War

They shoot, he scores

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FILM Even if you’ve never heard of the composer Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975), it’s a safe bet that you’ve quoted him at some point in your life. He’s the coauthor of the widely recognized shorthand for murder and mayhem, the mimed downward thrust of a knife accompanied by the high-pitched squeal, "Wee! Wee! Wee!" His collaborator on this contribution to the pop lexicon was Alfred Hitchcock, and its place of origin is, of course, 1960’s Psycho.

Herrmann, one of the most influential composers ever to work in the film industry, actually ignored Hitchcock’s instruction to leave the shower scene untouched. Hitchcock thought Janet Leigh’s death would be scarier without music but immediately relented on listening to Herrmann’s strings tear into human flesh. (He wasn’t so dazzled six years later when Herrmann pulled the same shit with Torn Curtain‘s score; Hitch dismissed the orchestra in a rage when he discovered the composer recording music for a fight scene intended to be left alone.) Though he’s most popularly associated with Hitchcock — he also worked on The Trouble with Harry, Vertigo, and North by Northwest — Herrmann wrote dozens of scores for other directors and for television. I am partial to his theme for the first season of The Twilight Zone (though he didn’t write the "doo doo doo doo" that is the widely recognized shorthand for weird and creepy — that was introduced in the second season).

The Castro Theatre is giving Herrmann the same treatment it gave Ennio Morricone in April, programming a generous sampling of films featuring the composer’s work. Among the selections is his first Hollywood gig, a little picture called Citizen Kane. Herrmann, who followed Orson Welles to Hollywood, had already been working as composer for Welles’s radio anthology, The Mercury Theatre on the Air, for which Herrmann provided musical accompaniment to the mass hysteria of the famous War of the Worlds broadcast. Other inclusions in the Castro’s program are three Ray Harryhausen projects, Brian de Palma’s Vertigo-inspired Obsession, and the last film Herrmann ever scored, Taxi Driver.

His uncharacteristically sax-heavy score for Martin Scorsese’s film has never really been my cup of tea, to be honest. My favorites are the overture to 1962’s Cape Fear (which film composer Elmer Bernstein adapted and conducted for Scorsese’s remake), Psycho‘s Prelude (an obvious but unavoidable choice, all the more so thanks to Busta Rhymes’s "Gimme Some More"), the spiraling freefall of Vertigo‘s Prelude, and Fahrenheit 451‘s "Suite for Strings."

LEGENDARY COMPOSER: BERNARD HERRMANN

June 1–7, $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

The war vote

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EDITORIAL Democrat Dianne Feinstein, the senior senator from California, was "deeply disappointed" that the Iraq funding bill passed May 24 "fails to hold the president accountable for his flawed Iraq War policy." Or at least that’s what her official statement says. Yet like a majority of her colleagues, she voted in favor of spending another $100 billion on the war — because "it provides funding for our troops."

That’s the same line Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia used: the bill was "necessary to fund our troops who are now in harm’s way."

That, of course, is nonsense and a demonstration of how the Democratic leadership in Congress has failed to effectively confront a tottering, unpopular, lame-duck president on the most important issue facing the nation.

Let’s be real here: nobody was suggesting that the United States stop issuing paychecks to soldiers or that the money for their meals, uniforms, and ammunition be cut off. This was about politics, about who would blink first. And the Democrats gave up far too quickly.

George W. Bush had already vetoed one bill that would have tied war funding to a timetable for withdrawal. Some Democrats, including newly elected East Bay representative Jerry McNerny, argued that Congress ought to keep sending the same bill back, again and again — and tell the American people that it was Bush who was refusing to support the troops by not signing the measure. That would have set up a confrontation that sharpened the distinctions between Democrats and Republicans — and at a time when the president’s approval rating is below 30 percent and the war is immensely unpopular, it would have ultimately backfired on Bush. It would also have demonstrated to voters that the Democrats meant what they said when they made the war the central issue in the 2006 campaigns.

Instead, the party led by San Francisco’s Nancy Pelosi has apparently adopted a new strategy: wait for ’08. Instead of fighting aggressively to block any further war spending, the Democrats seem willing to let the conflict drag on for another year — hoping that the situation will get so much worse that it will guarantee a Democratic victory in the presidential race.

As pure politics, that may be smart: the more body bags arrive home each week, the fewer votes any Republican gets next fall. But as a matter of policy (and basic humanity), it’s unconscionable: Thousands more will die in the next 18 months. Billions of dollars will be wasted. The time to end the war is now, and we can all worry about the political consequences later.

Pelosi, to her credit, voted against the funding bill. So did Sen. Barbara Boxer. And all the Democrats promised that they wouldn’t let the issue die. The funding only lasts through September, and in the meantime, Congress will take up any number of other efforts to set timetables for withdrawal.

But this was the big one, the bill that could have forced an early end to the war. And it’s not surprising that so many of the millions of voters and grassroots activists who helped put the Democrats in power last fall are angry. Pelosi needs to show she can really lead this party and use the constitutional power the House and Senate have to withhold funding for the war. Forget the White House: another vote like this in September, and the party will have a hard time keeping the loyalists it needs to hold on to the power it has now. *

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I love the whales, really I do. I even worked for Greenpeace once. I am in awe of these majestic creatures of the deep and see them as indicators of the health of the entire marine environment. Human beings should take care of their cetaceous fellow citizens of the watery planet. Folks, I am so down with the whales.

Yet as the two errant humpbacks led the news again for about the fifth night in a row and the Coast Guard cutters and the helicopters and the array of state wildlife officials and veterinarians swarmed around the Sacramento River basin, I had to stop and wonder, for about the 50th time:

Why don’t they treat wayward people like this?

Every day the streets of San Francisco are full of injured human beings, members of the species Homo sapiens who have been hit by the psychic or physical equivalent of boat propellers. There are women with children who stagger homeless from one place to another, unable to find their way to a functional family.

These living, breathing mammals do not get a special multiagency task force set up, with a designated full-time Coast Guard petty officer as a media liaison and a staff of dozens of officials from the military, the state Department of Fish and Game, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They don’t receive what amounts to an unlimited budget to get their wounds treated and their lives turned around.

And the media doesn’t pay any attention to them. Even when they die, as a couple hundred do every year. Nobody who owns a helicopter gives a shit about homeless people in San Francisco.

I’m not going to argue against the whale-rescue effort. I don’t think the Coast Guard ignored any looming terrorist threats in the nearby Pacific or let any sailors die in capsized crafts while it was helping the whales. It was probably a good training exercise for all involved, and hell, if it cost a million bucks, that’s less than the Pentagon wastes every five minutes or so in Iraq. Go team.

I’m just saying, that’s all. I’m just saying.

———————————————

Way back in 1974, a guy named Sam Lovejoy went on trial for destroying a weather tower in Montague, Mass., that a local utility had built in preparation for the construction of a nuclear power plant. One of Lovejoy’s expert witnesses was John Gofman, a nuclear chemist and the author of the book Poison Power, who made the definitive argument against nuclear energy. The material created by a reactor, he said, must be guarded "99.9999 percent perfectly, in peace and war, with human error and human malice, guerrilla activities, psychotics, malfunction of equipment…. Do you believe there’s anything you’d like to guarantee will be done 99.9999 percent perfectly for 100,000 years?"

You can’t, was the point. Lovejoy walked.

And now, as Amanda Witherell reports in "Nuclear Greenwashing," page 15, the nuclear industry wants a new life. We all ought to know better. *

Step Up! Sheehan hangs up her helmet.

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By Sarah Phelan

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You can’t blame antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan for hanging up her helmet, but what excuse do the rest of us have? Sheehan kept the memory of her son alive and didn’t flinch from confronting the truth that her son died for a lie. With the bloodiest month since the US invaded Iraq coming to an end, it’s time for the rest of us to debunk Bush’s “war” myth. There were no WMDs. And there is no enemy, now Saddam is gone. Instead, we have an occupation, which can only end one way: when we leave. How many more American troops have to die for Bush’s war lie? One more is one too many. Tell Congress that it’s the decider, not Bush. Tell Congress to take back its power. Now.

Muse of fire

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Perhaps the most intriguing question about David Gordon’s Pick Up Performance Company’s Dancing Henry Five is why it works so well. Gordon took the third of William Shakespeare’s Henry plays, the monumental but stiff Henry V, sent it through the wringer of his imagination, and spit it out as what he calls in the subtitle "a pre-emptive (post modern) strike and spin." That’s about as razor-sharp and witty a label as you could stick on this elegant and prickly entertainment, which lasts for an hour but resonated well beyond the confines of the ODC Theater’s modest stage during its May 16 to 19 run.

Not that Gordon didn’t have plenty of help; for one, there is Shakespeare’s resonant language, taken from Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film version, which buoyed a dispirited Britain. Then there is William Walton’s mostly excellent score. And let’s not forget the Bushites, whose own strike and spin provided the impetus for this sly look at history repeated. As for Gordon’s eight-member ensemble ("plus three dummies," as Valda Setterfield, the key pin in this finely tuned work, makes a point of specifying), it is an admirably gifted and beautiful group of dancers.

Gordon is not the first to use dance and language in a fully integrated way, but few others have become as masterful at holding the two in perfect balance. In a nod to his roots in the Judson Dance Theater, his work looks casual and ordinary. The language can be everyday conversational, the dancing based on walking. But the commonplace surface is deceptive. Gordon has assembled his components with a clockmaker’s attention to using finely calibrated gears that interlock to create momentum and flow. The resulting work charms with easy grace but impresses through impeccable craft.

For Dancing, Gordon took key elements of Shakespeare’s play — Henry’s debauched youth, his politically expedient abandonment of old friends, his going to war for economic reasons and with the moral force of religion behind him — and spun them into a contemporary fable whose parallels at times amuse but more often cut deeply.

The British-born Setterfield, Gordon’s life and artistic partner for the past 30-plus years, was the key to setting the tone for a work that easily could be but never became preachy. Her clipped delivery — sometimes cool, sometimes wry, and always straightforward — set up an ironic contrast with the mellifluous sonority of the Shakespearean language heard on tape. She brilliantly navigated between her roles as master of ceremonies, observing chorus, and when necessary, the various characters. Her function, she explained, was "to fill in, fill up, and fill out." She did so with the simplest of means. With direct addresses to the audience, while scurrying about or from her pedestal on a ladder, she interpreted the swiftly moving narrative. As the dying Falstaff, with a pillow held as a belly, she shrank in front of our eyes; as a woman with an adult-size rag doll in her arms, she became a mother who has lost a child to war; and as an attendant to Catherine of France, she was dainty, subservient, yet authoritative.

For all its simplicity, Gordon’s choreography is structured in overlapping phrases and precisely timed rhythms that are endlessly fascinating. Much of the dancing is robust, but it is always inflected. In the opening passage, the apparently random walks had a slight bounce to them. The Dauphin’s insulting gift of tennis balls became a game of passing and bouncing — at first one, then two balls — while crisply circling walking patterns were maintained. During the multilevel battle of Agincourt, the pounding poles’ rhythmic accelerations suggested the rising violence. However, whether throwing dolls and folding chairs was the best way to choreograph the collapse of civility remains dubious.

Dancing is also elegant and refined. Setterfield’s charming English lesson to the future queen (a sturdy, fleet on her feet Karen Graham) was delivered as a minuet between the two women, their arms lacily acting out the anatomical vocabulary. After Falstaff’s death, Sadira A. Smith danced a lyrical solo that mourned the loss of innocence. In the courting duet, which became a trio with Setterfield as an intermediary, the dour king (a stocky Tadej Brdnik) even managed a low-level jeté or two. The costumes were rugby inspired, and Jennifer Tipton’s lush lighting design was brilliant. *

Holdin’ the weight of the Bay

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Still looks like slavery

But it’s the black legacy

Mistah FAB, "100 Bars"

One night last September, I hitch a ride with G-Stack of the Delinquents and Dotrix of Tha Mekanix to Dem Hoodstarz’s album release party in San Francisco. As we park outside the club, Mistah FAB rolls up with a modest posse. In contrast to his usual iced-out Technicolor clubwear, the man also known as Fabby Davis Jr. is low-key, dressed all in black, a pair of designer stunna shades supplying the main clue to his identity. He hops in Stack’s car to hear a newly laid track for the latter’s upcoming Purple Hood, then we set out for the club, a less than half block journey whose distance is lengthened interminably by a series of well-wishers and business consultations. It’s like following two CEOs across the floor of the stock exchange: Stack is on two cell phones, trying to shake hands with someone. FAB, meanwhile, handles minor transactions, poses for a photo, and takes a call, all while briefing me on the deal he had just signed with Atlantic Records for Da Yellow Bus Rydah, the much-anticipated follow-up to his 2005 disc, Son of a Pimp (Thizz Ent.).

Near the door, a man takes FAB aside. "FAB, you gotta do something about the violence," he says, meaning specifically the 141 homicides in Oakland in 2006 under former mayor and present attorney general Jerry Brown. FAB nods at what is clearly an unreasonable request, albeit one that reflects the disproportionate political burden borne by black entertainers in America. No one would turn to, say, Justin Timberlake to stop violence. Then again, I imagine no one asks Keak Da Sneak either. FAB’s position, in other words, is unique.

Though he made his early reputation as a freestyle battle rhymer and owes his success to hyphy hits like "Super Sic Wit It," FAB’s lyrics seldom stray into gangsta or pimp terrain — the title of his last album is simply literal. Yet he can get down on a track with the most thugged-out MCs. Aside from the giants Too $hort and E-40 and on par with the perpetually hot Keak, FAB is the rapper all Bay Area rappers want on their albums, because he has the biggest buzz on the radio and in the streets. His popularity gives him influence, but FAB commands respect in the hood because he’s from the hood: his compass-based hit "N.E.W. Oakland" was the first major rap recognition of his native North Oakland as a hood. This rapport with the alienated and isolated ghetto youth who constitute hyphy’s core audience separates him from the vast majority of MCs to whom the label "conscious" may be applied.

"You go up to someone in the hood and be, like, ‘Dick Cheney had a heart attack,’ they be, like, ‘Who the fuck is Dick Cheney?’" FAB says later. "But you tell him, ‘Jay-Z donated a million dollars to improve water in Africa,’ they be, like, ‘For real?’ That’s something of their world. Being a Bay Area artist, I’m of their world. So you have the opportunity to teach without them knowing."

"People who have influence," FAB continues, "have an obligation to tell people, ‘Preserve life. Save lives. Help lives.’ But it’s hard to reach people if you’re not giving them something they relate to. The hyphy movement is something they relate to. Hyphy gets you in the door, to open their ears to what I’m saying. It’s up to them to digest it."

That night at the club, FAB exerts his influence. When things get salty between security and Dem Hoodstarz’s East Palo Alto associates, the group calls FAB to the stage to perform their collaboration "Ugh." Things chill out. FAB issues an impromptu plea against violence and murders. These are problems no single person can solve, but FAB is doing his part. Yet by the show’s finale — the "Getz Ya Grown Man On" remix, on which he has a verse — Fabby Davis has left the building. Being Mistah FAB, I realize, can be exhausting.

FOLLOW THE YELLOW BUS ROAD


Mistah FAB’s deal with Atlantic is a landmark in a scene long neglected by the majors. Along with Clyde Carson’s signing with Capitol, FAB’s arrangement — including distribution for his Faeva Afta Entertainment — is the first serious acknowledgment of the renaissance Bay Area rap has undergone in the past three years. Unlike E-40, a regional star who’d already achieved putf8um sales on Jive before his push last year by Warner Bros., FAB’s an unknown quantity outside the Bay. And in contrast to Frontline or the Federation — whose deals came through the respective backing of nationally known producers E-A-Ski and Rick Rock — FAB is the first evidence for a new generation of local rappers that enough talent and dedication can get you signed. It’s another weight on the shoulders of the man born Stanley Cox Jr.

"Lots of people are putting their hopes into the album," he acknowledges. "They’re, like, ‘I hope FAB do it, because it’ll kick in the door for all of us.’ I realized when I was creating this album it’s not just something I want to do. It’s something my whole region depends on."

Da Yellow Bus Rydah‘s journey has been anything but smooth, however. Bottom line: Atlantic has postponed the album’s tentatively scheduled spring release, due to controversy surrounding the Ghostbusters-themed advance single, "Ghost Ride It." A tribute to the hood-invented practice of throwing your car in neutral as you walk alongside and steer, "Ghost Ride It" was generating a buzz through its a video on YouTube and the minor-league MTVs when a Dec. 29, 2006, Associated Press story ("Hip-Hop Car Stunt Leaves 2 Dead") linked the song with a pair of unrelated deaths: Davender Gulley, 18, of Stockton, who "died after his head slammed into a parked car while he was hanging out the window of an SUV," and an unnamed "36-year-old man dancing on top of a moving car [who] fell off, hit his head and died in what authorities said was Canada’s first ghost riding fatality." While the scant details obscure whether these incidents stemmed from ghost riding or more traditional automotive horseplay, Fox News’s Hannity and Colmes found the trend alarming enough to call FAB on the carpet in January.

"You understand that a lot of kids look up to you?" Sean Hannity accused rather than asked FAB. "They sing your songs. They dress like you. They talk like you — they wanna be you!" Aside from displaying an oversimplified sense of the relationship between artist and audience, Hannity’s remark reveals a comic lack of familiarity with hip-hop and their guest in particular: what part of "Super Sic Wit It" do you sing? Moreover, while rap fans undoubtedly draw from the same well of slang, the idea that they all talk the same — or even like FAB, for that matter — is a stereotype.

"I don’t think they expected me to be so articulate," FAB recalls with a laugh. Yet among MCs, FAB is singular interview subject. While he has a clear sense of his talent and importance, he’s more apt to discuss his personal relationship with God or how his lonely childhood as a latchkey kid inspired him to create rather than brag about how real he is. His power to articulate the struggle of urban youth — to explain the rage that motivates, say, ghost riding — is the very reason he’s often labeled the spokesperson for a hyphy movement otherwise devoted to "going dumb."

Hannity treated FAB like he’s dumb, but FAB turned the tables. Hannity’s denunciation of his effect on the "kids" prompted the rapper to question whether his influence rightly extends to a Canadian 11 years his senior, which Hannity countered by accusing FAB of wanting as much "money and controversy" as he can get. When FAB speculated on the influence of turning on the TV and seeing 3,000 soldiers die in Iraq, Alan Colmes was sent in as a balm, ending the segment.

"Both those people were adults," FAB says later of the ghost-riding deaths. "I feel bad for the families, but at the end of the day, an adult has to take responsibility for his actions."

GHOSTBUSTED


The next pothole for Yellow Bus was a late March cease and desist letter from Columbia Pictures for copyright infringement in the "Ghost Ride It" video — just as it was about to debut on MTV’s 106 and Park. "We had permission [to use the Ghostbusters van] from the man who built it and owns it," FAB explains. "But Columbia owns the logo." The video was immediately pulled from all media outlets, impairing Atlantic’s ability to market the single nationally. As a result, the Yellow Bus has been parked. The official explanation, from Atlantic VP Mike Carin, is that the label is focusing on FAB’s "artistic development." Despite the inevitable rumor that the rapper was dropped, Carin confirms that "the deal is still in place."

Still, such delays have silenced many MCs’ buzz: witness how the delay of Raekwon’s album on Aftermath has converted excitement into skepticism, or how the Team’s World Premiere (Moedoe/Koch, 2006) dropped too long after its singles had peaked, leading to lower-than-expected sales. Fortunately, the structure of FAB’s distribution deal allows him an unusual degree of freedom.

"They were willing to sacrifice certain things," he says of his initial decision to sign with Atlantic among competing offers. "They allowed me to do what I want to do — if I want to drop an independent album, I can."

ENTER DA BAYDESTRIAN


This flexibility has allowed the prolific FAB to immediately walk out another new album, Da Baydestrian, on May 15, through SMC/Fontana. Although, according to SMC cofounder Will Bronson, Atlantic has options to include as many as five of its songs on Yellow Bus, Baydestrian is an otherwise distinct project intended to satisfy the demand for a follow-up to Son of a Pimp. FAB’s also preparing a series of summer releases, including a second installment of the all-freestyle Tonite Show with DJ Fresh. (Fresh, incidentally, edited FAB’s 2005 DVD, The Freestyle King, now packaged with Baydestrian as a bonus.) With Beeda Weeda and J-Stalin, representing the East and West respectively, FAB’s formed the multihood group N.E.W. Oakland, whose mixtape is nearing completion. Prince of Da Bay (In Yo Face/Hooker Boy Filmz), a documentary on FAB by local hip-hop director Dame Hooker, should be out by press time, while FAB’s next DVD, Shoobalaboobie TV, is in the works.

"You do what you have to do to keep the buzz going," FAB says. "Also sales — on the independent level, your numbers are what’s important [to major labels]." Da Baydestrian thus has Atlantic’s blessing, but its commercial success will determine the fate of his deal.

Yet the need to appeal to the marketplace hasn’t inhibited FAB’s creativity, and Da Baydestrian refuses to play it safe. Rather than exploit the hyphy sound he helped establish, FAB only sprinkles it in, most obviously on the remix of the Traxamillion-produced "Sideshow" and the opening title track, one of six bangers produced by FAB protégé Rob-E. The young Martinez-born producer proves his versatility on tracks like the triumphant "Get This Together" and the melancholy "Life on Track," featuring Faeva Afta vocalist J-Nash, whose Hyphy Love drops in August. Another four productions by Son of a Pimp collaborator Genessee contribute to Baydestrian‘s in-house feel even as the family breaks new ground: "Can’t Wait," say, evokes Andre 3000’s explorations of go-go, filtered through FAB’s hyphy sensibility, while "Shorty Tryin’ 2 Get By" is a contemporary "Keep Ya Head Up" spiced with Bay Area R&B. The album is refreshingly free of skits, and guest stars are kept to a minimum, but Too $hort blesses the disc three times, an unambiguous stamp of approval from Bay rap’s founder.

What makes Da Baydestrian one of the most extraordinary albums since hyphy’s inception, however, is its social consciousness. "Deepest Thoughts," for example, hits out at President George W. Bush, but even more pointedly at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for expanding the prison system instead of aiding the poor. The Sean T–produced "Crack Baby Anthem" addresses teen dope dealers, seeking to uplift without castigating or glorifying their activities — for the nonghetto audience, the song connects the dots between poverty, crime, and the present political climate. FAB describes his approach as "hip-hyphy," presenting an alternative to hip-hop fans who consider hyphy juvenile or incomprehensible. Granted, the disc’s school bus and helmet imagery — referring to the hyphy concept of acting "retarded" — is hardly p.c. Nonetheless, FAB’s lunchbox-wielding Baydestrian is a welcome change from the exaltation of guns and dope adorning your average rap album.

"In no way am I trying to say I’m like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X," FAB explains. "But I realized I could create nonsense and seem to support ignorance, or I can get people to start looking at the reality of it, and the reality of it is that young blacks are dying, not only in the Bay; they’re dying everywhere. We’ve been raised in a warlike civilization. We’ve been brainwashed to accept war as the proper thing to do when things don’t go right."

"Tupac [Shakur] said it himself," FAB concludes. "He said, ‘I’m not going to be the one to change the world. But I guarantee I’ll plant a seed in the mind of someone who does.’ We’re all the Tupac generation. Pac was hyphy."

While I don’t think it’s my place to declare FAB the next Tupac, I can’t fail to be struck by his invocation of the Bay Area icon. On a superficial level, of course, with all his non-thugged-out, cartoonish imagery, FAB is nothing like Pac, just as the hyphy movement differs from the Bay’s mid-’90s sound. Yet locally, if not nationally, the two rappers occupy the same position on the map of hip-hop: like Pac, FAB has cred with nearly everyone, he has a positive message within an utterly street aesthetic, and he makes tunes everyone wants to hear. No rapper has embodied all three attributes since Pac, and that combination makes FAB extraordinary. *

Czech, please!

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A faltering economy is the biggest threat to most national film industries, but Czechoslovakia’s had a more distinct misfortune: it was shut down by occupation forces not once but twice. Most famously, the 1960s Czech new wave, in which talents like Jirí Menzel, Ivan Passer, Vera Chytilová, and Milos Forman first flourished, was abruptly dammed by the 1968 Soviet invasion. The type of widespread film-buff culture that brought attention to those directors scarcely existed when — before the Nazis commandeered local studios and permitted only a handful of strictly escapist films to be made for the home market — the country’s cinema had its first golden age.

Before World War II, Czechoslovakia boasted one of the most adventurous and lively — if not widely exported — movie industries in the world. Of course, this meant there was room for a lot of populist fluff. But the 12 features in the Pacific Film Archive’s new series "Czech Modernism, 1926–1949" show why Nazi invaders sensed a celluloid threat: these films are full of playful social critique as well as imaginative stylistic leaps. They assume that an audience is intelligent and that it will enjoy the subversion of authority. These films don’t provide pacification, let alone propaganda.

As playwright and Velvet Underground fan turned president Václav Havel would suggest some decades later, Czech life — at least the urban variety — has long appreciated the intersection of the avant-garde and leftist politics. The region’s geographic location, between the sophisticated capitalist West and the stylistically impoverished Communist USSR, at times seems directly reflected in these films’ colliding influences, from German expressionism to Soviet formalism to an Erich von Stroheim–esque attitude decadence.

The series’ two movies by director Vladislav Vancura apply a mad stylistic energy to subjects that might easily have been played for simple melodrama or pathos. In 1933’s On the Sunny Side, a pair of city children whose friendship bridges the class divide end up dumped in an orphanage when their parents are deemed unfit: first it’s fatherless, accordion-playing Honza, then pigtailed Babula, whose womanizing dad has just bankrupted the family. Frenetic montages contrast the adult worlds of poor and rich, cutting between breadlines and champagne-guzzling flappers. At the progressive home for foundlings, by contrast, equality is ensured by self-government — as a collective, the kids are better able to look after their own welfare than the grown-ups who’ve failed them.

Vancura’s Faithless Marijka, from the next year, is set in the Carpathian Mountains, with local nonprofessional actors as the leads. But it’s no sylvan idyll. The supposedly central tale of a lumberjack’s cheating spouse is nearly lost amid the struggles of laborers to triumph over their greedy oppressors (whose ranks include a disturbing anti-Semitic caricature).

A similar mix of poetic naturalism and Eisensteinian montage marks Karl Junghans’s 1929 silent Such Is Life. Its titular shrug downplays a vigorous look at some ordinary Prague residents, notably a put-upon laundry worker (Vera Baranovskaya, who played the title character of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s 1926 Mother), her loutish husband, and a manicurist daughter pretty enough to attract major trouble. Similar perils await two office girls lured into a lecherous nightlife in 1931’s From Saturday to Sunday, by Gustav Machatý, who would create an international sensation with Hedy Lamarr’s nude swim in Ecstasy two years later. This time romance rather than lust prevails as the more innocent secretary flees a grabby grandpa and winds up meeting her pure-hearted lower-class match.

Mistrust toward the rich and powerful was also a frequent theme in the era’s Hollywood films, in an attempt to please American audiences suffering though the Great Depression, which in turn triggered Czechoslovakia’s economic hardship. But the criticism in such films was usually glib, the solutions fanciful. Not so here. It’s eye-opening to watch a popular hit like Martin Fric’s 1934 Heave Ho!, widely regarded as the best effort from local comedy team Jirí Voskovec and Jan Werich.

Werich plays a dissolute multimillionaire informed one day that his stocks are worthless and he’s broke. Teaming with an unemployed laborer (Voskovec) who’d ranted against factory-shutting fat cats on the radio (before being dragged off), he discovers — after making a mess of various odd jobs — that he’s inherited a huge building. Unfortunately, it’s just a bunch of steel girders, so the penniless duo hit on the scheme of collectivizing construction with other indigent workers, who’ll have a home when it’s finished. Naturally, corporate types try to thwart this truly free enterprise, but they are treated to the ol’ titular gesture. A socialist semimusical with sight gags and assorted silliness, this sure ain’t Gold Diggers of 1933. *

CZECH MODERNISM, 1926–1949

Through June 24; see Rep Clock for schedule; $4–$8

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

The drug war soldiers on

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

It’s been five months since the Board of Supervisors passed Sup. Tom Ammiano’s ordinance directing the San Francisco Police Department to make cannabis busts its lowest possible priority.

But is it safe to say San Franciscans can openly smoke, grow, or distribute cannabis without being harassed by law enforcement, as the nighttime talk show hosts and news pundits are fond of pronouncing?

Eric Luce, who’s worked as a public defender in Jeff Adachi’s office for the past four years, doesn’t think so. He’s seen a spike in recent cannabis busts and has eight open cases right now involving small-time marijuana sales.

"They’re being charged every day," Luce said. "This is a fairly new phenomenon, and I think it’s linked 100 percent to getting felony conviction rates up."

One of Luce’s clients, a Salvadoran émigré, already faced a stacked deck without trouble from the police. She’s an HIV-positive, transgender woman with a history of clinical depression. During a string of undercover operations conducted by SFPD narcs throughout March and April, an officer approached the woman (Luce requested that the Guardian not publish her name), asking if she had crack.

No, she said, but she did have a little pot, what turned out to be half a gram, hardly enough for a joint. The officer offered $5 for it, but she declined and turned to leave, declaring that she’d rather just smoke it herself. So he raised his offer to $10. She said yes and was arrested.

More than a month later, she remains in jail, and although she was granted amnesty in the late ’80s and has spent the past 25 years in the United States, Luce said, the arrest threatens her immigration status.

In another recent case, three men were arrested at Golden Gate Park in early March for allegedly selling an eighth of an ounce to an undercover narcotics officer. All told, police claim the trio possessed a half ounce between them. One defendant spent a month in jail for it, and Luce’s client, a homeless man named Matthew Duboise, was only released after Luce persuaded a judge that the officers had searched him illegally.

If Luce’s clients otherwise accept guilty pleas simply to get out of jail, District Attorney Kamala Harris gets to characterize these pleas as felony convictions of drug dealers — a significant distinction during an election year — even as she claims publicly to back the concept of low priority. Like so much about the drug war, Ammiano’s ordinance, joined by a handful of other piecemeal legislative attempts in California to soften prohibition, creates as many questions as it does answers.

How would police officers officially make cannabis a low priority? Could they look the other way without sanction? Does the SFPD even care what city hall decides if federal agents continue to insist through their actions and words that possessing or using cannabis in any form is still against the law?

In recent weeks we contacted the defendants in three additional local cannabis busts, ranging from large to small quantities, but none of them would speak to us even off the record about their cases, fearing a backlash at pending court hearings. So we visited the very unsophisticated criminal records division at the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street for a crude statistical analysis of recent marijuana charges filed in the city.

Using the hall’s record index, we conservatively estimated there were well more than three dozen cases filed by the District Attorney’s Office since the beginning of 2007 involving violations of California’s Health and Safety Code, section 11359, felony possession of marijuana for sale. The tally is just for simple drug charges, and that doesn’t even count cases with accompanying charges, like weapons possession or violent assault.

So where are all these cases coming from?

Sharon Woo, head of the DA’s narcotics unit, points out that Ammiano’s legislation specifically exempts "hand-to-hand sales" in public places and was amended — notably at the 11th hour before its passage — to include such sales "within view of any person on public property." She said most of the cases we identified, like the two mentioned above, involved an SFPD response to grumbling from residents about drug sales in certain neighborhoods. The resulting undercover sweeps net 20 to 50 suspects each time.

"The [Police] Department is really answering a community request for assistance, and we’re prosecuting based on the information they give us," Woo told the Guardian. "When it’s in an open place, a public place, we treat hand-to-hand sales of marijuana as seriously as any other type of crime."

Those are only the cases for which there’s a paper trail. Gary Delagnes, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association (SFPOA) and a former narcotics officer, told us police in the city are more than likely to simply book confiscated marijuana without filing charges against the suspect to avoid paperwork and the perceived inevitability by the SFPD rank and file that Harris won’t prosecute small-time users or growers, at least not with the zeal they’d prefer.

That means the index we scanned wouldn’t reflect instances in which police simply confiscated someone’s pot — possessed legally or illegally — or cases in which a suspect was never arraigned in court but still endured being ground through the criminal-court system. And it’s worth mentioning that at least under city rules, a qualified medical marijuana patient can possess up to eight ounces of dried cannabis, a considerable amount.

Delagnes says marijuana should be fully decriminalized. "But if somebody calls us and says, ‘Hey, look, there’s a place next door to me, and it stinks like marijuana to high heaven, and I just saw a guy in the backyard with 50 marijuana plants,’ what are we supposed to tell the guy on the phone? ‘Tough shit’?"

What’s remarkable is that San Francisco has been through all this before — 30 years ago. Local voters passed Proposition W overwhelmingly in 1978, demanding that law enforcement officials stop arresting people "who cultivate, transfer or possess marijuana."

Dale Gieringer, director of California’s National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said San Francisco all but forgot Prop. W. So how do you prevent the same thing from happening to Ammiano’s ordinance? "You don’t. Law enforcement is unmanageable," Gieringer said. "You have to get state law changed. The only way I know to get state law changed is you … try to build up local support before you finally go statewide, which is exactly what we did with medical marijuana."

Gieringer, who helped Ammiano’s office pen the most recent law, said it was modeled after a similar Oakland version, which explicitly made an exception for street sales. "We were protecting private adult cannabis offenses with the understanding that we didn’t want marijuana sold in the streets, which has been a real problem in Oakland and other places," Gieringer said. "You get all of these neighborhood complaints."

But in another case we reviewed from court records, a suspect named Christopher Fong was pulled over in January near Harold Street and Ocean Avenue and arrested for allegedly possessing five bags of marijuana.

He had a doctor’s recommendation but no state-issued medical cannabis card, according to court records. Under Proposition 215, passed by voters more than 10 years ago, you still don’t need a license to prove to officers you’re a cannabis patient, a fact Woo from the DA’s Office didn’t seem fully aware of during our interview. San Francisco state assemblymember Mark Leno simply created the license system in 2003 to encourage law enforcement to stay off your back with the right paperwork.

So despite each of California’s awkward lurches toward decriminalization, without a complete, aboveground regulatory scheme, users still exist in a form of criminal purgatory, and demand for cannabis still spills onto the street. The most anyone can pray for is being confronted by a cop who happens to be in a good mood that day.

"It still comes down to the discretion of the cop," Ammiano told us.

His law nonetheless quietly represents something that few other decriminalization efforts have in the past: its premise does not hinge on the notion that cannabis possesses medicinal qualities. It simply says taxpayers are weary of spending $150 million statewide each year enforcing marijuana laws and clogging courts, jails, and the probation system with offenders.

The ordinance also includes the formation of a community oversight committee composed of civil liberties and medical cannabis advocates. They’ll be responsible for compiling arrest rates and obtaining complaints from civilians in the city who believe they’ve been unfairly accosted by officers.

"I think [the department] would be more likely to take it seriously if they received a lot of complaints about what they’re doing," said Mira Ingram, a cannabis patient and committee appointee. "So I’m hoping with this committee, we’ll be able to bring all of this stuff out and be a sounding board for people who have problems with [police]."

Ammiano’s office told us the ordinance simply codifies what was already the prevailing attitude in the SFPD’s narcotics unit. But it remains doubtful as to how far the cannabis committee could go in forcing fundamental changes in department culture, especially considering the committee couldn’t punish officers for vioutf8g the lowest-priority law or even for refusing to provide detailed information about individual cases.

"Until we can change that culture, it’s not going to go away," admits Michael Goldstein, another committee appointee. "It would be my hope that … eventually we would have some empowerment to forestall and limit what they do in that regard. But you understand what it takes to completely transform an organization like that. It ain’t gonna happen. I’ve been around [San Francisco] for 30 years."

While Delagnes told us that he’s not altogether opposed to the idea of repealing prohibition, the SFPOA has attacked local officials who publicly support cannabis users, a signal that even after an entrenched, decades-long war against narcotics, the Police Department may be a long way from making marijuana a truly low priority.

Police commissioner David Campos, an aspirant to the District 9 supervisor seat now held by Ammiano, drew fire from the SFPOA when he recently criticized a regular antagonist of the city’s medical marijuana dispensaries, an SFPD sergeant and particularly aggressive drug cop named Marty Halloran.

"Commissioner Campos said Marty Halloran has no business being a police officer," Delagnes angrily told the commission in April. "Oh really? Well, for someone who has obviously dealt with this situation with a complete lack of integrity and has failed to act in a fair, impartial, and objective manner, I believe the opposite is true of Mr. Campos, and perhaps you should not be sitting on this commission."

Does that sound like an end to prohibition looms?

For Luce, the most alarming recent trend is officers finding a homeless street addict as a hook to direct them toward a more prominent dealer. When the arrest occurs, both are charged with felony possession of narcotics for sale.

"That’s not the point of these undercover narcotics operations," he said. "The point of them is to go after hardcore sellers. And what they’re doing is targeting the most vulnerable people out there, these addicts. It’s a way for the police to say, ‘We’re arresting dealers.’" *

Sam Devine contributed to this story.

Web Site of the Week

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www.pdamerica.org


While the Democrats in Congress seem to have lost their will to fight President George W. Bush over the Iraq War and other imperial excesses, the Progressive Democrats of America are pushing impeachment and other radical remedies for what ails the country.

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (5/21/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (5/21/07): 7 Iraqi civilians killed. 15 U.S. soldiers killed this weekend.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

7 people killed today when gunmen attacked a minibus headed for Baghdad, according to the Associated Press.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

63,929 – 70,023: Killed since 1/03

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 20 May 2007.

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

At least 15 U.S. soldiers were killed this weekend in Iraq, according to the Associated Press.


3,666: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

At least 3,398 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

107 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

Journalist abducted in Baghdad found dead, according to Reporters without borders.
177 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

156: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

50,502: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (5/21/07): So far, $427 billion for the U.S., $54 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (5/16/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (5/16/07): 32 Iraqi civilians were killed today.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

32 Iraqi civilians were killed today when a car bomb was detonated in a busy market just outside of Baghdad, according to the Associated Press.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

63,796 – 69,850: Killed since 1/03

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 13 May 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/44/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

3,642: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

At least 3,398 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

107 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

153 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

156: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

50,502: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (5/16/07): So far, $426 billion for the U.S., $54 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.
Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

The War on Mother’s Day

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By Sarah Phelan

images--support our troops.jpg

My 20-year-old son called me on Mother’s Day. He could only talk for a minute, because he was calling from a National Guard camp, where he’s training before deploying to Iraq, and all the other soldiers-in-training wanted a turn talking to their moms and families, too.Afterwards I choked up. I’ve been opposed to invading Iraq, ever since Bush began banging the anti-Saddam war drums in November 2001, so it’s hard to see my son volunteer at this time in history. I worry about what will happen once my son gets to Iraq, but I can’t stop him from making his own decisions.
What I can stop is Bush from getting away with bloody murder. We all know that his administration spun up a bunch of lies to invade Iraq in March 2003. We all found out the hard way that it was easier for Bush to tell these lies than it was for us to debunk them, especially once US troops were on the ground. Since then we’ve all witnessed how ruthless the Bush regime has been when it comes to smearing those who have challenged their lies. And no one wants to be accused of not supporting the troops.
But giving Bush more money for his war in Iraq is not supporting the troops. It’s supporting the Bush lie. I don’t blame America that my son signed up, but I will blame myself, if I don’t try to air the truth about Bush’s war. And if my son, who is Canadian, is prepared to fight for this country, Americans should be prepared to defend their Constitution, which has been under constant attack since Bush and his cronies came to power. So, don’t tell me there’s nothing you can do. Support the troops, bring them home. Defend America, defend the Constitution. It’s in your hands.

Gimme my Prince

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Iggy Pop spit in my face at one of the Stooges’ sold-out shows at the Warfield last month. And I loved it. The crowning moment, however, came just before that, when he stared me down and mouthed the lyrics of "1970": "Beautiful baby, feed my love … all night … till I blow … away," then slithered away from the seesawing mass in the pit. In the wake of our brief encounter, everything — the amplifiers’ deafening roar, Pop’s leathery frame, the tug-of-war crowd ripple — seemed to run in slow motion, amalgamating into a nauseating blob of wah noise. My mind and body felt geutf8ous after Pop’s rock ‘n’ roll kiss of death. Sure, it was a disgusting moment, but it was my Iggy moment, and you can’t take that away from me.

Rock star moments are quite a rarity nowadays, and I’m not referring to your recent brush with that sweaty tail wagger crawling around onstage at your favorite hole-in-the-wall dive in Hipstertown, USA. True rock stars are getting older, and there aren’t too many of the nimble bodied left who are willing to give you your full money’s worth like Pop. That is, unless you’re talking about the artist formerly and currently known as Prince. My devoted glorification of — or obsession with — the Purple One stems from the early ’80s, when Michael Jackson ruled the world and MTV still played videos. Nursed on albums such as Dirty Mind and Controversy (both Warner Bros.; 1980, 1981), I’ve come to celebrate his entire recorded output — except for For You (Warner Bros., 1978), which is a little too disco-y for my taste — and have eBayed his concert T-shirts just so I could get a piece of the action. At one point I even owned three VHS copies of his 1984 movie Purple Rain, for crying out loud. But what’s most unsettling is the fact that I’ve never seen Prince live. I’ve only heard the stories from concertgoers, and like Pop’s, his ticking clock isn’t slowing down.

Aside from his 96-date Musicology jaunt in 2004, the Minnesota native’s touring schedule has boiled down to a couple dozen sporadic dates in recent years. He’s also limited his public performances to awards ceremonies, and as of March his weekly concerts at his 3121 club in Las Vegas have ground to a halt. With hip-replacement gossip still lingering in the tabloids, we all might be SOL in terms of a Prince fix soon.

Yet the artist’s rain-soaked halftime performance at this year’s Super Bowl leaves a thread of hope that he’s not ready to wave the white flag just yet. The funky Rick James dance moves might have been absent, but it’s obvious he’s still able to rip on an electrifying guitar solo or belt out that soul-drenched wail. There have also been rumors that he’s slated to headline this summer’s Al Gore–curated Live Earth Festival and that he’s working on songs for a new album, to be released later this year.

I’m not expecting Prince to roll out a tour on the scale of those of his Purple Rain days, but considering it’s been two decades since the release of Sign ‘O’ the Times (Paisley Park), a live rendition of the entire album would be quite nice. Still, as with his one-off San Francisco performance May 19, Prince can pop up whenever he feels like it and entice a crowd with the mere snap of a finger — just because he’s fucking Prince. And as my Iggy experience gradually fades in my memory, I’m in desperate need of my Prince moment. At this point, I’ll take it any way I can get it. *

PRINCE

Sat/19, 8 p.m., $90–$225

Orpheum Theatre

1192 Market, SF

www.ticketmaster.com

Rhymes with work

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johnny@sfbg.com

I have some Björk memories stowed on shelves and in crates. There’s the signed copy of the Sugarcubes’ "Birthday" 12-inch from the days of the group’s English-language interview with Melody Maker, when Björk showed up late and apologized with the immortal first words "I was shitting" (a moment that all who mistook her for a cute elf should have noted). And I’ve got a great teenage Kodak shot of a friend who helped start riot grrrl long before she picked up a guitar, sitting on Björk’s lap.

But whither Björk? Has she indeed withered to nothing but old soulless art zombie bones because Matthew Barney took a flensing knife to her whale of a voice and cut away her personality? Those were the questions a semilapsed Björk maniac and I leaped to the minute her new album, Volta (Atlantic), blasted from his car speakers with its brash yet mannered call to arms, "Earth Intruders." Here it was, a track that united Björk and Timbaland! Ten years ago, swept up by my love for Post and Homogenic (both Elektra; 1995 and 1997) and the late Aaliyah’s even greater One in a Million (Blackground, 1996), I’d have been rapt. Now we both shrugged and wished we could wish ourselves into truly enjoying what we were hearing.

The good news about Volta is that it gets much better as it goes along. The bad news is that it takes a while to get someplace vital or unconventional by Björk’s standards. The arrival occurs when the heavily processed guitar riff and seesawing volume levels of "Declare Independence" kick in and Björk begins issuing commands like a less moldy and more melodic Peaches, a Chick on Speed with pagan fire in her blood, or a Cobra Killer without a sense of the ridiculous. Here, at least and at last, her flag-raising and megaphone-crackling shouts are matched by musical momentum, so that by the end of the track you’d have to be dead not to want to join her cheerleading squad.

She’s spelling out F-E-M-I-N-I-S-M, but in a manner much different from that of the riot grrrl schools with whom she once swam upstream, against dull dude rock currents, though sporting savvier raver gear. Volta‘s glossy color cover art and some of Björk’s comments about the album suggest she’s made a collection of wise party anthems for girls of the next generation. Her dedication to the feminine is there, no doubt, yet her mood and the music surrounding it are — until "Declare Independence" hits — often morose. The Henryk Górecki–influenced horn symphonics of a track such as "The Dull Flame of Desire" were mined a decade ago by Björk’s lesser contemporaries of the time, Lamb, and her duet partner on it, Antony (Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons), engages her in a maddening war of affectations. She has more range and emotion; he should be fined for grievous vibrato abuse. In the end, they’re both stampeded by the drumroll cameo of Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale. It’s epic, all right.

Elsewhere, Björk occasionally dips into the orientalist waters near where her husband’s recent ship of a movie, Drawing Restraint 9, sank much too slowly. Built around Min Xiao-Fen’s skittering pipa sounds, "I See Who You Are" gives that film’s anatomy lessons a less violent and possibly lesbian twist, staying chilly, while "Hope," another underwhelming collabo with Timbaland, further proves his ego is bigger than his imagination these days. So what’s to love? Before the anarchic blast of "Declare Independence," Volta‘s highlight is "Vertebrae by Vertebrae"; the sinister symphonic dissonance that was Björk’s métier during parts of Homogenic and most of her Dancer in the Dark numbers comes back, and she’s more than ready for it, unleashing her wildest howls. Instead of Górecki, the deathly cloud formations of Alban Berg come to mind during the song’s interludes. But Björk is no naive Lulu — she uses such a scene to try out some primal vocal and back-stretching calisthenics.

Such signs of life are a step in the right direction, away from the nadir of 2004’s Medúlla (Elektra), which was doomed from its conception as an all-vocal album. Björk has a tendency to overestimate her singing range, as any Ella Fitzgerald fan who has heard the Icelandic one try to get through "Like Someone in Love" on sheer winking cuteness can attest to. Fortunately, this same belief in her power has made for some thrilling songs. Volta only has a couple, but a couple are better than none. *

BJÖRK

With Joanna Newsom and Ghost Digital

Sat/19, 7:30 p.m., $26.50–$70.50

Shoreline Amphitheatre

1 Amphitheatre Pkwy., Mountain View

(415) 421-TIXS

www.tickets.com

The mark of Zidane

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Z marks the spot, whether that spot is the television, cinema screen, museum installation, or the memories of millions of people who’ve borne even cursory witness to the career of Zinedine Zidane, especially its instantly mythic — as opposed to merely controversial — final athletic moments. All of the above spots are touched on by the masterful Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, a multiformat work at the crest of a current fascination with athletic documentary. Shadowed by Verónica Chen’s undersung swimmer drama Agua (2006), Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s project reveals sports’ potential as a source for pure cinematic dynamism. Moreover, it taps into a famous athlete’s tremendous resonance as a subject of artistic portraiture.

The presence of the word Portrait in Zidane‘s English title is an important one. The film’s codirectors (the latter of whose recent installation The Boy from Mars is a favorite of filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul) shot only one match, from Real Madrid’s 2005 season. But they are portraying both Zidane and this century. If ever there was a solitary — if team-playing — figure up to the task of embodying or at least evoking a universe, Gordon and Parreno have chosen him. To use the vintage words of ABC’s Wide World of Sports, Zidane’s actions have transcended the thrill of victory and agony of defeat.

Zidane makes its public SF debut at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, thanks to film curator Joel Shepard. (One can always dream of a future screening at the Metreon, where its Kevin Shields– and Bay Area–influenced sound design, Mogwai score, and panoramic scope would be ideally realized.) Because I’ve only seen it on DVD, in lieu of writing a review, I recently spoke with Gordon. The Turner Prize–winning native of Glasgow, Scotland, began our talk while looking at a Neil Young record in a bookstore, before grabbing a cup of tea, and maintained his casual good humor whatever the topic.

GUARDIAN What led you to choose Zidane as the film’s subject? Were you a fan?

DOUGLAS GORDON Yeah. The first time we met Zidane, it was difficult to try and behave like adults. I can speak French OK, but I tried to introduce myself and sounded like a girl meeting John Lennon in 1960. I fell to pieces.

SFBG The George Best movie Football as Never Before (1971; directed by Hellmuth Costard) has been cited in relation to Zidane. But it comes from a different era, and Best is a different kind of subject or icon, and you’re using different equipment.

DG We developed our idea in blissful ignorance of Costard’s movie. But when we were having trouble figuring out how to deal with portraying the halftime period, someone mentioned [it] to us. At that point it wasn’t available on DVD, so Philippe actually flew from Paris to Berlin to go to the National Film Archive in Germany.

Later, we watched it together and looked into Costard’s practice. Obviously, he didn’t want to engage with the industry of cinema or the vocabulary of cinema — it was almost antithetical to his practice — whereas we wanted to play with the idea of a star and how a star is mediated, to see if we could get under the skin rather than stay on the surface.

SFBG Can you tell me about your tactics in using 17 cameras within one game to capture Zidane? To me, television hasn’t figured out how to present soccer. Some sports translate intimately to television, but soccer is often held at a distance.

DG Most televisual representations of football are based on a kind of theatrical convention of only shooting from one side — you have an entrance-left-exit-right type of motion. By breaking that down, you actually break up the architecture of the stadium. It’s no longer rectangular; it’s become circular in a way.

We wanted to make a portrait of a man: a working man who happens to be Zinedine Zidane, and the work happens to be football. It wasn’t a particularly good day at the office for him — he didn’t score any goals, and he got red-carded. But we wanted what we did to be along the lines of a Robert Bresson picture; to capture the honesty of the everyday.

Kon Ichikawa’s 1965 Tokyo Olympiad was a reference, and — more for me than for Philippe — the NFL. I wasted my youth watching 16mm, fantastically well-photographed NFL [footage]. Beautiful stuff, [shot by] cameramen who’d just come back from the war [in Vietnam]. Seagulls might flap by in front of them, and it wouldn’t be edited out. There was something rough about the NFL stuff that we wanted. There’s a couple of scenes in Zidane where the camera drifts up. That was deliberate, but it’s a reference to the sort of accidental beauty that can happen in that type of footage.

SFBG One thing that the film brings across is that there are long periods of the game when Zidane is meditative and literally just standing. Then when he does move, it’s incredibly sudden and really focused.

DG Some people have said that it’s a little reminiscent of nature programming. He’s definitely on the hunting side of things rather than the hunted.

It’s an exercise in one man’s solitude, though. There happen to be 80,000 people in the stadium, and he’s part of a team of 11, but there are huge periods where he’s completely alone.

Before shooting, we went to about 15 or 16 games and sat on the pitch. One of the big differences about the way we shot the film is that, apart from one camera, everything was on his level. There’s only one aerial camera that we used very sparingly as a backup. We knew the way he would walk around and that he’d pace himself during the game, so when we talked to the [project’s] producers, another reference we used was the corrida. You just don’t know if he’s the bull or the bullfighter.

If you were inside the head of Zinedine Zidane, you wouldn’t see him at all, which would sort of defeat the purpose of the film. But we did want to give his point of view, and there are specific passages where you see him move his head as if he’s a little disoriented. At points like those you don’t really know if you’re looking at the world through his eyes or looking at him.

SFBG What was his response to your portrait?

DG He’s not a man of many words, but he got pretty animated [when he saw it].

We kept him informed. We knew it was going to be a fairly hardcore exercise and that it was better to tell him how we were approaching it step-by-step rather than just turn up after a year’s worth of editing and hit him with [the finished work].

There were a couple of times [during the process] where he was really surprised and said, "That doesn’t look like me, this is not how I look on TV, this is not how I look in a newspaper — this is how my brother looks late at night talking to my mother."

We were nervous about how he felt he was portrayed because of the red card and the violence [in the match]. But he said, "I would do it again. The guy was an asshole."

SFBG That brings me to an inevitable question: what was it like to see things play out somewhat similarly in the final match of the 2006 World Cup?

DG I was in the stadium, and I couldn’t believe it. Of course, you couldn’t see what was going on because as usual there were another couple of Italians lying down feigning injury.

I knew we’d obviously stumbled upon something when, even before I’d seen the incident, people in the English press were quoting our film to make Zidane out to be a baddie.

SFBG Was that frustrating?

DG I think [Zidane]’s been sent out [of matches] more times than anyone else who wore the number 5 in the history of football. He’s a real person; he’s volatile.

It doesn’t really matter what [Italian player Marco] Materazzi said to him; what matters is that he said something to one of the greatest footballers of this generation. There’s five minutes left to go in [Zidane]’s career, and you want to taunt him about his wife?

SFBG How did you come to collaborate with Parreno?

DG Philippe and I have had mutual friends since the early ’90s. We’d pop up in the same group exhibitions around 1990 and 1991. He made a film with Rirkrit Tiravanija and Carsten Höller in 1994 called Vicinato, and then I got involved — along with Liam Gillick and Pierre Huyghe — in [1996’s] Vicinato 2. We’d spent a long time together talking about the script, and we shot it together down in Monaco. We watched a lot of football during that period as well.

But the genesis for the project really happened in Jerusalem, of all places. Philippe and I happened to be in a group exhibition ["Hide and Seek," curated by Ami Barak] there in 1996, and it just so happened the exhibition was under a football stadium, the Teddy Kollek Stadium. We finished our installations very early, and since Jerusalem isn’t a place to go idly wandering, we bought a football and played Keepy Uppy for about a week. During that time we spoke of what we remembered about being kids playing football, watching football, and what we aspired to [achieve]. Then we spoke about cinema and the fact that people had been waiting for us both to make a movie.

We chose Zidane partly because — and I think it’s the same after our film — he’s an incredibly enigmatic character. He has this absolutely impenetrable facade. He’s Zinedine Zidane.

Every time we met him, there was some other family member with him, and they’re all bigger than him. When he’s off the pitch, he’s not as big as he seems when he’s on the field. It’s incredible what happens to his physiognomy and physicality when he’s playing.

He was won over because during the first meeting we had with him, we said, "We want to work with you because, looking back over the past few generations, you represent something more than just another football star, something deeper than [Diego] Maradona or more complex than [David] Beckham." We had reedited some footage of [Manuel dos Santos] Garrincha, the old South American player, from a beautiful film [Garrincha, Joy of the People, directed by cinema novo pioneer Joaquim Pedro de Andrade] shot in the early ’60s. I think the fact that we’d chosen Garrincha and not Pele or Maradona, for example, really struck a chord with [Zidane].

SFBG What you’re saying goes back to the fact that Zidane both triggers and reframes issues of race and nationalism because he’s so powerful as an athlete and individual.

DG Someone told me that in France during the recent election there was a lot of graffiti over campaign billboards for [Nicolas] Sarkozy and Ségolène Royale saying, "Zidane, Zidane." I wish someone had taken a fucking photograph for me, but I could probably restage it somewhere.

Sometimes I think it even comes down to the Z. There’s something about it, like the mark of Zorro.

SFBG What have you thought about the art world response to Zidane?

DG We’ve spoken to a lot of people about sports, and about cinema. People have had a tendency to forget that Philippe and I used to say that we’re trying to drag people from the white cube [of art spaces] to the black box and from the black box to the white cube.

We didn’t lose sight of this, but it got lost along the way that Philippe and I knew [that] by choosing a subject or model like Zidane, we had the opportunity to really mix things up in terms of the audience. Kids could, in years to come, in turn take their kids to see it at the National Gallery in Scotland or the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris. For kids who have the DVD, that can work the same way that it does when kids who maybe have a postcard of a painting can see the real thing — they’ll have an affiliation with it.

SFBG How does the installation version of Zidane differ from the cinematic presentation?

DG It’s two projections — the cinematic one, plus one of the cameras. It seems like a glib deconstruction, but when you see it, it’s a different experience, much more demanding. It’s almost a forensic detail of how we made [it]; if you troll around to 17 different museums all over the world, you’ll see there are 17 different points of view.

Of course, when the one camera is the camera used in the cinematic version, you get this bifocal effect.

SFBG For you to have mentioned Bresson earlier while discussing Zidane is interesting, because the setting and subject matter are not what one would connect to Bresson. Usually when film directors mention him, their work is stylistically aping or imitating him.

DG The cinematography of [1966’s Au Hasard] Balthazar was influential. But more so, there’s a book Philippe sent to me [Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, most recently published in English by Green Integer] that had an impact, in the way he talks about the difference between the model and the actor. This was really clear to us when we were trying to speak about Zidane. People would say he’s an actor, and we’d say, "No, he’s not, he’s a model." He’s not playing a role. He’s doing his job, but with the awareness of being looked at, and that’s very different from the way the actor performs. Some of what Bresson says in his notes almost could have been written specifically for the Zidane film. It’s nice to quote Bresson, because he’s so unfashionable.

SFBG And so great! Some of the best current movie directors also produce work for art spaces. You’ve given a lot of thought to the specificity of DVDs and cinemas and gallery or museum installations, so I wanted to ask you about those distinctions.

DG One of the things that Philippe and I were constantly asked [at Zidane‘s film premiere] was "Were you excited to be working in the cinema?" We weren’t more excited than we would be [working] anywhere else. If there’s anything that would identify a certain practice of our generation of artists, it is that most of us are working with the exhibition as a format, and the context informs the format while the format interferes with the context. A lot of people don’t get that at all. I’m not trying to blow an intellectual trumpet here, but there is a certain amount of practice necessary to understand that. This is why when someone like David Lynch tries to move out of the cinema or TV screen into the gallery, it doesn’t work sometimes. The filmmaker might not do enough with the gallery or the museum. *

ZIDANE: A 21ST CENTURY PORTRAIT

Thurs/17–Sun/19, 7 p.m.; Sun/20, 2 and 7 p.m. (all screenings sold out except for Sun/20, 2 p.m.)

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.zidane-themovie.com

Weird Fish

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The fishing-out of the oceans, like all disasters, has produced its share of odd delights. Fish that were considered junk a generation ago — monkfish, grouper, skate — suddenly didn’t look so shabby when cod and bluefin tuna became scarce. Today’s weird fish is tomorrow’s lovable fish, mostly because it’s still there. But these little discoveries of necessity tend to end up amplifying the problem, as species go from being overlooked to sought after and thus overfished. Skate: one of nature’s most fabulous fish to eat, and a no-no.

At Weird Fish, a distinctly Mission-style seafood joint that opened late last year, you aren’t going to find much in the way of weird fish on the menu. You will find, in a host of guises, tilapia and catfish, a pair of river species (the former native to the Nile) that have become favorites of aquaculture. Farmed versions produce filets of mild white flesh that, like chicken, lends itself to sassy preparations and accompaniments, which the kitchen at Weird Fish ably supplies. But you aren’t stuck with them; in the evening the menu opens out to include such interesting, though far from weird, specimens as trout and ahi.

The restaurant’s physical setting is striking, despite the ordinariness of the storefront space: a deep, high-ceilinged, and narrow shoebox with a single aisle, as on a cramped airliner. The interior design includes swatches of blue-green paint and mirrors that look like portholes, but the overall effect doesn’t say "seafood house" so much as "Mission hipster café." If you’re in any doubt, the loud, bad music should clear it up. Here is yet another restaurant that does not need to be adding decibels beyond the ample number provided by the clientele. We did like the tabletops of pressed-tin ceiling remnants under glass.

Seafood takes far better to spicy handling than conventional wisdom — with its delicate sauces of butter, shallots, and white wine — seems to understand, and Weird Fish isn’t afraid of laying it on. A catfish po’boy ($7) wouldn’t be much without its bayou-style rémoulade, just a slab of breaded, deep-fried fish filet on soft bread. But the sweet heat of the sauce, essentially a mayonnaise reinforced with mustard and cayenne, provided enough voltage to power the sandwich. For an extra $2.50 you can get a side of fries — a blend of potato and yam sticks — but, given the scale of the handsomely bronzed stack, sharing is a thought to consider. Salting up is another. In this connection, the vegetarian black-bean chili ($3 for a cup) deserves a mention; it was dotted with corn niblets and was excellent in a mild-mannered way once a few good licks from the saltshaker had been applied. A few good licks of chipotle pepper would have been nice too, but I didn’t see that shaker.

Not everything on the menu is strongly seasoned. A sandwich of grilled tilapia ($7), for instance, was quite tasty despite an absence of any condiment other than coleslaw, but then, grill smoke is basically a spice. And a split-pea soup ($3.50 for a cup) was hearty and textural and didn’t seem to miss a powerful organizing flavor. But another soup, the ballyhooed tortilla (also $3.50) — almost like a thick salsa decorated with chunks of avocado and a blob of sour cream, with thin strips of crisped tortilla arranged around the edge of the bowl like a rib cage — delivered a forceful wallop of capsicum heat that would have done the black-bean chili proud.

We found the Jamaican-style catfish ($7) to be on the docile side despite a thick smear of jerk sauce spooned over the top of the poached filet. The jerk tended toward sweetness rather than menace; it was like a defensive fortification, a blanket draped over some weak-kneed (though firm and moist) fish, rather than a swaggering man-o’-war presence. But a daily-special starter, ahi tuna tartare ($10), did swagger. The cubes of ruby flesh were gently tossed in a ginger-soy-cayenne bath before being arranged atop a trio of deep-fried wonton skins, like a set of magic carpets bronzed as mementos of some exotic childhood in Lilliput.

And the evening’s "suspicious" dish ($10; the price varies), a kind of chef’s surprise, turned out to be spectacularly tasty despite being a pasta — linguine, in fact, tossed with a medley of bay shrimp, clams, and prawns in a garlic–<\d>white wine sauce perfumed with cilantro. The sauce gave a pleasant tingle on the lips, and the clams and small shrimp were fine in their supporting roles, but we did find the larger prawns to be noticeably dry and mealy: had they been frozen and thawed? Frozen too long or mishandled in some other way? This was an unexpected shortcoming in a restaurant that announces its commitment to high-quality ingredients in a posting at the doorway.

Apart from some hinky shellfish and too much noise, Weird Fish gives us a mostly bracing vision of a modern San Francisco seafood house. It is not the obvious descendant of such old-timers as Tadich Grill and Sam’s, nor is it the clear relation of such temples of luxe as Farallon and Aqua — but it does, perhaps, have some wisdom to impart to these august places despite being a whippersnapper. Its emphases on sustainability and the ingenious making of lemonade from the lemons of fish farming do raise the hope, however modest, that the weird fish of today will still be there tomorrow. *

WEIRD FISH

Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 9 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 9 a.m.–midnight

2193 Mission, SF

(415) 863-4744

www.weirdfishsf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Loud

Wheelchair accessible

Out of downtown

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Out of downtown

› steve@sfbg.com

It wasn’t going well for Ted Strawser, predictably. The alternative transportation activist faced an uphill battle March 14 trying to convince a San Francisco Chamber of Commerce committee to endorse Healthy Saturdays, a plan to ban cars from part of Golden Gate Park.

Representatives of the park’s museums and Richmond District homeowners had just argued their case against the measure. “Visitors want access to our front door, and we want to give it to them,” Pat Kilduff, communications director for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, indignantly told the group of two dozen business leaders gathered around a large conference table.

Strawser gave it his best shot: he talked about following the lead of other great cities to create car-free spaces; he said, “Golden Gate Park is one of the best parks in the nation, if not the world”; and he made a detailed case for closure. But around the table there were scowls, eye rolls, and other obvious signs that Strawser was being tolerated, not welcomed. Some — including chamber vice president Jim Lazarus — even started to interrupt and argue with him.

Then the man sitting next to Strawser spoke up. “I don’t think this is fair,” he said. And suddenly, everyone in the room shaped up. Strawser’s ally — his only supporter in the room — was somebody no chamber member could or would dismiss. Warren Hellman doesn’t shout or bang the table — but when he speaks, downtown pays attention.

Hellman, a prominent investment banker, told the committee members that he expected them to show the same respect for Strawser that they had for the previous two speakers. The nonsense ended, immediately.

And by the time Strawser turned the floor over to Hellman, the mood had changed. The group listened raptly, smiled, and nodded as Hellman spoke in his usual folksy, familiar, disarming style.

“It’s not a lot of fun when friends fall out,” he began, “because the previous speakers and many of you all agreed on the necessity of the garage [that was built in Golden Gate Park], and we worked together.”

He pointed out that many in the group had promised during the fall 2000 election to support Healthy Saturdays once the garage was built, although Hellman was now the only member of the coalition honoring that commitment. But he didn’t chide or shame his colleagues. That isn’t Hellman’s style.

Instead, he spoke their language. The garage has never been full and needs the money it can charge for parking to repay the bonds. This isn’t a fight that’s going away, since “part of the conflict is because this park is everybody’s park.” But there are “about 100 compromises not acceptable to either side that would move this forward.” And if a solution can’t be found, there will probably be an expensive ballot fight that nobody wants.

“My conclusion is we should attempt this test,” Hellman told the group. Ultimately, when the vote was later taken in secret, the chamber didn’t agree, although it did vote to back a trial closure after the California Academy of Sciences reopens next year.

At the meeting, Hellman openly called for Mayor Gavin Newsom to get involved in seeking a compromise, something Hellman said he had also just requested of the mayor at a one-on-one breakfast meeting. A couple of weeks later Newsom — who had already indicated his intention of vetoing the measure — did broker a compromise that was then approved by the Board of Supervisors.

As usual, Hellman didn’t take credit, content to quietly play a role in making San Francisco a better place.

Healthy Saturdays isn’t the most important issue in local history — but the significance of Hellman’s involvement can’t be underestimated. His alliance with the environmentalists and park advocates might even signal a sea change in San Francisco politics.

Warren Hellman represents San Francisco’s political and economic past. And maybe — as his intriguing actions of recent years suggest — its future.

This guy is a rich (in all senses of the word) and compelling figure who stands alone in this town. And even though his leadership role in downtown political circles has often placed him at odds with the Guardian, Hellman consented to a series of in-depth interviews over the past six months.

“Our family has been here since early in the 19th century, so we had real roots here,” Hellman told us. His great-grandfather founded Wells Fargo and survived an assassination attempt on California Street by a man who yelled, “Mr. Hellman, you’ve ruined my life,” before shooting a pistol and barely missing.

The Hellman family has been solidly ruling class ever since, rich and Republican, producing a long line of investment bankers like Warren.

Yet the 72-year-old comes off as more iconoclast than patrician, at least partly because of the influence of his irreverent parents, particularly his mother, Ruth, who died in 1971 in a scuba-diving accident in Cozumel, Mexico, at the age of 59. “She was entirely nuts,” Hellman said, going on to describe her World War II stint as a military flier in the Women’s Auxiliary Service Pilots and other colorful pursuits. “She just loved people, a little like I do. She collected people.”

Hellman grew up wealthy and cultured, but he also attended public schools, including Grant Grammar School and Lowell High School. In between, the young troublemaker did a stint at San Rafael Military Academy — “reform school for the rich,” as he called it — for stunts such as riding his horse to Sacramento on a whim.

After doing his undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, Hellman got his MBA from Harvard and went on to become, at the age of 26, the youngest partner ever at the prestigious Manhattan investment firm Lehman Bros. He developed into an übercapitalist in his own right and eventually returned home from New York and founded Hellman and Friedman LLC in San Francisco in 1984, establishing himself as the go-to financier for troubled corporations.

“He is really one of the pioneers of private equity,” said Mark Mosher, a longtime downtown political consultant and the executive director of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California Commission on Jobs and Economic Growth, on which Hellman sits.

Hellman became what Business Week called “the Warren Buffett of the West Coast,” a man of extraordinary wealth and power. Among other accomplishments, Hellman took Levi Strauss private, recently made billions of dollars in profits selling DoubleClick to Google, and manages the assets of the California public employee retirement funds (CalPERS and CalSTRS), which are among the largest in the world.

Like many financial titans, Hellman has always been a generous philanthropist, giving to the arts, supporting schools in myriad ways, and funding the San Francisco Foundation and the San Francisco Free Clinic (which his children run). He vigorously competes in marathons and endurance equestrian events, often winning in his age bracket. And he has his humanizing passions, such as playing the five-string banjo and creating the popular Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival.

But he’s also been a prime facilitator of downtown’s political power, which regularly flexes its muscle against progressive causes and still holds sway in the Mayor’s Office and other city hall power centers.

Hellman founded, funds, and is a board member of the Committee on Jobs, which is perhaps the city’s most influential downtown advocacy organization. Hellman and his friends Don Fisher, the founder of the Gap, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein also started SFSOS, which now wages the most vicious attacks on left-of-center candidates and causes.

When the de Young Museum and other cultural institutions were threatening to leave Golden Gate Park, Hellman almost single-handedly had an underground parking garage built for them, in the process destroying 100-year-old pedestrian tunnels and drawing scorn from the left. The Guardian called it “Hellman’s Hole.”

“We at the Bike Coalition very much started out on the opposite side of Warren Hellman,” San Francisco Bicycle Coalition executive director Leah Shahum told us. “We couldn’t have been more like oil and water on the garage issue.”

But over the past two years or so, Hellman’s profile has started to change. He went on to become an essential ally of the SFBC and other environmentalists and alternative transportation advocates who want to kick cars off JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park on weekends, crossing the downtown crowd in the process. He has shared his wealth with progressive groups such as Livable City, which often fights downtown, and has stuck up for edgy fun seekers over more conservative NIMBY types. He has also publicly repudiated the attacks of SFSOS and its spokesperson, Wade Randlett, and withdrawn his support from the group.

Hellman is still a Republican, but a thoughtful and liberal-minded one who opposed the Iraq War and wrote an article for Salon.com in February titled “If the United States Were a Company, Would George Bush Be Our CEO?” (His answer: hell no.) And to top it all off, Hellman sports a few tattoos and even attended 2006’s Burning Man Festival and plans to return this year.

Unguarded and reflective, Hellman’s comments to the Guardian foreshadow the possible future of capitalism and influence in San Francisco and point to potential political pathways that are just now beginning to emerge.

Our first conversation took place at the Guardian office two weeks before the November 2006 election, when it was starting to look like Nancy Pelosi had a good shot at becoming speaker of the House of Representatives.

“I think this election in two weeks is going to be really interesting,” Hellman told us.

This Republican was cheering for the Democrats to win. “They aren’t my kind of Republicans,” he said of the people in power. Hellman didn’t support the war or approve of how the Bush administration sold it, and he wanted Pelosi and the Democrats to hold someone accountable.

“What I’d like her to do is admit that we can’t get out [of Iraq immediately], but start to talk about what the fallout has been. Discuss the enormous cost in human life as well as money, and how it’s possible the war united the Middle East against us,” Hellman said.

The one thing he can’t abide is disingenuousness. Hellman speaks plainly and honestly, and he asked us to keep particularly caustic comments off the record only a few times during almost six hours’ worth of interviews. He was self-effacing about his political knowledge and seemed most interested in working through the problems of the day with people of goodwill.

Asked what he values most in the people he deals with, Hellman said, “It’s authenticity. Do they believe things because they believe in them, or do they believe in things because they’re cynical or they’re just trying to gain something?”

Locally, Hellman has reached out to people with varying worldviews and come to count many friends among those who regularly battle against downtown.

“I love to know people,” he said. “That’s probably the single thing that motivates me. When someone says to me, ‘How can you be friends with [then–head of SEIU Local 790] Josie Mooney?’ I say, ‘Look, I want to know Josie Mooney. And if she’s awful, then we won’t be friends.’ I’m just fascinated by getting to know people. And virtually always, they’re a little like Wagner operas: they’re better than they sound.”

Hellman was the chair of the Committee on Jobs when he got to know Mooney, who chaired the San Francisco Labor Council and was a natural political adversary for the pro-business group, particularly when Hellman was leading the fight to do away with the city’s gross receipts tax, which has proved to be costly for the city and a boon for downtown.

But after that victory, Hellman turned around and cochaired a campaign with Mooney to retool and reinstate the gross receipts tax in a way that he believed was more fair and helped restore the lost revenue to the city.

“We lost, but he put $100,000 of his own money into that campaign,” Mooney told us, noting that the proposed tax would have cost Hellman and Friedman around $70,000 a year. “I think he just thought the city needed the money. It was a substantive point of view, not a political point of view.”

Mooney considers Hellman both a friend and “an extraordinary human being…. He has made a huge contribution to San Franciscans that doesn’t relate to ideological issues. A tremendous thing about Warren is he’s not ideological, even in his political point of view…. On politics, I’d say he is becoming more progressive as he understands the issues that confront ordinary people.”

Mooney is one of the people who have helped bring him that awareness. When they first met, Mooney said, Hellman told her, “You’re the first union boss I ever met.” That might have been an epithet coming from some CEOs, but Hellman had a genuine interest in understanding her perspective and working with her.

“In a sense, I think that was a very good era in terms of cooperation between the Committee on Jobs and other elements of the city,” Hellman said. “Josie and I had already met, and we’d established this kind of logic where 80 percent of what we both want for the city we agree on, and 20 percent [of the time, we agree to disagree].”

Committee on Jobs executive director Nathan Nayman — who called Hellman “one of my favorite people in the world” — told us that Hellman feels more free than many executives to be his own person.

“He’s not with a publicly held company, and he doesn’t have to answer to shareholders,” Nayman said. “He takes a position and lives by his word. You don’t see many people like him in his income bracket.”

Hellman has become a trusted hub for San Franciscans of all political persuasions, Nayman said, “because he’s very genuine. He’s fully transparent in a city that likes to praise itself for transparency. What you see is what you get.”

Hellman expects the same from others, which is why he walked away from SFSOS (and convinced Feinstein to bolt as well) in disgust over Randlett’s scorched-earth style. Among other efforts, SFSOS was responsible for below-the-belt attacks on Sups. Chris Daly, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval (whom a mailer inaccurately accused of anti-Semitism).

“If all things were equal, I’d just as soon that SFSOS went away,” Hellman said. “SFSOS started doing the opposite of what I thought they would be doing, so it was fairly easy for me to part company with them. What I thought we were doing is trying to figure out ways to make the city better, not just being an antagonistic, nay-saying attack organization. I’m not a huge fan of Gerardo Sandoval, but I thought the attacks on him were beyond anything I could imagine ever being in favor of myself. And it was a series of things like that, and I said I don’t want anything more to do with this.”

Downtown, they’re not always quite sure what to make of Hellman.

“Every once in a while, he does things that irritate people who are ideologically conservative,” Mosher said. “He took an immense amount of heat for supporting the Reiner initiative [which would have taxed the rich to fund universal preschool].”

He’s given countless hours and untold riches to public schools, doing everything from endowing programs to knocking on doors in support of bond measures and often pushing his colleagues to do the same.

“My connection to him has been through the school district, and he’s really been a prince,” Sup. Tom Ammiano said. “He has even stopped calling me antibusiness. He put a lot of his energy into improving public education, and so he shows it can be done.”

Progressives don’t always agree with Hellman, but they feel like they can trust him and even sometimes win him over. “If you get a relationship with him and you’re always honest about the facts and your own interests, he will listen, and that’s pretty remarkable,” Mooney said. “He shows a remarkable openness to people who have good ideas.”

His appreciation for people of all stripes often causes him to reject the conventional wisdom of his downtown allies, who viciously attacked the Green Party members of the Board of Education a few years ago.

“Everybody said, ‘Oh my god, Sarah Lipson, you know, she’s a Green Party member, she’s the furthest left-wing person on the board,’ blah, blah, blah,” he said. “And I phoned her up one day and said, ‘I’d really like to meet you.’ And she’s — leave aside the fact that I think she’s a very good person as a human being, but she’s a very thoughtful, analytic person. Listening to her opinions about things that are happening in the school district, I really respect that. I mean, what do I know about what’s going on in the school district? I know more now than I did then. But just getting to know people, and maybe get them to understand my point of view, which isn’t that penetrating.”

Many of his efforts have received little publicity, as when he saved the Great American Music Hall from closure by investing with Slim’s owner Boz Scaggs and helping him buy the troubled musical venue. “There are things that you and I don’t even have a clue that he has done,” Nayman said.

“He’s an interesting guy,” Mosher said. “He’s one of a dying breed, a liberal Republican. He has a social conscience and wants to use his money to do good.”

Actually, calling Hellman liberal might be going too far. In the end, he’s still very much a fiscal conservative. He doesn’t support rent control, district elections for the Board of Supervisors, taxing businesses to address social problems such as the lack of affordable health care, or limits on condo conversions.

He also opposes the requirement that employers provide health care coverage, which downtown entities are now suing the city to overturn, telling us, “In general, I don’t think it’s a good idea, because I’m still, even in my aging years, a believer that the marketplace works better than other things…. Universal health care I do believe in, but what I worry is that it’s going to be another damned bureaucracy and that it’s not going to work.”

Yet he doesn’t believe wealth is an indicator of worth, saying of his fortune, “It is luck. Most of what you do you aren’t better at than everyone.”

He doesn’t believe in the law of the jungle, in which the poor and weak must be sacrificed in the name of progress. In fact, he feels a strong obligation to the masses.

As he told us, “My mantra for capitalism — and I didn’t invent this, but I think it’s pretty good — is that capitalism won, and now we need to save the world from capitalism.”

Hellman looms large over downtown San Francisco. His Financial District office offers a panoramic view of the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island, the Ferry Building, and the rest of the city’s waterfront. He likes to be personally involved with his city and the companies in which Hellman and Friedman invests.

“Usually I’m directly involved,” he told us in an interview earlier this year. “I’ve always said that I don’t like to go to the racetrack to just look at the horses. The fun of being a principal is that you’re standing at the track and not saying, ‘Gee, that’s a beautiful gray horse.’ You’re saying, ‘Come on, he’s got to win!’ So I’m almost always invariably invested in the companies that we work with, either individually or through the firm.”

Unlike many Wall Street barons who strive to control a company and bring in new executives, flip it for a quick profit, or liquidate it, Hellman said his firm tries to identify solid companies and help facilitate what they do. “We don’t usually take over companies. I always think that we provide a service to help the businesses,” he said. “Our job is kind of the opposite of owning a factory. Our job is to be sure the people who run the business feel like it’s their business.”

Similarly, he thinks capitalists need to feel a sense of ownership over society’s problems, something he thinks is taking root in San Francisco and other economic centers, particularly among the younger generations. “It’s about understanding how much suffering there is on the other side and trying to figure out how that suffering can be alleviated,” he said. “I think it’s partly good economics that as you bring people up, they’re able to do more for society. If nothing else, they’re able to buy more and shop at a Wal-Mart or something — probably someplace you would wildly disapprove of — and buy goods and services. But I don’t think it’s that narrow.”

Rather, he believes that everyone has a little progressive in them, a little desire to cooperatively solve our collective problems rather than pass them off to future generations. He sees a marked change from his days at Lehman Bros.

“Everybody was into making it,” he said, noting that many capitalists then did charity work as a means of attaining social status but focused mostly on the accumulation of wealth. But, he said, the new generation of capitalists seems genuinely interested in improving the world.

“The feeling for giving back in the next generation, in the now 25- to 35-year-olds, it’s just an order-of-magnitude difference than it was for people who are now in their 40s and early 50s,” Hellman said. “I’m very encouraged.”

Yet the flip side is that, in Hellman’s view, downtown doesn’t wield as much power as it once did. Low political contribution limits have made politicians less dependent on downtown money, creating fewer shot callers, while democratizing tools such as the Internet have broadened the political dialogue.

“For the last 30 years we have become an increasingly tolerant city, and that’s great,” he said. “In the old days, [the Guardian] complained about downtown, and yeah, no shit, downtown really did control the city. The benefit was as that slipped away, the city became fairer and more open to argument. So now downtown hardly has any power at all anymore. In a sense, that’s a good thing. Tolerance grew tremendously when the city wasn’t dictated to.”

That tolerance caused street fairs to pop up all over town and festivals such as Hellman’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass to blossom in Golden Gate Park. Bike lanes have taken space from cars, events such as Halloween in the Castro have gotten crazier, street protests have gotten bigger and more frequent, and people have felt more free to fly their freak flags. And all that freedom eventually triggered a backlash from groups of isolated NIMBYs who complain and often find sympathetic ears at city hall.

“Sometimes you get the feeling in this city that in the land of the tolerant, the intolerant are king,” said Hellman, whose festival has endured noise complaints even though the music is shut off by 7 p.m. “There is a continuing pressure to do away with fun, because fun is objectionable to someone, [but] we need to think about not creating a new dictatorship of a tiny group of people whose views are not in line with the opinion of most of the people of San Francisco…. You should try to balance the good of a lot of people versus the temporary annoyance of a few people.”

Preserving fun and a lively urban culture is a personal issue for Hellman, who plays the five-string banjo and calls his festival “the most enjoyable two days of the year for me.” He helps draw the biggest names in bluegrass music and acts like a kid in a candy shop during the event.

“I feel very strongly that an important part of our culture is built on the type of music and type of performance that goes on at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass,” Hellman said. From parables set to music to songs of struggle and the old union standards, “that kind of music is the conscience of our country.”

He considers bluegrass a vital and historically important form of political communication, more so than many of the upscale art forms that the rich tend to sponsor. “I’m glad that we have first-rate opera, but it’s equally important that we foster the kind of music, lyrics, etc., that support all this,” he said. “Somebody once said that most of the great Western philosophy is buried in the words of country songs. And that’s closer to the truth than most people think. A big passion of mine is to try to help — and people have defined it too narrowly — the kinds of music that I think have a hell of a lot to do with the good parts of our society.”

Perhaps surprisingly for a Republican venture capitalist from the older generation, Hellman also considers the countercultural freaks of San Francisco to be some of the “good parts of our society.” That’s why he attended Burning Man for the first time last year and why, he said, he loved it, as much for the culture and community as for the art.

“I went to Burning Man because as much as possible I want to experience everything,” he said. “I want to just see directly what it’s like. I knew I’d enjoy it. I never doubted that. But what really overwhelmed me is it was 40,000 people getting along with each other. I mean, it’s pretty intense. There were dust storms and the world’s most repulsive sight: nude men over 70 just dangling along. But I never saw an argument. It was 40,000 people just enjoying each other.”

It was most striking to Hellman because of the contrast with the rest of society. As he said, “I’ve never seen this country so divided.”

While Hellman supports Schwarzenegger — calling him “a good advertisement to California” — he has nothing good to say about his fellow Republican in the Oval Office. He calls Bush’s tenure “an absolute four-star disaster.” The invasion of Iraq is the most obvious problem, he said. “Our war policy has slowly veered from being ‘Don’t tread on me’ to we’re going to jump on your neck.”

But his antipathy to certain aspects of the Republican Party began even earlier, when the religious right began to take over.

“I thought we were not that polarized during the Clinton administration. I was somewhat encouraged,” Hellman said. “Maybe there was an undercurrent of strident religious behavior or strident conservatism, but not the conservatism that I think the Republican Party used to stand for, which was fiscal conservatism instead of social conservatism. Somehow, there was this angst in this country on the part of religious people who I guess felt this country was being taken away from them, and they were the kind of stalwart or underpinnings of society. And they took it back.”

But in the wake of that disaster, Hellman thinks, there is an opportunity for reasonable people of goodwill to set the future political course. As Nayman said of Hellman, “He does believe there is a middle way pretty much all the time.”

Politically, that’s why Hellman gravitates toward the moderates of both major parties, such as Schwarzenegger and Newsom. He looks for people who will marry his economic conservatism with a regard for things such as environmentalism and social justice.

“It’s very tough to be a big-city mayor,” Hellman said. “[Newsom is] probably the best mayor we’re entitled to. He’s got this fantastic balancing act.”

Hellman said downtown hasn’t been terribly happy with Newsom for supporting striking hotel workers, getting behind Ammiano’s health insurance mandate, supporting tax measures, and generally letting the Board of Supervisors set the city’s agenda for the past two years.

“Their measure is he has 80-percent-plus popularity, and he ought to spend some of it. Well, they might not agree with what he would spend it on. And he’s been unwilling to spend very much of it. In some parts of the business community there is disappointment with him, but I don’t think that’s right. He didn’t hide what he would be like.”

What Newsom said he would be — a big reason for his popularity — is a mayor for the new San Francisco, a place where the city’s traditional economic conservatism has been tempered by a greater democratization of power and an ascendant progressive movement that expects its issues to be addressed.

“I don’t like people who are intolerant,” Hellman said. “I don’t like people that are telling you something to get some outcome that, if you understood it, you probably wouldn’t want. I like people that are passionate.”

Asked, then, about Sup. Chris Daly, the nemesis of downtown and most definitely a man of strong political passions, he said, “I admire Chris Daly. I disagree with Chris on a lot of things he believes, but there are also probably a lot of things I would agree with Chris on. And I respect him.”

Hellman is the rare downtown power broker who wants to bridge the gap between Newsom — whom he calls a “moderate to conservative establishment person” — and progressives such as Daly, Mooney, and the Bicycle Coalition. The middle ground, he said, is often a very attractive place, as it was with Healthy Saturdays.

“I’m sure you spend time in the park on Sunday, and it’s a hell of a lot nicer in there on Sundays than Saturdays,” Hellman said. But even more important to him, this is about integrity and being true to what Golden Gate Park garage supporters promised back in 2000.

“They were proposing Saturday closing at that time, which I’ve always thought was a good idea,” he said. “And we made a commitment to them, or I thought we made a commitment to them, that let’s not have Saturday closure now, but as soon as the garage was done, we’d experiment with Saturday closure.”

We brought up what Fine Arts Museums board president Dede Wilsey has said of that pledge, that it was under different circumstances and that she never actually promised to support Saturday closure after the garage was completed.

“There’s a letter. She put it in writing,” he said of Wilsey. “She signed a letter on behalf of the museums saying that when the de Young is done, we should experiment with Saturday closings.”

The Bike Coalition’s Shahum said that even when Hellman was an enemy, he was a reasonable guy. But it’s in the past couple of years that she’s really come to appreciate the unique role he plays in San Francisco.

“He showed decency and respect toward us,” she said. “We never saw him as a villain, even though we disagreed completely. Later he really stepped up and has been a leader on Healthy Saturdays. And what I was most impressed with is that he was true to his word.”

Supervisor McGoldrick, who sponsored the measure, echoed the sentiment: “Hellman was certainly a man of his word who acted in a highly principled way.”

So why does Hellman now stand apart from the downtown crowd? Has he parted ways with the economic and cultural power brokers who were once his allies?

No, he said, “I think they parted ways with me.” *

 

The War on WiFi

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By Sarah Phelan

images-war lies.jpg

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s tactics to push through a Google Earthlink Wifi franchise are beginning to look a lot like Bush’s efforts to invade Iraq: only this time the invasion is of Internet privacy, the big lie is that the Google Earthlink deal will bridge the digital divide, and critics of the deal are being smeared as racists.

Nothing of course could be further from the truth behind why the Board has been questioning Newsom’s Google-Earthlink deal for years, but trying getting that message through when the Mayor’s PR machine is set on a deafening pre-election spin cycle of false messaging.

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (5/14/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (5/14/07): 145 Iraqi civilians were killed yesterday. 5 U.S. soldiers were killed today.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

145 Iraqi civilians were killed yesterday, according to Anti war.com.


98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

63,610 – 69,658: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 13 May 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/44/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

Five U.S. Soldiers were killed today according to the Associated Press.

Three U.S. Soldiers were abducted Saturday and an al-Qaida front group claims it has captured them and has warned the United States to stop searching for them, according to the Associated Press.

3,643: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

At least 3,398 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/2007.04.html
Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

153 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

156: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

50,502: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (5/14/07): So far, $425 billion for the U.S., $53 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.
Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

Jerry McNerny, the war and the netroots

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By Tim Redmond

So Rep. Jerry McNerny, who ran against Richard Pombo and told us all he was against the war, voted against withdrawing from Iraq. This has created a fascinating discussion on Calitics, which shows both how seriously the bloggers take their politics — and how forums like this have become THE place for political discussions of this sort.

And in the end, this is pretty fucking brilliant.

Dr. Dean’s cure for division

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By Steven T. Jones
Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean fired up the party faithful during a fundraiser at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco last night, displaying the passionate oratory that inspired the grassroots but prompted the mainstream media to turn on him during his run for president in 2004.
dean.jpg
File photo from the Guardian of London

He said the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 started “a national nightmare,” but with the Democrats retaking Congress in November, “we are on the way back.” He implored party activists that the power to fundamentally transform the country is in their hands. “It is all about grassroots and knocking on doors,” Dean said. “The 30-second ads are not going to cut it anymore.”
Yet for all his rhetoric about the superiority of Democratic Party values — such as environmentalism and opposition to poverty and war — there was something unsettlingly simplistic in Dean’s tendency to label Democrats good and Republicans bad.

Not Coachillin’

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SONIC REDUCER “I can’t believe you slept through the police helicopter above the tent at 3 a.m. and the megaphone going, ‘Disperse immediately or you’ll all be arrested,'” tentmate Fluffy marveled the day after another ear-busting night of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival’s unofficial after-party scene in the campgrounds. It was only 8 a.m., though the sun was already beating down relentlessly like our heedless neighborhood drum circle.

I’ve snoozed through my share of lousy plays, bad bands, and crappy circuses, but I never thought I’d slumber through the 24-7 thrills at the Empire Polo Fields. And the chopper was just the chaser to April 28 trance headliner Tiesto, who began his loud set, pompously booming out over our not-so-fair tent city of spring breakers and Euro tourists, with “In the beginning there was the earth….”

We’re gonna have to sleep through the history of the planet, was my last thought as I drifted off.

O Coachella, don’t you cry for me, ’cause I’ve come from Alabama Street with a heat rash on my knee — and doubts about making the scene at the festival despite the fact that about 160,000 brave music fans were expected to face down the desert swelter as the event swelled to three days.

At this juncture, Coachella might be described as a music festival on steroids: it’s a carnival for 18 and overs with rides, art installations, dancers, and completely insane people wearing full-body chicken costumes in the 110-degree heat, though still boasting a comprehensive bill of today’s so-called hot bands. It’s your one-stop smorgasbord for music lovers, who will happily chat you up about the performer they deemed the most mind-blowing the previous night or the last Rage Against the Machine show they caught.

And they got what they came for: the Björk shroom headdress; the crazed buzz rising from such festival circuiteers as Amy Winehouse and Klaxons; solid pop from Jarvis Cocker and Peter Bjorn and John; show-stopping performances by DJ Shadow, CSS, Arcade Fire, and Konono No. 1; and the rattle of reunion bones by an amped and antic Rage Against the Machine, glowering and balding Jesus and Mary Chain, and, er, Crowded House. You couldn’t go amiss if you stuck to the desert to-do’s rave roots and entrenched yourself beneath the mirror ball, video screens, and pink and blue lights of the Sahara tent: the performances there by Justice and LCD Soundsystem connected with the crowd with a screw-it-all exuberance.

But the untold story lay far away from the press tent and Palm Springs love nests — in the crowded, brutal heat of the campgrounds next to the performance area. Is it possible to review a camping trip? In what seemed like a dusty, straw-strewn football field with thousands of other wake ‘n’ bakers? I spent far too much time taking refuge from the nonstop heat at the campground’s cybercafé, where hundreds of shirtless boys and bikinied girls would miserably crouch, recharging their cells at a bank of outlets, sit stunned watching the Coachella film on a loop, or lie on the ground like clammy, comatose dead fish, waiting out the morning before the acts began in early afternoon.

The southerly discomfort led most campers on a lengthy hike from the tent city, past the obscenely grassy country clubs surrounding the polo grounds, to find refrigerated refuge and 40s at Ralph’s, the nearest supermarket, where people were literally chillin’ on store lawn furniture. Coachella: the fest that inspired global warming — and a post–<\d>Earth Day longing for air-con.

Organizers Golden Voice had a clue: they gave away free water sporadically and provided campers with free Internet use and showers. But there were too few laptops, the wi-fi was too erratic, and the showers were locked down too early — and you knew there was too little shade in general when audience members broiled in the sparse shadows of lemonade stands.

The crowd — weighted with Rage Against the Machine fans eager to see the band’s first concert in more than five years — was also heavy on the testosterone. But maybe that’s just the state of Rage love: the band never really seemed too underground to me but has historically worked to surface activist subversion via modern rock radio. And their audience was still boiling — and amazingly good-natured despite the sleepless nights. As for myself, I finally woke up hours after the helicopter early April 29 to the sound of a random dude shouting, “Whoo!” and yammering loudly in Portuguese to the tentizens the next flap over. Later I was tempted to put my own spin on Zack de la Rocha’s onstage suggestion that Bush and Cheney be “tried for war crimes and shot.” I know the 12-hour roller coaster ride of quality hallucinogens can be a bitch — but then, so can I: is it so wrong to want the early morning shouters and the dude with the air horn to be tried for crimes against humanity’s sleep schedule and shot? I’d settle for finding out where they were dozing it off and delivering a special whoo-gram of my own.

BOB DYLAN STUDIED HERE That’s the rumor, anyway, at the Blue Bear School of Music, which has seen Tracy Chapman and more than 20,000 other musicians come through its doors in the past 36 years. Executive director Kevin Marlatt told me the nonprofit’s second annual fundraiser — showcasing 2007 Grammy Lifetime Achievement winner Booker T. Jones as well as Blue Bear staffer Bonnie Hayes and Sista Monica — will include an appearance by the James Lick Middle School Band, the result of the organization’s efforts in the last year to get more involved in public school music education. Since it took over the James Lick music program and brought in 30 guitars, he says, more than a dozen bands have popped up at just that school. So Stax around for a good cause. *

BOOKER T. JONES

Sat/12, 8 p.m., $45–$125

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.bluebearmusic.org

 

Myth mash

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God of War II

(Sony Computer Entertainment; PlayStation 2)

GAMER The sequel to the best game of 2005 may not be the best game of 2007, but that’s only because Shadow of the Colossus ruined all games for all time by boiling adventuring nerdery down to an unheard-of, almost new-age minimalism. That game ruled. There is nothing minimal about God of War II: it’s actually gorier, with even more expansive cut scenes than before, seamless game play, and volcanic brutality.

Your guy, Kratos, decides to go after Zeus and along the way encounters such old pals as Gorgons, minotaurs, and Cyclopes, with some new creeps thrown in, such as a hammer-wielding berserker who is really fun to decapitate. You also meet up with — and kill — Perseus, free the Phoenix, and rip off Icarus’s wings. Practically every well-known myth is represented. They release the kraken, for crying out loud! Fun, fun, fun.

More of God of War II relies on instantaneous button sequences followed by merciless button mashing than its predecessor, which is OK if you’re part of this new generation of alien children born grappling PlayStation 2 controllers. But for the old, motor skill–deteriorated rest of us, it can be a living hell. Just lifting gates can be murder. You certainly get the feeling that the makers of the game had this in mind when they designed it. There was a lot of me muttering, "You dicks," at the TV. In fact, on the bonus making-of documentary that came with the first game, the main creator, David Jaffe, made a few comments about being bummed that some superhard levels had to be cut. This time around, the makers seem to have thrown every possible thing in there to make beating level bosses a nightmare, but somehow they don’t make the difficulty too much to bear. As tough as some of the levels were, I was never overwhelmed with frustration, a daily occurrence for me with God of War I. I said, "What the hell? I can’t beat this guy," a couple times, but then all of a sudden, the guy was dead, and I wasn’t even sure what I did.

If anything, the game is too short, with more puzzles than fighting, yet you don’t think of that while playing because you’re having too much fun. And admittedly, it’s not that easy. I did throw and break one of my controllers at one point. It’s just over kinda quick. The problem is, it’s so fun being Kratos, any ending is gonna be a letdown. There just isn’t another character in video games who kills with his ferocity — and variety of methods. The guy kills everybody. (Mike McGuirk)

Now with reel cheese!

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

By the time you read this, Spider-Man 3 will have already raked in approximately a kajillion dollars. But in a summer packed with superheroes, pirates, robots, and teen wizards, only one selection is destined to be the Best. Movie. Ever. (Hint: it’s animated, smells like a steak, and seats 35!) Still, what are you gonna do at the multiplex — or the rep house — on every other day that isn’t July 27? Arrange your vacations, hot dates, and Sno-Caps binges according to my highly biased, by no means complete guide to this season’s cinematic selections. All release dates are subject to change.

May 11 28 Days Later didn’t exactly have a happy ending — I’d call it ambiguous at best — and 28 Weeks Later explores what happens more than six months after the initial outbreak of “the rage.” Who’s the real villain in this one, zombies or the US Army? This sequel features a new director (Spain’s Juan Carlos Fresnadillo) and apparently an all-new cast, including Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, and The Wire‘s Idris Elba.

May 18 Who’ll be the next ruler of Far, Far Away? Shrek the Third investigates. New voices include Justin Timberlake (as a prince) and Ian McShane (as Captain Hook). And yes, your beloved Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) returns.

May 19 Prefer your movies under the stars? Film Night in the Park (www.filmnight.org) kicks off with The Graduate in Washington Square Park. Screenings continue through October at various locations in San Francisco and Marin County, with something for everyone — from kids (Happy Feet) to thirtysomething nostalgics (Sixteen Candles) to campaholics (The Bad Seed) — on the schedule.

May 25 You think your job sucks? Check out Severance, which is surely the raddest office horror–comedy–satire–gorefest ever. Also today: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End attempts to outgross 2006’s Dead Man’s Chest, which scored the biggest opening weekend of all time en route to a $423 million total haul. That’s a lotta eye patches.

June 1 From Russia — with vampires — came 2004’s Night Watch; the sequel, Day Watch, looks to be the same kind of darkly cool supernatural noir. (Coming soon: director Timor Bekmambetov’s English-language debut, Dusk Watch, the third in the series.) I also wanna see Knocked Up, the latest sex-centric comedy from The 40 Year-Old Virgin‘s Judd Apatow.

June 8 If Eli Roth’s faux trailer for Thanksgiving in Grindhouse wasn’t enough to get you excited about Hostel: Part II, well, there’s no hope for you — except to see this tourists-in-trouble follow-up and add a little more sleaze to your diet. Ocean’s Thirteen, a.k.a. George Clooney Would Like You to Please Pretend Ocean’s Twelve Never Existed, also opens today.

June 15 Experimental filmmakers, stop hiding your masterworks (and masterworks in progress) and share ’em with a supportive crowd at the San Francisco Cinematheque’s No Frame Cinema: Open Screening Event (www.sfcinematheque.org). Films and videos of 10 minutes or less will be compiled into a two-hour program on a first-come, first-served basis. Also today: did anyone really like Fantastic Four enough to necessitate Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer?

June 22 Dear Steve Carell, You are already a god to me, so I am all over Evan Almighty. Your pal, Cheryl.

June 27 McClane rules! Stop acting like you don’t want to see Live Free or Die Hard and like you don’t love the shit out of that ridiculous title.

June 29 John Dahl (Red Rock West) directs Ben Kingsley as a redemption-seeking hired gun in You Kill Me. Supposedly, there’s a Guardian cameo in this one. We’re famous, bitch!

July 13–14 Ain’t really summer till Peaches Christ (www.peacheschrist.com) says it is. Her Midnight Mass kicks off this weekend with screenings of Desperate Living (with Mink Stole in person!) and Female Trouble (with John Waters in person!); the series continues through Sept. 1 with more special guests, live performances, and after-dark cult film madness.

July 4 Scoff if you will, but Transformers appeals to the tiny parts of me that have seen Independence Day and Starship Troopers approximately 567 times (each). You can be certain director Michael Bay ain’t gonna give us a quiet, subtle, thought-provoking film about war in the time of Decepticons. You can be certain there will be many, many explosions.

July 13 I haven’t read a single Harry Potter book. I have, however, seen and enjoyed all the films. Which means I’ll eagerly line up for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but while you’re camping out at Border’s to buy the final book in the series, I’ll be watching Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, in which POW Christian Bale grabs a snake off the jungle floor and eats it raw, without the benefit of any magic powers whatsoever.

July 20 I’m on bridesmaid detail in Lake Tahoe this weekend, so I have an ironclad excuse to skip Hairspray (apologies to John Waters — but none to John Travolta) and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Whew.

July 27 All of summer is a vortex, whirling around the only spool of celluloid that truly matters. It’s The Simpsons Movie. If you care to argue otherwise, I will choo-choo-choose to ignore you.

Aug. 3 Gadgets? Jason Bourne don’t need no stinkin’ gadgets. He’ll kill you with a rolled-up magazine, motherfucker. The new, improved James Bond was cool, but the secret agent movie I most want to see is The Bourne Ultimatum.

Aug. 10 Apparently, Rush Hour 3 is due today. I suggest mashing up Friday and Drunken Master II and getting your Chris Tucker–Jackie Chan fix thataway instead.

Aug. 16 The King is dead — long live the King! Swingin’ cat Will the Thrill hosts Thrillville’s 30th Anniversary Elvis D-Day Party, at the Cerrito Speakeasy (www.cerritospeakeasy.com; www.thrillville.net), featuring a screening of 1964’s Viva Las Vegas (one of Presley’s best films — with probably his best-ever costar, Ann-Margret), PB and banana sammies, and a live performance by Cari Lee and the Saddle-ites.

Aug. 31 Yeah, Michael Myers is back — again — but this Halloween is directed by Rob Zombie. Zombie’s previous films (The Devil’s Rejects, House of 1000 Corpses), proved fondness for horror themes in everything from music to home decor, and the mere fact that he changed his name to Zombie bode well for his reverence for the series. John Carpenter’s 1978 original is scary-movie perfection, but I’m ghoulishly curious to see what Zombie’s gonna do with ol’ Shatner-face. Werewolf Women of the SS forever! *

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