Television Archives — Page 37 of 43 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Eyes on the prize

November 28, 2007

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"One thing about Chicago — it’s a no-bullshit city," Elia Einhorn, the maestro behind the Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, explains. "It’s a blue-collar, working-class city. There’s no pretension here." We’re sitting in the band’s de facto office — a corner booth at the absolutely unpretentious Pick Me Up Café in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood — where Einhorn and bandmate Ethan Adelsman have taken it upon themselves to school this recent San Francisco transplant in the ways of the local music scene.

To say they’re worthy teachers is an understatement. The group’s self-released 2003 debut, I Bet You Say That to All the Boys, topped many a best-of list that year, won the praise of local critics, and garnered heaps of music industry attention. The album led to shared billings with marquee artists like the Arcade Fire, the Violent Femmes, Spoon, and even San Francisco’s Dave Eggers. The obligatory television soundtrack spots followed, with salivating record execs not far behind. Eschewing major labels for its friendly neighborhood indie, Bloodshot, the band continued on its unpretentious way.

Originally recording more than 30 songs for its first Bloodshot full-length, the chamber-punk syndicate ended up with all of nine tracks. But even at a paltry 26 minutes, the album is the most complete I’ve heard in years. Steeped in Chicago’s "no bullshit" tradition, Einhorn’s songwriting is all substance. "Most records today are two or three good songs and then filler," the Wales-born songsmith says. "I could put out a double-disc record of fine songs, but fine can be the enemy of the best."

There’s no mistaking anything on this album for filler. Opening track "Aspidistra" tumbles with the frenetic energy you’d expect from a song propelled by three guitars. Recounting Einhorn’s history of drug addiction, the lyrical meat offers sinister contrast to the upbeat instrumentation. "Then and Not a Moment Before" showcases a similar dichotomy: long-overdue words fired at an absentee father are delivered over exhilarating major chords. Confusing, cathartic, and bordering on musical brilliance — it’s clear Einhorn’s understanding of songwriting forms, paired with his hard-won wisdom, presents a force to be reckoned with.

Employing the impossibly lonely voice of cellist Ellen O’Hayer, "In Hospital" delivers a gut-twisting account of coping with the death of a loved one. O’Hayer — who moonlights in Bright Eyes — also lends that sad and wispy voice to the sparse "Broken Front Teeth." Built from snapshots of Einhorn’s drug-addled past, the tune ends with the line "I knew I was done" but offers no closure. This honesty runs throughout the recording. "Most situations in life aren’t just resolved," Einhorn says. "It’s about recognizing the sadness. I’m putting it out there to say, ‘Look, here’s the confusion we’re dealing with. Here’s recognition that we’re all going through this together.’"

As far as uniting the masses goes, the sweeping anthem "Everything You Paid For" does this better than any song I’ve heard in years. Flanked by the disparate voices of the rest of the Choir, O’Hayer traverses the insecurities burgeoning inside the human condition in Einhorn’s ever-poignant narratives.

Fearlessly navigating a world beyond rock-ready love songs, the Scotland Yard Gospel Choir aren’t afraid to pluck at frayed and forgotten nerves. Such subjects as parental abandonment, gender identity, and mental illness aren’t your typical pop fodder. "People don’t want to hear songs about people you love dying," Einhorn says. "They don’t want to hear songs about having a crush on the same gender." Chalk it up to that no-bullshit ethos, but finally, here’s a band that’s working with something real. "If we ever go mainstream, it’s by pure luck," Einhorn adds before our waiter, eyeing the untouched food on the table, comes over to scold him, "Eat now. Interview later."

Obediently diving into his lunch, Einhorn can’t help but crack a smile: "See? There’s Chicago for you. Priorities in the right place." *

THE SCOTLAND YARD GOSPEL CHOIR

With Reduced to Ruin

Sun/2, 9 p.m., $7

Make-Out Room

3225 22nd St., SF

(415) 647-2888

www.makeoutroom.com

Eaux d’Anger

November 28, 2007

› johnny@sfbg.com

Whither Kenneth Anger? Has his signature hot temper withered into kind, grandfatherly wisdom? If the commentary tracks of the marvelous Films of Kenneth Anger Volume One and Films of Kenneth Anger Volume Two (Fantoma) are to be trusted, this is the case. But one can’t be faulted for suspecting that Anger has consciously decided to favor restraint over verbal fireworks when discussing his films. "There will always be mysteries," he decrees near the end of the second disc’s last moments, just after pointing out smoke from Lucifer Rising‘s burning script in one of the 1981 version’s final shots, a lingering, distant gaze at colossi in upper Egypt.

To say that the DVD issuing of Anger’s films has been long awaited would be an understatement. As months gave way to years, grumbles about what might be slowing or even permanently preventing the process mixed with a chorus of hopes regarding the film restoration efforts of Ross Lipman and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Now that the restorations have been screened and the DVDs released, it’s time to rain praise on Lipman. Not only has he directed his and UCLA’s attention toward Anger and Charles Burnett — two filmmakers whose non-Hollywood artistry would have deteriorated and vanished otherwise — he’s delivered superb restorations that will change the way you see classic works. Both Anger collections deserve a place next to the just-released Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection (New Yorker Video/Milestone Cinematheque) as one of this year’s most vital and rewarding DVD collections.

The Anger DVDs seem ordered according to a masculine-feminine divide, with volume one showcasing Hollywood and European pageantry, and volume two gravitating toward motorcycle machismo, rock ‘n’ roll, and the occult. One thing that becomes clear on watching both is that the films that benefit most from restoration aren’t necessarily Anger’s best known or most canonical. In volume one, 1953’s Eaux d’Artifice truly seems born anew: what was once black and blurred now pulses with distinct energy. I once saw Anger berate a projectionist immediately after the movie was screened; at the time it seemed like a peevish diva display, but now I realize what the projectionist (working with an old print) was up against and why Anger was enraged by the overly dim images that had just been projected. By shooting in sunlight on black-and-white film with a red filter, he created a unique, electric blue nighttime hue.

If it were merely crude, Eaux d’Artifice would be the ultimate water-sports fantasy, culminating in perhaps the longest and most gorgeous money shot in the history of film. (After using a totem as a hard-on in 1947’s Fireworks, Anger rendered sexuality through playful metaphor or the more direct hint of nude eroticism.) Simply put, it’s resplendent: in an extended pure-light-and-dark passage that echoes a hand-marked moment in Fireworks, Anger almost allows nature to do the drawing. The streams of water from the baroque fountains of Tivoli Gardens are Anger’s chief material, creating an effect that’s a more dynamic femme foreshadowing or Euroecho of Jackson Pollock’s action painting.

They run hot, then cold, then hot again, but jewel-like strings or streams continuously run and spill through Anger’s films, from the slo-mo-homo(genized) milky money shots of Fireworks — in which fire also blazes next to the reflective surface of water — to the beaded dresses of 1949’s Puce Moment, through Eaux d’Artifice, to the snakelike lava flows and volcanic eruptions of Lucifer Rising. This love of ornamentation in motion might reach a hallucinogenic delirium in 1954’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, in which Samson de Brier literally swallows a series of jewels. While 1964’s Scorpio Rising is partly renowned for its subliminal qualities, trances invoked via overt repetition are another Anger motif, most at the fore in the lunar views of Rabbit’s Moon (1950–71; 1979) and the solar worship of Lucifer Rising.

Fantasma’s volumes of Anger’s films may not expose their mysteries or hocus-pocus, but the DVDs further reveal Anger’s impact on equally iconic but less experimental directors. That Martin Scorsese and David Lynch drew from Anger’s pop soundtracking is obvious — but one could also argue that the all-American family-room surrealism at the climax of Fireworks predates the Christmas tree rampage at the start of John Waters’s Female Trouble. Influence runs both ways, of course, and Aleister Crowley’s on Anger is also apparent, thanks to the presence of Anger’s 2002 slide show appreciation of Crowley’s frankly lousy paintings and drawings, The Man We Want to Hang, in volume two. The same wild eyes and crazed gazes that Crowley loved to draw dominate some of acolyte Anger’s far superior films, Inauguration and Invocation in particular.

Anger’s DVD commentary shares next to nothing about his soundtrack choices or his interpersonal dynamics with the many men who have stepped before his camera lens. But he does utter select camp trivia, witty anecdotes, and even symbolic explanations without giving away magic tricks. He repeatedly praises his interior designer grandmother, whom he considers a sorceress. He says Louise Brooks told him Eaux d’Artifice was his sexiest film, and that the film’s midget protagonist was discovered by Federico Fellini. He gossips that the star of his Puce Moment was a mistress of Lázaro Cárdenas, claims that Inauguration star de Brier "was rumored to be the bastard son of the King of Romania," says Invocation actor Sir Francis Rose is the in-joke inspiration behind a certain famous Gertrude Stein line, and notes with a tinge of irritation that Jimmy Page outbid him at a Sotheby’s auction of Crowley paintings. "Cameron thought she was a witch, and I’m in agreement with that idea," Anger says about the late painter-poet whose flame-haired appearance is the most vibrant of all of Inauguration‘s many grand entrances.

Only Lucifer Rising star Marianne Faithfull seems capable of sparking some off-the-cuff impish remarks from the cozy incarnation of Anger who recorded commentary for Fantoma’s DVDs. During a travel guide’s discussion of Lucifer Rising‘s journey through Icelandic, Egyptian, and Germanic Black Forest sites, Anger takes the time to softly but repeatedly chide Faithfull — perhaps because she mocks him in her autobiography? According to Anger, the mosquitoes of Egypt loved to bite Faithfull’s "tender inner thighs." But that tidbit is nothing in comparison with an anecdote he shares about her disguising heroin as face powder in order to smuggle it into Egypt. Whether this is true or false, it’s impossible not to laugh out loud when Anger states that, had this ploy been revealed, he and Faithfull would have faced a fate far different than — though just as dramatic as — the stories they’ve gone on to live: death by firing squad.

IAPA in Venezuela: The international press advocacy group stresses deep concern over the climate of press freedom in Venezuela

November 22, 2007

By Bruce B. Brugmann

CARACAS, Venezuela (Nov. 20, 2007) It was an amusing and telling moment in the history of freedom of the press.

On the morning of Monday, Nov. 19th, as the press mission of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) started its 10th mission to Venezuela to check on President Hugo Chavez’s accelerating crackdown on the press, Chavez sent a message to the delegation:

It was a half page advertisement from the Venezuelan National Assembly, in the big morning Caracas daily paper El Universal, reprinting a copy of a congresswoman’s resolution urging the Executive Branch to declare IAPA “not welcome” in Venezuela. Click here to view the ad. This set the tone for our mission: The congresswoman refused IAPA’s invitation to meet with our delegation and no member of the three branches of the Venezuelan government and of the National Electoral Council agreed to meet with IAPA despite many contacts made in recent weeks from IAPA headquarters in Miami.

Nobody in the governement would meet with IAPA but Chavez, who was all over television and the newspapers for his trip to Iran and France, did send a Chavista group who called themselves Journalists for the Truth.
The president of the group told the IAPA mission that there was complete freedom of the press in Venezuela and then promptly told the press outside the meeting room that IAPA had been “duped in good faith by the reports prepared by the “opposition” Venezuela press. Gonzalo Marroquin, chairman of IAPA’s Commmittee on Freedom of the Press and Information, immediately retorted to the press that “it would seem that the journalists were at another meeting.” Gonzalo, director of Diario Prensa Libre in Guatemala, and a former television newsman, was widely interviewed on IAPA’s findings on radio and television.

The mission met with members of the Venezuelan Press Bloc, a constitutional attorney, representatives of a human rights group, polling experts, the mayor of Chicao, the head of the National Press Workers Union., and other civilian experts. The mission and its final press conference was widely covered in the Venezuelan press. There were no violent incidents nor any attempt to scare or demonstrate against the IAPA mission. B3

Click on the continue reading link to read the IAPA press release. Scroll down for the Spanish version.

Behind the Bey empire

November 14, 2007

Editor’s Note: The Chauncey Bailey Project, a collaboration of local media outlets including the Guardian, is investigating the circumstances surrounding the Aug. 2 murder of Bailey, an Oakland journalist who was reporting on the financial dealings of the Bey family’s Your Black Muslim Bakery at the time he was killed. For more information, including audio, video, and updates on the case, click here.

Since 2003, Esperanza Johnson, a former key figure within Oakland’s Bey organization, and her husband, Antron Thurman, have acquired nearly $2 million worth of East Bay real estate through a string of controversial deals tainted with allegations of deceit.

In five cases those deals led to litigation. Johnson, of Antioch, who also goes by the name Noor Jehan Bey, has twice been accused of fraud. Court records indicate that one of those transactions involved falsified documents.

One sale involving Johnson, a licensed real estate broker, led to criminal charges: Alameda County prosecutors in 2006 convicted a Johnson associate on fraud charges stemming from a deal that cost an East Oakland couple their home.

A broad array of characters have tangled with Johnson and Thurman in court, including a disabled Berkeley bus porter forced from his family home, an Antioch couple now facing foreclosure, and East Bay Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that builds homes for the poor and struggling. Combined, they claim to have lost at least $1.77 million in property, cash and equity in the deals.

The revelations about Johnson and Thurman come as authorities scrutinize the extensive real estate dealings of the Bey family and their bankrupt business, Your Black Muslim Bakery, including Johnson’s role as the broker for an Oakland woman named Paulette Arbuckle who is attempting to buy the bakery’s San Pablo Avenue headquarters. Johnson bore four of the Bey family patriarch’s dozens of children.

Bakery CEO Yusuf Ali Bey IV, 21, jailed without bail on kidnapping and torture charges, also is charged with real estate fraud: prosecutors say he bought an Oakland property under a false identity.

And bankruptcy trustee Tevis Thompson, who is overseeing the liquidation of Your Black Muslim Bakery’s assets, has claimed in court papers that Bey IV transferred $2.28 million in bakery properties to his mother, Daulet Bey, in a bid to “defraud creditors.” The trustee has sued for those properties’ return.

Devaughndre Broussard, a 20-year-old bakery associate, is charged with the Aug. 2 shotgun slaying of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey as he walked to work in downtown Oakland. Police say Broussard made a confession – later recanted – that he killed Bailey because the journalist was working on a story about the bakery’s finances and bankruptcy case.

Johnson, whose state business registration was suspended more than a year ago for failure to pay taxes and who with Thurman has more than $1 million in state and federal tax liens recorded against them, didn’t return numerous telephone calls and emails, and didn’t answer the gate at her Antioch home on two recent occasions.

Thurman refused to speak to reporters who approached him recently in Oakland.

A Los Angeles real estate consultant who reviewed Johnson’s transactions for the Chauncey Bailey Project said the trustee and judge handling the bakery’s bankruptcy should examine Johnson’s record.

They “should be made aware that a realtor on a transaction which requires the trustee’s approval has a murky… background,” said Eric Forster.

The attorney for the court appointed bankruptcy trustee charged with liquidating the bakery said Johnson’s transaction history would be probed.

“Obviously it is of some concern to us and we’re looking into it,” Eric Nyberg, attorney for trustee Tevis Thompson, said when informed of the cases.

He also noted that Arbuckle may not, in the end, be the highest bidder for the bakery. A hearing on her offer is scheduled for Nov. 29. If the $899,999 bid of Johnson’s client, Arbuckle, is successful and Johnson is “entitled to receive the commission, then we really don’t have an issue with it,” Nyberg said.

A spokesperson for the state Department of Real Estate, Tom Pool, wouldn’t discuss the Johnson and Thurman transactions.

Machado

Markus Machado and Gail Mateo said that when they wanted to buy a newer and bigger home in 2005, they went to a real estate broker they thought they could trust: Esperanza Johnson.

A Compton native, Johnson became involved with the Bey organization, a spin-off of the Nation of Islam, at the age of 12, taking the name Noor Jehan Bey.

She’s returned to using the name Esperanza Johnson, though she’s been listed in judgments against her by banks and credit-card companies as Nellie Bey, Nuri Bey, Noojean Bey and Noor Jehan Esperanza, a review of records by the Chauncey Bailey Project shows. And, in 2005 testimony, she said she still occasionally uses the name Noor Jehan Bey.

Johnson had hired Machado, a graphic artist, to create flyers for her Signature One Mortgage and Real Estate.

In a recent interview at his lawyer’s office, Machado described her as warm and gregarious – at first, anyway. Machado said Johnson arranged what seemed like an incredible deal: the couple could sell their 50-year-old Pittsburg house and move into a spacious four-bedroom home in a verdant Antioch subdivision, an ideal place to raise their three children and grow old together.

Johnson promised they’d pay about $1,600 a month for the new home, only a little more than their mortgage at the time. Machado said Johnson even agreed to forgo her usual commissions “because we were like family.”

They said Johnson had told them their credit was poor, and talked them into selling their Pittsburg house to one of her employees, Araceli Moreno, for $350,000 while putting the new home and mortgage in Moreno’s name as well. They expected to refinance the loan in about a year, when Moreno would sign the house over to them.

It seemed perfect – until the bills arrived.

The payments were $2,700 a month and soon ballooned higher, they now say in court records. And then Johnson – who in sealing the deal had diverted almost $58,000 of equity from their old home to others, and had won large commissions for herself by getting them an unfavorable mortgage – stopped taking their calls, Machado said as his wife sat next to him weeping.

The couple had trouble making the payments almost immediately and Moreno began receiving calls from the mortgage company. She sued Machado and Mateo last year.

“The point of (Moreno’s) lawsuit was to get them to refinance to get my client’s name off the loan and for her to go ahead and salvage what of her credit picture she could,” said Moreno’s attorney, Richard G. Hyppa of Tracy.

The couple counter-sued in November 2006, naming Moreno and Johnson as defendants, claiming that Johnson defrauded them. They are now months behind on the payments and stressed to exhaustion.

“I don’t sleep. Gail doesn’t sleep,” Machado said. “I was very naive. We were led down this primrose path because I trusted (Johnson) implicitly.”

After paying off what they owed on the Pittsburg house, about $190,000 was left over that should have been used for the down payment on the Antioch house. But the suit alleges that Moreno used only $77,973 toward the down payment.

Meanwhile, court records say Johnson arranged for another $10,000 to be paid out to Moreno, and for someone named Harry Hawkins to get $45,830 as “repayment of loans.” Machado’s lawyer, Ken Koenen, said attempts to locate Hawkins have been fruitless.

The suit also claims Johnson structured the Antioch mortgage so monthly payments would increase dramatically after a year, and so Machado and Mateo would have to pay an $18,000 penalty in order to refinance – thereby earning her a much larger commission.

Machado and Mateo now are several months in arrears on the mortgage in Moreno’s name. Default notices have arrived at the house.

“It’s an extremely painful thing,” Machado said. “We have been robbed of our peace of mind. We have to make decisions about whether to put food in the refrigerator or gas in the car. We’ve not even sure we’re going to have a place to live.”

Johnson hasn’t responded to the couple’s lawsuit and will likely be subject to a default judgment, Koenen said.

Chicago D&P
Johnson and Thurman in 2004 acquired a Hercules home after a federal judge had ordered it frozen as an asset of an investment company, Chicago D&P, that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had accused of fraud.
The property was supposed to be sold to help pay back investors – reportedly including at least 30 active-duty Marines and several churches – which had been cheated out of millions through Chicago D&P’s pyramid schemes.
The daughter of the company’s president had bought the property years earlier using a straw purchaser – a friend with better credit – as a front, according to court records.
That friend had been trying to get her name off the title for some time, and the daughter’s attorney – Githaiga Ramsey, who also worked for Thurman and Johnson on another case – persuaded her to sign the house over to them. Records shows Ramsey offered the friend $20,500 to complete the transaction but that the payment was never made.
The transfer of the house occurred after U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer ordered the property frozen. Thurman then turned around and sold it a month later to one of the employees of his bail bond business, Jamie Bonilla, for $460,000. Johnson filed Bonilla’s loan application.
Most of that money appears to have eventually gone to pay mortgages against the property when Thurman and Johnson acquired it for free. But first, Thurman received $60,213 from the deal’s escrow; and Ramsey got $31,000.
It remains unclear who lived in the house after Bonilla bought it.
Stephen Anderson, the receiver representing Chicago D&P’s bilked investors, wrote in April 2005 that he believed Johnson’s daughter, Nisa Bey, had lived there.
Other documents show Madeeah Bey – another mother to several of patriarch Yusuf Bey’s children – used it as her mailing address in two December 2004 real estate deals.
It’s also unclear whether Thurman and Johnson knew of the court order freezing the house when they took possession of it. But in February 2005 Breyer held Ramsey in contempt of court for defying his order.
Ramsey and Thurman both repaid the money they received from the escrow when Thurman sold the house to Bonilla.
Bonilla, within a few months, then sold the house for $625,000 – a profit of $211,690 from a property that the receiver had originally wanted to sell to help repay the defrauded investors.
Anderson said a long legal battle to regain title to the house would’ve been too costly.
“We made an economic decision,” he said. “The objective of the receiver is to return as much money as possible back to the investors, and it was not difficult to determine we were going to get more money” by taking the $91,000 from Thurman and Ramsey than by “trying to unscramble that whole mess.”
Ramsey, who surrendered his law license while facing disciplinary charges from an unrelated case, wouldn’t discuss this case or others in which he was involved with Johnson and Thurman.
“My God, am I never going to get away from this?” he said. “I’m not involved and I don’t want to be. I’m not in contact with these people anymore.”
Bonilla could not be located.
Habitat for Humanity house
Antron Thurman married a woman named Sharon Clements in December 1987. Records show they separated seven months later and eventually filed for a divorce that was never made final.

In early 2000, Clements, as a single mother, moved into a home on 105th Avenue in Oakland built by the low-income housing nonprofit East Bay Habitat for Humanity. It gave Clements a no-interest $112,000 loan with no down payment.

Clements died in April 2003, leaving no will. Usually either there’s a clear legal inheritance, or else the nonprofit passes the deed to someone qualified for low-income aid, executive director Janice Jensen said. But Clements’ son was still a minor.

Clements’ home stood vacant for three years while her estate was sorted out in Alameda County Probate Court.

Then, in mid-2006, Thurman argued he was entitled to the low-income property as Clements’ surviving spouse, records show – even as he listed his address as Johnson’s Antioch home, and other records showed that in the previous few years he had bought and sold in excess of $1 million in East Bay real estate.

“Frankly, I didn’t even know about Mr. Thurman,” Habitat’s Jensen said. “I had no idea who he was or that he even existed until the attorneys got involved. When we looked at the deed, she was the only signature, so she bought that home herself.”

Still, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Marshall L. Whitley awarded Thurman the house, which had restrictions in place to preserve its affordability for low income people.

Thurman then sold it back to Habitat for Humanity for the $13,500 in equity that had accrued during the three years Clements owned it.

Alana Conner, an attorney for Thurman at the time, said she couldn’t independently recall details of the case and declined to discuss it.

Stewart

Mitzie Peters befriended Brandy Stewart in 2001, studying the Bible with her eventual victim, court records say.

Peters persuaded the cash-strapped AC Transit bus driver to deed the home at 1565 77th Ave. – which Stewart had inherited from her mother, and in which she, her husband and her three children lived – into Peters name and use Peters’ credit to get an equity loan. Peters promised to return the deed after a few days, keeping $12,000 from the loan as a fee.

“She said that because she loved me so much, she would never, ever think about doing this for anyone else, but she would help me to get the house refinanced,” Stewart would later testify.

Stewart deeded the house to Peters on March 11, 2003. But rather than sticking to the deal, Peters drained the property of all equity and gave nothing to Stewart, court records show.

Peters couldn’t have conducted the transaction without Johnson and her family.

As Peters’ broker, Johnson submitted a series of loan applications reporting Peters’ income as increasingly higher until the bank accepted the deal; she also allegedly coached Stewart in writing to the title company and falsely claiming Peters was her cousin.

Johnson’s sister, Ruquayya Jasmine Pennix, prepared Peters’ tax returns to send to the loan company, showing self-employment income that Peters later admitted was bogus; it’s unclear if Pennix knew that at the time.

Another of Johnson’s sisters – Fatima Ismail, who worked in Johnson’s office – drew up a phony lease showing Peters had derived rental income from Stewart’s house, according to court records.

Three months after she took title to Stewart’s house, Peters sold it to one of Johnson’s sons, Amir Bey. Under oath, Amir Bey later admitted he was just a straw buyer for his mother.

When arrested and charged with unrelated public benefits fraud, perjury and grand theft in July 2004, Peters made bail with Thurman’s Sinbad’s Bail Bonds.

As investigators also began probing her real estate activities, Peters gifted her Hayward condo to Johnson’s daughter, Nisa Bey, who sold it a month later for about $400,000.

Peters then lived with Nisa Bey in Pittsburg until going to prison. Because her bail had been secured with the condo, Thurman later asked a judge to exonerate the bail and return more than $50,000 – to Nisa Bey.

The Alameda County District Attorney’s office interviewed Johnson, Thurman, and their attorney, Githaiga Ramsey – who had represented Peters until just two months earlier, and who had just arranged the Chicago D&P deal for them – in September 2004.

“Johnson seemed evasive when questioned about irregularities in the loan and application process,” inspector Paul Wallace wrote in court papers.

But Johnson wasn’t charged.

“We didn’t think we could prove the case against her beyond a reasonable doubt,” Deputy District Attorney Alyce Sandbach said. “We didn’t have enough to make her on a case of fraud… of having made knowing misrepresentations.”

Among additional charges filed against Peters in November 2004 was a felony grand-theft count for equity and title to the Stewarts’ home; she pleaded no contest to that and 15 other, unrelated counts a year later, and was sentenced in February 2006.

The Stewarts got the $50,374.10 bail money Thurman had tried to direct to Nisa Bey. A judge in January ordered Peters to pay $486,083.90 in the Stewarts’ civil lawsuit, but they haven’t seen a dime, their lawyers say.

Amir Bey and Johnson tried to evict the Stewarts, court documents show, but backed off when the couple obtained free legal help.

The Stewarts then sued Johnson, Peters and Amir Bey; Johnson eventually offered to deed the house back to Stewart, but with the equity drained, the Stewarts couldn’t afford the higher mortgage payments.

A judge in September 2006 ordered Johnson and Amir Bey to pay the Stewarts $100,000 – $20,000 up front and $1,667 per month for 48 months.

Rebecca Saelao, the Stewarts’ attorney, said this civil judgment became a lien on the house, and was subordinated to massive mortgages Johnson and Amir Bey had taken on the property and eventually defaulted on. The house was sold at auction last year for $80,900, public records show.

The Stewarts got only about $5,000 from the sale of the home they’d lost. They no longer live in the Bay Area, and couldn’t be reached for comment.

Taylor

Wrapped in a thin, sea-green blanket, Donald Taylor lay in a narrow bed at a Stockton nursing home recently, his frail 61-year-old body ravaged by diabetes and hypertension. His wheelchair was parked at his bedside, a walker he wants to learn to use, a few feet away.

Taylor is broke and relies on Medi-Cal, the state insurance program for the indigent, to bankroll his care and board at the Elm Haven Care Center.

His room is dingy and, fluorescent-lit with peeling blue wallpaper and a television, foil wrapped around its rabbit-ear antennae, issuing forth static-filled sound. He spends his days “just doing nothing.”

He said he wonders what his life might be like now if he never encountered Antron Thurman. “I think about it quite often, but there’s nothing I can do… I think about how they took the house from me,” Taylor said haltingly in a soft, gravelly voice that contained little emotion.

In the 1950s Taylor’s parents bought a cozy two-bedroom home on a tree-shaded street in north Berkeley. He grew up there and lived there still as an adult, while working as a bus-station porter. When his parents died, he and his sister, Loretta Alexander, inherited the house; the mortgage was paid off.

In early 2001, according to interviews and court documents, stepbrother Frederick Myers Jr., approached the siblings with a plan: He would help them form a company to manage the house and another property they had inherited, an undeveloped Lake County parcel.

Myers asked them to transfer the two deeds to the new corporation, which he would helm for them. Taylor said he agreed at his sister’s urging, believing the three of them could profit from development of the Lake County parcel.

But Myers suddenly sold the Berkeley house to Thurman, pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars and disappeared, court documents say, catching Taylor and Alexander completely off guard.

“I felt I had been cheated,” Taylor said, adding that he believes Thurman and Myers worked in concert. “Fred Jr. took the house and sold it to (Thurman) and it’s been downhill ever since. He sold it out from underneath us.”

Myers could not be located. Thurman, asked if he remembered Taylor, refused to answer as he climbed into a Cadillac Escalade outside a home in the Oakland hills.

Alexander’s son, Tony Cole, expressed disgust at the way his mother and uncle were played. “That property slipped right out from underneath them,” he said in a phone interview. “They didn’t have the business sense to know what was going on.”

Taylor and Alexander in 2004 sued to reclaim the house. Myers never appeared in court, but Thurman – represented by Githaiga Ramsey – responded by filing his own suit, claiming he had legitimately bought the property for $374,388 and demanding that Taylor pay $1,500 in monthly rent or get out.

Taylor and Alexander eventually settled the case for $55,000; it took Thurman 10 months to pay them, court records indicate. Taylor’s attorney, Frederic Harvey, refused to discuss the case.

The two-story, beige stucco house with a large garage has steadily appreciated in value. Public records show Thurman sold it in 2004 to Madeeah Bey – the same relative who used the Chicago D&P house in Hercules as her address – for $520,000; she sold it for $850,000 less than a year later. The house is now assessed at $867,000.

Alexander died last year. Taylor lost most of his possessions including photos of his mother when he left the property.

“I’d like to tell him to go (screw) himself,” Taylor said of Thurman, his legs twitching quietly under the blanket.

University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism students Lisa Pickoff-White, Robert Lewis, Nick Kusnetz, Vianna Risa Davila, Marnette Federis and Lucie Schwartz contributed to this story.

Thomas Peele and Josh Richman are staff writers for the Bay Area News Group; A.C. Thompson is a free-lance reporter working for New America Media and Bay Area News Group-East Bay; Bob Butler is a freelance reporter and president of the Bay Area Black Journalists Association.

Remain in light

November 13, 2007

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"The body, and its pleasures and powers, is rarely far from the spirit in California," Erik Davis writes in his introduction to Isis Aquarian’s firsthand account The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and the Source Family (Process). Many generations of Californians have enjoyed a mix of healthy eating, nature appreciation, and magical thinking, but few have done so with as much colorful exuberance as the Source Family, a group of angelic longhairs that thrived in the Hollywood hills in the late ’60s and early ’70s under the guidance of Father Yod (a.k.a. YaHoWa, Shin Wha, and Jim Baker), a fast-talking rascal with the hair, beard, and robes of a latter-day Zeus.

What began as a small commune of hippie restaurateurs (the group ran the Source, the veggie restaurant where Woody Allen has his Los Angeles lunch with Diane Keaton in Annie Hall) soon swelled into the hundred-plus-member Source Family. As Baker grew more assured in his Father role, so too did his leadership become more outlandish, both in terms of teachings (which dabbled in many incoherent mystical strands) and practices (which infamously incorporated tantric sex rituals and polygamy). The family’s experiment in living had stops in Hawaii and San Francisco (the Guardian‘s classified section is mentioned twice in The Source) before Father Yod died in a hang-gliding accident in 1975, a notably quiet way to go in a decade that also saw the Manson Family’s carnage and Jonestown’s horror.

Three events this week — an audiovisual-enhanced discussion at Artists’ Television Access, a signing at Aquarius Records, and a live performance at Cafe du Nord — commemorate the publication of Isis "Keeper of the Record" Aquarian’s Source Family primer, a stitching together of testimonies and primary documents. As is often the case with informal accounts, the book is wracked with cliché, most frustratingly in the form of new age truisms used to elide meaningful experiences. There are, though, more than enough weird and wonderful details to make it an enjoyable read (for example, the rainbow diet of avocado, eggplant, red onion, banana, filberts, tomatoes, and alfalfa sprouts), and something like pathos emerges when family members reflect on their experiences ("Probably 60 percent of my memories come from one single year of my life").

Still, it’s their glamour that holds our attention. There were dozens of similar-minded spiritual groups at the time, but nothing quite like the Source. Comparing the group with the earthier Love Israel Family, Aquarian writes, "[We] had a house in Hollywood and served organic cuisine to rock stars; our women wore custom-designed jewelry…. They had trucks, and Father had a Rolls Royce." The Source Family cut a path defined more by aestheticism than asceticism, and one of the chief pleasures of Aquarian’s book lies in the ephemera — commandments, names, menus, costumes — that, even in their most disposable forms, explode forth with the group’s high hippie style. Davis makes the crucial point that for the Source Family, "spirituality was a creative act of avant-garde exploration. In this regard, cults can be like art collectives."

This is certainly the case with the music, most of which came under the aegis of Ya Ho Wa 13, a core group capable of the thundering Dionysian grooves necessary to underwrite Father Yod’s commanding vocal presence. Besides being incorporated into Source Family meditations, the band played in town (a supplementary CD to Aquarian’s book includes a surreal performance at Beverly Hills High School) and cut numerous one-take albums (she estimates 65 in a two-year period, though many have been lost). The band’s changing permutations and relentless output anticipated the working methods of collective groups such as Acid Mothers Temple and Sunburned Hand of Man.

Can one enjoy the art without being a kind of spiritual tourist? It’s a difficult question, but one worth asking in light of the Source Family’s reemergence amid major excavations of the Age of Aquarius (see: freak folk, hippie chic). It goes without saying, but the various sponsors of this week’s Source events are impeccably hip: Other Cinema, Aquarius Records, and the locus of much of the current Aquarian fever, Arthur magazine.

What distinguishes today’s backtracking from the brief vogue for peace signs and psychedelic guitar washes in the early ’90s is the depth of the fascination. Seekers aren’t contenting themselves with the usual icons; they’re hungrier than that. How else to explain reissues of everything from Terry Riley to Karen Dalton, the popularity of Arthur, and the crowds when Alejandro Jodorowsky’s fantasias (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) played at the Castro Theatre some months ago? A week before the Source Family gathering at ATA, the same venue hosted another convergence of ’60s esoterica: Ira Cohen (the publisher and filmmaker behind the mirror- and mind-warping Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda) introducing Julian Beck’s documentary Paradise Now: The Living Theatre in Amerika.

As the cultivation of influences matures, younger artists and musicians begin to reshape the past in more interesting, nuanced ways. One such avatar is the LA-by-way-of-Baltimore blues banshee Entrance (né Guy Blakeslee). Booking him as the opener for the Ya Ho Wa 13 reunion is a brilliant stroke, since it properly asserts the bill as a cross-generational dialogue. Did Devendra Banhart consult the Source Family group shots before convening his own family portrait for the cover of Cripple Crow (XL Recordings)? Might there be something of Father Yod’s TEN (the eternal now) teachings locked in White Rainbow’s recent bliss-minimalism opus, The Prism of the Eternal Now (Kranky/Marriage)? I’m inclined to think so, especially after having learned that certain taste-making record producers love to gab about the Source Family. It would seem that the sons of Father Yod have become elders in their own right.

Elements of Aquarian culture will always be at best ridiculous and at worst morally vacuous. As Father Yod could pass megalomania off as free-spiritedness, so too is the current crop of (mostly white) aficionados sometimes guilty of confusing creativity with fetish: for surface, ornament, texture, and, inevitably, Native American signifiers. And yet, now as it was then, much of the work being produced is vividly realized and buoyantly energetic. Flipping through The Source, one does indeed experience a kind of timelessness quite apart from the star gates, comets, and prophecies. Forty years later, the book’s disarming photographs do not seem to represent individuals so much as an ideal, a vision of beauty that endures. *

ERIK DAVIS AND ISIS AQUARIAN ON FATHER YOD AND THE SOURCE FAMILY

Sat/17, 8:30 p.m., $7.77

Artists’ Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

BOOK SIGNING AND LISTENING PARTY

Sun/18, 1 p.m., free

Aquarius Records

1055 Valencia, SF

(415) 647-2272

www.aquariusrecords.org

YA HO WA 13

With Sky Saxon and the Seeds, Entrance, and Ascended Master

Sun/18, 8 p.m., $12

Cafe du Nord

2174 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com

Good-bye to my city

November 13, 2007

EDITORIAL My marriage to the city is ending. Yes, the one on a peninsula tipped with astounding beauty, filled with rich cultural communities and the fullness and complexities of the growing inequities in American life.

It is the city that has witnessed the nurturing scenes of my adulthood on the West Coast of North America since 1966. I was here as the beat generation turned over my new city bride to newcomers during the Summer of Love. They called us hippies. Later I witnessed the tear gas flows at Haight and Ashbury the year that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis. I watched television with Students for Eugene McCarthy on Haight Street on the warm June night when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.

Although my city bride is scarred and worn down, like any bride would be with too many lovers fighting over each blink of her aging eyes under a wrinkled brow, how can anybody leave after a 41-year love affair?

Sadly, the deepening citywide housing crisis, well documented by the Guardian, has now reached our rental home near our beloved Unitarian Church and Center.

I have been in the "good fight" for most of those 41 years in San Francisco, where I have been arrested in solidarity with homeless people, witnessed for peace and justice, and engaged the body politic at City Hall on behalf of sound environmental and planning policies. I have worked continually for better public TV and radio services, including 10 years of elected service on KQED’s Board of Directors.

Now what is a responsible lover of a city bride to do? Jump ship? Leave on the next voyage of the SS Bilge Rat?

As an aging groom, however, my choices are few.

Along with my human bride, Jean, I could live in the cramped, crowded, and often dangerous gray ghetto for folks of limited income. Perhaps we’d win the California Lottery so we could "afford" the city’s lottery for a so-called affordable-housing condo.

We could continue to mount the barricades, trying keep our bride from being dressed up for dates with the limousine-and-caviar set and the arrivistes of wealth and power who want to steal her remaining treasures.

Instead, we are now heading toward building a new community in Boulder, Colo., where my life in the West began nearly 50 years ago as a college student. We will be members one of America’s first cohousing villages designed by elders who are now building an intentional community of self-managed affordable and market-rate units in a city where there are successful policies geared to meet the housing needs of all income groups.

In many marriages facing uncertain challenges, at times ties are dissolved unwillingly. I will miss my haughty, imperial, and strangely vulnerable city bride called the city of St. Francis — in Spanish, San Francisco.

To you, the remaining citizens of San Francisco: I have had a wonderful relationship with my city bride, with many gifts from insightful people. It was a time of great love, affection, expectations met and unmet, with disappointments and frustrations and — of course — laughs and tears. I have had them all with you.

Henry Kroll

Henry Kroll moved to San Francisco in 1966.

RIP Cotton Hill, beloved TV curmudgeon and WWII vet

November 13, 2007

A meeting of the minds: Hank Hill, from left, Jimmy Carter, and Cotton Hill

By Erik Morse

On Sunday night, Nov. 11, FOX’s King of the Hill committed the ultimate cartoon sin when it saw the demise of cranky septuagenarian and war hero Cotton Lyndal Hill. A cruel gambit by the animators made all the worse as it was committed on Veteran’s Day, Cotton’s death illustrates a rare moment when an animated series has transgressed “Wile E. Coyote” immortality and confronted the loss of a central character. The following obit was released on the television show’s official Web site shortly before the episode’s debut:

“Cotton Hill, age unknown, World War II veteran, died Sunday in a Texas VA hospital. Hill suffered from several injuries ranging from four rusty bullets lodged in his heart from his military service, a broken hip and torn ligaments in his ankle-knees, to an infection in his esophagus and severe burns caused by a freak shrimp accident that occurred earlier this week at Tokyaki’s Japanese restaurant. Hill leaves behind sons Hank Hill and G.H. (short for “Good Hank”); daughter-in-law Peggy Hill; grandson Bobby Hill; ex-wife Tilly; second wife Didi; first love and former Japanese lover Michiko; an illegitimate Japanese son, Junichiro; and nephew Dusty Hill (of band ZZ Top).”

Texas redneck patrician, misogynist, gun lover, American hero, and war amputee, Cotton proved to be one of the most controversial and loveable television characters since the inimitable Archie Bunker. Representing the best and worst qualities of the “Greatest Generation” – its narrowmindedness, prejudices, simplicities as well as its patriotism, courage, and fraternity – Hill was a surrogate grandfather to many of us who had lost our own so many years ago. As a Texan and an obsessive viewer of the series from the beginning, I was startled by the news – Sundays have now lost a bit more of their juvenile innocence.

Goldie winner — Film: Samara Halperin

November 7, 2007

It’s hard to be in a bad mood when you’re watching the films of Samara Halperin. Take, for example, the minute-long Plastic Fantastic #1 (2006). Jaunty bleeps keep the beat as a pair of ketchup-and-mustard-bedecked hot dogs are shredded into meaty octopuses. Freed from their buns, they frolic across a checkered tablecloth and embrace atop layers of sauerkraut and relish.

All of Halperin’s works — especially the ones that use her trademark technique, stop-motion with plastic toys — convey the filmmaker’s ability to find gleeful joy in unexpected places, be it a construction site (as in 2006’s Hard Hat Required), the Wild West (1999’s Tumbleweed Town), or the homoerotic subtext of Beverly Hills, 90210 (2001’s Sorry, Brenda). Her films also reflect her love of bright colors and, especially, pop culture.

"I grew up a few blocks from where they would shoot Sesame Street," the New York City–born, now Oakland-based Halperin explains. "I’ve always had this disconnect where I didn’t really understand that television wasn’t real. I saw Snuffleupagus on the street! So from a very early age, I was deep into [pop culture]."

As a child, Halperin dreamed of becoming a cartoonist and later worked in ceramics. After she entered the Rhode Island School of Design, she realized filmmaking was her calling.

"I’ve always made shorts, and [in 1989] I started making films that I wanted to see that I didn’t see, like queer youth represented or really queer people represented at all," she says. "I got a lot of shit for [my queer subject matter] in the beginning. It just wasn’t fashionable yet."

Now, of course, there’s an entire TV network devoted to queer programming. Logo screened Tumbleweed Town — Halperin’s eight-minute graduate thesis project for California College of the Arts — when programming in response to the Brokeback Mountain renaissance. A marvel of mise-en-scène in miniature, with expressive plastic characters and a score by Corner Tour that perfectly complements the action (another characteristic of Halperin’s films: pitch-perfect musical choices), Tumbleweed Town had a genesis that was equal parts imagination and inspiration.

"I had never done animation before," Halperin recalls. "I’m not really an animation person, but I am a toy person. [The cowboy toy looked] so gay, I thought I’d find a boyfriend for him and build a world where they could be gay together. I’d just moved from Texas, where there were real, handlebar-mustachioed gay cowboys shining boots in the bars. I’m a New York Jew, and I’d never seen anything like this."

Tumbleweed Town is Halperin’s best-known work besides Sorry, Brenda, a black-and-white marvel of suggestive reediting that’s a must-see for anyone who was ever addicted to "BH Niner."

"I really loved the show," she says, inching up her pant leg to reveal a 90210 tattoo on her calf. "I always thought, ‘[Brandon and Dylan] are so gay’ — I just wanted to bring out their relationship and show people what I saw." The piece made its way into the hands of Conan O’Brien, who discussed it on the air with the Brandon Walsh.

"Jason Priestly loved it," Halperin says. "He stole the tape to show to Luke Perry, so that was the crowning glory for a fanatic such as myself."

When she’s not tuning in to new pop-culture craziness — like MTV’s "revolutionary" celebration of bisexuality, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila — Halperin teaches at Mills College and works on an array of new films: a sequel to Tumbleweed Town set in early 1980s New York City; a live-action, nonnarrative homage to her beloved Coney Island, Astroland; and a video project that pays tribute to Richard Simmons and "loving yourself, no matter what you are."

On that note, Halperin’s final thought is especially fitting: "I encourage people to make movies. It’s my personal view that the world can be changed through art."

www.steakhaus.com/samara

The earthquake: l989 and 2007. How my old Royal typewriter saved the day and helped get the Guardian out on time

November 1, 2007

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Yes, that is correct. I put my trusty old Royal typewriter to work in the deadline emergency of the l989 Loma Prieta quake and it helped get the paper out on time. The rescue confirmed my argument that my typewriter was much more reliable than a computer in an earthquake emergency when the power goes out. But first let me give you some quake context.

Somehow, when the quake hits, I am always on the couch and get the full force of the jolt. Tuesday night, I was sitting on our couch in our West Portal home watching the Democratic presidential debate when the 5.6 quake hit at 8:04 p.m., several hours after our deadline and after our paper was safely in bed at the printers. The quake rattled the room a bit but there was no damage and nothing stirred in the neighborhood. On Oct. l7, l989, I was sitting on a couch in our old Guardian building, at l9th and York Streets in the Mission District, when the quake hit on our final deadline late in the afternoon. We had one page left to finish, a hole on page 4 for the “In this issue” column by Executive Editor Tim Redmond. The truck driver was anxiously standing by to drive the pages, or flats as we called them, four hours up the freeways to our printer in the northern California city of Paradise.

The issue was a classic Guardian investigative story with then Mayor Art Agnos on the cover, holding a blank check from Bob Lurie of the Giants, and a head that read “Blank-Check Mayor.” The subhead read, “If you still think Art Agnos’s downtown stadium is a good deal for the city, you haven’t read the fine print. Jim Balderston exposes the hidden details of a deal that could rival the Candlestick Park Swindle.” Another front page head introduced “Bay Area Censored,” the first annual Bay Area Censored project and six big stories that “were too hot for the local media to handle.” Normal Guardian fare. Obviously, we wanted the issue to come out on time the next morning, even though it was too late for us to do any real quake coverage.

Our building was rattled but there was no damage, though it was a two story unreinforced red brick building.
But the phones went dead, the power went out, our computers were down, and we had to stop work. So the staff poured onto the street, a little scared but in good spirits, to reconnoiter and figure out what to do next.
That meant heading to the Jay ‘n’ Bee Bar, our local pub, down the street a block. Balderston, then our city hall and investigative reporter, caught the spirit of the moment: “We better get down to the bar and get our drinks before the ice melts.”

Joe the Bartender, as he was known, began rolling out the drinks for us with his usual panache (he shook splendid martinis with flourishes, no stirring). The television set was down, but a pub regular from a local machine shop brought in a generator and fired it up.

We watched the tv in growing shock. The news was grim and dramatic. The Marina was burning. The Oakland Bridge had collapsed with cars on it. The Giants/Oakland Athletics World Series game at Candlestick Park was hit and sportswriters suddenly became action reporters and put the story out play by play all over the world. Damage appeared to be extensive all over town and the area and fatalities and injuries were coming in.
We had our own problems. Among them, how to finish up the paper and get the flats in the truck and up to Paradise.

I offered my trusty Royal. Executive Editor Tim Redmond came back to the office and grabbed my typewriter and started batting away on the In This column. “There are times when modern technology just doesn’t make it,” he pecked out. “Like now.

“It’s about 6:45, and the sun is almost gone. I’m catching the last few rays of light through the front windows of the Guardian building, and Patricia (Filingame) is adding the glow of a flashlight to make sure I don’t make any typos.”

Tim typed on and ended up by writing that “By the time the shaking had stopped, there was no electricity at all–not to turn the typesetting machine, not to light up my windowless office…nothing to do but find the one functional office machine in the place, Bruce’s old Royal typewriter.

“We had a bit of trouble with the technological details (manual ribbon winding…) but it actually works. Remarkable.”

The page was pasted up, the flats were bundled into the truck, and the trucker headed out for the Golden Gate Bridge, which had held, and then up the freeway to Paradise and safety.

Balderston led a delegation back to the bar. Sfaffers who lived in the East Bay figured out whether to say in town or go home by way of the San Mateo Bridge, which had held. Julia Loftus, our classified director who lived in Silicon Valley and worried about a dangerous Bay Shore freeway, wingled and wangled her way slowly down the El Camino Real.

I drove Iris Maher, our circulation director, through intersections without lights and volunteer civiian traffic facilitators, to her apartment building on the slope of a Nob Hill illuminated against the sky by the blaze and smoke of Marina fires and God knows what else. People were streaming in and out of the Fairmont Hotel. So we decided to take a look. We spent the rest of the evening sitting on the floor of the lobby, chatting with hotel guests who were exchanging stories about what they were doing when and on what floor when the quake rocked the hotel. I bought a lot of drinks because the hotel wasn’t taking credit cards and the guests wouldn’t go back to their rooms to get cash. Some got a kick out of being part of earthquake history. Most of them were scared to death and trying to figure out how to get out of town fast.

The Chronicle, we heard, had no real backup generator and the word was that its staff was putting out the paper by flashlight. The driver made it to Paradise, the Guardian got printed, and the delivery trucks rolled into town the next morning on schedule over the Golden Gate Bridge. And we even had a few typewritten paragraphs of quake coverage.

And so, through the years between the quake of l989 and the quake of last Tuesday, 2007, I have kept my trusty Royal typewriter behind my desk, always at the ready for emergency duty. It still is. B3

Green City: Meeting the Climate Challenge

October 16, 2007

› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY It is easy to become discouraged by environmental problems, but a few San Franciscans are reminding us that we have collective power to make positive change. And we might even have a little fun along the way.

Paul Scott came up with the idea of the San Francisco Climate Challenge, a citywide contest to reduce household energy consumption. Scott is a lawyer and founding member of One Atmosphere — a nonprofit created by North Beach neighbors concerned with sustainability and conservation. "I think a lot of folks are concerned about climate change, but frustrated by the seeming inaction by the government to solve the problem," Scott told the Guardian. "The purpose of the San Francisco Climate Challenge is to give people something they can do right now."

A joint project by One Atmosphere, the Sierra Club, and SF Environment, the Climate Challenge officially starts Oct. 25 and registration ends the day before. Two top prizes of $5,000 (cash!) will be awarded for greatest overall energy savings and greatest percentage reduction in energy use. Winners will be determined by comparing last November’s Pacific Gas and Electric Co. bill with this November’s bill, so participants must pay their own utility bill and have lived in their current home — apartment, condo, or house — for at least a year.

Private residences account for about 20 percent of San Francisco’s carbon emissions, so the SF Climate Challenge is specifically focused on reducing household emissions. "Hopefully, this contest will increase people’s awareness of what they can do and the environmental damage done by normal activities," said Jonathan Weiner of One Atmosphere. "Simple changes can have significant impacts."

And what are some of these simple changes to make at home? Turn off lights when you leave a room, replace incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescents, wear a sweater instead of turning up the heat. And something that people often forget is that appliances use energy even when they’re turned off. So plug your television and stereo into a power strip and, when you’re done watching TV or listening to music, turn that power strip off.

"Eliminating unnecessary, wasteful use and being more efficient with the energy we do use is important," said Aaron Israel of the Sierra Club’s San Francisco chapter. "But you don’t have to eat in the dark or live like a monk. There are very easy things you can do if you’re just a little bit more aware."

Contest participants can sign up for the Climate Challenge as individuals or teams. So far, there teams have been created by neighborhoods, social groups, and sports teams. Even the Board of Supervisors has formed a team, with supervisors Michela Alioto-Pier, Aaron Peskin, and Sean Elsbernd already committed to participating. Word on the street is that even the Mayor’s Office may compile a team.

The Climate Challenge is also about building community. "This is an initiative to bring together a bunch of folks around how we, as residents in the city, can do things differently," said Mark Miller of One Atmosphere. "The more we see how we’re connected, the more we see how much we affect each other."

Making simple, painless changes at home is a great place to start taking responsibility for the health of our communities, city, and planet. Hopefully, the San Francisco Climate Challenge will inspire people to think about the environment in terms of the positive changes we can make instead of the overwhelming problems we feel helpless to fix.

"We need to paint a vision of our own lives that is better in the future than it is right now, so we are all motivated to take action," said Cal Broomhead of SF Environment. "How can we transform our neighborhoods so they’re more sustainable? We have collective power to make change."

To register for the San Francisco Climate Challenge, or to see a list of sponsors, prizes, and energy-saving tips, go to www.sfclimatechallenge.org. Or attend this upcoming event to learn more: ClimatePalooza, Fri/Oct. 19, 7 p.m., $12 or free with sign up for the SF Climate Challenge, at the Swedish American Hall, 2170 Market, SF. Live music by Ryan Auffenberg, Hyim, Valerie Orth, Sheldon Petersen, and Pixie Kitchen. Call (415) 861-5016 for more information. *

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Meat the Figurines

October 9, 2007

› duncan@sfbg.com

I have a meat map of the world in my head, so when I hear "Denmark," I think of ham. If I think a little harder, I’ll come to kringle, that delicious pastry that’s ubiquitous in Racine, Wis., which is the closest I’ve come to Denmark.

My baby-momma’s of Danish descent, so I also think of the time her cousins came to visit and were amazed by the size of American freeways and our unnatural attachment to firearms. This quaint yet magical mental landscape of cured swine and fatty pastry treats is peopled by friendly — that is to say, unarmed — round-faced folk in wooden shoes, riding horse-drawn buggies down narrow lanes. (The arboreal footwear, which is Dutch, not Danish, and the stray Amish buggy are figments of my somewhat limited imagination, but it’s my quaint vision, so fuck you.) This place has a subtle, subdued soundtrack: When the Deer Wore Blue (Morningside/Control Group, 2007), by Figurines.

The band’s been around since the mid-’90s, when three plucky and puckish teenage Danes by the names of Christian Hjelm, Andreas Toft, and Claus Salling Johansen grew tired of their apprenticeships at their fathers’ respective pig farms and started jamming out on guitars. Together. Three guitars. Which portended a future in a Danish black metal outfit–cum–Motörhead cover band called Thunderfoot–cum–Glenn Branca guitar chamber ensemble, which never came to pass, as Toft moved to bass and Johansen, his arms sinewy with muscle from pounding pig flesh in Papa’s processing plant, decided on drums. What followed was the self-released 2001 EP The Detour and a 2003 debut long-player, Shake a Mountain (Morningside), which was never officially unleashed on the gun-toting psychopaths stateside. Figurines added drummer Kristian Volden, and Johansen and his ham hands — sorry, can’t help it — moved back to guitar. Their burgeoning pop stardom brought them bushels of free ham and kringle and, inexplicably — except in the context of this ridiculous yarn — truckloads of hot chicks in wooden shoes. The boys bought the fastest horses on the lane and had them augmented with pinstripes, flame jobs, and bigger hooves in the back.

The year 2005 brought a daring daylight raid on the John Wayne–ophile Huns in the dark, dystopian land of America with the global release of Skeleton (Morningside/Control Group), which I discovered on my desk between 100 mph drive-by-shooting runs in my stroked-out Dodge Challenger hemi, done out in General Lee orange with a giant rebel flag painted on the roof, natch. As Hjelm sings on Skeleton‘s "Ambush," "Chase ’em down because you’re angry." The band drew comparisons, by other music writers with imaginations even more taxed than mine, to indie giants Built to Spill and Pavement. The Built to Spill thing makes sense, as Hjelm’s voice does have a nasal quality like Doug Martsch’s, but the Pavement allusion I can’t figure, except to say that when music writers get a really good pop record and want to blow smoke up a combo’s collective arse, they trot out left-field comparisons to Stephen Malkmus and company instead of inventing lands of ham and horses. I don’t know — maybe there was something there rhythmically.

For Deer, Figurines have replaced Toft on bass with Mads Kjaergaard, formerly a wood nymph, after the former left the band to open a drive-through guns and alcohol store on an American Indian reservation on Route 666 in Arizona. What can I say? After touring the States, he grew dangerously enamored of our culture. Perhaps more important than this — really, unless they’re Lemmy or Jaco Pastorius, there’s not a lot of change when you switch bassists — they added Jens Ramon on keyboards, which is perhaps the single biggest mood changer on the new disc. Deer has an eerie yet upbeat, cinematic feel to it. It could serve as an alternate to Air’s The Virgin Suicides soundtrack, if the movie had a different ending in which the sisters didn’t kill themselves but instead moved to Denmark to shack up with an indie band — and then killed themselves. "What if we had a chance?" Hjelm sings on "Childhood Verse." "I promise together we’ll die."

Hjelm goes on to channel Brian Wilson in "The Air We Breathe," which, with its backing harmonies, sounds like an outtake from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (Capitol, 1966). On "Good Old Friends," Neil Young comes to mind: "Not sure what to leave behind / But I know we’ll be all right," Hjelm sings, the phrasing and sentiment feeling like Young’s line in "Tell Me Why": "Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself / When you’re old enough to repay but young enough to sell?" From here the band moves on to "Drunkard’s Dream," which opens with a sort of indie-ized send-up of Stevie Wonder’s "Superstitious," though the metronomic snare hits contrast with the funky guitar lines, making the track more akin to art rock à la Television than Wonder funk. "Bee Dee" centers around an "up the stairs and down again" guitar riff and has a looser, Feelies vibe, while the keyboards in "Cheap Place to Spend the Night" move from rollicking Farfisa to tinkling celesta.

Overall, while conceptually satisfying, the cinematic feel of Deer is not quite the pure pop bliss of Skeleton. Maybe it’s a bit homogeneous, rife with ethereal keys and moody vocals. Maybe our Danish Fab Five have been influenced by the resurgence of folk. The back-cover photo is a cross between a Little House on the Prairie still and a Flying Burrito Brothers portrait, sans rhinestone suits: two Figurines are wearing suspenders, and they each have a questioning, somewhat obsequious look on their face, like they’re about to collectively ask, "Howdy, stranger, can we get you a sarsaparilla?" But the record is ambitious, signifying the band’s willingness to change its sound with each release and not just hammer on what’s worked in the past. From their humble beginnings in ham shanks and clog dancing, Figurines dream big — bigger than I do, certainly.

FIGURINES

Mon/15, 9 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Scavenging’s new spirit

October 9, 2007

› culture@sfbg.com

>>Click here to check out our Style 2007 Guide

It’s a warm September night, and I’m standing in a crowded art gallery in South San Francisco, staring at a metal octopus that moves its tentacles when you press a button. In many ways, it’s like every other reception I’ve been to: a table with snacks and wine, a healthy feeling of snobbery in the air, and a swath of hipsters blocking my view of everything. But as I walk around I notice some differences. The smell of decomposing flesh, the sound of heavy machinery, the walk-in "free shed," dozens of trash cans, and the mounds of refuse on the horizon all suggest that I’m standing in the middle of a landfill. Which, well, I am. It’s the site of the art exhibition "Waste Deep," by Nemo Gould, the San Francisco Dump’s artist in residence. And what’s most striking? I feel completely at home.

After spending most of September with junk collectors, vintage clothing nerds, and art diggers, I’m now completely accustomed to wallowing in trash and noticing freebies. For example, before driving to the SF Dump this evening I ate free baked goods at the X-rated Cake Gallery in SoMa, scrounged through leftovers at an estate sale in Bernal Heights, and knocked back pints of free Pabst at Broken Record in the Excelsior.

Yes, friends, I have become a bona fide freeloader. But like my newfound partners in grime I shun the connotations of the term. I choose instead to see myself as a sort of hip cultural revolutionary, one of the loose band of entrepreneurs and artists I’ve met over the past month who shamelessly revel in their personal gain because, at the end of the day, they know they’re "working" for a good cause. Not only are we getting a lot of cool free shit, but we’re also helping to transform the traditional hippy-dippy recycle-reuse-redistribute ethos into something more refreshing.

The freestyle movement is growing. Freeganism, a ragtag philosophy of cost-free living in a gift economy, has gained some national attention of late — especially in these economically challenging times — and the freegan ethos incubated in San Francisco, where groups like the Diggers gave away food during the ’60s. This city knows a thing or two about priceless give-and-take. And thanks to the freegan types I’ve been hanging out with, I now look at scavenging as an art form, a party, and a necessary lifestyle, one that has more to do with fashion, art, music, booze, and friendly competition than with fighting world hunger, globalization, or the war machine. Oh, most scavengers are concerned with all of that too, but creating awareness (about irresponsible consumption and the effects of wastefulness on the environment and humanity) is the fortunate by-product of the lifestyle, rather than its focus — which is, of course, copping free stuff.

THRIFTY EYE FOR THE HIP GUY

My journey from a life spent paying to consume to one consumed by the pursuit of freebies began two years ago, when I moved into a new building in the Mission. My neighbor was Aaron Schirmer — a reclusive artist who lives in a world of secondhand designer denim, seminew Macintosh computers, and used sound systems — whom I’d occasionally run into on my way to buy cigarettes and Jim Beam. Usually we’d smile and nod. But one day while he sat smoking on the stoop, he flagged me down. "Check out what I found today," he said.

At his side sat a large bag of American Apparel man panties and a crate of old-school electro cassettes. When I asked where they’d come from, he rambled on about free markets, dumpsters, and swap meets. Then he stopped abruptly, fished for the keys to his house, and said, "Here, I’ll show you."

I followed him into a hallway lined with half-finished paintings and strategically cracked mirrors, through a ’50s-style kitchen, and into his living room. In the corner, beneath a dangling gold and green Eames-style lamp, sat a 50-inch color television. His bedroom walls were lined with random bric-a-brac and outsider art, and his couch was a row of velvet-lined theater seats. Schirmer spread his arms and did his best Vanna White. "Here it is," he said. "I found all of this shit on the streets. People leave piles everywhere, and I just roam around all day and pick through them."

I quickly fell into a routine with Schirmer, a retired world-traveling DJ who now spends his days spinning rare records, tending his garden, and scavenging. I would come over to his house after work, crack a beer, and check out his finds, occasionally claiming certain items for myself. We’d then scroll through the Free section on Craigslist to devise a tentative map for the following day’s scavenge. I rarely had time to join him on his daily hunts, but I quickly learned that the free pot is virtually bottomless. And I was hooked.

These days I roam the neighborhood (corporate dumpsters are always a good bet) or scour the Internet anytime I need something. On my most recent search I found a stuffed bunny, a six-foot-tall stack of records, a pair of cowboy boots, and — I shit you not — Sharon Stone’s old couch. But I’m no expert. Anyone can search a Web site, but it takes a true connoisseur, someone like Kelly Malone, to build a business from scavenging.

FREE-MARKET ECONOMY

Malone, cofounder of the Mission Indie Mart, spent 10 years climbing the retail ladder at places like the Gap and Limited until she worked her way up to a glamorous life as a traveling designer. But then tragedy struck — in the form of ovarian cancer and its debilitating treatment process — and she had to quit. After spending the first few days of her indefinite vacation watching television, drinking too much at the Phone Booth, and watching old movies, she decided to revisit an old hobby: scavenging. "I just started over and kept positive," Malone said. "When I wasn’t sick from the chemo, I was trash-picking for cool stuff to sew and reconstruct." Malone began meticulously scouring estate sales, flea markets, and garage sales for that perfect owl clock or a one-of-a-kind sundress. She also got into interior and exterior design, grabbing spare paint and building materials off the streets, then enlisting her friends to help construct a backyard oasis.

Soon, though, Malone’s home had morphed into a retro junk museum. Her backyard was now dotted with old benches, barbecue grills, sculptures, and a sound system. Clothes were spilling out all over the place, and she had enough paint to cover a mansion. It was time to expand.

Malone began taking her stuff down to the flea market in South San Francisco. She set up a booth with music and goodies, offered free beer and hot dogs to friends, and spent whole weekends selling dolled-up vintage goods and making friends with others who did the same. It was there that she struck up a business relationship with Charles Hurbert, a public relations representative at a marketing firm who has a penchant for outsider art and found fashion. Soon Malone and Hurbert combined forces and decided to look beyond sanctioned venues. Malone’s backyard beckoned. The Mission Indie Mart was born.

The first mart went off without a hitch. Malone and Hurbert invited swap meet–interested friends to set up booths in Malone’s backyard. Cheapo flyers were designed, beer was purchased and resold at cost, and reimagined found apparel was offered for sale. It was a thrifty one-off that felt like an illegal rave, and people loved it. Mission District locals swarmed Malone’s backyard and nearly bought up her entire inventory. When she held it again the next month, the mart was even more successful and attracted more people — so many that her landlord threatened to evict her. So Malone sought sponsors and a new venue. The next Mission Indie Mart will be at 12 Galaxies and will feature a set by DJ Lovedust, extremely cheap Stella Artois, and an even bigger collection of vendors.

The mart’s success suggests that this model benefits its founders, who make some income from the event, and attendees, who get cheap goods, as much as it does San Francisco’s thriving community of independent designers, vintage-clothing dealers, and the recycling-scavenging movement in general. Malone and Hurbert are proving again that with a little effort and creativity, free shit can be turned into gold.

FRUGAL PHILANTHROPY

That’s also what Jason Lewis and Monica Hernandez, the founders of SwapSF, are doing at CELLspace — but for them the party and the product are more important than the money.

The couple started SwapSF a few years ago as a way to poach their friends’ unwanted apparel. "I had this friend who owned like a million pairs of limited-edition sneakers that he never wore," Lewis said. "The swap idea started as a way for me to get my hands on some of them." So Hernandez and Lewis, who have been throwing events since they met at a party five years ago, did what came naturally: they drew up a flyer, bought a bunch of cheap beer and pizza, and invited their friends to get down.

The idea has taken off, as I witnessed Sept. 22 when I threw a few shirts, a pair of pants, and some old hats in a bag and pedaled down to Bryant and 18th Street to volunteer at their recent event, the Most Hyperbolically Stupendous Clothing Swap Ever. It was to be a win-win situation: a little time in exchange for first dibs at free clothes. I arrived at CELLspace at 11 a.m. to find a DJ spinning downtempo hip-hop, a handful of kids sorting through bags, and Hernandez, who greeted me with a smile, a name badge, and a beer. I’d envisioned spending a leisurely afternoon sipping beer provided by Trumer Pilsner (the event sponsor) with about a hundred other scavengers, and the day seemed to be turning out that way.

But neither I nor the organizers were quite prepared for the four-hour clusterfuck that awaited us. Soon the volunteers were drowning in a mile-high volcano of pants, shirts, scarves, and underwear. By noon, the event’s official start time, a line wound around 19th Street. At 12:30 p.m. the place was packed. It was as if every hipster in the Mission had gotten wind of an opportunity for free music, beer, and dancing and had gathered up their unwanted clothes to join the party — a party that happened to result in free clothing for charity organizations like A Woman’s Place, the AIDS Emergency Fund, and San Francisco General Hospital.

FREE YOUR MIND

Since starting in Lewis and Hernandez’s apartment and then relocating, the SwapSF event has become so popular that it’s getting hard to handle. Even the duo have been surprised by its sudden and exponential growth. It seems that by using sarcastic graphic design on their flyers, guerrilla promotion techniques (word of mouth, stickers, blogs, etc.), and a refrigerator full of beer, Hernandez and Lewis have tapped into a new way to market charity events to a community of self-obsessed hipsters. Like Malone, the SwapSF duo see something wrong with the way our culture consumes and wastes, but they’re reluctant to jump on a soapbox — or even stand close to one.

Which may be why their parties have been garnering more attention and support than have the more traditional free markets that have been held across the nation for years. Malone and her contemporaries are creating awareness with no pretenses, no preaching, and no Hacky Sack–playing hippies. They are nurturing a world of gift exchange that speaks to a new generation of recyclers who enjoy the selfish thrills of scoring, a good party, and daytime drinking more than — or at least as much as — the satisfaction people find in collective self-sacrifice and charity.

Even San Francisco Dump artist Nemo Gould isn’t making his garbage art purely, or even mostly, as a political statement. "By virtue of it being made out of garbage, my art does make a statement about waste and overconsumption," Gould said. "But that’s not what it’s really about." Although Gould sees the danger in the complex environmental situations that create places like the SF Dump, his desire to work there had more to do with personal satisfaction than with changing the world. The dump’s Artist in Residence Program offers one of the most coveted positions in the city because it guarantees lifelong access to free garbage.

"There’s a scavenger spirit," Gould said. "Whoever has it is compelled to collect. Whatever comes after that is up to the scavenger."

The scavenger spirit is currently creating a subculture. Like skateboarders who view the city’s byways as a concrete playground, the new breed of scavengers looks at the urban environment from a different perspective. In their eyes the streets of San Francisco are aisles in a seven-mile-by-seven-mile warehouse of free shit. Their primary goal is to decorate their homes with one-of-a-kind furniture, dress their bodies in fly gear, and pad their pocketbooks, all while avoiding overdraft charges and, on the side, helping to generate awareness. In their separate and edgy styles, Gould, Malone, Hernandez, Lewis, and Schirmer have managed to turn this spirit into a lifestyle that doesn’t alienate people with its self-righteousness. I mean, everyone wants free shit, right? Who can’t relate to that?

THE (FREE) SHIT LIST

There’s a fine line between scavenging to make a statement and being a straight-up freeloader. Luckily, it’s up to the individual to decide exactly where that line is drawn. Here are some resources for learning more about the score.

FREEGAN.INFO

Information about strategies for sustainable living beyond capitalism; includes freegan hot spots in San Francisco.

freegan.info/?page=SanFrancisco

REALLY, REALLY FREE MARKET

A monthly alternate-economy festival and a really good place to get rid of your old stuff.

www.reallyreallyfree.org

MISSION INDIE MART

Kelly Malone and Charles Hurbert’s unique party take on the freegan ethos.

www.myspace.com/missionindiemart

SWAPSF

Jason Lewis and Monica Hernandez’s fabulous swap bonanza.

www.swapsf.com

MYOPENBAR.COM

A list of every open bar, happy hour, and extremely cheap alcohol event in the city.

sf.myopenbar.com

GOING.COM

A cross between MySpace and Yelp that focuses entirely on events, including a free section featuring happy hours, art openings, and concert ticket giveaways.

www.going.com

SAN FRANCISCO DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT

Official city site for recycling, disposal, and reuse information.

www.sfenvironment.org

SAN FRANCISCO DUMP

Learn about our city’s unique take on garbage and strategies for recycling.

www.sunsetscavenger.com

SCRAPEDEN SF

An art foundation dedicated to transforming trash into interactive public sculptures.

www.blackrockarts.org/projects/scrapeden-sf

ARTGOODHITLERBAD

Mission Indie Mart cofounder Hurbert blogs his best scavenger finds.

www.artgoodhitlerbad.com

NEMO GOULD

The latest artist in residence at the SF Dump has been making cool stuff from garbage for years.

www.nemomatic.com

Sputnik, 50 Years Later

October 4, 2007

[This is an excerpt from Norman Solomon’s new book “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.”]

A story could start almost anywhere. This one begins at a moment startled by a rocket.

In the autumn of 1957, America was not at war … or at peace. The threat of nuclear annihilation shadowed every day, flickering with visions of the apocalyptic. In classrooms, “duck and cover” drills were part of the curricula. Underneath any Norman Rockwell painting, the grim reaper had attained the power of an ultimate monster.

Dwight Eisenhower was most of the way through his fifth year in the White House. He liked to speak reassuring words of patriotic faith, with presidential statements like: “America is the greatest force that God has ever allowed to exist on His footstool.” Such pronouncements drew a sharp distinction between the United States and the Godless Communist foe.

But on October 4, 1957, the Kremlin announced the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first satellite. God was supposed to be on America’s side, yet the Soviet atheists had gotten to the heavens before us. Suddenly the eagle of liberty could not fly nearly so high.

Sputnik was instantly fascinating and alarming. The American press swooned at the scientific vistas and shuddered at the military implications. Under the headline “Red Moon Over the U.S.,” Time quickly explained that “a new era in history had begun, opening a bright new chapter in mankind’s conquest of the natural environment and a grim new chapter in the cold war.” The newsmagazine was glum about the space rivalry: “The U.S. had lost its lead because, in spreading its resources too thin, the nation had skimped too much on military research and development.”

The White House tried to project calm; Eisenhower said the satellite “does not raise my apprehension, not one iota.” But many on the political spectrum heard Sputnik’s radio pulse as an ominous taunt.

A heroine of the Republican right, Clare Boothe Luce, said the satellite’s beeping was an “outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our material superiority.” Newspaper readers learned that Stuart Symington, a Democratic senator who’d been the first secretary of the air force, “said the Russians will be able to launch mass attacks against the United States with intercontinental ballistic missiles within two or three years.”

A New York Times article matter-of-factly referred to “the mild panic that has seized most of the nation since Russia’s sputnik was launched two weeks ago.” In another story, looking forward, Times science reporter William L. Laurence called for bigger pots of gold at the end of scientific rainbows: “In a free society such as ours it is not possible ‘to channel human efforts’ without the individual’s consent and wholehearted willingness. To attract able and promising young men and women into the fields of science and engineering it is necessary first to offer them better inducements than are presently offered.”

At last, in early February 1958, an American satellite — the thirty-pound Explorer — went into orbit. What had succeeded in powering it into space was a military rocket, developed by a U.S. Army research team. The head of that team, the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, was boosting the red-white-and-blue after the fall of his ex-employer, the Third Reich. In March 1958 he publicly warned that the U.S. space program was a few years behind the Russians.

——————————

Soon after dusk, while turning a skate key or playing with a hula hoop, children might look up to see if they could spot the bright light of a satellite arching across the sky. But they could not see the fallout from nuclear bomb tests, underway for a dozen years by 1958. The conventional wisdom, reinforced by the press, downplayed fears while trusting the authorities; basic judgments about the latest weapons programs were to be left to the political leaders and their designated experts.

On the weekly prime-time Walt Disney television show, an animated fairy with a magic wand urged youngsters to drink three glasses of milk each day. But airborne strontium-90 from nuclear tests was falling on pastures all over, migrating to cows and then to the milk supply and, finally, to people’s bones. Radioactive isotopes from fallout were becoming inseparable from the human diet.

Young people — dubbed “baby boomers,” a phrase that both dramatized and trivialized them — were especially vulnerable to strontium-90 as their fast-growing bones absorbed the radioactive isotope along with calcium. The children who did as they were told by drinking plenty of milk ended up heightening the risks — not unlike their parents, who were essentially told to accept the bomb fallout without complaint.

Under the snappy rubric of “the nuclear age,” the white-coated and loyal American scientist stood as an icon, revered as surely as the scientists of the enemy were assumed to be pernicious. And yet the mutual fallout, infiltrating dairy farms and mothers’ breast milk and the bones of children, was a type of subversion that never preoccupied J. Edgar Hoover.

The more that work by expert scientists endangered us, the more we were informed that we needed those scientists to save us. Who better to protect Americans from the hazards of the nuclear industry and the terrifying potential of nuclear weapons than the best scientific minds serving the industry and developing the weapons?

In June 1957 — the same month Nobel Prize–winning chemist Linus Pauling published an article estimating that ten thousand cases of leukemia had already occurred due to U.S. and Soviet nuclear testing — President Eisenhower proclaimed that the American detonations would result in nuclear warheads with much less radioactivity. Ike said that “we have reduced fallout from bombs by nine-tenths,” and he pledged that the Nevada explosions would continue in order to “see how clean we can make them.” The president spoke just after meeting with Edward Teller and other high-powered physicists. Eisenhower assured the country that the scientists and the U.S. nuclear test operations were working on the public’s behalf. “They say: ‘Give us four or five more years to test each step of our development and we will produce an absolutely clean bomb.’”

But sheer atomic fantasy, however convenient, was wearing thin. Many scientists actually opposed the aboveground nuclear blasts. Relying on dissenters with a range of technical expertise, Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson had made an issue of fallout in the 1956 presidential campaign. During 1957 — a year when the U.S. government set off thirty-two nuclear bombs over southern Nevada and the Pacific — Pauling spearheaded a global petition drive against nuclear testing; by January 1958 more than eleven thousand scientists in fifty countries had signed.

Clearly, the views and activities of scientists ran the gamut. But Washington was pumping billions of tax dollars into massive vehicles for scientific research. These huge federal outlays were imposing military priorities on American scientists without any need for a blatant government decree.

——————————

What was being suppressed might suddenly pop up like some kind of jack-in-the-box. Righteous pressure against disruptive or “un-American” threats was internal and also global, with a foreign policy based on containment. Control of space, inner and outer, was pivotal. What could not be controlled was liable to be condemned.

The ’50s and early ’60s are now commonly derided as unbearably rigid, but much in the era was new and stylish at the time. Suburbs boomed along with babies. Modern household gadgets and snazzier cars appeared with great commercial fanfare while millions of families, with a leg up from the GI Bill, climbed into some part of the vaguely defined middle class. The fresh and exciting technology called television did much to turn suburbia into the stuff of white-bread legends — with scant use for the less-sightly difficulties of the near-poor and destitute living in ghettos or rural areas where the TV lights didn’t shine.

On the surface, most kids lived in a placid time, while small screens showed entertaining images of sanitized life. One among many archetypes came from Betty Crocker cake-mix commercials, which were all over the tube; the close-ups of the icing could seem remarkable, even in black and white. Little girls who had toy ovens with little cake-mix boxes could make miniature layer cakes.

Every weekday from 1955 to 1965 the humdrum pathos of women known as housewives could be seen on Queen for a Day. The climax of each episode came as one of the competitors, often sobbing, stood with a magnificent bouquet of roses suddenly in her arms, overcome with joy. Splendid gifts of brand-new refrigerators and other consumer products, maybe even mink stoles, would elevate bleak lives into a stratosphere that America truly had to offer. The show pitted women’s sufferings against each other; victory would be the just reward for the best, which was to say the worst, predicament. The final verdict came in the form of applause from the studio audience, measured by an on-screen meter that jumped with the decibels of apparent empathy and commiseration, one winner per program. Solutions were individual. Queen for a Day was a nationally televised ritual of charity, providing selective testimony to the goodness of society. Virtuous grief, if heartrending enough, could summon prizes, and the ecstatic weeping of a crowned recipient was vicarious pleasure for viewers across the country, who could see clearly America’s bounty and generosity.

That televised spectacle was not entirely fathomable to the baby-boom generation, which found more instructive role-modeling from such media fare as The Adventures of Spin and Marty and Annette Funicello and other aspects of the Mickey Mouse Club show — far more profoundly prescriptive than descriptive. By example and inference, we learned how kids were supposed to be, and our being more that way made the media images seem more natural and realistic. It was a spiral of self-mystification, with the authoritative versions of childhood green-lighted by network executives, producers, and sponsors. Likewise with the sitcoms, which drew kids into a Potemkin refuge from whatever home life they experienced on the near side of the TV screen.

Dad was apt to be emotionally aloof in real life, but on television the daddies were endearingly quirky, occasionally stern, essentially lovable, and even mildly loving. Despite the canned laugh tracks, for kids this could be very serious — a substitute world with obvious advantages over the starker one around them. The chances of their parents measuring up to the moms and dads on Ozzie and Harriet or Father Knows Best were remote. As were, often, the real parents. Or at least they seemed real. Sometimes.

Father Knows Best aired on network television for almost ten years. The first episodes gained little momentum in 1954, but within a couple of years the show was one of the nation’s leading prime-time psychodramas. It gave off warmth that simulated intimacy; for children at a huge demographic bulge, maybe no TV program was more influential as a family prototype.

But seventeen years after the shooting stopped, the actor who had played Bud, the only son on Father Knows Best, expressed remorse. “I’m ashamed I had any part of it,” Billy Gray said. “People felt warmly about the show and that show did everybody a disservice.” Gray had come to see the program as deceptive. “I felt that the show purported to be real life, and it wasn’t. I regret that it was ever presented as a model to live by.” And he added: “I think we were all well motivated but what we did was run a hoax. We weren’t trying to, but that is what it was. Just a hoax.”

—————————–

I went to the John Glenn parade in downtown Washington on February 26, 1962, a week after he’d become the first American to circle the globe in a space capsule. Glenn was a certified hero, and my school deemed the parade a valid excuse for an absence. To me, a fifth grader, that seemed like a good deal even when the weather turned out to be cold and rainy.

For the new and dazzling space age, America’s astronauts served as valiant explorers who added to the elan of the Camelot mythos around the presidential family. The Kennedys were sexy, exciting, modern aristocrats who relied on deft wordsmiths to produce throbbing eloquent speeches about freedom and democracy. The bearing was American regal, melding the appeal of refined nobility and touch football. The media image was damn-near storybook. Few Americans, and very few young people of the era, were aware of the actual roles of JFK’s vaunted new “special forces” dispatched to the Third World, where — below the media radar — they targeted labor-union organizers and other assorted foes of U.S.-backed oligarchies.

But a confrontation with the Soviet Union materialized that could not be ignored. Eight months after the Glenn parade, in tandem with Nikita Khrushchev, the president dragged the world to a nuclear precipice. In late October 1962, Kennedy went on national television and denounced “the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba,” asserting that “a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.” Speaking from the White House, the president said: “We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth — but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.”

Early in the next autumn, President Kennedy signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which sent nuclear detonations underground. The treaty was an important public health measure against radioactive fallout. Meanwhile, the banishment of mushroom clouds made superpower preparations for blowing up the world less visible. The new limits did nothing to interfere with further development of nuclear arsenals.

Kennedy liked to talk about vigor, and he epitomized it. Younger than Eisenhower by a full generation, witty, with a suave wife and two adorable kids, he was leading the way to open vistas. Store windows near Pennsylvania Avenue displayed souvenir plates and other Washington knickknacks that depicted the First Family — standard tourist paraphernalia, yet with a lot more pizzazz than what Dwight and Mamie had generated.

A few years after the Glenn parade, when I passed the same storefront windows along blocks just east of the White House, the JFK glamour had gone dusty, as if suspended in time, facing backward. I thought of a scene from Great Expectations. The Kennedy era already seemed like the room where Miss Havisham’s wedding cake had turned to ghastly cobwebs; in Dickens’ words, “as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together.”

The clocks all seemed to stop together on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. But after the assassination, the gist of the reputed best-and-brightest remained in top Cabinet positions. The distance from Dallas to the Gulf of Tonkin was scarcely eight months as the calendar flew. And soon America’s awesome scientific capabilities were trained on a country where guerrilla fighters walked on the soles of sandals cut from old rubber tires.

Growing up in a mass-marketed culture of hoax, the baby-boom generation came of age in a warfare state. From Vietnam to Iraq, that state was to wield its technological power with crazed dedication to massive violence.

_____________________________________________________

Norman Solomon’s book “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State” was published this week. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com

Postmortem

October 3, 2007

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Being named journalist of the year is a significant distinction. It’s just too bad that Chauncey Bailey isn’t around to receive the award.

The Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists named Bailey the winner of its top award Sept. 21, citing his "his fierce commitment to investigative journalism in the face of personal danger."

"At a time when journalists around the world are under threat for simply doing their jobs," the group said in a statement, "Bailey was a forceful presence in print and on radio and television in the Bay Area for the past 15 years. A tireless advocate for the African American community, he was assassinated while pursuing a story, and evidence presented thus far shows that he was assassinated because he was pursuing that story."

The longtime reporter and editor was shot to death Aug. 2 at the shady intersection of 14th and Alice streets in Oakland. That intersection, the site of Bailey’s Oakland Post office, sits in the center of the city’s power structure, with county court and government office buildings situated nearby.

An employee of Your Black Muslim Bakery — a group that has a history of both political influence at Oakland City Hall and severe money woes, which Bailey was investigating — is accused of shooting Bailey twice in the chest and once in the head with a black Mossberg shotgun as Bailey walked to work at the Post.

Devaughndre Broussard, the 19-year-old alleged shooter, was arrested during a raid at four locations, including the bakery’s main address, following the killing. Also arrested in the raids were three other people associated with the bakery and political movement; they were charged with kidnapping and torture following an earlier incident.

At the center of this story is the family of the late black Muslim leader Yusuf Bey Sr., who maintained a violent fiefdom now linked by law enforcement officials to an alleged assassination, vigilantism, child rape, and the abuse of a disadvantaged-business loan to the Bey family and its associates, as earlier media accounts and criminal charges revealed.

Police say they caught Broussard tossing a black shotgun out the window of a 59th Street address during one of the raids and that he admitted the gun belonged to him. Police have told the media that shells found at the intersection where Bailey was killed were linked to the gun.

But Broussard’s attorney has waged a public campaign to prove that Broussard wasn’t the assailant. The Oakland Tribune, where Bailey once worked as a reporter, has reportedly obtained police notes from interrogations that contained details of an unrecorded conversation between Broussard and Yusuf Bey IV, heir to the bakery chain and the black liberation movement that surrounded it.

Broussard’s attorney has insisted that Bey IV, during that brief exchange, coaxed Broussard into confessing to the murder. Broussard later did exactly that and reportedly claimed he pulled the trigger because Bailey was investigating the bakery’s deteriorating finances, which grew worse after Bey IV took over as CEO.

In mid-September, Alameda County reached a $188,000 settlement with three women who filed suit alleging that Bey Sr. assaulted them after local child welfare officials placed them in his custody. The three women first claimed in 2003 that Bey Sr. defecated on them and forced them to have sex with him and drink his urine and semen. But Bey Sr. died of cancer that year before he could face related criminal charges in court.

Bailey joins the growing roster of international journalists attacked or killed for reporting the news. On Sept. 27, Japanese photojournalist Kenji Nagai, who was working for the French news service Agence France-Presse, was shot to death by Burmese troops as they assaulted demonstrators in an increasingly bloody suppression of dissent still taking place in that country.

Reporters Without Borders notes that 75 journalists were killed worldwide in 2007, triple the number in 2002. Fifteen were killed in the Americas, according to the Inter American Press Association, which is preparing a resolution on Bailey’s death.

In early August two dozen Association of Alternative Newsweeklies newspapers published a story written by longtime Guardian Mexico City correspondent John Ross (and edited by the Guardian) outlining the events that led up to the shooting death of videojournalist Brad Will in Oaxaca, Mexico, during social and political unrest in the fall of 2006.

Gonzalo Marroquín, chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information and editor of the Guatemala City, Guatemala, newspaper Prensa Libre, stated in early August, "We urge the authorities to investigate the [Bailey] murder in depth and promptly, so that the case does not become just another on the list of unpunished crimes in the Americas."

Cecilia’s story

October 3, 2007

In an age of assembly-line careers and endless credentialing, it’s good to be reminded that life itself is a credential. Cecilia Chiang didn’t go to cooking school or restaurateur school; she didn’t even reach these shores until she was 40 years old and didn’t open her famous restaurant, The Mandarin, until she was 44, in 1964. These facts do not mean she was a slacker or late bloomer. They do hint at drama, and that drama unfolds in the pages of Chiang’s new book, The Seventh Daughter: My Culinary Journey from Beijing to San Francisco (Ten Speed, 256 pages, $35), a singular combination of personal and gastronomic history richly laced with recipes from a restaurant that forever changed the tenor of Chinese cooking in San Francisco.

Chiang was born in 1920, and the Japanese invaded China in 1931, which means that, from early girlhood well into adulthood, her life was lived in a world churning with conflict: soldiers of the occupying Japanese rifling roughly through the family house, long overland flights to tenuous safe havens, even a postwar sojourn in the enemy capital, Tokyo, where Chiang politely tried sushi for the first time and found she liked it.

Chiang’s story is a gripping one. War is not, after all, a television show or a sequence of reports in the gray pages of newspapers; it’s a reality quite beyond the imaginings of everyday folk living everyday lives, at least until it engulfs those lives, which never happens here, or at least it hasn’t yet. But did Chiang’s youthful experiences — of fear, loss, flight, renewal — make her a better restaurateur?

The book sheds only indirect light on this question, but we can make some guesses. Like many immigrants, she saw the possibilities this country offered, and she was old enough, and had access to enough resources, to seize her chance when she saw it. And she took little for granted; she worked such long hours, in fact, that for her 50th birthday, her children bought her a bicycle, a red Schwinn, because, as her daughter explained, "you’ve been working so hard lately and we thought you needed a little exercise, a little something fun to do outside the restaurant."

I wish Chiang had not given her recipe for shark fin soup, an unconscionable dish. In this land of plenty, the occasional sacrifice is in order.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Shorts

September 25, 2007

SONG FOR NIGHT

By Chris Abani

Akashic Books

164 pages

$12.95

In the secret sign language of Song for Night‘s mine diffusers — the child vanguard of an unnamed war somewhere in West Africa — silence is a steady hand, palm flat. Narrated in such a silence — of signed phrases and internal monologue — by a mute boy soldier named My Luck, Chris Abani’s new novella is both deceptively understated and harrowing. My Luck has been stripped by violence of his freedom, his family, and his very voice, and as he travels in search of his missing platoon, he is propelled across a once familiar terrain become an endless battlefield populated with shadows.

Winding throughout My Luck’s journey, a slow-moving river binds together wistful dreaming and uncomfortable reality. Contaminated by death, the river nonetheless remains a comforting constant — too familiar to mistrust entirely, too treacherous to ignore. A conduit to memories of a gentler past, as well as a gruesome reminder of the consequences of war, the river slowly takes on the metaphorical weight of the Styx, which the dead must cross to be admitted into the underworld.

No stranger to entrenched horrors within the West African political landscape, Abani was imprisoned several times in his native Nigeria, earning a death sentence for treason for one of his plays at the age of 21. Released in the face of international pressure, he has lived in exile ever since, first in the UK and now in California, where he wrote his previous novella, 2006’s Becoming Abigail (Akashic). Beyond questions of format, there are numerous echoes here from Abigail, in which another river flows and carries memories with it, and children with no guardians are drawn out of childhood into nightmare. Neither Abani’s nor Abigail’s story, however, is My Luck’s, and their sorrows are not the same. My Luck perhaps best sums up his own when dryly listing the pros and cons of child soldiering at the front of the line. Among the former: prime pillaging opportunities and choice of weapons. And the latter? Death, death, and death. (Nicole Gluckstern)

READINGS

With Joe Meno and Felicia Luna Lemus

Oct. 4, 7 p.m., free

City Lights Bookstore

261 Columbus, SF

(415) 362-8193, www.citylights.com

Oct. 5, 7 p.m., free

Black Oak Books

1491 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 486-0698, www.blackoakbooks.com

STEPS THROUGH THE MIST

By Zoran Zivkovic

Translated by Alice Copple-Tosic

Aio

136 pages

$23.95

With its humanist rewriting of superpowers and its emphasis on the malleability of time and fate, Steps Through the Mist may inevitably call to mind a certain heroics-themed blockbuster television program. Unfolding in crisp scenes that emerge from a foggy landscape, the five stories in Serbian fantasy-oriented author Zoran Zivkovic’s "mosaic novel" depict people whose fates are being decided before their eyes, their tales linked by an initially obscuring but ultimately redemptive mist that is brought to an almost visceral life in Alice Copple-Tosic’s attentive translation from the Serbian.

Although dreamlike, the mist seems charged with a purpose: to bring each female protagonist — a controlling teacher, a dreamer in a straitjacket, a neurotic woman on vacation, a struggling fortune-teller, and an elderly woman in love with the ticking sound of her alarm clock — face-to-face with her own strong views of fate and chance. Each woman encounters another individual — in four of the tales, a man — who triggers her insecurity about the future and taps into her obsession with how things ought to be.

Unlike the heroines of Heroes, who continually struggle with reutf8g to the wider world as it is, the often bewildered women in Zivkovic’s harsh imaginings — whether gifted with the ability to visit the dreams of others, beset with ghostly visitations from the past, or cursed with the horrifying task of choosing one of all possible futures (none, alas, very appealing) — are engaged in a struggle with imagined, internal landscapes that have little to do with the reality of others.

"Would you consent to be the one to choose who should be sacrificed on the altar of the happy majority?" asks Katarina in "Hole in the Wall." Faced with the alternatives of her own death and choosing the future every time she closes her eyes, she is really questioning which is better: to withdraw from the world or to act in it, despite the possibility of less than ideal outcomes. This question echoes throughout the book, answered finally in the last and most beautiful story, where the older woman with the cherished alarm clock sees her past reenacted and is thereby cleansed of overwhelming memories. "Who knew what dreams might visit her?" Zivkovic writes, when "[no] urgent work awaited her anymore." (Ari Messer)

Cold case

September 25, 2007

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

The gruesome death of a French national living in San Francisco is becoming a political hornet’s nest for local top law enforcement officials and the Mayor’s Office.

It’s still not clear how local homicide cops will define 36-year-old Hugues de la Plaza’s death after months of allowing for and even favoring the possibility that he took his own life. Suicide would have made things much less difficult for everyone in San Francisco responsible for catching those who kill, but few people close to de la Plaza believe that he killed himself.

But the French ambassador to the United States, Pierre Vimont, a confidant of newly elected president Nicolas Sarkozy, is following the case closely, and a police officer at the French consulate in Los Angeles is transutf8g hundreds of e-mails from de la Plaza’s Google and Yahoo accounts as well as mining material from the hard drive of his computer after breaking into it last week, a task homicide inspectors here apparently hadn’t yet bothered with.

"I have notified others regarding the implications contained in your letter and the wishes that you expressed to ensure an in-depth and serious inquest into the death of your son," Vimont wrote to de la Plaza’s parents, Mireille and François, earlier this year, according to our rough translation.

The status of the case right now is hardly reassuring for the de la Plazas, who forked out their own cash for a private investigator.

Recent photos of de la Plaza show him with unshorn black hair spilling out from an army cap and wide dark eyes under a pair of bushy brows.

His ex-girlfriend, Mellisa Nix, with whom he remained close, will testify soon in front of the Board of Supervisors’ Public Safety Committee on how well the SFPD is investigating violent crimes in the city as the homicide rate marches swiftly toward a 15-year high.

More than half of the annual homicide cases in San Francisco since 2001 have resulted in no arrests, according to the Police Department’s statistics, and that includes those in which the feds became involved.

Nix has doggedly pursued de la Plaza’s case, starting a blog with photos and updates, frequently calling area newsrooms to urge follow-up stories — she’s a reporter for the Sacramento Bee — and pestering the SFPD’s homicide unit to the point that it now refuses to answer her questions. Messages we left with the SFPD’s Bureau of Investigations seeking comment were not returned.

"From the get-go I had a sense that this investigation was being conducted in a fashion that doesn’t shed a very good light on the SFPD," Nix told the Guardian. "I was the one who had to call the parents and tell them their son was dead."

Two police officers kicked open the back door of 462 Linden on the morning of June 2 after a neighbor discovered blood dripping off de la Plaza’s front doorknob, with spattered pools of it leading from the threshold. They found de la Plaza lying on the floor, stabbed multiple times amid a grizzly scene of more blood that spread from the bathroom up the hallway to the kitchen and into the living room, where it soaked the coach and a television was knocked over.

De la Plaza had recently purchased land in Argentina, earned a promotion at work, acquired a new laptop, and made plans for the upcoming week — all things friends say a man considering suicide wouldn’t have done. But Nix said he had been frequently dating online, and it’s possible that an estranged lover or someone’s boyfriend attacked him.

The night of June 1 he’d met with a friend from work at SF Underground in the Lower Haight after going on a date to an art gallery with another transplant from France.

Nothing significant appeared to be stolen from his apartment after he made it home after last call, and both the front and back doors were locked when the two officers arrived. Immediately, police and officials from the Medical Examiner’s Office suspected a suicide. But Nix and others close to de la Plaza believe that persistent assumption has allowed the case’s trail to grow cold despite evidence suggesting he was murdered.

"It’s fucked-up in retrospect," said Orion Denley, a friend and neighbor who was briefly questioned by police the day de la Plaza was found. "I kept thinking, ‘How come they aren’t asking me if I heard anything?’ All they did was ask over and over again if he was suicidal, like they had already made up their minds that he had committed suicide."

No one from the Police Department contacted him again, but Denley said he heard de la Plaza’s front door slam three times, followed by two crashes and the sound of a distinct set of footsteps on the stairs leading from the apartment.

"It was definitely someone exiting the building," he said, "because you could hear the footsteps getting quieter as they ran away."

There was no suicide note or apparent weapon, nor was there an immediate suspect. Police found a knife in the sink with trace substances that could have been de la Plaza’s blood. They’ve since missed at least two promised deadlines for the completion of a DNA analysis, and now there’s no telling when the results will be available. It’s the only real piece of evidence left allowing investigators to regard de la Plaza’s death merely as suspicious rather than a murder.

"It’s something that I don’t think Hugues would have ever considered doing," Nix said of the suicide theory. "He had his ups and downs. He was a very private person. But if he were going to kill himself, he would probably write a letter. He was very precise and particular about how he conducted his life."

But there’s no doubt the pressure’s on. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has vocalized his disapproval of the way skyrocketing homicides in his district — which includes the Hayes Valley neighborhood, where de la Plaza lived — are being handled by the Police Department, and District Attorney Kamala Harris has paid special attention to the case. Her chief assistant met twice with de la Plaza’s family, who visited for several weeks earlier in the summer.

The family also met with Inspector Tony Casillas and bureau captain Kevin Cashman but returned to France largely empty-handed. They’ve since discussed using insurance money they received after de la Plaza’s death to establish a support group in San Francisco for the families of victims whose murders go unsolved.

"Is that what it takes in San Francisco? Hire a private investigator and involve a foreign police force?" Nix wrote to Mayor Gavin Newsom in July. "If so, shame on the leaders of San Francisco. If so, God help those in your city who do not have such resources."

Grr. Argh. Addict.

September 25, 2007

It’s official. I have a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” problem.

Sure, I’ve been obsessed with the Joss Whedon television show for years. I’ve been watching it every single night before I go to sleep (bedtime stories?) since I moved to San Francisco in February. I even once admitted during an Eating Disorder recovery meeting that I thought I was replacing my addiction to dieting with an addiction to watching the slayer kick demon ass.

But last weekend I took my Buffylove to a new level. I paid a ridiculous amount of money for two tickets to the live action, Rocky Horror-style screening and singalong of “Once More With Feeling,” the musical-themed (and pretty much everyone’s favorite) episode from Season 6. Not that the tickets themselves were expensive – oh no. At face value, they were $12 each. Perfectly reasonable. Me? I paid $90. Per ticket. Without flinching. Of course, I was too embarrassed to admit it to my partner in crime, Camille, so I paid for her ticket too. Which means I spent $180 to see a movie.

Feast: 7 homey hearths

September 6, 2007

Amber is my living room, and not just because I really like Pabst Blue Ribbon and smoking inside. It’s also because I live in a city where rents are high and living space is scarce, where community rooms are shared with multiple people (if there are community rooms at all), and backyards tend only to be big enough for the recycling bin. In suburban places, people share community and comfort around backyard barbecue pits and luxurious living-room couches. They have dinner parties and cocktail hours and invite friends over for tea. But here, we go to bars and restaurants and taverns and coffee shops. These are the places where we meet our neighbors, celebrate special occasions, while away idle hours, have intense conversations. And so, in many ways, these places — particularly those in our neighborhoods — become extensions of our homes and hearths. As the cold weather approaches (global warming willing), I’ve been thinking more about the literal interpretation of hearth; Amber serves me for late-night writing sessions and drunken postdate tell-alls, but where will I go when I want to curl up with a hot chocolate — or a hot toddy — and a long Russian novel? When I want to play Trivial Pursuit late into the cold night with a small group of good friends? When the weather outside is frightful and my date is so delightful? Where, by god, are the fireplaces? In this city of Edwardian apartments retrofitted with gas heaters (and roomies who have to get up early), here is a list of places with flickering flames and belly-warming booze.

BITTER END

I don’t think the Irish invented the fireplace, but they may have the patent on its best use. Wood paneling? A flaming heat source? Thick beer and hot soup? All Irish pubs seem to have ’em — and this Irish-style Richmond locale is no different. Stumbling into the Bitter End feels a bit like wandering into an O’Malley’s or a McSweeney’s in any country in the world — and with items like shepherd’s pie, Gaelic chicken with whiskey, and beer-battered appetizers on the menu, it’s almost like wandering into one in Ireland itself.

441 Clement, SF. (415) 221-9538

MCKENZIE’S

Sometimes you want cozy and kooky all in the same shot — and those are the times you end up at McKenzie’s. This small local favorite is half neighborhood bar in a mountain town (downstairs) and half cheap hostel (upstairs). Either way, it’s charming: small tables cluster around a fireplace over which a flat-screen television broadcasts sports, a jukebox blasts cheesy-but-lovable ’80s hits, and a live-feed video camera in the upstairs lounge, its images visible to every patron downstairs, lends itself to endless prank possibilities.

5320 Geary, SF. (415) 379-6814

ZEKI’S

Wanting no frills in Nob Hill? Try Zeki’s, which boasts two fireplaces — one by the pool table and one directly across from the leather-lined bar. With paraphernalia from old movies lining the walls and a good selection of European beers on tap, you’ll quickly see why this is a favorite spot for both old-school regulars and just-stumbled-in newbies.

1319 California, SF. (415) 928-0677, www.zekisbar.com

JOHN BARLEYCORN

If ever there were a place that personified hearth, it would be John Barleycorn, the little mountain lodge in the city that’s in danger of disappearing by November. This is the place to order strong whiskey from a salty but jovial bartender, to sip it while sitting on church pews in front of roaring flames, to break out a game of rummy or Scrabble (housed in a cozy room behind the chimney) long after you’d already planned to go home.

1415 Larkin, SF. (415) 771-1620

FIRESIDE

A cross between a dive bar and a swanky hipster joint, this Sunset watering hole embodies the schizophrenia of its up-and-coming neighborhood. Which seems to be fine with the down-to-earth drinkers who perch on leather couches around the neon-lit fireplace that anchors the room’s otherwise understated decor.

603 Irving, SF. (415) 731-6433

WILD SIDE WEST

A favorite of lesbians citywide and heteros in the know, this Bernal Heights beauty is most famous for its gorgeous garden patio. But a woodstove, a great jukebox, and strong, well-made drinks also make it perfect for those cold, foggy nights when all you want is a soft scarf, a smooth Scotch, and someone — boy, boi, or girl — to spoon with.

424 Cortland, SF. (415) 647-3099

HIDDEN VINE

OK. Including Hidden Vine may be cheating, as this secret hideaway doesn’t have a fireplace per se. But it’s sure got the atmosphere. Though this is a high-end drinkery, featuring a different wine region every month and offering an impressive selection of artisanal cheeses, the Vine is more comfy than chichi. And a display of white votive candles gives the impression — if not the heat — of a fireplace’s warmth.

620 Post, SF. (415) 674-3567, www.thehiddenvine.com*

Fall Arts: I screen, you screen

August 21, 2007

› johnny@sfbg.com

"Switching Schools Sucks" Jesse Hawthorne Ficks serves up a triple dose of teen alienation: Pump Up the Volume, Footloose, and the Andrew Stevens–starring, Heathers-influenced Massacre at Central High.

Aug. 31. Castro Theatre (info below)

"Rebels with a Cause: The Cinema of East Germany" Perhaps the most expansive retrospective of East German film in the United States, spanning from the early 1960s to 1990.

Sept. 1–Oct. 27. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

"Look Back at England: The British New Wave" Does kitchen-sink cinema deserve classic status? It would be great to witness Manny Farber (who wrote scathingly about Rita Tushingham and Tony Richardson) duke it out with Morrissey on the subject.

Sept. 2–Oct. 26. Pacific Film Archive (info below)

"Devotional Cinema: Films by Dorsky and Ozu" Nathaniel Dorsky shows two of his films and also talks about Late Spring, one of the Yasujiro Ozu films discussed in his insightful book that shares this program’s title.

Sept. 4. Pacific Film Archive

"Send Granny Back to Russia" The 1929 film My Grandmother is screened with Beth Custer’s score to raise funds for an upcoming trip on which Custer’s ensemble will perform the score in Russia and elsewhere.

Sept. 4. Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut, Berk. Also Sept. 5. Dolby Laboratories, 100 Potrero, SF. www.bethcuster.com

William Friedkin Series Someone I know who knows all the great actresses calls Ashley Judd’s performance in Bug a "tour de force." That film and others set the stage for more Friedkin freak-outs.

Sept. 4–6. Castro Theatre

"Helmut Käutner: Film Retrospective Part 2" The series continues with the post–World War II period of Käutner’s career, including a 1947 feature shot in Germany’s ruins and a 1954 film featuring a young Klaus Kinski (yes, he was young once).

Sept. 4–Oct. 9. Goethe-Institut, 530 Bush, SF. (415) 263-8760, www.goethe-sf.org

"Fearless Females: Three Films by Shyam Benegal" The director appears at screenings that highlight the feminist currents of his contributions to the Indian new wave of the ’70s.

Sept. 5–7. Pacific Film Archive

Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana Lars Laumann’s 16-minute video screens in a loop as part of the "There Is Always a Machine Between Us" exhibition.

Sept. 6–22. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org

The Darwin Awards A new comedy by Finn Taylor focuses on death by stupidity.

Sept. 7. Roxie Film Center (info below)

"TILT" The Film Arts Foundation presents an evening of films from its media-education program, which works with schools.

Sept. 7. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (info below)

Cruising The digital restoration of William Friedkin’s most controversial film finally hits the Castro Theatre, years after being revived from infamy at the Roxie Film Center.

Sept. 7–13. Castro Theatre

Imp of Satan Local queer horror midnight movie screens along with a live comedy drag show.

Sept. 8. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.synchromiumfims.com

"Tomu Uchida: Japanese Genre Master" An extensive series devoted to the undersung Japanese director, whose movies spanned five decades and even more genres, including comedies, samurai films, theatrical adaptations, and police flicks.

Sept. 8–29. Pacific Film Archive

9/11 Truth Film Festival Two days of films and discussions.

Sept. 10–11. Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand, Oakl. (510) 452-3556, www.renaissancerialto.com

Madcat Women’s International Film Festival Turning 11 this year, Ariella Ben-Dov’s festival includes a tribute to the life and work of Helen Hill and culls 98 films — 76 of them premieres — into 11 programs.

Sept. 11–26. Various venues, SF. (415) 436-9523, www.madcatfilmfestival.org

Super Sleazy ’70s Go-go Grindhouse Show Will "the Thrill" Viharo brings together Pam Grier in Black Mama, White Mama and live dancing by the Twilight Vixen Revue.

Sept. 13. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

Honor of the Knights Along with recent works by José Luis Guerín, this idiosyncratic take on Don Quixote by Albert Serra is being heralded as a new highlight of Spanish cinema.

Sept. 13–16. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Role Reversal" Midnites for Maniacs strikes again, with The Incredible Shrinking Woman, Yentl, and a film that can never be screened enough, The Legend of Billie Jean.

Sept. 14. Castro Theatre

The Warriors Walter Hill’s gang classic comes out to play.

Sept. 14–15. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.redvicmoviehouse.com

Film Night in the Park: Rebel Without a Cause Sal Mineo makes eyes at James Dean, and Natalie Wood weeps about her dad rubbing off her lips.

Sept. 15. Union Square, SF. (415) 453-4333, www.filmnight.org

Xperimental Eros PornOrchestra accompanies stag movies in a celebration for OCD’s latest DVD release.

Sept. 15. Other Cinema (info below)

Eros and Massacre Film on Film Foundation presents Yoshishige Yoshida’s 1970 film about anarchist Sakae Osugi.

Sept. 16. Pacific Film Archive

"It’s a Funny, Mad, Sad World: The Movies of George Kuchar" The man appears in person for a screening of five Kuchar classics spanning 15 years, selected by Edith Kramer.

Sept. 18. Pacific Film Archive

Orphans of Delirium What is paratheatre? Antero Alli and a 2004 video provide the answer.

Sept. 18. Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-3890, www.atasite.org

Midnites for Maniacs in 70mm All hail Jesse Hawthorne Ficks for bringing Tobe Hooper’s bodacious nude space vampire classic Lifeforce — one of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s favorite movies — back to the big screen. Even Planet of Blood‘s Florence Marly may have nothing on Mathilda May.

Sept. 21. Castro Theatre

Strange Culture The story of Steve Kurtz is discussed and reenacted in San Francisco filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson’s latest feature.

Sept. 21. Roxie Film Center

"Girls Will Be Boys" This series, curated by Kathy Geritz, includes Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich trouser classics, as well as Katherine Hepburn under the eye of Dorothy Arzner in Sylvia Scarlett.

Sept. 21–30. Pacific Film Archive

Amando a Maradona Soccer icon Diego Maradona gets the feature treatment.

Sept. 26. La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk. (510)849-2568. www.utf8ofilmfestival.org

In Search of Mozart Phil Grabsky’s digiportrait of the composer works to counter the distortions of Amadeus and the elitism that sometimes hovers around Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s legacy.

Sept. 28–30. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Legendary Composer: Jerry Goldsmith" The salt and pepper to John Williams’s Hollywood sucrose gets a cinematic tribute, with screenings of classics such as Seconds, Poltergeist, and the film with perhaps his best scoring work, Chinatown.

Sept. 28–Oct. 4. Castro Theatre

DocFest It turns five this year, offering more than 20 films and videos, including the Nick Drake profile A Skin Too Few.

Sept. 28–Oct. 10. Roxie Film Center

Film Night in the Fog The increasingly popular Creature from the Black Lagoon makes an appearance, this time at the Presidio.

Sept. 29. Main Post Theatre, 99 Moraga, SF. (415) 561-5500, www.sffs.org

"Red State Cinema" Joel Shepard curates a series devoted to rural visionaries, including Phil Chambliss and his folk-art videos set at a gravel pit and Spencer Williams and his 1941 Southern Baptist feature The Blood of Jesus.

October. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Olivier Assayas in Residence: Cahiers du Cinema Week" The Pacific Film Archive has screened early Assayas movies that didn’t get distribution, such as the Virginie Ledoyen showcase Cold Water. Now the director visits to show Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (think of Assayas’s Irma Vep, also screening) and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (think of his Demonlover), along with Assayas’s latest movie, Boarding Gate.

Oct. 4–11, Pacific Film Archive

Mill Valley Film Festival The biggest Bay Area film fest of the fall turns 30 this year, presenting more than 200 movies from more than 50 countries.

Oct. 4–14. Various venues. (415) 383-5256, www.mvff.org

Helvetica The typeface gets its very own movie.

Oct. 5–7. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Shock It to Me: Classic Horror Film Festival" Joe Dante will appear at this fest, which promises a dozen pre-Halloween shockers.

Oct. 5–7, Castro Theatre

"Zombie-rama" Thrillville unleashes Creature with the Atom Brain and Zombies of Mora Tau.

Oct. 11. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400. www.thrillville.net

"Joseph Cornell: Films" Without a doubt, this multiprogram series — in conjunction with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Cornell exhibition — is one of the most important Bay Area film events of the year.

Oct. 12–Dec. 14. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Wattis Theater, 151 Third St, SF. (415) 357-4000. www.sfmoma.org

"Expanded Cinema" Craig Baldwin, Kerry Laitala, Katherin McInnis, Stephen Parr, and Melinda Stone blast retinas with double-projector performance pieces.

Oct. 13. Other Cinema

"Celebrating Canyon: New Films" Under the SF Cimematheque rubric, Canyon Cinema’s Michelle Silva and Dominic Angerame put together a program of recent additions to the Canyon catalogue.

Oct. 14. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Films by Bruce Conner" The long-awaited new Soul Stirrers short His Eye Is on the Sparrow kicks off an hour of Conner magic.

Oct. 16. Pacific Film Archive

Arab Film Festival The festival’s 11th year will bring 11 days and nights of movies, including a Tunisian doc about the making of Tarzan of the Arabs.

Oct. 18–28. Various venues, SF. (415) 564-1100, www.aff.org

"I Am Not a War Photographer" Brooklyn-based Lynn Sachs presents a night of short movies and spoken word.

Oct. 20. Other Cinema

"Experiments in High Definition" Voom HD works, including one by Jennifer Reeves, get an SF Cinematheque program.

Oct. 21. SF Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org

"Walls of Sound: Projector Performances by Bruce McClure" Brooklyn artist McClure explores projection as performance in this kickoff event in SF Cinematheque’s "Live Cinema" series.

Oct. 24–25. Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org

Smalltown Boys Arthur Russell documentarian Matt Wolf’s semifictive historical look at David Wojnarowicz loops as part of the "There Is Always a Machine Between Us" series.

Oct. 30–Nov. 17. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org

The Last Man on Earth Vincent Price fights zombies in this oft-pillaged 1964 US-Italian horror classic, soon to be re-created with Will Smith.

Oct. 31. Pacific Film Archive

"Día de los Muertos: Honorar las Almas de Cineastas de Avant-Garde Vanguarda" Canyon Cinema and SF Cinematheque founder Bruce Baillie shares some favorites from the Canyon vaults.

Nov. 1. Roxie Film Center. Also Nov. 2. Ninth Street Independent Film Center, 145 Ninth St., SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org

International Latino Film Festival One of three fests to turn 11 this fall.

Nov. 2–18. Various venues, SF. (415) 513-5308, www.utf8ofilmfestival.org.

"Science Is Fiction" Nope, not Jean Painléve — the histories of the Tesla coil, the blimp, and other phenomena hit the screen, thanks to cinematographer Lance Acord and others.

Nov. 3. Other Cinema

Shatfest Get your mind out of the toilet — it’s another Thrillville tribute to William Shatner, including a screening of Incubus.

Nov. 8. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

Strain Andromeda The and Cinepolis, the Film Capitol Anne McGuire’s reedit of The Andromeda Strain isn’t exactly backward, but — thanks to Ed Halter’s "Crazy Rays: Science Fiction and the Avant-Garde" series for SF Cinematheque — it is back. The series continues to beam as Ximena Cuevas’s metamontage attack on Hollywood shares a bill with Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99.

Nov. 8. Roxie Film Center

San Francisco International Animation Showcase A big premiere, some music vids, and a link to the famed Annecy animation fest are possibilities as the SF Film Society event turns two.

Nov. 8–11. Embarcadero Center Cinema, One Embarcadero Center (promenade), SF. (415) 561-5500. www.sffs.org

"Celebrating Canyon: Pioneers of Bay Area Filmmaking" Bruce Baillie unpacks some Bay Area experimental cinema treasures from the ’40s and ’50s.

Nov. 11. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

My Favorite Things At last! Negativland premiere their first CD-DVD release.

Dec. 1. Other Cinema

"James Fotopoulos/Leah Gilliam" and "Victor Faccinto/James June Schneider" Fotopoulos has had some Bay Area attention before, but Gilliam’s Apeshit — a look at racial politics in Planet of the Apes — might be the highlight in this last evening of Ed Halter’s "Crazy Rays" series.

Dec. 13. Roxie Film Center *

CASTRO THEATRE

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

OTHER CINEMA

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

ROXIE FILM CENTER

3317 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS

701 Mission, screening room, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Cousin, cuisine

August 14, 2007

Given the state of English food, it should not surprise us that English food writers are either embittered and caustic or looking for a way out of their mildewed isles. In the latter group we find Ian Jackman, who hopped the pond hither 15 years ago and has now published a book, Eat This! 1001 Things to Eat before You Diet (Harper, $14.95 paper). If On the Road had been about eating in America and had been written by an earlier, less woozy edition of Christopher Hitchens, it might have been something like this.

But perhaps the Hitchens comparison doesn’t quite do justice to Jackman. Both writers are Oxbridge-educated, adoptive Americans with posh accents, but the Hitch is a bloated warmonger who mongered the wrong war and whose reputation — apart from an ability to recite poetry from memory when in trouble, like a squid squirting ink — seems undeserved. Jackman, by contrast, is soft-spoken and gracious. Of course, he isn’t a pugilist and raconteur who must snap and snarl for his supper on cable television but belongs, instead, to a long European tradition of discovering the New World and taking delight in it.

Eat This! reminds us that no matter how much America fatigue some of us might be feeling these days — and some of us are feeling quite a lot, thanks to Nancy Pelosi and the impeachment that wasn’t — the cultural possibilities of this country remain staggering. American food, in Jackman’s telling, retains its regional quality; New England is still notable for its lobster rolls, the Bay Area is a land of exquisite breads, Chicago is where you want to go for red-hot hot dogs, and in Memphis they use dry rubs on their barbecued ribs. Jackman has even tracked down what I regard, from profound personal experience, as the best cheeseburger ever; it’s sold at Solly’s Grille, in Milwaukee’s northern suburbs, and is so slathered with butter that it’s known locally (and Wisconsin is America’s Dairyland, after all) as the butter burger. No one can eat just one.

Since pretty much the whole world seems to be put out with us these days, we’re lucky our erudite British cousins are on hand to assure us we haven’t yet totally gone to hell. The food is still good here, and they should know.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Your neighborhood streets on wry (hold the Sesame)

August 14, 2007

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Who are the people in your neighborhood?" Wasn’t that the consciousness-raising question we were coaxed into asking as tots by the irresistibly catchy song stylings of public television? Well, if they’re the mix of humans and Muppet-esque monsters of Avenue Q, they’re strikingly but only superficially reminiscent of the denizens of that sidewalk utopia propagated by PBS children’s programming. After all, Sesame Street began way before anyone could stay shut up all day surfing the Internet for porn, like Trekkie Monster (Christian Anderson), let alone sing about it.

The inhabitants of Avenue Q are also the friends, allies, love interests, and fellow losers whom a recent college grad with few prospects and an elusive purpose — puppet protagonist Princeton (voiced and operated by Robert McClure) — can sort of maybe count on to get him through a disillusioning world that already seems downhill the moment one’s rolled off the university assembly line.

Such is the premise and highly qualified promise of Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx’s much-hailed musical comedy, which makes a vibrant San Francisco debut at the Orpheum Theatre in a Broadway touring production happily packed with energy and a talented, impressively versatile cast. Many jaded years after Big Bird was first through with watching you, Lopez and Marx’s reappropriation of such small-screen indoctrination serves up a deflated age writ Broadway large, an arch nostalgia tailor-made for an overeducated, underemployed population of thirtysomething slacker-searchers.

Avenue Q mines TV and Broadway in equal measure, with knowing references to each in a kind of pop cultural marriage overtly joined in one show tune–<\d>loving puppet named Rod, a closeted stockbroker who plays a kind of veiled Bert to sloppy but good-natured roommate Nicky’s Ernie. And if disappointment, humiliation, and an understated resilience are things everyone shares to varying degrees on Avenue Q (a run-down row of New York City brownstones with off-the-beaten-track rents — a decidedly grubby version of Sesame Street nicely realized by set designer Anna Louizos), they also come together in one neat, compact package that isn’t even Styrofoam based: Gary Coleman (voiced and operated by Carla Renata), the has-been TV child actor and ignominious tabloid fixture here turned, in one of many inspired touches, into the building super.

Smart, lively, and consistently funny, Avenue Q pretty well lives up to the heap of praise that brought the 2004 musical a small mound of Tony Awards. The show lags a bit in the second act (where, in medium-funny numbers like "Schadenfreude," the formula can begin to wear thin), but it’s never a bore. And if there’s inevitably a sentimental aspect to the "it sucks to be you and me" universality of its theme, it winds up on what is probably the best possible note — contained in the double-edged line "Everything in life is only for now" — which at the last moment smuggles in a defiant optimism clothed as ambivalence and compromise, much as throughout the play a certain felt reality (admittedly of a decidedly middle-class variety) comes agreeably filtered by felt puppets.

OTHERS MATTERS

Insignificant Others is a new musical comedy featuring its own assortment of lovable college grads unleashed in another big (or anyway biggish) city, by San Francisco playwright-composer-lyricist L.<\!s>Jay Kuo. It may not have anything like the budget of Avenue Q — and in truth doesn’t manage the tightrope walk between its sentimental theme and a cutting comic irony as smoothly either — but while uneven in both conception and execution, Insignificant Others nevertheless has some significant talent and inspiration behind it.

The story concerns a circle of five twentysomethings from Cleveland who relocate to San Francisco with hopes of embarking on lives of romance and adventure beyond the workaday world’s cubicle walls. At the center of these tales of the city is a buxom young firecracker named Margaret (the strong and winning Sarah Kathleen Farrell) on the lookout for Mr. Right — a designation given considerable latitude in a city with a scarce supply of heterosexual men, which becomes the excuse for three of the show’s most crowd-pleasing and clever numbers.

Friendships drift, but a crisis draws the characters together again, though this central thread comes over as both weak and overblown, and its resolution too pat and syrupy. Insignificant Others‘ best parts remain the more comedic ones, wherein Kuo’s generally polished lyrics and able if less consistently original music tend to reach their highest points.<\!s>*

AVENUE Q

Through Sept. 2, $30–<\d>$90

Tues.–<\d>Sat., 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 2 p.m.

Orpheum Theatre

1192 Market, SF

www.shnsf.com

INSIGNIFICANT OTHERS

Through Sept. 23, $35–<\d>$39

Thurs.–<\d>Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.

Zeum Theatre

221 Fourth St., SF

www.isomusical.com

New! Odd! Fantastic!

August 7, 2007

› Cheryl@sfbg.com

Rampaging genitalia, families of half-wits, towns shielding deadly secrets, and the end of the world — yep, there are good times to be had with the selection of new films in Dead Channels: The San Francisco Festival of Fantastic Film. The most buzzed-about title, Uwe Boll’s Postal (it’s a war-on-terror comedy that pokes fun at Sept. 11, among other topics; Seinfeld‘s Soup Nazi plays fun guy Osama bin Laden), wasn’t available for prescreening. But no matter — it’ll be far more rewarding to see the thing on the Castro Theatre’s giant screen, with the notorious Boll in person, at Dead Channels’ opening night Aug. 9.

Noteworthy picks include Canadian filmmaker Maurice Devereaux’s End of the Line, which offers more jolts per capita than much of Dead Channels’ other fare. A sinister dude on the subway is something just about every woman has encountered — but it only gets worse for a psych-ward nurse (Ilona Elkin) whose commute home coincides with an evangelical cult’s realization that the apocalypse is nigh. Piety has seldom been so gruesomely rendered. A more lighthearted look at the end of civilization is crystallized in Minoru Kawasaki’s The World Sinks except Japan, in which freaky natural events cause all the continents to sink into the ocean, save you-know-which island nation. World leaders and American movie stars swarm Japan, which is none too thrilled about playing host to so many refugees. The film is a tad overlong, but there are some juicy moments of satire, including a glimpse at a beleaguered Japan’s most popular television show — which basically involves a giant monster stomping on as many foreigners as possible.

More somber is Simon Rumley’s The Living and the Dead, which features a mentally challenged lead character (played with precious little showboating by Leo Bill) whose descent into madness is witnessed with horror by his bedridden mother (Kate Fahy). The location is a massive English manor house, as frightening and confusing a spot as End of the Line‘s subway tunnels. Some creative camera work, including the use of fast-motion footage to demonstrate what goin’ cuckoo feels like, makes for a more dynamic thriller than the film’s small cast and single setting would suggest.

The most conventional (not always a euphemism for "sucky") Dead Channels flick I watched was Harry Basil’s Fingerprints, dubiously notable for the presence of Laguna Beach hottie and US Weekly fixture Kristin Cavallari in a supporting part. (Hey, rolling your eyes expressively is totally what acting is all about!) Somber teenager Melanie (Leah Pipes) gets out of rehab and moves back in with her varyingly supportive family, who’ve relocated to a bucolic village still haunted by a long-ago train wreck that killed several schoolchildren. Possibly owing to her heroin-tastic past, Melanie proves supernaturally sensitive; after receiving some ghostly nudges, she sets about uncovering the town’s long-buried secrets. Fingerprints plays a little like a Lifetime movie with slasher elements, and it also employs the spooky-kid motif that was all the rage in scary movies a few years back. But besides the curiosity casting of Cavallari — unnecessary bubble-bath scene alert! — and Lou Diamond Phillips (as a sympathetic teacher), the film is actually pretty entertaining and solid, if inevitably derivative.

Fairly unlike any film you have ever seen before, or will after, is Hot Baby!, the seriously bizarre brainchild of Bay Area filmmaker Jeff Roenning. There’s a scene or two that recalls The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and other don’t-get-off-the-highway chillers, but mostly it’s an over-the-top array of shifting tones and character arcs, with a high schooler (Adam Scarimbolo) curious about his long-absent mother at its center. Plus: sexual-predator hypnotists, vengeful hookers, and doughnut jokes! Maybe even weirder is The Secret Life of Sarah Sheldon, writer-director-star Annette Ashlie Slomka’s take on a female mad scientist who conducts her sexually charged experiments with Herbert West–<\d>like focus. The film’s interesting premise is hampered by its amateurish execution, but it still features a rather horrifying penis monster — and what more can you really ask for?<\!s>*

Click here for reviews of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and Welcome Home Brother Charles

DEAD CHANNELS

Aug. 9 – 16

See Film List for venues and showtimes

www.deadchannels.com

Our Springfield soft spots

July 24, 2007

1. Tress MacNeille Julie Kavner and Hank Azaria always get props, but how about throwing down for my hero, the voice behind characters such as scathing Agnes Skinner, the brilliant-when-coherent Cat Lady, single working woman Cookie Kwan ("Stay outta the West Side!"; "Sign here, initial here, kiss me here!"), and Cookie’s sex-predator pal Lindsey Naegle, who appears as everything from a network executive ("We’re losing male tweens! Can you get jiggy with something?") to a consumer-testing ad sloganeer ("We’ll call it Desert Breeze!" she says after one spray of a product blinds Homer) to door-to-door baby-proofing salesperson (donning bonnet and pacifier in the process) to proud espouser of the child-free lifestyle. The sharpest sarcasm on The Simpsons comes straight from the mouth of MacNeille. (Johnny Ray Huston)

2. Homer as Mr. Sparkle (in "In Marge We Trust") After Homer spots his eerie likeness on a box of Mr. Sparkle, a Japanese detergent, he investigates. Though it’s later revealed that the Mr. Sparkle logo is actually an amalgamation of a fish and a lightbulb, the product’s television commercial is no less hilarious.

Disembodied Homeresque head: "I’m disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious? Out of my way, all of you! This is no place for loafers! Join me or die! Can you do any less?"

Giggling consumers: "What a brave corporate logo!" "I accept the challenge of Mr. Sparkle!" (Cheryl Eddy)

3. Springfield is for lovers We knew Matt Groening was ‘mo-friendly even pre-Simpsons, given the oft-nakedly frolicsome duo Akbar and Jeff of Life in Hell. But the show pushed boundaries right away — remember all that earnest "Is Smithers gay?" debate around school yards and watercoolers? Ah, how innocent (or just dumb) we were then. Aside from her time with a golf gender-bender, Patty’s love life has yet to be given much shrift, but at least two episodes wrapped themselves in the rainbow flag. In 1997’s "Homer’s Phobia," Homer (scared by flaming voice guest John Waters) decides Bart needs a father-son field trip to a steel mill — where, unfortunately, the uniformly hunky male workers spend their break shakin’ can to "Everybody Dance Now" by C+C Music Factory. Seven seasons later, "Three Gays of the Condo" found Marge and Homer temporarily separated, the latter moving in with a quarreling male couple in Springfield’s "gay ghetto." He fits in suspiciously well before heterosexual instincts triumph once again. (Dennis Harvey)

4. Quotability Every episode contains at least one line that can be used in any situation, be it from Comic Book Guy ("Ah yes — the Incredible Hulk Melon Baller!"), Ralph Wiggum ("When I grow up, I want to be a principal … or a caterpillar"), Groundskeeper Willie ("When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go … ach! doon-toon"), or, of course, Homer ("I’ve been a fan of the Who since the very beginning, when they were the Hillbilly Bugger Boys"). (Eddy)

5. Apt or prophetic celebrity cameos I’ll name just two: Serena Williams moaning, "I just ate a personal pizza," to beg out of a tennis match (in "Tennis the Menace") and Kathy Griffin as a bully named Francine who terrorizes Lisa (in "Bye Bye Nerdie"). For extra laughs, listen close to the crowd noises of the scientists in the latter episode and then brace yourself for the end, in which Griffin’s character howls with rage as she swallows the camera in an attempt to beat the stuffing out of the biggest nerd of all: you. (Huston)

6. Treehouses of Horror My favorite-ever "Treehouse of Horror" segment deserves its own mention. After a well-meaning Lisa frees Snorky — star dolphin performer at a Sea World–esque marine park — Springfield soon learns he’s King Snorky, finally able to lead his subjects from their forced habitation of the sea. Though Homer’s instinct to take a stand ("I’m not going to let a bunch of hoop-jumping tuna munchers push me around!") is classic, the most priceless moment is an aside between two supporting characters. Moe: "What did he say?" Carl: "He said years ago dolphins lived on the land." Moe: "Whaaaaaaa?" (Eddy)

7. Anthropomorphic slapstick See Snorky, above. I also give you rampaging rhinos, the sideways glances of annoyed-looking amphibians, the many worries of Mr. Teeny, and of course, Itchy and Scratchy, gleefully upping the ante of every cruel Warner Bros. cartoon ever made. (Huston)

8. All singing, all dancing Yes, Danny Elfman wrote the famous Simpsons theme, but the series’ real audio hero is composer-arranger Alf Clausen, who over 18 years has had occasion to brilliantly spoof just about every musical genre. Among serious songfests, it doesn’t get any better than Marge’s community theater turn as Blanche DuBois ("A Streetcar Named Marge") or Troy McClure’s big comeback as Charlton Heston in the Broadway-bound Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off ("A Fish Called Selma"). Then there was The Simpson Family Smile-Time Variety Hour, a 1997 tribute to horrendous ’70s variety shows that featured Smithers in chaps, singing Devo’s "Whip It." (Harvey)

9. Lenny Leonard What is it about Lenny Leonard (voiced by Harry Shearer)? Maybe it’s the sideburns, maybe the nonchalance — or the complete obliviousness — with which he floats through life. I don’t know, but I would do him. Carl is clearly the more functional half of their conjoined yet asexual partnership. But Lenny — he’s like Steve Buscemi with more sex appeal! (Harvey)

10. Yvan eht nioj ‘Nuff said. (Huston)

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE

Opens Fri/27 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.simpsonsmovie.com

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