Click here for a pdf version of this map
Guardian Staff Writers
5 Things: May 10, 2011
>>IF YOU WATCH ONE MOVIE THIS YEAR, DON’T LET IT BE THIS ONE Looking to revisit the magic that was 2009’s cinematic syrup of ipecac – and looking for a fix for idle hands? Princess Animal, SF’s sassiest eponymous yarn store owner, has lain down the gauntlet: whosoever shall craft the best human centipede shall receive a skein of locally-made Pigeonroof Studios “at only the cost of materials and your dignity.”
>>FLOWER POWER Katie Bush makes digital and analog art, and this month she’s showing work at two sites, Spunk Salon and The Lexington Club. The advance writeup for her show at the Lexington, “Mesmerizing Lady Parts,” promises “a month-long detonation of flowering lady parts” and “militarized bouquets of church-resistant ovariangasms.” The show runs through mid-June, and the opening is from 7 to 9 p.m. tonight, May 10.
Live from the Cadillac…
>>GROWN FOLKS TUNES Kids these days with their hippity-hoppity and their Lady Gaga – take a break from the Tweets of the week and hone in on three shows that pay homage to the days when people were smarter than their cell phones (that didn’t exist yet). Jazz Mafia will be playing their annual Stevie Wonder birthday tribute show not once, but twice, and over at the historic Cadillac Hotel, SF Recovery Theatre will be performing “A Night at the Black Hawk,” an original play that tells the story of artists at the Tenderloin’s famous jazz club. The historical beat drops at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, and the public is free to attend.
>>WE OLOVE BLACKBERRIES It takes very little (cold snaps aside) to get us to fire up the grill. That being said, We Olive (a local gourmet shop that’s one of our favorite stops when we make it over the Pac Heights hill to the Marina) has just given us the best reason of the season: a new, locally-produced balsamic blackberry vinegar fit to beat the band. Made from blackberry puree, the vinegar is light and tart and gets us in the mood for those purple-stained fingertips that are still a few months out. We Olive recommends it as a marinade for skate – we can see it dressing our arugula, or adding a sweet tang to some well-peppered grilled veggies.
>>HERE’S HOPING THEY’RE KIND BUDS Spotted near AT&T Park. Apparently Budweiser has tapped into the Bay’s Giants game refreshment of choice and wants to add its products to the pairing menu:
5 Things: May 5, 2011
>>FINELY BREWED PROSE Though his boozy empire is no longer based in the Bay Area of his youth, we still have a soft spot in our hardened alcoholic hearts (or is that livers) for Jeremy Cowan. The founder of Shmaltz Brewing, Cowan has brought corny Jewish wit into the world of craft beers — see the label for his nut brown Messiah Bold: “the beer you’ve been waiting for” — and done so at a time when we all still considered Sam Adams a microbrew. He’s written a memoir about his rise to beer lord, which he’ll be back in the Bay promoting this week. Check out his signing at Omnivore Books on Sat/7, and tell him l’chaim for us.
>>A WEDNESDAY KNIGHT Sharon Funchess contributed vocals to a standout track on Teengirl Fantasy’s album 7AM, but her main musical project is Light Asylum, with Bruno Coviello. “Knights and Week Ends,” one of four songs on the recent tour EP In Tension, exemplifies the duo’s melding of powerfully dramatic ’80s diva vocalization and cold metallic beats. The Brooklyn-based Funchess and Coviello have an album due next year on Mexican Summer, and they return to SF for a show this month.
Light Asylum, “Dark Allies”:
>>PREPARE TO STOP The clusterfuck of a new-bike-lane-meets-intersection that is Fell and Scott streets is being revamped in an effort to un-fuck and un-cluster the mess. The center of-the-street bike lane—a recent addition to assist cyclists turning left from Route 47 on Scott to Route 30 on Fell—has proved perilous to pedestrians crossing east and west due to hordes of cyclists who don’t stop for them, and to drivers turning left from Fell onto Scott who have had to swerve to avoid oncoming cyclists in their lane. This week the city installed two more signals, which have yet to be turned on but will likely be dedicated left-turn lights for bikes and cars. Now, if the city can only do something about doofuses turning right onto Fell -– right into three lanes of oncoming traffic…like maybe a “No right turn” sign?
Signs of a pedestrian, cyclist, and driver intersection.
>>CINCO DE DRINKO? On the hunt for the best deal on a bucket of Pacifico bottles, we ran across Colorlines’ timely reflection on the de-politification of Cinco de Mayo. Kinda crazy how all immigrant commmunity celebrations become occasions for the country to get shit-faced (see: St. Patrick’s Day).
>>REINSTALLATION Bliss Dance, a 40-foot sculpture of a dancing nude woman, was one of the best art projects at Burning Man last year. And this week, artist Marco Cochrane and his talented and hard-working crew have been installing the piece on Treasure Island, where she’ll be dancing for city residents until at least October. The build, sponsored in part by the Black Rock Arts Foundation, should be finished by the weekend. An opening reception is set for May 26.
Bliss Dance giving the hand on the playa in 2010. Photo by DJ Guacamole/Guacarazzi Photography
5 Things: May 3, 2011
>>BE STILL OUR WALLETS the Alameda Flea Market (ahem, Alameda Point Antiques Faire) was in full effect Sunday, a gently heaving behemoth of vans and makeshift shady areas packed with the finest in 20-plus-year-old posters, leather jackets, doilies, and more. Per usual though, our pulses raced for the clothes. 1960s hula wear, perfectly affordable granny boots, and darling handmade cardigans – all for very reasonable prices, for the Bay Area that is. If you’re going to the next one on June 5, we counsel stopping by St. George’s Spirits afterward for the $15 tasting menu, or at least a shot of the Firelit Coffee Liquer.
Shopping noms: a ric-rac peekaboo ’60s dress and zippy little weirdo bike at the Alameda Flea Market. Photos by Caitlin Donohue
>>FAIR FOOD Price, service, ingredients, taste – the myriad of factors that determine whether or not a restaurant will win your heart are well documented by a thousand SF guidebooks and websites. But one metric that has rarely been the day’s special is this: how well do our city’s eateries treat their employees? To the rescue is Young Workers United, a community group that released its second such guide at a release party yesterday at Daly’s Dive. Hit them up stat for a copy — because trust, a well-compensated server is much more likely to humor your request for one more basket of bread.
>>HABLANDO DE CINCO DE MAYO…No matter if you’re checking out the lady lube wrestling at El Rio, outdoor ballet folklorico, Danville’s Cinco de Mustache Bike Ride, or just joining the calvalcade of gringos that – like, totally – have to get a burrito on Cinco De Mayo, no SF celebration can hold a candle to that of Fruitvale’s annual festivities. We were there on Sunday – and dancing horses in bar parking lots? You’re not going to see that in Mission, unless they’ve called the cavalry on us.
>>SO GOOD, SOBERT Do not listen to those that tell you that you’ll never be ready for that trip to Lake Del Valle (outside Livermore — kayaking!) if you eat another pint of icecream. Or if you must listen, stay classy and gently incline the label of your newfound friend, Garden Creamery sorbet, towards the hater in question. The sorbets contain no dairy or soy (coconut puree instead), no refined sugars (they’re sweetened with agave), are made right here in San Francisco by the sweet-faced ladies on the back label, and are available by the pint in flavors like Thai iced tea, coconut, and coffee at the reliably awesome Green Earth Natural Foods on Divisadero.
Believe.
>>BLACK SUN SOUNDS While Slumberland labelmates Pains of Being Young at Heart chose to work with veteran producers to create a commercial second album, Crystal Stilts sticks closer to the sound of its debut, 2008’s Alight of Night, on this year’s In Love with Oblivion. The Brooklyn group still makes a dark cavernous sound, with an emphasis on reverb and treble, but any enhancements to its scope, or variations within lead singer’s Brad Hargett’s usually monotone delivery, only add to a musical atmosphere that is richerand more nuanced than most retro-leaning indie rock, and (unlike the efforts of many contemporaries) equal to the best recordings on labels such as K and 53rd and 3rd. Crystal Stilts shares a bill with San Francisco’s excellent Mantles at Rickshaw Stop this Sat/7.
Crystal Stilts, “Invisible City,” (from In Love with Oblivion), coupled with Jean Michele Jarre video footage:
2011 Small Business Awards
Everyone loves to talk about the value of small business. There’s a National Small Business Week, proclaimed by the president, and San Francisco Small Business Week, proclaimed by the mayor. There are conferences and speakers and programs. Even the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce — the mouthpiece for giant corporations in town — periodically hails the value of the little entrepreneur.
But when you get right down to it, small businesses don’t have it easy in this town. Under siege from big chains (who often get their way at City Hall), faced with unfair tax burdens (the little operators pay the same rate as the biggest companies), struggling to find support from banks (many of which don’t make many small business loans), the companies that create most of the new jobs in the city and preserve the lively character of the neighborhoods ultimately get little respect.
Check it out: if Twitter — worth billions — wants a tax break, City Hall leaps to the rescue. Yet a proposal that would have made the business tax burden more fair for small companies died last year without a vote.
Once a year we celebrate the people who hang in there, often against the odds, and not only survive but thrive. People who build small businesses that build cool neighborhoods and hire local workers and keep the San Francisco economy moving.
This year we’ve combined our editors’ picks with readers’ choices — and we’ve asked our winners who they would have picked as the best small businesses of the year. It’s a wonderful lineup that looks, and feels, like San Francisco. (Tim Redmond)
ARTHUR JACKSON DIVERSITY IN SMALL BUSINESS AWARD
LA COCINA
Believe it or not, there was a time in this city when Le Truc did not park its chicken parmigianas in front of the Conservatory of Flowers and street food did not inspire a weekly mob scene at Off The Grid’s mobile market. Back then, a lot of the people who sold food on the street were immigrant women.
“Their commonality is this incredible entrepreneurial spirit,” says Caleb Zigas of La Cocina, a food business incubator created to give street food vendors the tools they need to take their business into the next realm of profitability.
Its program has proven highly successful. After taste tests of applicants’ proposed cuisine (“They wouldn’t be here if their product wasn’t good,” Zigas says. La Cocina participants are counseled on brand development and distribution. In the organization’s gleaming commercial kitchen in the Mission District, eight businesses can simultaneously work at one time. On a typical morning, it’s used to prepare hummus, huaraches, and traditional Yucatecan-Mayan food for a day of sales.
Some graduates, like Clairessquares — a chocolate-shortbread-caramel treat company started by the eponymous Irish immigrant — are local grocery store constants now. Some businesses have used the program to go from selling at farmers markets to owning a restaurant of their own — Veronica Salazar of El Huarache Loco will be the first La Cocina grad with a brick and mortar location, opening in Larkspur this year. Two years ago, La Cocina started the Street Food Festival, an event that consistently packs the streets where it occurs and this year plans to expand to nine blocks of vendors.
Entrepreneurs from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Malaysia, Japan, El Salvador, and Mexico have passed through the La Cocina program. Everyone on staff speaks English and Spanish (the languages the organization offers counseling in). Outreach is done through partnerships with other groups like the Women’s Initiative and the Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center.
Though the center now fields applications from all socioeconomic levels as street food becomes chic food, its original purpose remains: to provide a foot up to the women who are pushing to make life work in a new country with their families. “It’s important for us to remember that our mission is to provide an entry into business,” Zigas says.
La Cocina’s small business award pick: As the diplomatic Zigas says: “The consumers who purchase from small business owners.” (Caitlin Donohue)
2948 Folsom, SF. (415) 824-2729, www.lacocinasf.org
GOLDEN SURVIVOR AWARD
HANS ART AUTOMOTIVE
The repair folks: Sophia Chicas, Norbert Alvarenga, Luis Frias, Joao Santos, Ricky Saavedra, Henry Wong, and Hans Art. Photo by Ben Hopfer
Hans Art got his start in business in 1970, when one of his Noe Valley roommates couldn’t get his car started — and was therefore unable to get to his job delivering erotic ice cream concoctions to stoners and musicians at midnight for the legendary restaurateur Magnolia Thunderpussy.
“I was your classic hippie mechanic,” Art recalled. “I came out there with my screwdriver, adjusted the points, and the guy was on his way. And it occurred to me that this might not be a bad way to make a living.”
His business plan: An index card with his phone number on the wall in Bud’s Ice Cream. His goal: Flexible hours, plenty of time off and “a great way to have an alternative lifestyle.” That didn’t last long: “Pretty soon I was the hardest working hippie in San Francisco.”
More than 40 years later, Hans Art Automotive is one of the city’s most beloved car repair shops, a successful small business that still has a bit of the old hippie ethic.
“I have lots of customers with very moderate incomes,” Art said. “I tell them what’s needed now, what can wait four months … I pare it down so the service is affordable. We’re very non-pushy.”
It’s certainly working: more than 95 percent of his customers are regulars. “We want you to have a regular mechanic, the way you have a dentist,” he said. “Our advertising is mostly word of mouth.”
These days Art works from a cramped office above the shop floor, supervising around 10 employees who take extraordinary care in their work. “There are 800 opportunities for us to screw up every day,” Art noted. “If we avoid 799 of them, a lot of people would think that’s great — unless your car is the one we missed.”
He’s up against much bigger outfits in a business with low margins and constant changes in technology that require expensive investments — and that easy lifestyle is still elusive — but Art is a survivor. “I think I’ve made payroll more than 3,000 times,” he said. “For a small business, that’s quite an accomplishment.”
Hans Art’s small business award pick: He couldn’t pick just one — Art went with Michael Bruno Luggage, Noe Valley Bakery, and Tuggy’s Hardware.(Redmond)
3121 17th St., SF. (415) 621-6400, www.hansartautomotive.com
WOMEN IN BUSINESS AWARD
KATE SOFIS
Kate Sofis. Photo by Ben Hopfer
Kate Sofis is quick to tell you that she only held “one nonprofit job” prior to her work with SFMade, San Francisco’s local manufacturers association. The real root of Sofis’ passion lies with the manufacturing world. It’s not surprising — she’s seen the sector shape communities.
Raised in 1970s Buffalo, N.Y., where manufacturing was seriously struggling, Sofis later found herself drawn to studying Japanese quality practices in college. After graduation, she ran production lines for high tech companies. “I worked with Apple during the first iMac production runs on Folsom,” she says. She was also there for Apple’s first outsource.
Later she worked with a small South San Francisco furniture manufacturer (“back when we were still making furniture in this country.”) that eventually folded. Sofis realized that although she wanted to work in manufacturing, she wanted even more for there to be a manufacturing sector to work for.
“There were no programs set up,” she says, sitting in SFMade’s office space within the TechShop building on Howard Street. “You couldn’t get a bank loan because no one believed it was possible to actually make money in small manufacturing.” Sofis knew that manufacturing created decently-paying, high-skilled jobs with good benefits. At the same time, she understood that it needed to define its identity in 21st century America — and stand up for its sector’s health.
Today, the year-and-a-half-old SFMade has grown to include 150 San Francisco manufacturers — from Anchor Brewing to mid-Market garment shops, to Home Kombucha and Rickshaw Bags. May 21-27, it will sponsor SFMade Week, chockfull of local shopping events and “open factories” tours of members’ production areas.
The group advocates for ways to make its members’ economic contribution tenable in one of the most expensive cities in America. Sofis and other staff work to establish lines of communication to City Hall around issues like improved public transportation in areas where a lot of manufacturing gets done. “If the mattress coil spring guy is late, guess what? Mattresses don’t get made,” she say. But equally salient is its work on raising awareness among consumers and policymakers that San Francisco manufacturing still exists — and in the age of artisanal products, has the capacity to grow.
Her small business award pick: Greg Markoulis, manager of the American Industrial Center. “Twenty-five percent of our companies are located there, and they’re there for the long haul. Without that asset. San Francisco wouldn’t have half the manufacturing it does.” (Donohue)
SFMade, 926 Howard, SF. www.sfmade.org
SPIRIT OF THE STREETS AWARD
THE TAMALE LADY
Virginia “The Tamale Lady” Ramos. Photo by Ben Hopfer
Virginia “The Tamale Lady” Ramos has been selling her own homemade tamales since 1993, when she started her business to make enough money to send her daughters to school. She didn’t expect to become a local legend. Selling bar-to-bar to hungry boozehounds ever since, she’s made a name for herself as one of the city’s most celebrated street food vendors.
Hungry? Current tamale varieties include chicken, pork, chile cheese, sweet potato black bean, and mixed vegetable. Although Ramos’ prices have gone up since the early 1990s, they’re still a bargain — $4 for a hefty handful of home-cooked masa and filling, delivered right to your bar stool.
There’s no disputing that the Tamale Lady has achieved T(amale)-list celebrity, but her work is far from done. With the help of her family, Ramos’ treats land in rates of about 100 per day in the stomachs of soused locals in bars across the Mission, Tenderloin, and Lower Haight.
She imports her cornmeal and husks straight from Mexico. Every tamale is made by hand in her kitchen — a process that can be witnessed by watching the 2004 Cecil B. Feeder rockumentary on her life, which features a slew of original songs in homage to her work. It’s physically demanding, but Ramos bears the honor of being the city’s tamale angel with pride.
“I had an unpleasant life growing up [in Mexico]. I’ve been here for 25 years, and San Francisco gave me something I never had before: it brought me my independence. SF people came into my life as angels, they gave me the opportunity to feel like I can do my thing and nobody can mess with me.”
The Tamale Lady’s small business award pick: “The independent flower girls who go around selling flowers in restaurants, bars, and shops around the Mission.” (Hannah Tepper)
EMPLOYEE-OWNED BUSINESS AWARD
ARIZMENDI BAKERY
Arizmendi employee-owners, fresh from the ovens: (from left) Yeni Solis, Leidy Fernandez, Juan Clavel, Yelena Khlystova, Isaac Hee, Erica Harris, Celia Sagastume, Troy Vadakan, Sandy Guevara, Liz Fitzgerald, Nicki Green, Madeleine Van Engel, and Jenny Espinoza. Photo by Pat Mazzera
For the worker-owners at Arizmendi Bakery, cooperation is more than just a nice idea — it’s their business model. “I’ve worked in everyplace from Safeway to a bakery that was owned by one person,” says Arizmendi worker-owner Heather Coppersmith. “Arizmendi is different because we have to worry about our own finances, cost of sales, and income. We all get a sound understanding of what it takes to run a business, but responsibilities are spread out so that no one person is bearing the full brunt.”
So how does the egalitarian model function so well? “All of the work is shared,” says Coppersmith. “We create an environment that makes everyone feel valuable and train everyone in all aspects of the bakery, so there is no need for management.”
Arizmendi’s first sister location, the Cheeseboard, opened in the mid-1990s on Lakeshore Boulevard in Oakland. The concept of a bakery that was entirely worker-owned was dreamed up by Berkeley professor Jaques Kaswan and his partner Tim Huet. The idea was a winner: today there are five bakeries in the Arizmendi family across the Bay Area. When a new Arizmendi is started, newly hired worker-owners intern and train at other locations, learning all they need to know to operate their own bakery before opening for delicious, fluffy, crusty business.
The model has worked so well that Arizmendi was one of only nine food businesses in San Francisco to be awarded a perfect worker treatment score by its employees in community group Young Workers United’s yearly restaurant guide. It received high marks in wages, job mobility, health and safety, and job security — not surprising since worker-owners have the final say on workplace issues at Arizmendi.
But let’s not forget — how could we, really? — that Arizmendi doesn’t just produce happy and fulfilled worker-owners. The bakeries are best known for their more public offerings: delicious brioches, organic breads, and vegetarian pizzas with seasonal toppings that change daily. Cooperation never tasted so good.
Arizmendi’s small business award pick: “Underdog on Irving street. It’s a family-run hotdog and sausage place that has some great vegan options. They are very conscious of the food they prepare and where they are getting it from — and they are really nice.” (Tepper)
Various Bay Area locations. www.arizmendibakery.org, valencia.arizmendi.coop, lakeshore.arizmendi.coop
CHAIN ALTERNATIVE AWARD
DISCOUNT BUILDERS SUPPLY
Shannon Brundiek of Discount Builders Supply. Photo by Ben Hopfer
Going up against big businesses like Lowe’s and Home Depot doesn’t mean Discount Builders Supply needs to pull any fancy gimmicks to get customers. Indeed, some clients have been returning to the 50-year-old SoMa spot since manager Shannon Brundiek started working there two decades ago.
“A lot of big-box stores have popped up in that time,” Brundiek says. “We don’t handle business in the same way, or stock the same products, but they’re definitely our competition. They spend a lot of money competing for the same market share.”
Money national chains spend on advertising, owner Charles Goodman channels into things like employee benefit programs. The result? A business you can go to even if you’re not quite sure what it is that you need. Discount Builders Supply banks on the fact that its employees know how to help whoever walks in the door.
“What stands out most to our customers is the service,” says Brundiek. “Because we pay benefits, our employees work full time, and we strive to keep our employees long-term. It’s a career for them — it’s what they do and they love it.”
All that added experience makes a difference to devoted customers who count on DBS employees to know the difference between cinder blocks and coffin locks, cable clamps and sodium lamps.
Brundiek is adamant that the store he works at is simply a good old-fashioned hardware shop — “We don’t sell TVs or dog toys,” he says. But the business does offer free design services for kitchen and bath and specializes in SF-specific fixtures, plumbing, and moldings common in Victorians. Plus, it caters to a huge Burning Man rush every summer. Now that’s giving customers what they want.
Discount Builders Supply’s small business award pick: Brundiek acknowledges that San Francisco is home to a “great group of small hardware stores that all work together.” How’s that for lending a helping hand? (Emily Appelbaum)
1695 Mission St., SF. (415) 621-8511, www.discountbuilderssupplysf.com
GOOD NEIGHBOR AWARD
GOOD LIFE GROCERY
Kayren Hudibergh of Good Life Grocery. Photo by Ben Hopfer
It’s not often that San Franciscans take to the streets to protest the closing of a grocery story. But when the Good Life Grocery on Potrero Hill faced a 1,000 percent rent increase in 1985, neighborhood activists marched, shouted, hung banners, and dragged then California Assemblymember Art Agnos into the fray. The uproar allowed the owners, Kayren Hudiburg and Lester Zeidman, to find a new location nearby.
The Good Life has been part of the hill’s DNA since the early 1970s, when it started as one of a handful of community food stores. “We live down the block,” Hudibergh said. “Customers come in day in and day out. We’re a part of the neighborhood.”
Hudiberg, who also has a store on Cortland Avenue in Bernal Heights, makes a point of hiring local residents first. “We pay good wages, have a good health plan, and after two-and-a-half years, employees become part-owners,” she explained.
It’s not easy running an independent food store, particularly when you’re under attack by the giant Whole Foods chain. “When they moved in eight blocks away, people said we’d never survive,” Hudibergh said. “Whole Foods has more money than God, they can buy up a whole farmer’s crop.” But after taking a “big hit,” the Good Life is doing fine. “It takes a lot of hard work — I’m the owner, the produce buyer, the accounts payable clerk, the payroll clerk — it never ends,” Hudiberg said. “But we have a great, dedicated staff and we offer exceptional customer service.”
She’s also an exceptional San Franciscan. When the Board of Supervisors was moving to offer Twitter a big tax break, she took time off to trek down to City Hall and give the supes a bit of perspective. “I was just outraged,” she recalled. “Here a multibillion-dollar company is asking for a tax cut. I have 65 employees; I pay my taxes and I’m proud to do it — the city needs the money.”
“If my small business can pay, why can’t Twitter?”
We quite agree.
Good Life Grocery’s small business award pick: Goat Hill Pizza. Hudiberg says not only are its pies “wonderful,” but the restaurant donates food to neighborhood events and political affairs, and meeting space to community groups. “They support everything worthwhile and are a true neighborhood institution.” (Redmond)
448 Cortland, SF. (415) 648-3221
READER’S POLL WINNERS
For the first time, we asked Guardian winners to weigh in with their own small business awards. Who was the shining local business star in their neighborhood? Here are the winners of the most online votes.
FAVORITE RETAIL
THE MISSION STATEMENT
Design team: Estrella Tadeo and Jessica Bovert. Photo by Ben Hopfer
“I have always worked better when I work as part of a team,” says Estrella Tadeo, owner of the Mission Statement, who runs the Mission clothing boutique with the help of six other designers. “Working as a collective helps me stay sane.” All seven sell their work and work shifts on the retail floor every week, making it highly likely that if you have a question on the jungle-toned, one-shouldered flowing top you’re fingering, the person that created it is only a few feet away.
“Our goal with our customers is that they identify with our work and with us. It’s so much more interesting when we know the history behind something,” Tadeo says.
That’s likely the secret to the shop’s popularity with our readers. Since Mission Statement designers swap goods through a fruitful bartering system, they’re the experts — they wear a lot of the designs themselves.
The shop’s hands-on approach also means that if you don’t see the perfect Vanessa Gage architectural necklace or Bedouin princess skirt from oda, those designers will take custom orders or do alterations to create it for you. “It’s the way of slow fashion,” Tadeo says of this more personal, connective way of shopping. “We want to develop a relationship with our customers so that they can feel special, look special, and covet all that they purchase.”
It would appear that the collective has achieved this goal. Even so, Tadeo admits that running a specialized boutique in a recession can be a challenge. But, she adds, “It’s about staying positive and being the best we can be as business owners and people. We all want to get a good exchange of energy, and the best way to get it is to give it.”
The Mission Statement’s small business award pick: “Two definitely stand out,” Tadeo says. “Wonderland/Chillin’ Productions and Rag Co-op. Both stores have great concepts, amazing owners, and contribute so much to the local design community. Our three stores are different, but I feel they mutually enhance each other.” (Donohue)
3458 18th St., SF. (415) 255-7457, www.missionstatementsf.com
FAVORITE RESTAURANT
GIALINA
Sharon Ardiana of Gialina. Photo by Ben Hopfer
“First and foremost, I always wanted Gialina to be a place that everyone — young, old, families, singles, gays, straights — would want to come,” says Sharon Ardiana, chef and owner of the Glen Park Italian restaurant. Judging from the response of our readers, she’s achieved her goal — Gialina got top marks for its neighborhood-focused dining room.
The first to own a business in her family, Ardiana spent 20 years in the restaurant industry until she says she “kind of got to a point where I realized that I needed to drive the bus, so to speak.” Although she says she finds laying down the chef’s hat to run the business to be the hardest part of her job, she’s blessed with “an amazing staff in the front and back of the restaurant.” Five employees have been there for Gialina’s entire four years of operation, and Ardiana says the rest of the staff averages three years in the crew.
Such was the fervor over food like Gialina’s Atomica pizza — a simple, flavorful pie with mushrooms, chilies, and red onions added to the tomato sauce-mozzarella base — that Ardiana recently opened Ragazza, another small Italian eatery that, in the words of a recent Guardian review, “brings haute pizza culture to a vortex of the Haights (lower and upper) and Nopa.”
But for Ardiana’s “fantastically loyal clientele” in Glen Park, a neighborhood that has managed to remain free from Starbucks and Denny’s, it will always be about kid-friendly Gialina. “I want people to see the huge family photos on the wall and to connect with them and remember their own family members,” Ardiana says. “I want everyone to walk out that door feeling like they just had a really great meal and that they want to come back again.”
Gialina’s small business award pick: “I would say my friends Kris Hoggerhyde and Anne Walker at Bi-Rite Creamery,” Ardiana says. “I have just been blown away by the response of their customers. They work tremendously hard to make really great, delicious products.” (Donohue)
2842 Diamond, SF. (415) 239-8500, www.gialina.com
FAVORITE BUSINESS THAT CONTRIBUTES TO THE COMMUNITY
CHLOE’S CLOSET
Staffers at Chloe’s Closet: Molly Tyson, Andrea Mejia, Keyko Ruiz, Zulekha Azam, Jane McIntyre. Photo by Ben Hopfer
“One of the things I always noticed was that second-hand kids’ clothes were a little expensive,” says Molly Coogan Tyson, owner of Chloe’s Closet in Bernal Heights. Tyson opened the in 2003 when her two kids were four months and two years old.
Opening her store was a response to feeling cooped up at home and a desire to fill the need for a no-frills used children’s clothing store. “I really didn’t want Chloe’s Closet to be picky about what clothes we would buy and sell. I just wanted to facilitate the trade of goods for people who have young children because I know that kids’ sizes and interests change quickly.”
Her shop’s original location has been open for eight years and continues to grow steadily — there’s also a Chloe’s No. 2 in the Sunset. All Tyson’s stores sell clothes on consignment. When clothes are purchased, the original seller receives 50 percent of the sale price, a generous cut.
But giving back is the main goal, Tyson says. “My husband has suggested that I take up a nonprofit status,” she says, referring to the minuscule profit margins that a community-oriented store like hers must sacrifice in exchange for giving young parents a break on clothing prices.
Chloe’s donates all overflow clothes that can’t fit on racks to churches that serve low-income families and other organizations that can sell the clothing at fundraisers. She even makes HR decisions based on her community’s needs.
“I was approached by mom of four who, due to religious beliefs, wears a full burka. She really wanted to work, and she said no one else would hire her. We didn’t really need extra help, but I hired her because I was touched by her story.”
Chloe’s Closet’s small business awards pick: “I would want to recognize Heartfelt gift shop. They have a rotating stock of interesting gifts and the owner is Darcy Lee of the Bernal Business Alliance. She does a lot for the neighborhood.” (Tepper)
451 Cortland, SF. (415) 642-3300; 616 Irving, SF. (415) 664-4611. www.chloesclosetsf.com
5 Things: April 28, 2011
>>POP-UP-TASTIC Oh pop-up phenomenon…why are you so enticing? Is it because our hype-heavy culture is so ADHD that the newest and coolest bar, gallery, restaurant, or what have you is “out” even before it’s torn down and replaced by the next “it” concept? The once failing Corner restaurant on 18th and Mission is now bustling thanks to the eatery’s new format of hosting a different recession-plagued talent with a menu to die for every night of the week. So, too, are venues supporting a great idea, but not necessarily one with enough gas to keep it going long-term, like the coffee shop-record store-music venue-rehearsal space-anarcho bookbindery of our adolescent dreams. Enter the People’s Gallery, host to the Big Things pop-up shop this Sat/30, which will feature everything from a bookbinding workshop to sidewalk sale-type treasures, handmade goodies, photo exhibitions, and food. Get there early, for it might poof into the ether before you even get a chance to check out the buzz.
>>ANOTHER WEDDING OF THE CENTURY! As the media breaks out its best British accents, the complete mayhem engulfing the royal wedding reaches its fevered pitch tomorrow with the event itself. For the truly die-hard, there is but one place to take in the beauty of clan-building: the British consulate, where the official viewing party kicks off at 9 a.m. with remarks by UK Counsel General Julian Evans. Call Renee at (415) 407-7424 to RSVP.
>>BEATS AMBASSADOR When the publicity ploy involves bad-ass Ghanian American hip-hop, count us as happily-enlisted marketing allies. Blitz the Ambassador plays La Peña Cultural Center tonight, and is offering up a free stream of his new album Native Sun so that you can learn the words before you shake ass. The album is a powerful barrage of traditional percussion, guitar licks, and fly verses – worth banging in your headphones even if you can’t make Berkeley tonight.
Blitz the Ambassador, Native Sun:
>>TRUCKING COMPANY Do you dream of owning a food truck but aren’t quite sure how to fund it? Stop squirreling away your Tooth Fairy money and learn how to apply for a loan — and get approved — from a panel of finance experts, fellow foodies, and food truck owners. Tonight, our friends at Renaissance Entrepeneurship Center are sponsoring this workshop for only 10 bucks, but the free publicity that comes with Chicken John threatening to vomit all over your new local economy-boosting venture is absolutely priceless.
>>BACK TO THE BEACH The last eighteen months have brought a bunch of repeat-listen recordings from bands that invoke the oceanside, including Beach House, Dirty Beaches, and Beach Fossils, who return to San Francisco a week from today, taking the stage at Slim’s to play songs from their 2010 debut album and the more recent EP What a Pleasure.
This place
arts@sfbg.com
LIT Begun in part as a series of maps accompanying public lectures, Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (University of California Press, 167 pages, $24.95) is a remarkable act of gathering, one that presents myriad versions and visions of San Francisco and its surrounding areas that can inform a reader’s experience.
Infinite City was recently selected by the Northern California Independent Booksellers as one of its 2011 winners. Duality is a fundamental aspect of the book’s breadth and depth and sense of sharply critical appreciation — structurally, Solnit pairs distinct maps with corresponding chapter-length essays. In keeping with that characteristic, and also with the book’s group spirit (though admittedly on a much smaller and less intensive scale), I asked different Guardian contributors to share appraisals of one, or in most cases two, of the 22 sections. The result provides just a hint of what can be found within Infinite City. (Johnny Ray Huston)
MAP 3. “Cinema City: Muybridge Inventing Movies, Hitchcock Making Vertigo“
The map for this chapter tracks the San Francisco life of Eadweard (sic) Muybridge, alongside landmarks from Alfred Hitchcock’s Bay Area masterpiece Vertigo. In “The Eyes of the Gods,” Solnit, who won the National Book Critics Circle award for her 2003 Muybridge bio River of Shadows, writes of the 19th century artist’s breakthrough high-speed photography, “It was as though the ice of frozen photographic time had broken free into a river of images.”
Many such rivers flowed all over this fair city when Vertigo premiered at the Stage Door Theatre at 420 Mason St. on May 9, 1958. Alas, only 10 of the more than 60 single-screen venues extant that year, all demarcated on Shizue Seigel’s fine map, are still functioning. Solnit rightly describes the shift to watching films on various digital delivery mechanisms as leaving contemporary culture with a “curious imagistic poverty.” As she concisely describes watching Milk and Once Upon a Time in the West on the Castro Theatre’s giant screen, we’re reminded that there is no comparison between enjoying cinema in such a grand setting and staring at a laptop. The great 20th century memoirist and observer Quentin Crisp wrote, “We ought to visit a cinema as we would go to a church. Those of us who wait for films to be made available for television are as deeply suspicious as lost souls who claim to be religious but who boast that they never go to church.”
That applies to you too, Netflix subscribers! The Roxie, Castro, Red Vic, Clay, and a small number of other houses of worship are still in business, so what are you waiting for? (Ben Terrall)
MAP 4. “Right Wing of the Dove: The Bay Area as Conservative/Military Brain Trust”
In “The Sinews of War are Boundless Money and the Brains of War Are in the Bay Area,” Solnit argues that antiwar, green, and left Bay Area hotspots are well known and don’t need to be charted again — unlike military contractors and assorted other forces of reaction in the region.
Solnit notes that many military bases that used to operate in the Bay Area are closed, “but the research, development, and profiteering continue as a dense tangle of civilian and military work, technological innovation, economic muscle, and political maneuvering for both economic and ideological purposes.”
Among the hard-right compounds providing counterevidence for that demonstration chestnut “the people united will never be defeated”: Lawrence Livermore National Labs (birthplace of Star Wars — the Reagan era money pit, not the George Lucas movie); Lockheed Martin, world’s largest “defense” contractor; the Hoover Institution, Stanford’s reactionary think tank; and Northrop Grumman, missile component designer. It’s useful to have so many of them in one place, if queasy-making.
On the lower left of the map sits Sandow Birk’s beautifully warped code of arms, which features the Cicero quote (Nervi belli pecunia infinita) that Solnit cites in her chapter title, under a half eagle/half dove, a rifle-toting soldier, and a scythe-clutching skeleton. It should be on the door of every U.S. military recruiting center. (Terrall)
MAP 6. “Monarchs and Queens: Butterfly Habits and Queer Public Spaces”
“How thoroughly the lexical landscape of gay history is invested with [a] paradigm of emergence,” notes poet Aaron Shurin in “Full Spectrum,” the chapter accompanying Infinite City‘s sixth map. Like one of the dazzlingly-named butterfly species rendered by Mona Caron on the map, Shurin flits gracefully between memoir and historiography as he tracks San Francisco’s ongoing evolution as a locus for queer emergence.
From North Beach to Polk Gulch, from Folsom to Castro, LGBT folk — be they American painted ladies, Satyr angel wings, or Mission blues — have continually migrated to and within the city to shed their cocoons and show their true colors. Local faux-queen Fauxnique traced this metamorphosis at the 2003 Miss Trannyshack Pageant when she climatically emerged as a regal butterfly to Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” (apropos to Shurin’s royalty motif, she won the crown). So too did the late Age of Aquarius painter Chuck Arnett, who often nestled butterfly imagery into his portraits of SoMa’s leather demimonde, and whose murals once adorned some of the many now-extinct bars also denoted by Ben Pease’s cartography. Only more than half a dozen of these “wildlife sanctuaries,” in Shurin’s parlance, have survived, with the Eagle Tavern’s announced closure marking another loss of habitat. Queers, though, are if anything adaptive, and my hope is that the future fluttering tribes of San Francisco will keep alighting on new ground to unfurl their wings. (Matt Sussman)
MAP 7. “Poison/Palate: The Bay Area in Your Body”
“Food is part of the Bay Area you hear about nowadays, exquisite upscale food at famous restaurants and gourmet markets. But it’s so boring we couldn’t stay focused on it in this map.” These refreshing, if rarely uttered words come two-thirds of the way through the chapter that accompanies the “Poison/Palate” map, Rebecca Solnit’s “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Gourmet.”
The phony Tuscany of Napa and the once-orchard-filled, now-EPA-Superfund-site-speckled Silicon Valley are wisely singled out for derision, a convenient duality in both geography and culture and the perfect framework on which to hang a critique of the local culinary community’s smug, myopic self-indulgence, by raising the not-so-elite-specters in Bay Area food history (the It’s It, the Popsicle, the Hangtown Fry, the Rice-a-Roni), and reintroducing the politics of food into the conversation, in the form of the chemical tonnage used to produce wine grapes, food giveaways at community gardens, Diet for a Small Planet, and Black Panther breakfast programs for school-kids. The sprawling topic is almost given too short a shrift, threatening to leap its mutant-mermaid-bedecked map.
Better is the 18th chapter, “How to Get From Ethiopia to Ocean Beach.” Solnit begins by loosely charting the ingredients that go into your cuppa joe: the water from Hetch Hetchy, the milk from West Marin, the coffee that courses through the port of Oakland, and, impishly, the leavings that flow toward the Southeast Water Pollution Control Plant. All that’s missing from the equation is the sugar that I need to make the darkest, brandy-and-cherry-tinged brew palatable. SF’s cafe culture is also deservedly lionized — though some might want to hurl china due to the exclusions on the accompanying map: why, for instance, call out Blue Danube Coffee House and not the grungier, more Chinese-populated Java Source? (Kimberly Chun)
MAP 8. “Shipyards and Sounds: The Black Bay Area since World War II”
Though author Joshua Jelly-Schapiro opens this chapter, subtitled “High Tide, Low Ebb,” with an eloquent invocation of Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” — penned in Sausalito, by the way — it was the slight mention of Lowell Fulson’s “San Francisco Blues” that most resonated with me. “Ohh, San Francisco,” the lyric goes, “Please make room for me.” The facts presented in “Shipyards and Sounds” record The City’s answer as a genteel and progressive “No nigger.”
Beginning at the start of WWII, when Southern blacks migrated to the Bay Area to build ships in Hunters Point, Jelly-Schapiro points out that the main areas of wartime shipbuilding (Richmond, Hunters Point, Marin City) are “places that today remain centers of black population and of black poverty.” Indicating, to me, that little has changed since the 1940s in some significant ways. Don’t get mad at me, I didn’t say it. Jelly-Schapiro did.
Jelly-Schapiro also shows how terms like “redevelopment” displaced black Fillmore District residents to housing projects they’d been banned from during the war and land-grab euphemisms like “urban renewal” decimated black neighborhoods such as West Oakland. Electoral laws mandating that the SF Board of Supervisors be elected by citywide contests and not by district allowed a city that desegregated its schools and transit system in the 1860s to remain progressive and very, very white.
Jelly-Schapiro’s conclusion contains a critique of Bay Area celebrations when “Negro president” Barack Obama was elected in 2008. What he won’t say is covered in Shizue Seigel’s map. A sidebar shows the dwindling soul of a city, while the headers cover the founding of the Black Panthers and Sylvester’s solo debut at Bimbo’s. (D. Scot Miller)
MAP 9. “Fillmore: Promenading the Boulevard of Gone”
After the damned disheartening facts presented in the previous chapter, it’s both merciful and hopeful that “Little Pieces of Many Wars” — though just as rage-inducing — establishes some kind of equilibrium.
Gent Sturgeon’s incredible Rorschach-inspired artwork opens a thoroughly-researched piece on Fillmore Street and its many incarnations. Mary Ellen Pleasant’s abolitionist work and her eucalyptus trees — which still stand on the corners of Bush and Octavia streets — are a starting point for a leisurely stroll with Solnit, who runs the voodoo down, “The war between the states left its traces here,” she says, “as did the Second World War, and the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the stale and ancient war of racism, and the various forms of freelance violence.”
She remembers San Francisco as an abolitionist headquarters, and Fillmore Street as the first place Allen Ginsberg read “Howl.” Recalling the Fillmore’s rich heritage of jazz, poetry, and art, Solnit takes it even further, adding, “The wealthy sometimes claim to bring civilization to rough neighborhoods, but the Upper Fillmore neighborhood that was so culturally rich when it was the property of poor people in the 1950s is smoothed over in significance now.”
The tragedy of Japanese internment, and the cross-cultural exchange that was demolished by it and redevelopment loom like white sheets over the city to this day. But Solnit closes with an optimistic sense of resurgence, even though Nickie’s has gone Irish.
Ben Pease’s cartography shows the cross-currents of culture of yesterday’s Fillmore Street, but not much else. That’s not a complaint, really. (Miller)
MAP 13. “The Mission: North of Home, South of Safe”
Two 2009 shootings on 24th Street pop out, in blood red, on the map accompanying Adriana Camarena’s “The Geography of the Unseen,” in much the same way that the spate of shooting deaths the previous year marked my brief time spent living in the Mission. In ’08, I lived in a Victorian flat at Treat and 23rd, distinguished by the fact that it was a favorite hang for the teenaged homies — its steps were slightly tucked back off the street, ideal when it came to hiding out, smoking dope, and snacking out — until my landlords installed a fence, ostensibly to keep the steps free of spit.
We were on the same block as an appliance-loaded junkyard; the last stop of an ancient Mission industrial railroad; and the Parque Niños Unidos, with its swampy, grassy corner, so often cordoned off to keep the tots from wading in the mud, its circling ice cream carts and its de facto refreshment stand, El Gallo Giro taco truck; and the community garden, where the feral kittens tumbled and hid and fresh produce was given away free every Sunday afternoon.
The Parque likely was the last thing 18-year-old poet Jorge Hurtado saw when he was shot and killed on our corner at 1 a.m. that year. I remember waking up that night to what sounded like a cannon boom, only the first of a slew that sweltering, ominous summer — Mark Guardado, president of the SF chapter of the Hells Angels, was killed a little over a week later, down Treat, in front of Dirty Thieves. The tension was thick and gooey in the air — who was next? The beauty of Shizue Seigel’s Mission map lies in how intimate it is, how it’s threaded around the shaggy-dog snatches of yarns Camarena catches among the day laborers waiting at Cesar Chavez and Bayshore, from the long litany of splintered families, time spent in the refuge of gangs at 24th and Shotwell, and then, in Frank Pena’s case, lives cut sadly short farther up 24th at Potrero. The included stories, rarely straying beyond the tellers’ voices and the facts they choose to reveal, stay with you — even if her sources’ internal lives remain, as the chapter’s subtitle goes, “the Geography of the Unseen.” (Chun)
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS 2011 BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDS
FICTION
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, stories, Yiyun Li (Random House, 240 pages, $25)
Nonfiction
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Mary Roach (W.W. Norton and Company, 336 pages, $15.95)
Honorable Mention: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1, (University of California, 760 pages, $34.95)
POETRY
Come On All You Ghosts, Matthew Zapruder (Copper Canyon, 96 pages, $16)
Food Writing
My Calabria: Rustic Family Cooking from Italy’s Undiscovered South, Rosetta Costantino, Janet Fletcher, and Shelley Lindgren (W.W. Norton and Company, 416 pages, $35)
Children’s Picture Book
The Quiet Book, Deborah Underwood and Renata Liwska (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 32 pages, $12.95)
Honorable mention: Zero, Kathryn Otoshi (KO Kids, 32 pages, $17.95)
TEEN LIT
The Sky is Everywhere, Jandy Nelson (Dial, 288 pages, $17.99)
Honorable mention: The Mockingbirds, Daisy Whitney (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 352 pages, $16.99)
REGIONAL TITLE
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, Rebecca Solnit (University of California, 167 pages, $24.95)
Honorable mention: A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California, Laura Cunningham (Heyday, 352 pages, $50)
What to watch, part two
WEDS/27
The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (Marie Losier, U.S., 2011) Once dubbed “the wickedest man in the world”, shock artist and cofounder of seminal industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has softened somewhat with time. Her plunge into pandrogyny, an ongoing artistic and personal process embarked upon with the late Jacqueline “Lady Jaye” Breyer P-Orridge, is an attempt to create a perfectly balanced body, incorporating the characteristics of both. As artists, the two were committed to documenting their process, but as marriage partners, much of their footage is sweetly innocuous home video footage: Genesis cooking in the kitchen decked out in a little black dress, Lady Jaye setting out napkins at a backyard bar-b-que or helping to dig through Genesis’ archives of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle “ephemera,” the two wrapped in bandages after getting matching nose jobs. “I just want to be remembered as one of the great love affairs of all time,” Jaye tells Genesis. This whimsical documentary by Marie Losier will go a long way toward making that wish a reality. Wed/27, 9:15 p.m., and May 5, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Nicole Gluckstern)
THURS/28
Love in a Puff (Pang Ho-cheung, Hong Kong, 2010) In 2007 the global crackdown on smoking made its way to Hong Kong, where the smoking ordinance effectively banned the practice in all indoor areas. This has lead to the explosion of “hot pot packs,” where smokers from varying walks of life come together in solidarity to grab their drags in the streets. That’s the milieu of Love in a Puff, an utterly charming, endearingly funny rom-com from Hong Kong filmmaker Pang Ho-cheung. When Cherie, a pretty Sephora sales clerk and asthmatic with a magenta-hued bob, meets Jimmy, a blandly handsome 20-something advertising exec, over Capri Slims and Lucky Strikes, what follows is a thoroughly modern and tentative courtship waged through dozens of text messages, a dash of karaoke, and a chaste encounter in a Hong Kong “love hotel.” Throw in some haunted car trunks, rogue foreign pubes in bracelets, all night-smoke runs to beat brutal tax increases, and a dry-ice-in-the toilet fetish (“It’s like taking a dump in heaven!” exclaims Jimmy) and you get a thoroughly quirky but never overly cute take on modern romance, one that never blows smoke when it comes to navigating the messy realities of love. Thurs/28, 8:45 p.m., and Sat/30, 1:15 p.m., Kabuki. (Michelle Devereaux)
SAT/30
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (Göran Hugo Olsson, Sweden/U.S.) Cinematic crate-diggers have plenty to celebrate, checking the results of The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975. Swedish documentarian Göran Hugo Olsson had heard whispers for years that Swedish television archives possessed more archival footage of the Black Panthers than anyone in the states — while poring through film for a doc on Philly soul, he discovered the rumors were dead-on. With this lyrical film, coproduced by the Bay Area’s Danny Glover, Olsson has assembled an elegant snapshot of black activists and urban life in America, relying on the vivid, startlingly crisp images of figures such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton at their peak, while staying true to the wide-open, refreshingly nonjudgmental lens of the Swedish camera crews. Questlove of the Roots and Om’Mas Keith provide the haunting score for the film, beautifully historicized with shots of Oakland in the 1960s and Harlem in the ’70s. It’s made indelible thanks to footage of proto-Panther school kids singing songs about grabbing their guns, and an unforgettable interview with a fiery Angela Davis talking about the uses of violence, from behind bars and from the place of personally knowing the girls who died in the infamous Birmingham, Ala., church bombing of 1963. Sat/30, 9 p.m., Kabuki, and Tues/3, 6 p.m., New People. (Kimberly Chun)
SUN/1
Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz, France/U.S./Iran/Lebanon) Thirteen (2003) goes to Tehran? The world of sex, drugs, and underground nightclubs in Iran provides the backdrop for writer-director Maryam Keshavarz’s lusty, dreamy take on the passionate teenagers behind the hijabs. Risking jail and worse are the sassy, privileged Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and the beautiful, orphaned Shireen (Sarah Kazemy), who, much like young women anywhere, just want to be free — to swim, sing, dance, test boundaries, lose, and then find themselves. The difference here is that they’re under constant, unnerving surveillance, in a country where more than 70 percent of the population is younger than 30. Nevertheless, within their mansion walls and without, beneath graffitied walls and undulating at intoxicating house parties, the two girls begin to fall in love with each other, as Atafeh’s handsome, albeit creepy older brother Mehran (Palo Alto-bred Reza Sixo Safai) gazes on. The onetime musical talent’s back from rehab, has returned to the mosque with all the zeal of the prodigal, and has hooked up with the Morality Police that enforces the nation’s cultural laws. Filmed underground in Beirut, with layers that permit both pleasure and protest (wait for the hilarious moment when 2008’s Milk is dubbed in Farsi), Circumstance viscerally transmits the realities and fantasies of Iranian young women on the verge. Sun/1, 6 p.m., and Tues/3, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki. (Chun)
The Salesman (Sébastien Pilote, Canada) Indefatigably optimistic on the outside, small-town Quebec car salesman Marcel (Gilbert Sicotte) refuses to slow down, let alone retire — perhaps from fear that grief over his wife’s death would fill any hours left empty, though he’s far too composed to let that show. He has his daughter (Nathalie Cavezzali) and grandson (Jeremy Tessier) to dote on, and his customers to endlessly fuss over and reassure. But there are few customers these days because the local factory workers are on strike, their plant in danger of being shuttered. Sébastien Pilote’s quiet drama carefully accumulates everyday details toward a full understanding of Marcel and his milieu, the stability of both eventually threatened by factors that not even his formidable powers of denial can overcome. It’s the kind of movie so small and unassuming you’re caught completely unaware when it delivers a gut-punch. Sun/1, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/3, 8:50 p.m., PFA; and May 5, 2 p.m., Kabuki. (Dennis Harvey)
13 Assassins Before you accuse Japan’s bad boy director Takashi Miike of going all prestige-y by making a Kurasawa-esque samurai pic, consider that his 13 Assassins is actually a remake of what was originally dismissed by many as a Seven Samurai knockoff, the late Eiichi Kudo’s 1963 film of the same name. Koji Yakusho stars as Shinzaemon Shimada, an aging ronin convinced to come out of the proverbial retirement to assassinate a psychotically brutal lord (Goro Inagaki) with a penchant for raping, killing, and wreaking general havoc. Shinzaemon assembles a ragtag team of warriors with varying levels of experience, and the requisite carnage ensues. Featuring solid performances and an impressively choreographed climax, this well-told tale nevertheless feels disappointing stale. The idea of the iconoclastic Miike reinventing the samurai genre is an intriguing one. But while the film at times gnashes the provocative pulp that most Miike devotees have come to crave, it admittedly elicits a measure of old-fashioned respectability that the genre, by default, seems to command like a master ordering his knightly charge. It certainly beheads all its targets, but with something of a shrug of its shoulders. Sun/1, 8:30 p.m., Castro. (Devereaux)
MON/2
Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, Canada/France, 2010) When tightly wound émigré Nawal (Luba Azabal) dies, she leaves behind adult twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) — and leaves them documents that only compound their feelings of grief and anger, suggesting that what little they thought they knew about their background might have been a lie. While resentful Simon at first stays home in Montreal, Jeanne travels to fictive “Fuad” (a stand-in for source-material playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s native Lebanon), playing detective to piece together decades later the truth of why their mother fled her homeland at the height of its long, brutal civil war. Alternating between present-day and flashback sequences, this latest by Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (2000’s Maelstrom) achieves an urgent sweep punctuated by moments of shocking violence. Resembling The Kite Runner in some respects as a portrait of the civilian victimization excused by war, it also resembles that work in arguably piling on more traumatic incidences and revelations than one story can bear — though so much here has great impact that a sense of over-contrivance toward the very end only slightly mars the whole. Mon/2, 6:30 p.m., and May 5, 8 p.m., Kabuki. (Harvey)
TUES/3
Tabloid (Errol Morris, U.S., 2010) Taking a break from loftier subjects, Errol Morris’ latest documentary simply finds a whopper of a story and lets the principal participant tell her side of it — one we gradually realize may be very far from the real truth. In 1978 former Miss Wyoming Joyce McKinney flew to England, where the Mormon boy she’d grown infatuated with had been posted for missionary work by his church. What ensued became a U.K. tabloid sensation, as the glamorous, not at all publicity-shy Yankee attracted accusations of kidnapping, imprisonment, attempted rape, and more. Her victim of love, one Kirk Anderson, is not heard from here — presumably he’s been trying to live down an embarrassing life chapter ever since. But we do hear from others who shed considerable light on the now middle-aged McKinney’s continued protestations that it was all just one big misunderstanding. Most important, we hear from the lady herself — and she is colorful, unflappable, unapologetic, and quite possibly stone-cold nuts. Tues/3, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki, and May 5, 2:45 p.m., New People. (Harvey)
THE 54TH ANNUAL SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL runs through May 5. Venues are the Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Castro, 429 Castro, SF; New People, 1746 Post, SF; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third, SF; and Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, SF. For tickets (most shows $13) and complete schedule visit www.sffs.org>.
Reject the Treasure Island plan
EDITORIAL After a long, long hearing April 21, as the San Francisco Planning Commission prepared to vote on an ambitious development plan for Treasure Island, Commissioner Gwyneth Borden acknowledged that the plan wasn’t perfect. But, she said, on balance it ought to be approved: “Twenty five percent affordable housing is better than zero percent.”
That’s not necessarily true.
Treasure Island is an usual piece of real estate, 403 acres of artificial land created in 1937 by dumping sand and dirt on a shallow part of the bay. It’s less than two miles from downtown San Francisco — but there’s no rail service, no BART station. The only way off the island is by boat — or by driving onto a Bay Bridge that’s already jammed way beyond capacity every morning and afternoon.
The soil is unstable, prone to liquefying in an earthquake — and if sea levels rise as high as some predictions suggest, the whole place could be underwater in a few decades.
A strange hybrid agency called the Treasure Island Development Authority, created by former Mayor Willie Brown, cut a deal with Lennar Urban (the same outfit that has the redevelopment deal for Bayview Hunters Point) and several partners to construct a neighborhood of some 19,000 people on the island. Among the features: a 450-foot condominium tower and 6,000 units of high-end housing. The developers brag that a fleet of new ferries will offer a 13-minute ride to the city and that some streets will be designed for pedestrians and bicycles.
But the fact remains that the developers want to add 19,000 new residents — almost all of whom will work off the island somewhere — to a place that has no credible transportation system. City studies show that even with an extensive (and costly) ferry service, at least half the new residents would drive cars to work (and, presumably, to shop, and go to movies, and eat and drink), joining the mob of vehicles heading east or west on the bridge. That’s almost 10,000 new cars each day trying to jam onto a roadway that can’t handle the existing traffic. The backups would stretch well onto San Francisco surface streets and as far back as Berkeley.
A rail line on the Bay Bridge would solve part of the problem. So would bike lanes. Neither option is even remotely possible in the foreseeable future. Free, or heavily subsidized ferries could, indeed, be a positive alternative — but who is going to pay for that service? Nonsubsidized ferries would be far more expensive than current Muni or BART service, a particular burden on the residents of the below-market housing.) And does anybody really think there’s going to be enough ferry capacity to carry 10,000 people a day to downtown SF, the East Bay, and the Peninsula?
The bottom line: this isn’t a good deal for San Francisco. The affordable housing level is too low. The transportation problems are nightmarish. The last thing Treasure Island needs is a 450-foot tower.
There’s no rush to approve this — and no immediate downside to waiting for a better deal. The supervisors should tell Lennar to come back with a project that has fewer residents, better transit options, and more affordable housing. Because zero is looking a lot better than what’s on the table.
PS: The 4-3 Planning Commission vote demonstrated exactly why it’s important to have key commission appointments split between the mayor and the Board of Supervisors. The mayoral appointees all rolled over — but at least the board-appointed members made strong points, forced real debate, and gave the supervisors plenty of ammunition to demand a better deal.
5 Things: April 25, 2011
>>TAKE BACK THE STREETS In Chiapas, small Zapatista towns will build DIY speed bumps on the freeways cutting through their community. Here in SF, we make our own bike lanes. Nicely done, Kingston and Guerrero, nicely done.
Look and listen
>>TRIANGULA The Alps’ next album after last year’s acclaimed Le Voyage includes striking design work by Tauba Auerbach — namely, a sleeve that can be folded out to form a sky-sided pyramid atop a landscape. Released by Mexican Summer, Easy Action finds core trio Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Alexis Georgopolous, and Scott Hewicker collaborating in different ways from song to song, using collage techniques to reframe sounds from past recordings, including Le Voyage. The overall textures are more dissonant, with fuzzy-needle effects and distortion present on more than one track.
>>MOMMY, HE’S SCARING US San Francisco’s latest YouTube sensation isn’t one of our outrageous performance artists or curbside curiosities. It’s Dr. Robert Lustig, a UCSF pediatric endocrinologist who wants to take away our candy. The opening salvo in Lustig’s journey to viral status was “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” a dense, learned, 90-minute lecture dissecting the harmful effects of sugar on everything from our triceratops to our hermaphrodites — or was it our trigyclerides and hematocrits? The YouTube lecture was followed by a New York Times Magazine cover story by Gary Taubes on April 17 and an appearance on Forum with Michael Krasney on April 21. As of April 22, more than 1 million people have viewed the lecture, presumably after they polished off the cookies in their secret office drawer.
>>G.A.W.K. AND RAWK The Gay Artists and Writers Kollective is celebrating its 25th anniversary this Saturday at Magnet in the Castro. G.A.W.K. still rocks thanks to the efforts of Jon Sugar, who in addition to music and drag endeavors has helped assemble and emcee the gathering for queer rock performers, songwriters, actors, writers, and more. The bill for Saturday’s free anniversary celebration includes Bambi Lake, Jerry the Faerie, Xavier, Khalil Sullivan, the band Era Escape, and violinist Kippy Marks.
>>GUTS ‘N’ GLORY Having emerged on the other side of its first decade, the BYOBW (Bring Your Own Big Wheel) races yesterday on Sunday, April 17 seemed to be gathering speed, and swinging a can of Miller High Life about as they one-handedly swerved down the backside of Potrero Hill. The capacity crowd on Vermont street was well-pleased with their careening crusaders – even spectators inconvenienced by an airborne Michael Jackson on turn number two gave a lusty cheer when the King of Pop spun about nimbly and re-boarded. The Internet has nothing else on it today but video footage of the event, but here’s our fave shots from the day.
The glory:
And the fall (sorry buddy):
5 Things: April 22, 2011
>>BLACK WHEELS Three reasons why African-Americans should ride bicycles, brought to you courtesy of community two-wheeler group Red Bike and Green. One, health: the exercise can counter obesity and chronic disease. Two, economics: why drop all your cash into a car pit when you can put it to brightening your present and future? Three, environment: environmental racism — including pollution in low-income communities — has gone on too long, and you can do you part to change it. Now that we have that out of the way, check out Red Bike and Green’s first “black Critical Mass” of the year in Oakland on Sat/23. Bikes: too many good reasons to ride them.
>>LOCAL BOY DONE GOOD Reynaldo Cayentano Jr. grew up on Sixth Street, and he’s not going anywhere. The City College student and photographer recently opened up gallery space with cohort Chris Beale in the old District Attorney’s office, but the two will be throwing their Sat/23 “Native Taste” party at the House Kombucha factory, where they’ll showcase the work of 13 local artists and the hip-hop stylings of Patience. Speaking of local boys, have you heard the new SF anthem by Equipto and Mike Marshall?
Equipto ft. Mike Marshall, “Heart and Soul”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3Fh0dXpuco&feature=player_embedded
>>GOOD & PLENTY CHEAP There’s nothing we like better than good, cheap stuff. Not the cheap, cheap stuff of a Walmart or Kmart, or the good, pricey stuff of a Neiman Marcus or Bloomingdale’s. Good. Cheap. Stuff. And in pursuit of said stuff, we know that many of our fellow city dwellers have checked out a City Car Share car for the express purpose of driving to Serramonte Shopping Center in Daly City and hitting the Daiso store. Put away that gas tank: now we have our own Daiso store, newly opened in Japantown. Since most of the items cost $1.50, a $20 bill will get you a Santa Claus-size bagful of beautiful origami paper, clever lunch boxes, kitchenware, or whatever strikes your fancy from Daiso’s — no jive — selection of 70,000 good, cheap goods.
>>THEY WALK AMONG US It isn’t often that we indulge in a little unabashed fandom when a celebrity comes to our city/ashram. After all, we have our standards (smart, funny, left-leaning, maybe a pot bust or two), which rules out your Biebers, your Gagas, your Cruises ‘n’ Holmeses. We also believe that a man with a three-day stubble muttering to himself as he walks down the street has a right to his private musings. But when that man is Alec Baldwin, well, we have to stop, give him a deep Zen bow, tell him he’s welcome here, and report back. We have no idea why Baldwin is here – a Giants game? No, they’re on the road. SFIFF? No, we would have heard. Filming an episode of 30 Rock, Alcatraz Edition? Possibly –- and truthfully, we don’t care. We will take this no further. No tweets, no nothing. Because we want him to come back -– with Tina Fey.
>>THE GOOD BOOKS A few minutes spent reading a good, cheap book can add some insight and perspective to anyone’s day, and this weekend presents a reason to look for said books. The San Francisco Public Library’s 50th Anniversary Book Sale is going on at the Fort Mason Center Festival Pavilion until Sun/24, with everything on sale for three dollars or less. Books, DVDs, CDs, tapes, and other media are available, and on the sale’s final day, nothing will cost more than a dollar.
What to watch
THURS/21
Beginners (Mike Mills, U.S., 2010) There is nothing conventional about Beginners, a film that starts off with the funeral arrangements for one of its central characters. That man is Hal (Christopher Plummer), who came out to his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) at the ripe age of 75. Through flashbacks, we see the relationship play out — Oliver’s inability to commit tempered by his father’s tremendous late-stage passion for life. Hal himself is a rare character: an elderly gay man, secure in his sexuality and, by his own admission, horny. He even has a much younger boyfriend, played by the handsome Goran Visnjic. While the father-son bond is the heart of Beginners, we also see the charming development of a relationship between Oliver and French actor Anna (Melanie Laurent). It all comes together beautifully in a film that is bittersweet but ultimately satisfying. Beginners deserves praise not only for telling a story too often left untold, but for doing so with grace and a refreshing sense of whimsy. Thurs/21, 7 p.m., Castro. (Louis Peitzman)
FRI/22
The Good Life (Eva Mulvad, Denmark, 2010) Portraits of the formerly wealthy are often guilty of peddling secondhand nostalgia for some ancien regime while simultaneously stoking schadenfreude toward the now-deposed (just ask Vanity Fair). Eva Mulvad’s melancholy character study of 50-something Annemette Beckmann and her aged mother, Mette, avoids both traps even as her subjects — formerly wealthy Danish expats living on the dole in a cramped apartment in a coastal Portuguese town — offer few inroads for sympathy. Narcissistic and petulant, Annemette blames the loss of her family’s wealth on the 1974 nationalization of Portugal’s then-Communist government, and claims that her cosseted upbringing has made it hard to find a job (“Work doesn’t become me,” she gratingly protests at one point). Mette, who is more likeable, is a resigned realist whose sole comfort, aside from the pet dog, seems to be her knowledge that she is not long for this world. Comparisons to Grey Gardens (1975) are inevitable here, but the Beckmanns simply aren’t as interesting or possessed by as idiosyncratic a joie de vivre as the Beales, making The Good Life a tough slog. Fri/22, 3:45 p.m.; April 28, 6:45 p.m.; and May 1, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Matt Sussman)
Hahaha (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2010) Do you remember a time you behaved badly (not horribly, but bad enough that you felt ashamed) but you didn’t really think about it until long after the fact, say, when getting drinks with an old friend? If you can’t, than the latest from South Korean director Hong Sang-soo will probably jog your memory. As with many of Hong’s films, Hahaha’s premise is similar to the above scenario: two 30-something buds get together and reminisce about their recent trips to the same seaside town. Shown in episodic flashbacks, we start to realize that the incidents and players in their separate accounts overlap into one story filled with terrible poetry, domineering mothers, stalker-ish behavior, and poorly made choices. Hong’s films are primers in how not to treat your fellow human beings (straight dudes are usually the culprits), so take notes. Fri/22, 9:15 p.m.; Mon/25, 9 p.m.; and Tues/26, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Sussman)
I’m Glad My Mother is Alive (Claude Miller and Nathan Miller, France, 2009) Codirected with his son Nathan, this latest by veteran French director Claude Miller is an about-face from his acclaimed 2007 period epic A Secret. Viscerally up-to-the-moment in content and handheld-camera style, it’s a small story that builds toward an enormous punch. Thomas (played by Maxime Renard as a child, then Vincent Rottiers) is a lifelong malcontent whose troubles are rooted in his abandonment at age five by an irresponsible mother (Sophie Cattani). Neither the attentions of well-meaning adoptive parents or the influence of his better-adjusted younger brother can quell Thomas’ mix of furious resentment and curiosity toward his mere, whom he finally develops a relationship with as a young adult. As usual, Miller doesn’t “explain” his characters or let them explain themselves, yet everything feels emotionally true — right up to a narrative destination both that feels both shocking and inevitable. Fri/22, 6:45 p.m., and Mon/25, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Dennis Harvey)
Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, U.S., 2010) After three broke down road movies (1994’s River of Grass, 2006’s Old Joy, 2008’s Wendy and Lucy), Kelly Reichardt’s new frontier story tilts decisively toward socially-minded existentialism. It’s 1845 on the choked plains of Oregon, miles from the fertile valley where a wagon train of three families is headed. They’ve hired the rogue guide Meek to show them the way, but he’s got them lost and low on water. When the group captures a Cayeuse Indian, Solomon proposes they keep him on as a compass; Meek thinks it better to hang him and be done with it. The periodic shots of the men deliberating are filmed from a distance — the earshot range of the three women (Michelle Williams, Zoe Kazan, and Shirley Henderson) who set up camp each night. It’s through subtle moves like these that Meek’s Cutoff gives a vivid taste of being subject to fate and, worse still, the likes of Meek. Reichardt winnows away the close-ups, small talk, and music that provided the simple gifts of her earlier work, and the overall effect is suitably austere. Fri/22, 9 p.m., and Mon/25, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Max Goldberg)
Stake Land (Jim Mickle, U.S., 2010) Not gonna lie — the reason I wanted to review this one was because of the film still in the SFIFF catalog. Rotten-faced vampire with a stake through its neck? Yes, please! But while Jim Mickle’s apocalyptic road movie does offer plenty of gore, it’s more introspective than one might expect, following an orphaned teenage boy, Martin (Connor Paolo, Serena’s little bro on Gossip Girl), and his gruff mentor, Mister (Snake Plissken-ish Nick Damici), on their travels through a ravaged America. As books, films, and comics have taught us, whenever a big chunk of the human race is wiped out (thanks to zombies, vampires, an unknown cataclysm, etc.), the remaining population will either be good (heroic, like Mister and Martin, or helpless, like the stragglers they rescue, including a nun played by Kelly McGillis), or evil — cannibals, rapists, religious nuts, militant survivalists, etc. Stake Land doesn’t throw many curveballs into its end-times narrative, but it’s beautifully shot and doesn’t hold back on the brutality. Larry Fessenden (director of 2006’s The Last Winter) produced and has a brief cameo as a helpful bartender. Fri/22, 11:30 p.m., and Mon/25, 9:45 p.m., Kabuki. (Cheryl Eddy)
SAT/23
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica, Romania, 2010) Andrei Ujica’s three-hour documentary uses decades of propagandic footage to let the late Romanian dictator — who was overthrown by popular revolt and executed in 1989 — hang himself with his own grandiose image-making. While the populace suffered (off-screen, you might want to bone up on the facts before seeing this ironical, commentary-free portrait), the “great leader” and his wife Elena were constantly seen holding state dances, playing volleyball, hunting bear, and vacationing hither and yon. (We even see them on the Universal Studios tour.) There’s no surprise in seeing them greeted with enormous pageantry in China; but it’s a little shocking to see this tyrant welcome Nixon (in the first-ever U.S. presidential visit to a Communist nation), lauded by Jimmy Cartner, and hobnobbing with Queen Elizabeth. This grotesque parade of self-glorifying public moments has a happy ending, however. Sat/23, 12:45 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/24, 5:15 p.m., New People; May 1, 1:30 p.m., PFA. (Harvey)
Life, Above All (Oliver Schmitz, South Africa/Germany, 2010) It’s tough enough to simply grow up, let alone care for a parent with AIDS and deal with the suspicions and fears of the no-nothing adults all around you. Rising above easy preaching and hand-wringing didacticism, Life, Above All takes as its blueprint the 2004 best-seller by Allan Stratton, Chandra’s Secrets, and makes compelling work of the story of 12-year-old Chandra (Khomotso Manyaka) and her unfortunate family, unable to get effective help amid the thicket of ignorance regarding AIDS in Africa. After her newborn sister dies, Chandra finds her loyalty torn between her bright-eyed best friend Esther (Keaobaka Makanyane), who’s rumored to hooking among the truck drivers in their dusty, sun-scorched rural South African hometown, and her mother (Lerato Mvelase), who listens far too closely to her bourgie friend Mrs. Tafa (an OTT Harriet Manamela), for her own good. Cape Town native director Oliver Schmitz sticks close to the action playing across his actors’ faces, and he’s rewarded, particularly by the graceful Manyaka, in this life-affirmer about little girls forced to shoulder heart-breaking responsibility far too soon. Sat/23, 4 p.m., and April 28, 6 p.m., Kabuki. (Kimberly Chun)
The Mill and the Cross (Lech Majewski, Poland/Sweden, 2010) One of the clichés often told about art is that it is supposed to speak to us. Polish director Lech Majewski’s gorgeous experiment in bringing Flemish Renaissance painter Peter Bruegel’s sprawling 1564 canvas The Procession to Calvary to life attempts to do just that. Majeswki both re-stages Bruegel’s painting — which draws parallels between its depiction of Christ en route to his crucifixion and the persecution of Flemish citizens by the Spanish inquisition’s militia — in stunning tableaux vivant that combine bluescreen technology and stage backdrops, and gives back stories to a dozen or so of its 500 figures. Periodically, Bruegel himself (Rutger Hauer) addresses the camera mid-sketch to dolefully explain the allegorical nature of his work, but these pedantic asides speak less forcefully than Majeswki’s beautifully lighted vignettes of the small joys and many hardships that comprised everyday life in the 16th century. Beguiling yet wholly absorbing, this portrait of a portrait is like nothing else at the festival. Sat/23, 12:30 p.m., SFMOMA, and April 27, 9 p.m., Kabuki. (Sussman)
Mind the Gap Experimental film fans: come for the big names, but don’t miss out on the newcomers. Locals Jay Rosenblatt (melancholy found-footage bio The D Train), Kerry Laitala (psychedelic 3-D brain-dazzler Chromatastic), and Skye Thorstenson (mannequin-horror music video freak out Tourist Trap, featuring the acting and singing stylings of the Guardian’s Johnny Ray Huston) offer strong entries in an overall excellent program. International bigwigs Peter Tscherkassky (the 25-minute Coming Attractions, a layered study of airplanes, Hollywood, and Hollywood airplanes — not for the crash-phobic) and Jonathan Caouette (“Lynchian” has been used to describe the Chloë Sevigny-starring All Flowers In Time, though it contains a scary-faces contest that’d spook even Frank Booth) are also notable. New names for me were Zachary Drucker, whose Lost Lake introduces a transsexual, pervert-huntin’ vigilante for the ages, and my top pick: Kelly Sears’ Once it started it could not end otherwise, a deliciously sinister hidden-history lesson imagined via 1970s high-school yearbooks. Sat/23, 4:45 p.m., and May 1, 9:45 p.m., Kabuki. (Eddy)
The Troll Hunter (André Ovredal, Norway, 2010) Yes, The Troll Hunter riffs off The Blair Witch Project (1999) with both whimsy and, um, rabidity. Yes, you may gawk at its humongoid, anatomically correct, three-headed trolls, never to be mistaken for grotesquely cute rubber dolls, Orcs, or garden gnomes again. Yes, you may not believe, but you will find this lampoon of reality TV-style journalism, and an affectionate jab at Norway’s favorite mythical creature, very entertaining. Told that a series of strange attacks could be chalked up to marauding bears, three college students (Glenn Erland Tosterud, Tomas Alf Larsen, and Johanna Morck) strap on their gumshoes and choose instead to pursue a mysterious poacher Hans (Otto Jespersen) who repeatedly rebuffs their interview attempts. Little did the young folk realize that their late-night excursions following the hunter into the woods would lead at least one of them to rue his or her christening day. Ornamenting his yarn with beauty shots of majestic mountains, fjords, and waterfalls, Norwegian director-writer André Ovredal takes the viewer beyond horror-fantasy — handheld camera at the ready — and into a semi-goofy wilderness of dark comedy, populated by rock-eating, fart-blowing trolls and overshadowed by a Scandinavian government cover-up sorta-worthy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009). Sat/23, 11:30 p.m., Kabuki; Mon/25, 6:15 p.m., New People. (Chun)
World on a Wire (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Germany, 1973) The words “Rainer Werner Fassbinder” and “science fiction film” are enough to get certain film buffs salivating, but the Euro-trashy interior décor is almost reason enough to see this restored print of the New German Cinema master’s cyber thriller. Originally a two-part TV miniseries, World on a Wire is set in an alternate present (then 1973) in which everything seems to be made of concrete, mirror, Lucite, or orange plastic. When the inventor of a supercomputer responsible for generating an artificial world mysteriously disappears, his handsome predecessor must fight against his corporate bosses to find out what really happened, and in the process, stumbles upon a far more shattering secret about the nature of reality itself. Riffing off the understated cool of Godard’s Alphaville (1965) while beating 1999’s The Matrix to the punch by some 25 years, World on a Wire is a stylistically singular entry in Fassbinder’s prolific filmography. Sat/23, 8:45 p.m., Kabuki, and April 30, 2 p.m., PFA. (Sussman) SUN/24
A Cat in Paris (Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli, France/Belgium/Netherlands/Switzerland, 2010) Save your pocket poodles, please: Paris, as cities go, is most decidedly feline. From 1917’s silent serial Les Vampires to its uber-cool 1990s update Irma Vep, cat burglars and the Parisian skyline have gone together like café and au lait. Add actual cats and jazz to the mix for good measure (even Disney saw fit to set its jazzy 1970 Aristocats in the City of Light). At just over an hour long, the animated A Cat in Paris is an enjoyable little amuse-bouche that employs all the standards of the cats-in-Paris meme: Billie Holiday warbling on the soundtrack, a dashingly heroic antihero who scales the rooftops as if he studied parkour under Spider-Man, and the titular untamable black cat who serves as his partner in crime. Complete with a climatic Hitchcockian set piece on the rooftops of Notre Dame Cathedral, A Cat in Paris has a refreshingly angular and graphic, almost cubist, feel. Directors Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli’s work certainly doesn’t rank among that of countryman Sylvain Chomet (2010’s The Illusionist), but this family film is worth checking out if kitties up to no good in Purr-ree simply make you want to le squee. Sun/24, 12:30 p.m., Kabuki, and May 1, 12:30 p.m., New People. (Michelle Devereaux)
MON/25
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, U.S., 2010) The latest documentary from Werner Herzog once again goes where no filmmaker — or many human beings, for that matter — has gone before: the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, a heavily-guarded cavern in Southern France containing the oldest prehistoric artwork on record. Access is highly restricted, but Herzog’s 3D study is surely the next best thing to an in-person visit. The eerie beauty of the works leads to a typically Herzog-ian quest to learn more about the primitive culture that produced the paintings; as usual, Herzog’s experts have their own quirks (like a circus performer-turned-scientist), and the director’s own wry narration is peppered with random pop culture references and existential ponderings. It’s all interwoven with footage of crude yet beautiful renderings of horses and rhinos, calcified cave-bear skulls, and other time-capsule peeks at life tens of thousands of years ago. The end result is awe-inspiring. Mon/25, 7 p.m., and Tues/26, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Eddy)
TUES/26
Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán, France/Chile/Germany, 2010) Chile’s Atacama Desert, the setting for Patricio Guzmán’s lyrically haunting and meditative documentary, is supposedly the driest place on earth. As a result, it’s also the most ideal place to study the stars. Here, in this most Mars-like of earthly landscapes, astronomers look to the heavens in an attempt to decode the origins of the universe. Guzmán superimposes images from the world’s most powerful telescopes — effluent, gaseous nebulas, clusters of constellations rendered in 3-D brilliance — over the night sky of Atacama for an even more otherworldly effect, but it’s the film’s terrestrial preoccupations that resonate most. For decades, a small, ever dwindling group of women have scoured the cracked clay of Atacama searching for loved ones who disappeared early in Augusto Pinochet’s regime. They take their tiny, toy-like spades and sift through the dirt, finding a partial jawbone here, an entire mummified corpse there. Guzmán’s attempt through voice-over to make these “architects of memory,” both astronomers and excavators alike, a metaphor for Chile’s reluctance to deal with its past atrocities is only marginally successful. Here, it’s the images that do all the talking — if “memory has a gravitational force,” their emotional weight is as inescapable as a black hole. Tues/26, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki, and April 28, 6:15 p.m., PFA. (Devereaux)
The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Breillat, France, 2010) Fairytales are endemically Freudian; perhaps it has something to with their use of subconscious fantasy to mourn — and breathlessly anticipate — the looming loss of childhood. French provocateuse Catherine Breillat’s feminist re-imagining of The Sleeping Beauty carries her hyper-sexualized signature, but now she also has free reign to throw in bizarre and beastly metaphors for feminine and masculine desire in the form of boil-covered, dungeon-dwelling ogres, albino teenage princes, and icy-beautiful snow queens. The story follows Anastasia, a poor little aristocrat, who longs to be a boy (she calls herself “Sir Vladimir”). When her hand is pricked with a yew spindle (more of a phallic impalement, really), Anastasia falls into a 100-year adventurous slumber, eventually awakening as a sexually ripe 16-year-old. It all plays like an anchorless, Brothers Grimm version of Sally Potter’s 1992 Orlando. And while it’s definitely not for the kiddies, it’s hard to believe that many adults would find its overt symbolism and plodding narrative any more than a sporadically entertaining exercise in preciousness. Your own dreams will undoubtedly be more interesting — perhaps you can catch a few zzz’s in a theater screening this movie. Tues/26, 6:15 p.m., and April 27, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Devereaux)
THE 54TH ANNUAL SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL runs April 21–May 5. Venues are the Sundance Kabuki, 1881 Post, SF; Castro, 429 Castro, SF; New People, 1746 Post, SF; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third, SF; and Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, SF. For tickets (most shows $13) and complete schedule visit www.sffs.org>.
Guardian named California’s best weekly newspaper
The California Newspaper Publishers Association gave the Guardian its coveted General Excellence Award April 16, in effect naming the Guardian the best large weekly newspaper in the state.
The blue-ribbon panel of judges considered entries from across the state, from alternative weeklies, community weeklies, and weeklies published by big daily outfits.
The contest required entrants to submit three consecutive issues from March 2010. In awarding first-place to the Guardian, the judges noted: “The San Francisco Guardian knows itself, knows what it does and does it very well. In-depth reporting, with an attitude yet fully fair, is a real contribution to a democratic society. The FOI awards are a shining diamond in the rough. The arts and culture coverage sparkles in words and design. The listings are endless.”
In his remarks accepting the award at the CNPA convention in Los Angeles, Bruce Brugmann, editor and publisher, noted that the award was timely because “it helps us celebrate 45 years of printing the news and raising hell by an independent, family-owned paper in San Francisco.” He added that the Guardian had an advantage because of the unending scandals in San Francisco: “We have Willie Brown, we have Gavin Newsom, and we have PG&E.”
Brugmann: Dammit, where’s our tax break?
Bay Guardian Editor and Publisher Bruce B. Brugmann announced today that the paper will move to Brisbane next fall unless the city expands its payroll tax exemption to cover Potrero Hill.
The paper, which plans to expand its workforce “by at least a few people” over the next five years, can’t continue to pay the roughly $500 tax for each new employee, Brugmann said. Although he denied rumors of an initial public offering, he said discussions about a “complex, derivative-based stock swap” that could lead to multi-dollar payoffs to some employees were a factor in his decision.
“We’ve always believed that stock options are the basis for American’s economy,” Brugmann said. “And it makes no sense to tax the wealthy when we can barely afford to tax the poor.”
The Bay Guardian building could also be converted to market-rate condominiums as part of the deal.
The Guardian is the latest local business to demand relief from the city’s crushing payroll tax. In the wake of proposals to offer a tax holiday to Twitter, companies like Zynga – also in Potrero Hill – and Yelp are threatening to leave town unless they get a similar deal.
“With the money we save,” Brugmann said, “we can afford to buy Steve Jones a car and get him off that goddam freak-ass bicycle.”
Jennifer Matz, a City Hall staffer who works to get corporations tax breaks, said she normally would be willing to give away public money to just about any company in town. “But my boss doesn’t seem that upset about the Guardian leaving,” she explained.
Still, several supervisors immediately announced plans to expand the tax district to the area immediately surrounding the corner of Mississippi and 17th where the Guardian is located. “If my favorite newspaper left town, I don’t know what I’d do with myself,” noted Sup. Jane Kim.
April Fool’s! Kinda.
Redmond traded for Nevius in mid-season shocker
Bay Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond has been traded to the San Francisco Chronicle for columnist C.W. Nevius and a right-wing associate editor to be named later, it was announced today.
As part of the deal, the Chronicle will pick up the remainder of Redmond’s $25.3 million contract. In addition to a future editor, the Chron will pay the Guardian an undisclosed amount of money “just to get Nevius the fuck out of here,” Chronicle Editor Ward Bushee said.
“We respect all that Chuck has done for us, but when we realized he couldn’t even get a hippie recycling center evicted by the deadline, we knew it was time to make a change. This is the big leagues, boyo.”
Former Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, one of the many die-hard Nevius fans who has become disillusioned of late, was more harsh. “Nobody pays any attention to his shit anymore,” she said.
Nevius, a former sportswriter, has been struggling lately with the transition to a political position. His Column Effectiveness Percentage has dropped to .212 and his embarrassing play on the Haight Asbury Neighborhood Council Recycling Center and the Park Merced development have spurred calls for his removal.
Redmond has been struggling, too, and is widely considered to be grossly overpaid. His CEP fell below .300 for the first time this year, a problem he has blamed on age and brain damage. He recently cut his hair in an effort to clear some of the heat from his leftist political rhetoric, but his last four pieces on tax policy have been complete failures – not one politician has held a hearing, made a statement or done anything but quietly murmur that Redmond “has gone off the deep end.” He has refused repeated calls to open up his stance.
Redmond insists that none of his problems are his own fault, and suggested that his lack of effectiveness is due to some sort of shadowy “juice” at City Hall. “David Chiu and Jane Kim can’t possibly be throwing curve balls like that on their own,” he said.
Under the terms of the deal, Nevius will immediately take over Redmond’s job and Redmond will become the Chron’s Conservative Suburban Twit.
Redmond announced that he will be selling his house in Bernal Heights and moving to a gated community in the East Bay. “If I’m going to trash San Francisco every day, I need to be living in a place where there’s no music and the cops shoot homeless people on sight,” he said. “If I’m going to become a conservative, it’s important to eliminate any actual connection to the people I’m writing about.”
April Fool’s.
5 Things: March 29, 2011
>>EYES OUT FOR LIL’ ONES What does a San Francisco look like where everyone is safe to ride their bikes? Well, a lot like next Thursday, April 7, we hope. That’s the day that 3,000 (at least) schoolkiddos will be hopping their two-wheelers to over 40 different schools. The San Francisco Safe Routes to School program is still looking for volunteer bike chaperones and mechanics to help families for the day, who wants to put on their teacher’s hat?
Betabrand’s Greed Pants: but one of many ways to support your local manufacturers
>>MADE YOU LOOK What do a Dogpatch bike bag factory, a fancy men’s shirt maker, SF’s biggest beer brand, and a socially-conscious print shop have in common? They’re all members of SFMade, a business association comprised of companies that manufacture their goodies inside city limits. Need to know more? The NYT gave them a sterling writeup in the op-ed section this past Sunday.
>>SKOOL SOMEBODY East Bay Free Skool‘s starting a newsletter for adherents to its circus skill-sharing-Spanish learning-urban studying sessions for the shallow-pocketed, yet deserving-of-education masses. And the skool longs for your voice to be represented within its Xeroxed reams! Holler at eastbayfs@gmail.com if you’ve got a tale to tell from a class you’ve gone to/taught at, submissions due by Friday, April 1.
>>LISTEN UP SLACKERS SF’s own Jenny Blake, a Career Development Program Manager at Google – something like an internal cheerleader and guidance counselor for the Google masses – launches her book today, Life After College: The Complete Guide to Getting What You Want. Check out her blog to glower at the hundreds of pics in which Blake looks consistently clean and well-fed (something many of us post-collegiate-types still strive for), or simply check out her promo video – it’s filmed in front of the Bay Bridge, and there are some nice birds in the background.
>>GETTING STOKED FOR TOMORROW’S PET ISSUE After our slow loris scare yesterday we’re all on edge of the abuse of animals in adorable videos, but this one seems okay:
Dogboarding from DANIELS on Vimeo.
5 Things: March 28, 2011
>>AS IF WE WEREN’T ALREADY DISTURBED BY THE TIME WE SPEND WATCHING ANIMAL VIDEOS News broke last week that the slow loris is being poorly served indeed by its onslaught of Youtube celebrity. The poor little guys, native to Southeast and South Asia, are being illegally trafficked due to their increasing popularity as pets, leading to infection-causing teeth removals and other forms of abuse. Sickeningly enough, some of the web’s fave videos (like this one and this one) are actually shown to be footage of hurt animals. Ugh.
>>GETTING CHASED Divisadero neighbors and anti-bankists (or at least anti-other people’s bankists) are still down on the idea of Chase Bank locating a branch at the corner of Divisadero and Oak streets. Banktivists showed up at an Appeals Board meeting March 16 to air their gripes, along with a contingent of neighbors and others who would rather see a bank branch than the grubby-window eyesore that has reined since Martini Cleaners vacated almost four years ago. The two businesses everyone liked – Country Cheese and Five Star Truffles (now in the Castro) – are already gone, which leaves one looming question about what Chase will bring: will the Wells Fargo ATM at the back of the building have to go, or do financiers of a feather flock together?
>>GOT PLANS TOMORROW NIGHT? You can meet us at the Lex for penny shots (yes, that means shots of liquor for one red cent) from 8:45-9 p.m., just like every other Tuesday. From 9-10 p.m. it’s two-for-one beers and mixed drinks. Penny shots: the perfect time to get wasted and talk about Abe Lincoln.
>>BARGAIN UP P-Kok on Haight Street is closing. But wait — P-Kok on Haight Street is not closing. And — P-Kok on Haight Street is opening! All true truths. Let us explain. P-Kok No. 1, at 791 Haight Street, is indeed closing, but P-Kok No. 2, the one across the street with the sauna and wild spa nights at 776 Haight, is staying open. And P-Kok No. 3, is moving uptown (well, the Upper Haight, anyway) to Haight and Masonic. So don’t worry. But do get over to 791 for some remarkable deals. The store slashed prices 50 percent to 70 percent and P-Kok’s clothes, jewelry, stockings, scarves, hats, boas, etc. have always been high on the fun-and-sexy-o-meter. Together, we can clean the place.
>>KILLING US We’re already begun sensei training with neo-soulman Aloe Blacc – gotta pick up those rubber-limbed dance moves – but only because the kid in this video was unavailable.
5 Things: March 25, 2011
>>I DREAMED MY BIKE HAD FENDERS… Should the rain keep up you will need a weekend project and more pots to catch the surprising amount of leaks a Victorian can accumulate in 100-odd years. But we’ve got you on the project: dream catcher 101, courtesy of ridiculously intriguing Portland style blogger Jena Coray. Ms. Coray’s site, Modish, can be depended on for ravishing vintage photographs interspersed with cute-as-a-button used uniform jackets, locally made jewelery, and snippets on that most haute of Portland pastimes, gardening. Nightmares begone!
>>MOUSE IS IN THE HOUSE Caught live painting at the Fillmore’s Craft Brewers Conference event last night: famous psychedelic poster artist Stanley Mouse, who was creating canvasses of bizarre creatures knocking back suds — only slightly less bizarre than the bearded creatures knocking back suds that surrounded him, talking about how they “used to spend soo much time looking at those posters back in the Dead days, man.” Mouse had a copy of his 1992 book out on a nearby table: Freehand: The Art of Stanley Mouse. It looked. Awesome.
>>BUN YOU Can the tasty, inexpensive Vietnamese sandwiches known as bahn mi, responsible for those lunchtime lines outside Saigon Sandwich in the Tenderloin, make the journey uptown? We’ll find out on April 1 when Bun Mee opens on Fillmore Street in Pac Heights, right next to the MAC cosmetics bar and directly across from preppy magnet the Grove. Even more pertinent: will the new location put an end to honest Vietnamese classics like head cheese and pork belly, or if it will fit in with its surrounding environs by Frenchifying and Californicating its menu with items like duck confit and braised rabbit bahn mi?
>>SQUID SCIENCE Few things gross us out – er, awaken our awe of nature – more than the slinky, writhing column that is the squid. And so it is with great trepidation and masochistic glee that we await Wendy William’s new book Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid. Apparently, the fish (are they fish? Mollusks? We don’t even know) might be able to help us out with that whole solving Alzheimer’s thing. She comes to the Booksmith to talk about the thing on April 27. Shiver.
>>BREAD OR DEAD We love Acme, we adore Arizmendi — but sorry y’all, the Honey Whole Wheat Bread from Edith’s Baking Co. Modesto is like the filet mignon of baked goods. Seriously, we want to use a steak knife on that toasted goodness, it’s that thick and rich. You can grab a weighty loaf at the Heart of the City Farmers Market in the Civic Center all day on Wednesdays and Sundays.
5 Things: March 24, 2011
>>BEES ARE BACK IN TOWN On March 24, Hayes Valley Farm welcomes back the bees. Hives previously kept at the urban farm were wiped out by a mysterious pesticide sabotage, but head beekeeper Karen Peteros, co-founder of San Francisco Bee-Cause, has stayed busy bringing the pollinators back. Tonight’s oddly matched Return of the Bees event at the Korean American Community Center will feature a discussion about the new hives, as well as a meet-and-greet with San Francisco Sups. Jane Kim (D-6) and Scott Wiener (D-8) and Ross Mirkarimi (D-5). Catching the buzz of urban farming politics? Become a budding apiarist by signing up for an urban beekeeping workshop.
>>A NEW KIND OF NINJA A recent New York Times editorial by 24-year-old Matthew Klein started out by drawing a parallel between Western youth and those young people in the Arab world who keep fomenting uprisings. “We all enjoy speculating about which Arab regime will be toppled next, but maybe we should be looking closer to home. High unemployment? Check. Out-of-touch elites? Check. Frustrated young people?” he wrote. “About one-fourth of Egyptian workers under 25 are unemployed, a statistic that is often cited as a reason for the revolution there. In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in January an official unemployment rate of 21 percent for workers ages 16 to 24.” What all these unemployed young’uns do with all their free time? Apparently, they re-imagine themselves as ninjas on YouTube.
>>GENDER MYSTIC Didik Nini Thowok, a popular dancer, choreographer and comedian from Indonesia, will be in San Francisco April 21 through 24. According to a post on the Asian Art Museum website, “Didik is one of the few remaining Indonesian dancers today who explores transgender culture and its historical connection with mystical practices in Indonesia.” Didik will give a short talk about his creative process and a dance performance, followed by audience Q&A, on Saturday, April 23 at the Asian Art Museum. The talk is free with museum admission.
You know your spring closet is begging for this Dry Bones “Hep Cat” button-down from Self Edge. Buy it Saturday AND help out communities in Japan? Me-yow.
>>LAND OF THE RISING CREDIT CARD BILL Bust out those pocketbooks, cause it’s time to lend a hand across the Pacific. Local retailers like Valencia Corridor holder-downers Five and Diamond, Self Edge, and The Summit are among those participating in Saturday’s worldwide Shop For Japan event. So open up that studded hand-tooled leather clutch, dive into the pocket of your artisan Japanese jeans, indulge your soy mocha addiction — whatever, just do it to it, moneybags.
>>UGLY DOG, PRETTY CAUSE Can’t hardly wait for this summer’s Petaluma Sonoma-Marin Fair ugliest dog contest? The O.G. ugly dog pagaent has spawned its share of imitation events and Associated Press kowtows, and now there’s a kooky little documentary about the bonkers owners that parade their boxers with underbites and Chinese crested with… well, the typical Chinese crested attributes, with a little extra wartage and askew tounge thrown into the mix. Assuage your barely contained anticipation with tonight’s Worst in Show screening in Berkeley. Bonus: half of your ticket price goes to help out East Bay furry friends! That’s enough to make us wanna grab some fuzzy hips and f’in conga:
5 Things: March 23, 2011
>>PILLOW TALK “Luxury-tech” home furnishings line DQtrs is releasing a really clever collection of limited edition tapestry wall hangings and pillows that links ancient Greco-Roman imagery and Sputnik-era space age fantasies. (Cue the gorgeous Apollo jokes.) Catch the launch tomorrow (3/24) at nifty Hayes Valley store Propeller, 6 p.m.-9 p.m. Plus: Food trucks!
>> SAFETY IN BURGERS? Thai didn’t fly, French didn’t fry, and now, after months of pondering grungy vacant windows, Greenburger’s burger joint has opened at 518 Haight Street. The latest entrant in this ill-fated spot, which looks out onto views of a Muni stop and Toronado street ruckus, is couple-run operation specializing in beef and veggie burgers, sweet potato fries and burger-y sides, milkshakes, salads, and so on, all with a greenish (grass fed, locally sourced, yadda, yadda, yadda) cast. The street has seen its share of flux lately — Pandora’s trunk, gone; Burger Joint, gone; RNM gone — so let’s hope that “sustainable” burgers are the elusive thing that Lower Haightians have been waiting for
>>CLAM-A-RAMA PART I This week’s issue of the Guardian captures the latest wave of Bay Area garage rock, with special attention to what makes it unique and even innovative. When she isn’t rocking the mic with Shannon and the Clams, current Guardian cover star Shannon Shaw is trading vocals with Hunx (a.k.a. Seth Bogart). The most recent addition to Hunx’s colorful music videos, directed by longtime collaborator Justin Kelly, “Too Young to Be in Love” provides an alternate, uptempo version of the title track on the group’s new album. Take a fateful trip to an endangered Coney Island and ride the Cyclone of love with Hunx, Shaw, and a fickle cutie. (Keep an eye out for a cameo by director Kelly — whose editing creates all kinds of architectural rhymes — at the very end.)
>>CLAM-A-RAMA PART II On the subject of Shaw, two YouTube preview clips showcase songs from Shannon and the Clams’ new album Sleep Talk, as well as amazing shots of the band by local photographer (and 2007 Guardian “Flaming Creator” honoree) Keith Aguiar. “The Cult Song” starts out with a harmonic reference to Tod Browning’s Freaks that doubles as a a nod to the Ramones before making a break from mind control. And then there’s Sleep Talk‘s hair-raising title track, which finds Shaw at her most sultry and powerful.
>>YOUCOLLAGE Youtube musical mosaic genius Kutiman just released another stunner …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIl4LkHYRkg
Our weekly Picks: March 23-29, 2011
THURSDAY 24
MUSIC
Music For Animals
The catchy tunes of the self-proclaimed “cult” Music For Animals — San Francisco quartet Nick Bray (guitar), Jay Martinovich (vocals), Eli Meyskens (bass guitar), and Ryan Malley (drums) — evoke 1980s classic pop rock while simultaneously embodying the twee music of the here-and-now. While comparisons have been drawn to other electropop acts like the Killers and Kaiser Chiefs, Music for Animals’ neon-retro fans have embraced the band as its own indie rock entity. Its high-energy shows can include wacky antics, making for a perfect opportunity to bust a move. Join the cult! (Jen Verzosa)
With Foreign Resort and Matinees
9 p.m., $8
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
FILM
Disposable Film Festival
Hollywood churns out a huge number of what you might call disposable films (Drive Angry 3D: use once and destroy). San Francisco’s Disposable Film Festival applies the adjective instead to the technology used to create each of its entries: readily available and often handheld devices like cell phones, point-and-shoot cameras, webcams, and so on. Celebrate the all-access-ness of 21st century filmmaking by checking out tonight’s always-popular competitive shorts program; weekend events include an industry panel entitled “How to Become A Disposable De Palma,” a spotlight on filmmaker Christopher McManus, a concert and workshop with YouTube music-video darlings Pomplamoose, and more. (Cheryl Eddy)
Through Sun/27
Competitive shorts night tonight, 8 p.m., $12
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
EVENT
Neil Strauss
I’m not sure what I like most about Neil Strauss. A six-time New York Times best-selling author and contributing editor at Rolling Stone, he coauthored memoirs with Jenna Jameson and Mötley Crüe. He lived with Dave Navarro for a year and went undercover in the “seduction community” to write about pick-up artists. He was in Beck’s gloriously goofy “Sexx Laws” video. His new book of celebrity chatter, Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead: Journeys Into Fame and Madness, features pop culture personalities from Britney Spears to Stephen Colbert. But his 227 “moments of truth” aren’t in-depth, traditional Q&A pieces. Instead, Strauss wove together the most intriguing few minutes of each interview. Huh? How? Ask him yourself. (Kat Renz)
7:30 p.m., free
Booksmith
1644 Haight, SF
(415) 863-8688
MUSIC
Phantom Kicks
Taking after the Grizzly Bear-meets-Radiohead, now-disbanded Raised By Robots, the San Francisco-based trio of Tanner Pikop (guitar-vocals-keyboard), Phil Pristia (guitar-vocals), and Mike Rieger (drums) — better known as Phantom Kicks — is experimental, ethereal post-punk born of white space à la the xx. Even without an album, Phantom Kicks’ eerie electro pop has garnered notoriety throughout the Bay Area after gigs at numerous local venues and festivals, sharing the bill with other local indie greats like My First Earthquake, the Dont’s, Skeletal System, and Sunbeam Rd. And its days as a live-only entity are soon to end: Phantom Kicks’ debut EP, Tectonics, is due in April. (Verzosa)
With Adventure and Exray’s
8 p.m., $6
Milk Bar
1840 Haight, SF
FILM
San Francisco Dance Film Festival
Now in its second year, the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, presented by Motion Pictures and the Ninth Street Independent Film Center, features three evenings of screenings as well as workshops on shooting and editing dance footage. In addition to selections of work by local and international dance filmmakers, Friday night’s lineup includes the San Francisco premiere of NY Export: Opus Jazz, a reimagining of Jerome Robbins’ 1958 “ballet in sneakers” danced by members of the New York City Ballet. This is the first return of Robbins’ choreography to the streets of New York City since the 1961 movie version of West Side Story. (Julie Potter)
Through Sat/26
6:30, 8, and 9:15 p.m., $10
Ninth Street Independent Film Center
145 Ninth St., SF
(415) 625-6100
FRIDAY 25
PERFORMANCE
Free: Voices from Beyond the Curbside
Destiny Arts Center in Oakland has been around so long — it was founded in 1988 — that you tend to take it for granted. Better stop doing that, especially in this climate of shrinking resources for socially-engaged arts programs. Destiny provides a safe place, activities, and role models during after school, weekend, and summer programs. Students ages three to 18 learn martial arts, dance (modern, hip-hop, and aerial), theater, self-defense, and conflict resolution. All these elements come into play one more time during this year’s Destiny Youth Company’s big-time production at Laney College. Created by the students with the guidance of adult artist-teachers, Free explores concepts of personal and social freedom (and the lack thereof). The program also features documentary filmmaker David Collier’s video of the process that made Free possible. (Rita Felciano)
Through April 3
Fri.–Sat., 7:30 p.m. (also April 2–3, 2 p.m.), $6–$25
Laney College
900 Fallon, Oakl.
1-800-838-3006
ROCK
Vastum
Vastum, from the Latin vastus: immense. Empty. Wasted. It’s easy to feel that way bumbling home from a dime-a-dozen metal show — depthless, bored, and boozed. But the three times I’ve seen Vastum, I almost pissed myself with joy: my fingers can form horns again, my head bangs rather than bobbles, my tired faith is revived. With members from two stalwart San Francisco bands, Saros and Acephalix, the five-piece delivers precision death metal with a little punk, classically fast and aggressive with none of the cheesiness often befalling the genre. The venue’s a gem, too: an all-ages Oakland warehouse run by an old-school artist and a gargantuan raptor. (Renz)
With Embers, Atriarch, and Headless Lizzy and Her Icebox Pussy
9 p.m., $6
First Church of the Buzzard
2601 Adeline, Oakland
Facebook: Vastum
MUSIC
Wye Oak
Rock duos tend to strive toward sounding greater than their parts. Wye Oak, composed of Baltimore-based musicians Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack, are no exception. Rather than pure bombast, the two play into the contradiction of expectations on almost every track. Wasner’s guitar and lyricism are the initial focus, typically heavily folk-influenced backed by true multi-instrumentalist Stack, who plays drums and keyboard at the same time. As the melodic verses build into the explosive choruses, so do the 1990s alternative rock influences, recalling Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, and My Bloody Valentine. It’s an attention-grabbing effect and in a smaller venue should be impossible to ignore. (Ryan Prendiville)
With Callers and Sands
10 p.m., $12
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
(415) 621-4455
SATURDAY 26
DANCE
“Pilot 58: Fight or Flight”
It may not take a village to produce a dance concert, but a collective of choreographers sure makes the process more creative and exciting. Or at least that’s the lesson gleaned from the participants in Pilot, ODC’s self-producing incubator that selects six dance artists to work together on a shared bill. Known as a springboard for emerging choreographers, Pilot showcases new and under-the-radar dance from fresh choreographic voices: Raisa Punkki, Byb Chanel Bibene, Bianca Cabrera, Katharine Hawthorne, Ashley Johnson, and Erica Jeffrey. Arriving at choreography through notably different experiences, the evening brings a host of ideas to the table, from moving light sources to little dance cartoons. (Potter)
Sat/26–Sun/27, 8 p.m. (also Sun/27, 4 p.m.), $12
ODC Studio B
351 Shotwell, SF
(415) 863-6606
SUNDAY 27
MUSIC
Rotting Christ
Though not as famed as other loci of Lucifer, Greece has a long and distinguished black metal history. Delightfully named Rotting Christ was founded in 1987 by brothers Sakis and Themis Tolis, who have been plying their blast-beaten trade ever since, much to the dismay of born-again Christian headbanger Dave Mustaine of Megadeth, who refused to play at a Greek music festival once he learned that Rotting Christ was on the bill. The hellbound Hellenic quartet is joined on its current tour by cult favorites Melechesh, a “Mesopotamian” metal band — composed of Israeli expatriates based in Amsterdam — whose distinctive sound combines razor-wire riffing with idiosyncratic Middle Eastern harmonies and rhythms. On a more somber note, this show will be the last promoted by Shawn “Whore for Satan” Phillips, whose retirement will be a deeply-felt loss for metal, both in San Francisco and elsewhere. (Ben Richardson)
With Melechesh, Hate, Abigail Williams, and Lecherous Nocturne
7:30 p.m., $25
DNA Lounge
375 11th St., SF
(415) 626-1409
MONDAY 28
MUSIC
Röyksopp
Fame can go in divergent ways. For Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp, the breakthrough was “Remind Me,” a catchy 2002 cut featuring vocals from Kings of Convenience’s Erlend Øye. In the U.K. it picked up Best Video at the Europe Music Awards that year. In the U.S., however, a version of the song is associated with a Geico commercial featuring a caveman. Look past that though, as the pair of musicians have otherwise proven themselves as standouts on the electronic scene, releasing ethereal downtempo compositions. Live, their performances are more amped up and free-ranging, involving unexpected covers like Queens of the Stone Age’s “Go With The Flow.” (Prendiville)
With Jon Hopkins
8 p.m., $30
Regency Ballroom
1300 Van Ness, SF
1-800-745-3000
TUESDAY 29
DANCE
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Under the directorship of Judith Jamison, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater became the country’s most popular dance troupe, with an impressive infrastructure and a $3 million budget. Now it will be up to Robert Battle, its new artistic director, to build a repertoire that matches the troupe’s organizational achievements. His appointment was something of a surprise; he never danced with Ailey and, at 37. he is young to assume that kind of responsibility. (Jamison was 43). Programs A and C on this year’s Zellerbach schedule each feature one of his choreographies. Whatever he does in terms of programming, he is not likely to offer fewer glimpses of Revelations, the company’s bread and butter. But how about presenting it with live music? The Bay Area has some excellent gospel choirs. (Felciano)
March 29–April 2, 8 p.m. (also April 2, 2 p.m.);
April 3, 3 p.m., $34–$62
8 p.m., $34–$62
Zellerbach Hall
Bancroft at Telegraph, Berk.
(510) 642-9988
The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.
5 Things: March 22, 2011
>>SUPERMOON SUPERSOUND Miss the GIANT SUPERMOON this weekend? Hell, we all did – it was storming cats and dogs (interestingly enough, Polish soulful techno DJ duo Catz ‘n Dogz were here this weekend as well, and they were magnificent, as always.) In any case, in memoriam and fantasy, here’s a special electronic “Supermoon Mix” by DJ Deevice, voted Best Radio DJ in our 2010 Best of the Bay Readers Poll:
DJ Deevice “Super Moon” mix by DJ Deevice
>>IN OTHER NATURE NEWS Octopi are storming the Embaracadero – and ready your barbed wire trucks, because they’re here to stop you from skateboarding. We don’t know how long these lovingly crafted, yet grind-deterring metal starfish, sea tortises, and eight-legged have been adorning the lips of concrete benches over by Waterbar and the Raygun Gothic Spaceship, but the fun police has arrived, and it is packing tentacles.
This week on octopus fun police…
>>CAUTION: ANOTHER THING TO WASTE YOUR TIME ON THE INTERNET In a city that knows how to toe the line between fun and just plain foolish, it’s good to know that we have resources available to help keep safety, if not at the forefront, then at least in the marginalized auxilIary regions of everyone’s mind. So whether you’re planning on unleashing live bison at your next warehouse rager, upgrading your upcoming Critical Mass ride to include a contingent of flame-throwing robotic rhinoceroses, or setting up a road-side stand for DIY weld-on chastity belts, just remember: there’s a sign for that.
>>WHITE LINES FOR YOU AND FOR ME Two wags of our handlebars for the new Potrero Hill 17th street bike lanes! The Bike Coalition explains this was all part of their nefarious plan for 30 miles of (relatively) worry-free bike glory.
>>SADDLE UP YOUR BAY MARE … and ride out for an upcoming exploration of our outer neighborhood’s high-steppin’ pony days — the adorably monikered Woody LaBounty of the Western Neighborhood’s Association, purveyor of amazing snippets from San Franciscos past like the book about the Sunset’s boho gypsy street car roots, will be sharing the story of the neighborhood that’s the midway point between City College and SF State. His yarn takes place Tuesday, March 28 and will involve horsies, a turf rivalry with Bayview, and what it all said about the country’s developement at the time… go here for info.
Beats the K-Ingleside any day
5 Things: March 22, 2011
>>1. MIGHTY BIG HEAD Definitely check out the new Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico exhibit at the de Young — the museum’s permanent Oceania collection is jutifiably famous (and controversial), and the level of expertise at showcasing indigenous culture and art bleeds perfectly into the realm of ancient Veracruzians as well …
>>2. TEENAGE KICKS OFF Here’s a teaser and blog for Teenage, the new film by Matt Wolf, director of the beautiful Arthur Russell doc Wild Combination. Wolf’s new movie is based on a book by Jon Savage, and grew out of Wolf’s experience as a pubescent, zine-producing Smiths fan in the 1990s.
>>3. FALLOUT FREE (SO FAR) The Guardian’s systems administrator, Adam, fashioned a Geiger counter over the weekend, and today used it to measure the radioactivity on the dust collected in his car filter during his commute from the East Bay (apparently this is a good thing to measure.) The verdict? All is normal! Average count is 21 counts per minute.
>>4. ANCHOR GETS HEAVY Brit liquor mogul Keith Greggor is settling into his place at the helm of Anchor Brewery and now the 115 year old SF craft brewery looks to make waves in the future of the city’s booze tourism. The company’s looking to expand its distilling operations (currently occupying a forklift-guarded section behind the brewery’s bottle line) into a building across the street. More accesible, plus more room for making 125 proof 18th century-style whiskies.Below, a pic of the Anchor staff in 1978.
>>5. STEAM IT OUT OK the world seems crazy right now? If you have an extra $25 to spare (we don’t usually, either, but we scraped it up), a trip to the Kabuki Springs and Spa in Japantown for a couple hours of steaming, sauna, soaking, and meditation really does help.