Theater

Irresistible ODC

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PREVIEW Some traditions are just too good to give up. I can forgo most holiday customs, except for singing carols, The Nutcracker, and a Tom and Jerry with lots of nutmeg and rum, preferably drunk from properly labeled china cups. Another, a peculiar San Francisco tradition is ODC/Dance’s The Velveteen Rabbit. It has proved remarkably sturdy and remains quite irresistible.

You’d think at a time when kids are growing up with anime and Nintendo games, there would be little interest in a story about a sawdust-stuffed rabbit and 10-foot-tall nanny who brooks no nonsense in the nursery. Yet KT Nelson’s 22-year-old adaptation of Margery Williams’ 1922 classic,with its whiff of upper-class British propriety, has not lost one iota of its charm. Nelson choreographed it when her son was young. Maybe that helped with the inspiration.

Another reason is that right from the beginning, ODC went for top quality in its choice of its collaborators. They could barely afford children’s author Brian Arrowsmith’s costumes and design, but what an investment that turned to be. The combination of Geoff Hoyle’s narration, Benjamin Britten’s score, and Rinde Eckert’s voice was inspired. By now ODC’s dancers may be able to dance their roles in their sleep — but it doesn’t show. They don the parts like a second skin and seem to enjoy themselves. Daytime performances, at 90 minutes, in a relatively small theater, should make Rabbit accessible even to the younger crowd.

THE VELVETEEN RABBIT Fri/28-Dec. 14, call for times, $15–$45. Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org, www.odcdance.org

Tale of the city

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If last week’s extensive Guardian coverage didn’t convince you, here’s my two cents: see Milk. Not that you may have needed convincing; seems like everyone in San Francisco is stoked to see Gus Van Sant’s political biopic, with Sean Penn starring as the first openly gay man elected to public office in America. If you live here, it’s impossible to separate yourself completely from the story — even if you’re too young to remember the history firsthand –- since so much of it is already familiar. There’s City Hall, Milk’s "theater" and the site of his 1978 assassination, along with Mayor George Moscone, by fellow supe Dan White; the Castro District, meticulously made over to mimic Milk’s 1970s; a dog-poopy moment in Duboce Park; and references to everything from district elections to this very newspaper.

Still, even out-of-towners, except bigoted ones, will be moved by Milk. Milk’s experiences allow the film to take a personal look at the struggle for LGBT civil rights in America, with a particular focus on Anita Bryant’s cross-country hate crusade. Scenes showing the triumphant defeat of Prop. 6 — a 1978 proposal to fire all gay teachers and those who supported them — are bittersweet in the wake of the passage of Prop. 8. At times, Van Sant’s film feels eerily timely, down to the spontaneously assembled protests on Castro at Market, and its focus on a politico who believed in hope despite the odds.

But Milk is more than its message — despite its many sober moments, it also manages to be an entertaining film. Thank Van Sant’s steady direction, which (mostly) avoids melodrama and integrates archival footage with seamless ease, and a Penn performance that feels remarkably natural even though he clearly obsessed over perfecting Milk’s voice and mannerisms. Among the supporting players, Emile Hirsch (funny and energetic as activist Cleve Jones) and Josh Brolin (fumbling and creepy as killer White) are standouts. Less successful is Diego Luna as Milk’s needy lover Jack Lira, though it’s not really Luna’s fault; the Lira subplot comes across as distracting, adding unnecessary drama to a story already brimming with compelling conflict. Look for Penn to scoop up mad awards-season praise, all the more deserved if his inspiring turn fires up a new generation to follow in Milk’s footsteps.

Milk opens Wed/26 at the Castro Theatre.

Political Theater

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

Pair an effusive and extroverted, larger-than-life politico like Harvey Milk — complete with community-forging charisma, panoramic outlook, and labyrinthine City Hall machinations — with a reserved, perpetually-outside-looking-in independent, à la director Gus Van Sant? That feature-film odd-coupling might have understandably strained some brains in Hollywood. Making the seldom-seen moments of otherwise-secret or neglected lives visible has seemingly been Van Sant’s calling, and his most memorable films — 1985’s Mala Noche, 1989’s Drugstore Cowboy, 1991’s My Own Private Idaho, 2003’s Elephant, and even the Oscar-gathering 1997 Good Will Hunting — have relied on his coolly unblinking, surprisingly cerebral yet gently empathetic eye, whether focused on Mexican immigrants, ’70s-era oblivion-seekers, Northwestern hustlers, a hidden savant, or disaffected teenagers.

Still, those leitmotifs — entwined with Van Sant’s terrible, tangible sense of romance with his outsiders, artists, and lost souls, as well as the way his camera seems to fall head over heels for his characters — made Van Sant a natural to make Milk, after Oliver Stone’s aborted feature-film attempt to tell the slain San Francisco supervisor’s story. "There is always that question: why I haven’t done a film like this earlier," Van Sant confessed, clearing his throat for the umpteenth time while agreeing that he hasn’t ever quite done a film like Milk. "Yeah, I hadn’t done a big movie, so there were people around who were like, ‘Can you handle it? Can it be done?’ They think that way. Since there was no business model, they were like, ‘No, he can’t, because he makes these scruffy, little movies. Too big a gamble, you know.’

"That’s a part of Hollywood, but it’s kind of like safe bets: it can make bad stuff happen as easily as good stuff, and it has its own closed policies like the old conservative City Hall-type policies. ‘New supervisors who haven’t handled the job before are incapable and they’re screwing things up.’"

Thankfully the gamble paid off and the tale of California’s first openly gay politician has been told with elegance, poetry, and not a little heart-stirring, inspirational grace, by the man whom biographer James Robert Parish describes as "the standard bearer of America’s ‘queer cinema’" — one who fuses extreme close-ups, handheld shots, and found footage in a collaborative, textural approach that lends a Kodachrome pop-culty feel to his films. The process makes for "beautiful pictures every time," as a windblown Sean Penn put it at a Ritz Carlton press conference after Milk‘s Oct. 28 world premiere at the Castro Theatre.

Seated at the middle of a long table between Penn and Josh Brolin, who portrays Milk’s killer Dan White, as they traded friendly jabs, Van Sant remained mostly silent — physically at the center, but an observer apart at the same time. Later in a hotel suite, face to face with a single interviewer, the director seemed equally out of place, folded uncomfortably into a plush chair, arms tightly crossed over a tan jeans jacket sporting a "No on 8" sticker, with a small, nylon, bright-blue dollar-store-style backpack by his side. He more closely resembles a 56-year-old teacher or elder-care worker than a Hollywood insider.

The latter role is evidently still alien to him. His first brush with Milk came in 1978 while he was driving across the country and heard on the radio that the supervisor was shot. Though he later saw the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, it never occurred to him to make a film about the politician. "It seemed like a very big story," Van Sant said. Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy "were stories that were devised to be made with really low budgets, like $20,000. So it was never like, ‘Oh, we can make a story about City Hall with $20,000.’ I guess I was always coming at filmmaking from not really being in the business, but knowing that I could get a hold of or save up my own money to the point where I’d have $20,000 and I could actually make a feature."

In the process of making Milk, the filmmaker admitted that he had to leave out many details that "I really like and things that sort of explain the situation. We suggest things. We explain this new law that enabled people to elect their supervisors from their districts, but we didn’t explain that the people up to that point that had to run city-wide resembled a different and maybe more antiquated type of politician. They were more, I guess, conservative. They were more business-oriented."

If San Francisco is palpable as a character in Milk, then City Hall is that elegantly shambolic figure’s brain, and Van Sant effectively used the Beaux Arts space, which harks back to classical forms, to his own dramatic ends. A down-the-rabbit-hole corridor leading to supervisors’ chambers becomes a pulsing nerve center visually rhyming with the characters’ stratagems. The sweeping staircase and balconies become the backdrop for Milk’s and White’s clashing trajectories, and the building itself becomes the spotless stage for Milk’s political birth and death.

"What I usually try and do, in general, is to connect the characters to a timeless quality, so it’s not necessarily situated in the specific time they’re in," said Van Sant. "So if they’re in City Hall and there’s a beaux-arts classical relief on the ceiling, if you frame it correctly, they can kind of look like Roman senators. You can get this timeless quality of people trading votes and betraying each other for as long as there’s been a forum and a senate.

"There were certain things in the script and in Harvey’s life — the famous line is ‘How do you like my new theater,’ which is what he says to Cleve [Jones, played by Emile Hirsch]: ‘Always take the stairs, never dress up, never blend in, make a show of it, use the whole space.’ I thought of that as a centerpiece of the whole film. That scene is one of my favorites because it was kind of like Harvey, who was a stage manager and was in theater. This was his new forum, his new theater, his new proscenium, with which to create new stuff — in this case, gay rights and other things that he thought were important, like education and help for minorities and seniors."

The question that arises so often among those who care about gay rights is: Why wasn’t Milk released before the Nov. 4 election, when it might have energized voters to shut down Proposition 8, a battle so similar to Milk’s charge against Proposition 6? As Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black said, "I didn’t know this [movie] would be about Prop. 8, but I don’t think this fight is over."

"I don’t really decide when movies should come out," said Van Sant. "The distributors came up with that." He spelled out some of the thoughts behind the Nov. 26 theatrical release: worries included "whether or not the elements of the story were so like the political moment that the film wouldn’t have a life after the election," and "whether people are too busy with the election to go see the movie. Are people overtaxed with politics to go see a political movie?" As a compromise, the late-October Castro Theatre premiere was arranged to get Milk and its overall message into the media eye, while still opening it into November through January, the Academy campaign season.

"Yeah, I didn’t make the call," repeats Van Sant, somewhat regretfully and shedding perhaps a smidge of that cherished detachment. "Harvey would have opened it in October."

Milk opens Wed/26 at the Castro Theatre, with additional Bay Area openings Fri/28 and Dec. 5.


>>Back to the Milk Issue

Past, present, future

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> johnny@sfbg.com

REVIEW As a programming move, the Roxie Theater’s decision to screen Rob Epstein’s classic 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk is both a no-brainer and a bit of casual brilliance. It’s a no-brainer because of Milk mania. It’s a little stroke of genius because this great documentary’s return, one week before the theatrical premiere of Gus Van Sant’s feature at the Castro, provides plentiful compare-and-contrast opportunities for all those wise enough to know that they need to see both. This isn’t the first time that the Roxie — which presented Tsai Ming-liang’s homage to movie theaters Goodbye, Dragon Inn during the Castro’s days of turmoil in 2004 — has chimed in like a smart kid brother.

Epstein’s movie is a classic partly because of its historical contents, but there’s a definite mastery to the way in which he assembles and presents that material — if today’s makers of stylized docs haven’t learned from his command, that command has at least influenced Van Sant. The Times of Harvey Milk doesn’t dig into day-to-day San Francisco politics with the same relish or perhaps even specificity of the Van Sant movie (which recalls Barbet Schroeder’s 1990 Reversal of Fortune in its affection for scenes of creative, energetic groupthink). But journeying through candlelight vigil and through riot, it remains the most dramatically powerful response to Harvey Milk. His life and death were the stuff of great drama as well as of history.

The time for The Times of Harvey Milk is now, once again: more than a number connects and separates Proposition 6 of Milk’s era with Proposition 8 today. Thanks to Epstein’s compassionate documentary eye, his talking heads are fully realized human characters, with a range of personalities: the fervor of Tom Ammiano, the gruff candor of union machinist Jim Elliot (who thought the police raids on gay bars were fine until he met Milk), the contemplative sadness and strength of Sally M. Gearhart. Other touches, such as Harvey Fierstein’s uncharacteristically stoic voice-over, are surprising. And Epstein doesn’t glorify or beatify Milk when presenting the relationship between Milk and Dan White — his look at their interactions shows the sharp, competitive edges of Milk’s humanism.

The 2004 anniversary edition of the Times of Harvey Milk DVD is a treasure trove of material providing greater insight into Dan White. But it’s important to revisit this movie outside of the isolated home box office. There are generations of people who, if they’ve seen it, have only seen The Times of Harvey Milk on video at home. Like the man at the core of its subject, Epstein’s documentary thrives in a public, theatrical setting. The events it collects and captures are still relevant to all the random people who will find themselves united by a decision to watch this movie in a cinema — people who will step outside of the Roxie into a city and a world not that different from the one where Harvey Milk died and lived, one that is demanding collective action, and his spirit, once again.

THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK

Opens Fri/21, $5–$10

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 431-3611

www.roxie.com


>>Back to the Milk Issue

A long look

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If you’re old enough to remember Loongbar — and I’m too polite to ask — you might experience a moment of confusion about Long Bar. You might wonder if there’s a familial connection, and why did the name of the restaurant split in two (some kind of verbal mitosis?), and what happened to the other O? But … no worries, as the Aussies say. Long Bar (whose principals are Alan Walsh and Bill Garlock) has nothing to do with Loongbar, the Mark Miller venture of the late 1990s that lived its brief life in a spectacular Ghirardelli Square setting before ending up in the hands of the actor Don Johnson under the name Ana Mandara.

Long Bar was, until spring 2007, the Fillmore Grill, a stalwart of that stylish street and a pubish sort of place. If your idea of a smart pub includes a long bar, then you won’t be too disappointed by the morph. Long Bar is aptly named; its bar (of Honduran mahogany) might not be quite the match of the big daddy that helped make Stars famous, but it is sizable, with seating for at least a dozen atop posh-looking stools, each with an unimpeded view to the large flat-screen television mounted on the wall, a window on the world of sports.

As impressive as the bar is, it takes up only a quarter or so of the dining room, with the rest given over to the usual suspect (tables and chairs in various configurations), a color scheme heavy on a cayenne or burnt-sienna hue — rich and warm, if under inflected — and, most appealing, a small selection of U-shaped, low-rise booths in a far corner. Long Bar isn’t what you’d call beatifically quiet (another sense in which the name is spot-on; will anyone ever open Quiet Bar?), but the noise level in the booths is far from unbearable, even as the restaurant fills up with Pacific Heightsers, some fresh from a movie at the Clay Theater across the street.

They’re hungry, of course, the P.H. crowd: they want good food but not fancy food, and they want it at a reasonable price, since, like everybody else, they must be feeling the wind a bit these days. What is a reasonable price? That, as Hamlet might say (in a yet-to-be-imagined turn as restaurant planner), is the question, and it’s a tricky one to try to answer in the midst of our present economic maelstrom. I will note that Long Bar’s main-course prices range mostly from the high teens to the mid-20s, which isn’t exactly bargain-basement country, but could be worse. A strong theory of relativity obtains in restaurant pricing, and any calculus must consider where the restaurant is located and who’s likely to go there.

So while it seems quite possible that the bulk of the clientele — vigorous, middle-aged-looking people who don’t appear to be poor — would consider Long Bar moderately priced, I would have to cogitate a bit before agreeing. Then I would agree. A grilled salmon filet perched on a bed of quinoa salad dotted with cauliflower florets, for $22? That’s not bad for casually sophisticated cooking.

Of course, no bar would be complete without a full complement of bar food, and bar food is so often deep-fried and greasy, maybe on the theory that the grease helps soak up excess alcohol, as if it’s some kind of blotter. (A friend recently told me a similar story about the therapeutic powers of tripe, which, prepared in a stew called menudo, is commonly served in Mexico on Sundays, when some people might need help clearing away the haze left by the previous night’s revels.)

Fried onion rings are often a spectacular example of this kind of cooking. Hence their migration to fast-food-land. But executive chef Ryan McDonald’s version ($6) was notable for its restraint. The rings were cut from red onions, for one thing, then given a tempura batter, which fried up strong and dry, without sogginess or a sheen of grease on the plate. We dipped the rings in the companion ramekin of plain ketchup, which was fine, though not quite as fine as the rings themselves.

Monterey calamari ($12) was a more typical item, with the rings and tentacles swaddled in a heavy golden coat of bread crumbs. Despite the slightly lurid look, the seafood itself was tender and gently sweet-briny, with a colorful salad of frisée and slivered carrot and lime aioli on the side for balance.

Comparably golden, though not as heavy, were crab cakes ($16), a matched pair of plump pucks made with a generous amount of actual crab meat (filler is a perennial problem for crab cake aficionados) and plated with a fabulously tart little salad of apple threads and tendrils of watercress. Lemon-caper aioli provided a final zest kicker.

Yes, the Long Bar kitchen has a flair for salads, of all things. Even the caesar ($9) was excellent, despite a lack of anchovies. The croutons were crunchy and plentiful, the Parmesan shavings were piled up like drifts in a blizzard, the dressing was notably lemony, and the romaine spears were immaculate and crisp. I did wonder why, given the considerable scale of the caesar, why no grilled-chicken upgrade is offered. With a little protein, this salad could easily pass as a light main course.

Desserts, we were told, are due for an upgrade, from a pastry chef whose arrival is imminent. In the meantime, the choices are a bit TGI Friday’s but perfectly serviceable: mud pie ($8), a fluffy chocolate mousse under a glossy cap of dark chocolate; and mango cheesecake ($8), also fluffy, in a graham-cracker crust that’s worth its weight in … well, graham crackers, at least.

LONG BAR

Dinner: Sun., Tues.–Thurs, 5–10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 5–10:30 p.m.

2298 Fillmore, SF

(415) 440-1700

www.longbarsf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

The Milk Issue

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It took Hollywood 30 years to make a feature film about the life of Harvey Milk, and when Gus Van Sant finally got the gig, and Sean Penn agreed to play the title role, it came out too late to have an impact on the California election. Would Milk, the movie, have helped defeat Prop. 8? Nobody knows. But the movie is inspirational, and with any luck will carry the message of Milk’s life to the masses. Milk always said that the more straight Americans got to know gay and lesbian people, the more they would be open to equal rights.

The Guardian covered Milk’s career as it was happening, devoted a special issue to him when he was assassinated, covered the trial of Dan White and the infamous Twinkie Defense and the riots afterward. And with the movie hitting theaters this month, we’re taking a look not just as the movie but the political legacy of Harvey Milk.

>>Political theater
Gus Van Sant gives Harvey Milk his close-up
By Kimberly Chun

>>Politics behind the picture
Would Harvey Milk be happy with San Francisco today?
By Steven T. Jones and Tim Redmond

>>I remember Harvey
Guardian memories of the long-haired young hopeful
By Bruce B. Brugmann

>>The apathy and the ecstacy
St. Harvey inflames, but does he inspire?
By Marke B.

>>Hot flash gallery
Now and then in the photography of Daniel Nicoletta
By Johnny Ray Huston

>>Behind the “Twinkie Defense”
The reporter who coined the infamous phrase looks back at the White trial
By Paul Krassner


>>Past, present, future
The time is now for The Times of Harvey Milk
By Johnny Ray Huston

BONUS
>>Where’s Harry?
Harvey Milk’s political torchbearer gets written out of film history
By Tim Redmond

From the archives (PDF)
How the District Attorney Joe Freitas’s office blew the Dan White murder case, May 23, 1979
By Robert Levering and David Johnston

What do you remember?

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PREVIEW "You can surely remember episodes from your childhood. Do you consider some of them or several so precious that you wouldn’t want to do without them?" "Is there an experience or experiences among your memories that you would describe as mystic, spiritual, or religious?" "What is your earliest memory?" "Which episode(s) of a sexual nature do you remember particularly fondly?"

These are but a few of the 50 questions that have been floating around the Internet and on printed questionnaires this fall. If you answered any of them, there is a good chance that your observations may show up in one of the season’s more unusual theatrical experiments, The Execution of Precious Memories, a collaboration by Nanos Operetta, Kunst-Stoff, and Blixa Bargeld, who created the first Execution in 1994 in Berlin. The idea is to develop a piece of dance/music/theater piece from the memories of people who live in specific places. So far Executions have taken place in London, Stockholm, Tokyo, and Kraków, among other cities. This is the first American version. Bargeld became famous in the 1980s as a cofounder of Einstuerzende Neubauten, one of the first and most influential industrial bands. But the Berlin native and current San Francisco resident is also an artist steeped in dadaism, an architectural critic, and one of the more radical and fascinating thinkers on contemporary culture, particularly as it plays itself out in Germany. Nanos Operetta founder Ali Tabatabai claims Bargeld as an important influence on all their work.

THE EXECUTION OF PRECIOUS MEMORIES Wed/19-Sat/22, 8 p.m.; Sun/23, 7 p.m.; $20. Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida, SF. (415) 863-9834, www.brownpapertickets.com, www.kunst-stoff.org

Harding theater: the show goes on

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HARDING THEATER — LIGHTS UP ON NEXT ACT
Richard Reineccius

The SF Planning Commission came through 7-0 for a full Environmental Impact Review on the Harding Theater on Thursday 11/13!

Commissioners almost universally criticized the staff recommendation for a “negative declaration” for the need for environmental review, and agreed with neighbors of the Divisadero building that there had been almost no public input.

No date was set for the beginning of hearings on the Harding, and staff said it would likely involve a hired consultant.

Community leaders who spoke included Joe Landini, Jim Bracken, Sheila Devitt, David Tornheim and more than a dozen others from the Western Addition/Panhandle/Haight neighborhoods, arguing that The Harding as a functioning arts venue will greatly enliven the Divisadero business strip, as the renovated Brava Theater Center has done for The Mission’s 24th Street.

Attorney Arthur Levy as the pro bono attorney for Friends of 1800, a non-profit preservation organization, had made the effective formal appeal on the basis that historic buildings being considered for major alterations must receive a full EIR under California law.

Prominent theater professionals and historic preservationists voiced concerns at the two hour hearing – including directors and advocates from Theater Bay Area, Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, Brava Theater, Magic Theater, Metro Theatre Center Foundation, the Garage Theater and The Independent nightclub.

—
Richard Reineccius was a founder of the SF Neighborhood Arts Program, and a long time advocate for arts facilities in communities. He, his ex-wife Brenda Berlin, and Doug Giebel founded the progressive Julian Theatre, performing in The Mission District and Potrero Hill from the 1960s to mid-90s.

Last stand at the Harding Theater!

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Richard Reineccius says “Don’t mourn, renovate the Harding” theater and save this historic landmark

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Well, hopefully this isn’t the last stand for the Harding Theater in the Western Addition. But I wanted to use the line that we used for years in the passionate and unending battle to save the Goodman Building off of Van Ness Ave.

The battle was lost to save the original building but there was a complicated deal done in which the people in the Goodman Building ended up in the Thick Description Theater Building at 1695 l8th st. on Potrero Hill.
The theater is the lineal descendant of the old Julian theater, one of the city’s finest and most avant garde neighborhood theaters founded by Richard Reineccius and Doug Giebel.

It most fitting that Richard is now a leader in the fight to save the Harding theater. Here’s his call to arms on a hearing for the latest proposal to demolish the building at a hearing on Thursday (11/13/08) before the city planning commission.

A FULL HEARING FOR THE HARDING

by Richard Reineccius

The SF City Planning Commission will this week hear the latest proposal for demolishing much of an historic theater at 616 Divisadero Street, erecting a multi-story apartment building plus retail space on the premises. The hearing will be on Thursday afternoon 11/13, Room 400 City hall. (www.sfgov.org/planning)

The Harding Theater in SF’s once artistically vibrant and stylish Western Addition hasn’t seen audiences for live performances or films in a number of years, but is an excellent candidate for saving, not only as an arts space but as a development catalyst for the neighborhood. While not currently listed as a historic landmark, it in fact is one, being the last intact theater remaining in the city designed by the famous Reid Brothers firm (Fairmont Hotel, Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, SF’s Roosevelt and Castro Theaters, Byron Hot Springs Spa Hotel, more)

LEVYdance

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PREVIEW LEVYdance company is small: only five performers. But they dance big — hugely physical, totally in charge — and they also think big. They once performed at ODC Theater, but that was too small. Last year they pushed themselves onto the much larger stage of Kenbar Hall at the Jewish Community Center, yet even that space proved too confining. So for the fall season LEVYdance created its own space on the street outside their studio, where they built three stages connected by catwalks. Audiences are interspersed between them. The location: one of the city’s smallest alleys — with very supportive neighbors. No wings or sets. Graffiti will have to do. Since it’s November, the company will provide hot beverages. For sweaters, blankets, and hats, you’re on your own. The program includes three world premieres: Physics, with a commissioned score by composer-DJ Mason Bates, which looks at the forces the body is subject to; Wake, a duet about the essence of communication for company veterans Brooke Gessay and Scott Marlow; and a yet-unnamed ensemble work performed to music from the Middle Ages. The event also introduces LEVYdance’s newest member, Aline Wachsmuth. Last year’s pop music-inspired and now-reworked Nu Nu completes the lineup.

LEVYDANCE Wed/12-Sat/15, 8 p.m., $20–$30. Heron Street, off Eighth Street between Folsom and Harrison, SF. www.brownpapertickets.com.

GOLDIES 2008

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Welcome to the other side. There’s got to be a morning after, and here it is. It brings 14 reasons why the Bay Area doesn’t just create its own political discourse — through art, it charts wonderlands and hells beyond any campaign promise.

The Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery awards turn 20 this year. The Goldie Awards have manifested as marathon-length award ceremonies, wild parties, and even as formal affairs. They’re usually rough around the edges, and always as great as the people they honor. Four years ago, in the immediate wake of George W. Bush’s reelection, Lifetime Achievement winner Bruce Conner exorcised a desolate awards night by dancing. This year’s awards, in part a celebration of all the winners of the last two decades, are dedicated to his memory.

This year’s Goldie winners were selected by the Guardian‘s Kimberly Chun, Cheryl Eddy, and Johnny Ray Huston, with valuable input from our writers and critics, including Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Glen Helfand, as well as members of the Bay Area arts community. The people in this issue turn apartments into stages and art galleries, transform entire theaters into stage sets, and bring the changing face of San Francisco to the screen. They make guitars sing, and in turn they sing like well-tuned strings. They write the history of modern art and poetry. They know the force of a cosmic ray. Join them, and us, on Tuesday, Nov. 11 at 111 Minna — 11/11 at 111 — for a celebration. It’s free. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Click below for more on our winners. All winner portraits by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover Photography

The winners of the 20th annual Goldie Awards

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LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT



>>LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI AND CITY LIGHTS BOOKS
Anything but a vanity press
By Ari Messer


>>V. VALE AND RE/SEARCH PUBLICATIONS
The monkish punk elder of counterculture in the Bay
By Kimberly Chun

———-

DANCE



>>ERIN MEI-LING STUART
Focusing on the mess humans manage to create for themselves
By Rita Felciano
———-

FILM



>>BARRY JENKINS
Viewing the city — and its displacements — through the prism of a relationship
By D. Scot Miller


>>KINO21
Creating a lively forum for critical engagement with aesthetics
By Matt Sussmanr

———-

LITERATURE



>>BILL BERKSON
Fifty years of slow-dawning epiphany
By Julien Poirier

———-

MUSIC



>>CITAY
Sublimely interwoven acoustic and electric guitars and lushly appointed folk-rock
By Kimberly Chun


>>THE DODOS
Concocting a sound that verges on epic, minus muddle
By Johnny Ray Huston


>>JONAS REINHARDT
Wembley-sized dreams for the contemporary Krautrockers
By Michael Harkin


>>TRACKADEMICS
Different buzzes in different circles, consciously
By Garrett Caples

———-

THEATER



>>THE CUTTING BALL THEATER
It’s often the warped glass that furnishes the truest picture
By Robert Avila

———-

VISUAL ART



>>MATT FURIE
Endangered species to champagne-and-SpaghettiOs
By Johnny Ray Huston


>>KAMAU PATTON
Behold the warp of truth, infinite
By Marke B.


>>MARGARET TEDESCO
An approach that always includes inviting others into the fold
By Glen Helfand

The Cutting Ball Theater

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If you were at the latest Cutting Ball show, avantgardARAMA!, you entered a theater that looked like an art installation, already buzzing and flickering with video images on a screen suspended in front of a shimmering mirror-box set, accompanied by a soundtrack of voices and droning tones. It was like some serenely wicked room in a purgatorial funhouse, where all you’ve been and all you might become could be reflected at you, from every possible angle, ad infinitum. As it turned out, it was an environment perfectly suited to the material sharply staged that evening: three short experimental plays on war, power, and betrayal by three women writers — Gertrude Stein, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Eugenie Chan — whose bold narrative loops and lacunae literally rebounded off the walls.

The stylish, jarring, exhilarating effect: our sleepwalking world was dramatically distilled into fractal-like figures that somehow made it real again. This is the oblique strategy of the Cutting Ball Theater, a passionately intelligent and skillful company with a declared commitment to poetic truths over superficial naturalism.

As it approaches its 10-year milestone, Cutting Ball transitions from dogged itinerancy into luxurious residency at Exit on Taylor, a satellite stage of the Exit Theater complex in the Tenderloin. Much as a ball rolls forward by turning full circle, the move marks something of a return for the company, which launched its career in a production of Richard Foreman’s My Head Was a Sledgehammer at the Exit-sponsored San Francisco Fringe Festival in 1999.

"That was the last time you had to stand outside at 3 in the morning and camp out," associate artistic director and actor Paige Rogers recalls of that time, before the Fringe established its lottery system. Rogers, and husband and artistic director Rob Melrose, established both the company and a family that year, more or less simultaneously. Melrose did the camping out and rehearsed the play by night at an Alameda Catholic school where Rogers was teaching music.

(As with many a start-up theater, overlapping accommodations was the name of the tune: when the school’s principal expressed surprise at happening upon a late-night rehearsal of Foreman’s madcap dream-world in the kindergarten, Rogers deflected further inquiry by joyfully announcing, "Marilyn! I’m pregnant!")

Cutting Ball has mixed new plays and "re-visioned" classics ever since. The visual metaphor is apt since Cutting Ball productions are nothing if not strikingly designed. For years, the company has had a talented core of collaborators that includes designers Heather Basarab (lights), Cliff Caruthers (sound and electronic music), and Michael Locher (sets). Together in close collaboration with the astute, Yale-trained Melrose, they regularly produce some of the best designs to be found on any Bay Area stage, large or small. Add artistic associates like playwrights Kevin Oakes (2003’s The Vomit Talk of Ghosts) and Eugenie Chan (whose A Bone to Pick was a highlight of this theater season), as well as dependably strong acting from Rogers, Felicia Benefield, Chad Deverman, David Sinaiko, and David Westley Skillman, among others, and you have the makings of some great small theater.

The new residency marks another return. Its ninth season will be inaugurated by a rarely staged early play by Eugène Ionesco, Victims of Duty, a work Melrose says he’s waited 15 years to direct. Centering on the abrupt crisis-ridden invasion of a bourgeois couple’s placid bubble-world and their equally staid conceptions of theatrical art, Victims is a fever-dream of a play that not only sounds strikingly contemporary but echoes the company’s own MO. When theater "holds the mirror up to the world," it’s often the warped glass that furnishes the truest picture.

www.cuttingball.com

A classic Kopp smackdown

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Watching former Sup. and State Sen. Quentin Kopp take on a bumbling politician or incompetant bureacrat used to be one of the great works of political theater in California. Now that he’s a retired judge, who has to show some sort of judicial temperament, you don’t see it as often, but this smackdown of Republican state Sen. Roy Ashburn, in a hearing on high-speed rail, is one for the ages.

(Thanks to Ken Bruce for the tip, and for pointing out the wonderful YouTube title:

October 23, 2008, in the California State Senate: Quentin Kopp delivers an epic smackdown to galactic
asshat Senator Roy Ashburn of Bakersfield

Yaelisa and Caminos Flamencos

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PREVIEW How many outside the flamenco family — a sizable one in the Bay Area — realize just how special an artist Yaelisa is? In a less ghettoized genre, this Emmy-winning and always expanding and deepening performer and choreographer would be considered a superstar. Yaelisa foregoes some of the showbiz antics of her colleagues for performances that are no less captivating and, frequently, more intelligently planned and presented. Her monthly Café Flamenco sessions — every third Sunday of the month and currently at Theater Artaud — have become a Bay Area staple.

The Yaelisa and Caminos Flamenco ensemble includes Melissa Cruz, Christina Hall, Mariana Elana, and Fanny Ara. Each of these women is a soloist in her own right. For the company’s new program, Canciones, Yaelisa and her dancers are stepping beyond their comfort level into non-flamenco music — not exactly a new idea, but one that apparently Yaelisa has wanted to explore for a long time. The impetus came from a 2006 collaboration with tap virtuoso Savion Glover that involved Brazilian funk, Miles Davis, and Dave Brubeck. Canciones — with guest dancer Timo Nuñez — includes music by Iron and Wine and the Spanish pop group Ketama and live sounds by Sonikéte, as well as more traditional compositions by Isaac Albéniz. Latin percussionist Michael Spiro and vocalists Felix de Lola and Miguel Rosendo join music director and master flamenco artist Jason McGuire.

YAELISA AND CAMINOS FLAMENCOS Sat/1, 8 p.m., and Sun/2, 7 p.m., $15–$60. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org>.

Family act

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> sarah@sfbg.com

District 3 supervisorial candidate Joe Alioto Jr., 36, has stated repeatedly on the campaign trail that he is not running on his family’s name.

But his lack of policy or political experience, combined with his campaign’s close ties to his sister, District 2 Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier — the most conservative and reactionary member of the Board of Supervisors — has progressives fearing he’ll be even more hostile to their values than his sister if he is elected this fall.

Records show that Alioto-Pier, 40, who was appointed by Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2004, consistently votes against the interests of tenants, workers and low-income folks. She recently sponsored legislation that passes increased water and sewer rates along to tenants. In the past, she has voted against relocation money for no-fault evictions and against limits on condominium conversions. And that’s just her record on tenants’ rights.

"Michela makes Sup. Sean Elsbernd look like a progressive," said Board President Aaron Peskin, who is termed out as D3 supervisor and has endorsed David Chiu as his preferred candidate to represent this diverse district, which encompasses Chinatown, North Beach, Fisherman’s Wharf and Telegraph Hill.

Alioto, who bought a $1.3 million Telegraph Hill condominium in 2004, has said in debates that he was proud to serve on the Telegraph Hill Dwellers Board for three years, citing his alleged involvement in stopping the Mills Corporation’s development at Piers 27 and 31, improving the Broadway corridor, and working on neighborhood parks.

But a former THD Board member says Alioto’s claims are wildly overstated.

"He did not achieve anything in North Beach as a board member," our source said. "His attendance was poor, he lacked leadership, and when he was asked to head a Broadway corridor subcommittee to tackle the Saturday night issue, he said no, he was too busy. He was on the opposite side of all our policies and goals. There were even questions whether he was residing in the district, when he house-sat for his parents in the East Bay."

In a March 2006 e-mail to THD members, Alioto acknowledges that he and his wife had indeed been house-sitting in the East Bay for months while his parents were in Italy. "Of course, I have never intended to stay in the East Bay, my being there for simply a temporary period," Alioto wrote, referring to the Supreme Court’s definition of residency, which he said he "relied on to continue to contribute to THD activities."

THD board members aren’t the only ones accusing Alioto of stretching the truth.

The Sierra Club’s John Rizzo is irate over the use of the club’s name in a recent Alioto campaign mailer in which Alioto claims that he helped create the San Francisco Climate Challenge "in collaboration with the Sierra Club and DF Environment."

"What he says is highly misleading," Rizzo told the Guardian. "It makes it sound like an ongoing effort he cofounded with the Sierra Club, but it was a one-time effort that, while worthwhile, only lasted a month and is over and done with."

Rizzo further noted that Alioto did not complete or return the Sierra Club’s candidate questionnaire, as is requested of candidates seeking the club’s political endorsement. Alioto also has ruffled feathers by claiming that he prosecuted criminal cases while working in the Alameda County District Attorney’s office in 1999.

Alameda County Senior Deputy District Attorney Kevin Dunleavy told the Guardian that Alioto was, in fact, "a summer intern, a student law clerk working under supervision" in 1999. "He got to prosecute a few cases under our supervision, including a misdemeanor jury trial, but he never worked as an actual deputy DA," Dunleavy said.

But Alioto’s alleged distortions have tenants’ rights advocates like Ted Gullicksen of the San Francisco Tenants Union wondering if Alioto will preserve rent control and try to abolish the Ellis Act, as he has promised on the campaign trail. Alioto never completed a Tenants Union candidate endorsement questionnaire, and has a massive amount of financial backing from the same downtown real estate and business interests that support his anti-tenant sister, Alioto-Pier.

Campaign disclosures show that Alioto’s campaign consultant, Stephanie Roumeliotes, led the Committee to Reelect Michela Alioto-Pier in 2006. Roumeliotes is also working on two other political campaigns this fall: No on B, which opposes the affordable housing set-aside, and Yes on P, which supports giving Mayor Newsom even greater control of how transportation funds are allocated and spent, and which even Alioto-Pier joined the Board of Supervisors in unanimously opposing.

Public records show that the Alioto siblings have 160 of the same campaign contributors. These include Gap founder Donald Fisher, wealthy socialite Dede Wilsey, and Nathan Nayman, former executive director of the Committee on Jobs, a downtown political action committee funneling big money into preferred candidates like Alioto.

All of which has progressives worrying that Alioto and his sister could become the Donny and Marie Osmond tag team for the same Republican downtown interests that are seeking to overturn the city’s universal health care and municipal identity card programs.

Talking by phone last week after months of stonewalling the Guardian’s requests for an interview, Alioto told us that he admires his sister very much, but that does not mean he shares her beliefs. "She has been through more in her relatively short life than most of us, and she does a great job representing her district," Alioto said. "But we are not the same people. Just because we are siblings does not mean we think the same."

Noting that, unlike his sister, he supports Proposition M, (which would protect tenants from landlord harassment), Alioto said, "If Michela ever proposed legislation that I thought was bad for the district and city, I’d vote against it."

Asked why he opposes the affordable housing measure Prop. B, Alioto told us that he doesn’t think that "locking away any more of our money helps … but I support affordable housing for low-income folks, including rental units, and we need more middle-income housing for police officers, firefighters, nurses and teachers."

As for his endorsement by the rabidly anti-rent control SF Small Property Owners, Alioto said, "I think people are supporting me because I’d be fair and reasonable."

Alioto, who attended Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley and works as an antitrust lawyer at the Alioto Law Firm with brother-in-law Tom Pier, insists that he never claimed he’d been a deputy DA, "but I have a proven record of being interested in putting criminals behind bars."

Noting that he supports the property tax measures on the ballot, "notwithstanding the fact that some real estate interests supporting my campaign are opposed," Alioto further claimed that estimates that a third of his campaign money is from real estate interests are "severely overblown."

"I think they must have been including architects," he told us.

Asked about the Golden Gate Restaurant Association’s lawsuit against the city’s universal health care ordinance, Alioto said he supports Healthy San Francisco, "but I am concerned a little about putting the burden on small business."

Claiming that he supports the mayor’s community justice center as well as "funding for whatever programs it diverts people to," Alioto talked about kick-starting the economy in blighted areas by creating jobs and incentives for small businesses in those districts. Alioto, who just saw the San Francisco Small Business Advocates kick down $9,500 in support of his campaign, also said he wants to increase the number of entertainment permits, add a movie theater, and decrease parking fees in Chinatown.

"And I support the [Chinatown] night markets," Alioto said, referring to a pet project of Pius Lee, whose Chinatown neighborhood association was found, during a 2006 audit instigated by Peskin, to have received excess city funds and allowed unlicensed merchants to participate in the markets.

But Lee is evidently now in good standing with Alioto and Mayor Gavin Newsom, since he accompanied both on a recent walkabout to boost Alioto’s standing with Chinatown merchants. And Alioto’s election is apparently very important to Newsom, given that the first public appearance the mayor made after returning from his African honeymoon was on behalf of Alioto’s campaign.

All of which seems to confirm progressives’ worst fears that Alioto, just like his sister before him, will become yet another Newsom call-up vote on the board. Three ethics complaints were filed against the Alioto campaign this week, and his detractors say he has a long history of questionable behavior, going back to 1996 when he had a severe ethical lapse while working on his sister’s campaign for Congress.

According to a July 27, 1996 Chronicle article, Alioto, who was then his sister’s campaign adviser, and their cousin, college student Steve Cannata, admitted they conspired to intercept the campaign material of Michela’s congressional opponent, Frank Riggs.

"If Miss Alioto tolerates this sort of deceit in her campaign, it is frightening to imagine how she would behave if ever elected," Riggs wrote at the time. Alioto-Pier lost that race. But if her brother wins this November, can progressives help but be a little frightened to imagine just how the Alioto siblings might behave?

As one observer who preferred to remain anonymous told us, "Alioto may be all Joe Personality on the campaign trail, and have the same photogenic smile as his sister, but in reality, he is a fraud."

Ritual de lo non-habitual

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Since rituals necessitate a community of believers, presenting one for an audience in a theater runs the risk of becoming a mere item of cultural consumption. Yet, on Oct. 16, master drummer-vocalist-dancer Dohee Lee went beyond expectations. Her oddly named Flux succeeded best in its most ritualistic elements — the moments when it called up soul-wrenching memory, pain, and reconciliation.

The title refers to the ever-changing aspects of all creation. That’s a cliché and doesn’t tell us much about the nature of this, at times, powerful work of dance theater created by the Korean-born Lee and a slew of excellent collaborators. Foremost among them are the musicians of Asian Improv Arts: Francis Wong; Tatsu Aoki, who also created one of Flux‘s films; Jason Lewis; and Jonathan Chen. They are master performers. And as a result of their efforts — along with Lee’s — Flux‘s seamless unity of dance and music made for an exceedingly rare experience. The only other dancer besides Lee was the very capable Sherwood Chen. Relegated for the most part to subsidiary roles, he was, however, underused.

Using the I-Ching as a shaping device and philosophical tool, Lee divided the evocative Flux into nine sections, helpfully explained in the program insert. The work started on a dreamy note and moved through historical sequences to the climactic dramatization focusing on the memory of Lee’s grandmother. The piece wound down to a peaceful, even joyously embracing close with the traditional passing of the Banyayoungsun, the ship that connects the living with ancestors.

Deann Borshay Liem’s excellent appropriations of historic Korean films included sepia-colored portraits of ordinary men and women in addition to haunting sequences of refugees, corpses, and iconic symbols. Combined with Aoki’s more abstract images — water, fire, wind, a ravine — which set the context for the individual sections, Flux captured the experiences of a specific people while placing them in a universal context of human experience. Less effectively, the program notes to the "Fire=Trade" sequence seemed a little naïve in the way it commemorated only the unequal trade treaties "between the US and Korea from 1850 to the present." It’s not as if Asian nations and European powers were entirely innocent when it came to Korea’s woes.

As a performer, Lee is a wonder of versatility and strength. In "Water," she commenced the refugee’s journey by stepping gingerly into the sea, her feet floating and blindly attempting to find firmer ground — her only guide a fan-shaped wooden rattle. In "Thunder," she played a battery of Korean drums with an increasingly furious intensity as we stared at those all-too-familiar images of terrorized faces and rows of bodies, victims of war. In the somewhat prolonged finale, a bouncy, almost jazz-like freedom propelled Lee into a rollicking celebration of hope.

Lee’s duets and the choreography for Chen, in contrast, looked uncertain. They spoke of what may be inexperience choreographing for other dancers. Yet as a soloist, Lee is outstanding. The "Mountain" section was an astounding tour de force that started on a rather low-key interchange between a child and her grandmother, then swelled into something approaching the demonic. The program notes explained that the old woman was recalling her experience during the Korean War, and that the style evokes Korean opera.

The moment was as dramatically powerful as anything in Puccini — and those vocalists don’t dance. Though performed in Korean and therefore verbally unintelligible to many in the audience, the trajectory of this tale of pain and fury was crystal clear. Bent over and dragging a drum behind her, Lee gradually straightened and then whipped herself into shamanistic ecstasy. In the end, standing on her drum, she returned to her guise as a fragile human being. It was the closest thing to a ritual that you are likely to see onstage. *

Little Delhi

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Manhattan joke: a part of Murray Hill, along Lexington Avenue in the ’20s, is known as Curry Hill because of its profusion of Indian and Pakistani restaurants. Even if you hadn’t heard the joke, you would probably recognize the neighborhood’s scent: no cuisine I’m aware of has a stronger or clearer olfactory signature. (Backyard barbecuing might deserve an honorable mention.)

We have our own Curry Hill, but it’s on Nob Hill, which pretty well mutes the word play, if not the scent. A major curry locus can be found on Jones Street south of Geary Boulevard, where the perfumed air is reminiscent of a spice market. But there is another node not far away, although perhaps — to vitiate the pun utterly — not on Nob Hill at all. I speak of the corner of Mason and Eddy streets, just a few steps from Union Square, the theater district, and the glamorous Westfield San Francisco Centre, and even fewer steps from the Tenderloin. If you’ve ever wondered what economic stratification, third world-style, might look like in a big American city, a brief reconnoiter of this largely flat area would give you a pretty good idea.

As for the corner itself: the air is redolent of curry, and for some of us, that means seduction. On one side of the street stands Punjab, wonderfully fragrant but with no table service, while on the other we find Little Delhi, an Indian restaurant that’s as comfortable as a pair of well-worn shoes, with table service.

As someone who bears witness to a great many restaurants that seem to have entered the world fully-formed under the godlike guidance of some designer, I warm to a place whose interior isn’t designed so much as accreted. Little Delhi has a well-lived-in look; its creamy walls are hung with portraits, tapestries, a map, and a flat-panel screen showing sports. The crowd is equally ad hoc: we noticed several tables full of what appeared to be (non-English-speaking) tourists, several more of possible neighborhood dwellers, including students (CCSF and Academy of Art College have campuses nearby), and a generous smattering of people who could have been of south Asian descent. This last convergence suggests, to me, a degree of authenticity. If people who grow up eating a cuisine later turn up in a restaurant serving the cuisine, there’s a reasonable chance the restaurant is turning out creditable versions of the food.

And Little Delhi is doing that — at moderate prices. Most of the menu consists of dishes that cost less than $10, and portions are generous. There are plenty of familiar faces in the crowd, including a notably good saag paneer ($7.99) — spiced spinach with cubes of white cheese — whose mild seasoning let through more spinach flavor than is usual. We were vaguely reminded of the creamed spinach that is a fixture of many a holiday repast in our part of the world.

A preparation I hadn’t seen before was badami chicken ($9.99), boneless chunks of tandoori-roasted meat in a curry (and yogurt-thickened?) sauce laced with slivers of pistachio and cashew nuts. It was a near, and crunchy, relation to that lovable stalwart, chicken tikka masala, but what most impressed me was a smokiness in the meat that managed to be heard through the assertive saucing.

Quite similar was lamb tikka masala ($9.99), cubes of tandoori-roasted lamb in another sensuous sauce, this one a bit redder, sweeter, and more tomatoey than its badami cousin, due perhaps to the presence of ketchup. (Ketchup — English ketchup in particular — plays a central role in the evolution of tikka masala.) Lamb’s gaminess stands up to strong saucing, though I caught no hint of smoke here as I had with the chicken.

As is typical at south Asian restaurants, the list of meatless possibilities is extensive, and this is good news for vegetarians, even us flexos. We were particularly impressed with chana masala ($6.99), a classic dish of chickpeas, enlivened here with slices of tomato and whole cardamom pods. These softened some from being braised and, when chewed on, gave off their refreshing woody flavor, with its hints of cinnamon and ginger. Cardamom is rich in a substance called cineole, a natural antiseptic that can fight bad breath. FYI.

From the oven: perfectly good naan ($1.50), cut into triangles for ease of use in sopping up all those irresistible sauces. For whole wheat aficionados, there’s roti (also $1.50) — virtually the same thing, except made from whole grain. Also useful for sauce-soppers is rice pillau ($2), a sizable dish of basmati rice. "Pillau" looks suspiciously like "pilaf," which would mean rice cooked in some kind of stock. This rice appeared to have been cooked in plain water, which didn’t do much for its color — it looked like a gritty heap of corn snow — but did show its wonderful nutty flavor to clearest effect.

Basmati is so tasty, in fact, that demand for it has been surging in India and throughout the Middle East. According to a story published in July in The Wall Street Journal, its price has risen between 100 and 200 percent in the past two years. So let’s count ourselves lucky to be able to enjoy this modest luxury for so little — a treat that won’t break the bank, not that there are all that many banks left to be broken. May the Fed be with you. *

LITTLE DELHI

Daily, 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.

83 Eddy, SF

(415) 398-3173

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Anniversary Issue: Culture isn’t convenient

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› molly@sfbg.com

San Francisco is the playpen of countercultures.

— R.Z. Sheppard, Time (1986)

I live near Church and Market streets, which means I’m stumbling distance from an organic grocery store, my favorite bar, several Muni stops, and a 24-hour diner. It also means the street outside my apartment is usually loud, the gutters are disgusting, there are rarely parking spots, and transients sleep, smoke, panhandle, and play really bad music near my front doorstep.

Actually, until recently, they did a lot of this on my front doorstep. Then the landlords — without asking us first — installed a gate. And I hate it. Yes, my stairs are cleaner. I suppose my stuff is safer. But I’m no longer as connected to my community. I’m separated from the life that’s happening on the street — the very reason I moved to this neighborhood in the first place. I fear I’ve lost more than I’ve gained.

Lately our city’s approach to entertainment and nightlife has been like that fence. While protecting people from noise, mess, and potential safety concerns, we’re threatening the very things we love about this city. Thanks to dwindling city budgets and increasingly vocal NIMBYs, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to manage nightclubs, plan street fairs, and organize outdoor festivals. And as we continue to build million-dollar condos at a brisk place, the city is filling up with affluent residents who may not appreciate the inherent messiness of city living. We’re at risk of locking away (and therefore losing) the events that make this a vibrant place where we want to live.

The recent history of this issue can be traced to the 1990s, when dot-com gold brought live/work lofts to otherwise non-residential neighborhoods — and plenty of new residents to live in them. Those newcomers, perhaps used to the peace and quiet of the suburbs, or maybe expecting more comfort in exchange for their exorbitant monthly rent checks, didn’t want to hear the End Up’s late-night set or deal with riffraff from Folsom Street Fair peeing in their driveways. Conflicts escalated. The Police Department station in SoMa, responsible for issuing venue permits and for enforcing their conditions, embarked on a plan to shut down half the area’s nightclubs. Luckily, city government and citizens agreed to save the threatened venues and the police captain responsible for the proposal was transferred to the airport, the San Francisco equivalent of political exile. In 2003, the Entertainment Commission was formed, in part to take over the role of granting venue and event permits.

But as Guardian readers know, the problem was not solved. As we’ve covered in several stories ["The death of fun" (05/23/06), "Death of fun, the sequel," (04/25/07), "Fighting for the right to party" (07/02/08)], beloved events and venues are still at risk. How Weird Street Fair was forced to change locations. Halloween in the Castro District was cancelled altogether. Alcohol was banned at the Haight Ashbury Street Fair and restricted at the North Beach Jazz Festival. Fees are still increasing. Rules are getting more stringent. As we predicted, it’s getting harder and harder to have fun in San Francisco. And while it’s the job of the Entertainment Commission to prevent problems while protecting our right to party, it has never been given enough funding, staff or authority to properly do its job.

So why should we care? Our legendary nightlife, festivals, and parades bring international tourists to our city — where they stay in hotels, eat at restaurants, shop at stores, and otherwise pump money into our economy. Street fairs give us ways to connect to our neighbors and our neighborhoods. Free events (which, if permit fees increase and alcohol sales are prohibited, will be a thing of the past) give equal access to fun and frivolity to people in all income brackets — and most raise money for charities and nonprofits. Particular venues and happenings provide an important way for those in the counterculture — whether that’s LGBT youth or progressive artists — to meet, mingle, and support each other. And none of that captures the intangible quality of living in a city where freedom, tolerance, and the pursuit of a good time are supported. And all this is one of the reasons many of us moved here, where we pay taxes (and parking tickets), open businesses, start organizations, and contribute to our already diverse and vibrant population.

But if we don’t establish a way to protect our culture, personally and legally, we may lose it. Instead, we need an overarching policy that establishes our values as well as the legal ways we can go about supporting them. The Music and Culture Charter Amendment, in the works for more than three years and currently sitting before the Board of Supervisors, aims to do exactly this.

The most important part of the amendment, created by a coalition of artists, musicians, event planners, club owners, and concerned citizens who call themselves Save SF Culture, would be to revise San Francisco’s General Plan to include an entertainment and nightlife element, just as the current plan contains an entire section devoted to the protection of (presumably mainstream) dance, theater, music, and art, calling them "central to the essence and character of the city." Not only would this amendment mandate that future lawmakers try to preserve events and venues, it would give a roadmap on how to do this effectively — most notably by creating a streamlined, transparent, online permitting process for special events.

Yet even if this important amendment passes and wins the mayor’s signature (which is hardly a sure thing), that’s just the beginning of a process of figuring out how to sustain San Francisco’s culture in the face of potentially threatening socioeconomic changes. At the very least, the next step will be giving the Entertainment Commission the full funding and staff (it currently operates with five of the eight staffers required). And once our beloved clubs and events are out of immediate danger, it will be time to form a coalition of citizens, government officials, and city planners to decide how and where culture in our city should grow, asking questions like whether or not we want a large-scale amphitheater or if we need to designate an area as an entertainment district. Most important, the city needs to develop a framework for resolving the inevitable conflicts with NIMBYs in a way that promotes a vibrant culture.

Yet there’s also a role in this process for each citizen of San Francisco. We need to remind ourselves and our neighbors that tolerance is one of our core civic values, tolerance for different races, classes, genders, sexual identities, and for the potentially noisy, messy, chaotic ways our culture supports those differences. If we erect a gate — physical or metaphorical — every time we’re uncomfortable or inconvenienced, we’ll turn San Francisco into the sanitized, homogenous, boring suburbs that I moved to Church and Market to escape. *

The land of the screen

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>johnny@sfbg.com

My flight to Canada was delayed, so I missed James Benning’s RR, the first film I planned to see at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival. Plane snafus kept me from seeing Benning’s film about trains, which had graced the cover of a recent Guardian issue devoted to life on the rails (and by extension, American capitalism off the rails). The first face to greet me in Canada was that of Sarah Palin, on TV screens by the arrival gate and above the luggage carousel. There she was, again, this time at the Vice Presidential debate. Since the airport TVs were muted, her lines of dialogue took the form of subtitles.

Even though I missed RR, Benning’s influence was present in a pair of sharp-eyed features by women who map personal visions of the United States. Train-hopping figures in the beginning and end of Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to 2006’s Old Joy. At the start of the film, Wendy (Michelle Williams, in a role that’s taken on an added subtext of grief) and Lucy (played by Reichardt’s dog of the same name) walk into a beatific but beat-up nighttime campfire scene that’s like a Polaroid Kidd photo come to life. By the end, at least one of them has forsaken fuel car for train car.

A different story involving one woman, a camera, and the land, Lee Anne Schmitt’s California Company Town takes a more direct look at the American landscape. Schmitt’s documentary adds another volume to a growing collection of rural and urban US portraits by Cal Arts alumni, from Benning to Thom Andersen (whose 2003 Los Angeles Plays Itself shares Schmitt’s focus on California history) and William E. Jones (whose increasingly significant 1991 Massillon might be the precedent for Schmitt’s mix of voiceover and radio chatter, as well as her use of 16mm film). No doubt about it: Schmitt’s dry, scathing report on the fatal nature of California capitalism and the greater American dream was the festival’s timeliest film.

The unsentimental relevance of California Company Town hasn’t kept some viewers from blaming the messenger, who aims to provoke by capping her survey of the state’s ghost towns with a voiceless look at Silicon Valley, where even nature takes on a sterile, cult-like ambiance. At Vancouver and elsewhere, Terence Davies has been praised for Of Time and the City, his voiceover-heavy screed against capitalism’s facelifts for Liverpool, yet Schmitt’s relatively low-key approach to similar subject matter pisses off more people. For some, maybe the truth — especially when accompanied by Irma Thomas’ "Time is on My Side"— stings most when spoken by a woman. Andersen and Fred Halsted have demonstrated that Los Angeles plays itself. Schmitt shows how California plays us.

Both capitalism and socialism are skewered with no mercy and maximum mirth by Jim Finn’s The Juche Idea, which takes the published film theories of none other than Kim Jong-Il as its point of entry. If the extreme solitude of Schmitt’s film demonstrates one type of (autobiographical) radical filmmaking ideal, then Finn’s madcap feature demonstrates another. It’s a playfully braided collaborative effort. The main actresses (Jung Yoon Lee, and Daniela Kostova — a painter, video artist, and "the lesbian" on Big Brother Bulgaria 4) wryly insert their authorial voices and visual creativity into the film’s world. And what a mad, mad, mad world it is: one where Korean language courses teach kids how to pronounce "Karl Marx was a friend to children" and instruct adults on how to relieve their "loose bowels."

This world — where shoveling duck dung together makes for a romantic first date — looks like North Korea, one has to guess, or at least "Dear Leader’s" ideal version. Still, reviewers who assume capitalism emerges unscathed from the uproarious Juche Idea are watching the movie with one eye closed. Finn spotlights hilarious propagandistic turns of phrase such as "the tiny dentures of imperialism." But with one capitalist land outside the movie screen saddled with a 700 billion dollar debt, a viewer is left to wonder who’s zooming who when passing through the film’s multi-faceted looking glass. Jaw-dropping stadium-size spectacle, punch line-worthy blue screen backdrops, a mural by SF painter Carolyn Ryder Cooley, and the type of absurd corporate training footage beloved by Animal Charm all figure within Finn’s one-of-a-kind picture. The closing titles credit more than one person with "Kim Jong Il Flyface Assistance." Make no mistake: The Juche Idea is a communal effort.

Communal cooperation and journeys through the looking glass are also at play in Albert Serra’s Birdsong and Vancouver International Film Fest programmer Mark Peranson’s documentary about Serra’s movie, Waiting for Sancho. If Schmitt’s California Company Town is near-academically reductive and definitive in its approach to land, Serra’s Birdsong couldn’t be less prescriptive: with help from Google Image, the director chose the Canary Islands as a last-minute setting for his idiosyncratic retelling of the birth of the Christ child.

Process is to the fore of Serra’s filmmaking, which combines Andy Warhol’s and Apichatpong’s interest in boredom (and Warhol’s carefree neglect of camerawork) with a comic view of the heroic quest. Serra’s more immediately pleasurable Honour of the Knights (2006) updated Don Quixote; this time, the Three Wise Men verge on Three Stooges trapped in a Beckett scenario. Birdsong improves after one observes its filming through the video camera of Peranson (who plays Joseph in Serra’s movie). The ancient Three Wise Men of Serra’s film multiply to become a contemporary crew in Peranson’s documentary, which charts an aimless yet instinctive search for just the right cinematic moment at just the right site.

Communal cinematic spirit also enlivens Brillante Mendoza’s Serbis, a day-in-the-life melodrama about a family that operates — and lives within — a soft-core porn theater where hustlers ply their trade. At Cannes this year, Mendoza’s movie inspired panty-twist outrage from critics rich enough to be proudly unaware that people have bodies and sex costs money. While Serbis definitely owes a debt to Tsai Ming-liang’s masterful Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2004) and Jacques Nolot’s Porn Theatre (2003), Mendoza charts out and navigates a unique meta-cinematic space that is somehow even sun-dappled. He’s helped considerably by the superb actress Gina Paredes — and by a last-minute cameo from a goat.

Cooperative efforts aside, Vancouver didn’t lack commercial films powered by old-school singular auteur visions. One such standout was Hunger, the directorial debut of the English artist (not the deceased American actor) Steve McQueen. The formal daring of McQueen’s rendering of Bobby Sands and the IRA — which veers from wordless passages into a one-take presentation of an extended conversation — doesn’t become apparent until the very end, when his film suddenly embraces the award-grubbing political docudrama clichés that it’s avoided. Regardless, McQueen’s talent for framing shots and constructing scenes is prodigious. Tomas Alfredson makes no such missteps with Let the Right One In. If you see only one Swedish preteen vampire romance in your life, make it this one. The planned US version by Cloverfield director Matt Reeves will almost certainly lack Alfredson’s pop translations of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s desire and fire. Likewise, the subversive preteen sexuality of Alfredson’s original is unlikely to make the trip from Sweden to California. Vampires bite, but Hollywood remakes really suck.

Writing on the Wallpaper

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SONIC REDUCER Everyone knows sex sells. But who knew, so many years ago, when hip-hop was still reporting from the streets and dance music revolved round the love and stardust thrown off those glittering mirrored balls, that overt consumption itself would sell just as well? So much of today’s mainstream pop and hip-hop continues to hobble along on the crutch of an all-glam, imagination-free, Benjamin-flaunting, daydream-stoking, showroom/showoff mentality, which masquerades as genuine energy and originality. Check, for instance, T.I.’s Cinderella-fantasy "Whatever You Like" video. Still, is Britney Spears ushering in a recession-era pop backlash against gimme-gimme materialism with her recent "Womanizer" clip? Its up-to-the-millisecond, dashed-off put-down of Wall Street traders ‘n’ traitors is delivered nekkid from a detoxing, rehab-ready sauna.

And you know the East Bay’s dance-pop provocateur Wallpaper is on that tip — with his own ironic-hip-cat zazu. The Wallpaper project itself, says mastermind Eric Frederic, is "a device to critique pop music but also popular culture, and I think things are getting exponentially worse — as far as consumer culture, cell phone culture, the culture of me goes. Even for those of us who think we understand it and are separate from it."

Take, for example, texting — my least favorite thing to watch in a dark movie theater and the subject of Wallpaper’s "Txt Me Yr Love" off its T Rex EP (Eenie Meenie). "That song is obviously a knock on text-obsessed people," Frederic continues. "But I probably send 100 text messages a day. I do it way more than I want to and way more than I’m comfortable with, and that represents, again, an inner struggle with this kind of stuff."

Fighting, thought-provoking words from a sharp, very funny mind. I first caught Wallpaper a while back at Bottom of the Hill, and Frederic’s uncanny pop hooks and cheesy-hilarious way of styling his performance — delivered in character, from a vinyl La-Z-Boy, as the egocentric would-be-superstar Ricky Reed, alongside drummer Arjun Singh — made me bookmark him for better or worse. Whether you catch the two live or Frederic in one of his wittily clueless video blog entries, you’ll find that Wallpaper brings that sense of humor so sorely missing from local pop, dance, and indie rock scenes.

And rest assured, the tousled-haired songwriter, who just graduated with a degree in composition from UC Berkeley, is nothing like his satirical persona.

"The character is a real jerk, and I don’t want to be anything like him or embody him in my daily life at all," says the Bay Area native while tackling a turkey sandwich at Brainwash Cafe. "He’s arrogant, and he’s chauvinistic, and he’s material-obsessed. He just represents everything that bums me out." Frederic laughs. "He’s not very bright. He doesn’t really get it, and he doesn’t realize that the joke’s on him half the time." Hence the surprised reactions from fans — apparently Wallpaper blew minds during their ’08 Brooklyn and Philadelphia shows — when they approach Frederic. "Usually the first response is, ‘I didn’t think you were going to be so nice to me!’"

He’s nice and hard-working apparently: Frederic toiled on the EP, played alongside party-starters like Dan Deacon, and did some requisite remixes while completing work on his degree, and now he’s deep into making an album, a form that he’s studying intently.

"It’s definitely hard because with today’s music culture or climate, you have to do remixes and video blogs and stuff just to keep people’s attention. Making a really intensive, really smart full-length record while doing all that stuff with a short period of time is really challenging," he says. Frederic’s happy with what he has, but "I put a lot of pressure on myself," says the songwriter who, in one hilarious video blog, threatened to quit the biz if Wallpaper’s EP was outsold by Grand Theft Audio IV. "I’ve been listening to Thriller about every other day. If you don’t set your goals to be the best, what are you going to do? Just be mediocre or halfway to the median? There’s no reason why anybody should not be trying to make timeless records." And who would get the last laugh if this semi-joke band made one of those? *

WALLPAPER

Fri/17, 10 p.m., $10–$15

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

www.rickshawstop.com


BARACK OUT OR …

LAIKA AND THE COSMONAUTS
Wipe…out! The Finnish surf combo bids, "Aloha," with this farewell tour. With Pollo Del Mar and the Go Going Gone Girls. Thurs/16, 8 p.m., $12. Rickshaw Stop.

GRUPO FANTASMA
Austin’s funky jamkins meld reggae, cumbia, and salsa grooves to a great din of buzz. With Boca Do Rio. Fri/17, 9 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.independentsf.com

MARY J. BLIGE
More drama, puleeze. With Robin Thicke. Sat/18, 7:30 p.m., $33.75–$119.75. Sleep Train Pavilion, 2000 Kirker Pass, Concord. www.livenation.com

TINA TURNER
Love’s got everything to do with it when it came to adding another show to the leggy legend’s San Jose stand. Sun/19-Mon/20, 7 p.m., $59.50–$150. HP Pavilion, 525 W. Santa Clara, San Jose. www.apeconcerts.com
KILLERS
Will the upcoming Day and Age (Island) be another Bruce’s — I mean —Sam’s Town (Island, 2006)? Tues/21, 8 p.m., $37.50. Warfield, 982 Market, SF. www.goldenvoice.com

San Francisco Trolley Dances

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PREVIEW How many more 38s do I have to look at when I really need the 5? And how come the 35 is always empty, while you can’t find a spot to put your feet, not to mention a seat, on the 22? Muni manages to infuriate just about everybody — from the latte-clutching N-Judah riders to the grocery bag-shlepping "Chinatown Express" shoppers.

Still, I’ve never lived in a city where people did not vociferously complain about their public transportation system. That’s why San Francisco Trolley Dances is such a neat idea. No, they are not another Muni pacification plan, but the brainchild of local choreographer Kim Epifano. If you are a stickler for accuracy, the idea came from Jean Isaacs Dance Theater in San Diego where they do have trolleys. For this year’s San Francisco Trolley Dances you board the new T-Third Street line anywhere between Mission Bay and Bayview-Hunters Point. Besides taking you through vastly varied cityscapes, you can watch performances on the street as you ride by or get off at designated spots. Scott Wells and his high-flying acrobat/dancers will send you off at Fourth and Berry streets, and Joanna Haigood’s community dancers will welcome you in front of the Bayview Opera House. All that for $1.50.

SAN FRANCISCO TROLLEY DANCES Sat/18-Sun/19, 11 a.m.–2:45 p.m. (rides start every 45 minutes from Fourth and Berry streets), $1.50 or Fast Pass. (415) 226-1139, www.epiphanydance.org

Pop Montreal part two: Irma Thomas, Silver Apples, DD/MM/YYYY, and more

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silverapplesintheday.jpg
Ripe for the picking? Silver Apples’ Simeon back in the day.

By Laura Mojonnier

A snapshot of the Pop Montreal festival, Oct. 2.

Irma Thomas at Ukranian Federation, 8:30 p.m.

The night started off with a bike ride up north into Montreal’s Mile End area to catch Irma Thomas and a full backing band play the Ukrainian Federation.

I’d only been to this venue once before, to see Patti Smith play a secret show at last year’s festival, and the place certainly seems made for that kind of gig. The venue feels like a cross between a middle school auditorium and a Protestant church, rows of 40-year-old theater seating on the first floor and a pewed balcony for the choir. In conclusion, Ukranian Federation is not great for rocking out, but it’s just perfect when watching Thomas belt torch songs for middle-aged Quebecers.

Duke’s gonna get ’em: High Decibels’ main man turns that shit into gold

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By Billy Jam

Shit happens. We all know that. But it’s what we do with that shit in life that is the important part. In the case of East Oaklander Duke, ne D’Andre Johnson, of new Oakland rap group with a blues twist, the High Decibels, the MC/poet has managed to take the negatives dealt him in life and spin them into something a lot more positive.

In fact if weren’t for one of his earliest humiliations as an artist – being booed offstage at a talent showcase at his Oakland high school – that he wouldn’t be doing what he is doing right now. “I went to Skyline High School, and at that school, they have a really good performing arts program, and they do this thing called “Showtime at the Line,” like at the Apollo with the Sandman and all,” he recently recalled of the night that he and his brother entered the contest. They were confident that their rap performance would win over the audience.

Not so. “The theater holds like five thousand people and it was packed. So we started out our song, and the music started skipping. And I was first. I just started busting a cappella. The music came back on and I was off beat. And we got booed off the stage,” said Duke of the incident that happened about eight years ago when he was 14. “And for the next year I would be walking down the hallway and one person would start booing, and before I would get to the end of the hallway, the whole hallway was booing.”

That Dude

New new wave

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Everything changes, civilizations collapse, end times approach and recede, but there are always good movies from France. How can this be so? Every film culture has its periods of pervasive suckingness. France perhaps had one: the 1950s, when the stagnation of vapid costume epics and such made bores of icons like Jean Gabin, provoking the nouvelle vague as creative protest. But even then you could find some gems every year, by the not-shabby likes of Ophüls or Tati.

Thus the addition of yet another annual film festival to the Bay Area’s crammed calendar seems not only right, but bizarrely overdue. Surely there was some local equivalent to "French Cinema Now" before San Francisco Film Society hatched it? Non? Quelle horreur.

The spotlight this inaugural year is on attending writer-director Arnaud Desplechin (2004’s Kings and Queen). His latest, A Christmas Tale, which opens the event, encapsulates certain familiar Gallic cinema values: it’s an all-star dysfunctional-relationship blowout in which gaping verbal wounds are inflicted in a tone of light badinage, often amid lengthy meals enjoyed no matter how high the crises pile.

Catherine Deneuve is a matriarch whose health emergency necessitates the entire, drama-packed yet insouciant clan gather for Xmas — including Desplechin’s muse Mathieu Amalric (2007’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) as Henri, the son who’s such an obnoxious screwup he’s been "banished" from such gatherings for five years. The inevitability with which Henri will make everyone want to smack him is just the funniest of the myriad storm fronts brewing. You can get another big dose of Amalric as cause for multiple characters’ complaints in the director’s 1996 My Sex Life … or How I Got Into an Argument. There will also be a rare screening of his 1991 debut feature Life of the Dead.

That classically French template of character, ensemble, and dialogue-based seriocomedy — not to mention Amalric as a tantrum-prone theater director — is also on display in writer-director-star Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s amusing carnival of neuroses, Actresses (2007). Straddling fiction and nonfiction terrain is the closing night film by Laurent Cantet (2001’s Time Out), The Class. It’s a vérité-style urban schoolroom drama that arrives in SF preceded by sky-high praise and a Cannes Palme d’Or. Benjamin Marquet’s documentary, Lads and Jockeys, observes kids in a different educational setting: high-pressure training for a career in horse racing.

As in so many countries — though France’s industry holds its own pretty well — there are debates about whether Hollywood’s influence is snuffing out native culture or, conversely, whether homegrown product is too boring, arty, and lacking in explosions. Actually, that latter complaint grows less credible amid an emerging generation of interesting genre talents, even if many — like Alexandre Aja (2003’s Haute Tension) or Christophe Gans (2001’s Brotherhood of the Wolf) — all too quickly bolt for you-know-where. Franck Vestiel joins their ranks with Eden Log (2007), a dystopian fantasy boasting lots of dank atmosphere, almost no dialogue, and a serpentine plot that starts like 1997’s Cube and ends up more like The Matrix (1999).

Less edgy but likewise certainly not catering to art-house snobs is Pascal Bonitzer’s Alibi, a starry whodunit so old-school it’s actually got an Agatha Christie pedigree; while Dany Boon’s Welcome to the Sticks is a fish-out-of-water comedy that’s become the biggest hit in French cinematic history.

Last but not least, a screening of 1965’s seldom-revived Six in Paris flashes back to New Wave’s heyday and that once-ubiquitous art house animal, the omnibus film. Its half-dozen miniatures (by Rohmer, Godard, and lesser luminaries) set in different City of Light districts range from the playful to the shocking, ending with a 10-minute distillation of all things Claude Chabrol: gruesome death arrives as a sardonically just punishment for the irksome hypocrises of the petite bourgeoisie. *

FRENCH CINEMA NOW

Wed/8–Sun/12, see Rep Clock for schedule

$10–$15

Clay, 2261 Fillmore, SF

(925) 866-9559, www.sffs.org

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