youth Archives — Page 52 of 67 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Farallon

June 30, 2009

paulr@sfbg.com

Since restaurants tend to age in dog years, a restaurant that reaches its 12th birthday — like Farallon — might be called venerable. It has survived its perilous youth to achieve, perhaps, the stability of middle age, and the good news is that while not all that many restaurants see their 12th birthday, the ones that do stand a reasonable chance of seeing quite a few more.

Mark Franz, who cooked at Stars while that glittering spot was still in the hands of founder Jeremiah Tower, has been the man at Farallon from the beginning — the man, at least, in the kitchen. The designer was Pat Kuleto, and the restaurant’s interior décor shows a definite kinship with other Kuleto projects from the mid-1990s; like Boulevard (1993), it is rich in fanciful lamps and light fixtures, and like Jardiniere (1997), it includes a conspicuous sweeping staircase.

But mostly there is the Captain Nemo effect, the sense of being in some magical grotto at the bottom of the sea. Many of the visual effects are not subtle: the huge faux scallop shell that forms part of the ceiling and the row of lamps like line-caught fish hanging in front of the exhibition kitchen are two that spring to mind. But Kuleto did not neglect the finer touches, even if it takes a bit longer to notice them. The tiled mosaics on the wall arches, for instance, are quietly spectacular in their byzantine colors and details. The mosaics have worn well. They lend an air of permanence and impressiveness, and they’re what you find yourself staring at long after you’ve stopped noticing the more outlandish stuff.

The menu describes the cooking as "coastal cuisine," an au courant designation for imaginative or contemporary seafood. The restaurant’s obvious peers are Aqua and Waterbar; it’s less monumental than the former and cozier than the latter, and because it’s just a few steps from Union Square, I wondered if we would find some pandering to tourists — some version of cioppino, say. I didn’t notice any such over-obviousness. The theme instead is one of discreet sophistication, cleverness that does not call attention to itself.

Sashimi of ahi tuna ($18), for example, is the kind of thing you could get at dozens of restaurants around town. But Farallon’s kitchen gave the glistening ruby tabs of flesh a sly Spanish twist, with an overlay of a boquerón (a white anchovy), a scattering of slivered almonds, and a nearby berm of ñora-chili purée, like an honor guard.

A buckwheat blini (part of a four-course, $65 prix fixe) was soaked — and I do mean soaked — in melted butter, then topped with alternating lengths of gravlax and sturgeon, themselves capped with crème fraîche and a brief hailstorm of salmon roe, like little pebbles of orange glass. The lesson here was butter, its delicate, singular richness. Accept no substitute, because there is none.

The combination of cantaloupe and prosciutto is friendly to the point of cliché, so a little inventiveness is welcome. Farallon’s summer melon salad (also part of the prix fixe) featured a core of cantaloupe dice wrapped in swaths of prosciutto and topped with what looked like simple shaved ice but turned out to be verbena granita. Since we intuitively associate color with flavor, it was startling to find so much punch packed into something that looked as if it had been reclaimed from a hotel ice bucket.

The menu does not beat you over the head with screeds about sustainability, and perhaps this restraint is wise, since seafood choices are so often fraught ones. I love arctic char — a milder, eco-friendly relation of salmon — and I very much liked the way it was handled here ($35): gently roasted, then finished in a cast-iron pot with some white wine and a succotash-like medley of corn kernels, summer squash dice, and cubes of Spanish chorizo. But: the fish had been taken in Icelandic waters, which are quite a few carbon footprints away.

Also carbon-footprinty, though delicious, was soft-shell crab, available as a starter ($18) on a bed of corn kernels, and as the third of the prix-fixe’s four courses, with Puy lentils (a bit overcooked, I thought) and basil-roasted tomatoes. In both cases the crab was fried "naked," which meant without being dipped in batter. Fried batter has its golden, crunchy charms, but it can be overbearing. When you are trying to enjoy crab — especially soft-shell crab, the essence of crab — the best crust is no crust.

Also, crustlessness shaves a few points from the calorie count, which leaves wiggle room for dessert: a warm (prix-fixe) brownie, say, with a pat of malted-milk-ball ice cream bisected by a chewy chocolate tuile, or, for the more restrained, an array of chocolate bites ($6), including a liqueur-filled truffle and two bites of a sublime milk chocolate-peanut butter pavé. Just the sort of thing the 12-year-old in each of us loves.

FARALLON

Dinner: Mon.-Thurs., 5:30-9:30 p.m.;

Fri.-Sat., 5:30-10 p.m.; Sun., 5-9:30 p.m.

450 Post, SF

(415) 956-6969

www.farallonrestaurant.com

Full bar

AE/CB/DC/DS/MC/V

Comfortable noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Average Jane

June 24, 2009

andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

I’ve known people who have sex for money, have sex as a hobby, write about (or perform about or do art about or teach about) sex as an avocation, and still have enough interest and energy left over to have the occasional bit of relaxing off-line sex at home with a partner when nobody’s watching or reading along. But I am not one of them. I get bored. There was a play about vibrators here recently and everyone asked me if I was going, but I said, "Eh, I’d rather see Up." I like to cook and read and watch shows about things that have as little to do with (my) real life as possible — high fashion, for instance, the nuttier the better. I like it when the models wear their dresses upside-down and have monkey-fur eyebrows and a teapot on their head. You don’t?

So … I’m a huge fan of Project Runway and a lesser one of its lesser successor, The Fashion Show. Every season, though, there’s some kind of challenge involving "real women" and, while it’s fun to see the contestants, used to dressing compliant stick insects, wrestle with a mouthy client who dares to voice her own, often scandalously après garde opinions (she often just wants to look nice, of all things), it’s appalling to hear what the designers have to say about the non-model bodies. Faced with the task of dressing a modeling agency admin instead of the expected model, one of the Fashion Show wannabes pouted, "She’s very normal. I don’t do normal."

Well too bad for you, darling! Let us return the favor!

So imagine my glee upon discovering a recent study which found that regular men (as opposed to fashion designers of any gender or sexual preference) not only DO do average women, they vastly prefer us. I knew it! All these years of assuring women that jutting hipbones and sunken chests are not only not required to attract guys, they aren’t even preferred, and now I have at least this one study to back me up.

This isn’t about the "something to hang onto" hypothesis, although I do think that men in general do prefer some padding on those they plan to bump up against, and not only to avoid all the bruising. Men who are attracted to women tend to be attracted to women, and women have boobs and butts and that cunning part in between, where it gets smaller.

You’ve probably heard about the alleged universally preferred waist-hip ratio: it’ s 0.7. This shows up constantly in popular-sciencey psych articles about men’s hard-wired preference for female bodies that signal youth, good health, and fertility (they also like symmetry, even skin tone, and teeth) and depresses female readers who wonder if they measure up. Some researchers in Australia decided to take a closer look, and recruited a bunch of guys to rate line drawings of female torsos for attractiveness. (I may have read too much hard-boiled crime fiction to hear about female "torsos" without mentally adding the word "dismembered," but let’s hope the test subjects had not.) From the NewScientist article:

The work, by Rob Brooks at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues, suggests that the popular notion that a waist-hip ratio of 0.7 is the most attractive only holds if the rest of the body is average (Behavioral Ecology, DOI: 10.1093/beheco/arp051 ).

"The orthodoxy says that you will be attractive with a certain waist-hip ratio no matter how the rest of your body varies. Our study shows this is not the case," says [researcher] Brooks…. The men showed a preference for women with a waist-hip ratio of 0.7 — but only if they had an average-sized waist, hips, and shoulders.

When compared with groups of real women, including Playboy centerfolds, Australian escorts advertising on the Internet and average Australian women between the ages of 25 and 44, the latter group most closely matched the preferred body shape.

Strike one for the average Sheila. Isn’t this heartening? Of course women who are substantially smaller or larger than average can still find plenty of ammunition here with which to wound themselves (the men liked average women, after all), and we don’t know for a fact that it applies to non-Aussie men. Even so, it’s something to remember when the heart sinks and the self-loathing rises upon looking in the mirror and failing, once again, to see Kate Moss pouting back at us. Suck it, Kate! Go eat some crisps.

In other heartening news, the editor of British Vogue put fashion designers on notice that she would no longer publish photos of ultra-emaciated models, so they’d better start sending larger clothes. Apparently the samples have been arriving at the magazines in ever-tinier sizes, until even the models we’re used to seeing, who are about 5’10 and 100 to 125 pounds, can’t fit into them. Not that the average size 14 Australian torso is going to be able to squeeze into those Valentinos, but at least it’s a start.

Love,

Andrea

The price of normal

June 23, 2009

news@sfbg.com

With a 2010 state proposition on gay marriage in the works and a national gay rally on the Washington Mall being planned for October 10-11 of that year, it’s obvious that more and more of the LGBT community’s resources are being funneled into the battle for marriage equality, while other causes go begging.

Already gay marriage has become a black hole that is sucking untold amounts of money, time, and energy out of our community. In the 2008 election alone, gay marriage supporters raised $43.3 million to defeat Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative that California voters passed by 52 percent. It may be the biggest chunk of change the community has ever spent for a single fight.

A QUESTION OF PRIORITIES

I’m not against gay marriage. If queer couples want to be as miserable as straight ones, that’s their choice. Marriage is a failed institution. With a 54.8 percent divorce rate nationally and a 60 percent rate here in California, there’s no doubt in my mind that heterosexual "wedded bliss" is more of an oxymoron than a reality.

What’s troubling to me as a queer activist of almost 40 years (much of that time spent on economic justice work) is that, with the tremendous amount of homelessness, poverty, and unemployment in our community, we are spending so much dough on the fight to give a minority of folks — those who opt for tying the knot — rights and privileges that straight married folks have.

Sure, it’s unfair that married straights get tax breaks, not to mention the status of next-of-kin for hospital visits and medical decisions when one partner is ill, and queers don’t. Altogether, married couples have 1,400 benefits, both state and federal, that domestic partners and single people don’t enjoy. It’s a matter of simple justice that the playing field be leveled. Only a right-wing idiot could disagree with that. Now, if only we could fight to give everyone (including singles) those 1,400 benefits.

For me it’s a question of priorities. We are living in scary times. Unemployment is sky-high; millions are without healthcare, including children; foreclosures are robbing homeowners and tenants alike of their housing; and business collapses are leaving a lot of people out in the cold and unable to pay the rent or the mortgage.

DINKS NO MORE

The queer community is no better off.

It’s a popular misconception that queers have a lot of disposable income. The "double income, no kids" (DINK) myth was promoted in the 1980s by gay publishers who wanted to expand their advertising base and their profits. These days, to read many gay publications, you’d think that all queers are going on fabulous vacations and buying expensive clothes, jewelry, and electronic gizmos.

That myth was easily dispelled by a recent study, "Poverty in the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Community," published this March by the Williams Institute at UCLA. Like "Income Inflation: the myth of affluence among gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans," the groundbreaking 1998 study by M.V. Lee Badgett of the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Williams report found that many members of our community aren’t shopping ’til they drop. They can barely afford to put food on the table.

Nationally, 24 percent of lesbians and bisexual women are poor compared to 19 percent of heterosexual women; 15 percent of gay and bisexual men are poor compared to 13 percent of heterosexual men.

Queers aren’t just low on cash — we’re homeless, too. A 2006 report, "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth: An Epidemic of Homelessness" from the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force and the National Coalition on Homelessness, showed that 20 percent to 40 percent of the 1.6 million homeless youth in America identify as LGBT. In San Francisco, the number of queers in the homeless youth population (estimated at 4,000 by the Mayor’s Office) is "roughly 44 percent," according to Dr. Mike Toohey of the Homeless Youth Alliance in the Haight.

Brian Basinger of the AIDS Housing Alliance says that 40 percent of people with HIV/AIDS, in the city once acclaimed for its care of those with the disease, are either "unstably housed or are homeless." In the Castro, Basinger said, there are only "12 dedicated HOPWA beds" for people with the disease. HOPWA (Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS) is a federal voucher program for low-income people with AIDS that is similar to federal housing assistance program Section 8.

Certain members of our community don’t fare much better in the area of employment. A 2006 survey by the Guardian and the Transgender Law Center reported that 75 percent of transgender people are not employed full-time, and 59 percent make less than $15,299 a year. A mere 4 percent of respondents earned more than $61,200, the then-median income average for San Francisco.

Fifty-seven percent of trangendered people said they suffered employment discrimination, demonstrating the need for the inclusion of "gender identity" in the federal Employment Non-discrimination Act. Human Rights Campaign, a national gay organization, and out Congress member Barney Frank (D-Mass.) cut transgenders out of that legislation the last time it was up before Congress.

It could all get a whole lot worse.

AXING THE FUTURE

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to lop at least $81 million from California’s AIDS budget, including money for AIDS drugs, leaving low-income people stranded without their medication. Senior services are also on his cutting block, including $230.8 million from in-home services and $117 million from adult health-care programs. (As we go to press, the state Legislature is working to restore the AIDS money to the budget.)

Mayor Gavin Newsom, in his proposed city budget cuts, is axing $128.4 million from public health and $15.9 million from human services. There’s no doubt these cuts in health and human services will severely affect people with AIDS, seniors, youth, the homeless, and others in our community who can least afford to pay for the city’s budget shortfall.

The millions spent on gay marriage in the past few years could have gone a long way in these lean times. It could have helped make the proposed queer senior housing project, Open House, a reality. With 88 units in the works at 55 Laguna St., the site of the old UC extension, it will be the only such housing for LGBT seniors in San Francisco.

The money also could have funded housing in the Castro for homeless queer youth or people with AIDS. It could have been used as seed money for a much-needed war against poverty in the LGBT community.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF LIBERATION

The queer movement hasn’t always been this obsessed about getting hitched. Forty years ago this week, drag queens and others fought back against the cops who were raiding a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s West Village. Three days of protests led to the creation of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a revolutionary group dedicated to the sexual liberation of all people. GLFers weren’t looking to walk down the aisle or form binary couples. In a desire to "abolish existing social institutions," as the NYC branch of GLF said in its statement of purpose, some GLFers explored polyamory (more than one relationship at a time).

That’s why I edited Smash the Church, Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Liberation, just published by City Lights Books, a collection of writings by former GLF members and other gay liberationists. I wanted to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Stonewall and the birth of GLF with a reminder of who we were and what we did. After all these years, I still don’t want to head to the chapel to get married.

When it really comes down to it, gay marriage is a conservative issue. It’s about wanting to fit in, to be like everyone else. Beyond the important issues of tax breaks and next-of-kin status — and the fact that if any institution exists, it shouldn’t discriminate against queers — marriage is ultimately a means of normalizing binary queer relationships, especially for gay men who have always enjoyed the freedom to be promiscuous. It’s a way to try and rein in our libidos, though the prevalence of extramarital sex among straight couples — 50 percent for women, 60 percent for men, according to a recent issue of Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy — shows that marriage doesn’t come with a chastity belt.

It also doesn’t come with any guarantees, as researchers discovered in Sweden, where queers were able to contract for same-sex partnerships from 1995 until recently, when full same-sex marriage was instituted. According to a study by the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, Swedish queers have been divorcing in high numbers, like their straight counterparts, who have a divorce rate that’s just a little higher than the United States.

For queers in Sweden, that’s the price of being normal.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca, who has been a queer activist since he was involved with the Gay Liberation Front at Temple University in Philadelphia in the early 1970s, is editor of Smash the Church, Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Liberation (City Lights Books).

Quickies

June 17, 2009

FRI/19

The Lollipop Generation (G.B. Jones, Canada, 2008) To truly appreciate G.B. Jones’ decades-in-the-making solo follow-up to her 1991 queer punk classic collaboration with Bruce LaBruce No Skin Off My Ass, you probably have to be a fan of Doris Wishman. Jones is on record as a major admirer of the woman behind Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965) and the Chesty Morgan vehicle Double Agent 73 (1974), whose singular directorial style had no need for dramatic momentum, synced-up dialogue, or sensible camera angles. (In a scene with dialogue, Wishman was more likely to lavish close-ups on nearby furniture than on the humans involved.) Lollipop Generation skewers the lust for youth at the rotten core of pop culture through its look at a loose gang of candy-licking teen and preteen trick-turners and the suckers who would like to prey on them. The cast includes writer Mark Ewert and Calvin Johnson, but Vaginal Davis steals a sizeable portion of the movie by throwing her all into a molester role in a sequence that shifts back and forth between Super 8 and video. My favorite aspect of Lollipop Generation is Jones’ eye for funny or dirty signs or landmarks, from giant smiling balls on the sides of freeways to sites with double entendres for names. By placing what story there is within this framework, she creates her own world with no need for special effects. (Johnny Ray Huston) 10:45 p.m., Roxie.

Making the Boys (Crayton Robey, USA, 2008) Whether you adore it as a nostalgic, pre-HIV throwback or despise it for its self-loathing and slew of gay stereotypes, The Boys in the Band was revolutionary for its time as the first play to revolve around a homosexual circle of friends and to present an honest examination of the gay community. In director Crayton Robey’s compelling and insightful new documentary, Mart Crowley, the playwright of Boys, recounts his days rubbing shoulders with the Hollywood elite as a burgeoning screenwriter only to be cast aside after a failed Bette Davis pilot and a film deal fell through. New York theater proved to be his salvation as he struggled with perceived personal and professional failure as well as alcoholism. With nothing to lose, he bravely penned Boys, secured the producer from Edward Albee’s equally controversial Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and released it off-Broadway on April 14, 1968 to commercial acclaim. Robey interviews both Broadway and Hollywood mainstays such as Albee, Terrence McNally, Robert Wagner, and Dominick Dunne, who reflect on the impact of Boys, for better and for worse, and its role in challenging mainstream opinions of homosexuality as a mental illness and in jumpstarting the gay rights movement. In the middle of the film, I started wishing Robey had interviewed more of the cast of Boys. After all, they were the ones who experienced the highs of being in an exciting and subversive new play as well as the lows of later being essentially blacklisted from Hollywood. Then it dawned on me that five of the nine original cast members of Boys have since died from AIDS. Ultimately though, their cause to validate the gay community’s presence in society is forever immortalized with the legacy of Boys, the play that Vincent Canby hailed "a landslide of truths." (Laura Swanbeck) 7 p.m., Victoria. Also Mon/22, 1 p.m., Castro.

SAT/20

Greek Pete (Andrew Haigh, U.K., 2009) A deadpan serving of real-life drama, this night-and-day portrait is a 21st-century update of Andy Warhol’s Flesh, the 1968 movie that made Joe Dallesandro a star. In Flesh, Dallesandro is a hustler named Joe in New York. Here, Peter Pittaros is an escort named Pete in London. In Flesh, we see Joe school comparatively naïve and weak street corner boys on the tricks of rough trade. Here, Pete is a responsible breadwinner in comparison to his drug-spun chicken boyfriend. Both Flesh‘s Joe and the title character of Greek Pete hang with trannies, though Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis are more camera-ready than Pete’s goth gal pals. But whereas a strange optimism radiates from Flesh, which is understandably too smitten with its charismatic star to knock the hustle, Greek Pete has a strong undertow of melancholy. Its sadness doesn’t stem from a moral tut-tut stance about whoring but from a sense of modern emptiness that haunts Pete whether he’s with friends, alone in his apartment, or watching footage of himself winning a competition that’s the male escort equivalent of Miss America. Well-shot and anchored by a performance that’s just deep and ordinary enough to remain compelling, Greek Pete isn’t just easy meat. (Huston) 10 p.m., Victoria. Also Tues/23, 2:30 p.m., Castro.

SUN/21

Training Rules (Dee Mosbacher and Fawn Yacker, USA, 2009) Homophobia in sports is, depressingly, still an enormous issue. But compared to the macho world of the NBA, you’d think that women’s college basketball would be a comparatively safe realm for queer players. In the case of Penn State, you’d be dead wrong. For 27 years, coach Rene Portland intimidated and harassed players who were lesbians — and those she thought might be lesbians, or who had lesbian friends. As players from past teams recall (often through tears), Portland was an outspoken homophobe who revoked scholarships as she pleased and made basketball a joyless pursuit for those she targeted. In 2006, former player Jennifer Harris, a star athlete and standout student, sued the school for discrimination. Though Harris can’t speak at length due to the terms of her settlement (and of course Portland, who resigned in 2007, did not agree to an interview), Training Rules is an eye-opening document, exposing not just the ugly truth about one coach, but a systemwide crisis that those in power (athletic directors, the NCAA) have been painfully slow to address. (Cheryl Eddy) 3:30 p.m., Castro

TUES/23

City of Borders (Yun Suh, USA, 2009) Forty-five minutes away from Middle Eastern "gay mecca" Tel Aviv lies Jerusalem, ancient religious center and, unfortunately, bastion of equally time-tested attitudes toward homosexuality. Many Tel Aviv gays don’t even see the point of living, let alone fighting for rights, in Jerusalem. Yet Jerusalem’s sole gay bar, Shushan, was one place where Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians, mingled as equals. Yun Suh’s documentary focuses on a few diverse patrons, plus Shushan’s owner Sa’ar Netanel, who became Jerusalem’s first openly gay elected official (as a city councilman) on the same day it elected its first ultraright Orthodox mayor. He endures routine death threats, Gay Pride parades attract violent protest, and the other principals here have their problems and flaws too: lesbian couple Samira and Ravit try to stay together despite major cultural differences; Palestinian youth Boddy fears he’ll eventually have to leave for his own safety; Adam, an Israeli activist since being queer-bashed, doesn’t see any ethnical conflict in building a house on occupied territory with his boyfriend. Borders is a vivid snapshot of a gay rights struggle that is still very much an uphill slog. (Dennis Harvey) 7 p.m., Roxie

Patrick, Age 1.5 (Ella Lemhagen, Sweden, 2008) Freshly settled in suburbia, gay couple Goran (Gustaf Skarsgard) and Sven (Torkel Petersson) are eager to adopt a child — or at least Goran is, with Sven reluctantly caving in. But when against the odds they’re informed a native-born boy is available, a misplaced bit of bureaucratic punctuation means they get not the 18-month-old toddler expected but 15-year-old Patrik (Tom Ljungman). He’s a foul-tempered foster home veteran who makes it clear he’s no happier cohabiting with two "homos" than they are with him. Nevertheless, they’re stuck with each other at least through the weekend, allowing a predictable mutual warming trend to course through Ella Lemhagen’s agreeable seriocomedy. While formulaic in concept, the film’s low-key charm and conviction earn emotions that might easily have felt sitcomishly pre-programmed. (Harvey) 7 p.m., Castro

JUNE 24

Prodigal Sons (Kimberly Reed, USA, 2008) When Kimberly Reed (who studied film at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University) set out to make Prodigal Sons, she was probably pretty certain the doc would be deliberately self-focused. The film’s first act takes place in Helena, Mont., at Reed’s 20-year high school reunion — amid former classmates who remember Kimberly Reed as Paul McKerrow, a football star who was voted "Most Likely to Succeed" (and, indeed, a success she has been; though she alludes to a difficult period during her transition, she’s clearly arrived at a happy and confident place in life). But Prodigal Sons is plural for a reason, and not because of brother Todd (who happens to be gay). Instead, it’s adopted brother Marc — who is given to terrifying rages as a result of a personality-altering brain injury; remains eternally resentful of Kimberly’s high school-era smarts and popularity; and (as is shockingly discovered) the grandchild of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth — who becomes Prodigal Sons’ focus. He is the most heartbreaking figure in an intimately personal (sometimes uncomfortably so) film that’s ultimately about identities lost and found. (Eddy) 7:30 p.m., Castro

JUNE 27

Off and Running (Nicole Opper, USA, 2009) Teenager Avery, an African American, was adopted as an infant by a single white mom, who soon afterward meets another single white mom who had recently adopted an African American baby boy. Before long, a family (nicknamed "the United Nations," especially after a Korean child joins the mix) was formed. A track star who dreams of running in college, Avery loves her moms, but she’s curious about her biological parents. She knows she’s from Texas and was originally called Mycole Antwonisha, facts that hint at a cultural experience far removed from her upbringing as a Brooklyn Jew. After a few letters are exchanged with her birth mother, Avery is crushed when the woman mysteriously ends communication. A profound identity crisis ensues. "It’s like something really traumatic happened to her, and nothing did," Avery’s caring if clueless adoptive mother says. But Off and Running suggests otherwise. The doc may not speak for every adopted child’s experience, but it’s eye-opening nonetheless, and is blessed with a subject who is sensitive and articulate even in her darkest moments. (Eddy) 2:15 p.m., Roxie

Pop Star on Ice (David Barba and James Pellerito, USA, 2009) Yay, Johnny Weir! If you don’t share my sentiments about the sassy, sparkly, outspoken (but not on-the-record out) figure skater, then you might want to skip this documentary, which was filmed over a two-year period and offers an up-close-and-personal (like, you see him in a tanning bed) look at the three-time national champ. Or maybe not, actually — haters might come around after realizing how hard he’s worked to achieve his ice-rink dreams, born after watching Oksana Baiul win Olympic gold on TV and learning to skate (at the ancient age of 12) on the frozen-over cornfield in his Pennsylvania backyard. Competition footage backs up claims by longtime coach Priscilla Hill (with whom he breaks up over the course of the film) and others of Weir’s extraordinary talents; backstage clips and off-the-cuff interviews establish the fact that he’s one of the sport’s most fun personalities, probably ever. Weir pouts, jokes, struts in a fashion show, speaks in a Russian accent, discusses his collection of furs, and lands quadruple jumps with ease. Gay or (ahem) nay, he’s clearly 100 percent comfortable with who he is. (Eddy) 11 a.m., Castro

Two entangled

June 10, 2009

kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Three is a magic number, but two is bliss. Two lovers, two wholly different, unholy kinds of fun, two great taste sensations in one. Koko Taylor’s passing and Exene Cervenka’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis saddens. The fluctuating news reports of the late David Carradine’s trussed member maddens. But it takes only two parcels of joy — one, Grizzly Bear, perched on the idealized yet full-bodied reaches of the Cali chamber pop; the other, Sonic Youth, reaching for awkwardly sensual slow jams tethered to a persistently urbane, urban art-school post-punk — to infuse my day with pure pleasure. And raise the stakes between musicmaker and listener.

Sex and death, eros and thanatos, are the breezy, almost feminized undercurrents rushing beneath Sonic Youth’s The Eternal (Matador), the band’s first independent release in more than 20 years since its classic Daydream Nation (Enigma/Blast First, 1988). Closer to the downbeat, Viagra-enhanced funk of Sonic Nurse (Geffen, 2004) than the spazz burst of Rather Ripped (Geffen, 2006), The Eternal rides an easygoing butterscotch stallion lightly packed with ’70s AM pop hooks ("Antenna"), diaristic complaints (Kim Gordon’s media grouse on "Sacred Trickster"), Gregory Corso and Bobby Pyn, a.k.a., Darby Crash, shout-outs, and archetypally nervy rockers ("What We Know" shows that the group still knows how to rise above "quiet meditation," as Lee Ranaldo sing-speaks "Oh, don’t you know, darkness makes the night more cold"). The faintly grunge-flavored "What We Know" makes the case for Ranaldo as late-period SY’s secret weapon: that tune and "Walkin Blue" with its anthemic "Everything we see is cleeeaaar!" refrain — L. Ron Hubbard calling? — are my cleeeaaar favorites. Coming down slowly and sexily with the acoustic guitar-sugared dissonant majesty of "Massage the History," coated with Kim Gordon’s hoarse, off-key gasps at "his … story," Sonic Youth seems to be clearing the libraries of rubble (or rock), intent on finding new expressways to the body, rather than simply settling for "yr. skull."

Enter Grizzly Bear. Based on the quiet-storm slouch and buzzing bottom end of "Southern Point," at first listen the group might now be aping the polyphonic euphoria of Animal Collective, though Tin Pin Alley and minimalist touchstones are hailed along the way, and side projects like Daniel Rossen’s dreamy Department of Eagles are given a respectful nod. Named after a small Massachusetts island, Veckatimest (Warp) revels in splendid isolation, relishing the angelic waves of vocal harmony on "Two Weeks" and the sluggish slow dance of "Cheerleader." Delicately nosing through the bucolic, classical-chamber rock quadrant of Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, Grizzly Bear might be charting the trajectory of a relationship as it blossoms then withers ("All your useless pretensions are weighing on my time" is the crux of "While You Wait for the Others"). But you don’t need to listen too closely to decide that an album spilling with this much longing needs a cleeeaaar narrative shape, a visual or literary corollary to the rubbery rhythms of "Fine for Now," the life aquatic vocals of "Dory," and "Good Vibrations"-organ-washed tour de force "Ready. Able." No man is an island, but for a vulnerable Bear, perhaps directness is dangerous. No less sensuous than The Eternal — and undercut with judicious guitar slash and burn; punk and hardcore being less of a bedrock on this watery retreat — Veckatimest might as well be nicknamed "The Ravishing."

GRIZZLY BEAR

June 21–22, 9 p.m., $22.50

The Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.livenation.com

SONIC YOUTH

Aug. 2, 8 p.m., $35.50

Fox Theater

1807 Telegraph, Oakl.

www.apeconcerts.com

———–

SONGS IN THE KEYS OF LIFE

A project that started life as a "casual keyboard club" and took on a life its own, Au Revoir Simone tends to get led around by the quirks and whims of its instruments. For instance, one of the all-female trio’s most important keyboards upped and broke at the start of its current tour, adding an element of chance to music-making. "You plug into some room and it might start crackling and making noise," the group’s Erika Forster says good-naturedly while traveling through Tennessee. "It’s a good lesson in ‘Let’s see how you’re doing today …”" About 50 "feisty" keyboards were layered throughout the threesome’s new Still Night, Still Light (Our Secret Record Company). On the album, Forster says, "We talked a lot about the idea of distance and how that came into play in terms of distance from home and from the people we love and from your own heart." Now Au Revoir Simone is looking forward to making that distance between them and a certain keyboard sound shrink: the musicians found a replacement for their busted Casio MP70 in Santa Clara after scouring the country with the help of friends on Twitter and Facebook.

AU REVOIR SIMONE

With the Antlers, Findlay Brown, DJ Victoria Bergsman

Sat/13, 9 p.m., $16

Bimbo’s 365 Club

1025 Columbus, SF

(415) 474-0365

www.bimbos365club.com 2

To Serge, with love

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June 10, 2009
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"Some people have their hang-ups about making music on a computer," opines tech house DJ and producer Serge Garcia, a.k.a. Greco Guggenheit. "Then again, some cinematographers during the silent era believed that the introduction of sound to films was fraudulent."

A relatively fresh face in the Bay Area, the 24-year-old Los Angeles native Garcia has more than a few bass monsters he’s itching to unleash. Wielding the Detroit techno scene and its forefathers as his beacon, he compounds elements from minimal house and peak-time techno into one banging track after another.

Garcia spent part of his youth in Mexico City, then Barcelona, where he played a lot of soccer (his "first love," he confesses). His introduction to electronic music began thanks to what he describes as "random CDs with the label ‘Techno/House Music’" that his older sister would mail to him. "Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Kerri Chandler, Derrick May," he incants, when asked about some of the DJs and producers who appeared on these CDs. "Basically, dance music that came out of Detroit and its surrounding areas in the 1980s and early ’90s."

In the last year, Garcia has split his time between San Francisco, Stockholm, and Berlin. He plans to make Berlin his home base later this summer, citing record label interest in and around Germany and an aversion to SF’s 2 a.m. curtain calls as motives for his move. "After visiting Berlin and experiencing places like Panorama Bar, Cookies Club, and Watergate, I remember coming home and feeling very alive and creative," he explains. "Here in the states, electronic music isn’t part of mainstream culture [the way] it is in many parts of Europe."

GRECO GUGGENHEIT

With Buttercream Gang, Magnanimous

Wed/10, 9 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

When in roam

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June 10, 2009
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Involving no catatonic housewives, no mortally botched abortions, and no luminous pools of blood in the kitchen either, Sam Mendes’ latest film presents a somewhat happier tale of domesticity than 1999’s American Beauty or last year’s Revolutionary Road, if "tale of domesticity" is a fair description for a road movie in which the stated goal is a home.

In Away We Go — from a screenplay by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida — 30-something couple Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Burt (John Krasinski) find themselves unexpectedly ditched during Verona’s second trimester by the only set of theoretically adoring grandparents available, Burt’s flakily self-absorbed parents (Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels). Thus unsettled, the two set off in search of a place to provide their child with an "epic," "Huck Finn-y" childhood, as Burt wistfully envisions it. Some parents might quibble with this aim, given Huck’s epic stint as a runaway on a river, but some offspring, even grown ones, might find it pleasurable to imagine their parents dreaming for them a heroic, adventurous youth, rather than the anxious rigors preparatory to an Ivy education and a professional life.

In any case, away they go to visit friends in Phoenix, a sister in Tucson, a cousin in Madison, Wis., and so on — each stopover offering interludes with the film’s excellent ensemble cast and presenting Verona and Burt with various slices of parenting life to digest or spit out. We don’t see much of these places; Away We Go is, until the end, only vaguely concerned with geography, focusing its lens on private scenes even in public places. At a Phoenix dog track, Allison Janney provides hilariously, wildly inappropriate commentary on life with pre-postal husband (Jim Gaffigan) and silently resentful children. In Madison, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton ooze sanctimony as a noxiously evolved couple raising their children via the Continuum school.

During calmer, more sober moments, you may find yourself idly pondering your investment in the drama and domestic arrangements of this financially solvent, utterly in love, ideally suited pair. But the dialogue is clever enough, the protagonists engaging enough to patchily override such cynical thoughts. If you can handle the twee whimsy of a shot in which the itinerant couple’s plane is transformed into a leaping dolphin in the reflection of skyscraper windows, you’re more than halfway home.

AWAY WE GO opens Fri/12 in San Francisco.

The two Newsoms

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June 10, 2009
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steve@sfbg.com

More on SFBG
>>Links to our complete Newsom coverage, from 2006 to the present (Microsoft Word)

There are two Gavin Newsoms: the mayor San Franciscans have gotten to know over the last six years, and the candidate running for governor.

The contrast is dramatic. The central persona being pushed by the Newsom campaign — that of a postpartisan progressive who has united fractious San Francisco around innovative, common sense solutions to the most vexing problems using his considerable courage and political skills — seems like pure fiction to most City Hall watchers.

Here’s Newsom, the candidate, kicking off his campaign and describing a harmonious local political scene: "We stopped fighting over who was going to be in charge and started working together to find solutions."

Here’s the reality: Newsom is a politically isolated mayor who refused to heed the voter directive to meet regularly with the Board of Supervisors or take part in budget negotiations involving key community stakeholders. His spokespeople regularly belittle and deride progressive supervisors and organizations. He has vetoed consensus legislation on tenant protections, police foot patrols, new revenue measures, and new parking policies. He is proudly taking campaign credit for other people’s initiatives he once opposed. He has been absent from some of the most important policy debates in the city. He has demanded the resignations of all appointees and top officials, even those protected by contracts and fixed terms. His dysfunctional, politicized office has been criticized for its secrecy by both the civil grand jury and Sunshine Ordinance Task Force and for its emphasis on loyalty over competence by past and current employees.

He is utterly unwilling to engage with people who disagree with him. In fact, he refused the Guardian‘s month-old request to discuss the issues raised in this article.

"It’s like a Wizard of Oz creation. You pull back the curtain and there’s nothing there," said Aaron Peskin, who was regularly vilified by Team Newsom when he served as president of the Board of Supervisors. "He is kind of an empty, sad guy and his handlers have managed to create a persona that is fake and false."

A close examination of Newsom’s record and statements shows a history of contradictions. He has supported and opposed public power, decriminalizing marijuana, requiring employers to help pay for the city’s universal health care system, temporarily closing some streets to cars, shelter and treatment on demand for the homeless, higher clean energy standards, and a long list of other issues.

He called for Muni to be free, then insisted on doubling Muni fares.

You’d think this would be a formula for political failure, that eventually California voters would figure out the fraud. But that’s not necessarily true. The reality, political professionals told us, is that the general public just doesn’t care about the details of his mayoral tenure. Such nuances don’t translate well into a statewide campaign.

Newsom’s platform and persona are what voters want to hear right now — and they’re just believable enough to be an easy sell for modern media manipulators.

But the public ought to be paying attention — because the record suggests that Newsom is hardly a great candidate for governor.

FOR THE RECORD

The policy initiative Newsom cites most frequently on the campaign trail is Healthy San Francisco, a plan to provide health care to all city residents, mostly by requiring employers to provide health insurance to their workers or pay into a city program that covers visits to city clinics and hospitals.

"In my city, we’re well on our way to universal health care. How can we afford it? Well, we’re proving what you already know: it’s less expensive to keep people well than it is to treat their sickness," Newsom said in his announcement speech.

"Mayor Gavin Newsom isn’t waiting for the politicians in Sacramento to solve this problem — he’s created the only universal health care program in the country," reads the Newsom campaign Web site.

It may be true that preventive care saves money over the long run, but that has nothing to do with how San Francisco affords this program. And Gavin Newsom never created it.

First of all, Healthy San Francisco wouldn’t exist if then Sup. Tom Ammiano (now a member of the California Assembly) hadn’t spent years fighting for a universal health care plan paid for by employers.

And while Ammiano was being savagely attacked over the idea by the business community, a key constituency of the mayor, Newsom sat on the sidelines until Ammiano lined up enough votes to approve the plan. At that point, Newsom introduced his own health plan, worked with Ammiano to merge the two, and has been taking credit for it around the country ever since.

Ammiano credits labor, not Newsom, with doing the hard work of fighting business community opposition to Healthy San Francisco. "The mayor’s role was that we would keep him updated, but I don’t think he thought it was going to happen," Ammiano told us. "There’s no doubt he came along for the ride."

Going through the issues on Newsom’s campaign Web site, there are a startling number of claims that don’t match his record. A few examples:

"California must be ready for a wide range of natural disasters … [and] man-made disasters as well — terrorist attacks, hazardous material and oil spills, and biological and chemical threats," said the mayor, whose latest budget includes a 24 percent cut to the Office of Emergency Services and who appointed unqualified (but politically connected) Republican hack Annemarie Conroy to head OES, and who remained on vacation in Hawaii as San Franciscans responded to the Cosco Busan oil spill, the biggest in San Francisco Bay.

"In the midst of a national economic crisis, San Francisco’s economy has remained strong … Mayor Newsom — building on his experience in the private sector where he built a thriving enterprise of 15 businesses and created 1,000 jobs — has transformed the city’s economy," his campaign wrote. Yet in his latest budget, he argues how weak the city’s economy has become and uses the crisis to slash spending on public health, social services, building inspections, and other essential services in the biggest government downsizing in the city’s history. Biotech businesses have located in the city, as Newsom has often touted, but they aren’t paying any city taxes because of a measure he sponsored exempting them.

"Working largely with existing resources, Mayor Newsom has applied a little common sense and a lot of innovation to help turn San Francisco public schools into a statewide model for educational achievement," writes the campaign. But despite regularly claiming credit for schools in his stump speeches, Newsom has had little to do with the San Francisco Unified School District, which has avoided layoffs mostly because of support from city funds (thanks to a voter-approved measure authored by Ammiano) and a parcel tax spearheaded by downtown financier Warren Hellman and others. Newsom also has done little to help find solutions to the most controversial issues plaguing the school district in recent years, such as eliminating JROTC, school closures, desegregation, and the divisive tenure of former Superintendent Arlene Ackerman. Indeed, his biggest role was defending a superintendent so polarizing the board of education fired her.

That has been the most common complaint about Newsom from both his political allies and opponents: he’s always been unwilling to spend his political capital on anything that might help the city or solve its problems.

The polls may show that Newsom’s popular, but he has never been able to translate that into political success. Despite spending a record-setting $7 million and nearly two years on his first mayoral campaign, Newsom only beat the poorly funded, last-minute campaign of Matt Gonzalez by about five percentage points.

Two months into his first term, on March 3, 2004 Newsom’s signature Workforce Housing Initiative went down hard, as have most of the ballot measures he has supported. The one notable exception was last year’s Proposition G, a measure Newsom created along with U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein to give Lennar Corp. the exclusive right to develop more than 10,000 homes and a new football stadium on Hunters and Candlestick points and through much of southeast San Francisco. That plan remains the centerpiece of Newsom’s housing policy even as the housing market and the value of Lennar’s stock have both collapsed.

When it comes to the Board of Supervisors, Newsom’s candidates lose almost every time there’s a closely contested race. In the last election, Newsom backed Joe Alioto, Ahsha Safai, and Sue Lee, all top fundraisers in their respective districts — and all of them lost. Even in ultra-liberal District 9, where one of three well-qualified progressive candidates was virtually guaranteed to win, Newsom backed a business-friendly also-ran.

Two years before, Newsom gave his strong support to Doug Chan in conservative District 4 and Rob Black in District 6, home to Newsom nemesis Chris Daly. Newsom actively campaigned for both men harder than he has for any other supervisorial candidate — and both lost.

Newsom even lost control of his own party. While he was campaigning for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party presidential primary, Daly, Peskin, and the progressives put together a campaign to take control of the Democratic County Central Committee, besting Newsom-backed alternatives.

That’s not to say Newsom isn’t a shrewd politician. Indeed, the one move that put him on the national political map was the same one that ensured his popularity and reelection in San Francisco: his decision to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples shortly after taking office in 2004.

There’s no evidence to refute Newsom’s claim that this was a principled decision stemming from his outrage at federal efforts to ban same-sex marriage. But as a side benefit, the move made Newsom of beloved figure among LGBT voters (who mostly cast their ballots for Gonzalez in 2003) and transformed Newsom from an ambitious and privileged young politician to an early civil rights leader in the eyes of many.

THE WAY HE WORKS

When Newsom unveiled his 2009-10 budget, it wasn’t in the Board of Supervisors Chambers, where there’s plenty of room for the press and public and where mayors have traditionally held these events. Instead, he made the announcement in his private inner office. And even though he invited local journalists, he filled the small room with department heads and supervisors and made the media peer in from an adjoining room. Then he spoke for nearly an hour and concluded the event without taking questions.

"I look forward to working with the Board of Supervisors," Newsom said, but nobody believed him. He made that same promise in January and then refused to work with supervisors or even to signal his intentions with the direction of this secretive budget.

It was an event that was in many ways emblematic of Newsom’s tenure as mayor, which he has always insisted be conducted on his terms, even when those terms contradict provisions of the City Charter, ignore his supposed partners in governance, or infer an almost kingly power that denies the notion of checks and balances on power.

"It’s totally top secret. They’re trying to control the message as much as possible," Sup. John Avalos, chair of the boards’ Budget Committee, told us before the event. "It’s going to be a gubernatorial campaign event, with a carefully crafted message that has more statewide implication than local implications."

Newsom visited the supervisors fewer times than any mayor, a trend with both real and symbolic meaning. Former Mayor Willie Brown was often criticized for heavy-handed tactics, but at least he was engaged with the political process by being willing to take on his political opponents and fight it out in public.

Newsom ended the tradition of delivering the legally required State of the City speech at the board chambers, instead holding it in locations around the city that emphasized something his political advisors found important.

Then last year, he dispensed with the speech entirely and highlighted what a tech-savvy hipster he is by releasing a set of marathon YouTube videos, 7.5 hours in all, and calling it his State of the City speech, a stunt that was universally panned by local journalists, even by normally sycophantic Examiner columnist Ken Garcia.

Newsom’s administration earned repeated condemnations from the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force for withholding public documents and information, from internal e-mail to his daily schedule.

"Withholding information is the name of the game for this administration. It’s how they work," Avalos said.

Newsom had developed such a reputation for political disengagement that voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition I in 2006, calling for the mayor to show up at Board of Supervisors meetings once a month for policy discussions. But Newsom simply refused to go, deriding the idea as "political theater" and announcing that he would instead hold regular forums in the community, which turned out to be highly scripted political events with department heads required to attend.

It wasn’t the last time he would use department heads as campaign props. The next year, in September 2007, Newsom suddenly decided (without seeking any legal advice first) to ask for resignation letters from all department heads and top officials, as well as appointees to city board and commissions.

Although he cast it as a bold, fresh move to shake things up, Newsom didn’t have the authority to do so. Many commission members serve fixed terms to prevent the mayor from exercising just this kind of political pressure on supposedly independent bodies.

Ultimately Newsom accepted only a few of the more than 200 resignations he requested. But the message was clear that Newsom was in charge and that he demanded the personal loyalty of those who serve in city government. Not long after, he summarily fired two popular and effective department heads — Susan Leal at the Public Utilities Commission and Margaret Brodkin at the Department of Children Youth and Families — because they were taking independent steps and not following the mayor’s script.

CHARACTER AND CONNECTIONS

Newsom is campaigning as a man of integrity. "I’m not the kind of person who says one thing in private and does another in public. You will know where I stand," he told the California Democratic Party Convention on April 25.

Yet at the end of January 2007, we got a telling peek at the actual moral fiber of Team Newsom. That was the week a pair of simmering scandals burst into public view, both of which were handled disingenuously by Newsom (see "Newsom’s scandals," 2/7/07).

The first was an incident in which Newsom’s press secretary, Peter Ragone, was caught by the SFist blog using fake names to post comments to that and other blogs attacking Newsom’s critics. When confronted about it by the Guardian and other journalists, he lied and blamed the posts on an imaginary friend, only admitting the truth once he was finally cornered.

But that admission was overshadowed by even bigger news that day, Jan. 31, when the San Francisco Chronicle printed a long-rumored story about Newsom’s affair with his political appointments secretary, Ruby Rippey-Tourk, who was married to Newsom’s reelection campaign manager and close confidante, Alex Tourk.

Newsom held a brief press conference to admit that "everything you’ve heard and read is true and I’m deeply sorry about that" and say he was getting back to business. He took no questions.

The next day he announced he had a drinking problem and was seeking help from the Delancey Street Foundation. Again, he took no questions and offered no answers about how he was casually dealing with that intensive (and politically connected) program (see "Sorta, maybe an alcoholic," 2/28/07).

A month later, controversial press secretary Ragone was moved from the Mayor’s Office to Newsom’s reelection campaign. Today, Ragone is the spokesperson for the gubernatorial campaign.

His replacement, Nate Ballard, has been every bit the scorched earth political operative, using glib put-downs to respond to serious requests for information and offering up belittling one-liners to attack progressive supervisors. Together with political consultant Eric Jaye, the ambitious trio is widely considered to be running the Mayor’s Office.

For years, Team Newsom has been perceived as looking beyond San Francisco and failing to establish any significant political base here.

"He’s not put together any kind of coalition. He is sort of an island," University of San Francisco political science professor Corey Cook told us.

Neither has Newsom been the reliable representative of business interests the downtown power brokers thought they were getting when they dumped money into his 2003 mayoral campaign. Many privately grumble that their desires have taken a back seat to Newsom’s personal ambitions.

But there are several well-documented examples of Newsom flipping his position on an issue after getting a call from a high-profile supporter. The first significant one came in December 2005 when Gap, Inc. founder Don Fisher convened a meeting to demand that Newsom oppose an ordinance limiting the amount of parking that could be built along with housing in the downtown core, progressive legislation championed by Newsom’s planning director Dean Macris.

Fisher and other downtown power brokers were angry with Newsom for being disengaged and letting progressives take control of the city’s agenda. As Guardian reporting later revealed (see "Joining the battle," 2/8/06), Newsom agreed to oppose the legislation and support an alternative written by a group of developer attorneys, which went nowhere. He eventually vetoed the good legislation, demanded some pro-developer loopholes, and signed the weakened legislation.

Another notable corporate-inspired flip-flop came last year when Pacific Gas and Electric Co. urged Newsom to reverse his support for installing two city-owned combustion turbine power plants, which he complied with within two weeks of the May 5 request (see "Ongoing threat," 5/21/08).

Critics contend that PG&E didn’t want any public power projects, and even though Newsom told the Guardian that he supported public power during both of his mayoral election endorsement interviews, he went along with PG&E’s wishes (claiming it was really about fossil fuel generation, not public power).

But within a few months Newsom decided he was actually against public power, using the new stance as his reason for opposing the Clean Energy Act (which would have set high renewable energy standards and created a study asking whether public power was the best way to meet those goals). After PG&E spent more than $10 million, the most ever on a San Francisco campaign, the Clean Energy Act was soundly defeated last November.

Yet confronting Newsom about any of his contradictions, flip-flops, and unsavory actions can get questioners black-balled. KGO-TV reporter Dan Noyes was shut out of the Mayor’s Office after he asked tough questions. And earlier this year, Newsom blocked me on Twitter after I publicly questioned his penchant for the communications medium (and the spelling errors that riddled his tweets).

"He’s notorious for having a thin skin," Ammiano told us, relaying a recent incident in which Newsom called Ammiano early one morning to yell at him after a blog quoted Ammiano for raising concerns that Newsom’s budget cuts are undermining the Healthy San Francisco program.

Peskin used these adjectives to describe Newsom: narcissistic, defensive, insecure, petulant, thin-skinned, and paranoid.

"Like a lot of people who come from privilege, he’s a do-gooder. And that, a lot of times, doesn’t allow him to see the forest for the trees," Ammiano said.

It is that gulf between how Newsom is and how he presents himself that frustrates many San Franciscans.

"If Gavin Newsom were as effective as he’s selling himself as, we certainly wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in," said Debra Walker, a progressive activist, member of the Building Inspection Commission, and candidate to replace Chris Daly on the Board of Supervisors. "The problem is, he’s charming. He does well at power points and engaging the audience. He’s good. But we all know it’s empty. He doesn’t have much to do with government. He’s just not engaged."

Cook told us that Newsom "has not worked closely with the Board of Supervisors." But as he runs for governor, he’s attempting to portray that political isolation as a kind of strength.

"In this economic environment," said Barbara O’Connor, a political communication professor at Sacramento State University, "it’s the only message he has."

DOES IT MATTER?

Whether or not Newsom fits the image of the postpartisan pragmatist he’s running as, most political experts say that’s what Californians — frustrated that the two major parties have essentially fought to a stalemate — are looking for right now.

"The whole postpartisan argument is more or less where voters are here in California," Cook said.

"They want someone who’s going to come in and take charge," O’Connor said. "You want something good at win-win conflict resolution, but not someone who will do anything for votes."

It’s unclear at this point whether Californians will see Newsom as a smarmy politician pandering for votes, or the real deal example of a next-generation political leader.

"There are disconnects and there are hypocrisies, but they’re not going to matter a helluva lot. He’ll get to play this game on his ground," said David Latterman, a San Francisco political consultant who works with moderates like Newsom.

"We forget what the average person out there thinks or cares about," he continued, referring to San Francisco political insiders. "Local city politics bores more people. The stuff he hasn’t done well is stuff nobody cares about."

Latterman says Newsom has an amazing ability to survive his many scandals and shortcomings and remain popular. "The guy is Teflon, he really is. Newsom is a charming guy. In a crowd, people like him."

This isn’t an assessment everyone agrees with. Certainly Newsom can come off as arrogant, a trait displayed during his "it’s coming, whether you like it or not" speech on same-sex marriage that the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign used so effectively against him in television ads.

O’Connor said she recently moderated a panel Newsom was on and wasn’t impressed. "I was amazed at how facile he is. He has a long way to go to being able to connect to the person."

Cook and Latterman say Newsom has presided over a city that has shown real leadership on health care, environmentalism, technological innovation, and other issues Newsom is running on. "Newsom, as the leader of the city, gets credit for that," Latterman said.

That may infuriate San Franciscans who know more about Newsom, but that anger isn’t likely to cause Newsom too many problems on the campaign trail. The stronger he gets hit by San Francisco progressives, the more he can use those attacks to explain why SF wackos are so hard to work with.

"He’s trying to turn all those things into positives, saying that’s why everyone hates him. It’s Arnold 101," Cook said.

Newsom’s playing hard to the youth vote, boasting of how many fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter that he has — but not all his positions are in step with young voters.

Ammiano noted how Newsom opposes his legislation to legalize and tax marijuana, an issue that polls strongly with young people and that could help the state’s fiscal crisis. Ammiano said he asked many of Newsom’s young volunteers at the recent California Democratic Convention (although few were from San Francisco) about the issue, and they were surprised at Newsom’s position. "A lot of the young people who supported him at the Democratic convention did not know he’s not supporting my marijuana bill [Assembly Bill 390]," Ammiano told us.

There’s also the fact that Newsom opposed this moment’s big change candidate, President Barack Obama. Instead, he joined with most political establishment Democratic stalwarts and backing Hillary Clinton in the primaries.

In fact, some of Obama’s California supporters are looking to bring a candidate who shares their values into the race and have formed a group called Change Candidate for California to recruit a gubernatorial candidate.

"We’re not convinced that Mayor Newsom is the best candidate to lead us out of this crisis," said Steve Fowler, one of the group’s founders. "We are inspired by the Obama campaign and we want a leader who can reengage Californians with their state."

O’Connor also thinks there’s a good possibility others will get into the race: "It’s not a good field on either side and you may see some people come in as a result."

Yet for now, Newsom the candidate looks like a strong contender, despite his myriad flaws.

"But the question is, How does that brand govern?" Cook said.

Being the postpartisan maverick may play well at the polls, but Gov. Schwarzenegger is proving that it translates into being unable to govern the state effectively or find common ground between the two polarized parties.

"It’s a good campaign position," Cook said. "But I don’t think this is a viable governing strategy for California."

Dismantling the Newsom budget

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June 9, 2009
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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom was upbeat when he delivered his budget proposal last week. It won’t be that bad, he told everyone — "At the end of the day, it’s a math problem."

Well, actually, it’s not. At the end of the day, it’s job losses, major cuts to city services, and hidden taxes — most of them, despite the mayor’s rhetoric, falling on the backs of the poor.

You can’t cut $70 million from the Department of Public Health — which is already operating at bare-bones levels after years of previous cuts — without significant impacts on health care for San Franciscans. You can’t cut $19 million out of the Human Services Agency without badly hurting homeless and needy people. You can’t raise Muni fares to $2 without taking cash out of the pockets of working-class people. The mayor’s cheery line may sound good when he’s out of town running for governor, but it’s not going to play so well on the streets of San Francisco.

Just for the record, here are a few of the proposed cuts:

A 21-bed acute psychiatric unit would be shut and replaced with an 18-bed unit for milder cases. Where would the seriously mentally ill go?

The number of home-healthcare workers, the folks who take care of the very sick who need skilled clinical services in the home, would be cut by 30 percent. Those clients would either suffer, go to (expensive) hospitals, or die.

Ongoing outpatient mental health services would be limited to the most severe cases. People who are, for now, only moderately mentally ill would lose access to care (until, without care, they become severely mentally ill).

The emergency food-bag program for seniors will lose $50,000, so hungry senior citizens won’t get to eat.

Almost $3 million will be cut from community-based organizations that provide direct, frontline services to the homeless.

Almost half of the city’s recreation directors — people who provide direct services and mentoring to at-risk youth — will be laid off.

The Tenderloin Housing Clinic Eviction Defense Center, the only place that offers free legal defense for Ellis Act evictions, will lose funding, leaving hundreds of tenants at risk of losing their homes.

Drop-in centers will close. Programs for homeless youth will shut down. More homeless people with increasingly more serious mental illness will be wandering the streets with nowhere to go for help.

Mayor Newsom brags in his campaign ads about creating private-sector jobs — but the budget will mean layoffs not just for city employees but for perhaps 1,000 nonprofit workers. That dwarfs the job creation he’s claiming — and defies the Obama administration’s call for government and private business to try to preserve and create jobs.

This isn’t a math problem. It’s a political problem, and the supervisors need to make it very clear that the mayor’s budget isn’t going to fly.

The supervisors need to take the budget apart, piece by piece, and reset its priorities. Newsom increases funding for police investigators by $7 million, while cutting the Public Defender’s Office by $2 million. He’s preserving his own bloated political operation (a big press office, highly paid special assistants and programs like 311 that are part of his gubernatorial campaign) while eliminating big parts of the social safety net. He’s raising bus fares, but not taxes on downtown.

"The mayor has presented his vision," Sup. John Avalos, who chairs the Budget Committee, explained. "Now our priorities have to be presented."

This can’t be a modest, typical budget negotiation with the supervisors tweaking a few items here and there. This is a battle for San Francisco, for its future and its soul, and the supervisors need to start talking, today, about how they’re going to fight back. *

PE credit for JROTC up tonight

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June 9, 2009
11

Editors note: The San Francisco School Board will vote tonight on a convoluted plan to allow physical education credit for JROTC. Since the military-recruitment program doesn’t meet state standards for PE, the board is trying a runaround — students would get “independent study” gym credit if they sign up for JROTC.

Marc Norton, who has been in the forefront of the opposition to JROTC, sent us this commentary:

by Marc Norton

Right-wing Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders jumped into the JROTC end-game with an opinion piece on Sunday. In April, Saunders, who endorsed John McCain for President, opined that “In Obamaland… the left chants, ‘torture doesn’t work…’ But common sense tells you that techniques like sleep deprivation [and] waterboarding… work, at least some times.”

In her latest rant, Saunders recounts the pro-JROTC mythology at length, but her real play is to torture the truth with the claim that the California Board of Education has “said local school districts have the authority to offer PE [physical education] credits for JROTC.”

What the California Board of Education actually did was revise its Physical Education Framework to say that JROTC classes “may not” meet PE standards, instead of “do not” meet PE standards. But, “if a district desires to award physical education credit for courses such as JROTC, marching band, cheerleading, and drill, it is the responsibility of the district to determine how each particular course, as conducted in its district, supports a course of study for grades nine through twelve… and substantially meets the objectives and criteria” for state PE curriculum and credentialing requirements.

Those who have followed the JROTC story know that bipartisan efforts in the state Legislature have tightened up PE standards in recent years because of the crisis of physical fitness among our youth, particularly low-income youth and youth of color. That is why PE credit has been withdrawn from JROTC programs all over the state, including San Francisco.

In fact, a recent report from San Diego compared physical fitness records of students who took PE and those who did not. Fitnessgram results for JROTC students actually declined during the same period that results for students in PE increased. The Fitnessgram is the test students generally take in the 9th or 10th grade to show their progress in physical education.

If you’re nasty

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June 3, 2009
0

U.K. HORROR Once outrage settles over the current Parliamentary expense-account scandals, our former colonialist landlords will no doubt return to their concerns about "broken Britain," as the perceived general decline of moral rectitude in the United Kingdom is termed these days. Call ’em hoodies, chavs, yobs, or Neds, U.K. youth are seen as waaay out of control — albeit in ways that would seldom elicit more than a perfunctory shrug of disgust here — and their loutish, negligent, unemployed, or dole-collecting parents merit equal time in the sense-slappin’ machine.

Real or exaggerated, this trend of antisocial behaviors has inevitably crept into the entertainment realm, horror movies included. While the two Brit features (Blood River and 2008’s The Dead Outside) in this year’s Another Hole in the Head Festival only marginally deal with the phenomenon, three recent stateside DVD releases by first-time feature writer-directors find "Whatever happened to family values?!" terror placed front and center.

Not long ago especially gory or sadistic genre flicks were branded "video nasties," heavily cut or banned outright from distribution in Britain. That those days are gone, however, is made vividly clear by Steven Sheil’s Mum and Dad (2008). When Polish immigrant Lena (Olga Fedori) misses the last bus to central London, aggressively friendly fellow Heathrow cleaning staffer Birdie (Ainsley Howard) and her shy brother Elbie (Toby Alexander) invite her to spend the night at their nearby home.

Unfortunately Lena soon discovers she’s a permanent guest, kept on a very tight leash by "Mum" (Dido Miles) and "Dad" (Perry Benson). Covering familiar terrain, with particular debt to 1991’s The People Under the Stairs, Mum sports its own distinctive musk of grotesquerie, with an all-time-sickest Yuletide celebration providing craftsy homemakers with one hell of a Christmas wall-ornament idea.

Meanwhile, in rural Ireland, the least united part of the "kingdom," Plague Town (2008) again proves you really don’t want to miss that last transit run. Here, a dysfunctional American tourist family discovers one extra-large brood of horribly functional kiddies during an overnight stranding they’re unlikely to survive. Director David Gregory cut his teeth making DVD-extra tributes to Tobe Hooper, Jess Franco, Jim Van Bebber, and the "video nasty" era itself. His mentors would be proud.

More realistic, upsetting, and directly addressing "broken Britain" fears is James Watkins’ Eden Lake (2008). Another vacation-gone-horribly-wrong tale, it played one unnoticed week at the Lumiere last year. Yuppie couple Kelly Reilly and Michael Fassbender’s weekend Buckinghamshire idyll runs afoul of some ill-mannered local tweens, who unfortunately are led by a full-blown junior psychopath. After its routine setup this develops into a genuinely grueling spin on Deliverance (1972), Lord of the Flies (1954), and whatnot, with an ending that can be nitpicked for plausibility but that nonetheless leaves a real chill.

Round one

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June 3, 2009
0

sarah@sfbg.com

The Board of Supervisors’ narrowly thwarted attempt to reject the Municipal Transportation Agency’s 2009-10 budget was the first in a wave of anticipated showdowns between Mayor Gavin Newsom and the progressives this summer as budget season gets underway.

The mayor appeared to win this particular showdown when the board voted 6-5 not to reject the MTA deal May 27, although the skirmish helped progressives voice their concerns over Newsom’s budget priorities. It also gave board President David Chiu the opportunity to conduct a masterful interrogation of MTA executive director Nat Ford that set the stage for Sup. John Avalos to try to place a charter amendment on the November ballot that would make MTA more accountable and accessible.

That said, the final MTA deal — which closes a $129 million deficit on the backs of Muni riders (through service cuts and fare hikes) rather than motorists (MTA governs all parking revenue) by a ratio of about 4-1 — seems to be inconsistent with San Francisco’s official "transit-first" policy.

Chiu was the first to suggest rejecting the deal when it became clear that the Mayor’s Office has been using the MTA as a backdoor ATM, authorizing $66 million in work orders for things like salaries for Newsom’s environmental aides and compensating the police department for vaguely defined security services.

The practice made a mockery of Prop. A., which voters approved in 2007 to increase funding to Muni by $26 million annually. But since then, work orders from unrelated city departments, including the police and Newsom’s 311 call center, had increased by $32 million.

"If people have to pay more for less, they will stop taking Muni," Chiu said at the May 6 Budget Committee hearing on the MTA budget.

Sup. David Campos also took issue with the work orders and service cuts. "Whatever money riders of Muni pay into the system should be used for public transportation," Campos said.

In the end, Chiu got the agency to trim $10 million from its budget, restore $8.6 million in proposed Muni service cuts, and delay the increases that seniors, youth, and the disabled will pay for fast passes. In exchange the board voted 6-5 May 12 to drop its MTA’s budget challenge, allowing fares to increase to $2 and for services to be reduced. Sups. Campos, Avalos, Ross Mirkarimi, Chris Daly, and Eric Mar dissented.

"We needed to work this out so we can move forward on the myriad issues before us," Chiu said.

But led by Avalos, who chairs the board’s powerful Budget and Finance Committee, the progressives revived the issue the next day. "Given our grave economic crisis, we owe it to seniors, youth, and other low-income Muni riders to come up with a better budget, one that ensures Muni accessibility and accountability," Avalos said.

Instead of increasing fares and cutting services, Avalos suggested that the MTA extend meter hours to evenings and Sundays. For a moment, it looked as if the progressives would be able to muster the seven votes needed to reject the deal. Ultimately Chiu, Sophie Maxwell, and the other MTA budget opponents stuck to the deal, which was reapproved May 27.

But the episode underscores why Avalos wants to reform the composition of the MTA board. Currently the mayor appoints all seven members. The only thing the supervisors can do is confirm or reject his nominations.

The mayor also appoints MTA’s executive director. Under Newsom, Ford was hired to the post for $316,000 annually, making him the city’s highest paid employee and someone who feels accountable to the mayor. "In all the cities, the mayor takes the heat for the transit system," Ford told the Guardian when challenged on his agency’s seeming lack of independence.

But under Avalos’ amendment, the mayor and the Board of Supervisors would each nominate three board commissioners while voters would elect the seventh. "The new MTA board composition will create greater checks and balances and also ensure that the MTA director is not solely accountable to one person, but to a board that is more representative of the city and county of San Francisco," Avalos said.

MTA now faces an additional $10 to $16 million deficit, thanks to union negotiations and fears that the state will raid city property tax and gas tax coffers. But as part of his budget deal with Chiu, Ford promised that the agency would study extending parking meter enforcement hours to close the gap.

Confirming that the agency dropped a $9 million a year proposal to extend meter hours citywide after receiving input from merchants, Ford said that "we’ll clearly have to revisit parking. We’ll be looking at how to administer extended meter hours, and how that impacts churches if we do it Sundays. But we are sitting here with a structural deficit that’s been going on for decades. We need to figure out the revenue streams we need to enhance the system."

Campos thought that a progressive Board of Supervisors should have gotten a better MTA budget. "As Sup. John Avalos and I pointed out, there’s almost nothing different between this budget and what was presented last week," Campos said. "I think it’s an illustration of how it is not enough to have power. You have to be willing to use it."

But Chiu defended his deal as a necessary way out of the board conflict with Newsom’s office. "Nat Ford has committed publicly and privately that he will propose meter hour change. And MTA Board President Tom Nolan has committed that he will ensure that car owners pick up more of the burden, and that if the budget gets worse, the additional problems won’t be balanced on the backs of Muni riders, which was not something we heard last week," Chiu said.

Avalos was less sanguine: "It was a clear moment for the Board of Supervisors to support transit-first and the city’s most vulnerable residents."

But he felt that concerns about the deal, and the realization that Newsom is an increasingly absent mayor, will help voters see the need for MTA reform.

"There wasn’t a single MTA commissioner or director accessible or accountable to the greater part of San Francisco. But they were responsive to Room 200, the Mayor’s Office," Avalos said. "Clearly, we need greater checks and balances."

Mirkarimi observed how, when faced with a crisis, people make practical decisions. "What gets lost when we are in crisis mode is our larger objective," he said. "We are a transit-first city that has strong climate change legislation, and Mayor Gavin Newsom is constantly campaigning on green issues. So it’s counterintuitive for us to broker an MTA budget on the backs of Muni riders and not understand that this deal could diminish that ridership."

But MTA spokesperson Judson True believes that what got lost in the discussion is that, as a result of Proposition A, the agency adopted a two-year budget that slapped drivers with increased rates and fees in 2008 while Muni riders and services were mostly spared.

Things changed, True said, when the economy tanked in 2008 and the MTA was left facing an unprecedented deficit. "At that point we reopened the budget and put everything on the table," True said.

Either way, Chiu has been urging supervisors to move on and focus on the next big thing: the mayor’s budget. "There’s a half-billion dollar hole in this budget," Chiu said last week. "It’ll make this debate look like child’s play."

Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.

Glittering prize

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May 27, 2009
0

johnny@sfbg.com

One shorthand description of Ramona Gonzalez’s recording project Nite Jewel is that it’s disco on quaaludes. I don’t know if I like Nite Jewel quite as much as Glass Candy’s underrated B/E/A/T/B/O/X (Italians Do It Better, 2007) — c’mon, they’re funnier than they are given credit for, and they made "Computer Love" melancholic, what’s not to love? — or if I love it more.

Throughout Good Evening (Gloriette, 2008) and Nite Jewel (Human Ear, 2008) Gonzalez’s singing is both high-pitched and kinda dazed. On "Weak 4 Me," she reminds me of Mr. Bill, which can never be a bad thing. "What Did He Say" is the best Nite Jewel song so far. It sounds like a radio playing "I Can’t Wait" by Nu Shooz slowly sinking to the bottom of a pool. I recently caught up with Gonzalez on the phone.

SFBG I hadn’t realized you’re from the Bay Area. How was Berkeley High? What did you like about the Bay Area and not like about it?

Ramona Gonzalez Berkeley High when I went there was transitioning between being out of hand and horrible and pretty much a normal school. Now it’s nice. Back when I went, it was not like that. There were 23 arson attempts when I was a sophomore.

Certain teachers I had there were some of the best ones I’ve ever had. As for the school itself — fuck, it’s hard for a kid to get along in a 2300 person student body. Lots of aggro annoying kids, popularity contests and danger, everyday. But overall it was rewarding.

SFBG How were your experiences in the Oakland Interfaith Youth Choir and the Berkeley Jazz School Music Ensemble?

RG Oakland Interfaith Youth Choir was pretty awesome. My friend Emily introduced me to it, because her dad was singing in the adult choir. The songs are incredible and really difficult — the girls in that choir were unbelievably talented. I wasn’t as good as them. Singing soprano in a chest voice — that’s crazy.

I did that for 2 years and then joined the Berkeley Jazz school, just taking piano. I ran into one of the girls from the Youth Choir there.

SFBG You’ve said Kevin Shields would be a dream artists to work with.

RG I got into my shoegaze period in college and started listening to Lilys whenever possible. Me and my friend Shane tried to start a fan club.

One of my favorite bands is Woo. Their It’s Cozy Inside (Independent Record Publishing, 1989) and Whichever Way You’re Going, You’re Going Wrong (no info available) might be the two albums I’ve listened to the most in my entire life. They’re these two brothers who are Hare Krishna who live in the UK. I recently found out where they are, and they wrote me back and we’re totally going to hang out when I go to England.

SFBG We have to talk Bruce Haack. What do you love about him?

RG Bruce Haack to me is psychedelic electronic music. It also has a playfulness, because he’s making music for kids. His music has this relaxing quality and aggressive quality at the same time. There’s a simplicity I like. I like his fervor and bitterness towards the music industry, especially on Haackula (Omni Recording, 2008). But the one I listen to most is Electric Luficer (Omni Recording, 2007). His music doesn’t have a direct correlation with Nite Jewel in terms of textures and sounds, but more in terms of what it means to be a punk electronic musician.

NITE JEWEL

With Telepathe, Hawnay Troof

June 12, 10 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

133 17th St, SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Senses and sensibility

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May 27, 2009
0

"Constant self-negation and transformation are necessary if one is to avoid debilitation and continue to confront circumstances as a filmmaker," filmmaker Nagisa Oshima wrote in a 1961 essay. Oshima’s declaration of restlessness presages what would become a four decades-long career defined by that continual struggle to "confront circumstances" — to challenge postwar Japan’s stagnant social order by pushing filmmaking into new areas of form and content. "In the Realm of Oshima," the first major U.S. retrospective of the director’s work in more than 20 years, is a staggering reaffirmation of the now 77-year old director’s persistence of vision. Frequently hailed as Japan’s answer to Jean-Luc Godard, Oshima’s reputation and stature among a certain generation of cinephiles has often dwarfed the unavailability of all but a handful of his films (Oshima would later counter, saucily, that Mr. Godard should be known as the Oshima of France).

Like his French counterpart, Oshima’s output grazed on familiar genres, such as youth-gone-wild and domestic dramas, while freely incorporating elements from avant-garde and documentary practices. As much as he sought to break from what he saw as the sentimentalism of the previous generation of Japanese filmmakers like Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, Oshima also spent a great deal of time dissecting the struggles and failures of the radical left, as vertiginously condensed in the debates between disillusioned former comrades of Night and Fog in Japan (1960). But Oshima’s larger interest has been with, to borrow the title of Jim Jarmusch’s latest, the limits of control — and those who infract upon the social order. Fittingly, the series comes to a close with Oshima’s most extreme film, In the Realm of the Senses (1976), whose Sadean lovers, Sada and Kichi, are perhaps the most terrifyingly literal embodiment of Oshima’s quest for "constant self-negation."

IN THE REALM OF OSHIMA

May 29–July 18

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

O.G. sleaze

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May 27, 2009
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

A full range of involuntary facial-muscle responses have already been triggered by the trailer to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which premieres at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. First 2008’s Valkyrie, now this: Brad Pitt’s Tennessee-hills-bred Lt. Aldo Raine twangily informing his Jewish-American Secret Service unit, "Each man under my command owes me ONE HUNNERD NAAATSEE SCALPS!" while Hostel auteur-turned-actor Eli Roth smirks in approval.

Will the whole turn out righteous, raucous, controversial, or just juvenile? We proles will have to wait until the film’s August theatrical release to decide for ourselves. Meanwhile, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is letting inquiring minds do their advance homework by reviving Enzo G. Castellari’s less orthographically challenged Inglorious Bastards, the 1978 Italian action movie Tarantino’s latest pays tribute to — though his isn’t a remake but a separate, newly crassed-up riff on The Dirty Dozen (1967).

That latter all-star World War II caper spawned umpteen "Europudding" imitations, including the QT-beloved Bastards, showing this week in a new 35mm print. A sort of Filthy Five to the original Dozen — budget reduced accordingly, with sharp eyes ID’ing the same extras experiencing different death throes in scene after scene — it centers on a quintet of U.S. Army grunts in 1944 France.

There’s Bo Svenson (who’d become a sorta-star by replacing the suspiciously car-crash-slain Buford Pusser in 1975’s Walking Tall Part II) as swaggering Lt. Yeager; Fred Williamson’s Pvt. Canfield, an incongruous 1940s fount of ’70s Black Power ‘tude; smirking wiseass, murderer, and racist Tony (Peter Hooten), who calls Canfield "Bongo;" Nick (Michael Pergolani), a long-haired hipster aping Donald Sutherland’s similar character in 1970’s hit Dirty rip Hell’s Heroes; and Jackie Basehart as fraidycat youth Berle.

After being sent to the brig for various misdeeds, they escape their captors, intending to flee to neutral Switzerland. En route they pick up a nice Nazi (Raimund Harmstorf, horny hero of 1971’s The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried) and bare collective musculature to some bathing Rhine maidens. But mostly they machine-gun everyone in sight, unfortunately including Yankee spies disguised in Third Reich uniforms.

Penitent, our protagonists vow to take over their late comrades’ dangerous mission. This culminates in an exploded train, and an SS commander foaming "All Americans are mongrels! Negro, Jew, Polish, Italian, Irish — every possible race! And your vimmen are whores! Coca-Cola! Hollyvood! Chewing gum! Stupid cowardly bastards!" just before his ass is whupped by Canfield. Musta been that soda remark.

Inglorious begins with psychedelic-silhouette images underlining two key things about Castellari: 1) he honed his energetic macho action style in spaghetti westerns; and 2) he isn’t considered "the poor man’s Peckinpah" for nothing, being absolutely addicted to balletic slow-mo violence. About a bazillion Germans here do the spastic dance of death, riddled by bullets or leaping from yet another explosion.

Yet the film’s tone is larky, at times even goofy. Hardly a neglected masterpiece, or a campy delight like some of Tarantino’s other retro faves, it’s a good example of another era’s disposable entertainment. Unlike the grim check-cashing air emitted by many similar Europudding exercises, here you can sense the fun that went into making it.

His big-screen career of Westerns, policiers, Mad Max and Escape from New York clones eventually tapped out, Castellari moved on to TV work. But at age 70, Castellari is still capable of rising to the exploitable moment. Currently being hawked at Cannes — alongside the considerably more hyped you-know-what — is his Caribbean Basterds, which appears to cobble together nods to Tarantino, contemporary sea piracy, Point Break (1991), and A Clockwork Orange (1971).

INGLORIOUS BASTARDS

Fri/29, 7:30 p.m.; Sun/31, 2 p.m., $8

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

Racial justice: A to G spells victory

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May 26, 2009
0

OPINION On Tuesday, May 19, poor and working-class families of color packed the San Francisco School Board with a powerful message of hope, opportunity, and justice: we want the right to a secure future in our own city. To get a good job here, we know we need a high quality education that prepares us for college, career, or union trade — not poverty or prison.

After a year of research, organizing, and talking to thousands of families, collecting 3,000 postcards, and mobilizing hundreds of parents and youth, our proposal — that every San Francisco student have access to the so-called A–G classes — was approved, setting the stage for a systemic change in our public schools that could dramatically improve the lives of tens of thousands of students of color over the next few years.

A–G describes the high school coursework that state colleges require for admission. Setting A-G as part of the graduation requirement will finally give low-income black and Latino students access to high expectations and our state college system.

We will have to stay on top of the district and monitoring will be intense and long-term, but we have parent and student leaders ready for the task, because their own lives are at stake.

Our experience is that thousands of parents and students get the issues, but that so many San Franciscans, even progressive ones, just don’t. In San Francisco, 75 percent of children are black, Latino, Asian, or Pacific Islander, and more than 80 percent of those families are low income. A full 90 percent of the students in public schools are students of color. This means kids’ issues in San Francisco are issues of racial and economic justice.

Our issues are often not the ones that make front page news. Education outcomes for black children — right here in San Francisco — are the worst of the state’s urban districts. But this gets lost in the inside baseball reporting about City Hall politics, the flinging about of political self-righteousness, and frankly, issues like JROTC.

We believe that organizing families for racial equity in our public school system is core to a progressive agenda in the 21st century. Consider the following.

•<\!s> Young people’s future in the 21st century San Francisco economy now requires a college education. More than 50,000 blue-collar jobs that paid a living wage without requiring a degree have disappeared from SF over the last generation.

•<\!s> Only one in three students from SF schools graduated from high school prepared for a four-year university in 2008. Without access to college and career-ready A-G classes, most graduating students weren’t even eligible for either the U.C. or California state universities or prepared for a union apprenticeship exam.

•<\!s> Most black, Latino and Pacific Islander students do not have access the A-G college, career, and union trade path in San Francisco. In fact, five out of six Latino students and 9 out of 10 African American students graduated without the A-G classes required to even be eligible for a U.C. or state university.

This new school board policy might be one of the most important steps toward racial equity in a generation. Join our work to make San Francisco public schools a vehicle of economic opportunity, racial justice and democracy. *

N’Tanya Lee is executive director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth.

Adam’s the real winner

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May 21, 2009
1

By Tim Redmond

Now that everyone with any sense knows Adam Lambert was screwed and the wrong guy won American Idol, let me suggest why Kris Allen might be the real loser here and Lambert shouldn’t feel so bad.

First of all, we all know why Allen won. As Kevin Lynch writes in the Examiner:

Kris is practically a poster boy for heterosexual, white-bread Christianity, while Adam is an in-your-face Jewish gay man.

Kris is Ken-doll cute (my seven-year-old daughter adores him) and safe and a goodam youth minister or something. Truth is, he’s as boring as dozens of other musicians and has nothing special to offer.

Besides, he’s stuck for at least the next year with the American Idol franchise. He’s kind of like Miss America — he can’t do anything wild or fun or unusual (I’m sure that’s in the contract). Simon Fuller holds a tight grip on his franchise, and a fair chunk of the money that Allen makes over the next year will go back to 19 Entertainment and the Idol operation.

Lambert can do whatever the fuck he wants at this point. He’ll be making a lot more money, having a lot more fun and walking away with all the marbles. He’ll even get laid whenever he wants, without the fear of God and Simon Fuller.

Congrats, Adam — you’re the real winner here.

Natural light

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May 20, 2009
0

REVIEW The abundant drama of natural light is reason enough to see Summer Hours, a family drama by Olivier Assayas aspiring to Proustian profundity and Chekhovian chambering. I prefer Les Destinées Sentimentales (2000) for Assayas’ novelistic mode, but the new film still has plenty to like. This will be especially true for Antiques Roadshow fans, who will have a field day with all the Musée D’Orsay-approved furnishings, even if the characters themselves don’t seem quite so sturdy. The film opens with an annual reunion at the beautiful country estate where matriarch Hélène (Edith Scob, the daughter in Georges Franju’s 1960 classic Eyes Without a Face) has tended the reputation and archive of a long-dead artist relation. When Hélène dies, the question of the house and all those beautiful objects falls to the three adult children. Being an Oliver Assayas film, this a globalization issue. Frédéric (Charles Berling) is the only one who remains in Paris (an economist who doesn’t believe in economics, he’s more susceptible to sentimentality than the other two). Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) has gone after the art market in New York, while brother Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) covers the financial sector in China. A clear opposition — perhaps too clear — is erected between the memory of provincial France and the dislocated pulse of the contemporary, but to Assayas’ credit, Summer Hours doesn’t feel like it has its mind made up between the two: the darting camera courts the promise of speed and movement, while the luxurious play of light nurses what’s been lost. The characters are never more than their scenes, but there are a few breathtaking ones, including two bookending portraits of footloose youth that recoup Summer Hours‘ air of inconsequence.

SUMMER HOURS opens Fri/22 in Bay Area theaters.

The list in surrealist

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May 19, 2009
0

1. Putney Swope (Robert Downey Sr., 1969) The elder Downey’s brilliant, completely irreverent send-up of race, politics and the advertising industry. Smoke a big fat joint and watch this one. You will laugh your ass off. Take special note of the "commercials" for the products by Truth and Soul, Inc.

2. Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2002) Spike Lee’s dark, squirm-in-your-seat masterpiece brings minstrelsy into the 21st century. Damon Wayans tries to get himself fired from a racist TV station by producing an extremely offensive prime time minstrel show. The show turns out to be a smash hit.

3. The Watermelon Man (Melvin Van Peebles, 1970) One of the great Afro-Surrealists casts Godfrey Cambridge as a white racist insurance salesman who wakes up as a black man after watching race riots on the late night news. Very, very OUT, especially the scene where Cambridge sits in a tub full of milk trying to reverse the color change.

4. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971) Peebles casts himself as Sweetback, a black stud sex worker who kills a racist cop and has to go on the lam. More allegory than literal narrative, it reminds me of Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970).

5. Black Like Me (Carl Lerner, 1964) Curious writer James Whitmore wants to experience being black so he takes a pill to darken his skin, tests his new identity on his favorite shoe shine man and heads down south. Bad idea. He runs into trouble instantly (near-lynching, bad vibes from every white person) and basically goes insane.

6. Which Way Is Up? (Michael Schultz, 1977) Richard Pryor plays three characters — a jackleg preacher, a dirty old man, and an orange picker who accidentally becomes union hero — in this very funny remake of The Seduction of Mimi (1972).

7. Richard Pryor: Live and Smokin’ (Michael Blum, 1971) Pryor’s first standup film. He’s coming off a coke binge, the film crew is pissing him off, and no one is laughing, but that doesn’t stop him. The highlight is the demented "a wino and a junkie" routine.

8. Space is the Place (John Coney, 1974) Sun Ra, black alien jazz musician for Saturn, lands his spaceship in early-1970s Oakland. His mission is to rescue black people, but strangely, no one wants to be saved. He battles the CIA, apathetic black youth (who think he’s a hippie from Telegraph Avenue) and a character called the Overseer while finding the time to put on a concert at Laney College. Anything by Sun Ra is Afro-Surrealism at its most potent.

9. Ghost Dog (Jim Jarmusch, 1999) Jim Jarmusch’s mystical meditation on the samurai, Brooklyn style. My man Isaach De Bankolé almost steals the movie.

10. Sankofa (Haile Gerima, 1993) Gerima’s off-the-charts take on slavery is disturbing, downright depressing, and utterly psychedelic. A black supermodel on a shoot on Goree Island, the infamous slave trader’s fort, steps into a basement and is transported back to a West Indies plantation. Afro-Surrealism at its best.

Avalos seeks greater transit justice

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May 19, 2009
6

Round three of the battle between Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Board over the Municipal Transportation Agency’s budget saw Sup. John Avalos, throw a powerful one-two punch at the Mayor’s Office, with the backing of Board President David Chiu and Sups. David Campos, Chris Daly, Eric Mar, Sophie Maxwell and Ross Mirkarimi.

Last week, as Avalos observed, the Board did not have the votes needed to reject the MTA budget, but today
they had enough to delay decisions on the MTA budget until at least next week: a special meeting was set for noon, May 27, to discuss the details in an alternative, transit-first budget that Avalos is calling the “Transit Justice Package.”

Under Avalos’ proposal, the MTA 2009-10 budget would roll-back proposed fare increases for seniors, youth and lifeline uers, restore bus lines to public housing, while increasing parking fees in the city’s downtown core on Sundays and evenings, and eliminating public subsidies in city parking garages.

“Given our grave economic crisis , we owe it to seniors, youth and other low-income MUNI riders to come up with a better budget that ensures MUNI accessibility and accountability, “ Avalos said, while his progressive colleagues noted that transit advocates are concerned that the under the budget that Newsom has been pushing, MUNI riders would pay four times more than drivers of private vehicles.

And then Avalos ntroduced a charter amendment to reform the MTA Board composition. Currently, the mayor appoints all seven members of the MTA Board and all the supervisors can do is confirm or reject these nominations.

Avalos’s charter amendment, which will be on the November ballot, proposes to split these appointments, so that the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors each get to nominate three commissioners, and the seventh is elected by the voters of San Francisco.

“The new MTA Board composition will create greater checks and balances and also ensure that the MTA director is not solely accountable to one person, but a Board that is more representative of the City and County of San Francisco,” Avalos said.

Big afternoon at City Hall

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May 18, 2009
1

By Steven T. Jones

A series of progressive groups will take to the steps of City Hall this afternoon for rallies supporting Sup. Chris Daly’s renters’ economic relief legislation, laying out the budget priorities of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, and opposing the damage to Muni that would be inflicted by the Municipal Transportation Agency’s budget.

San Francisco Tenants Union sponsors a noon rally that precedes the 1 p.m. Land Use Committee hearing on Daly’s legislation, which would expand renters’ rights to add roommates, suspend rent increases that would exceed 33 percent of a tenant’s income, and limit rent increases that have been banked over several years.

At 2 p.m., Coleman Advocates launches a preemptive strike on the June 1 release of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget, calling for City Hall to be mindful of the needs of low-income families that are being forced from the city.

And then at 3 p.m., the Transit Justice coalition will make a last ditch effort to save Muni from service cuts and fare hikes. Although the Board of Supervisors last week approved a negotiated deal to approve the MTA budget, progressive supervisors on the Budget and Finance Committee revived it the next day and it returns to the full board tomorrow.

While Sups. David Campos, John Avalos, Eric Mar, Ross Mirkarimi, and Daly – who oppose the MTA budget deal – need two more votes to be successful, they’ll highlight how Muni fares will have doubled to $2 under Newsom and they’ll push for drivers to share more of the Muni riders’ pain and a decrease in the $63 million in payouts to our departments.

Board restores some Muni service, but Newsom gets his fare hike

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May 12, 2009
18

By Steven T. Jones

After hours of negotiations between the Mayor’s Office (mostly via its representative, Sup. Carmen Chu) and progressive members of the Board of Supervisors, President David Chiu reconvened his colleagues this evening to announce that he had cut a deal on his challenge to Muni’s budget: “I’m happy to say we’ve made good headway.”

Chiu asked MTA chief Nat Ford to announce the terms: the agency would trim $10.3 million from the budget (a $2.8 million reduction in the $66 million it is giving to other city departments, $6.5 million in salary and operations savings and other nips and tucks, and $1 million in increased parking revenue after a 90-day study of extending meter hours) and restore $8.6 million in proposed Muni service cuts, immediately complete MOU negotiations with the SFPD to finally explain why the MTA is giving them millions of dollars every year, and delay by six months increases in what seniors, youth and the disabled will pay for Fast Passes.

Everyone thanked Chiu for taking the lead on challenging the MTA budget and negotiating a settlement to this conflict with Mayor Gavin Newsom, then all the progressive supervisors criticized the package as a bad deal that unduly punishes Muni riders and lets Newsom get away with raiding what is supposed to be an independent agency. “I have to say I’m utterly disappointed with where we are right now,” said Sup. David Campos, the first to react to the freshly inked deal.

The board voted 6-5 to drop its challenge of MTA’s budget, allowing fares to increase to $2 and services to be reduced, with Sups. Campos, Ross Mirkarimi, Chris Daly, John Avalos, and Eric Mar in dissent.

Seeming stung by the criticism of his colleagues, Chiu seemed to lay blame where it belonged when he said, “On Friday, the mayor and I had a conversation about this budget and it was made clear to me that there wouldn’t be any movement….We needed to work this out so we could move forward on the myriad issues before us.”

Sorry, “Wolverine” — “Star Trek” is the first summer movie worth seeing

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May 8, 2009
1

Star Trek? Campiness (Shatner! Montalban!) aside, I was always more of a Star Wars person. That said, I’ve pretty much hated the last four Star Wars movies (yep, Skyguy, that’s me admitting I saw 2008’s pitiful cartoon Star Wars: The Clone Wars, on the big screen no less) — but I thoroughly enjoyed JJ Abrams’ Star Trek (out now). Over at io9, my former Guardian colleage Annalee Newitz’s review is entitled “The Sexualization of Spock” — so that alone should tell you that Trekkie purists might have Bones to pick (har) with Abrams’ youth-gone-wild study of the USS Enterprise. But from a summer-movie standpoint, this flick has it all: explosions, witty one-liners, a fast-paced plot, entire planets in danger, rakish heroes and charismatic villains (including Eric Bana as a sarcastic Romulan), a Beastie Boys-injected car chase, and Simon Pegg. Zoe Saldana’s Uhuru — all false eyelashes and miniskirt — is underwritten to a laughable extent. But that’s pretty much my only complaint, other than I didn’t get to see the movie in IMAX. Yet.

Um, and just for fun:

Fill ‘er up

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May 6, 2009
0

a&eletters@sfbg.com

An anthology of poets who allegedly combine mainstream and avant-garde aesthetics, American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (WW. Norton and Co., 512 pages, $25.95) — edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John — is an idea whose time hasn’t come. The word "hybrid" is suspect, its trendiness invented by the auto industry to delay real electric cars, hence the cover’s Prius-green font. Like a hybrid car, American Hybrid is half-bad by design, the mainstream filling the role of nonrenewable fossil fuel, the avant-garde serving as electricity. I want an anthology without gas.

Obviously I speak from one side of this divide, having much admiration for Swensen as poet and translator, and little knowledge of St. John. Nor do I care to know a poet whose intro claims "Contemporary American Poetry is thriving on every front" like a hedge-fund brochure. Swensen’s intro, however, is substantial, her account of the post-Victorian split between mainstream and avant-garde poetries — and their uneasy dialectic — both excellent and provocative.

However, her conclusion that the best new poetry has become a hybrid of the two isn’t convincing. The decision to trace a hybrid tradition among older practitioners instead of spotlighting the generation supposedly defined by it only foregrounds the dichotomy. You could make a case for, say, Jorie Graham as hybrid, but turning the page to Barbara Guest, you find no resemblance, despite Swensen’s assertion that Guest is "the quintessential hybrid poet." Guest worked in the tradition of high modernist abstraction. Why project a concept onto her that didn’t exist in her lifetime?

Even John Ashbery doesn’t fit. He hasn’t "moved into the mainstream"; the mainstream moved to him. But mainstream adherents are tiresome. Ralph Angel’s "Someone remembers something that happened a long time /ago. She forgot it, it changed everything" summarizes rather than achieves an Ashberian mode. Only two lines into the first Ashbery selection we find: "The laurel nudges the catalpa." The word "nudges" is comically inapplicable to trees, yet it gradually begins to seem viable — a quick breeze might whip the branches of one against another, like a jab of the elbow to silence an indiscreet remark. Yet this possibility fails to exhaust Ashbery’s indeterminate line, as much what Swensen calls "an event on the page" as the work of more obviously disjunctive poets.

Mainstream poetry is ephemeral. Ever hear of Stephen Phillips? William Watson? Austin Dobson? Some of the most popular mainstream poets in 1890s England, they’re forgotten today. We remember innovators like Yeats. At best mainstream poetry echoes what was avant-garde but is now condoned. It’s the poetry of bourgeois comfort, of received ideas wrapped in clichés. When Albert Goldbarth depicts a black woman "whose rump thumpthumped in walking /like a pair of bongos" he invokes a jungle stereotype as corny as it is offensive. His poems can’t disappear fast enough. At the same time, much avant-garde poetry will disappear. Techniques like constraint writing and manipulation of extant text have become pat workshop formulae, and the formulaic isn’t really avant-garde.

The younger poets I’ve read — in, say, Sara Larsen and David Brazil’s biweekly zine Try — aren’t sweating the hybrid question. They don’t express the assurance of previous generations on the political efficacy of postmodern investigation of language’s structures of power. They’ve seen its impotence in the post-9/11 world. But I don’t see a generational rupture; the avant-garde is the only place where such poets can breathe. New poetry is always avant-garde, and they’re trying something new, not repudiating their elders. Some of these elders are writing the best poetry today, for in art, the new isn’t simply the prerogative of youth. American Hybrid contains many great poems, but I refuse to concede that poets I admire — like Norma Cole, Andrew Joron, even Swensen herself — are related to the mainstream.

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