SONIC REDUCER As the summer squeezes out its last warmish days, we can safely say that we’re glad for one thing: that with the end of the season comes those last nagging reminders of the Summer of Love, all that was great and good about hippie Frisky, the perpetually remarketable, oh-so-remarkable boomer musical legacy, and how radical it was that so many acolytes drifted here four decades ago to gobble acid and find themselves. Yet are we in the clear to say that we’re all a bit weary of the free-floating miasma of hype? By Jerry’s beard, it happens only every five to 10 years, when the once anti-establishment boomer establishment turns on, tunes in, and pats itself on the back yet again as the 25th, 30th, or 45th anniversaries roll around. I know an overweening sense of self-importance seems to be an intrinsic part of one’s duty as an American citizen, but has there ever been a more self-congratulatory generation than the one that birthed the Summer of Love? Can we now unofficially rename it the Summer of Self-Love? Can I be excused from the creaky, walker-bound group grope that will accompany the big five-oh?
Yep, hippie-bashing, at this queasy, war-wracked juncture, is a tired, predictable, oft-rightie-instigated contact sport that’s far too easy to indulge in. Still, has there ever been a wave of so-called progressives so determined to look back, so intent in repackaging their relics for resale? You can stuff mewling protests against ageism in your tie-dyed Depends. Boomer rockers have been so busy crowing from the rooftops about their accomplishments for so many years that they’ve failed to notice how incredibly bored youngsters — and even not-so-young ‘uns — have become with Grandpappy’s zillionth sing-along to "Love Me Do." Indeedy, nothing can ever compare to your old-time rock ‘n’ roll, your first trip, orgy, no-nukes protest, Jell-O wrasslin’ bout, ad infinitum. But must we still hear about it? This from the same gen, captains helming a capsizing music industry, that turned the phrase “classic rock,” that has insisted on recognizing every anniversary of ’60s-era recording classics, from the Beatles to Sly Stone to Jefferson Airplane to brrrzzzzzzz …
Grrrzzzdhoooh-ha! Oh, were you saying? By the way, when the music’s over — turn off the light, OK? I know hippies weren’t the ones to self-aggrandizingly dub themselves the Greatest Generation. And perhaps we’ve all come to expect far too much from our self-promoting, self-obsessed, yet always self-critical forebears. Yet when word of bickering between competing SF Summer of Love events in August began drifting hither — rumors that Summer of Love 40th Anniversary producer Boots Hughston tells me are simply that: rumors (“We’d been promoting Summer of Love for a year and a half. They had been working on the Hope and Beyond AIDS project in other countries, but this year they decided to change the name of the event — we have a lot of respect for them”) — it seemed like a little peace was in order. After all, the entire purpose behind the Sept. 2 event, Hughston explains, is to “remind people there are other things rather than taking over other countries and going to war over oil — like compassion and understanding. Why not remind people where it all began in 1967?” That’s why Hughston says Country Joe McDonald, Taj Mahal, Canned Heat, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and others are performing free, in between the spiritual and political speakers.
Good intentions go far with even crankaholics like yours truly. But how did the event — which could have used some younger, relevant artists indebted to the San Francisco Sound in its lineup (look for a sampling at this weekend’s Ben Lomond Indian Summer Music Festival) — come to fall on the very day most of its younger demographic might be burning elsewhere? “There is a strong synergy between us and Burning Man, you’re right,” Hughston says. “But you can always go to Burning Man, and you can’t always go to the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love.” He believes some burners will be leaving early to return for his 40th event. Smokin’.
One of the most seriously wonderful folk-rock LPs to come down the pike of late has to be Marissa Nadler’s Songs III: Bird on the Water, out last year on UK’s Peace Frog label and recently picked up for US distribution by Kemado. It’s anything but a purist artifact — "The reverb probably gives it that haunting quality. It’s something I’ve always used in abundance on my voice to many people’s distaste," Nadler, 26, says with a laugh, speaking from outside Boston.
Alas, Nadler has often struggled with intense shyness in presenting her creations. "Maybe it’s a masochistic thing that I want to put myself through the pain of performing," the songwriter says. "But at no point is the first song easy." Ever considered Blues Brothers–style shades? "I’ve definitely thought about it," she confesses.
Is this where today’s summer lovers are really headed? Bay Area and Los Angeles creatives like Entrance, Paula Frazer, and Mammatus converge. Fri/31–Sun/2, $12–$18 per show; $40–$45 three-day pass. Henfling’s Tavern, 9450 Hwy. 9, Ben Lomond. www.myspace.com/benlomondindiansummer
Sweetwater stemmed? The Bay Area singer-songwriter bids farewell to the historic club with its last show, the day before it shutters due to a drastic rent increase. Fri/31, 9:30 p.m., $15. Sweetwater Saloon, 153 Throckmorton, Mill Valley. www.ticketweb.com.
POLAR GOLDIE CATS
Paws for LA’s feral chamber post-punkers. Fri/31, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com.
The latest installment in the San Francisco Chronicle’s war on the homeless is pretty insane. According to C.W. Nevius, the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council’s recycling station is part of the problem and perhaps ought to be shut down.
Think about this for a second: Homeless people have had their general assistance and SSI benefits cut repeatedly. G.A., thanks to Care not Cash, is down to almost nothing. So how are these folks supposed to eat (much less ever find a place to live)?
Some of them do a bit of real work: They go around town and collect bottles and cans, some of which would otherwise be unsightly garbage. Some of the cans and bottles also came out of people’s blue bins, and would otherwise by recycled (for money) by the private garbage company, which is quite profitable anyway; I’m not going to cry about that sort of “theft.”
So these folks haul the bottles to the recycling center and get a few bucks, which, as the Chron even admits, often goes immediately for (imagine this!) food. I bet some of the remaining money sometimes goes for booze or drugs. (Some of my remaiming money every week goes for booze, too, and I know a few highly upstanding citizens who spend some of their disposable cash on the ol’ Evil Weed. I don’t think this signals the imminent decline of society.)
Here’s my question: What would the opponents of the HANC recycling center do — deny the can-collectors their money? Because here’s what would happen: More aggressive panhandling. More petty theft. Car windows broken and stereos stolen. Bicycles stolen. That sort of thing.
As long as we can’t provide people with a decent place to live in this rich city, some will sleep outdoors, including in the park. And they’re going to find a way to get some cash every day. I think the current situation is a lot better than many of the available alternatives.
The original Human Be-In on Jan. 14, l967, was not just a giant hippy party. It had an important political purpose and political consequences and helped mobilize the youth movement against the war in Vietnam
By Bruce B. Brugmann
As a participant in Friday night’s Human Be-In, the pre-40th Anniversary “Summer of Love” event on Sept. 2,
I plan to provide a bit of revolutionary poetry/journalism (my phrase) from my old friend and journalism colleague, the late Allen Cohen. Allen was the editor of the Oracle during the Summer of Love in l967 and a major organizer of the Human Be-in in Golden Gate Park.
He also published and pioneered what I considered the most colorful newspaper in the world at that time.
And how he did it was a San Francisco classic. The Oracle was printed by the Howard Quinn Co., at 298 Alabama Street, along with the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Black Panther paper, the Berkeley Barb, and a host of underground papers and alternative papers of the era.
One night the Oracle staff came in with their flats and asked the pressmen, a rough and tumble crew, if they could get some special color in the paper. The hippies, some in bare feet, wanted this and they wanted that and they were rapidly driving the pressmen crazy. Finally, the pressmen just waved them to the press and said in effect, go ahead, do it your way. So the Oracle hippies went to work and put all kinds of colored dyes in all of the ink wells on the press, with no consideration for what color went where. The result was a rainbow of colors, all kinds, splashed across the front page and every page in the paper. The Oracle was an immediate sensation, on the streets and amongst mainstream newspaper people still tied to the old-fashioned letterpress printing.
Allen was creating a revolution in newspaper printing at the same time he was promoting a cultural and anti-Vietnam war revolution with the politics of the Be-in.
His wife, Ann Cohen, wrote me that “the media this year has left out how the Be-In came to happen and it feels as if it will go down in history as just a big party.” So she sent me a piece he did at the time on the politics of the Be-In and a letter, dated Jan. 1, 1967, asking Art Kunkin, editor of the LA Free Press, to publish an announcement
of the Be-In and “help the echoes of this event reverberate throughout the world.”
Allen crystalized a key issue of the time: that there was a “philosophical split that was developing in the youth movement. The anti-war and free speech movement in Berkeley thought the hippies were too disengaged and spaced out. Their influence might draw the young away from resistance to the war. The hippies thought the anti-war movement was doomed to endless confrontations with the establishment which would recoil with violence and fascism.”
The idea was to have a Be-In, a “powwow,” to bring the two poles together and to strengthen the youth movement and bring on the “revolution.”
Click on the continue reading link below to see how Allen described it all:
The concierge desk in the lobby of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel was doing a brisk business on a recent Sunday afternoon. Located a few strides north of Union Square, the Drake is best known for its colorful doormen, who work the curb out front in cartoonishly red costumes. But on this day the doormen seemed to be just killing time, while the concierge, a tall blond named Jill Schultze, was dealing with the long line inside.
"How can I help you?" Schultze asked the elderly couple at the front of the queue. They told her they were interested in taking a bus sightseeing tour. She looked pleased, recommended a specific tour of the Napa wine country, then picked up her phone to make the reservation.
"That was easy," the wife said once the transaction was complete.
For the next half hour, Schultze — whom I watched from a nearby chair without her knowing that I was a journalist — set up one bus tour after the next. In fact, that’s all she seemed to do — or, at least, all she did well. When a party asked for a recommendation for Indian food, she suggested the nearby Naan-N-Curry on Eddy Street, a restaurant that (apparently unknown to her) closed down last year.
One might expect better of a concierge at a place like the Drake, which boasts a AAA three-diamond rating. But the Drake is one of many hotels in San Francisco that have decided professional, in-house concierges are too expansive to bankroll. Instead, the hotels are starting to lease their concierge desks to outside companies, often charging $1,000 a month for a spot in their lobbies. The outside companies, most of which are established vendors in the tourism world, happily incur the cost — and the responsibility of the desk — in exchange for exclusive access to the hotels’ clientele.
Tower Tours, the bus sightseeing company affiliated with the Drake, is the largest player in the growing outsourced concierge business. The company has created a sister enterprise called Tour Links, which runs the concierge desks at five San Francisco hotels: the Drake, the Argonaut, the Best Western Tuscan Inn, the Hyatt Fisherman’s Wharf, and the Hotel Whitcomb. Tour Links concierges like Schultze can range from longtime professionals to summer interns. They’re rotated from one hotel to the next, depending on how well a particular hotel likes them and where the holes in the Tour Links rotation might be. According to one former employee, Tour Links concierges are required to book Tower Tours bus sightseeing trips. The employee told the Guardian the concierges are required to book a minimum number of tours per month, although higher-ups within Tour Links deny there are quotas.
"Our tour desk do provide information about Tower Tours," Hagen Choi, the president of Tour Links and Tower Tours, conceded, speaking in choppy English. "But our concierge also provide high-level service. As long as guests get good service, it doesn’t matter who operates the desk."
Laura Meith, the assistant general manager at the Tuscan Inn, had high praise for the service Tour Links provides. She said her concierges are well-informed, loyal, and outgoing. But Meith also admitted that she worked for Tower Tours as a concierge in 2004 (before the bus sightseeing company formalized Tour Links). She said she was thrown into the fray with little training — "I quickly discovered Zagat and Google and really just utilized those resources" — and said she was denied tips and commissions.
"Basically, concierges can make commissions on anything they sell," Meith said. "At an outsourced concierge desk, the concierges don’t make the money, the company does. The incentive is to drive the sales." She added, "From the guests’ perspective, they don’t know, nor do they care."
The Holiday Inn at Fisherman’s Wharf and the Radisson Wharf both currently lease their desks to Airport Express, the mom-and-pop shuttle company that competes with Lorrie’s Airport Service. Like Tower Tours, Airport Express has created a sister enterprise, Concierge of America, to handle that responsibility. Gil Sherabi, Concierge of America’s head concierge, told us his company allows its concierges to keep their tips and doesn’t mandate any sales quota. They do, however, exclusively book Airport Express tours; it wouldn’t make financial sense if they didn’t.
"We only care about serving the customers," Sherabi said. "We don’t have any quotas on anything. As long as the hotel is happy, we’re happy too."
The Hyatt Regency has handed over its concierge desk to Presentation Services, the company that manages the hotel’s event technologies, such as stage sets, projectors, and audio-video. Presentation Services runs the desk in exchange for the business the hotel provides it. The four-star Westin Market Street leased its concierge desk to Tour Links until last week. According to several inside sources, SuperShuttle, Lorrie’s, and Airport Express are in a bidding war to fill the vacancy.
And then there’s Shell Vacations, the nationwide time-share company that owns the Donatello Hotel, the Inn at the Opera, and the Suites at Fisherman’s Wharf. Concierges at each of these locations are required to cajole guests into taking time-share tours for Shell Vacations. Shell Vacations also runs the concierge desk at the Sheraton Wharf, where its concierges pull the same stunt.
"Our concierges do have quotas they have to meet," Yvonne Merzenich, the assistant general manager at the Donatello, said. The sales center "has negotiated packages with local restaurants, so that if guests want a nice meal, we’ll offer them $100 off that meal if they go to one of our time-share presentations."
Professional, in-house concierges are understandably concerned about the long-term viability of their jobs and the impact of outsourcing on their reputations. I met with one member of Les Clefs d’Or, the prestigious concierge association, who called this new wave of outsourced concierges "un-American and absurd." Another told us that hotel managers need to get their priorities straight.
"It’s a difficult situation because the concierges do not generate revenue," she said. (All the concierges quoted in this story requested to remain anonymous, as they’re prohibited from speaking to the media without the consent of their hotels.) "But the concierges provide the services that the guests come back for. You can’t put a dollar amount on all that we provide."
Whether guests feel that way is a different matter. I caught up with Sandra Curtis, a tourist from New Castle, Australia, who was staying at the Drake recently. When I told her that the concierge who had just helped arrange her bus tour worked for a bus tour company, Curtis was unfazed.
"The concierge was very helpful," Curtis said. "And that’s the way it’s happening now, isn’t it? We’re from Australia, and everything’s outsourced there too."
Susan McDonough, a fellow Drake guest from Cairo, Egypt, was less enthusiastic.
"I question [whether] if I ask the concierge anything else other than about bus tours, will she work just as hard?" McDonough said. "It’s a way for the hotel to cut corners. I don’t like it."
Last year the Wall Street Journal was the first mainstream media outlet to identify the outsourced concierge phenomenon. In a story headlined "The Concierge’s Secret Agenda," the Journal revealed that many of America’s top hotel chains are leasing their concierge desks to third-party employers. The chains include Hyatt, Marriott, Starwood, and Kimpton. Online travel giant Expedia.com had already acquired control of 38 concierge desks when the article hit the streets. Ticket vendor Vegas.com had obtained control of six desks, with plans to open up shop in several dozen more hotels in 2007. As many as 15 hotels in Manhattan had already caved in, and there were more in places like Chicago, Orlando, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.
Unmentioned in the Journal‘s exposé was just how unruly the outsourced concierge game is in San Francisco. The national trend in the hotel industry is toward large-scale outsourced concierge providers, companies like Travelocity, Expedia.com, and Vegas.com. It’s the providers who are expanding their services and courting new hotels. But in San Francisco, midtier hotels are the ones driving the murky business. Many have leased their concierge desks multiple times, unsatisfied with the service they were receiving but unwilling to pay for better.
The Westin Market Street has switched four times, transitioning from in-house concierges to Gray Line Bus Tours, back to in-house, then to Tour Links. Last week the hotel fired Tour Links and is looking for another company to take its place. The Drake has switched outside providers four times as well. In just the past few years, it has fired Tour Links, hired Lorrie’s Airport Service, fired it, and rehired Tour Links.
Ed Gunderson, the Drake’s general manager, said his hotel outsources its desk because concierges are "pretty cost prohibitive" and "if you can find a really good [outside] company and can keep some autonomy over the concierges they bring in, it’s the best of both worlds." When asked if fluctuating from one provider to another is really the best of both worlds, especially for the guests, he replied, "Tour Links is providing a service we’re very happy with."
Adding to the turmoil is Choi. Most professional concierges we spoke to don’t like Choi. "He’s terrible and very litigious" was how one Les Clefs d’Or concierge described the Tour Links and Tower Tours president. "He’s scared the shit out of me." Many concierges associate the outsourcing phenomenon that’s costing them their jobs with Choi and Tour Links more so than with the hotels.
The Northern California Concierge Association has urged its members to strike back by enacting an embargo on Tower Tours bus trips. (There are three primary bus tour providers in San Francisco — Tower Tours, Gray Line, and Super Sightseeing — and each offers comparable sightseeing tours around the city, to the Napa wine country, and to Muir Woods.) The NCCA also won’t let Tour Links concierges join its ranks. "He can drink my blood, and I can drink his," one NCCA member said of Choi. "I think that’s a mutual feeling there."
Earlier this summer, I headed to Tour Links headquarters for a chat with the controversial Choi. I wanted to gain some general insights into the outsourced concierge phenomenon and some deeper ones into the operations of the city’s largest provider. No surprise: Tour Links and Tower Tours share the same headquarters, an impressive office on Beach Street with an unobstructed view of the Hyde Street Pier. I found Choi holed up inside, in a small, cluttered workplace. His desk was strewn with papers, and his walls were festooned with pictures of his daughter (a former Tour Links concierge) and a framed copy of the Wall Street Journal "The Concierge’s Secret Agenda" report. Choi had even highlighted his company’s name in the article.
To my surprise, I liked Choi immediately. He was funny and personable, and he spoke about his company with disarming candor. He told me that in 2003, Expedia.com came to town and started cutting deals with hotels behind the scenes. Once contracts had been finalized, he said, it approached tourism vendors looking for hands to run its newly acquired desks. With more than 20 years of hotel experience — among other things, he used to sell used furniture from hotels undergoing renovation — Choi recognized concierge outsourcing as the newest trend and jumped on the bandwagon.
"The industry is evolving all the time," he told us. "We have to go along with it."
Choi said Expedia.com is still the puppet master at most of the hotels where Tour Links operates. (Expedia.com officials didn’t return numerous calls requesting an interview.) Choi also confided that it’s financially tough to get by in the outsourced concierge business, what with having to pay a hotel for a service it should be paying the lessee to provide. He added that most outside concierge services in the city don’t have the financial resources to expand and that he didn’t know if Tour Links would still be around in a few years.
"We’ll see," he said, his eyes twinkling and blinking in rapid succession. "But if not me, it’ll be somebody else."<\!s>*
TECHSPLOITATION Pundits of the Internet age are fond of excoriating the Web because anyone can post on it anonymously. Andrew Keen, whose recent book Cult of the Amateur is a good primer on why people hate the Web, highlights the horrors of anonymity in his work, contrasting the millions of unnamed Web scribblers with honorable, properly identified writers of yesteryear. Keen’s point is that people who don’t put their names on what they’ve written don’t feel responsible for it; therefore they feel little compunction about lying or misrepresenting their chosen subjects. After all, an anonymous writer doesn’t have to worry that their reputation will be tarred — unlike, say, a writer at the New York Times, whose byline appears on his or her articles.
Every social stereotype has a caricature associated with it, and the "anonymous Web writer" has theirs. They’re always portrayed as a he, first of all. And he’s inevitably described as being "some blogger writing in his basement in his pajamas." In other words, this anonymous person is not a professional (hence the pajamas) and probably poor (he lives in a basement). He’s a nobody, a loner who lashes out at the world from his dismal cell, hiding behind his anonymity and destroying the good reputations of nice people.
Where does this sad little man like to post his anonymous invective? Wikipedia, of course. He can change any entry without leaving his name, adding lies to biographies of innocent mayoral candidates and spewing spam all over facts. And the best part is that most people take Wikipedia seriously. They regard it as a reliable source of knowledge, despite the fact that it’s written by unknown, basement-dwelling bloggers in pajamas.
That’s why I was so gratified when California Institute of Technology grad student and mad scientist about town Virgil Griffith released his software tool Wikiscanner, which you can use to quickly check on who has been editing Wikipedia entries anonymously. You see, whenever you edit a Wikipedia entry, the encyclopedia logs your unique IP address, which can often be tracked back to a physical location, including your place of employment. Even if you think you’re being stealthy with your anonymous writing, you’re not. Wikipedia sees all.
And now the public can see all if they visit Griffith’s Wikiscanner site (wikiscanner.virgil.gr). Turns out that all the anonymous propaganda and lies on Wikipedia aren’t coming from basement dwellers at all — they’re coming from Congress, the CIA, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Somebody at Halliburton deleted key information from an entry on war crimes; Diebold, an electronic-voting machine manufacturer, deleted sections of its entry about a lawsuit filed against it. Someone at Pepsi deleted information about health problems caused by the soft drink. Somebody at the New York Times deleted huge chunks of information from the entry on the Wall Street Journal. And of course, the CIA has been editing the entry on the Iraq war.
Wikiscanner allows you to search millions of edits, perusing a precise record of all the changes that have been made. While you can’t figure out exactly who at the CIA made the changes to the entry on the Iraq war, you can be sure the changes came from somebody on the CIA’s computer network.
Griffith created Wikiscanner for a frankly political reason. As he told the Times of London, he did it "to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike." In the process, however, he’s revealed something far more fundamental than the fact that acolytes of Pepsi and the CIA will stop at nothing to propagandize on behalf of their employers: he’s undermined the myth of the anonymous blogger in the basement.
It turns out that the people who are hiding behind anonymity online for nefarious or selfish reasons are not little guys in pajamas but the very bastions of accountability that haters of the Web have deified. It’s not a mean dude with a grudge who is spreading lies on Wikipedia but rather a member of the federal government or a journalist at the New York Times. Cultural anarchy online is coming not from the hordes of scribbling bloggers but from the same entities that have always posed a danger to culture: corporations and governments who refuse to take responsibility for what they’re doing.<\!s>*
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who once had the urge to do an anonymous edit on Wikipedia but was scared people would find out she’d done it.
Philip Glass fans are getting ready to camp out in San Francisco this fall.
The most influential composer of the late 20th century, Glass marked his 70th birthday Jan. 31, but the celebration continues throughout the fall in the Bay Area with concerts presented by SF Performances, Stanford University’s Lively Arts, the OtherMinds Festival, the SF Conservatory of Music, and the Cabrillo Festival in Santa Cruz in what has essentially become an ad hoc Glass festival.
At the center of this pan-Bay series of performances, recitals, lectures, and seminars will be the world premiere of Glass’s Appomattox, a major new commission by the San Francisco Opera. Set to a libretto by British playwright Christopher Hampton, the two-act Appomattox dramatizes the eponymous historical battle of the American Civil War and the events leading to the surrender of Confederate general Robert<\!s>E. Lee to US general Ulysses<\!s>S. Grant.
With a loss of 600,000 lives, the Civil War is easily the most devastating event in US history — but what have we learned? "The issues that were raised at the time are very much at the heart of social change in our country today: states’ rights, racism, you name it," Glass said recently from his home in Nova Scotia. "On the good side, we are still engaged in resolving these issues. That is one of the great things about our country, that we haven’t shied away from the issues. We embraced the difficulties as we tried to find solutions. We had some measures of success and some not. But [these issues] never stopped being relevant, because they were never resolved."
Glass’s previous operas, such as Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten, exude brilliant ideas and a sense of innovation, and in tandem with multimedia and experimental projects such as the high-profile cinematic Qatsi trilogy, they earned him a place among the 20th century’s great iconoclasts — not to mention a spot in the punch line to a joke on The Simpsons.
Yet Glass continues to evolve. With Appomattox, the composer has chosen a historical topic that lends itself to an arched yet linear narrative leading to a well-defined climax. And judging from his newer works, his compositional style has acquired a surprisingly lush lyricism. One might suspect Appomattox of being Glass’s first opera in grand 19th-century style, although the composer reassured those who fear he might be softening with age, "It is going to be a very confrontational piece. Some of the elements will be quite difficult for some people."
One such element is Appomattox‘s score, which integrates Old Testament hymns sung by black Southerners to welcome Abraham Lincoln during his visit to Richmond, Va.; military songs by the Arkansas First Brigade; and civil rights ballads.
"I wanted to include in the musical language the feeling and the musical culture of that time and of the present time," Glass explained. "While this was written for voices skilled in operatic singing, there are other kinds of music in this opera as well. This was for me one of the most interesting things, to try to bring together different music that would normally not be heard at the same time."<\!s>*
SELECTED PHILIP GLASS EVENTS
"Music of Philip Glass" Joined by cellist Wendy Sutter, Glass takes to the ivories in a recital of his chamber music, including the local premieres of "Songs and Poems for Cello," Etudes nos. 2 and 10, and "The Orchard for Piano and Cello."
Book of Longing Glass collaborated with singer-songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen on this multimedia work, staged by choreographer Susan Marshall, with the composer on keyboards at this West Coast premiere.
Oct. 9. (650) 725-ARTS, livelyarts.stanford.edu
OTHER TOP CLASSICAL AND OPERA PICKS
Il Rè Pastore Philharmonia Baroque opens the new season with a rare performance of this dazzling gem, written when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a mere teenager. Though the plot is a bit silly, the thrilling score is full of vibrant, infectious energy and includes a fabulous string of showstoppers that foretell the genius of the composer’s mature operas.
New Esterhazy String Quartet As part of a multiyear, comprehensive survey of Franz Joseph Haydn’s string repertoire in anticipation of the composer’s bicentennial in 2009, the local string quartet offers a fascinating exploration of Haydn’s quartets against a backdrop of early American history, finding unexpected associations linking the Old and New Worlds.
Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela The appointment of 26-year-old Venezuelan conductor Dudamel to the top post of music director of the LA Philharmonic shocked the American symphonic establishment, but Dudamel is the next great thing. He has proved his mettle as the guest conductor of major European orchestras and as the artistic director of the excellent Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, which recruits and grooms students from the poorest barrios in the country. They’ll perform works by Dmitry Shostakovich, Leonard Bernstein, and Latin American composers.
Nov. 4. (415) 864-6000,www.sfsymphony.org
For more Glass events and classical picks, go to Noise, the Guardian‘s music blog, at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.
Beyoncé Will our dream girl arrive on a palanquin amid tossed rose petals? Or re-create the Guess jeans Brigitte Bardot zombie on the cover of B’Day, hoisted atop a blossom-spouting bidet? Oracle Arena, 7000 Coliseum Way, Oakl. (415) 421-TIXS
SEPT. 2
San Francisco’s Summer of Love 40th Anniversary Concert C’mon, people, now, smile on your brother and skip Burning Man, find a flower, and get in free to this concert. Behold survivors Country Joe McDonald, Taj Mahal, Lester Chambers of the Chambers Brothers, Canned Heat, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Jesse Colin Young, Michael McClure and Ray Manzarek, Brian Auger, the Charlatans, Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks, Dickie Peterson of Blue Cheer, and many more unusual suspects who may or may not remember that actual summer, flashbacks permitting. Speedway Meadow, JFK and Crossover, Golden Gate Park, SF. www.2b1records.com/summeroflove40th
SEPT. 3–4
Brian Jonestown Massacre The übertalented, longtime San Francisco psych-rock train wrecks return, dig? Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. (415) 771-1421, www.theindependentsf.com
SEPT. 6
Bebel Gilberto Brazil is hot — Vanity Fair says so. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 346-6000, www.thefillmore.com
Rilo Kiley Love their precocious story-songs or cringe at the lyrics? Put them under the black light to peruse the new wardrobe, album, and outlook on the old winsome farmers. Warfield, 982 Market, SF. (415) 775-7722
SEPT. 15
Colbie Caillat The husky-voiced Jessica Biel look-alike attempts to break the Jack Johnson mold — maybe. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 346-6000, www.thefillmore.com
SEPT. 15–16
Treasure Island Music Festival Yaaar, blow me down some Golden Gate International Expositions! What it is about Treasure Island that brings out the barnacle-encrusted, vision-questing soothsayer in us? No wonder Noise Pop and Another Planet have touched down on the once-forbidden isle, transforming it into the site for one of fall’s biggest rock, pop, and dance music fests. Spoon, Gotan Project, DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, MIA, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, M. Ward, Two Gallants, Ghostland Observatory, Kinky, Zion-I, Earlimart, Flosstradamus, Au Revoir Simone, and more establish a beachhead, while Built to Spill and Grizzly Bear spill over into shows at the Independent and Mezzanine. Gurgle, gurgle. www.treasureislandfestival.com
SEPT. 17
New Pornographers Is AC Newman still spending his free hours with his SF lady friend? Prepare yourself for new porn pop from the New Pornographer: Challengers (Matador). Warfield, 982 Market, SF. (415) 775-7722
SEPT. 18
Peter Bjorn and John Scandinavian whistlebait keep blowing up. Warfield, 982 Market, SF. (415) 775-7722
SEPT. 21
Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem The Fire this time? DFA’s big kahuna is playing at my house. Shoreline Amphitheatre, 1 Amphitheatre Pkwy., Mountain View. (650) 541-0800, www.shorelineamp.com
The White Stripes What rhymes with "sticky stump"? The duo let the healing begin in Mexi-witchypoo getups, with biting story-songs and sexed-up nesting instincts. Greek Theatre, UC Berkeley, Gayley Road, Berk. www.ticketmaster.com
SEPT. 21–22
Amy Winehouse and Paolo Nutini The big-haired "Rehab" vixen reunites with her Scottish scrapper of a tourmate. Warfield, 982 Market, SF. (415) 775-7722
SEPT. 22–NOV. 30
San Francisco Jazz Festival SFJAZZ is jumping in honor of its 25th anniversary fest, starting with guitar genius John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension and continuing with Ornette Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Pharoah Sanders, Ahmad Jamal, Ravi Shankar, Caetano Veloso, Les Mystère des Voix Bulgares, Youssou N’Dour, Tinariwen, Cristina Branco, Vieux Farka Touré, the Kronos Quartet with Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche, and the Bay’s own Pete Escovedo. Gasp. Various venues. www.sfjazz.org
SEPT. 23
Alice’s Now and Zen The battle of the Brit crooners ensues. Soldier boy James Blunt tussles with body-painted vixen Joss Stone as the Gin Blossoms look on helplessly. Sharon Meadow, JFK and Kezar, Golden Gate Park, SF. (415) 421-TIXS, www.radioalice.com
SEPT. 27
Arctic Monkeys The ingratiating punky popsters emerge from a deep freeze. Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, 99 Grove, SF. (415) 421-TIXS, www.billgrahamcivic.com
SEPT. 28–30
San Francisco Blues Festival This year’s looks like a doozy, bluesy outing, starting with the free kickoff performance by Freddie Roulette and Harvey Mandel at Justin Herman Plaza, before moving on to movies at the Roxie Film Center and Fort Mason performances by vocalist John Nemeth, boogie-woogie keymaster Dave Alexander, hot ‘n’ sacred Robert Randolph and the Family Band, Allen Toussaint, the Carter Brothers, Fillmore Slim, and Goldie winner Jimmy McCracklin. Great Meadow, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF. www.sfblues.com
OCT. 5
Daddy Yankee Reggaetón’s big daddy, né Raymond Ayala, brings newfound hip-hop roots on the road. Shoreline Amphitheatre, 1 Amphitheatre Pkwy., Mountain View. (650) 541-0800, www.shorelineamp.com
The Shins Wincing the night away. Greek Theatre, UC Berkeley, Gayley Road, Berk. www.ticketmaster.com
OCT. 5–7
Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival Get your spot in the shrubbery now: after drawing 750,000 last year, our hoedown overfloweth with the usual generous array of country, bluegrass, and roots roustabouts, including Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Los Lobos, Doc Watson, Charlie Louvin, Keller Williams, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Nick Lowe, Michelle Shocked, Boz Scaggs and the Blue Velvet Band, Gillian Welch, the Flatlanders, Jorma Kaukonen, Bill Callahan, the Mekons, Dave Alvin, and Blanche. Golden Gate Park, Speedway, Marx, and Lindley meadows, SF. www.strictlybluegrass.com
OCT. 6
Download Festival Break out the old smudgy eyeliner: the Cure have been found. Then upload shed-friendly modern rockers like AFI, Kings of Leon, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, She Wants Revenge, Metric, and the Black Angels. Shoreline Amphitheatre, 1 Amphitheatre Pkwy., Mountain View. (650) 541-0800, www.shorelineamp.com
OCT. 8–9
Beirut Bold and brassy. Sprawling and sassy. Herbst Theatre, War Memorial Veterans Bldg., 401 Van Ness, SF. sfwmpac.org, www.ticketmaster.com
OCT. 9
Genesis "Turn It On Again: The Tour" — please, don’t. HP Pavilion, 525 W. Santa Clara, San Jose. (415) 421-TIXS, www.hppsj.com
OCT. 17
Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony Re-create martial bliss-hell? El Cantante go for that! Mennifer — that just doesn’t have the same ring — undertake their first tour together. HP Pavilion, 525 W. Santa Clara, San Jose. (415) 421-TIXS, www.hppsj.com
OCT. 20
Interpol We’re slowly warming to the cool rockers, who are sure to have their jet-black feathers ruffled by the Liars. Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, 99 Grove, SF. (415) 421-TIXS, www.billgrahamcivic.com
DEC. 6
Tegan and Sara So jealous of those who got to see them at Brava? Bet it stung. All you get is this, the last performance of their fall US tour. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Lower Sproul Plaza (near Bancroft at Telegraph), Berk. www.calperfs.berkeley.edu
Aesop Rock, None Shall Pass (Def Jux) We’ll see if ‘Sop has lost his edge livin’ in ol’ Frisky. Blockhead and Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle take a pass on the nervy rhymes.
Akon, Konvicted (Konvict/Upfront/SRC/Universal Motown) Konvinced? Or just plain a-korny?
Evelyn Champagne King, Open Book (RNB/Jaggo/Fontana) The disco queen who was discovered while cleaning the offices of Philly International brings “Shame” into the 21st century.
Ledisi, Lost and Found (Verve Forecast) The local singer’s debut for the true diva cathedral of all jazz labels has been three years in the making.
Liars, Liars (Mute) Work that skirt.
Noreaga, Noreality (Babygrande) Wake me up when Noreality TV has finished its broadcast day. Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, Jadakiss, Three 6 Mafia, David Banner, and a cast of thousands trade off on enabling duty.
Scorpions, Humanity — Hour 1 (New Door/UME) Oh, the inhumanity; Billy Corgan scorps out new turf.
Yung Joc, Hustlenomics (Block/Bad Boy South) Joc’ed up on java with the first single, “Coffee Shop,” off this Neptunes-, Fixxers-, and Gorilla Zoe–produced disc.
SEPT. 4
Calvin Harris, I Created Disco (Almost Gold) The brazen Scot is irreverent enough to lay claim to inventing the big D, the buzzword of this year and the year before.
SEPT. 11
Animal Collective, Strawberry Jam (Domino) Helmed by frequent Sun City Girls producer Scott Colburn, their eighth album’s nine songs include one dedicated to Al Green.
B5, Don’t Talk, Just Listen (Bad Boy) Diddy’s answer to the Backstreet Boys unknowingly use the favorite phone phrase of the Weepy-Voiced Killer as the title for their album.
Dirty Projectors, Rise Above (Dead Oceans) Another punk machismo-reclamation project? Queerific art rockers team with Grizzly Bear playas to rewrite Black Flag’s Damaged — from memory and with a hearty helping of cracked experifolk whimsy.
50 Cent, Curtis (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope) The artist also known as a form of VitaminWater that tastes like grape Kool-Aid continues his marketing onslaught.
Go! Team, Proof of Youth (Sub Pop) Will their first single, “Grip Like a Vice,” hook till it hurts?
Jenny Hoyston, Isle Of (Southern) The Erase Errata guitarist finds paradise far from the dashboard blight.
Modeselektor, Happy Birthday! (BPitch Control) Genre-hopping Berlin duo go the celebrity cameo route, enlisting the vox of Thom Yorke and others.
Pinback, Autumn of the Seraphs (Touch and Go) Will this top Pinback’s last album, Summer in Abbadon, which sold more than 80,000 copies? Indie music sellers wanna know!
Qui, Love’s Miracle (Ipecac) Jesus Lizard David Yow’s quid pro quo — with covers of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” and Frank Zappa’s “Willie the Pimp.”
Simian Mobile Disco, Attack Decay Sustain Release (Interscope) I got my pulverizing bass in your acid keyboard scrunchies!
Kanye West, Graduation (Roc-A-Fella) West’s mom has been caught saying that this is his best album ever. Making or breaking the case: West has said that Lil’ Wayne will rap over a song titled “Barry Bonds.”
SEPT. 18
Babyface, Playlist (Mercury) The onetime close, personal friend of Bill just wants do covers, like “Fire and Rain,” “Time in a Bottle,” and — hoo boy — “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”
James Blunt, All the Lost Souls (Custard/Atlantic) U-g-l-y, this ain’t got no alibi.
Chamillionaire, Ultimate Victory (Chamillitary/Universal Motown) The H-town star’s long-delayed sophomore effort has a mammoth supporting cast even by commercial-rap standards; it kicks off with a single featuring Slick Rick.
The Donnas, Bitchin’ (Purple Feather/Redeye) Named after the fluffy puppies overrunning their studio?
Eve, Here I Am (Aftermath/Interscope) Had anyone been looking? Listening in are producers Dr. Dre, Timbaland, Swizz Beatz, and Pharrell Williams.
Rogue Wave, Asleep at Heaven’s Gate (Brushfire/Universal) Just don’t drift off around Marshall Applewhite while wearing black-and-white Nikes. A new bass player — Patrick Abernathy — and a new label for the locals.
Angie Stone, The Art of Love and War (Stax/Concord) The road back from VH1’s Celebrity Fit Club may yet be one to salvation, since it’s passing through the holy land of Stax.
SEPT. 25
Devendra Banhart, Smokey Rolls down Thunder Canyon (XL) Gael García Bernal sings on one track, and Vashti Bunyan sings on two; Noah Georgeson produces a collection that is supposed to flit from Gilberto Gil breezes to Jackson 5–style pop.
The Cave Singers, Invitation Songs (Matador) Pretty Girls Make Graves–Murder City Devils, Hint Hint, and Cobra High grads calcify in intriguing country-folk shapes.
Keyshia Cole, Just like You (A&M/Interscope) Two years on, it’s clear that Oakland girl Cole’s The Way It Is was the best R&B debut since What’s the 411? Through the sheer intense focus of her singing, she rescues overexposed Missy and Lil’ Kim on the first single here.
José González, In Our Nature (Mute) Yes way, José. The long wait for the follow-up to Veneer is over. González recorded this in his hometown over a three-week period after obsessing about today’s religion and (lack of) ethics.
PJ Harvey, White Chalk (Island) Peej draws in longtime collaborator Eric Drew Feldman and Jim White of the Dirty Three.
Iron and Wine, The Shepherd’s Dog (Sub Pop) Here’s hoping three’s the charm for Sam Beam.
Jagged Edge, Baby Makin’ Project (So So Def/Island) Yet another case for population control.
Mick Jagger, The Very Best of Mick Jagger (Rhino UK) It’s semiofficial: the best of Mick Jagger is worse than the worst of the Rolling Stones.
Bettye LaVette, The Scene of the Crime (Anti-) A singer who can bring out the black-and-blue tone of that title, especially because the scene of the crime is Muscle Shoals, Ala., where she returned to record this album. She’s backed by Drive-by Truckers.
Matt Pond PA, Last Light (Altitude) Neko Case and Kelly Hogan hold a candle.
Múm, Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy, Let Your Crooked Hands Be Holy (Fat Cat) Mum’s the word?
Meshell Ndegeocello, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams (Decca) Connecting her MySpace page to the gender-bending edges of her cover of Bill Withers’s “Who Is He (and What Is He to You?),” you might say the man of her dreams is Miles Davis.
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Raising Sand (Rounder) Why does my mouth fill with sand when I think about this project?
Queen Latifah, Trav’lin’ Light (Verve) Latifah steps to a song that will always be owned by Billie Holiday — and sings some other songs as well — on her debut album for one of Lady Day’s main labels today.
Scott Walker, And Who Shall Go to the Ball? (4AD UK) The enigma returns more quickly than usual, albeit with a four-movement instrumental mini-LP composed for a dance piece.
Will.i.am, Songs about Girls (Interscope) The Black Eyed Pea with the lamest name loves the ladies, egged on by Snoop Dogg.
OCT. 2
Cassidy, B.A.R.S. (Full Surface/J) The Philly battle rapper rebounds from injury and lockup and leans on Bone Thugs, John Legend, and others for faith.
Annie Lennox, Songs of Mass Destruction (Arista) No doubt about it, “Why?” can be very irritating. But this title suggests she’s really amped up the damage inflicted by her tunes.
OCT. 9
Band of Horses, Cease to Begin (Sub Pop) Ben Bridwell expresses his love for YouTube video directors on this Phil Eks–produced second LP.
Dengue Fever, Untitled (M80 Music/NAIL/Allegro) On recordings, they’re sometimes glorious, sometimes not — will the third time be a charm for the group led by Chhom Nimol’s dynamic voice?
The Fiery Furnaces, Widow City (Thrill Jockey) The prolific sibs thrust forth their sixth full-length, emboldened by engineer John McEntire of Tortoise.
The Hives, The Black and White Album (Interscope) The ebullient Swedes will be donning black after a dozen or so shows opening for Maroon 5.
Jennifer Lopez, Brave (Epic) Are listeners courageous or is she?
Robert Pollard, Coast to Coast Carpet of Love and Standard Gargoyle Decisions (Merge) Two releases in one day — guided by bipolar voices?
She Wants Revenge, This Is Forever (Geffen) Let’s hope not.
Amy Winehouse, Frank (Island) Pre–US juggernaut album by the singer in rehab, for anyone who doesn’t think she’s overexposed or wouldn’t rather look at Ronnie Spector and listen to Ruth Brown.
OCT. 16
Nicole Scherzinger, Her Name Is Nicole …(Interscope) …and she’s the Pussycat Doll whom you can tell apart from the other Pussycat Dolls — I think. She falls in seconds-long love at first sight with prospective members of her group during auditions, if the trashiest TV show in recent memory is to be believed.
OCT. 23
Ashanti, The Declaration (The Inc.) I’ll flabbergast many by saying that Ashanti has served up more quality hit singles than the other R&B diva releasing an album this week.
Alicia Keys, As I Am (J) She can sing, she can play, she can sell Proactiv Solution like few others. But will she ever truly let that voice loose?
OCT. 30
Backstreet Boys, Unbreakable (Jive) Do we really want it that way again? Can they give it to us that way? One thing’s for sure — this should give Chelsea Handler months of comedy material.
Chris Brown, Exclusive (Jive) Yeah, he’s cuter than kitten posters. But his appearance in a tribute to the Godfather of Soul at last year’s Grammy Awards verged on sacrilege.
NOV. 13
Wu-Tang Clan, The 8 Diagrams (Street Recordings) Their first album in six years — thus their first post-ODB recording — takes its title from the Shaw brothers’ film Eight Diagram Pole Fighter; in tune with the George Harrison revival, it includes a cover of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
NOV. 20
Six Organs of Admittance, Shelter from the Ash (Drag City) The Redwood Curtain’s guitar-wielding heir to John Fahey breaks out a new LP, said to be smokin’.<\!s>*
"Switching Schools Sucks" Jesse Hawthorne Ficks serves up a triple dose of teen alienation: Pump Up the Volume, Footloose, and the Andrew Stevens–starring, Heathers-influenced Massacre at Central High.
Aug. 31. Castro Theatre (info below)
"Rebels with a Cause: The Cinema of East Germany" Perhaps the most expansive retrospective of East German film in the United States, spanning from the early 1960s to 1990.
Sept. 1–Oct. 27. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org
"Look Back at England: The British New Wave" Does kitchen-sink cinema deserve classic status? It would be great to witness Manny Farber (who wrote scathingly about Rita Tushingham and Tony Richardson) duke it out with Morrissey on the subject.
Sept. 2–Oct. 26. Pacific Film Archive (info below)
"Devotional Cinema: Films by Dorsky and Ozu" Nathaniel Dorsky shows two of his films and also talks about Late Spring, one of the Yasujiro Ozu films discussed in his insightful book that shares this program’s title.
Sept. 4. Pacific Film Archive
"Send Granny Back to Russia" The 1929 film My Grandmother is screened with Beth Custer’s score to raise funds for an upcoming trip on which Custer’s ensemble will perform the score in Russia and elsewhere.
Sept. 4. Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut, Berk. Also Sept. 5. Dolby Laboratories, 100 Potrero, SF. www.bethcuster.com
William Friedkin Series Someone I know who knows all the great actresses calls Ashley Judd’s performance in Bug a "tour de force." That film and others set the stage for more Friedkin freak-outs.
Sept. 4–6. Castro Theatre
"Helmut Käutner: Film Retrospective Part 2" The series continues with the post–World War II period of Käutner’s career, including a 1947 feature shot in Germany’s ruins and a 1954 film featuring a young Klaus Kinski (yes, he was young once).
Sept. 4–Oct. 9. Goethe-Institut, 530 Bush, SF. (415) 263-8760, www.goethe-sf.org
"Fearless Females: Three Films by Shyam Benegal" The director appears at screenings that highlight the feminist currents of his contributions to the Indian new wave of the ’70s.
Sept. 5–7. Pacific Film Archive
Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana Lars Laumann’s 16-minute video screens in a loop as part of the "There Is Always a Machine Between Us" exhibition.
Sept. 6–22. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org
The Darwin Awards A new comedy by Finn Taylor focuses on death by stupidity.
Sept. 7. Roxie Film Center (info below)
"TILT" The Film Arts Foundation presents an evening of films from its media-education program, which works with schools.
Sept. 7. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (info below)
Cruising The digital restoration of William Friedkin’s most controversial film finally hits the Castro Theatre, years after being revived from infamy at the Roxie Film Center.
Sept. 7–13. Castro Theatre
Imp of Satan Local queer horror midnight movie screens along with a live comedy drag show.
Sept. 8. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.synchromiumfims.com
"Tomu Uchida: Japanese Genre Master" An extensive series devoted to the undersung Japanese director, whose movies spanned five decades and even more genres, including comedies, samurai films, theatrical adaptations, and police flicks.
Sept. 8–29. Pacific Film Archive
9/11 Truth Film Festival Two days of films and discussions.
Sept. 10–11. Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand, Oakl. (510) 452-3556, www.renaissancerialto.com
Madcat Women’s International Film Festival Turning 11 this year, Ariella Ben-Dov’s festival includes a tribute to the life and work of Helen Hill and culls 98 films — 76 of them premieres — into 11 programs.
Sept. 11–26. Various venues, SF. (415) 436-9523, www.madcatfilmfestival.org
Super Sleazy ’70s Go-go Grindhouse Show Will "the Thrill" Viharo brings together Pam Grier in Black Mama, White Mama and live dancing by the Twilight Vixen Revue.
Honor of the Knights Along with recent works by José Luis Guerín, this idiosyncratic take on Don Quixote by Albert Serra is being heralded as a new highlight of Spanish cinema.
Sept. 13–16. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
"Role Reversal" Midnites for Maniacs strikes again, with The Incredible Shrinking Woman, Yentl, and a film that can never be screened enough, The Legend of Billie Jean.
Sept. 14. Castro Theatre
The Warriors Walter Hill’s gang classic comes out to play.
Sept. 14–15. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.redvicmoviehouse.com
Film Night in the Park: Rebel Without a Cause Sal Mineo makes eyes at James Dean, and Natalie Wood weeps about her dad rubbing off her lips.
Sept. 15. Union Square, SF. (415) 453-4333, www.filmnight.org
Xperimental Eros PornOrchestra accompanies stag movies in a celebration for OCD’s latest DVD release.
Sept. 15. Other Cinema (info below)
Eros and Massacre Film on Film Foundation presents Yoshishige Yoshida’s 1970 film about anarchist Sakae Osugi.
Sept. 16. Pacific Film Archive
"It’s a Funny, Mad, Sad World: The Movies of George Kuchar" The man appears in person for a screening of five Kuchar classics spanning 15 years, selected by Edith Kramer.
Sept. 18. Pacific Film Archive
Orphans of Delirium What is paratheatre? Antero Alli and a 2004 video provide the answer.
Sept. 18. Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-3890, www.atasite.org
Midnites for Maniacs in 70mm All hail Jesse Hawthorne Ficks for bringing Tobe Hooper’s bodacious nude space vampire classic Lifeforce — one of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s favorite movies — back to the big screen. Even Planet of Blood‘s Florence Marly may have nothing on Mathilda May.
Sept. 21. Castro Theatre
Strange Culture The story of Steve Kurtz is discussed and reenacted in San Francisco filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson’s latest feature.
Sept. 21. Roxie Film Center
"Girls Will Be Boys" This series, curated by Kathy Geritz, includes Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich trouser classics, as well as Katherine Hepburn under the eye of Dorothy Arzner in Sylvia Scarlett.
Sept. 21–30. Pacific Film Archive
Amando a Maradona Soccer icon Diego Maradona gets the feature treatment.
Sept. 26. La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk. (510)849-2568. www.utf8ofilmfestival.org
In Search of Mozart Phil Grabsky’s digiportrait of the composer works to counter the distortions of Amadeus and the elitism that sometimes hovers around Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s legacy.
Sept. 28–30. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
"Legendary Composer: Jerry Goldsmith" The salt and pepper to John Williams’s Hollywood sucrose gets a cinematic tribute, with screenings of classics such as Seconds, Poltergeist, and the film with perhaps his best scoring work, Chinatown.
Sept. 28–Oct. 4. Castro Theatre
DocFest It turns five this year, offering more than 20 films and videos, including the Nick Drake profile A Skin Too Few.
Sept. 28–Oct. 10. Roxie Film Center
Film Night in the Fog The increasingly popular Creature from the Black Lagoon makes an appearance, this time at the Presidio.
Sept. 29. Main Post Theatre, 99 Moraga, SF. (415) 561-5500, www.sffs.org
"Red State Cinema" Joel Shepard curates a series devoted to rural visionaries, including Phil Chambliss and his folk-art videos set at a gravel pit and Spencer Williams and his 1941 Southern Baptist feature The Blood of Jesus.
October. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
"Olivier Assayas in Residence: Cahiers du Cinema Week" The Pacific Film Archive has screened early Assayas movies that didn’t get distribution, such as the Virginie Ledoyen showcase Cold Water. Now the director visits to show Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (think of Assayas’s Irma Vep, also screening) and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (think of his Demonlover), along with Assayas’s latest movie, Boarding Gate.
Oct. 4–11, Pacific Film Archive
Mill Valley Film Festival The biggest Bay Area film fest of the fall turns 30 this year, presenting more than 200 movies from more than 50 countries.
Oct. 4–14. Various venues. (415) 383-5256, www.mvff.org
Helvetica The typeface gets its very own movie.
Oct. 5–7. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
"Shock It to Me: Classic Horror Film Festival" Joe Dante will appear at this fest, which promises a dozen pre-Halloween shockers.
Oct. 5–7, Castro Theatre
"Zombie-rama" Thrillville unleashes Creature with the Atom Brain and Zombies of Mora Tau.
"Joseph Cornell: Films" Without a doubt, this multiprogram series — in conjunction with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Cornell exhibition — is one of the most important Bay Area film events of the year.
Oct. 12–Dec. 14. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Wattis Theater, 151 Third St, SF. (415) 357-4000. www.sfmoma.org
"Expanded Cinema" Craig Baldwin, Kerry Laitala, Katherin McInnis, Stephen Parr, and Melinda Stone blast retinas with double-projector performance pieces.
Oct. 13. Other Cinema
"Celebrating Canyon: New Films" Under the SF Cimematheque rubric, Canyon Cinema’s Michelle Silva and Dominic Angerame put together a program of recent additions to the Canyon catalogue.
Oct. 14. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
"Films by Bruce Conner" The long-awaited new Soul Stirrers short His Eye Is on the Sparrow kicks off an hour of Conner magic.
Oct. 16. Pacific Film Archive
Arab Film Festival The festival’s 11th year will bring 11 days and nights of movies, including a Tunisian doc about the making of Tarzan of the Arabs.
Oct. 18–28. Various venues, SF. (415) 564-1100, www.aff.org
"I Am Not a War Photographer" Brooklyn-based Lynn Sachs presents a night of short movies and spoken word.
Oct. 20. Other Cinema
"Experiments in High Definition" Voom HD works, including one by Jennifer Reeves, get an SF Cinematheque program.
Oct. 21. SF Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org
"Walls of Sound: Projector Performances by Bruce McClure" Brooklyn artist McClure explores projection as performance in this kickoff event in SF Cinematheque’s "Live Cinema" series.
Oct. 24–25. Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org
Smalltown Boys Arthur Russell documentarian Matt Wolf’s semifictive historical look at David Wojnarowicz loops as part of the "There Is Always a Machine Between Us" series.
Oct. 30–Nov. 17. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org
The Last Man on Earth Vincent Price fights zombies in this oft-pillaged 1964 US-Italian horror classic, soon to be re-created with Will Smith.
Oct. 31. Pacific Film Archive
"Día de los Muertos: Honorar las Almas de Cineastas de Avant-Garde Vanguarda" Canyon Cinema and SF Cinematheque founder Bruce Baillie shares some favorites from the Canyon vaults.
Nov. 1. Roxie Film Center. Also Nov. 2. Ninth Street Independent Film Center, 145 Ninth St., SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org
International Latino Film Festival One of three fests to turn 11 this fall.
Nov. 2–18. Various venues, SF. (415) 513-5308, www.utf8ofilmfestival.org.
"Science Is Fiction" Nope, not Jean Painléve — the histories of the Tesla coil, the blimp, and other phenomena hit the screen, thanks to cinematographer Lance Acord and others.
Nov. 3. Other Cinema
Shatfest Get your mind out of the toilet — it’s another Thrillville tribute to William Shatner, including a screening of Incubus.
Strain Andromeda TheandCinepolis, the Film Capitol Anne McGuire’s reedit of The Andromeda Strain isn’t exactly backward, but — thanks to Ed Halter’s "Crazy Rays: Science Fiction and the Avant-Garde" series for SF Cinematheque — it is back. The series continues to beam as Ximena Cuevas’s metamontage attack on Hollywood shares a bill with Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99.
Nov. 8. Roxie Film Center
San Francisco International Animation Showcase A big premiere, some music vids, and a link to the famed Annecy animation fest are possibilities as the SF Film Society event turns two.
Nov. 8–11. Embarcadero Center Cinema, One Embarcadero Center (promenade), SF. (415) 561-5500. www.sffs.org
"Celebrating Canyon: Pioneers of Bay Area Filmmaking" Bruce Baillie unpacks some Bay Area experimental cinema treasures from the ’40s and ’50s.
Nov. 11. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
My Favorite Things At last! Negativland premiere their first CD-DVD release.
Dec. 1. Other Cinema
"James Fotopoulos/Leah Gilliam" and "Victor Faccinto/James June Schneider" Fotopoulos has had some Bay Area attention before, but Gilliam’s Apeshit — a look at racial politics in Planet of the Apes — might be the highlight in this last evening of Ed Halter’s "Crazy Rays" series.
1. Across the Universe Stage visionary (The Lion King) turned occasional film director (Titus, Frida) Julie Taymor’s latest attracted advance attention of the wrong kind. Revolution Studios found her final cut of this Vietnam War–<\d>era musical drama — whose characters break into Beatles songs — too surreal and abstract, reediting it without her consent. Given that, Taymor’s extravagant visual imagination, a script by two 70-year-old Swinging London veterans, low-watt leading actors, and weird cameos (Eddie Izzard, yes; Bono, god no!), this could turn out great, awful, whatever — but it shouldn’t be ordinary. (Sept. 14)
2. The Brave One Jodie Foster is Ms. 45! Or she’s Charles Bronson in Death Wish — take your pick. She’s a New Yorker turned vigilante after suffering a violent assault. Reasons this probably won’t be cheesy include director Neil Jordan and Terrence Howard, Mary Steenburgen, and Jane Adams in supporting roles. (Sept. 14)
3. The Last Winter Global warming has provided an agenda for various cautionary documentaries, nature flicks, and penguin-centric cartoons. This latest by underappreciated genre specialist Larry Fessenden (Habit, Wendigo) puts it where it really belongs: in a horror movie. James LeGros and Ron Perlman lead an advance team planning oil drills in pristine Arctic Alaska. Cabin fever, the supernatural, and perhaps a fed-up Mother Nature fast decimate these human intruders. Recommended for those who like their horror ambiguous and psychologically fraught. (Sept. 28)
4. Lust, Caution OK, Hulk wasn’t so hot. But that aside, is there a working commercial director with a higher-quality track record than Ang Lee? Great expectations are de rigueur for this Mandarin-language drama entangling Joan Chen and Tang Wei with politically powerful Tony Leung in World War II–<\d>era Shanghai. (Oct. 5)
5. For the Bible Tells Me So Like No End in Sight and Sicko, this is one of those documentaries you’ll wish every diehard conservative would see. Daniel<\!s>G. Karslake’s feature takes an evenhanded, big-picture look at just how and why the US religious right has made homosexuality its favorite target. (Oct. 12)
6. No Country for Old Men By all accounts, this lesser Cormac McCarthy novel has been adapted into the greatest Coen brothers movie in aeons. Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, and Kelly Macdonald are among those embroiled once Josh Brolin finds $2 million, mucho cocaine, and a lotta corpses in the Texas desert. Trouble is, evil Javier Bardem wants his dough and his blow back. Gruesome splatstick ensues. (Nov. 21)
7. Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten Julien Temple’s documentary portrait of the late Clash-leading punk rock hero has been praised to the skies — though not having seen it, I’m a little unclear as to why Johnny Depp, John Cusack, and Matt Dillon are leading interviewees. (Dec. 6)
8. Atonement Ian McEwan’s extraordinary novel — about the havoc wrought by a child’s misunderstanding in pre-WWII England — required careful handling. With a screenplay by Christopher Hampton, direction by Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice), and a cast including Brenda Blethyn, Keira Knightley, and Vanessa Redgrave, this might well be as good as it needs to be. (Dec. 14)
9. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street This looks like a perfect match for director Tim Burton, whose work has largely disappointed since 1994’s Ed Wood. But can Johnny Depp as the titular murderous Victorian — or Helena Bonham Carter as his human pie–<\d>baking pal — actually sing this demanding Broadway-operatic score? Can Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, or Sacha Baron Cohen? The breaths of Stephen Sondheim’s and Burton’s fans are bated. (Dec. 21)
10. Youth Without Youth George Lucas has been saying he’ll return to his small-scale filmmaking roots for at least a couple of decades. His original industry booster, Francis Ford Coppola, actually delivers on that promise with this HD-shot adaptation of a Mircea Eliade story. Tim Roth plays a professor turned globe-hopping fugitive; Downfall‘s Hitler, Bruno Ganz, and secretary Alexandra Maria Lara are reunited as players on Roth’s enigmatic journey. After his full decade’s absence, it’ll be intriguing to see what dragged Coppola back behind the camera. (Dec. 21)<\!s>*
"See the way he walks down the street / Watch the way he shuffles his feet / My, he holds his head up high / When he goes walking by / He’s my kind of guy-ai-ai-ai." The agony and the ecstasy of the Crystals echo through the humid second-floor rehearsal space at Intersection for the Arts, bouncing off the pine floors, streaming out the open window, and pinging off the scaffolding propped on Valencia, above the construction bustle and everyday hustle of the Mission District. The Gene Pitney song originally soared, with so much heart-pinching, giggle- and tear-inducing bittersweetness, from the diamond pipes of Darlene Love, at the time the chosen femme surrogate of Wall of Sound architect Phil Spector. But today that sugar-high, lonesome-in-the-crowd sound is emanating from choreographer Erika Shuch, our Fall Arts Preview cover star, who’s leading her dance company through an a cappella rendition to close out the afternoon’s rehearsal. As Tommy Shepherd holds up one wall of the studio, beatboxing out the rhythm, the rest of the Erika Shuch Performance Project — Dwayne Calizo, Jennifer Chien, and Danny Wolohan — fall in line, their righteous harmonies echoing through the space like those of a juvy hall teen-angst gospel choir.
"When he holds my hand I’m so proud / ‘Cause he’s not just one of the crowd / My baby, oh, he’s the one / To try the things they’ve never done / Just because of what they say …"
And then they drop into a shambling routine echoing those executed by the sharp-dressed singers on The T.A.M.I. Show or Ready Steady Go! Intersection staffers enter and immediately exit their impromptu stage, sidling through a nearby door like silent visitors from a forgotten slapstick who lost the joke but can’t quite cease their loop through the space. But nothing breaks the group’s concentration as Shepherd strolls over to the rest of the ESP and Shuch continues to wail, "He’s a rebel, and he’ll never be any good / He’s a rebel, and he’ll never ever be understood …" The entire company breaks into an improvised dance, grinning and whirling off into gentle mashed potatoes or frugs of their own.
Comfortingly familiar yet terribly resonant enough to bring tears to one’s eyes, "He’s a Rebel" isn’t the obvious song choice for 51802, a dance theater meditation on the impact of incarceration on those left behind on the outside. Somehow, in Shuch’s poetic framework, it slides in among the original blues-imbued songs perfectly, like leather clinging to flesh.
"I’m just … way into kitsch!" Shuch says with a girlish laugh after the rehearsal. Pale streaks shoot through her dark pigtails, and freckles race across her cheeks. "This piece has such a potential to be dark and self-important, and I feel like if I have a really hard day, I really like to listen to loud pop music in my car and, like, sing it dramatically. So I think it’s a very natural, very real way of dealing with difficult situations, to sing these cheesy pop songs. That’s a very real kind of relief that people seek and find."
With "He’s a Rebel" and another song from 51802, Little Anthony and the Imperials’ "I’m on the Outside (Looking In)," "you just have permission to be dramatic. You just have such permission to be such drama queens!" Shuch exclaims. "And I just love that. I don’t want it to be like …" Suddenly she breaks into a deathly dull, pretentious robot voice, " ‘Oh, subtly expressing my feelings abstractly …’ I just want it to be so dramatic and so devastating and so the end-of-the-world kind of feeling."
It might have seemed like the end of the world when Shuch watched a loved one enter the California prison system three and a half years ago, the same year she won a Goldie for dance from the Guardian. Since then, the 33-year-old San Jose native has been running the Experimental Performance Institute she cofounded at New College to focus on activist, queer, and experimental performance and has choreographed or directed plays by Charles Mee at the Magic Theatre, Philip Kan Gotanda and Octavio Solís at Intersection, and Daniel Handler for Word for Word Theater. Unlike other productions, 51802 — which is being staged as part of the Prison Project, a yearlong interdisciplinary examination of the state’s prison system at Intersection — cuts to the bone for the choreographer.
"It’s something that I feel I’ve been doing for a while in abstract ways," Shuch says, discussing her 2004 work All You Need and her 2005 piece One Window. The latter concerned "physical and emotional confinement," while the former revolved around a German case of allegedly consensual cannibalism — "this situation of having a desire that kind of has no place in this world and being punished because you want something that doesn’t fit and having the world look at these desires through a moral lens. Who has the authority or the power to say what is right or what is wrong when two people find something that they both want?"
"So I’ve been kind of …," she says, laughing nervously, "floating around this theme for some years. This is the first time I’m coming out and saying this is actually what I’m making a piece about. It is something very specific, and we’re using these abstract symbolic tales to speak to the feelings of what it’s like to be on the outside, though the text that I speak is very straightforward."
Shuch recites an excerpt from her text, an explanation of 51802‘s title, which was inspired by the five-digit number given to each prisoner that takes the place of their name: "I had to write a little poem to remember his number. It went something like this: five is for your fingers, one is for the star, eight is for the years you’re locked up, zero is for your heart, and then there’s a two. But the two is easy to remember. It’s always about two — one on the inside, one on the outside, and zero for the heart."
Powerful words from someone acclaimed (Shuch recently won the prestigious Emerging Choreographers Award from the Gerbode Foundation) for the use of movement as her central mode of expression. But the text also bears the imprint of a creator who has long toiled as a resident at Intersection through the Hybrid Project, which builds bridges between artists working in different mediums.
Shuch directed Domino by Sean San Jose, Intersection’s program director of theater, when it premiered with Campo Santo at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2005, and he was impressed by her ability to get people to "that trusting place" necessary to make great work. "Everything is very present to her, and everything is very real for her. She knows no bounds when she’s onstage — there’s no dance artifice. It’s whatever the feeling is, and that sounds, wow, very heavy, but what I’m impressed with is how much life and air she lets in, and the way that she incorporates as many elements as possible is very exciting to watch and very inspirational."
51802 exemplifies Shuch’s interdisciplinary megamix, melding movement, puppets, doo-wop, and two tales centered on one person stuck at the bottom of the well and another who yearns to be haunted by a ghost. During her Headlands Center for the Arts and Djerassi Institute residencies in the past year, Shuch mapped out the bones of the play before she began actualizing the piece with the ESP, beginning in mid-June.
At this point, a month from opening, the mood is frenetic, but the approach, Shuch says, is "the only way I know."
During the choreographer’s writing process, she talked to other people who had loved ones on the inside and fictionalized or "translated" some of her own experience. "People are always going, ‘Is it true or not true?’ And I’m, like, ‘Does it matter?’ I just want to present it as a story of somebody that’s on the outside. I mean, it’s all true, and none of it is true, so it’s riding that line between fiction and truth."
While collaborating with the rest of the ESP, Shuch might ask the players to spend 10 minutes writing, say, a rant to deliver to a mouse at the bottom of the well, or come up with a movement. She’ll then edit it, and they’ll piece it together, or they’ll integrate the movement into the work, with cochoreographer Melanie Elms lending an outside eye to Shuch’s moves.
"They’re all incredible movers," Shuch says of the ESP while munching a sliver of watermelon. "We all don’t have the same dance training. Two nights ago we had this rehearsal with Melanie where we realized there’s a section that actually should not be choreographed, that we should actually let them craft it for themselves because we don’t want everybody to be clones of each other all of the time. I mean, I want to build movement vocabularies, and it’s been really great also to have them amplify rather than just curb their instincts."
Instinct is a primary driver for Shuch, a one-of-a-kind choreographer, far from yet very much a part of the Spector girl groups, specters, lonely cons, and rumbling streets below us. The daughter of a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence investigator father and a Korean mother whose family was killed in the Korean War, she is, unsurprisingly, a bit of a contradiction — a little bit inside and outside, unable to talk openly about her felon and, despite his request, unable to stop herself from following the creative urge that is drawing her toward that unmentionable story. She’s gathering increasing attention here, yet she’s also eager to travel to South Korea to learn traditional dance and reenvision her mother’s folk tales. And she’s a choreographer who confesses, howling with laughter, that she would rather sit in a dark movie theater or go camping than see more dance. "I talk to so many dancers who are, like, ‘I never go see dance! I don’t like dance!’ " she says, chuckling, before realizing, "I’m going to get in trouble, like, get fired for saying that." But somehow the form continues to move her, "just because we can say things that we can’t say in any other way." 2
51802
Sept. 13–29
Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m., $8–$25 (Thurs., pay what you can)
“The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families — it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right” Dick Cheney, excerpt from an April 15, 1994 interview first aired on CSPAN. Watch the interview here.
Read Editor and Publisher coverage here.
3,964: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03
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.
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
The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (8/14/07): So far, $452 billion for the U.S., $57 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.”
When the big earthquake, terrorist attack, or other civic disaster finally hits San Francisco, a lot of people are going to be in for a major shock: their high-tech cell phones and computer-based office telephone systems might not work.
But after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake and after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City, residents found there was still a way to reach their loved ones and let the world know they were OK; they used an old-fashioned communications tool that’s low tech, securely grounded, publicly accessible, and reliable.
It’s called a pay phone.
Next time there’s a disaster, we may not be so lucky: pay phones, fixtures of the public landscape for more than a century, have been quietly disappearing. And many of those that remain don’t work. These essential communication tools — good for emergencies, privacy, and the poor — are falling victim to deregulation laws, the greed of telecommunications companies, and the public’s obsession with high technology.
In San Francisco they’ve departed in droves from sidewalk carrels; corner stores; bus shelters; subway platforms; office, museum, and movie theater lobbies; supermarkets; shopping malls; city swimming pools and YMCAs; diners; parks; and gas stations. They’ve been disappearing at a rate of about 10 percent annually for the past four years, down from roughly 400,000 at the height of the dot-com boom to 150,000 today, trade group attorney Martin Mattes told state regulators last year. The decline in San Francisco mirrors those in California and the nation.
And while pay phones may seem like quaint relics of another era, they remain an important part of the nation’s communications system, serving millions of people who for one reason or another don’t have or can’t use cell phones. And consumer advocates say the loss of the pay phone system is a serious problem.
Although cell phones are pretty ubiquitous, not everyone can afford one — and not everyone can use one. For socially marginalized people, pay phones are still a lifeline. For people who can’t use wireless technology — and can’t afford a home phone line — they’re essential.
Why are pay phones vanishing? The ready answer — cell phones — identifies the technology that’s replacing them and cutting into their profits. But it doesn’t completely explain why a society that once valued pay phones — and may ultimately remember that it still does — has let them disappear. That story has more to do with the politics of deregulation and the profits of telecom companies.
THE POWER OF OLD TECH
In the 2004 climate-change disaster film The Day after Tomorrow, Dennis Quaid plays a climatologist who anticipates dire consequences from a sudden oceanic temperature drop, which is triggered by global warming and leaves New York City frozen solid. From the beaux arts NYC Public Library where he’s taken shelter, the Quaid character’s son (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) needs to call Dad in Washington, D.C., but the cells don’t work. So he finds a half-submerged mezzanine pay phone with a dial tone ("It’s connected to the telephone lines," he notes brightly), drops in a couple of coins, and bingo — he gets Dad’s insider travel advisory.
Such a scenario — at least the pay phone part — isn’t science fiction. In fact, it has played out like that in NYC a few times and also did so in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. When the Twin Towers went down Sept. 11, cell phone masts went down with them. Lines were endless as outgoing calls from lower Manhattan funneled through two nearby landline pay phones, as reported on NBC’s Today. Ditto in the summer heat wave of 1999, when New York air conditioners on overdrive toppled wireless transmitters like dominoes, silencing cell phones from NYC to the Great Lakes. Landline telephones — including pay phones — continued to ring. And when the waters rose in New Orleans, residents flocked to pay phones made available for free use to contact loved ones and let the world know they were stranded.
Landline pay phones — like wired home and office phones — are simply more durable and reliable. "I love my cell phone," said Natalie Billingsley, who heads the California Public Utilities Commission’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates. "But I wouldn’t give up my landline. There’s not enough [wireless] network redundancy."
When the Loma Prieta earthquake hit the Bay Area in 1989, electricity and cell phone service were out for hours, but, Billingsley said, "landline phones were back up in 10 minutes."
Regina Costa of San Francisco’s the Utility Reform Network recalled that when the quake trashed Pacific Street in Santa Cruz, the public switch connecting local phones to the larger network worked despite a local power outage.
The reason, Costa says, is that the traditional wired phone network has a robust, independent electrical backup. Not so wireless transmitters and cable fiber-optic systems, both powered by the public grid.
"Wire lines are a really big public safety feature," Billingsley told us. Backup generators at switching points, where regional and long-distance lines converge, create "all kinds of redundancies" for rerouting calls if parts of the network go down.
That’s not just a technological issue. The new tech networks lack robustness and redundancy, Billingsley said, in part because such standards are no longer mandated. Before telecommunications were deregulated, companies were required to pay for reliability. Now reliability is no longer a public service. Under deregulation, reliability is more spotty. Last year state legislators addressed the need for adequate backup power-pack standards for Internet phones — but in the end, consumers will need to buy the backup systems.
In Japan, where the old but vital wired pay phone network has been reduced by more than half (from 910,000 to 390,000) since the public phone company was privatized in 1985, a public safety official recently warned against such shortsightedness. "To remove public telephones amounts to decreasing the means of communication during emergencies," disaster prevention program director Hitoshi Omachi of Yokohama’s Chiiki Bosai Laboratory observed in a May 8 Asahi Weekly article about cell phones overtaking pay phones. "People should think about measures to maintain public phones, including financial assistance from the central or local governments."
Then there are the social issues. Beth Abrams, director of Grupo de la Comida, which feeds 2,000 immigrants and refugees in the Mission each week, said many are dependent on pay phones. "The thing to remember," Abrams told us, "is that a pay phone could mean somebody’s life in an emergency, when time is of the essence." A child suffering an asthma attack or an adult with heart disease or diabetes (the occurrence of which is high in the immigrant community) "often needs immediate response and has difficulty walking far," Abrams said. Many people whom her group serves don’t have cell phones and rely on pay phones when caring for children outside the home or answering job ads.
Howard Levy, attorney and executive director of Legal Assistance to the Elderly, which serves about 1,000 clients a month, told us many seniors in the Tenderloin and in SoMa hotels don’t have home phones or cell phones. Besides the disincentive of cell phone cost, "folks beyond a certain age don’t feel comfortable with the technology," which is not designed for people "whose vision isn’t so great," Levy said.
Jennifer Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness told us that "a lot of folks do have cell phones nowadays, on a prepaid card," but have only intermittent access, and none when the card runs out. "Poor people in general — people who have extremely low incomes — even if they have a phone at home, [it] can be shut off at times," she said. "Pay phones are really important for emergency situations for folks living outside," or when homeless people are first on the scene, to report an emergency.
In an impromptu survey of eight clients at the Independent Living Resource Center, a San Francisco disability-rights advocacy and support group, services coordinator Diane Rovai found three who had been seriously inconvenienced by lack of pay phone access. One needed a ride home from the airport and was stranded after an entire bank of pay phones was removed; another "missed a really important meeting" after getting wrong directions (the phone she finally found "was dirty and not in good repair"); and the third, who has no cell phone, has problems when she goes out to meet people.
"There are still people who depend on pay phones," particularly in rural communities, Anna Montes said. She belongs to San Francisco’s Latino Issues Forum and is a member of the PUC advisory committee on Universal Lifeline Telephone Service, which subsidizes phone service for low-income households.
Four percent of state households don’t have basic phone service, she said, and many of those are poor and Latino and rely on pay phones.
"Pay phones should be supported because there are individuals who can’t afford [cell phones] and places where wireless doesn’t work," said Bill Nussbaum, a telecommunications lawyer at TURN. "Public policy is a reason to wrap [pay phones] into the goal of universal service, the concept of maximum penetration with reliable and affordable phone service for all."
THE END OF PUBLIC SERVICE
One reason the government has allowed pay phones to disappear is that most people don’t think about them. Cell phones often seem like all one needs to stay in touch, at least to those who own them.
"There’s an unfortunate assumption that everyone has a cell phone. It’s not true," said Harold Feld, senior vice president of the Media Access Project, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit public interest media and telecommunications law firm.
Regulators used to feel it was important for people to have access to public phones, but "they don’t think it’s important anymore," he told us.
Feld pointed out that pay phones used to be owned by AT&T, which created and maintained the pay phone network as part of a widely accessible phone system. Government-guaranteed profit on the company’s investment essentially subsidized even those pay phones that weren’t profitable, an arrangement institutionalized by the 1934 Telecommunications Act. Moreover, as a regulated public utility, the phone company needed permission to get out of the pay phone business.
With the monopoly’s breakup in 1984, competitors could enter the pay phone market, and by 1996 AT&T could get out of it.
"The old Bell monopoly came with a historical sense of public service that did not survive the [company’s] breakup and the new cost-benefit accountants and the MBA bottom-line artists," technology historian Iain Boal, coauthor of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso, 2005) told us. "Under neoliberal economic doctrine, all public goods are suspect."
Boal noted, "The new telecom companies had little or zero interest in the public phones they inherited. In fact, quite the reverse. It was in their interest to close or leave trashed any boxes that weren’t profitable and in general to force laggards to mobile phones."
It didn’t happen immediately, attorney Mattes, who has represented the California Payphone Association, a trade group, told us.
"Because the pay phone business was still pretty good in the late 1990s, the telephone utilities stayed in the business during those years, competing with the independents," Mattes said. Pay phone rates also rose.
But the economics of the pay phone business started to change around 2000, Mattes said, mostly due to wireless competition, and companies had difficulty collecting for toll-free calls and calls made through other long-distance providers. So telephone utilities started giving up their less-profitable pay phone locations.
"Bell South abandoned the pay phone market entirely about five or six years ago," Mattes said. "AT&T and Verizon have been gradually leaving the market, giving up their less-profitable pay phones at a steady pace."
From January 2005 to June 2007, AT&T reduced its pay phone lines in California by more than half — from 77,467 to 36,870 — according to PUC counts. And in the same period, Verizon went from 28,743 to 16,421 pay phones.
While the pay phone business was "modestly profitable," according to Mattes, it was mainly important to the utilities "as a platform for customers to make highly profitable long-distance calls." But, he said, with competition in long-distance and wireless services, the profits have been squeezed out of long-distance calls. Pay phone use also dropped dramatically, he said, due to wireless competition.
TURN’s Costa suggested that the old AT&T overpaid in its postdivestiture bid to acquire cable and bypass local exchange carriers for direct connections with its former customer base. Later, it abandoned the poor voice-quality network and may have needed to recoup losses.
"The Bells have a separate incentive to pull out copper," the older coaxial wire that connects almost all landline phones, Feld said. "The FCC says they don’t have to share [fiber-optic cable wire with competitors] as they do copper, and copper needs to be maintained. It was laid because regulators made them. It’s more costly to maintain than they can charge."
"Without regulation," Feld noted, "big companies can leave the [pay phone] market, but they can also increase line charges" — monthly fees for phone connection to the local exchange — "and interconnection fees" for long-distance connection, paid by callers and local exchanges to the nonlocal carrier for allowing calls to go through.
The loss of pay phone service is one more result of faith-based deregulation, the belief that the market will provide for everyone’s needs. "The demise of pay phones was utterly predictable," Boal told us. "It’s a disgrace."
And the impact of the disappearance of pay phones ripples beyond service needs.
OUTSOURCED
A sprawling ’70s low-rise cement building at West Portal and Sloat, once hidden by shrubs from view of the adjacent Muni tracks, is now vacant and slated to become the new Waldorf High School. It used to be the Pac Bell operators’ building, housing 35 workers, mostly women with more than 30 years of service, "the forefront of the [union] movement," said Kingsley Chew, president of Communications Workers of America Local 9410 in San Francisco.
Those operators answered 411 information queries and routed 911 emergency calls. Two years after winning a strike by shutting down the phone company, the operators saw their jobs outsourced in 2006 to Dublin and Pleasanton.
The majority of the local’s members are women, Chew said. Their male counterparts, mostly collectors in the coin department, are now gone, accounting for the loss of 25 to 30 union jobs in the past five years. Besides gathering coins from pay phones, the collectors maintained the phones and removed graffiti (which is more prevalent these days).
Pay phones once meant union jobs, and as their numbers have declined, so has the union. Local 9410 membership is down from 3,000 when Chew took office in 2003 to 750 today, with those still around mainly technicians who install and repair phones.
Chew calculated that one job here is financially equivalent to six jobs in India or the Philippines, where 1-800 calls are processed and workers are paid $400 a month. The city and the state lose local business tax revenues when jobs go overseas, he said, and the costs of vanishing pensions as workers are laid off are eventually externalized and borne by local residents when demand for public services rises.
There may be greater demand for pay phones soon: the major phone companies are expected to raise home-phone rates. Basic service rates have generally been averaged geographically, within a major company’s service "footprint," Lehman said, but deaveraging can soon occur, which will drive up the price of basic rural and high-cost urban services.
Meanwhile, two state programs supporting pay phones are being axed.
REGULATIONS DIE
Two pay phone regulatory programs remain on the books, one frozen and one barely operating. The PUC created both programs in 1990 as part of a legal ruling, when new pay phone providers were struggling to gain a foothold in former Pac Bell (now AT&T) and GTE (now Verizon) monopoly territory and consumers were encountering new system abuses.
One program, the Public Policy Payphone Program (PPPP, or Quad-P), was designed to subsidize phones located "in unprofitable locations to serve the health and safety needs of the public," while the other, the Payphone Enforcement Program (now known as Payphone Service Providers Enforcement), was established "to ensure that pay phone consumer safeguards are being followed." Both programs, which were expanded statewide, were funded by a monthly per-line surcharge on the industry, unlike other telecom public policy programs, which are supported by a percentage surcharge on consumers’ monthly phone bills.
But the list of potential state locations for subsidized pay phones was reduced from 67,000 in 1988 to 22,000 in 1989, just before the state programs were initiated, and to 1,975 in 1993. By 1998, when deregulation was complete and pricing went to market rates, Pac Bell had only 300 subsidized business phones out of 140,000, attributing the change to the increased number of independent providers and to multiphone contracts, which enabled revenues and costs to be averaged out.
Applications to designate or install Quad-P phones have to pass through the PSPE advisory committee, which hasn’t aggressively solicited them or approved more than two or three (with just one installed) of the 33 received since 2001, according to the Division of Ratepayer Advocates.
Almost nobody knows that Quad-P exists — or that anyone can file an application if a proposed site meets certain criteria. Currently, there are only 14 Quad-P phones statewide, mainly in parks, down from 40 in March, with 13 supported by AT&T and one by Verizon.
The PSPE was set up "to enforce, through random inspections, consumer safeguards for all public payphones … such as signage requirements, and rate caps for local, long distance and directory assistance calls within California."
Until recently, inspectors made the rounds of for-profit as well as subsidized pay phones, numbering more than 400,000 in the ’90s, on a rotation schedule that took a decade to complete. Between December 2001, when the project came under PSPE administration (it was formerly run by the industry), and June 2007, civil-service inspectors logged 133,893 violations on 39,444 phones, a rate that has slowed with staff downsizing. The DRA estimates its activities reduced the average rate of violations significantly. The inspection staff was cut in half last fall, to three, and other program staffers were transferred to other divisions to cut expenses.
The number of pay phones to monitor has declined, but with reduced inspections, violations have begun to rise. Numbering too few to be proactive, inspectors now respond only to consumer complaints registered on the PUC’s consumer fraud hotline. This number, not posted on pay phones, is 1-800-649-7570; it accepts calls between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. There’s no after-hours message machine, but if you’ve got a computer and are still primed when you get home, you can log on to the PUC Web site, at www.cpuc.ca.gov, to report a complaint. Patterns of systemic abuse — and dead phones — are less likely to be detected from reactive, hotline-triggered complaints.
Last summer the industry’s PSPE advisory committee formally requested that both programs and the committee itself be eliminated and program surcharges ended, citing reduced activity and need. "All that Quad-P has done is subsidize its own costs," said Mattes, the attorney for the California Payphone Association. "It deserves a quiet burial."
The DRA argues that the reduction of these state programs is premature: even if dramatic market changes have made pay phones a distant second choice over wireless for many, the old technology is still important.
For one thing, predictions of the death of pay phones may be exaggerated. "It is likely that some core base of payphones will continue to be used regularly and earn a profit," the division observed in a July 2006 report, responding to gloomy industry forecasts.
For another, the actual basis for the pay phone network’s decline is far from clear. The division noted "a distinct lack of quantitative analysis regarding both the reduction … and demographic information about the location and need for payphones" in its program review comments, part of the PUC’s formal rule-making process (to be concluded in coming months, following administrative law judge Maribeth Bushey’s findings).
Acknowledging that "concerns about migration to wireless phone plans and cost recovery issues (including interconnection costs, phone card fraud, and 911 services)" need to be addressed, the division restated the universal service goals of both the ’96 act and the original 1934 Telecom Act, quoting a commission ruling from a decade ago, now more urgent: "Parties have not substantiated that telephone service will continue to be available at unprofitable locations to satisfy public health, safety, and welfare needs. Nor have they convinced us that the marketplace will replace the existing public policy payphones or fulfill the public policy objective in public health, safety, and welfare."
The DRA recommends a two-pronged strategy for stabilizing the for-profit market and assessing the need for subsidized pay phones — one that could potentially restore proactive inspections.
Instead of eliminating Quad-P oversight, it said, "the task, rather, is to address these problems by reforming and strengthening the program, as well as by assessing [systematically] the continuing public need for payphones" and finding ways to meet it. The division proposed a formal workshop or survey to compile data about profits and costs, locations, and demographics — hard data on where pay phones exist and where they don’t but are needed.
The DRA also suggests that regulatory oversight be overhauled; that the PUC exert closer control over pay phone service providers by imposing fines or through disconnection; that pay phones be registered or certified, as they are in numerous other states; and that new procedures be adopted for installing and removing pay phones.
Oversight is needed, the division says, even if the industry can’t pay for it; it recommends a surcharge on monthly phone bills, as there are for other public policy telecom programs. It also says an overdue audit of both programs is needed and that the hotline-triggered inspection regimen needs to be reassessed within 12 to 18 months of its inauguration last fall.
SAVING PAY PHONES
On the ground floor of San Francisco’s City Hall, a single pay phone remains among six phone bays. Under existing subsidy rules, the city — which contracts for multiple phones — is ineligible for a subsidy.
It seems like high time to figure out how to restore some conventional lines of communication. Instead of shifting the whole cost of backup phones to the public, why not consider allocating it between the industry and ratepayers, placing the industry’s contribution on a sliding scale to be reviewed every year or two along with revenues, and even incorporating a percentage of more competitive telecom video and cable profits?
Admittedly, this goes against the current tide. Avid deregulators — like former PUC commissioner Susan Kennedy, now Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, and current commissioner Rochelle Chong — have aggressively promoted advanced technology and less oversight.
But is what’s good for AT&T and Verizon really good for ratepayers or small businesses? Letting the pay phone network — a real, decentralized public space — be dismantled just because many of us now have private cell phones violates fairness and common sense. Corporate-minded advanced-tech boosters may dismiss the older technology, but it serves everyone.
"Just because it’s old," TURN’s Nussbaum said, "so what?"<\!s>*
REVIEW "One single picture could be the mother of cinema," one of our leading auteurs has observed. Apichatpong Weerasethakul would have said saint, Jean-Luc Godard death, and Quentin Tarantino motherfucker, but only renowned Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami could glimpse in a lone image the maternal nurturing of reel life. With remarkable films such as Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), And Life Goes On (1991), and Through the Olive Trees (1994), Kiarostami has put his country on the world-cinema map in the uneasy decades following the plucking of the feathers from the shah’s Peacock Throne. Faux-vérité documentation, unscripted drama, and deceptively casual construction characterize Kiarostami’s complex narratives, most of which eschew the overt nationalist critique of his more politically trenchant peers (Samira Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi) in favor of to-be-or-not-to-be philosophizing and a quasi-spiritual appreciation of fleeting pleasures — the lengthening of late-afternoon shadows across a park bench, confessional conversations with jovial strangers, ditching homework to watch soccer on TV.
Now approaching 70, the creatively restless and keenly observant Kiarostami has recently refocused on photography, with which he has been intermittently engaged since the 1970s. In conjunction with a retrospective of both his widely celebrated and his lesser-known works at the Pacific Film Archive, which runs through Aug. 30, the Berkeley Art Museum has mounted a bracingly stark exhibition of Kiarostami’s photographs, culled from four distinct series. Sporting the disappointingly generic title "Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker" — one of his film titles, such as The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), would have sufficed — the show fortunately far transcends its unpromising nomenclature and, like a Kiarostami film, slowly and indelibly reveals its aesthetic mastery, meditative rewards, and picturesque wanderlust.
In his introduction to the exhibition — which benefits from handsome, unadorned installation in BAM’s airy upper galleries — Kiarostami notes that still images, unlike films, are not weighed down with viewers’ expectations of narrative progression or conventional entertainment. Stripped of sustained storytelling and freed from the need to posture or pander — not that his films ever stoop to such commercial demands — Kiarostami’s photographs are nonetheless imbued with dramatic arcs, panoramic vistas, hints of intrigue, and a rigorously intellectual yet unrepentantly earthy moviemaker’s sure, sensual approach to framing, sequencing, and characterization, even if the scene-stealers are all blackbirds.
Camera in hand, Kiarostami regularly embarks on long walks across his homeland, frequently crossing hundreds of miles on epic treks on which the journey truly is the destination. Iran’s war-torn topography, haunted by the ghosts of dissidents and withering under the ceaseless gaze of enemies real and imagined, is for the ever-inquisitive Kiarostami a locus of geographic wonder and emotional extremes. Guided only by a moral compass, he traverses desolate roads and loses himself in his country’s seasonal secrets. Kiarostami keeps to himself on these outward- and inward-looking road trips, but as Scottish troubadour Roddy Frame — who for years memorably viewed the world through his Aztec Camera — once noted, loneliness and being alone aren’t always the same. "Not being able to feel the pleasure of seeing a magnificent landscape with someone else is a form of torture," Kiarostami confesses in the exhibition intro. "That is why I started taking photographs. I wanted somehow to eternalize those moments of passion and pain."
Kiarostami fully explores the dichotomy of these heightened instances in a quartet of works unified by the artist’s steady perspective (nothing seems to disturb his calm) and ability to appreciate the hushed prescience of transformation — in mind, body, and physical surroundings — where preoccupied passersby might only see oil slicks and burkas. In the Roads and Trees series, Kiarostami depicts in grainy, high-contrast black-and-white photos the byways and trunks that stretch onward and upward forever, bisecting his country vertically and horizontally into socially segmented fields of ground and sky. Whether smoothly paved or roughly pebbled, the roads are nearly empty, bereft of the comings and going that typically signal industrial progress and limitless options. Stasis defines the stunning Snow White series as well. Absence is palpably present in these bleak yet beautiful images in which anthropomorphized trees are starkly silhouetted against unending fields of pure white snow.
Winter’s monochromatic chill thaws into vibrant color in the Trees and Crows photographs, all taken on the verdant grounds of palaces in Tehran where flocks of birds have taken up residence as the winged heirs apparent to ousted royals. Crows are highly valued in Iran as a special species that lives longer than most and bears witness to national history. Kiarostami reverently views them as birds of pray, pecking and genuflecting on deep green lawns that appear freshly painted.
Kiarostami is back on the road in the Rain series, now behind the wheel of a car and looking through the windshield at patterns of water on glass and raindrops falling on yet more tall trees. ("If I were not a filmmaker, I would have become a truck driver," he told Deborah Solomon in a New York Times interview earlier this year.) Careening across flooded two-lane blacktops, these gorgeous, pictorialist photos drive straight into abstraction.
Many of Kiarostami’s poems begin with the lines "The more I think<\!s>/ The less I understand," an admission of epistemological uncertainty — and unfettered emotional sincerity — that informs every image in this show. Like the archetypal wanderer who quests for a life worth living in his award-winning 1997 film Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami concludes in these photographs that the search for meaning is an affirmation of time well spent on the road to nowhere.<\!s>*
ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: IMAGE MAKER
Through Sept. 23, $4–<\d>$8 (free first Thurs.)
Wed. and Fri.–<\d>Sun., 11 a.m.–<\d>5 p.m.; Thurs., 11 a.m.–<\d>7 p.m.
The world of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos (a.k.a. The Stoolie, 1963) is an incredibly complicated one. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that its inhabitants are ex-cons, petty thieves, snitches, and ambiguous lovers, all of whom are as loyal as they’re unfaithful. Or maybe the complexity emerges from the strong sense of honor and morality that these underground characters share.
Maurice (Serge Reggiani), a robber, is sent to prison because somebody snitches on him. He’s willing to believe that it was his best friend, Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who betrayed him. But Silien, a small-time crook who we know almost immediately is also a police informant, proves to be the only person Maurice should have trusted.
The film’s aesthetic adds to its layers. Borrowing elements from the gangster movie and film noir and combining them in a way that resembles a low-budget B flick, Melville creates a personal response to the French new wave. His characters and story are mere starting points from which to present a highly stylized, detached contemplation of the circumstances under which we can each become the most devoted or the most disloyal of people. All this might be inspired by Melville’s experience with the World War II French Resistance, which the director most overtly examined in his acclaimed 1969 film Army of Shadows. (Maria Komodore)
So the members of Rage Against the Machine are having themselves a little reunion outing, eh? What a great reason for a massive flock of shirtless, chest-bumping frat boys to jump in place with middle fingers extended while screaming, "Fuck you — I won’t do what you tell me!"
It should come as no surprise that the politically charged rap-rock foursome caved in for a supposed one-off performance — their first in almost seven years — at the recent Coachella Festival. Since 2001 the festival’s organizers have been shelling out the bling for such iconic alt-rockers as Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Stooges, and the Pixies to kiss and make up for one stifling day in the desert. Now Rage-oholics have a machine to rail along with again — at least until October.
So far the group has only committed to a string of scattered festival appearances around the country, including four dates headlining the "Rock the Bells" tour, the annual hip-hop festival including performances from the Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy, Nas, Mos Def, and EPMD. According to RATM, there are no plans for a new album; guitarist Tom Morello stated in a May Blabbermouth.net interview that recording a follow-up to their last studio disc, Renegades (Epic, 2000), would be "a whole other ball of wax right there" and "writing and recording albums is a whole different thing than getting back on the bike and playing these songs."
But why play these songs now? Is it only a coincidence that the RATM realliance followed the dissolution of Audioslave in February? Morello confirmed this with Billboard.com in March, revealing that "the Rage rebirth occurred last fall when it was clear that there was not going to be any Audioslave touring in the immediate future." In addition, sources for the Los Angeles Times disclosed that Coachella’s quick sellout and the ticket scalping that followed factored into the band’s decision to add more dates after that appearance.
RATM, however, have spun their reunion to NME.com as a response to the "right-wing purgatory" that this country has "slid into" under the George W. Bush administration since the group’s demise in 2000. As Morello additionally told Billboard.com, "These times, I think, demand a voice like Rage Against the Machine to return" and "the seven years that Rage was away the country went to hell. So I think it’s overdue that we’re back."
So what took RATM so long, and why listen to a leftist band that’s earned its salary from a subsidiary of a corporate media conglomerate, namely Sony Records? And who’s willing to listen — the decider in chief? Efforts ranging from the worldwide protests against US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to legislation to cut off war funding crafted by the Democratic-led Congress have failed to move the Bush camp. It’s doubtful that a band known for its aversion to both the Democratic and Republican parties is going to have any impact.
Since RATM’s so-called "Dixie Chicks moment" at Coachella, corporate media has definitely scrutinized the group’s defiance of the Bush regime. During a performance of "Wake Up," Zach de la Rocha made a speech stressing that the current administration "should be hung and tried and shot." The band members quickly came under fire, and on a segment of Hannity and Colmes, Alan Colmes pegged them as "anarchists," while Sean Hannity suggested that they should be investigated by the Secret Service. Guest Ann Coulter scoffed, "They’re losers, their fans are losers, and there’s a lot of violence coming from the left wing." In rebuttal, de la Rocha deemed the three "fascist motherfuckers" and reiterated that the band believes Bush "should be brought to trial as a war criminal," then "hung and shot." Thanks for clearing that up, Zach.
RATM’s songs have more significance today then they did 10 years ago, but if RATM choose to have a voice now, will their cause be served come November should they dissolve again? It’s likely de la Rocha would retreat to the rock he’s been hiding under for the past seven years if the band decides to part ways a second time. Even if the rap-rock pioneers’ material is tagged as anarchist propaganda for the masses, they definitely have something more to offer listeners than does, say, a Smashing Pumpkins reunion. A reassembled RATM couldn’t come at a better time — and these songs are meant to be played and heard now. Perhaps this time we’re ready to listen and stand up with them. *
Given the state of English food, it should not surprise us that English food writers are either embittered and caustic or looking for a way out of their mildewed isles. In the latter group we find Ian Jackman, who hopped the pond hither 15 years ago and has now published a book, Eat This! 1001 Things to Eat before You Diet (Harper, $14.95 paper). If On the Road had been about eating in America and had been written by an earlier, less woozy edition of Christopher Hitchens, it might have been something like this.
But perhaps the Hitchens comparison doesn’t quite do justice to Jackman. Both writers are Oxbridge-educated, adoptive Americans with posh accents, but the Hitch is a bloated warmonger who mongered the wrong war and whose reputation — apart from an ability to recite poetry from memory when in trouble, like a squid squirting ink — seems undeserved. Jackman, by contrast, is soft-spoken and gracious. Of course, he isn’t a pugilist and raconteur who must snap and snarl for his supper on cable television but belongs, instead, to a long European tradition of discovering the New World and taking delight in it.
Eat This! reminds us that no matter how much America fatigue some of us might be feeling these days — and some of us are feeling quite a lot, thanks to Nancy Pelosi and the impeachment that wasn’t — the cultural possibilities of this country remain staggering. American food, in Jackman’s telling, retains its regional quality; New England is still notable for its lobster rolls, the Bay Area is a land of exquisite breads, Chicago is where you want to go for red-hot hot dogs, and in Memphis they use dry rubs on their barbecued ribs. Jackman has even tracked down what I regard, from profound personal experience, as the best cheeseburger ever; it’s sold at Solly’s Grille, in Milwaukee’s northern suburbs, and is so slathered with butter that it’s known locally (and Wisconsin is America’s Dairyland, after all) as the butter burger. No one can eat just one.
Since pretty much the whole world seems to be put out with us these days, we’re lucky our erudite British cousins are on hand to assure us we haven’t yet totally gone to hell. The food is still good here, and they should know.
Several folks pointed out to me that the San Francisco Chronicle carried a premature comment on my death, in its Aug. 9th feature “What people say about the designs (of our new towering highrise buildings).”
It quoted Michael S. McGill, the former executive director of the San Francisco Urban Planning & Research Association and former executive director of the Bay Area Forum, 64, now living in Washington, D.C.
Said Gill, “Having left SF at the end of the two-decade war over high-rises, in the early ’90s, I am astonished at the apparent public support for ‘the tallest high-rise on the West Coast.’ How things have changed! Is (San Francisco Bay Guardian publisher) Bruce Brugmann still alive, or is he spinning in his grave?”
Hey, Mike, good to hear from you. Your report of my death is premature and I am happy to report that the Guardian
is still firmly on top of the highrise issue, which I like to call pellmell Manhattanization. We stopped the first highrise boom with Proposition M, the limited growth initiative on commercial highrises and the downtown highrise boom.
But now the issue is highrises with million-dollar condos, ugly, much too high and out of proportion for a compact city and its compact neighborhoods, built not for residents but for people working outside the city and driving out our lower income and middle classes.
You can rest assured, Mike, that we are on the story and fighting them every way we can. And soon you may see the equivalent of a Prop M for highrise condos. Can we count on you to come back and join the battle?
Postscript: “The Devil’s Bargain at the Transbay Terminal,” a blog by Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond, eloquently summarizes the key political point behind the new highrise boom. “Nobody in California wants to pay higher taxes for anything. So the folks at City Hall have decided that the only way we can have a new transit terminal is if we hock a piece of our city and our skyline to fund it. So we take some of the land on the terminal site and let a developer build monstrosity of a highrise on it–and that will bring in the money that we can’t get any other way.”
The dust is still settling after a contentious Board of Supervisors hearing July 31 about public health problems allegedly related to the 1,500-unit condo complex that Lennar Corp. is building on Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard. Department of Public Health officials succeeded in convincing a narrow board majority not to urge a temporary halt to the project but failed to reassure hundreds of mostly African American residents of Bayview–Hunters Point that their health has not been negatively impacted by Lennar’s inability to properly monitor naturally occurring asbestos and control dust at the hilltop site.
At the hearing, minister Christopher Muhammad of the Muhammad University of Islam, which lies adjacent to Parcel A, urged a shutdown and accused the city of "environmental racism," while Dr. Arelious Walker of the True Hope Church of God in Christ and Rev. J. Edgar Boyd of Bethel AME argued that the project is safe and beneficial to the community and that, in Walker’s words, there is "no evidence to warrant a shutdown." Many project supporters were brought in by Lennar on buses. Some observers called the clash "a holy war in the Bayview."
After the board voted 5–6 against a shutdown, there were angry allegations that some pastors had not publicly disclosed their financial interest in seeing the construction project continue. During the hearings, neither Walker nor Boyd disclosed that they had a contract with Lennar to build 200 homes on Parcel A. Reached by phone, Walker denied any self-interest in recommending that Lennar’s construction project continue. "My history disproves that," Walker told the Guardian. "If anyone unearths any evidence of harm, I’d back off my support."
The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is doing an assessment based on a July 17 request by the Department of Public Health. In a public health assessment of Oak Ridge High School in El Dorado County, where naturally occurring asbestos was exposed during construction of a playing field, the federal agency found that athletes, coaches, and maintenance workers were "at higher risk [of exposure to asbestos] than previously thought," according to spokesperson Susan Muza. But while the agency recommended soil removal and landscaping, Muza told us it did not recommend the school be relocated or closed.
Meanwhile, Walker also rejects the notion that Bayview–Hunters Point is being torn apart by competing religious factions. "Minister Muhammad’s group has helped prove that there is a serious problem," Walker said. "I applaud him for that. We just disagree about the dust, but that’s not going to bring about a breach. I refuse to let there be a holy war."
Walker said his motive is more African American homeownership. But he learned how tough that is when he developed 20 town houses near Candlestick Point. "We wanted a 50 percent African American homeownership rate, but only two families ended up qualifying," Walker said, blaming "bad credit."
That raises questions about the likelihood that Bayview–Hunters Point’s predominantly African American and low-income community will be able to afford Lennar’s condos, with prices ranging from $300,000 for units required to be "affordable" (about 30 percent of the units) to $700,000 for market-rate units. (Sarah Phelan)
CHEAP EATS First windmills we saw were in Wyoming, and I was in the back of the van writing about Don Quixote. So that was cool. I like stuff like that. Then in Nebraska it was my turn to drive and we went through a tornado. It was just getting dark out, and at first this was amazing. Lightning was everywhere all at once — not just bolts but balls and flowers and roadmaps. Explosions of pure pyromania, like fireworks or a war zone. One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.
I was in the van by myself. For a while we had two cars, and Phenomenon was in the other one with Fiddlesticks and our fearless leader, Chief. So they had all the bravery with them, but I had the snacks.
The van goes like a boat in the wind. I was giggling and hooting, scanning my music for something to live up to the light show. I had snacks and iTunes. When a speed limit sign twisted out of the ground and flew away, things changed for me and I very immediately had back problems. Neck. Shoulders. If I lived, I was going to need a massage.
Besides bravery, the other car had all of our toll money and leadership skills, but for some reason me and snacks were calling the shots. So long as I didn’t see any actual twisters, and I didn’t, my strategy, now that we were in it, was to just keep driving. The lightning was indistinguishable from the thunder, or anything else. Everything was just light and noise, rain and us, all rolled up and rolling. My knuckles hurt.
Drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, and then right when we’d finally outrun the mayhem, my fuel light came on. I got off at the next exit and gassed up, sirens whooping from all the nearby Nebraska towns and the wind whipping plastic cup can lids around my ankles. The food mart woman was standing in the doorway of the store saying, "Tornado."
"Which way’s it coming?" I asked.
"From the west," she said. Like us, meaning: my massage would have to wait. Not wanting to tempt the tempest, we skedaddled. We dragged that weather system all the way across Nebraska and never got wet.
I ate some wonderful food in Youngstown, Ohio, of all the crazy places. My hometown. We played outside in an alley at this café called Selah, and they fed me ricotta gnocchi with fresh spinach and cream sauce that was as good as any gnocchi I’ve eaten in any San Francisco restaurant. So I take back everything I ever said about my old hometown.
Even though technically Selah is in Struthers.
And then this morning I woke up in my other old hometown, Portsmouth, N.H., where I ate brick oven pizza that rivaled Tomasso’s and top-notch carne asada burritos across the river in Kittery, Maine (of all the other crazy places). Loco Coco or Coco Loco. Southern California transplants, I believe, but they do put rice in their burritos, and I’d just as soon have another one of those than anything I can think of in the Mission.
I’m not saying all this to dis my city. It’s more like: Hey, look at this! Or: Wish you were here. It’s a postcard. And I do wish you were here, and also wish I were there, instead of in the back of a van spinning down the East Coast now, Earl Butter at the wheel, Phenomenon all neck-cricked next to him, drooling into his western shirt.
We lost our fiddler and our chief, Chief, and picked up Mr. Butter, who is rapidly becoming every old person’s favorite young person. On the other hand, he’s not entirely certain he’s a licensed driver anymore. And he’s driving. I backed into a deck a couple days ago and sharded our back window into all our gear and sleeping stuff. Now we’re counting on plastic and duct tape to keep our stuff in and the weather out.
After seven shows in three days in Bangor, Maine, I’d had it up to here with outrageous friendliness, mosquitoes, and "King of the Road."
If all goes as planned, tomorrow we will wake up near an unpronounceable, unspellable tidal river in Rhode Island, and we’re going to rake for clams and hopefully have some homemade chowder for breakfast.
Then: Providence. Then: Albany, N.Y. Then: Bikkets’s wedding, and then, old folks be damned, we start sallying slowly back to home-sweet-home and my new favorite restaurant. *
A couple of years ago, filmmaker Thom Anderson remarked to me that all films about war, even those that aim to show its injustice, are prowar.
War Made Easy might be the first film I’ve seen since hearing Anderson’s assertion that effectively counters such a claim. Admittedly, Anderson was likely referring only to dramatic movies, especially those produced by Hollywood. Yet even a contemporary doc such as Fahrenheit 9/11 not only takes the honor of military force for granted but spins it into a cause for voice-over dramatics. In contrast, War Made Easy codirectors Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp’s documentary uses Norman Solomon’s recent book to perform an autopsy on the now-zombified propaganda surrounding post-1940s US war.
Alper and Earp’s doc skips smart-ass sarcasm and the usual air of incredulity in order to make complex points clear, and it does so skillfully and quickly. It still has moments when horror and humor commingle, such as when various embedded TV reporters cream their business slacks or loaned camouflage gear during assertions of love for aircraft such as the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and the A-10 Wart Hog.
George Santayana’s famous statement that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it is proven without a doubt throughout War Made Easy. A parade of presidents mouths variations of the same theme, which goes something along the lines of “We love democracy and peace so much that we have to murder others to maintain it.”
With the passing of time, the words and phrases used to justify US military action have become increasingly debased and the puppets mouthing them more craven, until today, when we have George W. Bush repeating the word evil more often than an old metal album skipping on a turntable. Yet if evil exists, he and his cronies are exact embodiments of what they decry. Witness a moment in this movie when Bush describes Saddam Hussein as “a homicidal dictator addicted to weapons of mass destruction.” (Johnny Ray Huston)
Americans no longer like the war in Iraq. They know it is not going well. Still, most don’t really want to know how things got so bad. Ergo, there’s probably not much hope No End in Sight will join the ranks of those rare recent must-see documentaries involving penguins, Global Warming 101, or Michael Moore. That’s too bad, because Charles Ferguson’s film has no preaching-to-the-converted tone or snarky on-camera filmmaker.
Ferguson, a sometime lecturer at UC Berkeley, draws on heavyweight connections to show how the administration continually matched arrogant, ignorant policy with new staff, people who — not unlike Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld — lacked experience in combat and postwar infrastructure rebuilding, let alone knowledge of Middle Eastern history, culture, and relations.
“I don’t do quagmires!” Rumsfeld quips in one of several gag-inducing moments of news conference levity. It’s repeatedly noted that Bush didn’t read even the one-page summaries crafted for his wee attention span.
No End in Sight includes input from US and Iraqi scholars as well as former Pentagon, CIA, and White House staff, sorely disillusioned American military leaders, and grunts badly wounded by inept policy. This movie should be required viewing for all US citizens currently obsessed with gas prices, the wacky misadventures of Lindsay Lohan, and their navels. The DVD version is going to make a great Christmas present. (Dennis Harvey)
Rampaging genitalia, families of half-wits, towns shielding deadly secrets, and the end of the world — yep, there are good times to be had with the selection of new films in Dead Channels: The San Francisco Festival of Fantastic Film. The most buzzed-about title, Uwe Boll’s Postal (it’s a war-on-terror comedy that pokes fun at Sept. 11, among other topics; Seinfeld‘s Soup Nazi plays fun guy Osama bin Laden), wasn’t available for prescreening. But no matter — it’ll be far more rewarding to see the thing on the Castro Theatre’s giant screen, with the notorious Boll in person, at Dead Channels’ opening night Aug. 9.
Noteworthy picks include Canadian filmmaker Maurice Devereaux’s End of the Line, which offers more jolts per capita than much of Dead Channels’ other fare. A sinister dude on the subway is something just about every woman has encountered — but it only gets worse for a psych-ward nurse (Ilona Elkin) whose commute home coincides with an evangelical cult’s realization that the apocalypse is nigh. Piety has seldom been so gruesomely rendered. A more lighthearted look at the end of civilization is crystallized in Minoru Kawasaki’s The World Sinks except Japan, in which freaky natural events cause all the continents to sink into the ocean, save you-know-which island nation. World leaders and American movie stars swarm Japan, which is none too thrilled about playing host to so many refugees. The film is a tad overlong, but there are some juicy moments of satire, including a glimpse at a beleaguered Japan’s most popular television show — which basically involves a giant monster stomping on as many foreigners as possible.
More somber is Simon Rumley’s The Living and the Dead, which features a mentally challenged lead character (played with precious little showboating by Leo Bill) whose descent into madness is witnessed with horror by his bedridden mother (Kate Fahy). The location is a massive English manor house, as frightening and confusing a spot as End of the Line‘s subway tunnels. Some creative camera work, including the use of fast-motion footage to demonstrate what goin’ cuckoo feels like, makes for a more dynamic thriller than the film’s small cast and single setting would suggest.
The most conventional (not always a euphemism for "sucky") Dead Channels flick I watched was Harry Basil’s Fingerprints, dubiously notable for the presence of Laguna Beach hottie and US Weekly fixture Kristin Cavallari in a supporting part. (Hey, rolling your eyes expressively is totally what acting is all about!) Somber teenager Melanie (Leah Pipes) gets out of rehab and moves back in with her varyingly supportive family, who’ve relocated to a bucolic village still haunted by a long-ago train wreck that killed several schoolchildren. Possibly owing to her heroin-tastic past, Melanie proves supernaturally sensitive; after receiving some ghostly nudges, she sets about uncovering the town’s long-buried secrets. Fingerprints plays a little like a Lifetime movie with slasher elements, and it also employs the spooky-kid motif that was all the rage in scary movies a few years back. But besides the curiosity casting of Cavallari — unnecessary bubble-bath scene alert! — and Lou Diamond Phillips (as a sympathetic teacher), the film is actually pretty entertaining and solid, if inevitably derivative.
Fairly unlike any film you have ever seen before, or will after, is Hot Baby!, the seriously bizarre brainchild of Bay Area filmmaker Jeff Roenning. There’s a scene or two that recalls The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and other don’t-get-off-the-highway chillers, but mostly it’s an over-the-top array of shifting tones and character arcs, with a high schooler (Adam Scarimbolo) curious about his long-absent mother at its center. Plus: sexual-predator hypnotists, vengeful hookers, and doughnut jokes! Maybe even weirder is The Secret Life of Sarah Sheldon, writer-director-star Annette Ashlie Slomka’s take on a female mad scientist who conducts her sexually charged experiments with Herbert West–<\d>like focus. The film’s interesting premise is hampered by its amateurish execution, but it still features a rather horrifying penis monster — and what more can you really ask for?<\!s>*
Click here for reviews of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and Welcome Home Brother Charles
The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (8/7/07): 4 U.S. soldiers killed today. 19 U.S. soldiers killed since the beginning of August.
Compiled by Paula Connelly
Casualties in Iraq
U.S. military:
4 U.S. soldiers killed today in Baghdad, raising the number of U.S. soldiers killed in the first week of August to 19, according to the Associated Press.
3,942: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03
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.
164: Killed since 3/03
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
The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (8/7/07): So far, $450 billion for the U.S., $57 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.”
Oaxaca, Mexico — Those of us who report from the front lines of the social-justice movement in Latin America share an understanding that there’s always a bullet out there with our name on it. Brad Will traveled 2,500 miles, from New York to this violence-torn Mexican town, to find his.
Throughout the summer and fall of 2006, the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca was on fire. Death squads, the pistoleros of a despised governor, rolled through the cobblestoned streets of this colonial capital, peppering with automatic weapon fire the flimsy barricades erected by masked rebels. Hundreds were killed, wounded, or imprisoned.
Will, a New York Indymedia videojournalist, felt he had to be there. Xenophobia was palpable on the ground when Will touched down. Foreign journalists were attacked as terrorists by the governor’s sycophants in the media: "Si ves un gringo con cámara, matanlo!" the radio chattered — if you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!
For much of the afternoon of Oct. 27, Will had been filming armed confrontations on the barricades just outside the city. He was trapped in the middle of a narrow street while gunshots boomed all around him, but he kept filming, looking for the money shot.
And he found it: on his final bits of tape, two clearly identifiable killers are perfectly framed, their guns firing. You hear the fatal shot and experience Brad’s shudder of dismay as the camera finally tumbles from his hands and bounces along the sidewalk.
By all visible evidence, Brad Will filmed his own murder. But this is Mexico, where justice is spelled impunity — and Will’s apparent killers continue to ride the streets of Oaxaca, free and, it seems, untouchable.
Curiously, this egregious murder of a US reporter in Mexico has drawn minimal response from US Ambassador Tony Garza, an old crony of President George W. Bush. Why this lack of interest? Can it be that Washington has another agenda that conflicts with justice for Will — the impending privatization of Mexican oil?
HEADING SOUTH
Will was once a fire-breathing urban legend on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Whether perched atop the Fifth Street squat where he had lived for years and waving his long arms like Big Bird as the wrecking ball swung in, or being dragged out of City Hall dressed as a sunflower while trying to rescue the neighborhood’s community gardens, this child of privilege from Chicago’s wealthy North Shore was a legitimate street hero in the years before the World Trade Center towers collapsed and the social-change movement in New York City went into deep freeze.
Will hosted an incendiary weekly show on the New York pirate station Steal This Radio and was an early part of Indymedia, the Web publishing experiment born during the "Battle of Seattle," the World Trade Organization protests that rocked that city in 1999.
With his long hair neatly tied back and parted down the middle, with his granny glasses and fringe beard, and with his fierce commitment to building community, Will seemed to have emerged whole from a more utopian time in America.
He was an independent journalist, one of the growing number of people, such as Josh Wolf in San Francisco, who use the Internet and their video cameras to track and report on social moments and injustice. He wore no credential from any major news organization. But using outlets like Indymedia, he — like Wolf, who spent seven months in prison to avoid giving the police a copy of his video outtakes — represented part of the future of journalism.
Will’s journey to the land where he would die began right after Sept. 11, 2001. Dyan Neary, then a neophyte journalist, met Will in a South Street skyscraper elevator coming down from the WBAI studios from which Amy Goodman broadcast soon after the terrorist attacks.
"We walked down the piles. They were still smoking," Neary remembered in a phone call from Humboldt County. "We were both really scared. We thought this was not going to be resolved soon. Maybe never. So we thought we should go to Latin America, where people were still fighting."
Will and Neary spent most of 2002 and 2003 roaming the bubbling social landscape of Latin America. In Fortaleza, Brazil, they confronted the director of the Inter-American Development Bank during riotous street protests. They journeyed to Bolivia too and interviewed Evo Morales, not yet the president. They traveled in the Chapare rainforest province with members of the coca growers’ federation. They hung out in Cochabamba with Oscar Olivera, the hero of the battle to keep Bechtel Corp. from taking over that city’s water system. Everywhere they went, they sought out pirate radio projects and offered their support.
In February 2005, Will was in Brazil, in the thick of social upheaval, filming the resistance of 12,000 squatters at a camp near the city of Goiânia in Pernambuco state, when the military police swept in, killing two and jailing hundreds. On his videos, you can hear the shots zinging all around him as he captured the carnage. Will was savagely beaten and held by the police. Only his US passport saved him.
Undaunted by his close call, Will picked up his camera and soldiered back through Peru and Bolivia, and when the money ran out, he flew back to New York to figure out how to raise enough for the next trip south. He was hooked. In early 2006, drawn like a moth to flame, he was back, tracking Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign through the Mayan villages on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
In the spring of 2006, Will was back in New York as he tracked the Other Campaign and the incipient rebellion in Oaxaca on the Internet from his room in Williamsburg. (The rent gougers had forced him out of the Lower East Side.) He was poised to jump south again, friends say, but was worried that he would just be one more white guy getting in the way.
In the end, the lure of the action in Oaxaca pulled him in. He bought a 30-day ticket, caught the airport shuttle from Brooklyn to John F. Kennedy International Airport, and flew south Sept. 29. His return was set for Oct. 28. He never made that flight.
THE COMMUNE OF OAXACA
A mountainous southern Mexican state traversed by seven serious sierras, Oaxaca is at the top of most of the nation’s poverty indicators — infant mortality, malnutrition, unemployment, and illiteracy. Human rights violations are rife. It’s also Mexico’s most indigenous state, with 17 distinct Indian cultures, each with a rich tradition of resistance to the dominant white and mestizo overclass. Oaxaca vibrates with class and race tensions that cyclically erupt into uprising and repression.
The Party of the Institutional Revolution, or PRI, ruled Mexico from 1928 to 2000, the longest-running political dynasty in the world. The corrupt organization was dethroned by the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and its picaresque presidential candidate, Vicente Fox, former president of Coca Cola México.
But in Oaxaca, the PRI never lost power. While voters were throwing off the PRI yoke all over the rest of the country, in Oaxaca one PRI governor had followed another for 75 years. The latest, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, a protégé of party strongman and future presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo, won a fraud-marred election over a right-left coalition in 2004.
In the first 16 months of his regime, Ruiz proved spectacularly unresponsive to the demands of the popular movements for social justice. When, on May 15, 2006, National Teachers Day, a maverick, militant local of the National Education Workers Union known as Section 22 presented its contract demands, Ruiz turned a deaf ear. Then, on May 22, tens of thousands of teachers took the plaza and 52 surrounding blocks and set up a ragtag tent city. Each morning the maestros would march out of their camp and block highways and government buildings, which were soon smeared with anti-Ruiz slogans.
Ruiz retaliated before dawn June 14, sending 1,000 heavily armed police officers into the plaza to evict the teachers. Low-flying helicopters sprayed pepper gas on the throng below. Ruiz’s police took up positions in the colonial hotels that surround the plaza and tossed down concussion grenades from the balconies. Radio Plantón, the maestros’ pirate radio station, was demolished and the tent city set afire. A pall of black smoke hung over the city.
Four hours later a spontaneous outburst by Oaxaca’s very active community, combined with the force of the striking teachers and armed with clubs and Molotov cocktails, overran the plaza and sent Ruiz’s cops packing. No uniformed officers would be seen on the streets of Oaxaca for many months. And on June 16, two days after the monumental battle, 200,000 Oaxacans marched through the city to repudiate the governor’s "hard hand." The megamarch was said to extend 10 kilometers.
John Gibler, who closely covered the Oaxaca uprising as a human-rights fellow for Global Exchange, wrote that the surge of the rebels June 14 soon transformed itself into a popular assembly. The Oaxaca Peoples Popular Assembly, or APPO, was formally constituted June 21. The APPO had no leaders but many spokespeople, and all decisions had to be made in assemblies.
A CITY PARALYZED
For the next weeks, the actions of the APPO and Section 22 paralyzed Oaxaca — but the rest of Mexico took little notice. Instead, the nation was hypnotized by the fraud-marred July 2 presidential election in which a right-wing PAN-ista, Felipe Calderón, had been awarded a narrow victory over leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the candidate of a coalition headed by the Party of the Democratic Revolution. López Obrador was quick to cry fraud, pulling millions into the streets in the most massive political demonstrations in Mexican history. Oaxaca still seemed like small potatoes.
But Oaxaca is an international tourist destination, and the APPO and Section 22 protests had closed down the tourist infrastructure, blocking the airport and forcing five-star hotels to shutter their doors. On July 17, Ruiz was forced to announce the cancellation of the Guelaguetza, an indigenous dance festival that has become Oaxaca’s premiere tourist attraction, after roaming bands of rebels destroyed the scenery and blockaded access to the city.
Ruiz began to fight back. By the first weeks of August, the governor launched what came to be known as the Caravan of Death — a train of 30 or 40 private and government vehicles rolling nightly, firing on the protesters. Ruiz’s gunmen were drawn from the ranks of the city police and the state ministerial police.
To keep the Caravan of Death from moving freely through Oaxaca, the APPO and the union threw up barricades; 1,000 were built in the working-class colonies throughout the city and its suburbs. The rebels piled up dead trees, old tires, and burned-out cars and buses to create the barricades, which soon took on a life of their own; murals were painted using the ashes of the bonfires that burned all night on the barriers. Indeed, the barricades gave the Oaxaca struggle the romantic aura of the Paris Commune uprising of 1871 and attracted droves of dreadlocked anarchists to the city.
An uneasy lull in the action gripped Oaxaca on Oct. 1, when Will arrived at the bus terminal, then found himself a cheap room for the night. The break wouldn’t last long.
ON THE BARRICADES
Like most non-Mexicans who style themselves as independent reporters, Will had no Mexican media credential and therefore was in the country illegally, working on a tourist visa and susceptible to deportation. To have some credential other than his Indymedia press card to hang around his neck, he got himself accredited with Section 22 and wore the rebel ID assiduously.
On Oct. 14, APPO militant Alejandro García Hernández was cut down at a barricade near Símbolos Patrios, a downtown plaza. Will joined an angry procession to the Red Cross hospital where the dead man had been taken.
In the last dispatch he filed from Oaxaca, on Oct. 16, Will caught this very Mexican whiff of death: "Now [García Hernández lies] waiting for November when he can sit with his loved ones on the day of the dead and share food and drink and a song … one more death — one more martyr in a dirty war — one more time to cry and hurt — one more time to know power and its ugly head — one more bullet cracks the night."
The dynamic in Oaxaca had gotten "sketchy," Will wrote to Neary. Section 22 leader Enrique Rueda Pacheco had cut a deal with the outgoing Fox government and forced a back-to-work vote Oct. 21 that narrowly carried amid charges of sellout and payoffs. If the teachers went back to work, the APPO would be alone on the barricades and even more vulnerable to Ruiz’s gunmen. But backing down was not in the assembly’s dictionary, and the APPO voted to ratchet up the lucha (struggle) and make Oaxaca really ungovernable.
Mobile brigades were formed — young toughs armed with lead pipes and nail-studded boards who hijacked buses still running in the city, forced the passengers off, and rode around looking for action. Later the buses would be set afire. Charred hulks blossomed on the streets of the old colonial city. The barricades were reinforced to shut down the capital beginning Oct. 27.
The escalation proved to be a terrible miscalculation. In Mexico City the postelectoral turmoil had finally subsided, and PAN was ready to deal with the PRI; bailing out the governor of Oaxaca was the PRI’s price of admission.
It wasn’t a good time for inexperienced foreigners. Ruiz’s people were checking the guest lists at the hostels for "inconvenient" internationals. Immigration authorities threatened extranjeros with deportation if they joined the protests. The local US consul, Mark Leyes, warned Americans that he would not be able to help them if they got caught up in the maelstrom.
Adding to this malevolent ambiance, a new pirate station popped up Oct. 26. Radio Ciudadana (Citizens’ radio) announced it was broadcasting "to bring peace to Oaxaca" and to celebrate the honor of "our macho, very macho governor." The announcers seemed to have Mexico City accents. Wherever they had been sent from, they let loose with a torrent of vitriolic shit — stuff like "We have to kill the mugrosos [dirty ones] on the barricades." The extranjeros, the radio said, were stirring up all the trouble: "They pretend to be journalists, but they have come to teach terrorism classes."
More frightening was this admonition: "Si ves un gringo con cámara, matanlo!" — "If you see a gringo with a camera, kill him!"
This poison spewed out of local radios all day Oct. 26 and 27, but whether Will heard the warnings — and if he did, whether knew what they meant — is unclear. He didn’t speak much Spanish.
SHOT IN THE CHEST
On Oct. 27, Will went out to do interviews on the barricade at Santa María Coyotepec, about 20 kilometers from the city. The three barricades at Coyotepec, Cal y Canto, and La Experimental were crucial to closing down Oaxaca the next day. The broad Railroad Avenue where the barricade was stacked was empty. Nothing was moving. Will walked on to the next barricade at La Experimental to check out the action.
Soon after the Indymedia reporter left, all hell broke loose at Cal y Canto. A mob of about 150 Ruiz supporters stormed down Railroad Avenue, led by what witnesses thought was a Chevy Blazer. The vehicle was moving very fast. "We thought it would try and crash through the barricade," Miguel Cruz, an activist and witness, recalled. But the SUV stopped short, and several men jumped out with guns blazing. The APPO people hunkered down behind the makeshift barrier and moved the women and kids who were with them into a nearby house. Then they went on the counterattack with Molotov cocktails, homemade bazookas that fired bottle rockets, and slingshots. Most of the mob had melted away, and with the gunmen retreating, the rebels torched their vehicle.
Will heard about the gunfire and hurried back to Cal y Canto with a handful of other reporters. They arrived a little after 3 p.m.
Will climbed under a parked trailer to film the shooters. He focused on a man in a white shirt. When an APPO activist (who is not seen on the videotape) came running by, Will indicated the shooter — "Camisa blanca." While all this was going on, the camera captured a bicyclist peddling dreamily through the intersection. Soon after, a large dump truck appeared on the scene, and the group on the barricade used it as a mobile shield as they chased the gunmen down the avenue.
Suddenly, the pistoleros veered down a narrow side street, Benito Juárez, and took refuge in a windowless, one-story building on the second block. The only access to the building was through a large metal garage door, and the reporters followed the APPO militants, many of whom were masked, as they tried to force their way in. Will stood to one side of the door for a minute, poised for the money shot. Then the compas tried unsuccessfully to bust down the big door by ramming the dump truck into it.
In the midst of this frenzy, five men in civilian dress — two in red shirts (the governor’s color) and the others in white — appeared at the head of Benito Juárez, about 30 meters away, and began shooting at the rebels.
Two of the gunmen were later identified by Mexican news media as Pedro Carmona, a cop and local PRI political fixer, and police commander Orlando Manuel Aguilar Coello. One of those in the white shirts, crouched behind Carmona, was Abel Santiago Zárate, a.k.a. El Chino. Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello were reported to be the personal bodyguards of municipal president Manuel Martínez Feria of the PRI. The other two would later be fingered as Juan Carlos Soriano, a.k.a. El Chapulín (the grasshopper), and Juan Sumano, both Santa Lucía del Camino police officers. All five are eminently identifiable in the film Will shot just moments before the bullets hit him.
When the shooting erupted, Will took cover on the opposite side of the narrow street from the rest of the media. He was crouched against a lime green wall when the first bullet came. On the video soundtrack, you can hear both the shot and Will’s cries of dismay as it tore through his Indymedia T-shirt and smashed into his heart. A second shot caught him in the right side and destroyed his innards. There was little blood spilled, the first slug having stopped his heart.
In footage that witness Gustavo Vilchis and others filmed, the entrance wound of the first shot looks like a deep bruise. The second shot was not recorded on the soundtrack and may have been fired simultaneously with the first.
Others were shot in the pandemonium. Oswaldo Ramírez, filming for the daily Milenio, was grazed. Lucio David Cruz, described as a bystander, was hit in the neck and died four months later.
As Will slid down the wall into a sitting position, Vilchis and activist Leonardo Ortiz ran to him. Will’s Section 22 credential had flown off, and no one there knew his name. With bullets whizzing by, the compas picked Will up and dragged him out of the line of fire and around the corner to Árboles Street, about 35 paces away. Along the way, his pants fell off.
"Ambulance! We need an ambulance! They’ve shot a journalist!" Vilchis, a tall young man with a face like an Italian comic actor’s, shouted desperately. Gualberto Francisco, another activist, had parked his vochito (Volkswagen Bug) on Árboles and pulled up alongside Will, who was laid out on the pavement in his black bikini underwear.
Ortiz and Vilchis loaded the dying Will into the back seat. They thought he was still breathing, and Vilchis applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. "You’re going to make it … you’re all right," they kept telling him. But Will’s eyes had already turned up — he was perdido (lost), as they say in Mexico.
The vochito ran out of gas, and while the frantic young men ferrying Will were stuck in the middle of the Cinco Señores crossroad, it began to rain hard. They tried to stop a taxi to take them to the Red Cross, but the driver supported the government and wanted to argue. Finally, they flagged down a pickup truck and laid Will out in the bed. He was dead when he arrived at the hospital, according to the report by the coroner, Dr. Luis Mendoza.
THE OUTRAGE BEGINS
Oct. 27 was the bloodiest day of the Oaxaca uprising. Four people were killed besides Will: Emilio Alonso Fabián, Esteban Ruiz, Esteban López Zurita, and Audacia Olivera Díaz.
Unlike their murders, Will’s death triggered international outrage. Because he was so connected — and because much of the episode was recorded on film —the shot of the mortally wounded Indymedia reporter lying in the middle of a Oaxaca street went worldwide on the Web in a matter of minutes.
There were instant vigils on both coasts of the United States. On Oct. 30, 11 of Will’s friends were busted trying to lock down at the Mexican consulate off Manhattan’s Park Avenue, where graffiti still read "Avenge Brad!" in December. Anarchists splattered the San Francisco consulate with red paint. Subcomandante Marcos sent his condolences and called for international protests. Goodman did an hour-long memorial.
On March 16, 2007, at its midyear meeting in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, the Inter-American Press Association, an organization devoted to freedom of speech and the press in the Americas, passed a resolution calling for action on the Will case.
"The investigation into the killing has been plagued by irregularities and inconsistencies, and no arrests have been made," the group said in a statement. IAPA called for the federal attorney general to take over the investigation, "in view of the lack of confidence in state authorities and the lack of progress in the case, so that it may apprehend the culprits, who, according to one theory of the investigation, may be indirectly linked to state authorities."
The official reaction to Will’s death was more cautious. "It is unfortunate when peaceful demonstrations get out of hand and result in violence," a US spokesperson told the media, seeming to blame the APPO for Will’s killing. After once again warning Americans that they traveled to Oaxaca "at their own risk," Ambassador Garza commented on the "senseless death of Brad Will" and how it "underscores the need for a return to the rule of law and order."
"For months," he said, "violence and disorder in Oaxaca have worsened. Teachers, students, and other groups have been involved in increasingly violent demonstrations."
Garza’s statement sent Fox the signal he had been waiting for. Now that a gringo had been killed, it was time to act. The next morning, Oct. 28, 4,500 officers from the Federal Preventative Police, an elite force drawn from the military, were sent into Oaxaca — not to return the state to a place where human rights, dignity, and a free media are respected but to break the back of the people’s rebellion and keep Ruiz in power.
On Oct. 29 the troops pushed their way into the plaza despite massive but passive resistance by activists, tore down the barricades, and drove the commune of Oaxaca back into the shadows.
In Mexico the dead are buried quickly. After the obligatory autopsy, Brad’s body was crated up for shipment to his parents, who now live south of Milwaukee. After a private viewing, the family had him cremated.
SHAM ACCOUNTABILITY
Killing a gringo reporter in plain view of the cameras (one of which was his own) requires a little sham accountability. On Oct. 29 the state prosecutor, Lizbeth Caña Cadeza, announced that arrest warrants were being sworn out for Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello, two of the five cops caught on film gunning Will down, and they were subsequently taken into custody.
The scam lost currency two weeks later when, on Nov. 15, Caña Cadeza dropped a bombshell at an evening news conference: the cops hadn’t killed Will, she said; he was shot by the rebels.
Will’s death, she insisted, had been "a deceitful confabulation to internationalize the conflict" and was, in fact, "the product of a concerted premeditated action." The mortal shot had been fired from less than two and a half meters away, Caña Cadeza said — although there is nothing in the coroner’s report to indicate this. The real killers, she said, were "the same group [Will] was accompanying."
In the state prosecutor’s scenario, the order of the shots was reversed: first Will had been shot in the side on the street, then rematado (finished off) with a slug to the heart on the way to the hospital in Francisco’s vochito.
The prosecutor’s plot was immediately challenged by the APPO. "The killers are those who are shown in the film," Florentino López, the assembly’s main spokesperson, asserted at a meeting that night.
And in fact our detailed investigation shows that there is very little evidence to support Caña Cadeza’s theory. Photos from the scene, some published in the Mexican media, show Will’s body with a bloody hole in his chest on the street near where he fell — indicating that his fatal heart wound occurred well before he was dragged into the car where he was supposedly shot.
There’s another problem with the prosecutor’s suggestion: nobody on the scene saw any APPO members, or anyone except the authorities, carrying guns. This reporter has talked to numerous eyewitnesses, and all told the same tale: the rebels at the barricade that day had no firearms with which they could have shot Will.
Miguel Cruz, who spent much of Oct. 27 with Will, first at the Council of Indigenous People of Oaxaca, of which he is a member, and then on the barricade at Cal y Canto and on Juárez Street, is a soft-spoken young Zapotec Indian, but he pounded vehemently on the kitchen table when he addressed Caña Cadeza’s allegations.
"The compañeros had no guns. What gun is she talking about? They had slingshots and Molotovs but no guns. The PRI-istas and the cops had their .38s, and they were shooting at us," he said. "We were trying to save Brad Will’s life, not to kill him."
And if Caña Cadeza had any proof of her allegations, she likely would have filed charges. But none of the protesters or Will’s companions has been formally charged with the killing. Prosecutors have never publicly presented the alleged murder weapon.
But by the time Caña Cadeza told her story, of course, the only way to determine for sure the order of the bullets and the distance from which they had been fired would have been to exhume Will’s body. And there was no body; he had been cremated the week before.
On Nov. 28, Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello were released from custody by Judge Victoriano Barroso because of "insufficient evidence," with the stipulation that they could not be rearrested without the presentation of new evidence.
Caña Cadeza, who is now running as a PRI candidate for the state legislature, collaborated closely on the case with Oaxaca secretary of citizen protection Lino Celaya. Both reported to Ruiz’s secretary of government, Heliodoro Díaz, who in turn reported directly to the governor. There seems little doubt that the prosecutor’s accusations of murder against Will’s comrades — and the determination of innocence for the apparent killers — came straight from the top.
ON THE EVIDENCE TRAIL
Dr. Mendoza was occupied when I stopped by the Oaxaca city morgue to ask for a copy of the autopsy report on which the state has based its allegations.
"Will died eight months ago," Mendoza complained testily. "Do you know how many others have died since? How many autopsies I’ve performed?" He gestured to a morgue room where cadavers were piled up.
The coroner was scrunched over his desk, filling out the paperwork for one of the dead. He didn’t have any time to look for the autopsy report. I was not the first reporter to ask him about the document. "What paper are you from anyway?" he asked suspiciously, and when I showed him my media card, he told me that it didn’t sound like a real newspaper to him. "I know what I’m doing. I worked as a coroner in your country," he snapped defensively and waved me out of the office.
But Mendoza might not be quite as cocksure as he sounded. A senior agent for the US government in Oaxaca, who asked not to be named in this article, told me later that Mendoza confided to him that he was no ballistics expert, nor could he determine from how far away the bullets were fired.
I walked into the police commissary under the first-floor stairs of the Santa Lucía del Camino Municipal Palace. The small room was crowded with cops and cigarette smoke. Three of the officers were in full battle gear, and the rest were plainclothes. I had been warned not to ask for Carmona, the most prominent red shirt on Will’s film. Carmona is described as a prepotente — i.e., a thug with an attitude who is always packing.
Instead, I asked the desk clerk if I could get a few minutes with Santiago Zárate and Aguilar Coello. For all I knew, the two were sitting in the room behind me. The desk clerk studied my card. "Qué lástima!" he exclaimed — what a shame. Santiago Zárate had just left and wouldn’t be back until after six. Aguilar Coello was off that day. When I called back after six, Santiago Zárate was still not available. Nor were he and Aguilar Coello ever available the dozen or so times I called back.
This sort of stonewalling is not terribly unusual for Mexico, where killer cops often sell their services to local caciques (political bosses) and go back to work as if nothing had happened. Those who direct this sort of mayhem from their desks in the statehouses and municipal palaces — the "intellectual assassins," as they are called — are never held accountable for their crimes.
A VISIT FROM HOME
In March, Brad’s parents, Kathy and Howard Will, and his older brother and sister paid a sad, inconclusive visit to Oaxaca. They had hired Miguel Ángel de los Santos Cruz, a crackerjack human rights lawyer who has often defended Zapatista communities in Chiapas. Gibler, the Global Exchange human-rights fellow, was the translator.
The Wills, upper-middle-class Americans, had little experience with the kind of evil that lurks inside the Mexican justice system; the trip was a traumatic, eye-opening experience.
The federal Attorney General’s Office had taken over the case from the state in December, but rather than investigating police complicity and culpability, it was pursuing Caña Cadeza’s dubious allegation blaming Will’s companions for his killing.
Gustavo Vilchis, Gualberto Francisco, Leonardo Ortiz, and Miguel Cruz were summoned to give testimony, with the Wills in attendance. Testifying was a risky venture, as the witnesses could have been charged with the murder at any moment, but out of respect for the family, the compas agreed to tell their story to the federal investigators. During the hearing they were repeatedly questioned about and asked to identify not the cops who appear on Will’s film but their own compañeros, some masked, who appeared on tape shot by Televisa, the Mexican TV giant. They refused.
When Los Santos accompanied the Wills to a meeting with Caña Cadeza, she touted her investigation and promised them a copy of its results. But she refused to allow the family to view Will’s Indymedia T-shirt and the two bullets taken from his body. They were, she explained, under the control of Barroso — the judge who had cut loose the cops.
THE POLITICS OF OIL
There are larger geopolitics at work here.
The US Department of State has a certain conflict of interest in trying to push first-year Mexican president Calderón to collar Will’s killers. The crackdown in Oaxaca was all about a political deal between Calderón’s PAN and Ruiz’s PRI: if PAN saved the governor’s ass, the PRI would support the president’s legislative package.
Indeed, the PRI’s 100 votes in the lower house of the Mexican Congress guarantee Calderón the two-thirds majority he needs to alter the constitution and effect the change that’s at the top of his legislative agenda — opening up Petróleos Mexicanos, or PEMEX, the nationalized petroleum corporation and a symbol of Mexico’s national revolution, to private investment, a gambit that requires a constitutional amendment.
Since then-president Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated Mexico’s petroleum industry from Anglo and American owners and nationalized it in 1938, the United States has been trying to take it back. "Transnational pressure to reprivatize PEMEX has been brutal," observed John Saxe Fernandez, a professor of strategic resource studies at Mexico’s autonomous university, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
During the run-up to the hotly contested 2006 presidential elections, candidates Calderón and López Obrador debated the privatization of Mexico’s national oil corporation before the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico City; former US ambassador Jeffrey Davidow moderated the debate. When the leftist López Obrador insisted that he would never privatize what belonged to all Mexicans, the business leaders stared in stony silence. The conservative Calderón’s pledge to open PEMEX to private investment drew wild applause. Calderón was, of course, Washington’s horse in the fraud-marred election.
In order to accommodate Washington, Calderón needs a two-thirds majority in the congress — and the PRI’s votes in the lower house are crucial to guaranteeing passage of a constitutional amendment. "Without the PRI’s votes, PEMEX will not be privatized. That is why Calderón has granted Ruiz impunity," Saxe Fernandez concluded.
Washington is eager to see PEMEX privatized, which would create an opportunity for Exxon Mobil Corp. and Halliburton (now PEMEX’s largest subcontractor) to walk off with a big chunk of the world’s eighth-largest oil company. Pushing Calderón too hard to do justice for Will could disaffect the PRI and put a kibosh on the deal.
It is not easy to imagine Brad Will as a pawn in anyone’s power game, but as the months tick by and his killing and killers sink into the morass of memory, that is exactly what he is becoming. 2
John Ross is the Guardian‘s Mexico City correspondent. This story was comissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and is running in about 20 alternative papers this week.
