› paulr@sfbg.com
Reincarnation is a sketchy proposition, even if you’re a restaurant. True, you won’t come back as a rabbit or a mosquito — a couple of the less juicy possibilities human beings have to worry about in anticipating their next go-round in life — but you will certainly be stuck with a past that, even if punctuated with interludes of glory, has to have culminated in some sort of gloomy closure for you to be available for reincarnation at all. The truth is that the names of successful restaurants don’t recycle easily. Two vividly local examples: Stars and Trader Vic’s.
For years I would pass by Julie’s Supper Club, on Folsom, and I would mean to go there even as I was on my way to someplace else, to many someplace elses. The supper club (opened by Julie Ring in 1987) was a SoMa stalwart in the early 1990s, when the neighbors included Appam, the Acorn, and, just a few blocks west, Hamburger Mary’s. All those places had closed by the turn of the millennium, but Julie’s soldiered on, though without Julie herself: she’d sold her interest in 1998 and moved along to other ventures. When the end finally came for Julie’s Supper Club, about a year and a half ago, it was as if the last veteran of the Civil War had died.
So much for Julie’s Supper Club, I thought, RIP. Rumor told of some new loungey deal, with a new name, to open in the space, and rumor, as we all well know, is always true, except when it isn’t. The recently opened successor to Julie’s Supper Club is … Julie’s Supper Club and Lounge II. I am not sure about the Roman numeral, which makes me think of Super Bowls or people who wear monocles. It seems weighty in a way the new proprietors might not necessarily intend. But it also suggests continuity, a fusing of western SoMa’s seedy-glamorous yesterdays with a lively tomorrow.
Since I never saw the inside of the original Julie’s, I cannot say whether much has been changed, though I suspect not. The look is very hip-loungey, with a series of warped-L ceiling supports (whose holes of various sizes give one the sense that they’re made of colored Swiss cheese) and a long bar backed by a mirror and a battery of pink neon lights that look like they’ve been salvaged from the starship Enterprise (so often wrecked and reincarnated, like a stock-car racer). The oak floors are simply magnificent; they are a rich coffee color and are immaculately glossy, as if they belong in the ballroom of some posh town house on the Upper East Side.
The biggest change is probably chef Shane Suemori’s food. Under the old regime the vittles used to be a mélange of Californian and American influences; now, according to the menu card’s terrifying proclamation, it is “fusion cuisine, where east truly meets west.” There is also a quesadilla ($9), but pass on that: it consists of a pair of semi-stale tortillas enclosing an undistinguished filling of melted white cheese, diced yellow bell peppers, and chopped chicken. This is the kind of food famished travelers have to eat, at the kind of price they have to pay, while held captive at those prisons called airports. Marginally better (but still airportworthy) is a Japanese chicken curry ($7), which consists of chicken chunks, bits of carrot, and potato quarters in a golden sauce that reminded me of similar sauces I used to make from those soaplike bars of curry paste.
At its best, the cooking is quite innovative. I’d never had anything remotely like the lemon ponzu somen salad ($6), which was like a pasta sushi, with four little nests of cooked somen noodles arranged around a dipping dish of ponzu. And the asparagus cheese tease ($7) turned out to be a kind of vegetarian version of pigs in a blanket, with the asparagus stalks swaddled in phyllo leaves and baked with mozzarella and parmesan cheeses. The ends of the stalks could have used trimming; they were inedibly tough, but then it is not really asparagus season.
The crab cakes ($16 for two) were slightly larger than golf balls and were simply terrific, particularly with the spicy creole sauce, but the presentation was otherwise about as minimalist as it gets, with the pair of spheres sitting naked on the plate like … like … I can’t say it, but you see what I mean. A little more generous was the oven-roasted chicken breast ($14) stuffed with cheese, cut into quarters, and set atop a mound of cheese mashed potatoes and a mix of sautéed eggplant, zucchini, and tabs of carrot. The sole dessert, meanwhile, bananas flambé ($6) presented in a martini glass, was positively luxurious. The lengths of fruit were swimming in a warm custard beneath whose bubbly surface lurked large chunks of chocolate. There was even an ornamental sprig of mint on the plate beneath the glass!
The reincarnated Julie’s prices don’t look too high as printed, but when you see what you actually get, you start to wonder. Of course, we live in the age of the $40 main dish, as the New York Times reported recently. Still, should a glass of no-name cabernet sauvignon cost $10? (We were given no wine list, just offered a few banal choices.) Should a doll-size snifter of Rémy Martin cognac — good though hardly regal — cost $8? I might have minded less if plate after plate hadn’t seemed quite so abstemiously composed and if I’d never laid eyes on the airport quesadilla. SFBG
JULIE’S SUPPER CLUB AND LOUNGE II
Lunch: Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–3 p.m. Supper: nightly, 5–10 p.m.
1123 Folsom, SF
(415) 864-1222
AE/MC/V
Full bar
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Volume 41 Number 07
November 15 – November 21, 2006
Microsoft Linux
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION I’m living in a bizarro business deal universe. Microsoft and Novell, which distributes a version of Suse Linux, have formed a partnership. When Microsoft’s notoriously anti-Linux CEO Steve Ballmer announced the deal, he claimed it was because customers demanded it. But the open-source community is worried something else may be afoot.
PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak speculated last week that Microsoft was trying to do an end run around free software licensing, essentially breaking the GNU General Public License (GPL) via legal loopholes. Then Linux Journal’s Nicholas Petreley, speaking for a lot of disgruntled open sourcers, urged Linux users to migrate away from all Novell Suse products over the next five years.
It’s easy to understand why open-source and free-software advocates are up in arms. Members of these communities have worked for decades to build robust, free alternatives to proprietary, big-business software products. And Linux, one of the most successful free operating systems available, has openly challenged Microsoft’s hegemony in countless ways.
Linux isn’t just a good technological alternative to Windows. It’s a symbol. This upstart, community-built operating system creates choice in a market where big players dominate. Plus, everything about Linux is transparent, open, and customizable. You can do whatever you want to your Linux operating system — rewrite the code, turn it into another piece of software, copy it a zillion times for your family and friends.
There’s only one rule: don’t break the GPL. So if you turn Linux into something else, that something else must also be licensed under the GPL.
Now that Microsoft and Novell are shacking up together at a joint research center, it feels like we’re only a few months away from a Microsoft Linux distribution. In fact, Microsoft has said it will officially recommend Novell Suse Linux. Could Microsoft actually undermine the legal foundation of the GPL and create a form of Linux that cannot be modified or copied freely?
The answer is yes and no.
Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Jason Schultz says the deal doesn’t threaten the legal status of the GPL. But he speculates that the products Microsoft and Novell have discussed creating — such as a software package containing interoperable versions of Windows and Novell Suse Linux — could make it very difficult for consumers to modify Novell Linux without also running into problems with Windows.
“This hybrid product could intermingle its Linux and Microsoft parts so that it could be hard to copy the open portions,” he says.
Schultz also points out something crucial about this deal: it’s less a legal threat to Linux than it is a publicity threat. Microsoft’s move is savvy marketing. The more it can confuse customers about what Linux is by attaching Windows products to it, the less name recognition Linux will have on its own. And the less people will understand what free software and open source really mean.
Ballmer has been blabbing to anyone who will listen that he’d love to cut similar deals with other Linux distributors, like Red Hat. No matter what the legal implications of this deal turn out to be, it’s definitely a weird new stage in Microsoft’s fear, uncertainty, and doubt war with Linux.
I think Microsoft is trying to muddy the waters just enough that consumers will stop recognizing the fundamental divide between Windows and Linux.
We’ve seen this problem in the free-software community before, though in a far less insidious form. When the phrase “open source” began gaining currency in the late 1990s, people often confused it with “free software” because many open-source projects are literally free (like free beer). But there are dozens of open-source licenses, many of which permit people to create proprietary software out of the open software.
As more people used open-source software, the popular media and public began to conflate free software and open source — much to free-software inventor Richard Stallman’s dismay. I worry that this Microsoft-Novell deal has the potential to do the same thing to open-source software.
The more Microsoft can absorb Linux, the fewer people will recognize the challenge Linux represents. Linux isn’t just an alternative set of software tools. It’s another mode of production — one that’s more transparent and more sensitive to the public good. That’s something we can’t afford to lose. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who thinks that if Microsoft makes a software shim, Linux developers should make a software shiv and stick those bastards right in the gut.
Ooga-booga
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I wish I hadn’t read your column about cervical penetration. I am thoroughly disgusted, disturbed, even angry. It’s been my understanding that body modification is a red flag of imbalance, poor sense of self, and ignorance about anatomy and physiology. Do you think I’m justified in being disturbed that people are going around messing with irreplaceable tissue and getting off on their own pain? Throughout history we have tested our physical limits through sports, battle, fasting, etc. I can understand the desire to be liberated from our fear of pain by initiating it ourselves. It seems like a misunderstanding, however, to think that in our search for spiritual enlightenment, we will transcend the physical by destroying it. I’m hoping you can explain so I can stop feeling horrified.
Love,
Puzzled by Perversion
Dear Perv:
There are ways to indulge that are probably harmless, and there is stupidity (you ought to know better) and compulsion (you do know better but can’t help yourself). Since the young lady had a desire that could not be pursued without causing herself injury, I gently steered her toward what I hoped would function as a harmless alternative. What I did not do was presume to know her motivations or assume that she was broken just because she wanted something I thought was ill-advised.
We should make a distinction between body modification — generally understood to mean piercing, tattooing, maybe some scarring, and the occasional loony tunes full-body job like that guy on the Discovery Channel who looks like a big doofy cartoon cat — and S-M. The pain usually but not always inflicted or received in pursuit of the latter may look like a mere ouchy sensation but can feel like anything from a massage to a form of worship, depending on who’s doing what to whom. You can’t tell just by looking, and certainly not if you use preconceived notions of what damaged people they are, doing such damaging things.
Body mod is usually done to, well, modify the body. You may think it’s dumb — hell, sometimes I think it’s dumb — but you don’t know what motivated the pierced or tattooed person to mark themselves. Your Anthro 101 explanation actually supports my argument more than yours: “throughout history humans have tested our physical limits,” indeed, by poking sticks through our noses, hacking bits off our genitals, and rubbing dirt into holes in our faces. While I’ll grant that the people who invented these practices knew little of anatomy and physiology, I’ll wager that they were neither unbalanced nor lacking a sense of self. They were (as our modern practitioners often still are) both seeking to set themselves apart from the other tribes (them) and be instantly identifiable to their own (us). This was more useful and important when the “them” tribes were wont to hit you with a rock and then eat you, but it’s still an essential human urge, and decorating ourselves is a pretty harmless if occasionally silly way to express it. Does that help?
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
I’m in a long-distance relationship and having serious sexual frustration. I can’t bring myself to masturbate more than once a month. I dream about masturbating but can’t bring myself to actually do it. I feel dirty and wrong, and during my big one monthly moment I find the only place I’m comfortable is the bathtub. Is there something wrong with me? I was never like this before.
Love,
Frustrated
Dear Frust:
Masturbation, which for a long time appeared in popular culture mostly as joke fodder and the object of many undignified gerundial nicknames of the “choking,” “draining,” and “clubbing” variety, has been undergoing an image upgrade of late, in some circles anyway, often finding itself exalted as a holy experience or at least revered as therapeutic and educational. I’m down with respecting it — masturbation is useful, and you can learn a lot — but I’m never too big on the sacred. Nothing’s sacred if everything can be made fun of, and everything can be made fun of.
All that said (and it was a lot), it seems to me that you’re putting way too much pressure on one humble little act, imbuing it with too much meaning. If you used to masturbate regularly but not excessively and without guilt and that has suddenly changed, poor little masturbation is surely standing in for something else. I’d be tempted to suggest that you are depressed or developing an anxiety disorder. A change in attitude that dramatic about something that quotidian and harmless cannot mean anything good. If attempting to desensitize yourself by simply doing it more (and, we hope, thinking about it less) doesn’t work, I’d get some short-term therapy, not because it’s crazy not to want to masturbate (it most certainly is not) but because it’s dysfunctional to punish yourself harshly for wanting to. Plus, come on, only OK in the bathtub? How Freudian can you get? That’s like suddenly manifesting a fear of snakes or dreaming of trains going into tunnels. Something’s up.
Love,
Andrea
The new sunshine “problem”
EDITORIAL Matt Dorsey, who handles press for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, stopped by last week to talk to us about the barrage of public records requests that are coming in from one activist, Kimo Crossman, who is demanding so many records and so much information from so many departments that it’s costing the city big money.
The problem, Dorsey says, is a lot of the records that people like Crossman request (particularly if they have metadata, or hidden computerized information, embedded in them) have to be reviewed by a lawyer before they’re released to determine if any of the internal information might contain something confidential. The city typically accounts for its legal work at about $200 an hour — and already, Herrera’s office has spent hundreds of hours scouring records just to satisfy one aggressive gadfly whose sunshine activism is, we have to agree, sometimes rather scattershot. That’s a hefty taxpayer bill.
Dorsey’s done more for promoting open government than anyone who has ever worked for the Office of the San Francisco City Attorney, so we don’t dismiss his concerns. And we’ve said before and we’ll say again that the Sunshine Task Force needs to take up this issue, hold hearings, and make some policy recommendations.
Still, we had the same response we typically do when public records are at issue:
Why all the effort? Why the fuss? Just release the stuff. Give Crossman what he wants, and that will be the end of it.
Dorsey’s response: state law and state bar requirements mandate that attorneys, including municipal attorneys, carefully monitor all documents that might contain metadata and “at every peril to himself or herself” prevent any potentially confidential material from accidental release. “The lawyers in our office risk real penalties if they don’t carefully review every one of these requests, and that takes a lot of time,” Dorsey told us.
Well, if that’s a problem, the city and the state need to address it right now. Metadata is increasingly becoming part of government activities and will increasingly be part of public records requests by community activists. And there’s no reason that city employees, including city lawyers, should have to fear retribution if they make a good-faith effort to release information to the public.
Under state and local law everything the city government does is presumed to be public, unless it falls under one of a set of very narrowly defined exemptions.
But in San Francisco there’s been a culture of secrecy at City Hall that goes so far back and is so deeply inbred it’s hard to remove it from the political DNA. All sorts of deals are done behind closed doors. It’s considered perfectly acceptable to promise vendors bidding on public contracts that they can keep basic financial data secret. Every city official seems to think that every request needs legal review.
It’s ridiculous — and the supervisors, the mayor, and the city attorney should take some basic steps to end it.
For starters, the supervisors should pass a clear policy statement that says no city employee shall face any disciplinary action of any sort stemming from a good-faith effort to release information to the public. Herrera should tell his lawyers the same thing: nobody gets in trouble for handing out information.
Yes, there are sensitive documents, particularly in the City Attorney’s Office — but overall, the risk to the city of a mistaken release of confidential information is far, far lower than the risk (and the cost) of continuing this deep culture of confidentiality.
If that creates a problem with the state bar, Assemblymember Mark Leno should introduce a bill that eliminates any penalties or consequences for public agency lawyers who, in good faith, allow the release of public information that may unintentionally include confidential material.
Meanwhile, Crossman has a good idea: why not create a publicly accessible database that gets automatic copies of every document created at City Hall (unless there’s a damn good reason to mark it secret)? That way the busiest of the advocates can spend their time searching the files on their own, and the lawyers can go back to fighting Pacific Gas and Electric Co. SFBG
EDITOR’S NOTES
› tredmond@sfbg.com
I started getting all the usual calls last week, from all of the usual national media outlets, with all the usual questions that a local political reporter gets when a local politician makes good. “Who is Nancy Pelosi, really? What do her constituents think of her? Is she going to bring Burning Man and gay marriage to Washington?”
My answer to everyone, from the liberals to the conservatives, was exactly the same:
Relax. There’s nothing to get excited about. Pelosi is by no means a San Francisco liberal. She’s a Washington insider, a born and bred politician who cares more about power and money than she does about any particular ideology.
I’m glad the Democrats are in charge, and Pelosi deserves tremendous credit for making that happen. But she’s not about to push any kind of ambitious left-wing political or cultural agenda.
Just look at her record. Pelosi was weak on the war and late in opposing it. She was the author of the bill that gave that well-known pauper George Lucas the lucrative contract to build a commercial office building in a national park. She worked with Republicans such as Don Fisher of the Gap on the Presidio privatization and set a precedent for the National Park System that the most rabid antigovernment conservatives can love.
Just this week Bloomberg News reported that Pelosi is working with Silicon Valley venture capital firms to weaken the post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley law, which mandates strict accounting procedures for publicly held corporations.
And just a couple of weeks before the election, she told 60 Minutes that same-sex marriage is “not an issue that we’re fighting about here.”
I think it’s pretty safe to say she’s never been to Burning Man.
Pelosi, who is backing antiwar but also anti-abortion Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha for majority leader, has an agenda for her first 100 hours. It’s nice moderate stuff — raising the minimum wage (to all of $7.25 an hour), lowering interest on student loans (but not replacing loans with grants), and allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower-priced drugs (but not making Medicare a national health insurance program for every American). Tactically, it’s brilliant: there won’t be a lot of national opposition, and Bush will look like a heel if he vetoes the bills.
In fact, as a political strategist and tactician, Pelosi has proven brilliant. She’s whipped together a dysfunctional party and led the most important electoral change to this country in more than a decade.
Along the way, though, she’s pretty much stopped representing San Francisco. On issue after issue, her constituents are way to the left of her. This fall she didn’t even bother to show up in the district (except to extract money for Democratic congressional campaigns around the country). She spent election night in Washington.
There are a lot of people who think that’s fine. Now that she’s speaker, she’ll be able to do a lot for this city, particularly when it comes to bringing in federal money. I appreciate the fact that her work on the national level, which often involved running away from San Francisco, will allow more-progressive Democrats like Los Angeles’s Maxine Waters to chair powerful committees that can go after White House cronyism and corruption.
But if the right-wing talk show hosts are worried about San Francisco liberals like me, they can take it easy: Nancy Pelosi is not one of us. SFBG
No more surveillance cameras
OPINION In July last year, San Francisco began installing video surveillance cameras to monitor the public streets. What quietly started as a pilot program with two cameras in the Western Addition has quickly expanded, with more than 30 cameras throughout the city. The Mayor’s Office is seeking to install 22 more cameras at a number of locations, including heavily trafficked areas such as the 16th Street and Mission and 24th Street and Mission intersections.
On Nov. 15 the Police Commission will decide whether to approve the installation of additional cameras. It should reject the mayor’s proposal and send a strong message that scarce public safety dollars should be spent on less intrusive and more effective programs such as increased foot patrols, improved lighting, and community policing.
While surveillance cameras may seem like an intuitive solution to the serious problem of violent crime, in reality cameras pose significant threats to civil liberties while providing few public safety benefits. Study after study demonstrates that video surveillance does not reduce violent crime in cities.
In Britain, for example, where there is one camera for every 13 people and the average person is photographed more than 300 times a day, a recent comprehensive review of 13 jurisdictions showed that cameras do not reduce crime or fear of crime. A University of Cincinnati study found that cameras in its city merely shifted crime beyond the cameras’ view. As Cincinnati police captain Kimberly Frey mentioned in one recent news report, “We’ve never really gotten anything useful from them…. We’ve never had a successful prosecution…. We’re trying to use … money for other things.”
With limited public safety dollars, cameras deprive more effective programs of funds that would significantly reduce crime. Studies show that improved lighting can reduce crime 20 percent, and increased foot patrols have also been shown to significantly impact crime, including violent offenses.
Moreover, the ever-increasing expansion of surveillance cameras poses a significant threat to our privacy. The prospect of 24-hour surveillance of innocent San Franciscans — with video accessible to city officials and the public under state open-records laws — is chilling in and of itself. If the trend continues, cameras installed today may be paired with other new developments, such as facial recognition and Radio Frequency Identification technology, giving law enforcement the ability to develop dossiers about our personal lives.
While San Francisco has some regulations governing camera use, those regulations have already changed and may change again, due to an overreaching political response to crime concerns. To see San Francisco’s future, one need only look to the inspiration for the program — Chicago. There, Mayor Richard M. Daley recently announced a plan that by 2016 would put a camera on almost every street corner in the city.
In light of the significant privacy and free speech implications and limited public safety benefit, the Police Commission should decisively reject further camera placement and strongly urge the mayor and Board of Supervisors to pursue effective programs. San Franciscans deserve more than symbolic measures like video surveillance cameras in response to very real crime problems. Scarce public resources should not be spent on ineffective Big Brother surveillance programs. SFBG
Mark Schlosberg and Nicole A. Ozer
Mark Schlosberg is police practices policy director, and Nicole A. Ozer is technology and civil liberties policy director, respectively, for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.