June Events at Station 40! STATION 40
3030B 16th Street San Francisco , CA
(across from the 16th & Mission BART)
Tuesday, June 8, 7PM
Open discussion and video screening about the recent
struggle against police violence in Portland, Oregon after the police
murder of Jack Dale Collins on March 22.
A participant in the struggle will be speaking about the organizing techniques
used as well as analyzing
the way the movement was perceived by Portland residents.
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Saturday, June 12 at 8:00 pm
Karaoke Night with KJ Soul Destroyer
$3-5 sliding scale donation (or pay what you can)
Power ballads, the punk rock glory days, sweet rhymes, and lonely country
songs. Show the world what you're made of. Blow some minds and some ear drums.
Cheap vegan food & drinks.
All proceeds go to benefit Station 40 as a radical community events space!
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Sunday, June 13th and June 27th 3-5pm: Letter-writing to comrades locked up.
This is a new regular event at Station 40. Come by and write a letter to a
friend, family member, political prisoner, or any prisoner!
Many of us often wish we got around to pen-paling with someone in jail. It is
some of the most important political work that anyone can take part in!
This is an informal get-together. There will be no expectation about who you
write to or why, the important thing is to make connections with those under
the thumb of the state.
We'll hopefully begin doing small 15-minute presentations about a prisoner in
need of support at the beginning of each meet-up. See ya there.
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Movies
Every Thursday Station 40 hosts free movie night after Food Not Bombs at
8:30PM!
For the month of June we are showing Queer films, not because Obama oh-so
liberally declared June "Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Month," but
because it has always been the month we remember how fabulously we queer folk
have kicked hetero-patriarchy ass throughout history. Double features this
month!
Thursday June 3:
Jihad for Love: (2007) In a time when Islam is under tremendous attack from
within and without, "A Jihad for Love" is a daring documentary filmed in twelve
countries and nine languages. Muslim gay filmmaker Parvez Sharma has gone where
the silence is loudest, filming with great risk in nations where government
permission to make this film was not an option. "A Jihad for Love" is the
world's first feature documentary to explore the complex global intersections
between Islam and homosexuality. Parvez enters the many worlds of Islam by
illuminating multiple stories as diverse as Islam itself. The film travels a
wide geographic arc presenting us lives from India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey,
Egypt, South Africa and France. Always filming in secret and as a Muslim,
Parvez makes the film from within the faith, depicting Islam with the same
respect that the film's characters show for it.
Breakfast on Pluto: (2005) An Irish boy becomes an emotional and sexual outcast
as the 1960s fade into the 1970s in this period drama from director
Neil_Jordan. When he was just a baby in the early '60s, Patrick Braden (Conor
McEvoy) was abandoned by his mother and left on the doorstep of a church
overseen by Father Bernard (Liam_Neeson). Placed in a foster home, sensitive
Patrick doesn't much care for the emotionally chilly attitude of his new
"family," and psychologically buffers himself against the world by writing
stories that make fun of Father Bernard and the other authority figures in his
life. As he grows into adulthood, Patrick (played as an adult by
Cillian_Murphy) also discovers that he enjoys dressing in women's clothes and
prefers the company of men, and as a teenager he falls into an affair with
Billy Hatchet (Gavin_Friday), a nightclub performer who also runs guns for the
Irish Republican Army. In the early '70s, Patrick -- who has since taken on the
drag name "Kitten" -- makes his way to London, where he becomes involved with
Bertie (Stephen_Rea), a small-time nightclub magician who gives the young man a
place to say, a sense of security, and a job as his on-stage assistant.
However, Patrick's idyllic life with Bertie proves short-lived when his old
friends come to town on IRA "business."
Thursday June 10:
Paris is Burning: (1990) Poignant, well-received documentary that reveals the
community of New York's minority drag queens, gay black and Latino men who
cross dress as women and invent the dance style of "voguing," imitating the
fashion poses on the covers of the magazine Vogue. As director Jennie
Livingston discovers, her subjects band together into family-like "houses" for
protection, taking the same last names and competing in drag balls where awards
are given out for authenticity or "realness," as well as other categories like
"evening wear" and "executive wear." Both an embracing and a refutation of the
world of high fashion, the balls become the social locus of this underclass,
underground society of outcasts defiantly refusing to be ignored by a world
that scorns them. Paris Is Burning (1991) was one of several critically
acclaimed documentaries of the late 1980s and early 1990s excluded from Academy
Award nominations, eventually leading to a reappraisal of the Academy's stodgy
selection process.
Ma Vie en Rose [My life in Pink]: (1997) Ludovic is a young boy who can't wait
to grow up to be a woman. When his family discovers the little girl blossoming
in him they are forced to contend with their own discomfort and the lack of
understanding from their new neighbors. Their anger and impatience cave and
Ludovic is sent to see a psychiatrist in the hopes of fixing whatever is wrong
with him. A movie that addresses trans-gender and gender issues in general
through the eyes of a child.
Thursday June 17:
The Edge of Heaven: (2007) Ali (Kurtiz) is a feisty Turk living near his
university professor son Nejat (Davrak) in Bremen. In his loneliness, Ali hires
an outrageous Turkish hooker, Yeter (Köse), to live with him. When Yeter dies
suddenly, Nejat heads to Istanbul to find her long-lost daughter Ayten
(Yesilçay), then decides to stay there. Meanwhile, the rabble-rousing Ayten
has fled Turkey and is looking for her mother in Bremen. She meets Lotte
(Ziolkowska), a bright student who falls for her, then follows her to Istanbul
when she's deported. When Lotte dies suddenly, her mother (Schygulla) goes to
Istanbul to get some answers. The actors expertly play these six intriguing
people through a range of associations and missed connections that are funny
and romantic, earthy and sad. At the centre is the duality of cultures, as the
film slides between Germany and Turkey with remarkable ease, and dialog shifts
from German to Turkish to English. The various stories parallel and overlap
each other tellingly, intertwining and pulling apart as the characters have no
idea exactly how closely connected they all are.
Raspberry Reich: (2004) The Raspberry Reich is a film about "radical chic,"
specifically the phenomenon of the modern left in Germany adopting the
signifiers and postures of extreme left-wing movements of the 1970s,
particularly the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhoff Gang. The
movie starts off with the abduction by a gang of bumbling, would-be terrorists
of Patrick, a young man who is the son of one of the wealthiest bankers in
Germany. A scene of chaos and slapstick humor ensues in which Clyde, one of the
aspiring terrorists - or activists, as they prefer to refer to themselves -
accidentally handcuffs himself to the kidnapping victim and is forced to join
him in the trunk of their stolen BMW. Unbeknownst to the rest of the gang,
Clyde, whose job it was to follow Patrick and report his whereabouts to his
cohorts, has already had a sexual liaison with Patrick, and the two young men
are already planning Patrick's escape as soon as the abduction takes place. The
gang does not realize that Patrick's father disowned and disinherited him when
Patrick came out as gay, and therefore he has no value as a hostage. Nothing
seems to go right for this well meaning but ineffectual gang of aspiring
terrorists. In the meantime, the leader of the Raspberry Reich, Gudrun, a
charismatic young woman who has patterned herself after Gudrun Ensslin, one of
the main members of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, is indoctrinated the other
members of the gang to her cause. Gudrun, a strict devotee of Wihelm Reich and
Herbert Marcuse, believes that heterosexual monogamy is a bourgeois construct
that must be smashed in order to achieve true revolution. To that end, she
forces her straight male followers to have sex with each other to prove their
mettle as authentic revolutionaries. When Holger, one of her followers,
protests that he is her boyfriend, Gudrun tells him not to be ridiculous, that
the revolution is her boyfriend!
Thursday June 24
Screaming Queens: (2005) Three years before the famous rioting at New York's
Stonewall Inn, there was a riot in San Francisco at Gene Compton's Cafeteria.
On a hot Summer's night in 1966, in the city's Tenderloin district, a group of
transgender women and gay street-hustlers fought back for the first time in
history against everyday police harassment. This act of resistance was a
dramatic turning point for the transgender community, and the beginning of a
new human rights struggle that continues to this very day.
Maggots and Men: (2009) Maggots and Men is an experimental historical narrative
set in a mythologized, post-revolutionary Russia that re-imagines the story of
the Kronstadt uprising with a subtext of gender anarchy. The film dramatizes
the events of the 1921 rebellion and pays tribute to the Kronstadt sailors
earnest pursuit of communist ideals. Agit-prop theater group Blue Blouse guides
us through the story, which is narrated by fictionalized letters written by
Stepan Petrichenko, the leader of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee.
Maggots and Men positions the struggle for gender equality within a larger
struggle for peace and justice. Cast with female-to-male transgender actors,
the film documents a rapidly evolving transgender community and illuminates the
gender revolution currently taking place in our society. Painting the brief
success of communal society at Kronstadt as a fanciful utopia, Maggots and Men
transports us to a realm where we can dream of alternatives to capitalist
society.
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STATION 40
3030B 16th Street
San Francisco , CA
(across from the 16th & Mission BART) |