Volume 40 Number 51 Archives — Page 2 of 2 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

September 20 – September 27, 2006

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Mural as magnet

September 19, 2006

› gwschulz@sfbg.com
Stretched across the west wall of the New Santa Clara Market in the Lower Haight is a full 15 by 45 feet of political controversy, in both its intended content and the fact that it has become a magnet for graffiti.
Located on the southeast corner of Haight and Scott streets, Positive Visibility, as the mural there is titled, shows women suffering from the symptoms of HIV-AIDS. It was completed in 1995 by an artist named Juana Alicia, who learned her craft in part from two former students of painter Diego Rivera.
Reflecting a somewhat surreal departure from Rivera’s own direct imagery, Alicia’s painting (finished with help from other HIV-AIDS activists) contains a multitude of pastel colors applied in vigorous brushstrokes. In one segment, a tattooed drug addict accepts a clean needle from a needle-exchange worker. Another woman nearby wears a shirt with the queer pink triangle and the phrase “silencio = muerte.” Three pig-faced corporate drug execs guard a prescription bottle, and a woman is kicking one of them directly in the face. Slivers of broken mirrors create a mosaic across the mural’s top center. Affable skeletons celebrate el Dia de los Muertos.
The message: women contract HIV too. It’s not unlike the hundreds of other politically charged murals most San Franciscans are proud to have coloring the city. But currently, Positive Visibility faces a cruelly ironic fate; it’s half covered in a red paint used by the building’s owner to rub out graffiti while awaiting a complex decision about how and when to restore it.
Alicia, who now lives in Mexico and has taught arts education and community organizing for 25 years, has also completed major pieces in the Mission District and at the San Francisco International Airport and the UCSF Medical Center. (She did not respond to an e-mailed list of questions.)
The problem is that Positive Visibility has been plagued by graffiti since it was completed — not spray-can lettering so much as haphazard markings. The entire bottom has been covered at times, sending neighbors into a furor and attracting citations to the owner of the building from the San Francisco Department of Public Works. Some of the graffiti has targeted the content of the mural in the form of angry expressions that the piece is antimale. One resident said she’d prefer that any existing mural at the spot reflect “the neighborhood’s vitality.”
“It’s been very controversial,” said Marc Shapiro, who lives nearby on Waller Street. “Some people want the mural. Some people don’t. I didn’t care what happened as long as somebody would maintain it…. The street has been so terrible for the last 10 years, you know. Nobody was maintaining the mural. So we had to live in a neighborhood with all of this horrible graffiti.”
The Neighborhood Beautification Fund under then-mayor Willie Brown put up $8,000 to restore the mural in 2000, an effort that included several layers of what was supposed to be a special graffiti-proof varnish. It wasn’t enough, and the graffiti continued.
“The final straw was when there were swear words — ‘Fuckin’ bitch,’ ‘asshole,’” said the building owner’s son, Suheil Alaraj. “The neighbors were, like, ‘We have children. We can’t keep walking across the street and bypassing this.’” Shapiro added that sometimes attackers would throw entire buckets of paint on the mural.
Alaraj called Alicia last year to see if she’d be interested in restoring it again. But the talks broke down and Alicia, he says, threatened to sue him if he painted over the mural completely. Exasperated, he called Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, whose district includes the Lower Haight, looking for suggestions on what to do. His office convinced Alicia to allow the Mission-based muralist collective Precita Eyes to restore the piece. Nonetheless, finding money for the project took several months. Some of the funds again came from the mayor’s beautification fund.
“Basically, they took such a long time,” Alaraj said. “They could have had it up six months ago, restored. They were waiting for this, waiting for that, waiting for this. [The graffiti] kept getting worse and worse. Once there’s tagging on it and you don’t do anything about it, people feel it’s a free-for-all. It just got out of control.”
Three months ago he decided to paint over the bottom, which was hardest hit with graffiti. Each morning he’d go back with a paintbrush until finally, about two months ago, the graffiti ceased.
Mirkarimi aide Regina Dick-Eudrizzi told the Guardian that due to a misunderstanding about covering the graffiti, Alaraj used the red paint instead of white, which would have made restoring the mural easier. The red paint doubled the costs, and only recently did Mirkarimi’s office and Precita Eyes manage to come up with the $10,000 necessary to complete the restoration. There’s a possibility that Precita Eyes could re-create the mural at a new spot, rather than restoring it at its current location. SFBG

Discovering the formula

September 19, 2006

› amanda@sfbg.com
San Francisco has a thing for local businesses. From Chinatown to Hayes Valley, the dozens of distinctive neighborhoods that constitute this city have for the most part maintained their individuality with one-of-a-kind, locally owned places to shop, snack, and seek services.
While many cities and small towns across the country have succumbed to the sprawl and homogeneity of chain stores, some have resisted, even in the face of lawsuits and wily campaigning from megaretailers. Big corporations including Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Target are combating restrictive municipal legislation with their money, pouring millions into local political races and flying in paid signature gatherers for ballot referenda.
“They’re spending $100 per vote in some cases,” Stacy Mitchell told the Guardian. Mitchell is the author of Big-Box Swindle and a senior researcher for the New Rules Project, a subsidiary of the Institute of Local Self-Reliance, which tracks legislation against formula retail.
“They’re getting mixed results,” she said, which means sometimes the big boys lose, like in the multiyear battle with Inglewood that sent Wal-Mart walking. But more often than not, the formula retailers win.
Take Chicago as a recent example: Mayor Richard Daley overrode city councilors and issued his first veto in 17 years, against legislation that would have required large retailers to pay a living wage to employees. Councilors hoped to trump the mayor with another vote, but at the last minute three councilors switched positions to side with Daley.
“I still don’t understand how it happened,” said SF supervisor Tom Ammiano, who flew into Chicago to speak in favor of the legislation. He told us the city was behind it, though opponents were arguing that low-income people needed the option to work and shop at Wal-Mart and it was discriminatory to not allow the store to move into the city. “They played the race card. It was obvious they were people on [Wal-Mart’s] payroll.”
In the week since the veto, Wal-Mart has already swooped in with several site proposals for the first 20-acre megamart in Chicago. It’s stated an eventual goal of building 20 stores in the Windy City. Could Wal-Mart spite San Francisco just like it did Chicago?
Since 2004, San Francisco has operated with the Formula Retail Ordinance, designed to preserve “the city’s goal of a diverse retail base.” This isn’t an outright ban, but it makes the application and review process more arduous for formula retail. The ordinance defines formula retail as any chain with 11 or more outlets that offer standardized services or mimic one another in decor, architecture, and practices (like Starbucks, the Gap, and Wal-Mart, to name an infamous few).
The relevant legislation, Section 703.3 of the Planning Code, reads like it was penned by a Norman Rockwell acolyte and cites such businesses as generally undesirable, granting neighborhoods the right to be notified of potential chain store proposals. While the legislation allows neighborhoods to create their own stricter legislation, it also grants them the right to accept a chain into the fold, which is a pretty big loophole.
So far, most neighborhoods haven’t been welcoming. A battle in North Beach over Home Depot resulted in an outright ban of all formula retail in the neighborhood. Hayes Valley followed suit. Conditional use permits in western SoMa, Cole Valley, and Divisadero from Haight to Turk add an extra layer of scrutiny to the planning process when a Starbucks or Target want to set up shop. Potrero Hill–Showplace Square is the next in the trend, with a 12-month interim conditional-use period and a more permanent restriction on the way. That restriction was introduced by Sup. Sophie Maxwell, approved by the Land Use and Economic Development Committee, and headed to the full Board of Supervisors for initial approval Sept. 19 after Guardian press time.
Maxwell’s legislation could become moot this November if voters approve Proposition G, the Small Business Protection Act, which would extend conditional-use permitting to the entire city, making any proposal from a chain store subject to public hearings and an arduous Environmental Impact Review at the expense of the applicant, not the city.
Dozens of counties and municipalities have enacted similar ordinances around the country in response to the track records of megaretailers. Public criticism is mounting against corporations such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot for drawing the shopping masses by reducing prices to quash smaller competitors and for pulling profits out of communities instead of keeping them local, as small businesses tend to do.
But the chain stores aren’t just rolling over.
“It’s happening in enough places that it’s reached a point where they’re feeling nervous about how it’s affecting their growth,” Mitchell said about the retail giants. Her organization has been assisting communities for several years in drafting legislation against formula retail and is seeing some of that legislation undercut by voracious chain stores. Wal-Mart, the most notorious foe, dumps thousands of dollars into local election races. The tactic is especially evident in California.
“Wal-Mart spends more in California than anywhere,” said Nu Wexler, spokesperson for Wal-Mart Watch, a Washington-based organization with hawk eyes on the company. “They have active lobbying in all 50 states, but California is a particularly important market for them.”
He attributes that to the state’s status as the sixth-largest economy in the world. In 2002, Wal-Mart promised to open 40 supercenters in the state within four to six years. As of October 2005, only six had been opened. “They’re fighting expansion battles all over the country, but they’re having an especially difficult time in California,” Wexler said. Inglewood, Turlock, and Hercules have all recently dodged Wal-Mart.
But several other cities have not, despite protective measures, and in the last year 12 more supercenters have opened in California, bringing the grand total to 19.
Contra Costa County, apropos of no immediate threat, passed a 2003 ordinance prohibiting “big box” stores over 90,000 square feet. In response, Wal-Mart dumped more than $1.5 million campaigning for a measure overriding the ordinance on the next available ballot. In 2004, the ordinance was overturned by 54 percent of voters.
Four years of fighting in Rosemead resulted in two city council shake-ups, with a recall election of two council members set to be decided this week; a possible Brown Act violation when city officials approved a permit for Wal-Mart during a meeting when it wasn’t on the agenda; and multiple lawsuits from both sides. Wal-Mart spent $200,000 campaigning and dropped another $100,000 in local charities to spread some good cheer. It worked: doors opened at a new supercenter Sept. 18.
Last August, a Wal-Mart opened just across the bay in Oakland even though the city already had a ban on big-box retail larger than 2.5 acres. Spurning the city’s provincial laws, Wal-Mart found real estate regulated by the Port of Oakland — which, similar to San Francisco’s port, is outside the city’s jurisdiction and not subject to local ordinances.
“It was passed in a backroom deal with the port before the city could have any public hearings,” said Adam Gold, a spokesperson from Just Cause Oakland, a local group that opposed the store. “It made it difficult to resist it. It had already been approved.”
At the state level, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently vetoed Senate Bill 1414, introduced by San Francisco’s state senator Carol Migden, which would have required employers with more than 10,000 workers to put 8 percent of total wages toward health care. Not a surprise: Wal-Mart’s Walton family dropped more than half a million dollars into electing the governor, with a most timely donation of $250,000 last year on the very day he vetoed legislation aimed at Wal-Mart that would have required businesses to disclose when employees use public health care services.
Two other bills, SB1523, requiring environmental impact reports and public hearings for the construction of stores larger than 100,000 square feet, and SB1818, allowing cities to recover legal fees when sued by big-box retailers, sailed through the legislature but are currently festering on the governor’s desk.
Is it all enough to protect San Francisco? Can the city keep mom and pop on the corners and resist the commercialism that has made a city like Emeryville the mall that it is today?
Maxwell, who pushed the recent legislation for Showplace Square and Potrero Hill, hopes so. “I’d rather have the position of them on the offense than the defense,” she said of potential retail applicants. When asked if the city codes are strict enough, she said, “If not, I’d be willing to put forth the legislation that is.”
As for the idea of Wal-Mart coming to town, the District 10 supervisor was nothing if not firm: “No, no way. Not in San Francisco.” SFBG

Redefining radicalism

September 19, 2006

› news@sfbg.com The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights has a 10-year history — which it marked Sept. 14 with an anniversary gala in Oakland — of aggressive opposition to police abuse, racism, economic injustice, and the get-tough policies that have created record-high incarceration rates. Those problems have only gotten worse over the last decade, despite some significant successes by the group in both Oakland and San Francisco. But these days, founder and director Van Jones sounds more like a hopeful optimist than an angry radical. “When we first got started, our politics were more about opposition than proposition,” Jones told the Guardian. “We were more clear what we were against than what we were for.” An organization once prone to shutting down the halls of power with sit-ins is now working on prison reform legislation, doing antiviolence public education campaigns, and promoting the potential for a green economy to revitalize West Oakland and other low-income communities. “Now, I’m in a place where I want to see the prisoners and the prison guards both come home and get some healing,” Jones said. Some of that transformation comes from Jones’s evolving critique of progressive political tactics, which he has come to see as ineffective. “Our generation would be better if we had a little less New Left and a little more New Deal.” But the change was also triggered by a personal epiphany of sorts following his unsuccessful effort to stop the passage in 2000 of Proposition 21, which sent more minors into the adult correctional system. “I went into a major depression and I almost quit being an activist,” Jones, an attorney who turns 38 this month, told us. “It was a very personal journey, but it had a big impact on the Ella Baker Center.” The change has made allies of former enemies, like radio station KMEL, which was vilified for selling out the Bay Area hip-hop culture after Clear Channel Communications purchased the station, but which is now helping the Ella Baker Center spread its antiviolence message. The center has also attracted a new breed of employees to its ranks of 24 full-time staffers, people like communications director Ben Wyskida, who moved here from his Philadelphia communications firm last October. As he told us, “What drew me to the Ella Baker Center was this message of hope.” Jones has a critique of the problems and those in power that is as radical as ever, noting that authoritarians have taken power and essentially dismantled our democratic institutions. But he’s moved from diagnosis to prescription, telling us, “I think the ‘fuck Bush’ conversation is over.” His new approach hasn’t always gone over well with his would-be allies. Environmental groups including Greenaction boycotted Mayor Gavin Newsom’s photo-op posturing during World Environment Day last year, and they were critical of Jones for validating the event and using their absence to grab the media spotlight for his green economy initiatives. But Jones tells us he doesn’t get rattled by criticism that he’s playing nice with the powerful because he remains committed to helping the underclass. “The most important thing is to know who you’re for and know your history.” And if the group’s 10th anniversary black-tie celebration in the Oakland Rotunda was any indication, the Ella Baker Center has more support now than at any other time in its history. The guest list for the event was a veritable who’s who of every major political, grassroots, and environmental organization on the West Coast. Guests included Code Pink cofounder Jodie Evans, Mother Jones publisher Jay Harris, and actor-activist Danny Glover. “Radical means root — that’s what we have always been addressing,” Jones told us at the event. “We used to spend a lot of time pointing out the hurt in the community. Now we connect the points of hope.” To Jones, hope means tying the need to save the planet from global warming to the need for economic development in Oakland. “Let’s make it into job opportunities for poor people and build a green economy strong enough to lift us out of poverty. That’s hope. We want to take people out of the prison cells, into solar cells.” Jones’s allies see him as a silver-tongued visionary, a lighting rod who can bridge movements with apparently differing agendas. Activist Julia Butterfly Hill, a longtime friend and political ally of Jones, told us at the event, “Van shows he cares and he’s human, and he puts himself out there on the line. That’s why you saw this coming together. This is the voice, this is the conversation that the planet is literally dying for, and I really mean sick and dying for.” The evening, a spirited celebration of hope and achievement, gave influential friends a chance to size up where the group has been and where it’s headed. As Harris of Mother Jones told us, “Van is a big thinker. He really engages people’s imaginations in terms of what could be. There’s one way, which is to fight against the system. Van’s way is to reimagine the system.” There to bless the event, Glover warmly heaped his own praise on Jones by comparing him to the Civil Rights Movement worker who is the organization’s namesake. “When I think of Ella Baker and what she stood for, Van carries on that work, and I think that’s vital. We envision ourselves through the women and men that set a certain standard. Van sets a certain standard.” SFBG www.ellabakercenter.org

Bringing Knives out

September 19, 2006

› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Emily Haines is not known for keeping her thoughts to herself.
As part of Toronto’s Metric, the notoriously outspoken singer-keyboardist incorporates her political beliefs into wildly infectious synth-rock songs. On 2003’s Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? (Everloving) and last fall’s Live It Out (Last Gang), Haines tackled such unlikely pop-song subject matters as war, Big Brother, and the emptiness of consumer culture with thrilling, often thought-provoking results. “Buy this car to drive to work/ Drive to work to pay for this car” — from “Handshakes” — is a typical sentiment. She’s even more articulate in Metric interviews, discussing everything from voter disenfranchisement to the futility of trying to create real change through music.
It’s strange, then, that Haines is tight-lipped when it comes to her solo debut, Knives Don’t Have Your Back, out Sept. 26 on Last Gang. During a phone conversation from England, where Metric performed at Reading Festival two days prior, she sounds annoyed by the mere idea of talking about her album’s lyrics. “Do you think you can put it in words?” she icily counters when asked to elaborate on the central theme. “If I have to name the narrative, then there’s no point in having had one there at all.” Clearly, she prefers to keep her own songs open to interpretation.
Thing is, Knives is such a huge artistic departure both musically and lyrically for Haines that some insight might prove helpful. Rather than rely on the propulsive energy and shout-it-out choruses that define Metric’s sound, Haines (who also moonlights in Broken Social Scene) has recorded an album of soft, piano-based hymns more intent on capturing a mood — and a seriously somber one at that — than whipping audiences into raucous, dance-floor frenzies. Recorded with help from members of Sparklehorse, Stars, and Broken Social Scene, the album is hardly recognizable as the work of the same feisty woman who fronts Metric.
Haines, however, insists she didn’t approach Knives’s songs any differently than those of her band. “I spend all my time at the piano,” she explains. “For Metric, we’ve always just adapted my piano songs into a rock ’n’ roll format. So it was interesting [for Knives] to keep some of them for myself and leave them as is. Because I’ve always written more music than anyone could be asked to digest, I just chose the songs that I realized it’d be kind of sad if I never, ever put them out. It’s taken me a while to get up the nerve to release them though.”
The product of a rather lengthy incubation period, Knives was written over four years and recorded in as many cities — namely, Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles, and New York. So it’s a bit surprising that the album comes off as such a cohesive collection of, as Haines puts it, photographs from her past. “It ended up feeling like snapshots over that period of time,” she says. “When I look back and listen to these songs, I feel like the last four years have been some of the most intense.”
As song titles such as “Our Hell” and “Nothing and Nowhere” suggest, the result is almost abysmally bleak. Turning her focus from political anger to personal turmoil, Haines ruminates extensively on pain, loss, loneliness, and despair. “Are we breathing? Are we wasting our breath?” she sings in “Crowd Surf off a Cliff.” Even more unnerving, “The Last Page” finds her cryptically singing, “Death is absolutely safe.” But while the entire album could pass as a heartrending document of one woman’s extremely troubled times, all Haines will say (and only after much prodding) is that Knives is “essentially about being grateful for what you have, even when your life is shit.”
When she comes to San Francisco this week — a sequel to her July 2004 Cafe du Nord appearance, where she offered a rare sneak preview of an in-progress Knives — Haines will be accompanied by bassist Paul Dillon and Sparklehorse drummer Scott Minor, whom she’s enlisted to help her “nail that Plastic Ono Band vibe.” She’ll then head back to England for another Metric tour and to start recording the band’s third album. Later, if time allows, she hopes to play more solo gigs and eventually perform again with Broken Social Scene.
In other words, while fans may find it odd that Haines is suddenly mum about her solo music, they can take comfort that she’s fast becoming one of the busiest artists in indie rock.
“It’s weird,” she says. “When people say to me how busy my life is, I suppose that I really am ridiculously busy. But to me, it just feels like being a musician. That’s what I wanted to do and that’s what I’m doing. I’m making music. It’s not a job. It’s my life. It’s my friends and my family. So the more the better.” SFBG
EMILY HAINES AND THE SOFT SKELETON
Fri/22, 9 p.m.
Cafe du Nord
2170 Market, SF
$12
(415) 861-5016
www.cafedunord.com

Live bait

September 19, 2006

› kimberly@sfbg.com
Sneak a peak at the California Cereals factory — a gray, boxy concrete sprawl looming over an otherwise peaceful West Oakland neighborhood lined with wood frame houses and a sugary spray of Victorians — and you immediately expect that mulchy aroma of processed wheat products to assault the senses. So why do you detect … barbecuing oysters? But that’s the overriding scent du jour — and the improvisatory, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-fun nature of the Cereal Factory, one of many unpermitted party outposts where the city’s rock, improv, noise, and punk scenes have survived and even thrived in the Bay Area despite fin de siècle real estate insanity, party-killing neighbors, and ticket-threatening cops.
Scruffy, T-shirted kids lounge on the front steps of Jason Smith’s two-story home, dubbed the Cereal Factory for the genuine, sugar-coated article churning out Fruity Pebbles and generic raisin bran across the street. Down a side path, in the small backyard, music scenesters, fans, punks, indie rockers, and cool dudes mingle on the grass and down the canned beer and grillables they’ve brought as CF housemate Daniel Martins of Battleship throws more oysters on the barbie. Double back, and in the basement you find a dark, humid, tiki-embellished crash pad, not uncomfortably crammed with bodies shaking to Italian punk-noise band Dada Swing. Or you catch Bananas, Mika Miko, or Chow Nasty killing the rest of the early evening for gas money.
“My whole thing is to make it free, make it so that people can go to it,” the extremely good-natured Smith says much later. “If there’s a touring band, I always run around with a hat and kind of strong-arm people into coughing up some change or a couple bucks to give them some gas, but otherwise the bands all play here for free. I just provide the coals, and I buy two cases of beer for the bands.” As for the oysters, he adds, “shit like that happens! People are just, like, ‘I caught this huge fish — let’s smoke it.’”
Smith is one of the proud, brave, and reckless few who have turned their homes into unofficial party headquarters, underground live music venues. San Francisco and Oakland are riddled with such weekly, biweekly, and even more sporadic venues — some named and some known by nothing more than an address. But oh, what names: Pubis Noir, 5lowershop, an Undisclosed Location, Club Hot, Noodle Factory, Ptomaine Temple, and the Hazmat House. Some, like the Cereal Factory, are only active during the summer barbecue season; others, like LoBot Gallery, host shows and art exhibits year-round. Why go through the headache of opening your home up to a bunch of hard-partying strangers, music lovers, and the occasional psycho who trashes your bathroom? Some, such as Oakland’s French Fry Factory, have bitten the dust after being busted for allegedly selling beer at shows. Others, such as 40th Street Warehouse and Grandma’s House, have bowed to pressures external (neighbors, landlords) and internal (warehousemates), respectively. Why do we care?
CULTIVATING NEW AND UNDERSERVED SCENES
The Clit Stop can take credit for being one of the first venues in San Francisco to dream up the now-familiar cocktail of noise, indie rock, jazz, and improv. Ex-Crack: We Are Rock and Big Techno Werewolves mastermind Eric Bauer and Bran Pos brain Jake Rodriguez began booking shows in 1998 in Bauer’s 58 Tehama space, once dubbed Gallery Oh Boy. Shows began on time at 8 or 9 p.m. so that East Bay listeners could BART back before midnight, and as a result Bauer and Rodriguez would often open, under assorted monikers. A May 2000 lineup at the Clit Stop (named after Bauer’s band Planet Size: Clit by Caroliner’s Grux) combined scree-kabukists Rubber O Cement with improv rockers Gang Wizard, indies Minmae, and Bauer’s dada-noise Aerobics King; another bill matched the angsty indie-electronica of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone with the noise-guitar-funk of Open City and the jazz sax of Tony Bevan. The common thread? The fact that Bauer and Rodriguez both liked them. “It was kind of hard sometimes,” Bauer says today. “We got requests from tons of shitty bands, and it was, like, ‘No, no, we don’t like you guys.’”
A year after Clit Stop began, Kimo’s started showcasing the same combination of rock and noise characterized by such varied Clit Stop players as Cock ESP, No Neck Blues Band, and Nautical Almanac — a mix that has filtered to the Hemlock Tavern and 21 Grand and into the sounds emerging from Bay Area bands like Deerhoof, Total Shutdown, and the pre–Yellow Swans group Boxleitner, all of whom played the Clit. “The weirder and more fucked up, the better,” Bauer continues. “We wanted to push boundaries — we wanted to annoy people.” Bauer moved out in 2000, leaving Rodriguez to continue to book shows at the venue under, Bauer says, the name Hot Rodney’s Bar and Grill. Bauer went on to put on the first noise-pancake shows with ex–Church Police member and Bauer’s Godwaffle Noise Pancakes co-overlord Bruce Gauld at Pubis Noir, a former sweatshop at 16th Street and Mission. Gauld is expected to put out a DVD of Clit Stop performances this year.
GIVING UNDER-21 KIDS ACCESS TO CHEAP ART
“The cheapness factor is a huge part,” says Cansafis Foote, sax player for the No Doctors. “In Oakland right now, you have a lot of kids who are trying to make a go at being an artist or being a musician or whatever, and almost all of them are broke. But they’re all really excited about people making stuff, so they’ll go to Art Murmurs on the first Friday of the month or they’ll go to warehouse shows, and maybe at the end of the day they won’t have any money in their pocket — and we’re still going to let ’em in to see the show. That, or they’re underage.”
An improv seminar leader at Northwestern University and onetime music teacher in Chicago, Foote was accustomed to instigating music- and merrymaking when he took the lease in February 2005 at Grandma’s House in Oakland. “Everything was kind of funneling out of that experience and just having the background with Freedom From [the label the No Doctors ran with Matthew St. Germain] and free exploratory music.” Grandma’s House had already been putting on shows in the massive warehouse it shared with Limnal Gallery (and at one time the Spazz collective), and Foote threw his energy into doing two to three shows a month — including performances by Sightings, Burmese, Hustler White, Saccharine Trust, and Warhammer 48K — until March, when, he says, an especially loud show by USA Is a Monster brought the police on a noise complaint. Foote, a.k.a. Grandpa, was already bummed because housemates who had initially said they’d help with shows “totally weren’t coming through on that. So I was sitting in my car and watching the gate while everyone was watching the show and I was, like, ‘What’s the point of doing this? I don’t even get to see the show.’ So I took a ladder and put it outside the window. I thought it was fun too, because it was like a clubhouse and people could come up the ladder and through the window into Grandma’s House, and then the cops came, and one told me they’d unlock the seventh door to hell if I did it again.
“I was actually kind of excited — should I allow him to unlock the seventh door to hell for me? Is there going to be a special fire-breathing dragon there for me? It was amazing. It’s, like, ‘Dude, there’s some 16-year-old kid who’s going to shoot some other 16-year-old kid down the street — go deal with him.’”
The next show was the deal breaker: police returned twice to open that door as a brouhaha broke out at a Grey Daturas show between audience members and various warehousemates. Warehouse denizens put pressure on Foote to halt the shows, and now he’s moving out: “It was the only reason I was living there. It’s not real glamorous to be living in a warehouse with little mice and weird bugs in the summer.”
BRINGING ART, THEATER, MUSIC — AND STRAIGHT-EDGED VEGETARIANS TOGETHER
House-party spaces have come and gone, but one of the saddest passings had to be 40th Street Warehouse in Oakland, which put on rock, folk, and hip-hop shows, queer cabaret, and art events from 1996 until the collective shuttered last winter with a last loud musical blowout (This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb headlined) and a commemorative zine. From Monument to Masses guitarist Matthew Solberg lived there for three years and recalls that the onetime auto mechanic shop’s shows were initially started by members of the experimental Noisegate.
By 2003, Solberg says the Temescal space was putting on shows, plays, or benefits every weekend, with an emphasis on rock and metal: Parts and Labor, Tyondai Braxton, High on Fire, Ludicra, Merzbow, Masonna, Melt Banana, a Minor Forest, Lesser, Curtains, Neon Hunk, Hair Police, Deep Dickollective, Thrones, X27, Soophie Nun Squad, Toychestra, 25 Suaves, Monitor Bats, the Intima, Lowdown, the Coachwhips, Hammers of Misfortune, the Vanishing, Mirah, Gravy Train!!!!, Eskapo, and Microphones (last on the Microphones bill, beneath Loch Nest Dumpster, is Devendra Banhart, described as “acoustic ardor from San Francisco’s shyist [sic]”), with bands like Numbers getting a running start with multiple performances there.
The schedule, however, took its toll. “People would move into the warehouse and be really stoked to have that autonomous space, but they didn’t really know what they were getting into. They usually lasted six months, and then they’d be, like, ‘I can’t stand this anymore!’” Solberg says. “But certain people adapted because they were passionate about being able to create that sort of space and making it work: a DIY show space where 100 percent of proceeds went to the bands — and obviously, we’d cover some expenses, like electrical and providing food for the bands. But apart from that, the house didn’t take any money. It was all done out of, I dunno, community service.”
The collective itself got a reputation as a straight-edged vegan cabal that forbade hard drugs and meat in the fridge that sat on the outskirts of the barnlike communal show space. “We didn’t want to succumb to the crash pad–flophouse thing,” Solberg explains. “We just wanted to preserve sanity.”
All that came to an end when in 2004 the Oakland City Council passed the Nuisance Eviction Ordinance, which took aim at crack houses but covered “noise” as a reason for eviction. “The people at 40th Street all believed that was the reason we got so much police attention the last year we were there,” Solberg says. After joining his fellow tenants in a winning fight against their landlord, who had given them a month’s eviction notice in order to convert the space to condos, Solberg moved to Ptomaine Temple, which continues to stage experimental noise shows.
BACK AT THE FACTORY
And despite the rewards, good times, and appreciative bands that get play and earn gas money to their next show, shutdowns are still a threat, casting a shadow even over spots like the Smith-owned Cereal Factory. After a neighbor began objecting last year to the soused kids milling in the street and lined up out the Factory’s front door to go to the bathroom, the Mothballs drummer slowed the shows, built a discreet bathroom in the basement, and then carefully began the music once more. Why bother? The chuckle-prone Smith, who works in the live-music department at KALX, bought the house with the intention of having shows. “At the risk of sounding like a stupid hippie, I think it’s important to contribute things,” he says before the last show of summer 2006 on Sept. 16, with Them There Skies, Sandycoates, and Dreamdate.
This last show likely went off smoothly: the model property owner checked in with his neighbors that evening during his walk home. “I said, ‘Donny, we’re having a barbecue show this Saturday.’ And he said, ‘OK, OK, baby, you’re cool. You’re cool.’ I’m hoping to have everything done by 9 o’clock, and that’s pretty tame on a Saturday night,” Smith explains. It’s guaranteed there won’t be any problem on at least one side of his summer house party — “there’s this Argentinean woman named Pepper and she’s fucking awesome. She’ll be, ‘Aw, yeah, it better be fucking loud because that’s how I know you’re having a good time. You gotta live life!’ SFBG

An underground party primer

September 19, 2006

HYPERREAL.ORG
Monthly-ish e-mail calendar (a.k.a. Hyperreal Rave Interface) of upcoming SF underground events
BAYRAVES.COM AND NORCALNIGHTS.COM
Affiliated BBS sites that list upcoming parties
RAVELINKS.COM
Links to a calendar of SF events
SPRACI.COM
“Site for Party, Rave, and Club” Info with links to a calendar of SF parties
NITEWISE.COM
Weekly newsletter that includes major underground events
PACIFICSOUND.NET
The underground and overground crew that throws free parties in Golden Gate Park and on the Bay

Oral histories

September 19, 2006

By Marke B.
› marke@sfbg.com
Thousands of fantastically perverse revelers (most of them gay) will flood San Francisco for the Folsom Street Leather Fair on Sept. 23, ensuring that every cranny of the city brims with wanton copulation — which really is the way it should always be in our famously lewd burg, no? Too bad that for the other 364 days of the year, good ol’ slutty San Francisco is considered by erotic tourists to be one of the most prudish cities in the world.
Unlike other civic dens of iniquity, San Francisco has no gay bathhouses, no sleazy back rooms in bars (well, none that the cops have sniffed out yet), and a dwindling amount of mischief in the bushes. This sorry state of affairs is due partly to the advent of Internet hookup sites in 1996 (thanks, AOL) and partly to the break in gay traditions caused by the loss of a generation to AIDS. But mostly it’s due to the “sex panic” of 1984, when well-meaning gay activists looking to protect gay men from their supposedly unsafe urges convinced the city to ban all bathhouses and enforce rules that separated public sex from any sort of alcohol consumption and unmonitorable activity. Gay folks would just have to go to Berkeley to get wet and have sex. That may have made BART more fun, but for many it seemed like a forced expulsion from SF’s sexual garden by Big Brother.
In 1996, gay city supervisor Tom Ammiano tried to get the baths reopened by proposing a set of HIV-risk-reducing regulations that included no private rooms, no alcohol consumption, safer-sex education materials and condoms on-site, brighter lighting levels, and the presence of staff monitors to ensure against unsafe activity. Pretty oddly, the city adopted most of his proposed regulations — leading to the rise of today’s slick, commercially licensed sex clubs — but kept the bathhouse ban. This means that it’s now OK to pay to have sex with strangers in a public setting, but if there’s any kind of water running other than from a broken toilet, you’re in trouble.
Whether or not gay men in San Francisco should be left to their own sexual devices is still a matter of polemical debate. Or is it? Not many people seem to talk about it anymore. But you can’t stop the party. From 1989, when the last bathhouse was closed by a city lawsuit, to 1997, when San Francisco began using commercial licenses to approve sex clubs, a vibrant sexual underground ruled. Often subject to raids by police, the underground included anonymous-encounter mainstays like Blow Buddies and Eros, both of which opened on a members-only basis in hopes of circumventing any legal trouble. It also included less formal play spaces like the Church of Phallic Worship and Orgasm, naughty nooks that live on only in legend.
This dark period — or golden age — of underground sex clubs (and with the lights off, it was probably both) has largely been forgotten. But exciting tales of the past still issue forth from it, and with the current revival of ’70s bathhouse nostalgia, it’s interesting to note that bathhouse culture extended well into the ’80s — yep, folks were dropping towel to Paula Abdul’s “Cold Hearted Snake” — and poured out into the underground sex clubs of the early ’90s before being sucked toward the Ethernet of now. We asked a few of the scene’s regular, anonymous players for their memories of some clubs of the time.
NIGHT GALLERY, A.K.A. MIKE’S PARTY
“You’d ring a little bell at this house a few doors down from the Powerhouse — tingaling-aling — and they’d open the door, and at the top of this long flight of thickly carpeted stairs, there’d be this guy sitting in a chair who would say in this flat, uncommitted voice, ‘Welcome to my party. Friends tend to chip in $5 to help cover costs. My roommate’s in the kitchen if you want to check your stuff.’ That was Mike, and it was funny he said roommate, because you know no one really lived there.
“At the top of the stairs was this long hallway full of amateur erotic art — not like Tom of Finland, more like a horny Grandma Moses. I stole a drawing that I think was supposed to be of an S-M twink but more resembled a Christmas pixie in irons. I don’t remember much about the sex rooms, except there was a shoddy maze in the back and a sign that said ‘No talking in the fun zone.’
“In the kitchen there was a beer keg and a big aluminum bowl of shiny-looking Cheez-Its that I could just never bring myself to snack on. I knew where those Cheez-Its had been. There was also this kind of ‘Your Own Carnival Hot Dog’ maker that was more like a filthy aquarium with gray franks in tepid hot dog water that no queen would touch — despite the metal tongs provided ‘for your protection.’”
TROUBLE
“Conga-line dance-floor fucking was what I remember most about this place. Which is pretty darn difficult if you take varying heights into consideration. Trouble was a totally anything goes kind of club — after-hours alcohol served, a big dance floor with professional-looking lighting, out-in-the-open nasty sex. Like Studio 54 if Liza was a go-go whore and, you know, a sexy guy. It was in SoMa around Folsom and, I think, First.
“There were dark rooms and a maze upstairs — it was in a big warehouse space with a high ceiling. It got raided three or four times before they finally shut it down. It only lasted like eight months. During the raids the cops weren’t all, like, ‘Let’s get the faggots,’ they were more, like, bored, flashing their lights around and saying in a polite voice, ‘Please leave — you have to go now,’ like they were ushers and we had overstayed our welcome at the opera.”
THE BLACK HOUSE
“The Black House was freakin’ scary. It was this old Victorian off Castro painted completely black. I had just moved here — in 1994. I was 23 and thought the Black House was where Anton LaVey used to live and they had Satanic rituals there, but really it was just a bunch of naked guys fooling around in the basement. I don’t remember exactly where it was, but somehow my drunk feet took me there after the bars closed.
“Mostly the guys were cute in a hustler sort of way — this was when tweakers left the house to get laid. But there would be some letches. One guy followed me around telling everyone I looked like an Etruscan statue. I got really embarrassed and had to leave and go look up Etruscan. One time the hot young guy doing coat check took out his teeth to blow some other guy. I wonder whatever happened to him.”
ORGASM
“Orgasm was across the street from Endup on Sixth, so you could just stumble there and have sex at any time of the day or night, it seemed. There was this huge stage, 10 feet deep, where they had live sex shows and some really crusty Goodwill couches. One time I tricked with a guy who asked me to drop him off at Orgasm, and the minute he got there, he shed his clothes and got up onstage for a show. Where did he get the energy?
“Like most other clubs, it was in a warehouselike space, very minimal. There was a door guy and another guy inside with a clipboard, but that was just to look official — there was never anything on the clipboard. The space was divided by curtains for ‘privacy’ and had a long overhead shelf with candles on it, which added atmosphere to the ‘lovemaking.’ There were turntables, and I remember it was around the time that Boy George came out with ‘Generations of Love,’ which was a surprisingly good record.”
CHURCH OF PHALLIC WORSHIP
“I think the Church in SoMa used to have ads in the back of the Bay Area Reporter, but everyone just seemed to know about it. It had a real rough, underground feel. I don’t know if it was officially religiously affiliated, but maybe they got free parking out of it. They served beer after hours — it was like a one-stop shopping hub of gay socializing: backyard barbecue, glory holes, music, the works.
“It was run by a Santa Claus–type character called Father Frank, and every time you called the info line, he’d answer the phone by reciting a homoerotic limerick in this hilariously effeminate voice, like Rona Barrett on 33 1/3. It was a cross between a house and a warehouse — pretty big, but it could get way too overcrowded. What was so great was that it went all night, yet no one seemed like they were on speed. Everyone was just drunk and having a great time.”
1808 CLUB
“This was a big house down by Guerrero and Market near where the LGBT Center is now. I remember this huge door with a tiny window you had to knock on, like it was a speakeasy in Communist Czechoslovakia. This totally hot bald guy would answer, and I’d kind of be intimidated because he was so muscular. Years later he became my personal trainer at Gold’s Gym.
“The place was painted all black on the inside and was on two levels, one overlooking the other. Balconesque, as the French would put it. There were these little cubbyholes all over the place that two people could fit in, and maybe you could squeeze in three on occasion. On weekends it was packed. It was cheap too: $5 for the whole night, and they’d stamp your hand so you could get in and out. I didn’t go too much, because it was in my neighborhood and I like being a little incognito. That’s a little more classy.” SFBG

Notes from the underground

September 19, 2006

› kimberly@sfbg.com
Looking for hints of San Francisco’s renowned underground nightlife? It pays to keep your eyes and nose to the ground — and to be textable. That’s one of the few subtle signs that the hottest underground party in town is happening right here on an early Sunday summer morning: reedy, peg-legged hipsters standing out by the curb on this barren, bulldozed Hunters Point artery, busily texting and talking up fidgety, insomniac friends about their next landing strip. Beats bang gently in the background as fashion-damaged kids dangle from the railings along the short flight of steps to the door, smoking and guzzling from sacks like it’s recess at their own semiprivate too-cool school.
Upstairs in a long, tall space lined with huge rectangular windows, the Sixteens are getting ready for a set. And everyone else — and that’s every-fucking-body — is madly dancing on the other side to stabbing electrotech beats that come off so metallic and grimy that you could slice yourself open and get a nasty infection on ’em. Is that arch-retro-candy raver actually swinging a stretchy glow stick with one hand while trying to hold on to a mixed drink in the other? Swirling moiré patterns, projections of flames, and found industrial footage lick the walls of the room and the faces of the dancers. A burnt-orange slice of summer moon is slung low in the sky as if already hungover from the shit-hot party raging below.
Closing time — you may not know whom you want to take home, but do you know where your next party is? Above-grounders might say “you don’t need to go home, but you can’t stay here,” but you needn’t turn into a pumpkin and pass out in your car just yet. Bay Area underground parties like this one — and of every imaginable stripe and musical genre — are where sleepless scenesters flock.
So why is the underground scene continuing to blossom like a hundred Lotus Girls on a dust-caked playa in a city chock-full of wholly legit clubs? This summer, as a series of humongoid dance clubs including Temple Bar SF, prepped to throw open their doors, one had to wonder: why bother going off the grid?
Perhaps that’s where you can find the sounds you crave, a frustrating chore when clubs book conservatively — and an experience that may end all too soon with the city’s 2 a.m. last call. DJs such as Jamin Creed of BIG are seeing their grime and dubstep parties, for instance, starting to blow up now both over- and underground after gestating in after-hours soirees. “It’s a music-orienting thing, to be honest,” says underground breaks party thrower DJ Ripple, né Lorin Stoll. Citing undergrounds in Big Sur as well as the Harmony fest in Santa Rosa, the ex-Deadhead sees continuity between the city’s Left Coast vibe and “the merging of the counterculture of the ’60s with the rave culture of the ’90s, merging with the experience and professionalism of Burning Man culture in the 2000s. It’s created this nice renaissance in underground music.”
Dub it an unintended fringe benefit stemming from the failure to change the city’s last call two years ago, an effort led by Terrance Alan, chairman of the Late Night Coalition and legislative chair of San Francisco’s Entertainment Commission. That move failed — after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution urging the state legislature to make the change — when the proposed legislation got stuck in committee at the State Assembly. Despite the support of the city’s Entertainment Commission, Board of Supervisors, and Mayor Gavin Newsom, the bill was opposed by antialcohol groups and organizations such as the Oakland Police Department, whose officers testified that a later last call in San Francisco would create traffic accidents in Oakland. “Those observations were never supported in the data on changes in last call,” Alan says today.
The reality is that partly as a result of those quashed endeavors, the Bay Area underground party scene continues to flourish, via Tribe.net, lists, and those omnipresent flyers. Tomas Palermo — a DJ, Guardian contributor, and former XLR8R editor — thinks the underground warehouse and techno event circuit has been bubbling along nicely since 1988, with surges in house in the early ’90s and explosions in drum ’n’ bass during the dot-com years. And even a seasoned listener like him isn’t immune to the simple pleasures of an outdoor beatdown: “In the last two weeks I went to a free [breakbeat] sound system gathering in a tiny grassy nook of Golden Gate Park and a Sunset Party in McLaren Park,” he e-mails.
The latter gatherings, put on by Pacific Sound System, just may embody the resilient, oh-naturel vibe of the undergrounds in this area. DJ Galen began the daytime Sunset Parties on summer Sundays about a dozen years ago at Golden Gate Park. Old-school — yep. Family oriented — believe it. Ideal if you’re still tweaked the morning after — maybe. An outdoor dance floor of up to 3,000 — yikes. “I just feel events are very much the reflection of the people who put them on, and you can kind of tell when people are doing it for money or just the pure feeling of bringing people together through music and the outdoors,” says Galen, who co-owns Tweekin Records. When he started the parties, he was a shell of a raver, burned out from lifelong training as a swimmer for the 1996 Olympics. “I hadn’t felt like I lived life and came home and some friends took me to a party and just opened my eyes,” he recalls, citing the Wicked Crew’s Full Moon Raves as inspirational. “Looked at all these people having fun and a sense of community — I just got so excited that this whole other world existed and got immersed in it.”
He maxed out his credit card, bought a sound system, and began playing house music in the park as the audience grew. His three-person collective has since produced successful overground boat parties, but they’ve maintained that earthbound sense of perspective. “I think that’s one major reason why things have gone well — we’re not out of it for ego,” he says. “We are very respectful of everyone, and in turn people are respectful of us. When we leave these parks, they’re spotless, and a lot of people have told us, ‘Wow, that was a really crazy party, but everyone’s so mellow and nice!’ SFBG

More underground:

Live bait: the secret life of warehouse shows

Oral Histories: underground gay sex clubs of the early ’90s

Party primer: underground party web sites

TUESDAY

September 12, 2006

Sept. 19

Dvd/Music

Bad Brains, Live at CBGB 1982

There’s nothing fancy about the new Bad Brains DVD, Live at CBGB 1982 (Music Video Distributors), but then again, there doesn’t need to be. The recently issued concert film captures the band onstage at the peak of their early hardcore era – performing classics such as “Redbone in the City,” “How Low Can a Punk Get,” and “Attitude” – with no annoying camera tricks or other distractions. (Will York)

9 p.m.
12 Galaxies
2565 Mission, SF
Free
(415) 970-9777
www.12galaxies.com

Visual Art

“Mexico As Muse: Tina Modotti and Edward Weston”

Intended as an archive for the monumental partnership between two major artistic figures, Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “Mexico as Muse” serves more as a teaser to Modotti’s life and work. While Weston’s images of earthen pots, ancient pyramids, and Mexican skies build a foundation for later works, his portraits of his artistic partner are by far his most interesting contributions to “Mexico as Muse.” Modotti chose her subjects carefully, opting for the limitless possibilities of telephone lines stretching over the rural Mexican landscape and flimsy, partially ajar doors instead of the immobile and established nature of Weston’s content. (K. Tighe)

Through Jan. 2
Fri.-Tues., 11 a.m.-5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 11 a.m.-8:45 p.m.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third St., SF
$12.50, $8 seniors, $7 students, free under 13 and members (free first Tuesday; half price Thurs., 6-8:45 p.m.)
(415) 357-4000
www.sfmoma.org

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