Scene

“Brad Noble: Chaotic Resolve”

-
0

The recent Washington Post obituary of Andrew Wyeth reveals that the figurative painter considered himself an abstract artist, because he didn’t depict but rather evoked a metaphysical vision. This idea is at least as old as 1907, when antimodernist Max Nordau hurled it as an accusation at French symbolist Puvis de Chavannes, and while few use the word abstract with this meaning, I find the conception sympathetic rather than pejorative. If we can call it a lineage, then Brad Noble is part of it. His Beach Girl (2007-08) could be a symbolist painting, evoking rather than dispelling mystery. Is the reclining nude partly buried in the sand, or is she becoming sand? Or is the sand becoming her? Up close, she seems to be eating it. This scene is abstract in that it takes representational elements and recombines them in nonrepresentational ways.

Most of the works in "Chaotic Resolve" lack recognizable landscapes, though Lucid Dream Lab features a woman seated on the ground with her back to us, forearms wrapped in ribbons, gazing into a receding horizon. The landscape’s vagueness is complicated by metallic paint that shows through, and many works have a metallic gleam impossible to capture in reproduction. Quagmire features a nude man in profile against a brown surface so shiny it looks lacquered. His back is stooped; thorny vines wind up his legs. His penis is obscured by one arm, but a lone tendril of hair curls out from between his legs at crotch-level: this, like many of Noble’s images, is fraught with uncertainty, lifting as if erect, then curving down impotent, then circling back on itself, suggesting infinity. Exacerbating the whole is the man’s cracking body, his missing brainpan, and the hatchet wounds dividing his neck. A couple pieces, such as Third Party, are less successful, but on the whole, this art is of productive opacity, subtly in tune with the host gallery’s orientation toward surrealist abstraction.

BRAD NOBLE: CHAOTIC RESOLVE Through Feb. 24. Mon.–Fri., 10 a.m.–6 p.m. Weinstein Gallery, 301 Geary, SF. (415) 362-8151. www.weinstein.com

Fashion forward

-
0

› culture@sfbg.com

Looking at fashion designer Miranda Caroligne today, it’s hard to imagine she ever did anything other than sew and sell clothing. In addition to running her namesake boutique on 14th Street, she manages the co-op Trunk, peddles her wares at events across the country, and was asked to write Reconstructing Clothes for Dummies (For Dummies, 2007). Thanks to her gorgeous, whimsical, reconstructed styles, as well as her dedication to environmentalism and artistic community, she has become a well-reputed force in the SF indie fashion scene and beyond.

But she didn’t start that way — and the road to the present was neither easy nor direct.

Caroligne grew up in the woodland areas of Rhode Island with her mom, an elementary school teacher and brilliant seamstress, and her dad, a textile scientist. As a child, she spent most of her time hiking, exploring, or working on creative crafts with her mom, developing equal interest in both art and science. By high school, she was passionate about three very different subjects: writing, health care, and fashion. But when she got to the University of Rhode Island, she chose her major based on which jobs she thought would be available after she graduated. Health care won by a long shot. "And I was afraid of this thing called writer’s block," she jokes. Sewing remained a captivating pastime.

After graduating with a MS in physical therapy in 2000, Caroligne began working with children who had sensory system problems in Washington, DC. "Being young and having a job that relied on my physical strength — that time was psychologically stressful," she recalls.

Caroligne’s stress level hit the roof after a bicycling accident in 2003, which left her with a crushed nerve in her neck. Her physical strength had failed her, and she was without a job. It was a sign that it was time to turn her lifelong hobby, fashion design, into a career. With her short-term disability insurance and unemployment checks, she moved to Boston and found an art studio, where she spent nearly all her time at the sewing machine. "Sometimes when I don’t know what to do, I just do," she explains. "I’m not one to be idle." She spent so much time working at the studio that she decided to sublease her apartment, leaving her nowhere to sleep but on friends’ couches. After a few months of couch-surfing, she cashed her unemployment checks and moved across the country to pursue a career in fashion.

It was January 2005, and Caroligne lived in a closet in her friend’s apartment. Her only possessions were a disco ball, which hung from the ceiling next to the skylight, a sewing machine, and a few pieces of colorful fabric draped over a stretch canvas which served as sewing material by day and bedding by night. Soon, she found her dream store in the heart of the Mission District.

She opened the shop in November of that year. About the size of a large dorm room, the cluttered space is filled with radiant, one-of-a-kind garments that reflect many years of hard work. She stitches them with a beat-up machine that faces a window on the street, so she can smile and wave to people as they pass. Her wares are reconstructed garments (made from donated clothing that she dismantles and pieces back together in different ways), articles produced from original patterns, and offcut items (made from the leftover scraps she accumulates while working on patterned pieces).

And her reuse of materials is more than just style — it’s an outgrowth of the environmentalism she learned as a kid. Caroligne advocates sustainability and makes use of almost every shred of old fabric, no matter how big or small. "I have this philosophy of not having sizes," she says. "I alter everything to fit." Sometimes she lets her customers alter pieces with her, so inspired buyers can learn how to make clothing on their own. "Part of the reason the sewing machine’s out is to show people they can do it, too."

To share her philosophy, Caroligne agreed to write Reconstructing Clothes for Dummies in the fall of 2007, encouraging fellow fashionistas to reuse old materials. She was surprised to reach not only an earth-loving, crafty crowd but also a non-sewing, mainstream audience. People were motivated to salvage their materials, whether they made their own clothes or not. Now, her style is becoming so popular with typical shoppers that some conventional retailers have started "faking" reconstruction. But Caroligne says her authentic pieces are about reducing waste and avoiding conformity, not just about looking good.

Now, on a typical Friday afternoon at her boutique, as she sits at her old-fashioned sewing machine with a pile of white, ruffly fabric exploding out from under it, she waves playfully at a child strolling past the shop with his family. Another woman walks in and gives Caroligne a hug. "It’s less about fashion and more about meeting people, helping them get in touch with themselves," she says. She wants everyone to be able to express themselves by wearing clothes that reveal how they feel. While her designs are meant to be fashionable, they’re carefully crafted based on how they feel and move while wearing them. Her background in physical therapy helps her understand the way fabrics are supposed to flow with the body, as well as how light or heavy the materials should be. She tests most of her skirts and dresses for these characteristics, because she says the weight of a fabric can change the way someone walks in it, depending on his or her physical composition. "They don’t teach you that in fashion school," she says, noting that she’s glad she didn’t attend. "It’s rigid."

Most designers she knows went to fashion school, though, and have taken a more standard route: they’ve created clothing lines and sold them to national retailers. While this route is probably the easiest, Caroligne says she’ll never regret opening her neighborhood boutique and sewing her designs herself. "There’s a life that happens when hanging up a new piece," she says. Curiously, it’s the one people ooh and ahh over when entering the store, even though everything looks new to them when it’s their first time in. Caroligne gets new ideas when sewing one-of-a-kind articles, which she says wouldn’t happen if other people sewed the clothes for her.

This March, however, Caroligne and her sales rep plan to start taking orders for a nationally distributed clothing line — without abandoning her boutique. Her "adult contemporary" collection will comprise pieces she has crafted for her store and her fashion shows, which are usually fundraising events for groups such as the Black Rock Arts Foundation.

On top of everything, she runs a sustainable art-retail-fashion cooperative, Trunk, in Upper Haight. Formerly known as Pandora’s Trunk, the shop has been renovated inside and out since she and her business partner split last fall. Caroligne says the corporate structure and leadership has changed, and for the first time it feels like a true San Francisco co-op, where people encourage each other and each other’s art. "There’s a sense of community support in San Francisco," she says, thinking about the differences between the Bay Area and Boston. "People live better here." Now there’s more space for local designers in the store, including the San Francisco–born, world-renowned company Wildlife Works, whose proceeds benefit endangered species and help create jobs and schools in Kenya. Caroligne donates regularly to Wildlife Works, which gives her scrap fabric and clothing in exchange. She uses the leftovers for her reconstructed and offcut designs, noting that this swap is just another way she likes to support the community and reinforce its connectedness.

Years after accomplishing her goal of becoming a successful designer, she has only one piece of advice for others with a similar ambition: "Just do it." She remembers one of her college professors who’d had many different jobs in various fields, and back then she thought he was a failure. But now his story inspires her.

"There are different ways of looking at life: you can work to financially support the life you want to live, or you can figure out a way to make the thing you love to do a source of financial stability," she says. With a humble smile, she adds: "I think I’ve found success in that." *

MIRANDA CAROLIGNE

485 14th St., SF. (415) 355-1900, www.mirandacaroligne.com

TRUNK

544 Haight, SF. (415) 861-5310, www.myspace.com/trunksf

Mo Biggie

-
0

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Wait for it, wait for it: the moment when Jamal Woolard as Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. Big Poppa, utters, with admirable understatement, "Mo money, mo problems." The woman he married three days after he met her, vocalist Faith Evans (a sad-eyed Antonique Smith), is pregnant but estranged; his spunky protégé Lil’ Kim (Naturi Naughton) is hopping mad that her lover-protector-mentor has dropped her and is instead bossing her in the studio; his original baby mama is miffed that his daughter gets zero Big Poppa time, and his ex-BFF Tupac Shakur (Anthony Mackie) thinks Biggie is out to get him, and the East Coast vs. West Coast beef is now fully fired up. ‘Nuff said.

"Mo Money Mo Problems" is the obvious alternate title for Notorious, which has the ring of a men’s cologne by Sean "I Am King" Combs, aka Puff Daddy, aka P. Diddy, aka Diddy, the film’s executive producer. It’s certainly more glammy — and feeds into the mythmaking that Combs has been so adept at when it comes to his Bad Boy artists — than Unbelievable: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Notorious B.I.G. (Three Rivers, 2004), the title of the book by Cheo Hodari Coker that this biopic is based on.

The drive-by shooters who killed the legendary rapper, born Christopher Wallace, at the far-too-young age of 24, remain cloaked in mystery, despite the attention given the MC’s murder in Randall Sullivan’s 2002 book, LAbyrinth (Grove/Atlantic) and Nick Broomfield’s ’02 doc Biggie and Tupac, and his death is still embroiled in knotty intrigue, having triggered multiple wrongful-death claims against the Los Angeles Police Department. But of course, history is written by the winners — and those happen to be Combs and Notorious‘ producers, Biggie’s mother Voletta Wallace and Biggie managers Wayne Barrow and Mark Pitts — and in the end, they prefer to skip the speculation and allegations of conspiracy surrounding the rapper’s unsolved murder and focus on the love.

So much like recent musicmaker biopics à la 2007’s Control, which privileged the perspective of Joy Division frontperson Ian Curtis’ wife over his bandmates’, there’s an element of noticeably selective memory-picking to Notorious — even as it tries to play fair with those outside the equation, such as Shakur and Lil’ Kim. The latter has slammed the movie, according to MTV: she believes it hews to the version of history as written by Biggie’s mother and wife and portrays her inaccurately.

Still, director George Tillman Jr. (Men of Honor, Barbershop) seems to have thrived on the tension between a mother who adored Biggie but disapproved of his criminal activities, and label heads and managers aware that the dope-dealing, dues-paying gangsta grind girding Notorious B.I.G.’s lyrics must be shown to authenticate the first-person experiential honesty the rapper was known for. Thus we get a multidimensional Biggie — the big-kid vulnerability he showed to his moms and his "Faith-Faith," as well as the tough, rock-slinging-to-pregnant-crackheads, money-making front. Plenty of respect is also given to the MC’s art, which this rags-to-riches/gats-to-bitches tale (with much due given to a kind of golden-age of hip-hop label patronage in the form of Puffy [Derek Luke] and Biggie’s friendship) reverently visualizes on the street, in the basement, in the studio, and on the arena stage.

Putting his interest in street-level soul, characters less than well-represented in mainstream Hollywood, and his touch with rappers to work, Tillman subtly injects more cinematic interest into his already-dramatic material than it might have had on the page. Biggie’s childhood is washed with glowy, golden hues, while his time dealing on the street is leached of hues and clad in corroded grays, blacks, whites, and browns, until the MC battles another rapper on the sidewalk and color begins to enter the picture.

And unlike 2008’s Cadillac Records, which bought into the overt displays of bling that talent can bring, Tillman and company give adequate shrift to the musicmaking that built Biggie’s renown: the mic is shot as if it’s a grail, swathed in a silvery aura. The symbols of power — such as the Big Daddy Kane–like throne Biggie mounts — speak louder than his kicks, cribs, or cars. And the scenes in which Woolard actually raps — particularly in a basement scene after he emerges from prison and a bout of lyric writing and soul searching — are believable and compelling: flecks of his spit shimmer in the harsh light. Woolard, who grew up blocks from Biggie’s original hood and had a promising career until a shooting in front of NYC’s Hot 97, is the perfect choice to portray the man.

Notorious‘ melodramatic, overly amped conclusion may ring a bit artificial with its drawn-out return to the opening scenes: as "Hypnotize"’s "Rise" sample ripples through the dancers, Notorious B.I.G. says, in flashback, that he’s finally found peace, he’s become a man, and, well, he’s Ready to Die (Bad Boy, 1994), to crib the title of his classic debut. But I dare anyone to not get choked up by Notorious‘ coda, as Voletta Wallace, portrayed with grand-dame grit by Angela Bassett, looks out on the crowd surrounding her son’s NYC funeral procession, playing his music and flinging their arms, and realizes that, though she never quite trusted the easy money and fast friends surrounding her son, Biggie will always be remembered for his way with words.

NOTORIOUS opens Fri/16 in the Bay Area

———–

JUST PLAYING

BRIGHTBLACK MORNING LIGHT


It’s not a hologram: the roving musicmakers return to the region they once called home. Wed/14, 8 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

LOS YEUX NOIR


They’re dark-eyed and infatuated with gypsy, Yiddish, and Manouche jazz. Wed/14, 8 and 10 p.m., $20–<\d>$25. Yoshi’s SF, 1330 Fillmore, SF. sf.yoshis.com

LENKA


Cutie-pie pop oozes from the Aussie charmer who once studied acting with Cate Blanchett. Thurs/15, 8 p.m., $13–<\d>$15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

WILD WEEKEND


We’re lost in an all-girl punk rock wilderness. Sat/17, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE


The popsters go acoustic with tunes from an album-in-progress. Sun/18–Mon/19, 8 p.m., $25. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com.

BARRINGTON LEVY


The acclaimed live performer taps Obama samples for his new single, "No War." Tues/20, 9 p.m., $28. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

The Funeral Party

-
0

PREVIEW By the late 1990s, the better part of the country had reached a consensus. The whole East Coast vs. West Coast thing had officially run its course and was, decidedly, un-chill. A pimp-stick-wielding Snoop Dogg blowing a gasket at The Source Awards and doing his damndest to incite a riot was one thing. But, once the two most transcendent, brilliant musicians of the generation were murdered in cold blood, America and everyone else involved decided, enough was enough.

Ten years on from Biggie’s death, a new crew of whippersnappers has decided to boil up some East Coast/West Coast beef. Though they aren’t talking about engaging in sexual congress with anyone’s betrothed, Los Angeles dance-punk quartet the Funeral Party is sick of the Big Apple hoarding all the indie cred. On the raging "NYC Moves to the Sound of LA," from their jarring debut EP, Bootleg (Fearless, 2008), the precocious upstarts take aim at the "unoriginal," "contrived" New York City scene. Vocalist Chad Elliot venomously spits, "Stole all of your ideas from other cities<0x2009>/ Things are lookin’ stale<0x2009>/ It’s time to turn around<0x2009>/ New York City loves to mess around with the LA sound!" You hear that, Vampire Weekend? You’re fucking going down!

Only time will tell if this sick burn will plant the seeds of a feud that will dominate the back pages of publications nationwide. If I was a betting man, I’d give the "FP vs. NYC" feud between a 2 percent and .00231 percent chance of captivating America. But I would bet the ranch that the Funeral Party’s arresting brand of punk-based dance-rock — imagine Babyshambles on uppers, jamming with At the Drive-In-era Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Johnny Marr — landing them on the front pages of a few magazines in the coming years. Popscene has a knack for booking artists with solid buzzes before they blow up, so get ready to add the Funeral Party to the list of bands you saw before Carson Daly 2.0 informed America who they were.

THE FUNERAL PARTY Thurs/15, call for time, $8–$10. Popscene, 330 Ritch, SF. (415) 902-3125, www.popscene-sf.com

The news from Rock Rapids, Iowa

-
0

The news from Rock Rapids made the Keith Olberman show on MSNBC cable television. Watch the report below.

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Last night my daughter Katrina Perez called me from her home in Santa Barbara, quite excited, with a field report to the San Francisco correspondent on breaking news from Rock Rapids, Iowa. That would be me, of course.
She reported that Keith Olberman featured an item about Rock Rapids on his evening MSNBC cable news show. Something about a deer breaking into a bank.
She suggested I watch the show, which airs an hour later in San Francisco, and get all the details.

I did and to my surprise found that the show, which featured news on the Obamas in Washington, the worst person in the world (Bill O’Reilly of Fox News), fighting in the Gaza strip, and the latest moves to seat the senator=designate from Chicago, also featured a breaking news item from Rock Rapids.

A deer on Sunday had “busted” the window in the Frontier Bank in Rock Rapids which had “loads of money,” according to Keith. The deer tripped the alarm, got into the bank, and wandered around. The bank’s video camera caught the deer in action and Keith showed it as he commented on what the caption said was “Deer Day Afternoon.”

As to motive, Keith said the “coppers” reported that the deer was “looking for a few bucks,” attempting to “pass along fawny checks,” or “simply trying to reign in spending.” By the time the “coppers” got to the scene, the deer had fled the scene of the crime. And Keith, having exhausted all his bad puns for the night, moved on to the next item.

So, as Paul Harvey would say out of his Chicago radio station, “what’s the rest of the story?”

To me, the rest of the story was how this deer-in-the-bank incident from a small town in northwest Iowa and got to New York and on to the Keith Olberman national television show. I promptly emailed Ken Barker, the star page two columnist of the local Lyon County Reporter, to check it out for me. He said he was worried that the deer had gotten in to his account. But he said he would nail down the rest of the story and get back to me. I’ll keep you posted.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Speed Reading

-
0

A SLOW DEATH: 83 DAYS OF RADIATION SICKNESS

By NHK-TV "Tokaimura Criticality Accident Crew"

Vertical

160 pages

$19.95

It’s tacky to begin a review of a book about death by radiation poisoning by praising the design of its jacket. But I’m afraid I have to — John Gall’s art for A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness is unique in a gaze-snatching fashion. It combines hues of yellow and green, block patterns, and a news photo backdrop into an attractive, enigmatic, and faintly disturbing image that makes a browser wonder, "What exactly is inside this book?"

The answer is an account of a nuclear plant worker’s gradual demise after he was accidentally exposed to 20,000 times the maximum tolerable amount of neutron beam radiation. As some alleged environmentalists (including figureheads such as Al Gore) have begun touting the benefits of "non-carbon sources" of energy — an evasive way of saying "atomic power" — Hisashi Ouchi’s death comes across as an extreme cautionary tale.

Built from a television documentary about the nuclear accident, A Slow Death bluntly but compassionately renders Ouchi’s physical symptoms — which included massive skin loss — and the emotional impact his plight had on the doctors and nurses who treated him. The last extraordinary aspect of Ouchi’s story involves his heart, which persevered and remained relatively healthy while the rest of him demonstrated the impact of radiation — as the book puts it, "it continued living amidst the destruction of virtually every other cell in his body." (Johnny Ray Huston)

REFLECTION OF A MAN: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF STANLEY MARCUS

Photo selection by Allison V. Smith

Cairn Press

192 pages

$60

Sale signs at Macy’s and other businesses tend to suggest that the department store is a 20th-century phenomenon on its way down. But the department store had a great curator of sorts in Stanley Marcus, the Marcus in Neiman Marcus. An over-the-top extravagant collection of the businessman’s photography, Reflections of a Man might seem like a vanity project, but in fact it reveals a talented cameraman and, somewhat enticingly, the aesthetic point-of-view that might have gone into creating a popular chain of stores.

Dallas was Marcus’ home, and his version of the city wasn’t characterized by ugly American cowboy mentality so much as a love of beauty, parties, and profitable combinations thereof — he invented an annual Fortnight celebration as a way to boost sales during the slack period between back-to-school and the holidays. Oscar de la Renta’s brief forward to this monograph is a semi-flattering if fully affectionate account of Marcus’ unflagging success at making a sale. An old press pass reveals he wanted to be a photojournalist, but his public profession proved far more lucrative.

As for the photos, they are gorgeous, Popsicle-bright Kodachrome images of life in the South and abroad in Europe. Marcus had a terrific eye for patterns and repetitions, whether they came from cubic carpeting on the floor of a Paris fashion show or funny visual rhyming between Stetson hats and hanging lamps in a Houston restaurant. Christian Dior and Pucci pose with personality for Marcus, but his skill isn’t so much for portraiture as it is for the art of commerce, capturing the flair of couturiers as well as balloon and sponge vendors on the street. (Huston)

HOME: SOCIAL ESSAYS

By Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)

Akashic Books

282 pages

$15.95

THE HUNGERED ONE

By Ed Bullins

Akashic Books

192 pages

$14.95

I didn’t ask, so don’t tell me why queers have come to be the fashionable sacrificial stooges for pandering new Democratic presidents. For some overstanding on the matter, read Amiri Baraka’s intro to the most recent edition of Home: Social Essays, a collection he wrote between 1961 and 1966 as Leroi Jones. Anyone familiar with reprints of Jones’s autobiographical works knows that they afford Baraka with a chance to engage in scathing (and sometimes funny) multileveled assessments of his past writings and views. Here, he leaps right into a critique of his past use of the word "fag" that insinuates tribute (without naming names) to some of the strong, influential queers he’s worked with over the years. It’s a prescient genuine act, but characteristic — Baraka was calling Obama "slick" years ago at a City Lights reading.

Baraka also writes a preface for a reprint of Ed Bullins’ story collection The Hungered One, but it’s Bullins’ introduction that makes an impression, because of its open-ended refusal of readings that interpret (and thus restrict) the title tale as an allegory. The Hungered One is filled with pieces that do exactly what they set out to do — "An Ancient One," for example, perfectly renders a city scene that happens in front of my building every day of the year. But it’s that title story — more horrifying than anything a genre writer like Stephen King has imagined — that lingers. It’s as uncanny as a nightmare, and as real as human nature. (Huston)

Vive l’amour

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Stephanie Young edited the anthology Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 432 pages, $29), which attempted to take a snapshot of the Bay Area’s poetry scene while acknowledging the failure built into such a task. Her second book of poetry, Picture Palace (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 120 pages, $15), is not particularly concerned with choosing between various poetic modes and traditions. Picture Palace draws as heavily on pop culture as it does on theory to find its form and to subsequently understand form’s impact on content. In the process, Young escapes the lyric poetry/language poetry binary. (Or, to use a less geography-bound but equally contemporary axis, the flarf/conceptual poetry binary.)

As its title suggests, Picture Palace is heavily invested in movies. Young makes and unmakes icons as well as the minutiae of daily life. On the theoretical tip, she applies Gaston Bachelard’s thought in books like 1994’s Poetics of Space and 1987’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire to the act of walking around Lake Merritt. In terms of ideas and visual imagination, Picture Palace is best described as dense. Images and their aftereffects are at play, but the reader has to dig for the gratifying thrill of recognition; even when a pop-culture reference is spotted, it has a strange murky glimmer. Young is both recovering a shared experience and implanting a new one when she writes lines like "Tim Robbins with Tupac<0x2009>/ the one where they stabbed each other<0x2009>/ for treatment," in "Betty Page We Love You Get Up."

There are other funny moments (the most intense flashes of Sylvia Plath’s "Lady Lazarus" are condensed into the formula "Rising, ash, eat, air, etc."), yet the real thrill of Picture Palace comes from the way it jumps between different levels of knowledge, in the kind of epistemological recreation that brings us back to Bachelard. Young’s ability to portray, in tandem, the way her speakers routinely perceive the world and the way they are able to break with those perceptions, and the ways of knowing the world that those perceptions embody, reminds me of the libretti of Robert Ashley’s operas more than it does the work of other contemporary poets. Much like the titular protagonist of Ashley’s Now Eleanor’s Idea (2007), her poetry is haunted by an "end of the world feeling," but where that feeling prodded Now Eleanor to pursue investigative journalism focusing on New Mexico’s lowrider culture, the same feeling pushes Young’s speakers to ponder and deform images projected onto, or from, screens: "There was a superimposed face on my face and I gradually came to see my own belief that it could never change. In this way my face functioned as an image on film."

The overall effect — and this seems like an inaccurate phrase, given how much Young’s poetics depends on micro-effects, small calibrations, and reversals of thought — is similar to Lynne Tillman’s 2006 novel American Genius. By this I mean that both writers’ driving concern is finding new forms to convey new experiences; they each establish a voice that, in its neurotic precision, contains multitudes.

Adventures! Bodily injury! No sleep! Hawnay Troof/Vice Cooler’s 10 patience-testers of ’08

-
0

HT-by-manjari-doxey-sm;.jpg
Under pressure: Vice Cooler in repose. Photo by Manjari Doxey.

We saved the worst for last. Another in a series of year-end picks from Bay Area musicians, writers, scene-makers, and music lovers. Here’s the rest of Hawnay Troof/Vice Cooler’s best (or worst) of 2008; for more, go here.

HAWNAY TROOF/VICE COOLER’S TOP 10 SHITTIEST TOUR HAPPENINGS IN 2008

1. The police stole my rental car.

On the third to last day of my first US leg we were cruising through eastern Arizona when a policeman pulled us over. He thought we had drugs and illegally searched the car. After not finding anything he was bummed. My friend Rory Rabut was driving, and when the officer looked up his license he found out that Rabut had a small parking ticket that hadn’t been paid yet. He used this as a basis for seizing our vehicle.

Theremin cat, faux GN’R, guit-playing Lil Wayne: Vice Cooler’s 10 things of ’08

-
0


Take me down to the paradise kitty: gotta love that theremin cat.

Another in a series of year-end picks from Bay Area musicians, writers, scene-makers, and music lovers. Here’s more of Hawnay Troof/Vice Cooler’s best of 2008; for the first part of his best-of list, go here.


HAWNAY TROOF/VICE COOLER’S TOP 10 THINGS

1. A goat saying, “Mom.”

Return to deform

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

PREVIEW One of the most exciting and unusual theatrical events of 2008 came from a small San Francisco–spawned, now Brooklyn-based company: the curiously named Banana Bag and Bodice. It almost sounds unexpected, but in fact BBB, which retains close ties to the Bay Area, has been doing shrewd, highly imaginative, often startlingly designed songplays — their preferred term — with practically no budget for about a decade. Habitués of the San Francisco Fringe Festival, most of the company’s work has appeared there in one form or another — almost invariably garnering Best of Fringe honors — beginning with 1999’s debut outing, The Bastard Chronicles, and running through such memorable encounters as the dadaist delight and vegetarian horror show, Sandwich (2004), or the haunted viscera and satirical apocaly-poesis of The Sewers (2007).

Nonetheless, last spring’s world premiere of Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage — a slick, rousing performance-arty rock operetta-cum-English-lit-seminar that ran at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley — raised things to a new level for the company, especially in terms of production values. And thanks to the support of commissioning company Shotgun Players, BBB’s well-honed minimalist aesthetic, sardonic humor, enveloping musical designs, and performance rigor all proved more than capable of expanding to fill the bigger space and budget. It’s otherwise impossible — and still somewhat awesome — to imagine a BBB performance being mounted at a top-of-the-line venue like the Berkeley Rep. But that’s just where Beowulf will be reprised Jan. 8, expanding to fill the Rep’s cavernous Roda stage, in a single benefit performance ahead of the show’s New York City premiere in April at the Henry Street Settlement’s Abrons Arts Center. A sign of things to come.

Since co-founding Banana Bag and Bodice in 1999, writer-actor Jason Craig and actor Jessica Jelliffe have led the extremely resourceful, highly collaborative ensemble — which includes stalwarts composer-actor Dave Malloy and actor-director Rod Hipskind — in far-flung productions that regularly straddle NYC, SF, and Craig’s hometown of Dublin, Ireland. While dazzling audiences with works as conceptually unconventional as they are hilariously clever, behind the scenes they take a tough-minded and committed approach that serves them well in the lean and unforgiving environment of NYC’s alternative theater scene, and the group’s recent productions there have gained enthusiastic audiences and reviews as well as plenty of street cred with their peers.

Meanwhile, nurturing longstanding ties to the Bay Area has helped ensure a consistent output as well as momentum. When Shotgun’s artistic director Patrick Dooley held out the offer of a commission for an opera, Craig says they took the plunge without hesitation, telling him they’d like to do something with Beowulf. The idea apparently came more or less out of a hat. "I didn’t read it until Shotgun agreed to do it," he confesses alongside Jeliffe and Malloy at Craig and Jeliffe’s comfortable roost in a warehouse in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. "It’s just really not my cup of tea. Honor and machismo." But Dooley immediately agreed, providing BBB with what was, for them, unprecedented support.

Malloy — as composer, musical director, and actor in the role of King Hrothgar — reveled in the creative possibilities: "To be able to have an eight-piece orchestra — I’ve never been able to have that before, and it’s so rich and rewarding." For the NYC production he’s even adding two more musicians. "I’ve been rewriting all the music, making it thicker and denser," he says. "It’s just a real treat, because I’m so used to doing black box theater where it’s like, ‘oh, this actor plays violin — great.’<0x2009>"

Craig’s script, meanwhile, ended up brilliantly channeling his reluctance and skepticism toward the epic poem itself, turning his own discovery and questioning of the text into a set of theatrical subjects and productive dichotomies: a panel of seemingly empty academic experts — two of whom, including Jelliffe, double as Beowulf’s monster adversaries — and the titular hero, played by Craig, as an unlikely he-man gone slightly to seed, in addition to a showdown with monsters who are also a mother and son, and the sly morphing of Beowulf’s medieval warrior mythos with its 21st-century rock-god counterpart. The latter concept was already honed in BBB’s 2007 show, The Fall and Rise of the Rising Fallen, which birthed a mock-legendary band with a life beyond the play. The results have shown BBB playing at the top of their game.

"It’s working with Shotgun that’s ramped up everything," confirms Jelliffe. "Not that we have to match that every time, but it has upped the ante, definitely. Usually we make whatever we can with whatever we can. With The Sewers, we made this incredible $20,000 set with no money because of the resources we are able to draw from in New York.

"We still do that, and will continue to do that," she continues. "But with Shotgun, I mean, having a budget?" It’s a modest one to be sure, but for now, without a doubt, as Craig says, "It’s cool."

BEOWULF: A THOUSAND YEARS OF BAGGAGE

Thurs/8, 8 p.m., $30

Roda Theatre

2025 Addison, Berk.

www.shotgunplayers.org

Beautiful voices

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

In the 2005 Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home, Bob Dylan noted an era when people desired "beautiful voices over very melodic songs." He referred to the early 1960s and pop balladeers such as Doris Day and Johnny Mathis. But the description fits the current soul scene, too, and its celebration of black — and, increasingly, white — artists with wondrously perfect voices and virtuous, albeit sexually complicated lives. A friend of mine used to call it "church."

If the soul scene resembles a megachurch, then John "Legend" Stephens is its deacon. His rise in the music industry — from backup vocalist on Jay-Z’s "Encore" to flagship artist on Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music imprint — was balanced with a years-long stint as music director at Philadelphia’s Bethel A.M.E. Church. In photos accompanying his 2004 debut Get Lifted (G.O.O.D. Music/Columbia), Legend stood in the aisle of a nondescript church, bathed in sunlight, his hands resting on two adjacent pews. Thematically the album followed Legend’s transformation from hip-hop kid with a roving eye ("She Don’t Have to Know," "Used to Love U," which pays homage to Common’s "I Used to Love H.E.R.") to chastened man trying to save his relationship ("I Can Change," "Ordinary People") and, finally, spiritually and physically devoted lover ("Stay With You," "So High"). He performed these songs with a studious air. His voice alternately massaged and swayed, like an altar boy brushing the dirt off his shoes as he enters.

Legend has moved on to other themes of love and devotion, but the Christian aspects of his music remain. The "church" probably wouldn’t have it any other way. The modern R&B industry resembles the old-school pop industry — before it lapsed into the Madonna/whore syndrome personified by Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus — in its celebration of carefully manicured personalities with stylish (but not too avant-garde) fashion sensibilities and gossipy (but not too slutty) love lives. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with going to church. Still, whether used as a metaphor or visited as a place of worship, a church and its congregation idealize the world around it.

As a result, most soul vocalists sing about love and sex, reducing the vagaries of life to intimate relationships. A few, particularly the great Anthony Hamilton and Raheem DeVaughn, address the black community, the effects of violent crime and rampant poverty, and the idea of working hard for a paycheck and dreaming of better days. But that’s not really Legend’s thing. He imagines as a songwriter and composer in the vein of Quincy Jones and Billy Joel. He cuts a dashing figure on the cover of his 2004 album Once Again (G.O.O.D. Music/Columbia), tinkling a grand piano in the middle of busy New York City streets and spinning light, romantic numbers such as "P.D.A. (We Just Don’t Care)." "Let’s go to the park, I wanna kiss you underneath the stars," he sings in a breezily sultry voice. "Let’s make love."

Much like Burt Bacharach, the old-school mandarin of fluffy Brill Building pop, Legend is an ace craftsman of modern standards. His best songs mix concise and thoughtful lyrics with subtle melodies, expert musicianship, and standout choruses. For his new full-length, Evolver (G.O.O.D. Music/Columbia), he adds "Green Light," a seductive come on buffeted by drum and keyboard programming. "Give me the green light, give me just one night," croons Legend as stray synth melodies pop and sparkle around him. Andre 3000 from OutKast shows up after the second hook, promising to have "you giggling like a piglet / Oh, that’s the ticket / I hope you’re more Anita Baker than Robin Givens."

The cover of Evolver, where Legend poses mysteriously in a Members Only jacket, plays on "Green Light"’s promise that the traditionalist is playing a new game. But, of course, it’s the same tricks. Get Lifted successfully mixed A-list rappers with familiar neo-soul grooves: baby-making music with a contemporary edge. Despite the subtle nods to ’80s babies nostalgia, Legend doesn’t wander too far from that winning formula. Instead, he offers creamy ballads such as "Cross the Line," where he admits, "I don’t want to risk losing everything."

For all the loveliness of Legend’s voice, it would be nice to hear him write more challenging material. Get Lifted drew unpredictable, exciting tension from his classical tendencies and hip-hop’s swagger, but with Evolver he veers dangerously close to blandness. Of course, his "church" probably wouldn’t want it any other way.

Back in 2006, I saw Los Angeles singer-songwriter Esthero open for Legend. Walking on stage barefoot and in loose-fitting clothes, Esthero’s funk jams and earthy Bjork-like trip-pop drew snickers from the audience. She was almost booed off the stage. It took Legend to pacify the old ladies and married couples.

"Hey, do you remember this one?" he teased them, playing a few notes from Jay-Z’s "Encore" and Slum Village’s "Selfish." He sang in fine form that night, and the church was pleased.

JOHN LEGEND

With Estelle

Mon/12, 8 p.m., $50.50–$76.50

Paramount Theatre

2025 Broadway, Oakland

www.apeconcerts.com

Senioritis

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

It seems inevitable that no matter how admired and lauded the actor, a time comes sooner or later when there ain’t much left but the Crotchety Comedy Coot roles. Some, like Peter O’Toole, Helen Hayes, Walter Matthau, or Maggie Smith, build entire second-act careers out of them; others are dragged kicking and screaming into those twinkle-eyed support slots. (You’ve got to respect Glenda Jackson, who quit acting for politics at age 55, snorting "I don’t fancy hanging around to play Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Life’s too short.")

Not all such parts are demeaning. But there often is something bleak about seeing actors of great range reduced to formula cuteness and sentimentality — the kind of emotional marks that often make old people on screen roughly equivalent to doggie reaction shots.

Perhaps the biggest wallow of this type since 1988’s Cocoon: The Return is now upon us in How About You, a crusty codgerfest that’s like tapioca for the soul. It’s the kind of "crowd-pleasing" movie a particular crowd likes no matter how poorly it’s made (and it is poorly made), because it gives you exactly what’s expected, on cue: broad geezers-behaving-badly laughs, canned nostalgia, a maudlin turn or three and plenty of forced joie de vivre, all enacted in handsome Tourist Board settings by comfortingly familiar faces.

Trouble is, when the familiar faces are ones you still vividly remember as, say, Vera Drake, or Christy Brown’s mum, or — yeesh, where to even begin with Vanessa Redgrave, possible Greatest Actress of Her Generation? — such innocuous matinee fluff can start smelling like a form of hazardous waste.

A terribly picturesque Irish country estate is the site for an elderly care facility run by a young widow, Kate (Orla Brady). Like managing a B and B, it’s one of those neverending jobs, made worse here by four residents so obnoxious they’ve sent some other patrons scurrying for other accommodations. The culprits: grandiose retired showgirl Georgia (Redgrave); sobered up but still fight-picking jerk ex-judge Donald (Joss Ackland); and gnomish sisters Hazel (Imelda Staunton) and Heather (Brenda Fricker), a disagreeable society of two who are really too young to be here. But the latter have led such a sheltered life that once their mother died, they opted to find another hole to hide in rather than face the outside world. It’s not the world’s loss.

A rather humorless workaholic, Kate isn’t all that happy when her perpetually footloose younger sister Ellie (Hayley Atwell) turns up wanting short-term employment to fund another global party trot. After a distressingly long time spent on narrative dead ends, disconnects, and anecdotal errata unhelped by Anthony Byrne’s direction, the screenplay by Jean Pasley — based on a short story by Maeve Binchy, and you can really feel that original material stretching thin — finally locates a plot engine. This occurs when a family emergency forces Kate to leave over the holidays, when all staff and residents have briefly disappeared back into family life.

All save the quarrelsome quartet, of course, whom no one will have. So it falls to inexperienced, irresponsible Ellie to tend this impossible lot (who don’t even like each other) by herself. Naturally it all goes hilariously horribly … and then life-affirmingly wonderfully! Awww. Yes, there is geriatric dancing and snowball-throwing.

The dears!

Binchy is Ireland’s most popular living author; one gleans her work is more of the Literary Tea Cozy than Booker-winning type. (A quote on her latest: "Only a curmudgeon could resist this master of cheerful, sit-by-the-fire comfort.") Still, it can’t be her fault that much of How About You handles its uncomplicated agenda so sloppily, with some scenes that appear missing (particularly those involving Ellie’s off-screen boyfriend) while others meander pointlessly. Why do the seasons seem to change from scene to scene? Irish weather is changeable — but not that changeable.

Of course the old and not-so-old pros ably ham it up in the desired "colorful" fashion. But these actors can do just about anything — watching them asked to do so little, for so little real reward, is dispiriting. Hearing Redgrave bray the titular Tin Pan Alley standard over and over, gowned and painted like a drag queen’s Cruella De Vil, is somehow ever so much less fun than that might sound. Could be worse: she could be doing Nunsense. Or Juliet’s Nurse.

HOW ABOUT YOU opens Fri/9 in Bay Area theaters.

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

When I saw KTVU’s excellent report Saturday night about the BART police officer shooting an unarmed man, all I could think was: I’ve been here before.

In 1992, Officer Fred Carbtree, a 15-year veteran of the BART police force, shot and killed an unarmed kid named Jerrold Hall in the parking lot of the Hayward station. That was way before cell phones and ubiquitous video; there were no pictures of the shooting and few witnesses would come forward. BART made a monumental effort to cover it up; I spent an entire month working seven days a week to break through that brick wall. In the end, I got the story: Crabtree, who was white, had heard a report of an armed robbery on the train, saw Hall, who was black, leaving the station and called him over. Hall, who had no weapon, argued with the cop and told him he’d done nothing, then turned and started to walk away. Crabtree racked his shotgun, fired a warning shot over Hall’s head, then fired again, killing him.

There is no police agency in the United States that allows its officers to fire warning shots. There is no police agency that authorizes an officer to shoot an unarmed suspect who is fleeing the scene. I thought Crabtree should be prosecuted for homicide, but at the very least, he violated his own agency’s clearly written rules.

Nothing happened. He was not subject to any discipline at all. BART called the shooting justified.

Back then, I raised the question: Who’s in charge of the BART police? Where’s the civilian oversight?

There wasn’t any. And 17 years later, there still isn’t.

This latest incident is going to cost BART at least $10 million when the lawsuits are over. That could fund a modest civilian oversight operation for 20 years. And maybe it will save someone’s life.

>>Read the Guardian’s previous BART tragedy coverage here

Another BART police tragedy

-
0

EDITORIAL The video isn’t the highest quality — it was taken on a cell phone — but it’s pretty simple to figure out what’s happening. A young man named Oscar Grant is lying on the ground on a BART train platform, surrounded by BART cops. His hands are behind him, and the police have him completely under control.

Grant was one of a group of young men who had been removed from the train and arrested after reports of a fight early in the morning on New Year’s Day. The other suspects are handcuffed; Grant is not, but in early footage, he has his hands in the air and appears to be cooperating. Witnesses on the scene say that’s what they saw — a young man doing what the police told him to do.

Then suddenly — shockingly — one of the officers reaches back and pulls his gun. He points the weapon at Grant, and fires, point-blank, from perhaps two feet away. The bullet entered Grant’s back, ricocheted off the concrete, and hit him again, in the chest.

It’s mind-boggling. It appears to violate so many standards of police conduct we don’t even know where to begin. Oakland lawyer John Burris, who is representing the Grant family, puts the first question pretty succinctly: "Why did he take his gun out?"

Let’s go a few steps further. Why did the BART officer, who has been identified only as a two-year veteran of the force, feel he needed to use lethal force on a suspect who was unarmed, was (at worst) guilty of fighting on a train, and was on the ground with two other cops on top of him? Why did the officer fire his gun at close range, with the prospect not only of hitting his colleagues but also of injuring bystanders? Why didn’t any of the other cops tell him to put the gun away? Why is the young father of a four-year old daughter dead?

We’ll add a few more: Why is BART still in full-on public relations-cover-up mode, acting as if the evidence is still unclear? Why is the name of the officer still a secret?

And why — why, as we’ve asked a dozen times over the past 15 years, do the BART police operate with absolutely no civilian oversight?

The structure of the BART police force is a recipe for disaster. BART’s general manager, (who is not an elected official and has no expertise in law enforcement) hires the BART police chief, who then runs a force with some 200 armed officers. There is no police commission, no police review board, not even a committee of the elected BART board designated to handle complaints against and issues with the BART police.

The BART board holds no regular hearings on police activity or conduct. There is no public forum where the chief is held to account. There is no procedure for complaints against BART officers to be heard and adjudicated by anyone except the BART police.

There is, in other words, no civilian oversight or accountability. This is unacceptable.

The killing of Oscar Grant isn’t an isolated case. Back in 1992, a BART cop pulled a shotgun and killed an unarmed man named Jerrold Hall. Hall wasn’t threatening the officer or anyone else. He was walking away. The shotgun pellets hit him in the back of the head. The officer, Fred Crabtree, was never subject to any discipline, and BART tried to cover up the whole thing (see "Lethal force," 12/9/92). In 2001, a BART cop shot an unarmed naked man who was seriously mentally ill (see "Gun crazy," 10/17/01).

The BART Board simply can’t let this continue. The board must immediately create a process for civilian oversight of the BART police, including a civilian monitor to handle complaints. The BART board must establish a permanent police oversight committee that meets regularly to hear public comments and monitor police practices. Every city that BART passes through, starting with San Francisco, should pass a resolution demanding accountability for the BART cops, and the state Legislature (which granted the BART police peace officer status in 1976) should pass a measure mandating that the BART police have civilian oversight proceedings.

We’re sick of this. How many more people have to die before BART gets its act together?

Lethal force

-
0

Editors note: This story ran Dec. 12, 1992

The autumn air was crisp and clear in Hayward on the night the kid called Glasstop took a shotgun blast in the back of the head and died for the theft of a $60 radio.

It was just before 8 p.m., on Sunday, Nov. 15. The lights were on in the parking lot outside the Hayward BART station, where a six-car southbound train had arrived a few minutes earlier. About 50 passengers had gotten off, and some were still straggling into cars or waiting around for the next AC Transit bus.

Glasstop, a 19-year-old warehouse worker from Union City whose legal name was Jerrold Cornelius Hall, had ridden the train from Bayfair, one stop north, along with John Henry Owens, a 20-year-old unemployed custodian who lived in Oakland. The two young African American men were standing at the bus stop, not far from the station entrance, when Officer Fred Crabtree pulled into the parking lot in a BART police cruiser.

Crabtree was a white 16-year veteran of the transit police agency and a member of its elite Canine Corps. His partner was a highly trained German shepherd imported from a special obedience school in Germany. The dog trotted at Crabtree’s side as he approached Owens and Hall. The officer carried a loaded 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.

Crabtree was responding to a report of an armed robbery: Halfway between Bayfair and Hayward, a passenger had told the train operator that two black men had taken his Walkman personal stereo. The passenger said one of the robbers had a gun and described what they looked like; the trainman passed on the message, and the BART dispatcher passed it on again. Owens and Hall matched the third-hand description that came over Crabtree’s radio.

Within a matter of minutes, Hall was lying in a pool of his own blood, Owens was in handcuffs, and the parking lot was a mass of sirens and flashing red lights. Hall was pronounced dead shortly after midnight at Eden Hospital; Owens is still in the Alameda County jail. The police never turned up a gun.

And the man who reported the robbery disappeared without leaving his name.

That’s about all BART officials will say about the incident. They’ve clamped on a lid of secrecy that defies most normal local police procedures and violates the California Public Records Act. The San Francisco newspapers have almost entirely ignored the shooting, and there’s been little reaction from the East Bay community.

But an extensive Bay Guardian investigation has turned up a long list of troubling questions about the death of Jerrold Hall – and a long list of serious problems in an agency that has some of the most sweeping police powers in California, and some of the least civilian oversight.

Our investigation, based on a dozen interviews, a review of public records, and more than 50 pages of unreleased internal documents from the BART police and other local authorities, shows:

Officer Crabtree violated one of the most basic rules of modern law enforcement – and his own department’s written policy – when he fired a warning shot toward the suspect, potentially endangering the lives of passersby in the busy urban area. The nine .33-caliber pellets from that shotgun cartridge wound up in the side of a tree, about 4-1/2 feet above the ground.

BART’s own internal documents contradict the official claim that Hall was attacking or threatening Crabtree at the time of the shooting. Statements filed by several witnesses, and at least two BART police officers, suggest that Hall was more than 10 feet from the officer when the shots were fired, and was walking away. Medical records obtained by the Bay Guardian show that he was shot in the back of the head.

The shooting appears to violate nearly every modern police standard on the use of deadly force. In fact, the latest BART Police Operational Directive, dated July 22, 1987, states that guns may be fired only to prevent a suspect from killing or wounding another person, or to stop a suspected felon who is presumed to be armed and dangerous from fleeing and escaping arrest. But BART internal documents and other records obtained by the Bay Guardian provide little evidence to suggest that Hall fit either category.

Nevertheless, on Dec. 4, a BART Firearms Review Board, consisting entirely of BART police officers appointed by the chief, determined that the “use of lethal force in this instance was justified.” BART officials refuse to release the report or comment further on the findings.

The fact that Crabtree fired a gun to subdue Hall seems to undermine one of BART’s central reasons for the use of trained attack dogs. The dogs, BART officials say, are supposed to support officers in situations just like the one in question – to intimidate, and if necessary, pursue and immobilize a suspect when other backup isn’t available, and to attack immediately if an officer is under assault. Some law-enforcement experts, and many civil-rights advocates, question the use of dogs for that purpose – but all those contacted by the Bay Guardian agreed it was rather curious that Crabtree’s canine partner sat out this whole bloody incident.

Officer Crabtree is on administrative leave, with pay, pending the final outcome of an internal investigation. Owens is still facing robbery charges, despite the lack of a victim willing to testify against him. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for this week.

But the problems with the BART police go far beyond the arrest of John Owens and the death of Jerrold Hall. In fact, the Bay Guardian has learned:

BART’s Internal Affairs Division, which reviews citizen complaints against BART police officers, has investigated 162 cases in the past five years, 39 of them involving excessive use of force – and not a single charge was sustained. Law-enforcement observers say that’s an astonishing statistic, one that casts severe doubt on the department’s ability to control police abuse.

“I’ve never heard of any department with a rate of zero sustained complaints,” said John Crew, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Police Practices Project. “I can’t believe that none of those people had a single valid case.”

The BART Police Department has a written procedure for civilians filing complaints. A 1991 directive signed by Chief Harold Taylor states that every department employee should accept complaints by mail, by phone, or in person, and refer them to the watch commander or the Internal Affairs Division. But there’s nothing posted in any BART train or station to tell the public about the complaint process, no procedure for appealing a Police Department decision to a civilian review agency, and not much visible effort to inform BART employees about how to handle complaints.

The BART police use dogs for purposes inconsistent with many modern law-enforcement guidelines. Most local police agencies employ canines primarily to sniff out bombs and narcotics, or to search for dangerous suspects hidden in dark, confined areas. Berkeley has banned police dogs altogether. The BART police dogs are not trained to sniff out bombs or drugs, and are rarely involved in searches; the officers use the animals as standard backup, to intimidate and apprehend suspects in even fairly routine arrests.

The elected BART Board of Directors has demonstrated virtually no effective control over the BART police, and most board members don’t seem to know or care what their armed employees are doing with those badges, dogs, and guns.

None of the board members contacted by the Bay Guardian could even guess how many citizen complaints had been filed against the BART police since 1988, or what the outcome of the cases had been. None could explain the complaint procedure, or identify the person responsible for supervising internal investigations. Most didn’t know how the police chief was hired, or to whom he reported; some board members didn’t even know his name.

Several years ago, I asked Art Shartsis, a downtown lawyer who was then the BART Board president, if he knew who ran the BART police. His answer was unusually blunt, but entirely typical of the attitude board members show toward the force.

“I don’t know,” he told me. “I guess we must have a chief.”

A DAY AT THE MALL

Jerrold Hall was the son of Alameda Fire Department Captain Cornelius Hall, a retired Navy Reserve officer who lives with his wife, Rose and two other sons in a comfortable middle-class home in suburban Union City. Both of Jerrold’s brothers are in college, earning top grades; his aunt is the first black woman ever to serve on the Board of Trustees of Auburn University.

Jerrold, who graduated from high school in 1991 and was living with his parents, “had some problems, like a lot of kids these days,” his father told me. “But we hoped he’d outgrow them. He was a good kid, never into guns or killing or any of that sort of thing.”

On Sunday, Nov. 15, at about 2 in the afternoon, Hall met Owens at the Eastmont Mall in Oakland. According to a sworn statement Owens gave to the police, the two drank a few beers and part of a small bottle of E&J Brandy. Early in the evening, Hill invited Owens to his home, and they left the mall on an AC Transit bus to catch a BART train for Union City.

According to Owens and several other witnesses, Owens and Hill encountered a black man in his late 30s on board the train, and the man asked them if they wanted to buy one of the Walkmans he was carrying in a bag. When first questioned by police, at about 1:35 a.m., Owens said he declined the offer, went to another train car “where more girls were,” and met up with Hall again a few minutes later. At about 4:30 a.m., he made another statement, acknowledging that he was present when the friend he called “Glasstop” told the would-be salesman, “give me your Walkman.”

Several other witnesses on the train agreed that Hall had confronted the man, and walked away with a bag. None, including Owens, saw a gun.

However, the victim of what the BART police still call an “armed robbery” called the train operator on the intercom and said two men with a gun had stolen his Walkman. The operator, who never saw Hall or Owens, reported the incident, and it was relayed to BART police, who instructed the trainman to stop in Hayward, and, after a brief delay, to open the train doors. Hall and Owens left with about 50 others; according to the station attendant, they jumped the emergency gate and walked into the parking lot.

The police were able to find several eyewitnesses to the alleged robbery; however, other than Owens and Crabtree, who was the only police officer on the scene at the time, the internal report does not identify a single witness who actually saw the shooting.

An official Dec. 7 statement, written by BART Police Chief Harold Taylor at the request of the Bay Guardian and reviewed by BART’s legal department, notes that “witnesses disagreed as to the precise sequence of the next events.”

The internal BART police documents obtained by the Bay Guardian contain no formal statement or direct quotation from Crabtree; he apparently filed no written report. The reports were all prepared by other officers, who arrived at the scene after the shooting.

According to those reports, filed shortly after the incident, Crabtree approached Hall and Owens, who were standing near a bench in the parking lot’s bus-stop area, and ordered them to lie on the ground with their hands over their heads. Owens complied; Hall did not.

Hall, the reports state, “confronted and challenged Officer Crabtree, attempting to take Officer Crabtree’s shotgun from him at one point.” There is no mention of what the dog, who was trained to bite anyone who attacked Officer Crabtree, was doing at the time. BART officials refuse to elaborate, saying the incident is still under investigation.

However, one Bay Area dog trainer, who has trained police dogs, said it’s highly unlikely that a German shepherd of the sort imported by the BART police (see sidebar) would fail to respond in such a situation. “Dogs are very loyal and protective,” the trainer, who asked not to be identified, told the Bay Guardian. “These dogs are carefully bred and taught to attack anyone who physically endangers their human handler. Sometimes they overreact; they very rarely underreact.”

TO TAKE A LIFE

Owens told the police he “did not see the cop and Glasstop get into any physical fighting. They did not touch. They were just arguing.” After a few moments, Owens said, “Glasstop walked over to me and said we could go. So we started to walk away.”

Whatever the nature of the confrontation between Hall and Officer Crabtree, the police report and witness statements leave very little doubt that it ended with Hall walking away – and, as the internal police report states, “with Officer Crabtree retaining the shotgun.”

It’s also clear that some time, perhaps as much a minute or two, passed between the initial clash and the shooting – more than enough time for Hall and Owens to start walking away. During that period, the documents suggest, the passenger who had initially reported the robbery – and had not made any contact yet with police – suddenly ran out into the parking lot, pointed toward Hall and Owens and shouted, “That’s them.” Then the passenger fled.

Crabtree then ordered the two young men to halt again – and at that point, the statements get very fuzzy.

According to the official statement released Dec. 7 by BART, Crabtree “summoned his canine, but Hall resisted the dog.” A medical report filed by Alameda County emergency technicians who examined Hall after the shooting includes no mention of any dog bites or wounds of any sort other than those caused by the shotgun. A copy of the report, which has not been released, was obtained by the Bay Guardian.

Crabtree, the official BART statement continues, “fired a warning shot at a nearby tree. Hall continued to move toward the other suspect, and at one point turned and assumed a position which concealed his hands.”

The internal police report, however, states that Owens was the one who was “failing to keep his hands in view,” and who, in what the report described as “an effort to get rid of the evidence [Walkman],” put his hands into his pants pockets. At that point, the report states, Crabtree “used deadly force on suspect Hall.”

Owens said he responded immediately to the second command to halt, but that Hall kept walking away. When Owens heard the shots, he turned around, “and my partner was lying face down…. Then I heard all the cops coming with sirens.”

In fact, within a matter of minutes, at least three more BART police cars and a backup unit from the Hayward Police Department had arrived on the scene. Even if Hall, who by all accounts was walking, not running, had been attempting to “flee,” it’s unlikely he would have been able to get far.

And after an extensive search of the train, the tracks, the station, the parking lot, and everything else in the vicinity, the BART police acknowledge they were unable to find a gun.

Although the BART police initially insisted that Hall had been shot in the chest, and most of the news reports carried that statement unchallenged, even BART now admits that the shot struck the young man in the back of his head. His father, Cornelius Hall, never had any doubt.

“I’m a trained emergency medical technician,” he told the Bay Guardian. “I was in the hospital room when the nurse was washing down the body. I know what an entrance wound looks like, and my son was shot in the back.”

In Modern Police Firearms, a textbook on law-enforcement procedures, Professor Allen P. Bristow of California State University, Los Angeles, writes that deadly force should be used to stop a fleeing felon only when “he cannot be contained or captured” through other means. Further, Bristow notes, an officer considering deadly force should ask the following question:

“Is the crime this suspect is committing, or are the consequences of his possible escape, serious enough to justify my taking his life or endangering the lives of bystanders?”

The San Francisco Police Department guidelines on deadly force embody some of that same philosophy. “Officers shall exhaust all other reasonable means of apprehension and control before resorting to the use of firearms,” the Aug. 24, 1984, policy states. Officers are allowed to shoot at a dangerous, fleeing felony suspect “only after all other reasonable means of apprehension and control have been exhausted.”

San Francisco, like almost every other police agency in the Bay Area, and most in the country, strictly prohibits warning shots. So does BART: “Discharging of firearms [is] not allowable as a warning,” BART’s official weapons policy states.

The BART police are a bit more lenient than San Francisco on the use of deadly force to stop fleeing suspects. The officer must only believe that “the suspect is likely to continue to threaten death or serious bodily harm to another human being,” according to BART’s July 22, 1987, operational directive. Yet the directive also states that a firearm may not be used “when the officer has reason to believe … that the discharge may endanger the lives of passersby, or other persons not involved in the crime, and the officer’s life, or that of another person, is not in imminent danger.”

THE OPEN RANGE

Armed guards have patrolled BART trains and stations since the agency started running trains about 30 years ago. At first, they were simply known as “BART Security”; the officers had the authority to carry weapons and arrest suspects, but under state law, they weren’t members of a real police department. For the most part, that limited their authority to the confines of BART property.

In 1976, the state Legislature granted BART the authority to run a police department with jurisdiction and authority second only to the California Highway Patrol. BART officers now have full police powers, not only on their own turf, but in every one of the 58 California counties.

The department, headquartered near the Lake Merritt BART station, currently employs 151 sworn officers and nine dogs (see sidebar Page TK). An undisclosed number work undercover, in plain clothes, riding the trains and looking for crimes that range from fare evasion, “eating,” and “expectoration,” to assault, robbery, and rape. By far the most common crime, according to a BART police statistical breakdown for 1992, is “vagrancy”: 4,227 separate instances were reported by BART officers in the first 10 months of the year.

The BART Police Department has a $12 million annual budget, a fleet of patrol cars, and its own communications system. Officers earn salaries that Chief Taylor calls “competitive” with other departments in the Bay Area.

And at a time when California law-enforcement agencies are coming under increasingly strict civilian control, the BART police operate with nothing more than token oversight.

Chief Taylor reports to no commission, mayor, or city council. The department is administered by BART’s assistant general manager for public safety, who reports to the general manager, who reports to the board. BART spokesperson Michael Healy said the board plays no role in hiring or firing a chief, much less in disciplining police officers.

Former BART Board member Arlo Hale Smith said that in his term of office, the BART police chief rarely showed up for board meetings. “Even when we had something to discuss about the department – usually a labor-contract issue – the assistant general manager would come,” Smith explained.

Citizen complaints against the BART police are handled by the Internal Affairs Department, which is not a separate agency, as it is in many police departments, but a branch of the Detective Division, Taylor told the Bay Guardian.

That, some critics say, may explain why BART has the lowest possible rate of sustained complaints against its police officers. “There’s a very good reason for civilian agencies to handle complaints against the police,” said the ACLU’s John Crew. “People who have been abused by the police have a hard time trusting the same police department to do an honest investigation.”

Cornelius Hall, who is no stranger to government bureaucracy, said he ran into a stone wall when he tried to get some basic information about his son’s death from BART. “They wouldn’t even give me the police report,” he told the Bay Guardian. “The only way I can find out what happened to my son is to hire a lawyer and have it subpoenaed.”

Crew said he finds the situation “chilling.” He said he saw a “complete dearth” of civilian oversight in the BART administrative structure. “There’s no opportunity for meaningful public input, for hearings, for discussion of issues,” he continued.

“It’s not an acceptable situation. But under the circumstances, the members of the BART Board have an increased responsibility to ask questions and keep on top of their police department’s practices.”

In the case of Jerrold Hall, at least, that doesn’t seem to be happening. The shooting hasn’t been on the agenda for any board meeting since Nov. 15, and board members say they haven’t received any information about it from BART management.

And unlike Cornelius Hall, they haven’t even bothered to ask.

TO TELL THE TRUTH

The day after a BART police officer shot Jerrold Hall in the back of the head, transit agency spokesperson Mike Healy told reporters that Hall had been shot in the chest.

Not true.

Healy also told reporters that Hall had attacked Officer Fred Crabtree, and continued to attack him after Crabtree fired a warning shot.

Not true.

And Healy said that the warning shot was fired “over Hall’s head.”

Not true, either.

Healy freely referred to an alleged “armed robbery,” but he didn’t tell reporters that BART police had searched the entire area and never found a gun. He didn’t say that the alleged robbery victim had vanished without a trace, either.

So the public got a one-sided – and, as it turns out, largely inaccurate – picture of the incident. The press, taking Healy’s information at face value, portrayed Jerrold Hall as a violent, gun-wielding punk, shot in the act of attacking a cop.

“In some ways,” says Hall’s father, Cornelius, “that’s the saddest part of all.”

And while Healy finally put out a statement Dec. 7 acknowledging that some of his previous comments were in error, he did so only after a three-week barrage of questions from the Bay Guardian – and he never issued a word of apology to the Hall family.

It’s hard to blame Healy for the initial round of misinformation: In the heat of a bloody battle, the truth is often obscured. But Healy clearly knew, or could have known, within a few days after the incident that his official press statements had been wrong – that, for example, the medical reports showed Hall had been shot from behind. He could have called the reporters who were covering the story and let them know, or issued a new press release with updated information.

He could have tried to rescue some of what was left of the dead 19 year old’s personal reputation – and salvaged a bit of his own in the process. Instead, he fell back on the old BART strategy: When in doubt, stonewall. Then duck for cover, and hope it will all go away.

The BART Police Department may be the least-responsive law-enforcement agency I’ve seen since the discovery of the shredding machine in the White House basement. There is no press officer. The watch commanders, lieutenants, and captains refer all press calls to Chief Harold Taylor, who won’t come to the phone; his secretary refers the calls to the BART Public Affairs Office.

When I first called Healy Nov. 16 to ask about the shooting, he told me he hadn’t seen a police report, and didn’t know if one existed. He also said he didn’t know what the citizen complaint procedure was for the BART police, and had no idea if it was in writing. I filed a formal request for those and other records Nov. 17; under the Public Records Act, I had a legal right to a response within 10 days.

I let it slide to 15 days (holidays and all), then started calling Healy’s office. He was too busy to come to the phone at first, but after I harassed him for several hours, he told me that Chief Harold Taylor was handling my request, and that I should call him directly. Taylor wouldn’t come to the phone at all: He had an assistant tell me that Public Affairs was handling the request, and that I should call Mike Healy.

I spent another day trying again to reach Healy, who finally told me he wanted to set up an interview with Taylor – for Dec. 4, 17 days after I’d sent in a request for information most police agencies would probably have provided in less than an hour.

Chief Taylor showed up for the interview with a BART lawyer, who promised that the chief would fax me a statement of the facts of the shooting sometime later that afternoon. The brief, incomplete statement finally arrived three days later, around 3:30 p.m. Dec. 7, 21 days after my initial request. And BART officials still won’t release the full police report.

If I were a suspicious reporter, I’d wonder what they were trying to hide.

————

Deputy dog

In Philadelphia, the Inquirer revealed several years ago, police dogs attacked 358 people in the course of 33 months, leaving many of them scarred or maimed for life. In Los Angeles, the Times recently reported, the local K-9 Corps recorded more than a thousand bites in three years. In Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, trained German shepherds tore into a total of 375 legs, arms, and torsos in the course of their law-enforcement work.

In the past 10 years, canine corps scandals have tarnished the reputations of police departments all over the country and have cost taxpayers millions of dollars in lawsuits.

In Berkeley, however, police dogs have been banned since the early 1970s, when a City Council member named Ron Dellums responded to the brutal use of dogs against blacks in the South with a resolution abolishing the local canine corps. In San Francisco, dogs handle only a few very limited tasks.

But since 1990, the BART Police Canine Corps has been expanding into the sort of work that created such extensive problems in other American cities – a use for dogs that critics say has little justification.

“There are two basic rationales for using police dogs,” explained Richard Avenzino, director of the San Francisco SPCA, whose agency has worked with the local Police Department canine program. “One is for sniffing out explosives or narcotics. The other is for searches, mainly in enclosed spaces, where the dog’s sense of smell can aid in finding a hidden human suspect.

“But there’s also a perception that a snarling dog can intimidate people, which creates a lot more potential for trouble.”

The first BART Police canine corps dates back to the early 1970s. But the BART Board disbanded the program in 1975, after a police dog on a train in Philadelphia barked at BART Director John Glenn.

In 1990, Police Chief Harold Taylor restored four dogs to the force, saying they would be “a strong statement of police presence,” would deter violent crime, and could be used to help clear homeless people from trains and stations. In an interview last week, Taylor said the dogs, which now number nine, are used “to back up officers, in all their law-enforcement duties.”

The dogs, imported German shepherds, are bred and undergo Schützhund training at a special school in Germany, where they learn to attack on command. “The dogs only [understand] German,” explained Deputy Chief Kevin Sharp. “The officers learn to issue their commands in that language.”

Sharp said none of the BART dogs are trained to sniff out bombs or drugs and that they aren’t often needed for searches. In normal situations, he said, the dogs stay in the police car, with the window open, while the officer approaches a suspect. “They’re trained to jump out and attack without any command if they see that the officer is under assault,” he added.

ACLU Police Practices lawyer John Crew found that description alarming. “In other words,” he said, “we have dogs deciding on their own when to use what amounts to lethal force. That’s not a very good idea.”

Avenzino said the training methods used for such dogs “are, to put it mildly, controversial. A dog will do anything to please its owner; if you teach it to attack on command, it’s like loading a gun. In my opinion, it’s very dangerous.”

Jim Chanin, a Berkeley lawyer who has filed several lawsuits over attacks by police dogs, said he sees no good reason for BART to have a canine corps. “The problem is that these dogs are just trained to attack,” he explained. “You can’t use them to search for some kid lost in the BART tunnel.

“If there’s something the BART police do on a regular basis that requires the use of dogs, I certainly can’t see what it is.”

Chief Taylor told the Bay Guardian that dogs provide much less expensive backup than additional sworn officers. Berkeley Police Lt. Tom Grant said he agrees, to a point: “But then you have to pay out those big legal settlements if one of the dogs does something wrong.”

Gun crazy

-
0

Editors note: This story ran Oct. 17, 2001

Bruce Seward imploded while riding an AC Transit bus.

It was 4 a.m. on May 28, 2001, and Seward was rolling through the darkness on the 82 line, headed south from Oakland toward Hayward. Hands clapped over his ears, Seward, a 42-year-old car salesman, rocked back and forth, vacilutf8g between sobbing and shouting. He was barefoot, according to witnesses.

Bus driver Anthony Ramsey heard Seward ranting, “They trying to kill me, they trying to kill me.”

“Shut up!” one passenger screamed. Another rider threatened to toss Seward off the bus.

Seward morphed, gaining some inner – momentary – calm. “Thank you, God, thank you, God, thank you, God,” he chanted.

A few weeks earlier Seward had jetted to Danville, Ill., for his mother’s 67th birthday; his mom and eight siblings didn’t notice any behavioral peculiarities. But now, quite publicly, the Oakland man’s synapses were misfiring.

At the end of the line, the Hayward BART station, Seward got off the bus. An hour later a veteran BART cop named David Betancourt found the rangy African American man outside the station, lying next to a Dumpster, naked and semi<\h>coherent. Betancourt, according to confidential police reports obtained by the Bay Guardian, grabbed Seward and shook him. “Are you OK?” the cop yelled.

“No,” Seward shouted, standing up. “No, it’s not OK.”

Betancourt, police reports indicate, says Seward then charged him. Yanking a can of pepper spray off his belt, the cop blasted the naked man in the face. The chemical spray did nothing.

Then, according to witnesses, Seward grabbed Betancourt’s 26-inch-long wooden nightstick. The officer – as he would later tell his superiors – began to fear for his life. Betancourt said he thought Seward would “beat [him] to death” with his own baton or attempt to disarm him and shoot him.

The cop drew his blued steel Glock and squeezed the trigger, dropping Seward with a single .40-caliber slug through the heart.

Seward’s demons are buried with him. Family members have few clues about why his mind melted down. They know he survived a similar psychotic episode in the early 1990s. And they know he went to see a psychologist two days before he died. It seems his relationship with an Oakland woman was collapsing; maybe the emotional turmoil had shattered him.

Betancourt, who has 20 years of law-enforcement experience, 8 of them with BART, emerged unharmed from the fatal skirmish; police records show the officer suffered no injuries. His career seems undamaged as well: Betancourt returned to active duty last week after probes by the BART police and the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office cleared him of any wrongdoing. The cop had been on paid administrative leave since the incident.

“It’s unfortunate that somebody died, but the officer was justified in using deadly force that morning,” Betancourt’s attorney, Leo Tamisiea, said.

BART police chief Gary Gee concurs. “I think he acted appropriately,” Gee told us. “The tussle that took place, the back-and-forth exchange – when it had no effect on [Seward] and the officer feared that he himself was going to suffer serious injury or death, he took the action he felt necessary.”

Regardless of BART’s official line, a key question remains: did Betancourt really have to kill Seward? It’s a question neither asked nor answered in the 90 pages of BART police reports leaked to this paper.

“My brother would still be alive today if the officer was doing his job correctly,” Michael Seward, 45, an Illinois state prison guard, told us. “I can’t see any justification for shooting an unarmed civilian.”

According to almost every major U.S. police department’s official guidelines – including those of the BART police – a cop can use deadly force only if the cop reasonably believes his or her life (or the life of another person) is in immediate jeopardy.

Did Betancourt truly think Seward was going to bludgeon him to death? And if so, was the cop making a realistic assessment of the situation? These questions, too, are unresolved by the investigations of BART and the D.A.’s Office.

The subway system has offered Seward’s family only fragmentary information about case number 01-22334. “The hardest part is that we’re not getting any help from the police department,” Michael Seward said. “I have not received an autopsy report on my brother. We’re trying to find out what actually happened, and the police have not been forthcoming in terms of giving us an accurate, detailed explanation of what happened.” The family is contemputf8g a lawsuit.

Lurking in the police documents leaked to this paper is one fairly startling fact: “Officer Betancourt’s duty weapon left the scene with him,” one chronology of the incident reads. Two hours after the killing, Betancourt turned the Glock over to investigators. “That’s totally against protocol,” said former Santa Monica cop Frank Saunders, a consultant on police practices. “In these cases, you’re supposed to take the officer’s weapon immediately.”

“I don’t know why there are time gaps in the reports,” BART spokesperson Mike Healy admitted.

For Samantha Liapes, director of Bay Area PoliceWatch, Seward’s death is symptomatic of a broader problem. “We’re very troubled by this: yet another example of unwarranted deadly force being used in a situation where someone was obviously in mental distress,” Liapes said. “The fact that the man was naked and clearly not carrying a life-threatening weapon makes the use of deadly force by the officer even more troubling.”

Two weeks after Seward was killed, San Francisco cops put 20-some bullets in another mentally ill man, Idriss Stelley, in a movie theater at Sony Metreon. Stelley, according to his mother, was brandishing a less-than-lethal, two-inch-long knife.

Beyond the specifics of the two cases, there’s a larger policy issue: are local cops getting the proper training in how to handle mentally ill people?

As required by state law, BART – along with most other Bay Area departments – gives new recruits six hours of schooling on the subject. “We are sensitive to the fact that there may be a need for additional training and are receptive to looking into it,” BART chief Gee said. “But I’m not so sure that even if Betancourt had gotten supplemental training on dealing with persons who are mentally ill, that it would have changed the outcome in this case.”

The chief could take a cue from San Jose, which has put 130 of its officers through a 40-hour training on mental health crisis calls.

Lt. Brenda Herbert, head of the San Jose Police Department’s Crisis Management Unit, runs the training program, which was launched in 1998. “What we’re trying to do is teach officers to talk someone down, rather than take them down physically,” Herbert says. “It’s a matter of teaching these officers what it means to be hearing voices, how to talk to someone who’s hearing voices, how to find out what the voices are saying so that you can take the necessary precautions.”

Seward is not the first person to bleed to death in the parking lot of the Hayward BART station. It was there, in 1992, that BART cop Fred Crabtree confronted Jerrold Hall, a 19-year-old African American. Hall, who was getting off a train with a pal, fit the description of a robbery suspect. Crabtree – armed with a baton, a can of pepper spray, a handgun, a shotgun, and an attack-<\h>trained German shepherd – told Hall to halt.

After a quick discussion Hall turned and walked off, his hands clearly visible. Crabtree ordered him to stop. When Hall failed to heed the command, the cop loosed the 12-gauge shotgun, blasting the young man in the back of the head.

As it turned out, no evidence was ever found connecting Hall to any robbery – and he was unarmed (see “BART Cops, 41-0,” 1/14/98).

BART came under public pressure to fire – or at least discipline – the officer. Politicians made noises about putting the subway system’s largely unaccountable 182-<\h>officer force under the supervision of a civilian review board.

Apparently unswayed by reason, BART officials did absolutely nothing, and eventually the public discontent tapered off. Crabtree remained on active duty until his own inglorious demise a few years later: the officer was found hanging from a noose in his home as porno tapes played on the TV.

Interviewed last week, Tom Radulovich, a member of the BART Board of Directors, said he’s pushing for more police oversight but at this point doesn’t have the votes on the nine-member board to pass any new rules. It may prove especially hard to muster those votes in the fear-<\h>laden post-Sept. 11 climate.

“The concern the [Seward killing] triggers for me is whether we’re doing enough to make sure things like this don’t happen,” Radulovich said.

It could be that David Betancourt really had no choice but to gun down Bruce Seward. Maybe it really was a kill-or-be-killed situation.

There is, however, another, more grim possibility: that the police culture at BART has changed very little in the last nine years. And the majority of the BART board doesn’t seem to care.

Zomes, Liquid Liquid, Silver Apples: Mi Ami picks the rest of the best of 2008

-
0

zomes-zomes sml.jpg

Another in a series of year-end picks from Bay Area musicians, writers, scene-makers, and music lovers. Here’s the rest of Mi Ami‘s best of 2008; for more of their selections, go here.

MORE 2008 PICKS FROM MI AMI’S DANIEL MARTIN-MCCORMICK AND DAMON PALERMO

– Omar-S, “Psychotic Photosynthesis” (both the original and beatless versions) (FXHE)
– Rhythm Based Lovers, “Boogie Vision”/”Snow Drift” 7-inch (Future Times)
– Group Inerane, Guitars from Agadez (Sublime Frequencies)
– Zomes, Zomes (Holy Mountain)
– Kyle Hall, Worx of Art EP 1 (Wild Oats)
– Liquid Liquid, Liquid Liquid (Grand Royal)
– Theo Parrish, Sound Sculptures Volume 1 (Sound Signature)
– Silver Apples, Selections from the Early Sessions (ChickenCoop Recordings)
– Droids, Star Peace (Barclay)
– La Düsseldorf, Viva (Water)
– Methusalem, Journey into the Unknown (Ariola)

Why?, Deerhunter, Chief Briggum land Sholi’s top slots of 2008

-
0

dead science sml.jpg
Life force: Dead Science.

Another in a series of year-end picks from Bay Area musicians, writers, scene-makers, and music lovers.

MORE PICKS FROM SHOLI‘S PAYAM BAVAFA AND ERIC RUUD

– Dead Science, Villianaire (Constellation)
– Deerhoof, Offend Maggie (Kill Rock Stars)
– Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago (Jagjaguwar)
– Chief Briggum, Ambiguous Garment (self-released)
– Buildings Breeding, LP2 (self-released)
– Deerhunter, Microcastle (Kranky)
– Why?, Alopecia (Anticon)
– Beach House, Devotion (Carpark)
– Fennesz, Black Sea (Touch)
– Matmos, Supreme Balloon (Matador)
– Dodos, Visitor (French Kiss)
– What’s Up, Content Imagination (Obey Your Brain)
– Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend (XL)
– Love Is Chemicals, Song of the Summer Youth Brigade (Near Earth Objects)

Stoltz, Citadelle, Agent Ribbons make Neil Martinson smile: more picks from ‘2008

-
0

agent ribbons sml.jpg
The up side: Agent Ribbons.

Another in a series of year-end picks from Bay Area musicians, writers, scene-makers, and music lovers.

SMILE’S NEIL MARTINSON’S TOP 10

– Citadelle at the Knockout, Aug. 4
– Robert Forster at Great American Music Hall, Sept. 10
– Peter Hammill at Great American Music Hall, Sept. 30
– Kelley Stoltz, Circular Sounds (Sub Pop)
– The Moon Upstairs, Guarding the Golden Apple (Gifted Children)
– Various artists, Daisies soundtrack (Finders Keepers)
– Bart Davenport, Palaces (Antenna Farm)
– Lavender Diamond, www.myspace.com/lavenderdiamond
– Agent Ribbons, www.myspace.com/agentribbons
– Willow Willow, www.myspace.com/willowwillow

Fresh and Onlys and Sonny Smith’s ‘Fine and Good’ picks for ’08

-
0

dragging ox sml.jpg
Ox-y contained: Dragging an Ox Through Water.

Another in a series of year-end picks from Bay Area musicians, writers, scene-makers, and music lovers.

SONNY SMITH‘S “FINE AND GOOD” LIST

– The Dry Spells
– The Fresh and Onlys
– Nodzzz
– Brilliant Colors
– Thee Oh Sees
– Sic Alps
– The Sandwitches
– Jeffrey Lewis
– Dragging an Ox Through Water

Guns N’ ‘Hits’ N’ the free market: Yellow Swans’ Gabriel Mindel gives up last year’s ‘Kill Yr Idols’ moments

-
2

hits are for squares sml.jpg
Caffeine-d: Sonic Youth’s Hits Are for Squares (Starbucks Entertainment)

Another in a series of year-end picks from Bay Area musicians, writers, scene-makers, and music lovers.

YELLOW SWANS‘ GABRIEL MINDEL’S TOP TEN KILL-YR-IDOLS MOMENTS OF 2008

1. Sonic Youth’s “Hits Are for Starbucks”
Crap, you guys — really?
2. Obama’s cabinet
Ah, hope and change, I hardly knew you …
3. Guns N’ Roses, Chinese Democracy (Interscope)
What about this isn’t beating a dead horse?
4. Scarlett Johansson, Anywhere I Lay My Head (Atco)
I think my crush has worn off.
5. Ian Curtis’ gravestone gets stolen
6. The “free market”
Too late, capitalism.
7. Heath Ledger.
8. MIA “retires”
I hope she’s better at this than Jay-Z.
9. Indian Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Steven Spielberg, US)
10. The USAISAMONSTER announce their breakup
This is probably only a big deal to about 50 people, but it really does bum me out.

‘Girlfriend,’ Special Disco, Danzig: Michael Harkin’s tops for 2008

-
0

chromatics sml.jpg
Doing it better: Chromatics.

Another in a series of year-end picks from Bay Area musicians, writers, scene-makers, and music lovers.

MICHAEL HARKIN’S TOP 10

– Nobunny, “I Am a Girlfriend”
If the original Ramones replaced Tommy with a drum machine, it might’ve sounded as amazing as this track from Love Visions (1-2-3-4 Go!).
– Danzig at the Warfield
“Mother”… kicking a pizza box out of a roadie’s grasp … Glenn still rules.
– Nodzzz, Nodzzz mini-LP (What’s Your Rupture?)
Fantastic, distortion-free guitar pop.
– Special Disco Version at Mighty
God bless James Murphy and Pat Mahoney for their brilliant edits and many mirrorballs.

Dress up, hook up, play the unofficial office party: Hank IV’s tops of 2008

-
0

llamarada sml.jpg
On the loose: Los Llamarada.

Another in a series of year-end picks from Bay Area musicians, writers, scene-makers, and music lovers.

HANK IV’S TOP 10 OF 2008

-Los Llamarada at Cake Shop, November
-Newbridge Mayor-Elect Philly Boy Roy appointing Hammerhead as P.I.G. (Pit Inspector General) on the Best Show on WFMU
-Bassist Chris P. getting propositioned/accosted by a persistent lady superfan in the middle of playing a song at Budget Rock VII
-Los Llamarada ordering Pat’s cheesesteaks in Philly slang
-Mission of Burma’s road manager (and Clint’s brother) Jimmy Conley’s story about, as a teenager, being dressed up like a girl by Clint and taken to a mid-1970s New York Dolls show in NYC
–The Shield‘s final season
-Mayyors live
–In Bruges screening at the Shill Building
-Outdoor day party show at SXSW with Ross Johnson
-Buttholes Urfers live on the seventh floor of a Financial District office building at 4 a.m. for Donny Wyatt’s birthday

HANK IV
With Wooden Shjips and E-Zee Tiger
Jan. 22, 9 p.m., call for price
Eagle
398 12th St., SF
(415) 626-0880

The in crowd: Lil Wayne, Charles Hamilton, Zo! and Tigallo, and others make a hip-hop top 10

-
0


Ladies do the same: Charles Hamilton’s “Brooklyn Girls.”

Another in a series of year-end picks from Bay Area musicians, writers, scene-makers, and music lovers.

DANIEL N. ALVAREZ’S TOP 10

10) Lil Wayne, Tha Carter III (Cash Money/Universal)

If for no other reason, Tha Carter III belongs on this list, because it proves that in the age of illegal downloading, hip-hop can still commercially thrive. While the record is uneven, its widespread success was achieved by Wayne’s hard work and prolific output. Most of his mixtapes, especially the ones in the “Da Drought” series, are stronger than this record, yet this album does have some dizzying high points. His expansive collaboration with the elder with Jay-Z, “Mr. Carter,” brilliantly builds to an explosive crescendo, where Wayne lets his hair down and destroys Infamous’ soulful beat.

“Next time you mention ‘Pac, Biggie, or Jay-Z, don’t forget Weezy, baby!” – Mr. Carter

9) Kidz in the Hall, The In Crowd (Duck Down)

Bursting out of hip-hop hotbed, the University of Pennsylvania, the duo’s breakthrough effort is one of the slickest of the year. Riding old-school soul beats, provided by Michael Aguilar (a.k.a., Double-O), the group’s MC Jabari Evans (Naledge) effortlessly cruises through downtown Chicago, putting a premium on storytelling. Often unfairly lumped in with the “hipster-hop” crowd, Kidz in the Hall’s sound actually aligns more with the Chicago scene, drawing striking parallels to Common and pre-robot Kanye West.

“And I’m looking blessed, like I said achoo.” – “Drivin’ Down The Block (Low End Theory)”

1...9899100...128Page 99 of 128

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org