LaborFest

7 days ago

Drama Masks: SF Mime Troupe marches forth through country’s ‘Wreckage’
Religious prurience meets the surveillance state in company's latest free show. Happy Birthday, America!
48hills.org/2026/07/drama-masks-sf-mime-troupe-marches-forth-through-countrys-wreckage/

By CHARLES LEWIS III
JULY 8, 2026
This is Drama Masks, a Bay Area performing arts column from a born San Franciscan and longtime theatre artist in an N95 mask. I talk venue safety and dramatic substance, or the lack thereof.

Have a fun 250th for our bastard nation? I mostly stayed clear of mainstream media, but some highlights included: 1) white supremacists marching through DC like they owned the place; 2) our transphobic SCOTUS saying San José Mayor Matt Mahan (inspired by London Breed) can go right ahead and arrest homeless people for being homeless; and 3) SF Sup. Matt “Lock up all the addicts!” Dorsey asked a pro-Nazi chatbot for good reasons why people in Gaza deserve to die by the hands of Israel, thus conclusively he is SF’s Mike Lindell: weaponizing his own former addiction to target other addicts as he leans on Big Tech to spread his right-wing conspiracy theories.

Truly, this is the greatest country in the world. Where else could a twice-impeached failed businessman with numerous sexual assault allegations rise from his already-affluent background to the highest office in the land? Where else would such a chronic loser set new standards for his title by {checks notes}

transforming the Reflecting Pool into a literal swamp
destroying the White House lawn for a shitty MMA fight
greenlighting the Paramount-WB merger just so he could throttle CNN (and order a new Rush Hour sequel)
making FIFA reverse a Team USA penalty
picking a fight with the Pope
and turning himself into a literal golden idol.
All of that is just in the past year-and-a-half. Again, these are just off the top of my head. Forgive me if I forgot a few. (Killing SNAP benefits, demanding the Nobel Prize, making air travel even worse, etc.)

It’s easy to forget his desecration of the arts. Whether it be sticking his leathery grimace on US passports, sticking his bankrupt name on the Kennedy Center (only for it to be taken off), or the way he gutted the NEA, our country now finds itself full of major media powers all-to-willing to capitulate, and a citizenship refusing to accept that capitulation.

When all is said and done, how will this story be written? I’m old enough to remember when any one of the above listed was enough to instantly nuke one’s career, political or otherwise. Now, this Epstein associate has done all that and more without consequence. It’s like that time Mr. Burns went for his check-up and was told that he had so many diseases that they essentially cancelled out one another. This story is tragedy and farce at the same time.

Where does that put someone like me? Well, like the citizens of Whoville after the Grinch stole all their presents, we push forward.

I’m not a flag-waver. Hell, I’ve personally witnessed a great many flag-burnings. But I do believe in the collective power of the people. People wonder why I still do what I do when I’m barely scraping a living off it. It’s because I’m always amazed by how much story there still is to tell.

No, I haven’t made a full-time living off arts writing, but I love the fact that companies go out of their way to get my attention. They feel it’s important to have a voice like mine—PoC, genuinely Bay Area, fully independent —shining a light on their works. It offers a perspective they just won’t get from the still-majorly-white alternatives. They want to see themselves reflected in critique the way they try to reflect themselves on stage or on canvas. I wish I had the time and money to get to them all.

You notice me, and I notice you. And, it turns out, others notice us all.

So, when I look back over the story of the past 250 years, I don’t see it from the perspective of the disease-spreading pilgrims, I see it as a Black Panther would, as an indigenous tribe member would, as a suffragist would, as San Francisco’s very own Wong Kim Ark would. I see it from the perspective of everyone whose story isn’t awarded golden statues. As both an artist, activist, and journalist, I still love telling that story.

Most of all, I know that story isn’t over.

Keiko Shimosato Carreiro in SFMT’s ‘Wreckage’
SF Mime Troupe presents Wreckage: A Musical Tragicomedy

What would the 4th of July be without sitting outside in Dolores Park (CO² levels hovered around 423ppm the whole time) in the sun watching Socialist theatre? That much I expected. Getting a large crowd to join in a chant of “Tax! The! Church!”? Now, that was unexpected.

Such is the dénouement of Wreckage (through September 7 at various Bay Area parks), SF Mime Troupe’s latest call to arms. Though SF isn’t specified this time (there’s an Escape from New York-style Liberty head in the set design), the setting has the air of Silicon Valley-vicinity.

Michael Gene Sullivan’s script follows Felicity (Chloris Li), a good Christian girl eager to serve the Swaggart-like Brother Gideon (Jed Parsario)—mind you, Gideon’s definition of “service” is more prurient than the girl realizes. Still, Felicity takes Gideon’s word to the rundown city streets, where flower merchant Mari (Keiko Shimosato Carreiro) is happy to still have customers. She doesn’t like the way the world has gone, but she believes the lesson of her parents—victims of internment Order 9066—was to keep one’s head low and go unnoticed.

That’s hardly an option anymore, now that every digital device in the city is forcibly updated with “Claudine” (Li again), the new AI app so intrusive, even it disillusioned creator (Sullivan) is having second thoughts about implementing it.

Wreckage goes some places that are dark even for a Mime Troupe show: Though never explicitly detailed, there’s the suggestion of a sexual assault committed by Gideon, and the play stops cold in the latter-half to see Mari’s mother (Li) recounting her tenure in an internment camp through Japanese theatre techniques. As important as these elements are, they’re awkwardly wedged into the show that’s otherwise pretty enjoyable. It’s stances against the military (when one realizes they’re part of ICE murder-squad) and organized religion (what with the Bible preaching altruism and all) are as inspired as the songs are entertaining.

Mime Troupe shows don’t often require a trigger warning, but be advised of the above darkness amongst the pro-worker satire this time.

WRECKAGE: A MUSICAL TRAGICOMEDY runs through September 7th at various Bay Area parks. Further info here. … See MoreSee Less

Drama Masks: SF Mime Troupe marches forth through country's 'Wreckage' – 48 hills

48hills.org

Religious prurience meets the surveillance state in company’s latest free show. Happy Birthday, America!

LaborFest

1 week ago

Workers Fighting The Bosses Using AI From UC to UPS
laborfest.net/2026/event/workers-fighting-the-bosses-using-ai-from-uc-to-ups/
Tuesday July 7 @ 5:00 pm PDT
Zoom event
Workers and unionists are starting to use AI to fight court cases and also to help with grievances and getting information on issues facing them on the job.
Ashley Gjovik was an engineering manager at Apple and her office was on a toxic dump site. When she tried to get it remediated she was targeted and fired. She is now fighting the Apple octopus in part by using AI
Eric Johnson is with IBT Local 160 in Montana. He has been writing lyrics and translating them with music and videos with help in the fight against inward facing inferred cameras that are causing cataracts and tumors.
Jennifer Cruz is a member of IBT 2010 and has been using AI and tech to support a working class caucus and to fight for rights as an injured worker. … See MoreSee Less

Events for July 2026 – LaborFest 2026

laborfest.net

Workers and unionists are starting to use AI to fight court cases and also to help with grievances and getting information on issues facing them on the job.

LaborFest

1 week ago

Workers Fighting The Bosses Using AI From UC to UPS
laborfest.net/2026/event/workers-fighting-the-bosses-using-ai-from-uc-to-ups/
Tuesday July 7 @ 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm PDT
Workers and unionists are starting to use AI to fight court cases and also to help with grievances and getting information on issues facing them on the job.
Ashley Gjovik was an engineering manager at Apple and her office was on a toxic dump site. When she tried to get it remediated she was targeted and fired. She is now fighting the Apple octopus in part by using AI
Eric Johnson is with IBT Local 160 in Montana. He has been writing lyrics and translating them with music and videos with help in the fight against inward facing inferred cameras that are causing cataracts and tumors.
Jennifer Cruz is a member of IBT 2010 and has been using AI and tech to support a working class caucus and to fight for rights as an injured worker.
Link to Join Meeting … See MoreSee Less

Events for July 2026 – LaborFest 2026

laborfest.net

Workers and unionists are starting to use AI to fight court cases and also to help with grievances and getting information on issues facing them on the job.

LaborFest

1 week ago

ILWU 10 "Bloody Thursday" Commemoration on July 5, 2026 & Growing Threats To Union & Membership
youtu.be/aPWVYsZgH-Q
ILWU Local 10 members and supporters commemorated the "Bloody Thursday" on July 5, 2026 at their hall in
San Francisco. Speakers talked about the attack on ILWU 6 workers at C & H in Crockett and the upcoming
contract negotiations and the growing threat of AI to their jobs and future.
Additional Media:
ILWU10 Workers Protest Unloading At Levin Terminal Of Ship Of Sugar To Bust ILWU6 C&H Strikers
youtu.be/QEkB5QUAQG8
ILWU 6 Workers Strike At Crockett C&H ASR Sugar Plant To Protect Their Contract & Conditions
youtu.be/PY6Rj82n_cs
ILWU Struggles 1984-2010, The Struggle Continues
youtu.be/ABosvjawnj4
The Sugar Babies Amy Serrano 2005 2006
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyVcyRjy52Q
Juneteenth & The Fight Today Against Resegregation & A Fascist Government-Time For Mass Action
youtu.be/3fTLkPEEu34
On Juneteenth, ILWU Local 10 VP Trent Willis Talks About History & Struggle For General Strike Today
youtu.be/-dqrEQHYzqI
Kill Tariffs Not Workers! Teamsters & ILWU Members Protest Tariffs & Trade War At The Port Of Oakland
youtu.be/DdIzrM2B-9w
ILWU 10 Solidarity Meeting On Palestine: An Injury To One Is An Injury To All
youtu.be/XiPs6lccJM0
Zim Line Hit With Pickets-ILWU 10 & 34 Workers Stand Against Israeli Apartheid
youtu.be/2Gp503j9WSk
Mass March & Picket At Oakland Port To Stop Israel's Zim Line Ship Piraeus To Protest Crimes In Gaza
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcJHlnq4YIo
Danny Glover Joins ILWU 10 In Supporting Freedom For Mumia on February 16, 2023
youtu.be/j0qJX4zDf9s
ILUW 1984 San Francisco Local 10 & 34 Anti-Apartheid Action Against Racist South African
For More Information
ILWU 6 Crockett C&G Strike Fund
square.link/u/ifFpgkRO
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net … See MoreSee Less

Labor Media – Labor Media

www.labormedia.net

Support Ryan: Fired for Union Organizing at UFCW 2013 …https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-ryan-fired-for-union-organizing?attribution_id=sl:48d80d14-aba0-4b2c-b9b9-3b6cf7305aaa&lang=en_US&ts=1780882…

LaborFest

2 weeks ago

I Love Heist Films. This One Is Special.
June 24, 2026
www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/opinion/boots-riley-i-love-boosters.html
By Lydia Polgreen
Opinion Columnist
I was a few months shy of my seventh birthday the first time I saw looting up close. We were living in Nairobi, Kenya, in an apartment complex near the downtown shopping district. All of a sudden, people started streaming back to our building with armloads of brand-new stuff. I watched in awe as a man balanced a small refrigerator on his head, blood pouring out of a gash above his eyes.

“All the shops are open and everything is free,” I declared to my mother. “Can we go?”

We did not go. The shops weren’t open, exactly. A group of disgruntled military officers had attempted to overthrow the Kenyan government, then led by a budding kleptocratic autocrat named Daniel arap Moi. Amid the chaos, some of the Kenyan underclass had decided to pry open the gates of shops across the country and help themselves to the goods inside.

Kenya was, and still is, a highly unequal society, and there seemed little evidence that merit was the distinguishing factor between those who had access to wealth and opportunity and those who toiled in menial jobs and lived in penury. The government did little to improve people’s lives; corruption was rampant. In a perfect world, no one would steal. This was not a perfect world, and if the powerful were engaged in a smash-and-grab, it seemed natural that ordinary people would join in.

I thought of this childhood memory as I watched the filmmaker Boots Riley’s irresistibly overstuffed, technicolor provocation, “I Love Boosters.” The film, which was released last month, follows a charismatic and very stylish crew of professional shoplifters — boosters, as they are known — who steal high-end clothing from retail stores and resell it to friends and neighbors at a steep discount.

Part anticapitalist satire, part buddy comedy, part heist movie, “I Love Boosters” is a messy, brilliant sendup of the absurd contradictions of our savage era of inequality and political corruption. It asks us: When theft defines a social system, what’s the difference between the individual acts of ordinary people and the collective behavior of the powerful?

The movie’s heroine goes by the nickname Corvette. Played by a luminous Keke Palmer, she lives in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant in Oakland and dreams of becoming a fashion designer; she plasters her makeshift home with her supernatural, candy-colored streetwear creations.

Corvette idolizes a famous, girl-bossy fashion mogul named Christie Smith, played by a delightfully unhinged Demi Moore. Smith sells her clothes at a highly successful chain of stores called Metro Designers, offering flashy, expensive streetwear in a single color at each outlet. Want a different color? Go to another store. Corvette keeps a well-thumbed copy of Smith’s “Lean In”-style manifesto on her night stand, bristling with Post-it notes.

Metro Designers is a favorite target for Corvette and her best friends, Mariah and Sade. The crew, the so-called Velvet Gang, have perfected an ingenious method for their elaborate heists. Corvette, Mariah and Sade, all of them Black women, stuff their oversized outfits with clothes while a pair of large Black men — participants in the scheme — pretend to get into a fistfight. A white woman, another confederate, distracts the salesclerks with feigned hysteria over witnessing Black male violence. In the melee, the Velvet Gang waddle out with their booty.

These thefts are common enough, and bold enough, to catch Smith’s attention. In a television interview, she refers to the Velvet Gang as “low-class, urban bitches” and vows to punish them. In her telling, the members of the Velvet Gang “have no style, they have no ingenuity. They steal it from me.” Smith, it turns out, is a thief on a grander scale. Corvette discovers that Smith’s company copied one of Corvette’s far-out designs, a sculptural jumpsuit festooned with Jurassic scales on its arms and legs.

The thieving doesn’t end there. The crew, having got themselves hired at a Metro Designers store to better case the joint, discover that workers are required to wear current-season Metro Designers clothes. The cost is deducted from their meager paychecks, with a 30 percent employee discount. Lunch breaks are so comically short — 30 seconds — that the peevish store manager sets out starting blocks for workers and times them on a stopwatch. A co-worker tries to persuade Corvette and the gang to join a unionizing effort, but they dismiss the idea in favor of their own scheme: a complicated heist of every Metro Designer store in the area.

Riley, the director, has been a left-wing agitator and activist for a long time. He is a self-described communist, and years ago he released rap albums with titles that made his politics quite plain: “Kill My Landlord,” “Genocide & Juice,” “Pick a Bigger Weapon” and “Steal This Album.” His first feature film, “Sorry to Bother You,” a black comedy about workers at a sinister telemarketing firm, was a modest indie hit, making about $18 million on a budget of just over $3 million. For his follow-up, Riley’s producers nudged him toward a script he had shelved that was in a bankable genre: the heist movie.

I adore heist films. The genre has varied over the decades, but the essential elements create a timeless formula: a motley crew of down-at-heel social outcasts who possess unusual skills that the straight world has failed to reward. Invariably led by a charming antihero — think George Clooney’s suave Danny Ocean from Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s” franchise — they have gifts for things like safecracking, explosives management, reading architectural plans and coming up with creative ways to unload hot merchandise.

Their target is at best morally ambiguous: an odious casino mogul, a faceless bank, a jewelry store packed with trinkets for billionaires. The crimes aren’t victimless, exactly, but no one roots for the plutocrat who gets fleeced. And most important, the crime itself must be executed with dazzling elegance. Heists are an artistic endeavor in which undervalued forms of labor are combined to pull off something akin to poetry or ballet. In the process, viewers almost inevitably end up on the side of the criminals.

The Velvet Gang are in many ways a classic heist crew — misfits on the edge of society with outsize talents for which the world has no use. Expected to take their place at the bottom of the modern economic pyramid, they choose instead to dynamite the whole thing. So far, so heist. But instead of breaking into an art museum or cracking a safe buried beneath layers of elaborate security, they steal clothes from high-end stores. The gang’s central crime threatens to upend the usual distribution of sympathy.

Shoplifting, after all, is regarded as a particularly pernicious crime, as close to pure selfishness as one can get. By stealing items most people simply pay for, shoplifters shift the cost of their greedy unwillingness to follow the rules onto everyone else. This basic violation of the social contract would strike anyone as wrong. In recent years, this moral objection has risen to panic as retailers have claimed that gangs of shoplifters have caused huge losses and forced them to close stores.

In business terms, it isn’t that simple. TJ Maxx was at the center of the shoplifting panic. An analysis of its parent company’s accounts showed that though theft had whittled its margins by about 0.3 percentage points, other costs — including higher spending on shipping and markdowns of unsold merchandise — took away four times as much. In other words, the company’s leaders bought things consumers didn’t want and paid more to ship them.

Despite those missteps, the chief executive of TJX, the parent company of TJ Maxx, saw his pay rise 23 percent, not adjusted for inflation, between 2019 and 2024. Over that period, the company spent more than $11 billion buying back shares of its own stock, a common method of rewarding shareholders and plumping the wallets of executives paid handsomely in company stock. That helped the chief executive make 1,565 times as much as the company’s median employee. To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, what is the robbing of a retail store compared to the founding of a retail empire?

This is exactly the kind of legal but mind-bending corporate flimflam at which Riley takes aim. In his hands, the heist movie becomes a metaphor for the multilayered heist of contemporary capitalism. There’s the theft of ideas from the street to the high-fashion atelier; the purloined time, wages and dignity of workers; the stolen responsibility, as blame for social and economic problems is shifted from corporations and governments to individuals. In one running gag, supposedly ordinary citizens complain in television interviews about how cheap housing limits their ability to pay more rent and extol the freedom that comes with low pay.

Yet the film’s resonance goes beyond the fun-house mirror of modern capitalism to the heart of power. In Donald Trump’s second term, each week brings some fresh and shocking example of wanton self-dealing by the president and his cronies: shady crypto deals, the Jan. 6 slush fund, his family’s exemption from I.R.S. audits, his flurry of well-timed stock trading, sweetheart no-bid government deals to favored contractors and more. In this heist, it seems, the casino bosses are definitely winning.

Heist movies are all about the thrill of the plan and the skill and camaraderie of the crew sticking it to an unfair system. Hollywood is, after all, part of the system, so heist movies do not always end in triumph for the thieves. In the original “Ocean’s 11,” a seemingly fail-safe plan to hide the stolen cash in the coffin of a crew member who dies of a heart attack goes spectacularly awry when the coffin, booty and all, ends up as ashes in a crematory.

So it is fitting, in a way, that by the end of “I Love Boosters” — stop reading if you don’t want to know — the crew doesn’t have much money to show for their ingenious schemes. The film has a happy ending in another way. Through a convoluted series of events, the crew ends up making common cause with the exploited workers in the Chinese factory who make the garments Metro Designers sells. Their efforts set off a series of global strikes, gumming up companies all across the world.

In the final scene, a cartoonish boulder of overdue bills that has chased Corvette throughout the film shrinks to the size of a golf ball, small enough to fit into her pocket. It turns out that the ultimate boost wasn’t loot after all, but solidarity. … See MoreSee Less

Opinion | I Love Heist Films. This One Is Special.

www.nytimes.com

“I Love Boosters” is a brilliant sendup of the absurd contradictions of our age.