Berlin Carillon Bell Tower at Tiergarten by Jayme Catsouphes

Bayern v Chelsea Champions League Final ends in penalty kicks by Jayme Catsouphes

Saturday night jazz at Club Deluxe by Jayme Catsouphes

Chapter 1 - https://soundcloud.com/jcatsoup/filmfatale-dark-times-for#t=2m35s

Chapter 2 - https://soundcloud.com/jcatsoup/filmfatale-dark-times-for#t=5m35s

Take a walk down any major street in San Francisco and you’ll see them: dead movie theaters. Corpses. It’s hard not to shudder when you walk past one – the doors locked and covered with plywood, the entrance collecting tin cans and old newspapers. The theater’s once grand marquee, now deprived of the electricity needed to power the lights, seems gaudy and hubristic. These are dark times for movie theaters.

On July 25, 2011, The Red Vic Theater became the city’s latest victim. It had just turned 31 years old. When I arrived on the scene – San Francisco’s iconic Haight Street – the theater lay in critical condition. One of the Red Vic’s guardians, Jack Rix, let me in to examine the victim, his theater. It was a bright sunny day, and Rix seemed to be in a relatively cheerful mood, despite the recent tragedy.

Once inside, I saw they were doing some emergency reconstructive surgery to keep the Red Vic alive.

“This is the old Red Vic auditorium. The permanent fixed seats have all been taken out. They were sort of like church pews, which we always thought was quite appropriate because this was the Temple of Film,” Rix said.

Back in the projection room, the heart of the theater, it appeared that the Red Vic had a bum ticker.

Rix explained, “We’re finding we need to take out the old Red Vic projector, the 35 mm. Apparently, what they’re saying is they’re going to quit making 35 mm movies as of next year.”

“They,” meaning the Hollywood movie industry. Tinseltown. And when they go digital, it’s all digital, everywhere. A brand new digital projector for the Red Vic could easily cost $70,000 – an expensive procedure with a small chance of success in this case.

As I poked around in dusty corners of the old theater, one fact became clear – the Red Vic would never be the same. I needed to know more about the theater’s past. Rix was happy to oblige.

“The Red Vic was so eclectic, we played everything. We would show a political documentary, then a second run title, then something crazy like The Room, the Citizen Kane of bad movies. We always tried to program what we called ‘Red Vic films’ and it was something you could never define. Sometimes it was high art, sometimes it was low art, but it was always film as art.” Rix said the audience for these screenings steadily declined. “Toward the end, we probably had a group of maybe 20 or 30 people, on a good night, who would still show up for the movies.”

The theater was dying. Slowly. Even more disturbing, Rix seemed to believe that the Red Vic was just the latest in a series of attacks. He pulled out the documents that appeared to prove it.

“This is interesting, looking at the San Francisco movie list, there are all these downtown theaters - The Electric, which I don’t even remember, the Embassy, St. Francis 1 and 2, and the Strand - those are all gone. The Alexandria’s gone, the Alhambra’s gone, the Balboa is still going, thank goodness.”

Rix’s list continued on an on, but I had heard what I needed. The Balboa was a living witness. I was on my way.

Located in San Francisco’s outerlands, The Balboa is the westernmost theater in the continental US. Its massive marquee shines through the fog like a beacon. And it was there, in a closet-sized office, that I found the man I was looking for. Roger Paul is the general manager of the Balboa Theater. On the day of our meeting, he was wearing a bowler cap and a white t-shirt.

I asked him if he knew anyone who might want to see the Red Vic dead.

“You know, back in the day, two theaters that really had a fierce competition with each other at one time were the Red Vic and the Roxie,” said Paul, contemplatively.

Was that it? An inside job? A fierce rivalry between two theaters that ended with the Red Vic beaten and bloodied? No. Not here. These days, independen

In 2008, double bassist and founder of the Musical Art Quintet, Sascha Jacobsen regularly attended the Sunday night chamber music jams at Cafe Revolution. But after his umpteenth time through Dvorak’s Opus 77, String quartet No. 2 in G major – one of the few chamber music standards that includes double bass – he realized that if he wanted to play something else, he’d have to write it himself.

Now, after 3 years of experimentation, composition, and revision, Jacobsen presents Nuevo Chamber – an innovative collection of new chamber music that draws on unique musical traditions like tango, Afro-Cuban jazz and electronica to create songs that are complex, compelling, and universally appealing.

KALW’s Jayme Catsouphes brings us this Bay Area Beats profile of the Musical Art Quintet.

SASHA JACOBSEN: The Musical Art Quintet formed at Café Revolution during the Classical Revolution jam sessions that are held every Monday night. When we first founded Classical Revolution, the idea was to have a weekly classical jam session where people could just show up and read through chamber music. And I would show up. I’m a bassist, so there’s basically one piece of chamber music in the standard rep that has bass in it, and we played that piece. And then the next week, we played it again. And the following week, I was like, “Well, I don’t even really like this piece. I’m gonna have to write some new material.”

I ended up writing a piece and I would bring it in to Café Revolution and we would – whoever was there – would sight-read through it. Then the following week, I would write up another piece. I would be furiously composing and I would print it out. I would run down to the café and we would just sight-read it.

Every piece that I write, it’s based on a rhythm. And then I carry that through the whole piece. For instance, the milonga rhythm, which is from Argentina and has African roots, is basically this rhythm – when they teach it to the dancers they say, “Francisco SAN, Francisco SAN, Francisco SAN.”

The Musical Art Quintet is a classical ensemble in the sense that it is a string quintet, string quartet plus bass. But the music we play is definitely heavily influenced by Afro-Cuban music, jazz, even electronica. A lot of the sound effects that I try to get my musicians to employ, a lot of them come from Argentine tango. I love the sounds and I think it really adds a new texture to the music. It’s not something that we do all the time, it’s just in certain key moments that we use them. And I always think, “Oh, the poor instruments.” If the instrument makers could see and hear what we’re doing to these instruments, they’d be rolling over in their graves. We’re playing these hundreds of year old instruments. My bass is over 150 years old. The violins can be over 200 years old. And we’re hitting them and we’re scraping them and scratching them and all these weird ways.

There’s a sound effect called “chichara” which means cicada, and it’s a really scratchy sound where they actually bow behind the bridge, and it goes “chicachicachhhhh.” It sounds like a giant insect is flying around or something.

My poor bass, we were playing this benefit last January for the Pakistani flood victims at Brick and Mortar, and I was doing some percussion on my bass and I slapped my bass with my thumb and the whole bass broke apart on stage. It just cracked open, like an egg, and I was just standing there in shock going, “Oh my god.”

I think sometimes people see the group and they go, “Oh, this is going to be boring. This is going to be classical music. It’s going to be lame.” And then we have this high energy style and we just start tearing into it and we’re not sitting down, we’re standing up and we’re moving around and we’re improvising, and so I think it kind of surprises them.

On this album, Nuevo Chamber, what we’re trying to do is bring new audiences into chamber music, to bring new life to chamber music, which is really just all abo

That 52-inch flat-screen TV you just bought your loved one (or yourself) for the holidays should be arriving any day now. And what a deal – nice picture, good price, delivered right to your door. And since you made the purchase online, you weren’t charged California sales tax for that shiny new piece of technology.

Here’s the thing though: there’s a good chance you owe the California government some money. And the state needs it. You know it and Governor Jerry Brown knows it.

In what he called an “Open Letter to the People of California,” yesterday Governor Jerry Brown announced his intention to raise the state income and sales tax. The Governor says the measure will raise $7 billion in new funds for education and public safety. It’s not the first time the Governor has tried to find a way to increase sales tax revenue. In September, he asked online retailer Amazon [dot] com to start charging sales tax on products it sold to Californians. To date, they haven’t collected a cent.

So why wasn’t Amazon charging Californians sales tax in the first place?

To answer that, we have to go back to 1992. In a case called Quill vs. North Dakota, the Supreme Court ruled that retailers do not have to collect sales tax for any state they don’t have a physical presence in. In other words, Quill Corporation, with its headquarters in Delaware, didn’t have to collect sales tax for mail-order purchases made by customers in North Dakota, for example.

So today, under the same laws and reasoning, it means an online retailer like Amazon, with its headquarters in Seattle, doesn’t have to collect sales tax in California.

But just because the ruling exempts companies from collecting a tax, it doesn’t mean that the citizens are exempt from paying one.

The government still needs the money, so they just change the name from “sales tax” to “use tax.” Nomenclature aside, the money owed is pretty much the same.

If this is news to you, you’re not alone. A lot of people don’t know that the use tax exists, which is a big part of the problem. And the California state government has only one weapon to fight use tax evaders/neglectors - the tax audit, which is a very consuming ordeal with serious repercussions, especially when it’s carried out on the state level.

But the thing is, fighting use tax evaders with an audit is like trying to kill a cloud of mosquitoes with rifle. You might completely obliterate a handful of mosquitoes, but it’s not going to fix the problem.

All the same, California has a big mosquito problem. Amazon [dot] com is the nation’s number one online retailer. Number two is Staples. They collected $160 million for California state government in the year 2010. So experts estimate Amazon should be collecting somewhere around $200 million each year for California. And that’s money the state needs badly – about $20 billion badly.

Governor Brown began to search for a solution back in June of 2011. After some posturing and huffing and puffing from all sides, Amazon [dot] com ultimately agreed to go hand-in-hand with the state of California and local brick-and-mortar retailers to pass a nationwide bill that simplifies the tax code and mandates that online retailers collect sales tax for all states. Plain. Simple. But nothing has actually been passed yet.

The proposed solution is pretty good – governments get their sales tax money, Amazon [dot] com would be free to establish warehouses and headquarters wherever they want and physical retailers will no longer feel like online retailers are getting an unjust competitive advantage. But shoppers are arguably left holding the bag. The legislators behind the bill argue that they’re not creating any new tax, but in practice, it’s pretty much a legislative shakedown that will leave the people’s pockets a little less full.

Another possible solution is to abolish the sales tax entirely. Oregon, New Hampshire, and Alaska don't charge sales tax. The businesses there are happy and so are the people. “Ca

Music, as an industry, has found a consistent audience in young people for decades. But what music means to them is changing. Popular songs today often have less to do with singers than they do with the artistry of sound engineers (consider the production work on the new number one song in America: “I Wanna Go” by Britney Spears).

With sound editing programs, digital suites, and auto-tune at their disposal, the concept of live performances can seem like an afterthought. But a few artists, like Bay Area rapper Lyrics Born, are working hard to keep live music, well, alive. KALW’s Jayme Catsouphes has the story.

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JAYME CATSOUPHES: When you think about it, the whole notion of going to see live music is a bit twisted. I mean, you don’t go to the Louvre and listen to the “Mona Lisa.”

But traditionally speaking, music is performance art. It lives. It breathes. And recordings are just archives, snap shots, the postcard you pick up as you exit through the gift shop.

Music is supposed to be perceived through all five senses.

June 25, 1972: third row at the LA Forum. Music looked like tight pants, big hair, a wall of speakers. It smelled like an ashtray, tasted like a beer and felt like the deep rumbling bass of John Bonham’s kick drum.

Some details just don’t quite make it onto the recording.

And that’s why every summer, music fans travel across the country to attend big music festivals to see their favorite artists live and in person.

But putting on a jaw-dropping live show is complicated, especially when you’re a musician who uses a lot of electronics. In hip-hop for example, it’s not uncommon for an album to be recorded, cut, and sold, all without anyone playing a single instrument.

How do you turn that into a live show?

Bay Area rapper Lyrics Born says that it takes a lot of work.

LYRICS BORN: Interpreting hip-hop live, it’s always been an interesting thing to watch, with people that do it well. People can listen to your music in their car, or at home, or on the computer. You don't necessarily pay to see somebody perform to get the same experience. You want it to be exciting. You want to walk away from it feeling like, “Oh wow. More dimension has just been added to what I’ve previously been listening to.”

Which is one of the reasons why this seasoned producer chooses to perform with a live band.

LYRICS BORN: For me, I find myself frequently taking the original recording and wanting to provide a departure, for both the listener and also myself. Maybe you want to extend it or change certain things about the recording or the tempo, the groove. I mean, you just have a lot of flexibility when you play with a band.

And adding live musicians makes the show more exciting for the audience. Fans get to look at the players, see their instruments, visually connect that with the sound...

GONZALO CASTRO: And I was happily surprised by how much more went into the production.

Gonzalo Castro first saw Lyrics Born at San Francisco’s Outside Lands music festival.

CASTRO: There was a horn section, two drummers, a bongo section, backup singers, a full live band, guitar, bass, so I was kind of surprised at the production of it all. It just had a different feel to it, the music, because it wasn’t studio-based.

For some fans, that’s a good thing. But Lyrics Born says there’s a flip side.

LYRICS BORN: A lot of people come to the shows and they wanna see, or hear, the music be different – but not that different. You don’t want to stray too far from the original feeling.

With a genre like hip-hop that’s both rhythmic and poetic, playing a live show in front of thousands of fans requires making a few artistic concessions.

GEORGE ELLETT: Sometimes the lyrics go over your head because it is live. And if they have a live band, you’re kind of distracted.

George Ellett Smith is a longtime Lyrics Born fan.

ELLETT: But it’s always cool to see how the emcee … his mannerisms and the way he carries his flows. So that way, when you’re actually l

HOST: From KALW News in San Francisco, I'm Casey Miner with this local news update.

Advocates of same-sex marriage are celebrating in San Francisco today, after a federal court ruled California's Proposition 8 unconstitutional. The majority decision upholds a lower court ruling against the ballot measure, which has banned same-sex unions since 2008. KALW's Jayme Catsouphes has more.

AMBI Cheering

CATSOUPHES: The court found that Prop 8 lessens “the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California.” Earlier today, dozens of people gathered outside the federal building to celebrate the 2 to 1 decision. Joe Capley-Alfano said he and his husband have been worn down by discrimination.

CAPLEY-ALFANO: I grew up hearing the messages that I didn’t matter and that I could never fall in love, and that gays were incapable of loving, and other horrible stereotypes like that. And I’m really happy now that the next generation of kids don’t have to grow up that way. They get to grow up in a world where they are included and accepted and treated as equals, and that’s an amazing thing.

CATSOUPHES: San Francisco Supervisor Scott Weiner represents the Castro District – the same district that Harvey Milk represented 30 years ago. Milk was the city’s first openly gay elected official.

WEINER: When Supervisor Milk was in office, it was a lot less clear whether LGBT people would ever get true equality in this country. Today, we can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel. We still have a ways to go but we can actually see the end game here, and that’s something that I’m sure Harvey Milk is smiling from heaven right now.

CATSOUPHES: The ruling applies only to same-sex marriage in California. Proponents of Proposition 8 are expected to appeal to the US Supreme Court; the advocacy group Protect Marriage issued a statement saying today’s decision “disregards the will of 7 million Californians.” For KALW News, I’m Jayme Catsouphes.

San Francisco’s Bhi Bhiman set out from his home in St. Louis in pursuit of the mecca of classic rock and roll – a city where Jefferson Airplane still haunts the streets. But once he arrived on the west coast, Bhiman found only a few remnants of this once golden age of American music.

Not to be discouraged, the first-generation Sri Lankan singer/songwriter steeped himself in the rich American musical traditions of blues and folk.

On his self-titled debut album, BHIMAN, he weaves stories of heartbreak and suffering, told with a disarming blend of humor and sincerity.

HOST: Apple Store managers in major cities around the world, today, received a stack of papers bearing a quarter million signatures demanding Apple improve working conditions for employees in its manufacturing plants. KALW’s Jayme Catsouphes reports from near San Francisco’s Union Square.

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CATSOUPHES: At Apple’s flagship store in downtown San Francisco, representatives of Change [dot] org and the Apple retail workers union handed the documents to general manager Larry Verder.

VERDER [apple store manager] [3:19-:22]: Is that it? That’s quite a bit actually. Well thanks guys, thanks for bringing this up.

CATSOUPHES: The petition was inspired by recent reports of workplace abuses in Shenzhen, China, where many high tech components are made. Change [dot] org communications manager Charlotte Hill says she has an iPhone and a MacBook but doesn’t want to be complicit in worker abuses.

HILL [1:16-1:33]: 17sec As much as we love Apple we would love it so much more if we could trust that our products were being made by workers who were working regular hours who werent suffering from loss of the use of their hands, or from swollen legs or from neurological damage from chemicals being used in these factories.

CATSOUPHES: And Change [dot] org CEO Ben Rattray says it’s not just about Apple.

RATTRAY: [:40-50] If Apple changes its policies, it doesn’t change one company, because the iconic nature of this company, it changes two, and then ten, and then hundreds.

CATSOUPHES: Apple issued a response the the protest, saying, “We insist that our suppliers provide safe working conditions, treat workers with dignity and respect, and use environmentally responsible manufacturing processes wherever Apple products are made. Our suppliers must live up to these requirements if they want to keep doing business with Apple.” And Apple has made recent changes. Last month, the company joined the Fair Labor Association, which will independently report on workplace conditions in the factories of Apple’s suppliers. For KALW News, I’m Jayme Catsouphes, in San Francisco.