’s not interesting to show movies to people who already agree with you. It’s better to show to a hostile audience.”
It’s certainly possible that his two newest works, The Denazification of MH and 731, might stir up the wrong (or right) kind of crowd. Both are technically different from films he’s made before: Denazification retains his signature narration-over-black-and-white-footage style but is entirely in German; 731 was shot on high-definition color video. Both were created using footage Hong captured while traveling earlier this year; both deal with questions of perspective in individuals and countries greatly affected by World War II.
“I’m just a war nerd,” he admits, but his interests extend far beyond those of the casual History Channel viewer. While the 2005 SFIFF featured his Iraq War parable, The Form of the Good, both of his latest efforts tie into his WWII fascination. The experimental 14-minute Denazification, which pays a visit to Martin Heidegger’s Black Forest cabin, explores the philosopher’s late-in-life struggle to come to terms with his wartime allegiance to the Nazi party.
Hong — who was born in the United States but says he’d jump at the chance to move to China permanently — calls 731 “a regular documentary — at least what I think is a regular documentary.” The 30-minute film features footage of an abandoned facility in northern China once used for biowarfare testing. The filmmaker’s narration grimly describes the Chinese view of the horrors that transpired there (“3,000 were killed in live-body experiments”) — before switching gears and offering the Japanese response (“war and atrocities go hand in hand”).
The point-counterpoint structure of 731 prefigures Hong’s most ambitious project to date, an in-progress film with the working title New History Zero. “It’s a feature-length documentary about the war and revisionism — the way the Japanese see it, the way the Chinese see it, and the way that America has had a huge influence on the way that the Japanese have dealt with the war, which is incompletely.”
After Denazification, Hong hopes to make more films in other tongues, to “force people to understand that English is not the only language.” But his overriding goal is as personal as it is political.
“My aim now is to communicate more with Asians. I realized that most of the Asian Americans I’ve encountered don’t like my work. Either it’s too nonnarrative — they’re more into the Hollywood type of movies — or it disturbs the kind of quietist attitude that they have,” he says. “They want to just fit in like everybody else. They don’t want to look like assholes. My aim is always to show that no, we are assholes — everybody is.” (Cheryl Eddy)

Goldies Film winners Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer

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Like the steadfast Salton Sea itself, Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer’s Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea has displayed remarkable staying power. The first version of the film played at the 2004 San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, one of more than 100 festivals that have screened the doc since its initial release. Salton Sea reappeared — with new narration by John Waters — earlier this year at the Red Vic and other local rep houses, and the response was so positive that Metzler says the pair are now talking to major distributors with an eye toward a larger theatrical release in the spring.
“Salton Sea has taken on a life of its own,” says the San Francisco–based Metzler (Springer is currently living in Berlin but plans to move back to the Bay Area later this year). “When we first started out, we were having the regular problems that any filmmaker has about finding funding and later, distribution. We soon realized that since the film encapsulates both the quirky, indie movie sort of thing and also the environmental issues, nobody knew how to sell it. We always knew there was an audience out there, but it was gonna take two things: one was overcoming the hurdle of getting people familiar with the Salton Sea, because people didn’t know about it. And then also we recognized that a large audience for the film was people who don’t normally watch documentaries. So we took it out on the road, and wherever it screened it’s gotten an enthusiastic response and created this momentum on a grassroots level. The film, which we kind of expected to die two and a half, three years ago, just keeps on getting bigger.”
Anyone who’s seen Salton Sea knows why. Sure, Waters adds quirky star power, but the film’s briny subject is already as chockablock with character as it is with dead tilapia. Metzler and Springer trace the sea’s accidental birth (two words: engineering mistake) and first century, which saw the region spiral from thriving resort into scruffy, smelly, near-abandoned ruin. Most compellingly, the film draws out the people who choose to dwell on the sea’s desolate shores for whatever reason, be it the low cost of living or most poignantly, the fierce hope that the sea’s 1950s and ’60s salad days will somehow miraculously return.
Though Salton Sea continues to chug along, the filmmakers have begun to turn their attention to new projects. Metzler and fellow San Francisco filmmaker Lev Anderson are currently working on a documentary on the band Fishbone (Springer is helping with shooting and editing); Metzler and Springer plan to reteam for a pair of docs — one on taxidermy and one on evangelical Christian backpackers who follow the path of the apostle Paul through the Middle East. “We have a deep affection for outsiders, and we always want to explore different subcultures,” Metzler says. Then there’s that other idea they have, for a doc on German tiki bars. Metzler’s take on the phenomenon is in line with the duo’s filmmaking philosophy: “It just shows you people like to embrace the exotic, wherever it might be.” (Cheryl Eddy)

Goldies Dance winner Funkanometry SF

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Earlier this fall Funkanometry SF celebrated their fourth anniversary at the same place, 111 Minna Gallery, that is hosting this year’s Goldies ceremony and party. They packed the joint. Between then and now the company has been places. Six core members — including directors Emerson Aquino and Gina Rosales — answered an invitation to travel to Bogotá, Colombia. There, as part of the city’s Festival de Danza Urbana, they taught classes, were interviewed on the streets for radio and television, and gave performances.
Funkanometry SF is traveling these days — this month includes a trip to Chicago — but their heart remains in the Bay Area, where every Sunday night they take over the Westlake School for the Performing Arts in Daly City. In one large room company members and new students might run through eight counts while in another, smaller classroom veteran dancers hone an upcoming performance. Before, after, and in between the dancing, everyone hangs out in the courtyard, where kids and parents stop by to see what’s up.
“I really started choreographing when I was 14,” the soft-spoken Aquino explains one such Sunday, as he, Rosales, and cofounder Kyle Wai Lin good-naturedly attempt to break down the group’s history, kidding each other all the while. “To me, choreography is about making pictures. Once you realize the amount of people you have [to work with], you can maneuver them to make pictures.”
The pictures the group creates aren’t just captivating still images — they form waves of energy as friends in the audience shout encouragement to dancers on the floor. That type of flow is no small feat, considering Aquino and the 20-some-member group tap into many different genres of music. The ladies are as slyly, stylishly sexy-tough as Amerie and Aaliyah, and the gentlemen aren’t buried under baggy clothes — they’ve got debonair flair. In other words, Funkanometry SF aren’t solemn hip-hop snobs — they’re just as likely to draw from J-pop, house, or rock as they are Bay Area hyphy. “The art of choreography involves movement that is clear,” Aquino says while discussing the fact that Janet Jackson is a dancer’s pop singer if there ever was one (an axiom that extends to Timbaland as producer). “But a lot of people focus on movement at the expense of feeling. You can just move, but if you’re not feeling the music, you’re not dancing.”
Like Aquino, Funkanometry SF’s other codirectors started dancing in high school. Before joining Funkanometry SF the energetic Rosales captained a high school team and was part of another local crew, Xplicit. Lin and Aquino are friends dating back to childhood; these days Lin oversees the business and Web creative side of the group (www.funkanometrysf.com and www.funksters.org), letting Aquino guide the dancers. “Both of us wanted to create a foundation to serve the community, to challenge dancers, and create an outlet for youth,” Lin says. Judging from the huge response to the group’s Funksters youth program — overseen by Mary Jane Huang — they’re succeeding on all fronts.
Each fall the San Francisco Hip Hop Dance Fest rolls around, and along with another community-based local company — Oakland’s Izzy Award–winners New Style Motherlode — Funkanometry SF can be counted on to represent. This year Aquino and company are preparing a new show, Funk’s Boutique, for Micaya’s annual Palace of Fine Arts event. “It’s set in a trendy boutique, and it showcases the versatility and diversity of the company,” Aquino explains. Versatility and diversity — those are just two of the qualities that make Funkanometry SF unique. Each dancer brings another reason to check out their boutique. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Goldies Dance winners Benjamin Levy and LEVYdance

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Benjamin Levy entered college as a future pediatrician. He left as a dancer — not exactly what his Jewish Iranian parents had in mind. “They were not pooh-poohing it,” Levy recently recalled. “They just had no frame of reference. It was not even in their lexicon.”
After graduating from UC Berkeley, Levy danced with the Joe Goode Performance Group for two seasons. “He was such a beautiful mover. He could do anything and was a good inventor and great collaborator,” Goode says. “But it was very clear that he needed to do his own thing.” So in 2003 the newly formed LEVYdance company made its first splash as part of the second House Special, ODC Theater’s two-week residency program. The following year the company made its East Coast debut, and the dancers have been back every year since. In 2005 they were chosen for the prestigious California Regional Touring Project. Last March they performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic as part of its “Minimalist Jukebox” festival. Last month they embarked on their first international tour — a two-week gig in Lithuania. The company has given workshops across the country and worked with college ensembles. Recently, it moved into its own large and handsome studio South of Market. And all of this with a repertory of barely a dozen pieces.
So what makes LEVYdance so hot? For one thing, the dances crawl under your skin. Levy’s pieces look a little bit like creepy film noir. Shadowy forces lurk inside the voluptuously strong dancers, but you can’t quite pin those forces down. And actually, you probably don’t really want to know why a hug turns into a chokehold or flailing limbs get so entangled that you wonder whether they’ll ever return to their owners. The intensity is fierce. The choreographer describes Violent Momentum, a 2005 commission from ODC and Meet the Composer, as “being with the rawest part of yourself. It may be an uncomfortable experience, it may be an embracing one, but ultimately, it’s an important, sobering journey.”
And yet Levy’s work is gorgeous to look at. He embeds finely detailed choreography into theatrical contexts with sophisticated lighting designs, stark but elegant costumes, and imaginative and oft-original scores. This is a man of the theater, maybe even an old-fashioned man of the theater.
Levy started to dance and choreograph in high school (“It fulfilled a PE requirement, and I didn’t want to run laps”), but his eyes were opened by his Martha Graham training. It’s as much Graham’s ethics as her movement that impressed him: “Life is too precious to mess around. If you can’t be here fully, don’t show up.” Used to seeing a lot of dance that he describes as “the ooey, gooey, never-ending releasy soup,” Levy appreciated that in Graham “a hard line could be a hard line, and it could stay there and be energized and buzz with life. That was so exciting.”
Up next is an untitled work to be premiered at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco in 2007. It will be the biggest piece Levy has done yet. “It’s about how identity is formed in first-generation Americans who are born of parents who fled oppressive governments,” he says. “The interesting thing is that it is a veiled past — a past that is vast and influential, yet your parents don’t speak about it very much.”
So are his parents reconciled to not having a pediatrician in the family? “My mom not too long ago said to me that doctors can heal bones, but artists can heal human souls,” Levy says with a smile. (Rita Felciano)

Goldies Dance winner Sean Dorsey

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One look at Sean Dorsey — a debonair dancer with slightly mussed hair and innovative modern dance choreographer — and two words instantly come to mind: dip me!
But watching him dance, you see more of a rough-and-tumble Gene Kelly than a gliding Fred Astaire. Which isn’t to say he can’t throw down a steamy tango, as he does in Red Tie, Red Lipstick, a moving pas de deux about violence against a transgender couple. Dorsey featured the piece, with narration by trans poet Marcus Van, in his first full-length show, Outsider Chronicles, staged last year at ODC Theater and soon to be remounted Nov. 16 to 18 at the Dance Mission Theater.
Since moving to San Francisco in 2001 from Vancouver, Dorsey has blazed a fierce trail for transgender performers. He immediately became enamored with the city when he met site-specific choreographer Lizz Roman while visiting here with the Kokoro Dance company. “There was very little release technique or inversion work in Vancouver,” the native Canadian recalls. “I totally fell in love with her [Roman’s] movement and what she was doing.”
The feeling was mutual, and Roman gave the young dancer a spot in her company. Dance Brigade founder Krissy Keefer also went mad for Dorsey, granting him a solo slot in the now-defunct Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival. Even our pampered SF LGBT audience wasn’t used to seeing butch-looking dancers like Dorsey onstage, and its response was ecstatic.
By the spring of 2002 he was in ODC Theater’s Pilot Program, which nurtures emerging choreographers as they develop new work eventually showcased on the theater’s floor. Three months later he founded the groundbreaking Fresh Meat Productions, which brings trans and queer performers, filmmakers, musicians, and writers together annually to tell their stories through their chosen artistic discipline. Since the first two-day show at ODC Theater that summer, Fresh Meat has moved on to cosponsoring Tranny Fest, a festival of independent trans cinema now helmed by Dorsey’s partner, filmmaker Shawna Virago, and also helped to organize national tours of trans artists. Currently, Dorsey, the nonprofit’s artistic director, is organizing a show for a trans printmaker at the Femina Potens gallery and another solo show for a trans visual artist.
Amid all the organizing, marketing, and promoting, Dorsey brought his own point of view to queer performance with last year’s Outsider Chronicles, via an individual artist grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission. Written and choreographed by Dorsey, the program combines modern dance with music and narration in five stories that reflect the life of a transgender person — as well as any human being who has ever had a crush, a secret, or a high school guidance counselor with a textbook full of bad advice. Each vignette (most performed with dance partner Meir Culbreth) expresses a language of movement that is boldly real and acutely honest.
Through Fresh Meat and his own choreography, Dorsey has been able to combine art and activism in a way that creates alliances, fosters a community of like-minded artists, and changes our notion of what defines dance and, at its most basic level, our bodies. Next on the horizon, the onetime housing and poverty activist who realized his dance career almost accidentally while on a hiatus from grad school plans to use his Gerbode Emerging Choreographer Award to continue combining his two great passions. Tentatively titled Some Went Untold, the envisioned piece will be based on interviews Dorsey conducts with trans folk across the land.
“I’m still, like, ‘Hello, hello, hello, where are all the trans dancers?’” Dorsey says. “I’m hoping very soon that there will be more trans dancers to work with.” He also hopes to find the time to learn ballroom dance. Let the dipping begin! (Deborah Giattina)

Goldies Lifetime Achievement winner Pandit Chitresh Das

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After a highly disciplined childhood, spending up to six hours a day practicing on a cement floor for his very demanding but revered guru, Pandit Ram Narayan Misra, Kathak master Chitresh Das moved from his native Calcutta (by way of a one-year stint in Maryland) to the Bay Area.
The year was 1971. Das had been hired by the Ali Akbar College of Music to teach one of the most ancient arts of India to young countercultural Americans eager to learn Eastern practices.
It was, at the very least, something of a cultural shock — for both sides. “This was the beautiful age of the flower children, the hippie generation,” Das remembers. “They were looking toward the East for answers, but I did not fit their idealized image of an Indian guru. Having been schooled in the old-world traditions — to respect and obey my teachers and elders and to assume a secondary stance in their presence — my amused bewilderment at my students’ behavior never ceased.”
Thirty-five years later Das and his American-born dancers, many of Indian descent, have more than reached harmony. His Chhandam School of Kathak has five Bay Area branches, plus outposts in Boston, Toronto, and Calcutta. The most accomplished of his Chitresh Das Dance Company members is the Floridian Charlotte Moraga, who stumbled into Das’s class at San Francisco State University — where he taught for 17 years — because the jazz dance class she wanted was full.
Das’s most important contribution to the Bay Area may well be the way he has woven Kathak into the fabric of local dance. Once an exceedingly esoteric art form, born at the Islamic courts of the Mogul Empire in northern India, Kathak now has a home in the Bay Area’s more egalitarian environment. In the ’80s, Das’s dancers were among the first participants in the SF Ethnic Dance Festival. His company regularly presents him as a solo dancer and as a choreographer of both traditional and unconventional work.
Now in his early 60s, an age at which most Western dancers have long retired from the theater, Das remains a stunning performer and the best advocate for his art. When he is onstage, you cannot take your eyes off him, whether he’s moving through the pure dance passages that require dizzying turns and mind-boggling footwork or the more expressive sections in which the dancer calls up a favorite story from the Mahabharata, impersonating all its different characters and sometimes the landscape as well.
Das thinks nothing of transforming a performance into something akin to a lecture demo if his audience will walk away with a better understanding of Kathak’s rhythmic intricacies and the vast world of the Hindu mythology in which the art is rooted. A “kathaka,” he likes to remind theatergoers, is a storyteller.
In September, Das organized “Kathak at the Crossroads,” the largest festival of its kind ever held outside India. The San Francisco event’s subtitle, “Innovation within Tradition,” could describe Das himself. A fierce traditionalist, he is also explosively freethinking. He embraces the improvisatory interaction between dancer and musician — a connection that takes place within given parameters but is never rehearsed. The way he talks about it, the dancer strives toward a kind of oneness, maybe a divine type of play that is both meditative and intensely joyful. His guru used to tell him to “dance in such a way that the sound of your [ankle] bells and the room become one.”
As traditional as Das can be, he is also an innovator. A few years ago he created a new genre of dancing, Kathak yoga, inspired by the ascetic traditions of the Himalayas. It is primarily designed as a spiritual and physical practice. Without music the dancer mentally counts the rhythms, recites and chants the embellishments aloud, and dances the footwork.
As a storytelling choreographer, Das has been a force for change ever since he first performed the clever and amusing The Train as a student at an international East-West dance conference in India. Choreographed by his guru, the piece imitates a train — traveling, speeding up, changing tracks, breaking, passing a railroad station.
Das has created traditional dance dramas (such as Darbar [1999]) but also less traditional ones, such as Impressions of the California Gold Rush (1990), in which a trio of 49ers perform in ankle bells and cowboy outfits.
Sadhana (2001) is a multimedia solo evening about different forms of practice — dance, life, meditation. For his 60th birthday he created the autobiographical Sampurnam (2004) for himself and his company.
But Das’s most innovative work has come with practitioners of other dance styles: The Guru (Bharata Natyam, 1991), Sole Music (tap and flamenco, 1986), Sugriya-Subali (Balinese, 2000), and East as Center (Kathakali and Balinese, 2003). His latest exploration in that direction is Jazz Suites, a collaboration with tap dancer Jason Samuels Smith that grew out of a friendly competition in the hallways of the American Dance Festival in 2004. The duo have been touring the piece around the country and will take it to India this winter.
While Das has been passionate about opening American eyes to the beauty of his art form, he is equally committed to doing the same for Indian audiences. He spends part of every year in Calcutta teaching, performing, and giving workshops. In 2002 he reopened his father’s old school, which had trained Kathak dancers in Calcutta even before Indian independence. Last year Das started a training program for the children of Calcutta’s sex workers; most recently he gave a lecture demonstration for professional Indian boxers about their connection with the Hindu goddess Kali and the monkey god Hanuman.
Clearly, one lifetime simply may not be enough to contain Chitresh Das, his artistry, his humanity, his passion. (Rita Felciano)

The SFPD will not reform itself

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has vetoed legislation requiring a few police officers to actually walk beats in high-crime neighborhoods, says he was proud of the San Francisco Police Department’s action in the Castro on Halloween night. Proud? Some 800 cops were on hand, and yet someone managed to bring in a gun, shoot nine people — and get away. As we report on page 11, a lot of cops weren’t really doing much for most of the night except standing around; foot patrols (that is, cops actually mingling with the revelers, keeping an eye on things) might have prevented the shootings.
The SFPD is a mess — and the department isn’t going to reform itself. The mayor ought to be in the forefront on this, but he’s ducking — so the supervisors need to step up.
The foot patrol legislation, sponsored by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, is hardly radical and isn’t a threat to the department’s independence. The bill simply directs the department to put a few cops on the beat, out of their cars, in a few high-crime areas. It passed 7–3, with only Sups. Aaron Peskin, Sean Elsbernd, and Michela Alioto-Pier dissenting, and Sup. Jake McGoldrick absent. If that vote holds and McGoldrick sticks with the majority, the supervisors can override the veto.
But there’s immense pressure coming down on individual supervisors to change their votes, and even one member slipping away would allow Newsom’s position to hold. That’s unacceptable: every supervisor who approved foot patrols needs to vote to override the veto — and just to be sure, Peskin, who is generally good on these issues, needs to come over to the progressive side. This one modest mandate could be not only a lifesaver in areas with high homicide rates but also the beginning of some real change at the SFPD.
The Police Commission is struggling with a disciplinary issue that’s also potentially a turning point: three commissioners — David Campos, Petra de Jesus, and Theresa Sparks — want to refuse to settle any disciplinary cases unless the cops agree to make the settlement public (see Opinion, page 7). Commissioner Joe Veronese initially agreed with that proposal but has shifted his position and is offering a really weak alternative instead. That’s a bad sign for the politically ambitious commissioner; he needs to show some spine, defy the Police Officers Association, and sign on with the Campos plan.
This just in: Bill Lee, who works for Mayor Newsom and (sort of) for the airport, is up for reappointment as a planning commissioner at the Rules Committee on Nov. 9. It’s a clear conflict of interest: a city employee working directly for the mayor shouldn’t be on the Planning Commission. Besides, he’s been a pretty bad vote. The supervisors should send him packing. SFBG

City hall’s new secrets

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EDITORIAL Back in 1999 reporter Scott Rosenberg dug up a juicy little scoop for Salon: he found out that part of Microsoft’s annual report was written on an Apple computer. That caused the giant purveyor of Windows software (and Apple competitor) no small amount of embarrassment. And Rosenberg did this without any secret source or leaked records; he just looked at the metadata embedded in the files of public company documents.
Metadata is part of the new frontier of public-records law. It’s the stuff you can’t see that’s hidden in digital versions of, say, Microsoft Word documents. It shows what computer (and type of computer) created the document and often shows the revisions the document has gone through. It’s sort of an electronic history of what used to be something typed on paper — and as such, it’s extremely useful to researchers who want to follow what the government is doing.
It’s also, all too often, something that public officials want to hide. That’s the case in San Francisco, where Gloria Young, the clerk of the Board of Supervisors, has refused to release copies of the original Word versions of what are clearly public records. She wouldn’t, for example, give out a Word copy of the city’s Sunshine Ordinance.
That’s a mistake — and the Board of Supervisors needs to direct Young to change her policy.
Young isn’t refusing to release the records per se — she’s had them made into PDFs, the electronic equivalent of photocopies that don’t contain the embedded data. And she’s released those versions. The office of City Attorney Dennis Herrera concluded Sept. 19 that city officials have the right to withhold metadata and provide documents only in PDF format. The argument, contained in a six-page memo, goes more or less like this:
A Word version of a document can be edited and changed — and thus someone who requests a public record might alter it and then pass it off as a true version.
Besides, metadata might possibly contain privileged information (legal advice from an attorney). It might include early drafts of a document (which are exempt from disclosure but really shouldn’t be). And it might give somebody with evil intent the ability to hack into the city’s computer system and do a lot of damage.
In the end, deputy city attorney Paul Zarefsky argues, figuring out where there is and isn’t metadata and what it might include is a huge job that requires special skills and would be inordinately burdensome for city agencies.
The first argument is just silly. Sure, somebody could take a copy of a city record and alter it — but enterprising scammers have always been able to take real records and turn them into phonies. That’s why the city keeps the originals on file and releases only copies.
The rest of Zarefsky’s analysis is a bit more complex. But in the end the posture of the city is far too defensive. This is, after all, data that was produced by city employees on the taxpayers’ dime. And like just about everything else the city produces — with only narrow exceptions — it ought to be released to the public.
We don’t buy the argument that there are vast stores of deep secrets lurking in the metadata that might somehow damage the city’s interests. There may be a few specific cases in which documents have been reviewed by the City Attorney’s Office and might include confidential advice. But most of the material will simply show who created the document, how it was edited (and by whom), and how all of that relates to the final product. Like the Microsoft revelation, some of that might embarrass city hall — but that’s not an excuse to keep it secret.
Tom Newton, general counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association, noted in a Sept. 22 letter to the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force that the “CNPA is aware of no other state or local agency that has adopted this restrictive policy.”
Herrera’s office, interestingly, isn’t arguing that all metadata must be secret — the opinion only says that department employees have the ability to withhold it if they want to. That’s where the supervisors need to weigh in.
Young asked the Rules Committee on Nov. 2 for policy direction on the matter. The committee heard testimony and took the matter under advisement.
The chair, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, should bring up the issue again at the next possible meeting, and the committee should direct Young — and all other city officials — to stop using metadata as an excuse to withhold documents. San Francisco ought to be taking the lead here and setting a policy precedent for cities across the state. SFBG
PS This is just one example of what seems to be a renewed war on sunshine at City Hall. The task force just had its budget cut and no longer has a full-time staffer assigned to it (although the Sunshine Ordinance mandates full-time staff assistance). The supervisors should make it clear that San Francisco isn’t going to slide backward into the old, dark days.

Keep police discipline public

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OPINION Three years after San Francisco voters passed Proposition H, the landmark police reform initiative, the San Francisco Police Commission finds itself at a crossroad. At the heart of the matter is how the commission deals with one of the worst decisions to come out of the California Supreme Court in recent memory, Copley Press v. Superior Court. In that decision the court held that records reutf8g to police officer disciplinary proceedings are confidential and not subject to disclosure under the California Public Records Act.
Citing the Peace Officers Bill of Rights, the court even held that an officer’s identity in disciplinary proceedings is confidential. How the Police Commission deals with this ruling will determine the level of openness with which the commission — and consequently, the Police Department — will conduct its business.
In turn, this may well determine the extent to which the promise of Proposition H — transparency and accountability for the police — will become a reality.
In an effort to protect transparency and accountability, the three undersigned police commissioners, as individuals, proposed what we believe is a commonsense approach to Copley: let’s comply with Copley’s requirement of confidentiality, but let’s only be as confidential as the decision requires us to be. Stated differently, let’s follow the law — but let’s be as open as the law allows.
This is why we proposed a rather simple and measured idea — since Copley only requires the confidentiality of records in police disciplinary proceedings and since the state legislature never gave police officers the right to confidential settlements, why not continue to handle such settlements out in the open, the way they’ve been handled for 14 years without ever facing a legal challenge? To be sure that our idea would pass legal muster, we asked the City Attorney’s Office to draft a resolution that would be legally viable and could survive legal challenge. That resolution was submitted for the public and the Police Commission’s consideration last week.
One would think a resolution reflecting a tried-and-true process that was never challenged in more than a decade, a process carefully vetted with the city attorney, would satisfy even the strictest of legal constructionists. And yet, not surprisingly, the San Francisco Police Officers Association has come out against our proposal to openly handle settlements in police disciplinary cases. Without citing any legal authority, the POA argues that police officers have the right to settle disciplinary cases through backroom deals without ever revealing their identity or the terms of the deal to the public.
The POA’s position seems to be shared by a number of other commissioners, and a counterresolution essentially changing how settlements are handled was recently introduced. Both our original resolution and the counterresolution are scheduled to be heard Nov. 15. Even though it’s unclear which resolution will pass, we remain hopeful that the Police Commission will not grant police officers a right the legislature never bestowed on them — the right to cloak settlements in secrecy. This is especially true since several commissioners come from communities adversely impacted by police actions and have a long legacy in support of civil rights and public access.
Openness in the handling of settlements in police disciplinary hearings has been the norm in San Francisco for more than a decade. There is no reason to change course today. SFBG
David Campos, Petra de Jesus, and Theresa Sparks
David Campos, Petra de Jesus, and Theresa Sparks are members of the San Francisco Police Commission.

Preparing for scary

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› sarah@sfbg.com
Nine people were shot during this year’s big Halloween celebration in the Castro, prompting city officials to announce the convening of a task force that will examine the event and its future in San Francisco. Supporters and event planners say such early attention is crucial for a gathering of this magnitude — and that the lack of proper planning contributed to this year’s problems.
Concerns that the event has gotten out of control prompted some Castro residents and Sup. Bevan Dufty to announce in July that they wanted the event cancelled, moved, or drastically scaled back. Instead, the plan was hatched to increase the police presence by 25 percent, adopt a zero tolerance policy for public drinking and other crimes, and end the event at 10:30 p.m., which they announced just days before Halloween.
More than 100,000 people showed up anyway, passing big groups of police clumped at the edges of the event but rarely undergoing even cursory searches for weapons and other contraband as they entered the cordoned area. Just after the music was turned off at the one stage (down from three last year) and police announced, “The party is over,” a conflict between two San Francisco gangs escalated, with someone being hit by a bottle and then someone pulling out a gun and opening fire in retaliation. There were no fatalities, and the shooter escaped.
Other than that one incident, which most attendees weren’t aware of until the next day, the event was pretty tame. More striking and upsetting to most who came was the fact that the event ended just as its numbers were peaking and that the end was reinforced at 11 p.m. by water trucks and street sweepers that cleared the still-large crowd.
Mayor Gavin Newsom seemed to acknowledge the lack of preparation when he told KRON-TV, “We’re not going to wait until the last few months before the event. We’re going to start planning right away.” Nonetheless, both Newsom and Dufty praised the police and the planning efforts, with the mayor telling the Chronicle, “We’d done everything we could imagine doing.”
Yet critics say that if that’s the best city officials can do, we’re in no shape to host other large events, such as the 2016 Summer Olympics, which Newsom is bidding for.
“If San Francisco wants to host the Olympics, it can’t go around telling the world that it can’t keep a party under control one night a year,” Ted Strawser of the SF Party Party told the Guardian. “Halloween is like gay Christmas. It’s a travesty to talk about canceling it.”
Other cities seem to be up to the task. Take New York’s Village Halloween Parade. Twenty-five years ago, when its crowds first topped the 100,000 mark, New York celebration artist Jeanne Fleming began working closely with local residents, schools, community centers, and the police to maintain “a grassroots feel and prepare for future growth.”
Today, the New York Village Halloween Parade is the biggest in the world, a fact organizers actively advertise on their Web site to attract sponsors and fill the city’s coffers with $80 million worth of tourists’ money annually, thanks to two million spectators and 60,000 parade participants.
And while Newsom, Dufty, Police Chief Heather Fong, Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White, and Sheriff Michael Hennessey deliberate whether the party should continue and how to make it securer if it does, the NYPD hails the Village parade as a valuable public service that makes Halloween safe for New Yorkers.
“Maybe the SFPD needs to talk to the NYPD,” Fleming told the Guardian, noting that the Village parade has changed routes four times over the years in response to merchants’ fears and neighborhood concerns without losing its original identity. “Instead of putting up walls, San Francisco needs to open up its mind.”
That’s what Alix Rosenthal (the domestic partner of Guardian city editor Steven T. Jones) had been urging during her campaign against Dufty for his seat on the Board of Supervisors.
“Bevan Dufty has accused me of playing politics with Halloween, but he should have started working on this plan at least six months ago,” Rosenthal said at a day-after press conference. She believes that more entry points, entrance fees (with higher fees for uncostumed attendees), and a parade leading away from the Castro would be helpful. “Getting out the word that there are going to be changes has to be a huge PR effort.”
Paul Wertheimer of LA-based Crowd Management Strategies told the Guardian that talk of canceling the event is “an understandable reaction if you know you can’t do it right.”
“Organizers often fail to recognize the changing demographics and popularity of events,” Wertheimer said, pointing to the success of New Orleans in managing its Mardi Gras parades despite narrow streets and huge crowds. “You can’t have a hippie, anything-goes mentality. Once an event gets bigger than 3,000 to 5,000 people, it has to be organized and planned with the proper resources, but it can be done, because the techniques and plans are already laid out.”
Wertheimer hopes the SF Halloween task force will assess what worked and what didn’t, take a break, then begin planning no later than six months out. “And merchants’ issues have to be addressed. Merchants are always concerned, but if they can be shown ways they can benefit and be protected from vandalism, they’ll be for it.”
Or as Strawser put it, “We need to put the dollars into better management, not police overtime. Former mayor Willie Brown learned that lesson in 1997 when he tried to cancel Critical Mass. We’re a city that handles the Love Parade, Gay Pride, and Bay to Breakers. To cancel what began as a gay event because of fear of gay bashers and violence would be to give in to the terrorists.” SFBG

Bollywood dreams

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› news@sfbg.com
It was the proverbial phone call every aspiring actor waits for. An agent for a TV producer rang Raj Vasudeva in 2003 to say he would be perfect for a role in a new show that needed a dynamic lead.
Vasudeva, 33, eagerly invited the agent over to view his modeling portfolio and acting tapes. The agent flipped through a book that featured shots of the former Mr. India California crawling through the surf seductively with a dress shirt fluttering open. The agent said he was impressed. Vasudeva thought he had the role, but then the real audition began.
“‘Can I be blunt with you?’” Vasudeva recalled the agent saying. “‘Are you ready to get your ass fucked by men and older women?’”
Vasudeva laughed at the sleazy suggestion and said no. The interview ended abruptly, and the agent tossed the following advice at Vasudeva as he left the meeting in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay: “If you’re coming to Bollywood, you have to be shameless.”
Welcome to Bollywood, or as they say in India, Bollywood mein aap kaa swaagat ho. Vasudeva, who was born in Delhi but spent much of his life in San Francisco, is trying to accomplish something no US resident has ever done: become a top star in the world’s largest film industry.
For anyone still not familiar with Bollywood, it’s entertainment on a scale that can make your average Hollywood production look like Saved by the Bell. The films are a brawling mix of Broadway-style song and dance, bling that rivals a 50 Cent video, and dizzying scene changes across two or even three continents. The pictures often mash up elements of drama, comedy, and action into a single bursting-at-the-seams melodrama that can last more than three hours.
Bollywood has grown increasingly popular in the United States over the last five years. While it was a lackluster summer for many of Hollywood’s big summer releases, Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (Never Say Goodbye) grossed $1.4 million in US theaters during its opening weekend in August — the best showing ever by a Bollywood movie in this country. The film shows Nov. 11 at 8:15 p.m. in the Castro Theatre as part of the San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival (www.thirdi.org/festival).
Vasudeva’s transformation into an aspiring actor might work nicely as a plot for a Bollywood film. Vasudeva came to the States in 1990 to attend college. He graduated with a degree in industrial management and seemed to be headed down the path to a respectable, if somewhat unfulfilling, white-collar future.
His acting career began as little more than a hobby in 1997. He began taking classes at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. Later, he took a job in sales at Oracle in Redwood City. His friend Paul Chopra recalled Vasudeva renting a bunch of Bollywood films and then practicing lines from them in between fielding service calls to Oracle from India in the dead of the night.
He graduated to theater and film productions at the San Francisco Academy of Art, which was followed by his first feature film, Indian Fish. It traces the journey of an Indian software engineer as he makes his way through unfamiliar American culture. Vasudeva, who is tall and has boyish good looks, burnished his résumé by snagging the title of Mr. India California in 2002 on the strength of a performance of a monologue from a Bollywood film.
Vasudeva then starred in Khwaab, the story of another Indian immigrant who gives up a career in the tech world — against the wishes of his parents and friends — to pursue an acting career. Vasudeva declined to discuss whether the movie parallels his own struggles, but the similarities are striking. He said his parents were initially upset about his career choice but eventually came around.
With some solid acting experience to his name, Vasudeva decided to make the leap to Bollywood in 2004. He packed up his San Francisco apartment and moved to Mumbai. It was a shock for him.
Vasudeva found the Mumbai film industry was more freewheeling than the one in the United States. Contracts are often nonexistent; producers hit him up for money to complete films and sometimes bounce his paychecks. Then there are the thickets of “secretaries” — movie agents who serve as intermediaries for actors looking to land roles.
“There are secretaries that will squeeze every penny from you,” Vasudeva said.
Occasionally, the action off the screen seems as dramatic as that on it. The Indian underworld has been accused of threatening — and even killing — actors who won’t pay it protection money or act in its films.
It hasn’t been easy, but Vasudeva managed to get his first break by placing in the top 10 in another contest, called Grasim Mr. India, which was broadcast nationally in India. He compared the contest to Bravo’s short-lived Manhunt USA, which pitted aspiring models against each other to win a contract with an agency. A publicity photo for Grasim Mr. India shows Vasudeva was right on the mark. It features him and a stageful of hunky guys decked out in mesh shirts. (Unfortunately, mesh shirts seem to be a staple fashion for male actors in Bollywood.)
Vasudeva’s showing in the event prompted the interview with the sleazy talent agent. He has since landed a role in Kaho na Kaho, a Bollywood remake of Notting Hill. (Bollywood often liberally borrows from American films and music because, for the most part, artists in the West have not paid much attention to Bollywood, although this is coming to an end.) And he’s starred in a remake that would seem an unlikely choice for Bollywood’s romance- and family-centered cinema, The Ring. The movie is called Second Day. Both Kaho na Kaho and Second Day have yet to be released.
Lisa Tsering, who has covered Bollywood for the newspaper India West for 10 years, said Vasudeva’s chances of making it in Bollywood are “not too good.” And it has little to do with his talent.
“I think that NRIs [nonresident Indians] don’t have a certain quality they are looking for in India,” Tsering said. “They feel NRIs are too complacent and too well fed. They’re not hungry enough.”
An American has yet to crack Bollywood’s A-list, although Canadian-born actress Lisa Ray (who starred in Deepa Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood and Water) has generated buzz recently. Tsering said non-Indians are also at a disadvantage because many don’t have the family connections that are so important to making it in Bollywood. Unlike in Hollywood, where actors often try to obscure their family connections by changing their name (think Angelina Jolie and her father, Jon Voight), blatant nepotism is part of the game in Bollywood. It is so pervasive it has become a running joke among Indian film fans, who often complain about the latest pudgy, bad-haired, leaden-acting relation who is foisted on them. Vasudeva may be able to capitalize on this nepotistic trend: he is related to Gauri Khan, an actress and the wife of megastar Shah Rukh Khan, star of Never Say Goodbye. (Vasudeva said he doesn’t trade on his family connections.)
Vasudeva’s current role could be his most challenging yet. In the psychological thriller tentatively titled Boomerang he plays three separate characters. The movie is based on the story of a famous London crime novelist who returns to his ancestral home in India to write a novel. The novelist, played by Vasudeva, soon realizes that someone has followed him there. Drama ensues.
Vasudeva’s choice to pursue a career in Bollywood instead of in the States says as much about Hollywood as it does about the Indian film industry. Despite the exasperations of Bollywood, he’s happy with the choice and doesn’t plan to return to this country anytime soon.
“I didn’t want to spend my career playing a cab driver,” Vasudeva quipped about the limited roles for Indians in Hollywood. SFBG

GOLDIES 2006

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The Guardian turned 40 this year, and the Goldies — our annual arts awards — are now 18. Which makes them a bit like the paper’s child, a many–gendered and splendored one that reaches the US’s idea of adulthood this year. An event like that deserves a party and — after a private award ceremony in honor of this year’s winners — we’re throwing one at 111 Minna Gallery.
It’s free — a San Francisco value.
Dance is at the heart of any ceremony that matters and any party worth remembering, and it’s at the heart of this year’s Goldies thanks to three winners that demonstrate the diversity of its forms. Our cover stars, the extraordinary Benjamin Levy and LevyDANCE, prove it is past time to explode the cold post that’s been lingering in front of the phrase modern dance: close to two years after the first time I saw them perform, I still remember specific images of aggression and tender respite from their pieces. Local Hip Hop Dance Fest mainstays Funkanometry SF take the movement language of B-boys and music video choreographers, add their own signature style, and electrify and take over any room in the process. This year’s Lifetime Achievement awardee, Pandit Chitresh Das, introduced Kathak dance to this country; more recently, he has tapped into its connections to tap.
This year’s Goldie winners were selected by the Guardian’s Johnny Ray Huston, Kimberly Chun, and Cheryl Eddy with valuable input from our writers and critics, as well as members of the Bay Area arts community. The people in the following pages make noise that’s transcendental and meditative, use film to look at toxic currents of contemporary life, stage works that leap across boundaries, and vivify — and add impish prankishness to — visual art. Join us, and them, at this year’s party.
MUSIC
DEERHOOF
GRIS GRIS
OM
TRAXAMILLION

FILM
JAMES T. HONG
CHRIS METZLER AND JEFF SPRINGER

THEATER
LAST PLANET THEATRE

DANCE
FUNKANOMETRY SF
BENJAMIN LEVY AND LEVYDANCE

PERFORMANCE
SEAN DORSEY

VISUAL ART
CHRIS DUNCAN
YOON LEE
TIM SULLIVAN


LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
PANDIT CHITRESH DAS

OMG — “This Prop was Made for You and Me”

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Live report from Amanda Witherell

Slim’s is hosting a party for local ballot measure Prop A, the bond for SF schools. The bar is aswirl with San Francisco’s school crowd — those that are of age, at least, meaning current board members and hopefuls.

Keefer looks ahead; calls Pelosi out

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Live report from Sarah Phelan

Krissy Keefer, the candidate for Congress, District 8, rose amid a flurry of Peruvian pan pipes at Café Boheme, dressed in bright green, to address the crowd of her supporters. Her platform had been: US out of Iraq, impeach Bush, stop global warming. With Democrat Nancy Pelosi leading at 77 percent — looks like she may be the next Speaker of the House – Keefer had this to say:

“The most important thing now is to see if measure J passes. Pelosi has to look at what her district wants — impeachment for Bush. Her district was against the Iraq war from the start.

It’s time for Nancy Pelosi to take the interests of San Francisco and put them at the center rather than the margins. People from SF will be watching.”

Asian representation in District 4

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live report by Jon Beckhardt

The energy at Harry Ha’s restaurant on Irving isn’t exactly captiviting. Janry Mak’s core campaign has yet to show at the election night party being held there. “It’s hard to know,” one supporter, who refuses to give his name, says of Mak’s chances of becoming a Supervisor. “They say we won’t know the results until Friday. That’s San Francisco politics.”

Polling problems

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The Chris Daly campaign just issued the following statement:

Almost 20 percent of the polling places in San Francisco’s District 6 are experiencing problems and irregularities in the early hours of Election Day, according to Supervisor Chris Daly’s campaign.

According to the Daly campaign, at least 10 out of 52 precincts have experienced problems ranging from late openings to voting machine failures to incomplete ballots. In one case, a precinct did not open until almost 90 minutes after the official 7 AM opening time, preventing many voters from casting their ballots. At the same time, the Department of Elections was telling the Daly campaign that the precinct was open. In another instance, witnesses saw a voting machine that was not turned on.

The Daly campaign encourages all media outlets to remind voters that the polls are open until 8 p.m. The campaign encourages all voters within District 6 to vote throughout the day.

Two drug execs escape jail … for now

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By G.W. Schulz

Two former executives at the San Francisco-based McKesson Corp. escaped prison sentences by the skin of their teeth late last week in this ongoing era of blind fury over corporate corruption. And McKesson’s former blue suits have the indecisiveness of just one juror out of 12 to thank.

The two were acquitted on one count of securities fraud stemming from a $9 billion accounting scandal, but a mistrial was declared after the jury deadlocked 11-1 on three of the remaining counts. Four other executives were previously convicted in a scheme by which the company allegedly overstated revenue to the tune of $300 million during its merger with an Atlanta-based outfit called HBO & Co.

McKesson is one of the nation’s largest prescription-drug wholesalers with revenue of $88 billion annually. It’s current CEO, John Hammergren, makes more each year than even the head of Bay Area-based ChevronTexaco.

One juror told the Associated Press that the rebel holdout “got to the point where he didn’t want to be talked to anymore.” U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan’s office is determining whether to retry, which could still land the two men, Charles McCall and Jay Lapine, in jail for 10 years each.

The Guardian reported in late October that McKesson is in no small amount of trouble these days. The company, along with the New York-based Hearst Corp., which owns the San Francisco Chronicle, was charged by a group of unions in a civil suit filed in a Boston federal court last year of conspiring to inflate drug prices. Hearst owns a drug info publishing company based in San Bruno called First DataBank. The suit alleges that the effort caused consumers to overpay $7 billion for prescription drugs between 2001 and 2005. First DataBank has since settled, as we reported, but McKesson is still a major target of the lawsuit.

Big Pharma is nearly as profitable as Big Oil these days. The state of California pays out over $3 billion each year for prescription drugs through programs that benefit children and the indigent, while Santa Clara County alone — as a smaller-scale example — pays out nearly $35 million. (Santa Clara County sued a bunch of manufacturers and wholesalers a couple of years ago for allegedly rigging prices, but the case was recently tossed out of federal court in San Francisco.)

Defense attorneys for the former McKesson execs are calling last week’s ruling a victory, but Wall Street didn’t appear to see it that way. Value of the company’s shares dropped by nearly a half following announcement of the news to $35. The company quickly informed the business press just a few days later of its $1.1 billion purchase of Georgia-based Per-Se Technologies and just as soon recovered $15 per share of the drop. Guess corporate ethics don’t have to be much of a pain in the monetary ass after all.

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