Volume 45 [2010–11]

Ms. Mirliton

2

CHEAP EATS First time I went to Criolla was with Coach and company and I was just tickled to death to be eating chicken and waffles within walking distance from my home. Chicken and waffles! I forgave them the dry chicken, even though it was all dark meat and dark meat is of course harder to overcook, because the waffle was good. And they offered real, true Vermont maple syrup for one worth-it dollar more.

And it was chicken and waffles. And walking distance. And so forth: sweet potato tater tots, limeade, sunshine, just a beautiful sidewalky San Francisco day at Market and Noe.

I thought: OK, new favorite restaurant. It ain’t Farmer Brown’s Little Skillet, or even Auntie April’s, but it ain’t Baghdad Café anymore, either. It’s chicken and waffles! In the Castro, and that was overall a happy thought.

Next time I went was with Hedgehog on an also-beautiful day, but we sat inside. In the window, and looked out upon the sidewalk there. It’s a colorful corner. Men stroll by naked. Nobody blinks.

All right.

But if you are going to make fried chicken anywhere in the world, including the Castro, including walking distance to my house, you are going to need to make it to order. Fried chicken don’t sit well. It never has, and it never will. So unless you’re a place that sells it as fast as you can crank it out, you’re going to serve some hit-or-miss soggy-breading-ed and dry-meat fried chicken. Most of the time.

I don’t know if Criolla Kitchen fries or tries to fry their chickens to order. If they do, they better get better at it.

The good news is, since it isn’t just a chicken and waffle place, or even a fried chicken place, you’ve got plenty of other options. And a lot of them sound kinda good. Almost all of them, besides the chicken and waffles, sound Louisianic: chicken gizzards with pepper jelly, mirliton salad, red beans and rice, shrimp po’oy …

I got the Louisiana farm-raised catfish mojito isleño on the sheer strength of the number of words in its name. If there were green olives in the tomato-ey, onion-y smother as advertised, I didn’t see or taste them. But it was pretty good anyway.

Hedgehog’s chicken was soggy-topped and dry inside. I’d warned her, but she had to see for herself, poor li’l prickly. Anyway, the red beans and rice that came with it were good.

Warning: the black beans are vegetarian, and therefore not very good. Unless maybe if you’re a vegetarian, but even then I think they might could use a little something.

The best thing I’ve had, in my two visits to Criolla, was the mirliton salad. Hedgehog, being an issue-taker by nature, took issue with our waiterperson’s mispronunciation of mirliton. She’s also a former and future resident of New Orleans, so has heard the word more than most of us’ns.

The way she says it sounds like mella tone, as in melatonin — which has helped me sleep once or twice, so I like it. But the salad is something else entirely: almost see-through, thinly sliced strips of mirliton — or chayote, a kind of gourd with crunch, which tastes pretty much exactly like whatever you put on it, in this case a lemon-cumin vinaigrette.

And avocado, which needs no introduction.

Yum! So that was the best thing I have had at my new favorite restaurant. A little tiny starter salad. Still, I will go back, I’m sure, because even though I’m mad at them for their fried chicken, and disappointed in the catfish, there are still the shrimp po’oys and charbroiled oysters to be tried.

If those oysters come even close to the chargrilled ones I ate one day at Acme Oyster House in Metairie after buying some shirts at the mall last spring, then I will be the happiest little glaze-eyed chicken farmer in the whole wide city, and will promise to never ever leave the Bay Area ever again.

Which. Wait. I have promised before, and broken. And broken. And will break again, I promise. 

le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CRIOLLA KITCHEN

Daily: 7 a.m.-2 a.m.

2295 Market, SF

(415) 552-5811

www.criollakitchen.com

AE/D/MC/V

Beer and wine

 

Rogue pairings

1

culture@sfbg.com

BEER AND WINE The other week, I hit up one of the free, bi-weekly Thursday night tasting parties put on by San Francisco nanobrewery Pacific Brewing Laboratories, located in a small garage on a side street deep in SoMa—and was completely smitten. The adventurous atmosphere and swell-looking crowd were part of that, of course. But the small-batch beers on offer (I quickly downed a gorgeously smooth black IPA), the rogue food vendors (I then dove into a box of Nosh This Bacon Crack chocolate), and the almost-steampunk assemblage of tangled brewing equipment, scuffed kegs, and illustrative blackboards really sealed the deal.

Since they seemed exquisitely attuned to the underground brew-plus-food equation, I asked the guys behind Pac Brew Labs, Patrick M. Horn and Bryan Hermannsson, to tell us a bit about themselves and give us a wee menu of street pairings. Here’s what Patrick came up with for us. (Marke B.)

“Pacific Brewing Laboratory started in a garage as a place for us to experiment with new beer flavors, styles, and brewing techniques. What started out as a place to share new creations with friends grew into a twice-monthly, totally free event with hundreds of our “new” friends and great local street food vendors.

“We brew small, 10-gallon batches which allows for constant beer experimentation. Some of our more exotic beer styles include Hibiscus Saison, Squid Ink Black IPA, Chamomile Ale, Lemongrass IPA, Szechwan Peppercorn Red ale, and wine-soaked oak-aged Brown Ale. We’re always on the lookout for new ingredients and inspirations that will lead us to palate-pleasing creations. For our tastings, we often invite a local food cart to attend, in order to pair our beers against some of the amazing varieties of flavors produced by DIY local food vendors. Below are a few of our favorites, which include beers we enjoy from other local breweries.”

Read about Pac Brew Lab’s upcoming free Thursday Night Beer Nights at www.pacbrewlab.com.

 

WISE SONS DELI PASTRAMI + PACIFIC BREWING LABORATORIES SQUID INK BLACK IPA

“Leo Beckerman and Evan Bloom of pop-up Wise Sons Deli (Saturdays, 9 a.m.-2 p.m. at Beast and Hare, 1001 Guerrero, SF. www.wisesonsdeli.com) are on a mission from God to bring to us mere mortals the best in Jewish deli. They’ve been serving up their in-house pickles, matzo ball soup, pastries and — most importantly — their weeklong-brined, spice-rubbed, hickory smoked pastrami with home made rye bread to San Francisco and at many of our beer socials since the year 5771. Our Squid Ink is made with darker grains than traditional IPAs and uses West Coast hops to give it a traditional West Coast IPA hop aroma and bitterness. The richness and spices of the pastrami pair perfectly with the citrus-y, hoppy and roasted flavors of the Black IPA. Finish with a house fermented pickle for the perfect sandwich-beer-pickle experience.”

 

MISSION CHINESE FOOD + TRUMER PILSNER

“Anthony Myint and Danny Bowien have created one of the most creative and community minded pop-up restaurant in the nation with Mission Chinese Food (Thu-Tue, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. and 5 p.m.-10:30 p.m., at Lung Shan, 2234 Mission, SF. (415) 863-2800, www.missionchinesefood.com). Their delicious twists on traditional Chinese and Asian cooking include kung pao pastrami, thrice-cooked bacon, tingling lamb noodle soup, salt cod fried rice and cold-poached chicken with chicken hearts. Mission Chinese Food also contributes $0.75 from each entrée to the San Francisco Food Bank. The Trumer (www.trumer-international.com) from Berkeley, with its high carbonation, crisp malt backbone and good hop bitterness, offers a good counterpoint to the exotic flavors and spices of Danny’s cuisine. As the heat and tingling build from chilies and Szechwan peppercorns, a pilsner can really satisfy. (And if you need to douse a flaming palate, the low alcohol content allows for a few brews with minor effect.)”

 

NOSH THIS CHOCOLATE + 21ST AMENDMENTS MONK’S BLOOD

Beer and chocolate go together like Bert and Ernie or peanut butter, bananas, and Elvis. Kai Kronfield of Nosh This (noshthis.com) makes some of the most creative chocolates in San Francisco. Butter toffee Bacon Crack, salted caramels made with balsamic vinegar, Meyer lemon, or salt & pepper… not to mention the Bacon Bourbon Rocky Road. These chocolates are the perfect balance of sweet, salty, and chocolate-y and pair well with darker, maltier beers. 21st Amendments Monk’s Blood (www.21st-ammendment.com), a dark Belgian ale, fits this bill well. Made with the traditional hops and barley, it also contains figs, vanilla, and cinnamon. It’s a complex beer, in a can, that complements the richness and intricate flavors of Kai’s creations. This combo is a perfect end to an evening, a mid-day snack, or breakfast — whatever, nobody’s judging.

 

PIZZA HACKER + MOONLIGHT DEATH AND TAXES

“Pizza and beer is typically a no-brainer pairing, but often most choose an IPA, pale ale, or lager to go with their cheesy slice. Moonlight’s Mooonlight’s Death and Taxes (www.moonlightbrewing.com) is a dark lager — but its roasty, crisp and malty flavors lends itself perfectly to the olive oil and salt-covered crust and smoky essence of the Pizza Hacker’s (www.thepizzahacker.com) pies. Jeff, the nominal Pizza Hacker and self-described “occasional Pazi (Pizza nazi)”, has built a custom-made portable wood fired brick oven called the FrankenWeber. He wheels it up outside bar or brewery, assembles, and bakes fresh pizzas on the sidewalk. His sauce is from organic heirloom tomatoes and he uses a method pioneered by Tartine for kneading the dough. Best tasted with a full bodied, flavorful pint of brew!

 

MAGIC CURRY KART + ALMANAC SUMMER 2010

Almanac’s Summer 2010 Belgian golden (www.almanacbeer.com) is made with blackberries and aged in red wine oak barrels for 11 months. Brian Kimball of Magic Curry Kart (www.magiccurrykart.com) wheels around two burners and two rice cookers on his bike, and whips up the most incredibly Thai-influenced curries in front of you with amazing precision. The ingredients are fresh and the spices are delicious. Almanac’s golden ale will add a nice fruity finish to the spicy and flavorful red or green curry. With an eight percent alcohol count and naturally carbonated in the bottle, Summer 2010 will refresh your palette after every sip without overpowering it, enabling new tastes in every luscious bite of curry. Cheers!

Get naked

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caitlin@sfbg.com

BEER AND WINE The high priestess of natural wines and I are going out for a glass. As is to be expected of a meeting with a thought leader, it’s a learning experience.

Alice Feiring peruses the bar menu in front of her. It’s a nice enough place, the restaurant we’re at, and the wine list includes a few organic pours — but even these, Feiring says, were made with foreign yeasts and an excess of sulfur. The bartender tries lamely to help her order, but it’s apparent that even he is not sure what her criteria for an acceptable wine is. Finally, she finds a rose that will work.

Um, I’ll have the same.

“I’m kind of a bitch when it comes to wine,” she apologizes to me.

Her disclaimer is unnecessary — I’ve invited her here to teach me about a movement in the wine world that is turning conceptions of sustainable viniculture practices on their head. The bartender is to be excused for not knowing about it yet.

Feiring’s new book Naked Wine (231 pp, Da Capo, $24) is a declaration of her personal preference towards wines grown organically — as many wines are, particularly in California where you can find organic vintages wherever local, seasonal foods are favored — but it goes beyond that. Although a wine’s bottle may tell you it’s “made with organic grapes,” this says nothing about its life post-vine. Reverse osmosis, chemical additives, foreign yeasts, and more are all common practices in wineries. Feiring’s beloved natural wines don’t use any of these artificial aides.

For locavores, natural wine would seem like the, yeah, natural choice. But even when bottles say “made from organic grapes,” it’s hard to know what happened to the wine after it left the vine.

As Naked Wine puts it, “A truly natural wine, most natural wine proponents agree, is not possible in every year, but no one ever needs gum arabic, tannin addition, micro-oxygenation, or strong doses of sulfur at every stage.” In the back of the book, a list of chemical additives determined permissible for wine by the FDA are listed.

There are over 60 of these, including ferrocyanide compounds and colloidal silicon dioxide. Each time one of these substances are added, your wine is further away from a true expression of the terroir in which it was grown. All these chemicals are legal in wine “made from organic grapes.” Many conventional producers claim that without these crutches, winemaking can be neither cost-effective or competent — but to natural adherents, their presence obstructs the connection between terroir and taste.

The day after drinking with Feiring, I attended a screening of a new documentary on Californian natural wines, Wine From Here. After we watched the film (a lovingly shot, low budget homage to vignerons who spend their lives in pursuit of purity), the winemakers profiled were invited onstage for a Q&A. They represented some of the best natural wineries in the state — Clos Saron, Coturri, Old World Winery, Edmunds St. John, Dashe Cellars, La Clarine Farm, and the Salina and Natural Process Alliance.

A few of the vignerons said at various points they’d attempted to add an ingredients section to their labels that would read, simply, “grapes.” Officials balked, however, saying that the labels “would imply that other wines were made with things other than just grapes.”

But how do natural wines taste? Even Feiring writes in Naked Wine that “how one treated a wine was not a moral issue, after all.” (A view which possibly negates the environmental dimensions of viniculture; the link between more sustainable, organic farming practices and impact on ecosystems being fairly well established.)

The answer is: varying. Eschewing artificial chemicals and fermentation agents often means giving up standardized product. Natural wine can oxidize more easily than wine treated with sulfites. Reliance on natural yeast means that whatever Mother Earth brings to your grapes is what you end up tasting in the glass.

But for natural wine proponents, this kind of variation can be thrilling.

After my chat with Feiring, we hopped over to Biondivino, a fetchingly designed Russian Hill wine shop that specializes in Italian pours. Owner Ceri Smith stocks many natural wines, which she arranges like books in a library — a visual connection that’s strengthened by the rolling ladder Smith uses to access the top racks.

The tasting featured natural selections from the Spanish wine catalog of importer José Pastor. The man pouring us our sips seemed to be a bit cautious of the wines’ effect on newbies.

“Now this one is really, really unusual,” he told me, doling out a finger of Vinos Ambiz Airén from Madrid vigneron Fabio Bartolomei. He wasn’t kidding — it was probably the most distinctive wine I’ve ever tasted.

Although Airén is the most-harvested white wine grape in Spain, it’s usually made into nondescript wine sold in bulk. Not so with Bartolomei’s version. The winemaker eschews all additives besides some sulfur spray in his vineyard, and bottles the wine unfiltered. The result was a mouth-encompassing herbal wash, almost Fernet-like in its grassy, spicy taste. I was still wide-eyed when the next wine that found it’s way into my glass: Catalonia producer Laureano Serres’ “5 Anys i un Dia” (“Five Years and One Day” in Catalan).

“Is that… gasoline?” I asked Feiring, who was standing at my side. “You’re tasting sherry,” she smiled. Wild. But even more wild? All the bottles featured in the tasting were $25 and under.

Will Feiring become the wine world’s Michael Pollan, launching a thousand natural vignerons? Only time will tell — but regardless of the movement’s future, natural winemakers certainly pour a glass worth writing home about.

Generation cork

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virginia@sfbg.com

BEER AND WINE It’s a unique time in Bay Area winemaking. We see more California winemakers finding harmony between New and Old World-style production, laying off heavier-handed extremes of overly-oaked or high alcohol wines, honing in on our region’s true terroir. While global love for big, bold California wines isn’t going anywhere, it’s ever more apparent that our range is far beyond what might be assumed.

Small, family-run wineries have long undergirded our region’s greatness, and today there are many new wines, from Sonoma to Napa, adding nuance to the landscape. As is the case historically, many wineries are a family affair where parents and children share in the work, from production to business operations. Here are a few we felt you should know about; you can order most of their wines through their websites.

 

SUTTON CELLARS, SAN FRANCISCO

San Francisco holds a treasure in the person of Carl Sutton of Sutton Cellars. He walks the fine line of approachability and Old World-influenced production style. At 22nd Street and Illinois sits a funky warehouse winery where he throws Jug Sundays, tapping barrels and selling jugs or liters of wine (email directly through its website — www.suttoncellars.com — to be added to the event email list). Carl corrals Dogpatch neighbors to supply grub, like Olivier’s Butchery or the TomKat Asian street food truck. His wife Sharon often pours and works with him, both of them wine aficionados and passionate global travelers.

His grapes grow mostly in Sonoma County (with a little Mendocino in the mix), and are often single vineyard wines. At a time when many claim personal care, Sutton’s brown label wines are actually filled and corked by hand. Often this kind of care implies high costs, but Sutton stays amazingly affordable at $14–<\d>$21 a bottle.

Sutton is heavily influenced by France and Spain. He offers a full-bodied Rattlesnake Rosé ($15), but also the stunning Fizé, a 2010 rosé of organic Carignane grapes. It unfolds with each sip: tart cranberry and pomegranate notes, and a crisp effervescence. With no yeast or sulfites added, fermentation actually happens in the bottle. It possess a bready nose, with a profile far beyond typical rosés on either end of the sweet/dry spectrum (find this beauty at the winery, Bi-Rite, Rainbow Grocery, D&M). As of last week, he has keg preview of the 2010 Rattlesnake Rosé on tap at Magnolia Pub and Brewery.

His 2007 Carignane is an acidic, balanced, food-friendly red (barrel fermented in neutral oak). The aged La Solera is an elegant after-dinner imbibement and one of Sutton’s best creations. A blend of syrah, zin, and carignane wines from 1999-2006, it at turns evokes Madeira, Banyuls, sherry, even whiskey, with whispers of burnt orange, and a golden richness from its time resting in the sun, a classic method he picked up in Spain. La Solera is at the top of his price range at a mere $30, a steal for such a complex wine.

Sutton’s Brown Label Vermouth (unaged brandy-fortified neutral white wine, infused with 17 botanicals, bottled fresh weekly) is a winner. The Alembic was the first place to serve this refreshing aperitif on tap, enjoyed on the rocks, Italian-style. Sutton bubbles over with visions for a wide range of wines and liqueurs, including at least one new aperitif/digestif wine due before year’s end.

 

KELLY FLEMING WINES, CALISTOGA

Head off Silverado Trail, past vines and olive trees, onto a dirt road that leads to a gate. Beyond a sea of cabernet vines, lies Kelly Fleming’s stone winery (www.kellyflemingwines.com), evoking an Italian villa, similar to many I explored in Tuscany. The winery’s stone walls and wood shutters imbue the space with a rustic character far beyond its years.

In an open-air dining room, I sat under stone arches at a handmade wood table crafted from one tree off the 300-acre property. Kelly and her daughter Colleen, who also works for the company, served a Mediterranean-style spread for lunch, using ingredients from their garden (like a silky jam from their fig trees).

We sipped Fleming’s 2009 Sauvignon Blanc (50 percent French oak, 50percent stainless steel), representative of the Oakville soil from which these grapes grow. It’s a balanced white with a floral and fruity (pear, pineapple) profile, rounded out by a hint of vanilla. 2007 Cabernet is 100 percent estate and CCOF organically grown, rested in 85 percent new French oak. Though fruit plays prominently (warm, dusty raspberries), hints of wood, nuts and spice give it contrast.

Winemaker Celia Welch works with the region’s terroir (this is cabernet country, after all), from vines planted in 1999. The wild beauty of the property’s forests and creeks is kept intact with only 12 of the 300 acres planted with vines. Inside limestone caves, the air is naturally cool, storing barrels and bottles of past vintages (unreleased but which they’ve been perfecting for nearly a decade). At a mere 850 cabernet and 675 sauvignon blanc cases a year, these are truly small production wines.

Kelly is hands-on in so many aspects from harvesting to forklift operation. She and Colleen both were recently certified in forklift driving, highlighting the involved, familial nature of the winery. They are gracious hosts, welcoming guests by appointment.

 

SWANSON VINEYARDS, RUTHERFORD

Think Parisian carnival, classic French estate, Napa’s rich nature, New Orleans’ roots, and you’ll begin to get an idea of the influences on Swanson Vineyards (www.swansonvineyards.com). The winemaker is Chris Phelps — Clarke Swanson founded the winery back in 1985, planting his first merlot grapes. His daughter, Alexis, works as the winery’s creative director. Wife Elizabeth buzzed about as we sipped wine in their enchanting garden, greeting each guest.

The first sign Swanson is different comes when you enter the Sip Shoppe, with red-and-white striped tented walls, Old World French artwork, and Billie Holiday playing soothingly in the background. Elizabeth and Alexis designed the shop themselves, imparting a playful Parisian spirit to what could just be another tasting room. One wants to linger for flights like “Some Like it Red,” paired with the likes of warm pistachios, Alexis bonbons (made by Vosges with curry and Swanson’s Alexis Cabernet), or a potato chip topped with creme fraiche and Hackleback sturgeon caviar (lovely with their Chardonnay).

The 2010 Chardonnay was my favorite, and a complete surprise as a mineral, French-inspired chardonnay, reminiscent of Chablis. Neutral oak allows crisp, green apple notes to shine, while honey adds a tinge of cream to the finish. At a pricey $45, this one is only available at the winery or to wine club members.

Of the reds, Swanson’s signature 2007 Merlot offers the best price-to-taste ratio at $38 per bottle. It’s unexpectedly balanced with tart tannins, hints of black cherry, currant and mocha. On the pricier end, the 2007 Alexis Cabernet ($75) is bold and layered, while a 2006 Petite Syrah ($70) goes the earthier, spice and gentle black pepper route.

Make an appointment to visit the winery for a Salon tasting ($65) or Sip Shoppe flight (around $25), then finish by lingering in the garden. You can taste at dozens of wineries but the Swanson’s chic shoppe and salon deliver a fun, Parisian spirit to the Napa countryside. *

Virginia Miller writes about the latest food and drink news at The Perfect Spot, www.theperfectspotsf.com

Write what you know

8

arts@sfbg.com

LIT Most fans probably associate Will “The Thrill” Viharo with Thrillville, the awesomely cool series of B movie screenings he hosted at the Parkway (now closed) and Cerrito (now operating under new ownership) theaters. But in recent years, Viharo’s become “The Quill,” shifting his focus to his first love: writing. He’s written several novels and numerous short projects in a retro, neo-pulp vein; he’s currently working on new material as well as publishing several of his older novels, some of which go back decades. He started his first novel, Chumpy Walnut — about a foot-tall boy lost in a world of macabre make-believe — when he was only 16.

“I am a born writer, as pretentious as that may sound. I’m basically unemployable, possess no other marketable or practical skills, and so realistically, my career options are severely limited. It’s a matter of simple survival: sink or swim, write or die,” the 48-year-old Alameda resident explains. “Once I started writing, I just couldn’t stop. It’s how I respond to life and the world in general, my natural mode of expression. I really have no choice.”

Viharo’s first published novel, Love Stories Are Too Violent For Me, was released in 1995 by Wild Card Press. Movie rights to the book, which introduced recurring character Vic Valentine, have been owned by the actor Christian Slater for the past ten years — though Valentine, a San Francisco private eye, has yet to make his big-screen debut. Undeterred, Viharo has penned a slew of other killer, colorfully-titled books, including A Mermaid Drowns in the Midnight Lounge, Fate is My Pimp, Romance Takes a Rain Check, and Diary of a Dick. All are written in a feverish style that recalls not only the hard-boiled detective novels of authors like Raymond Chandler, but also a wide variety of cinematic influences.

“My work has always been informed and creatively inspired by films, particularly exploitation cinema, and all kinds of ‘mood music,’ even more so than my sundry literary influences,” Viharo says. “I think that’s why my stuff has a keen visual sense and fluent rhythm unique to the form, kind of like graphic novels, sans the graphics.”

It makes perfect sense then that Viharo has made a book trailer to help promote his work. The clip, posted on his website (www.thrillville.net), recalls a classic film noir narrated by tempting excerpts from Viharo’s books. The brand-newest Viharo tome, Freaks That Carry Your Luggage Up To The Room, is a blistering tale he describes as “gonzo bizarro pulp;” it’s due out in November. He’s self-releasing it, as he has all his works since Love Stories.

“My stuff is good, I know it, and I’m taking it directly to the audience I know is already out there, bypassing the corporate middleman,” Viharo says. He’s learned that the mainstream publishing industry is a conservative, fickle beast — and he’s done trying to win the hearts of corporate titans. “I’m actually riding a new wave since digital publishing has usurped the marketplace, opening doors for many neglected talents at both ends of the scale.”

Viharo’s novels are available online through Lulu as eBooks or print-on-demand paperbacks, and he recently got approval to sell Down a Dark Alley on iTunes after a period of “special review” — it seems his more lurid material had triggered an additional vetting before being given the green light.

“Basically, after several decades of self-exploration, I have no more inhibitions, at least artistically,” Viharo says. “My brain has been irrevocably damaged over the years, via sustained exposure to the insanity of our world as well as endless viewings of seriously fucked-up movies, and it shows, but I’m shameless by nature.”

Although his books can feature sensationalistic and savage settings, events, and characters, they are still meant to be simply entertaining — a goal that they exceedingly achieve, thanks to Viharo’s artistic outlook.

“Even the most graphic depictions of XXX kinky sex and ultra-violence are presented in a satirical, cartoonish context, not meant to be taken too seriously,” says Viharo. “I’m a softie at heart; my hard-boiled veneer is pretty transparent, I think. It’s impossible for me to remove my tongue from my cheek no matter how twisted my subject matter happens to be.”

Central Subway: justice and jobs

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OPINION The Central Subway is a result of years of grassroots environmental transit justice organizing that San Francisco should be proud of. But in recent weeks, politicos and the media have stirred up a string of unfounded criticisms of the Central Subway — an essential project that will upgrade transit for the long term, create thousands of jobs in the midst of a recession, and expand opportunity for tens of thousands of San Franciscans who need to get to work everyday. Politicians who supported the project for years are now reversing themselves and calling it a “subway to nowhere” and a “boondoggle.” And short staffed newspapers find it easy paint a cartoon picture of City Hall and Chinatown “powerbrokers” who conspired to sell the city on an expensive project it doesn’t need.

But San Franciscans should ignore the overheated rhetoric of the moment and see the future value and need for this critical project — particularly when the Republicans in Congress are attacking us from the right. We need to unite as one city and not squander what might be the last opportunity to access federal funding to make the economic center of the city more transit accessible for all San Franciscans. In this limited space, we offer some of the facts about the project that seem to be missing in the present reporting.

The number of recent critics and media attention about the subway makes it appear that the subway’s costs and design were new news. Planning for the project began more than 20 years ago, and the essential alignment and projected costs have been agreed to and consistent since 2008. There is no new news.

The claims about skyrocketing costs are misleading, comparing different project proposals. The Civil Grand Jury and others fail to do an apples-to-apples comparison. The project costs have increased primarily because, in response to public feedback, the final project is a different project. It has a new alignment, new stations, and more contingency funds built in. The core costs for the project have not changed since 2008, when it was approved with broad support, including some of its present critics.

The critics who claim that not building the project will save future Muni operating costs fail to address the costs of doing nothing. The environmental impact report showed that the no-project option would cost even more. The absence of a subway would require Muni to run and maintain more buses on streets that will be more crowded and more gridlocked. (Ten years from now, if the critics succeed in killing the project, when you are stuck in traffic and late for work you will know who to blame).

Beneath the unfounded criticism about costs is actually a disagreement over values. The grand jury report relied upon by critics makes a only brief and superficial criticism about costs. The report actually devotes more attention and criticism to the location of the Chinatown station. The grand jury prefers a subway that runs closer to the financial district. For critics, the present project is a “subway to nowhere.” But for the Asian, black, and working class neighborhoods that will be connected via the subway and the T-line, this is a subway to jobs and economic opportunity.

Finally, we need to be clear that this is probably the last chance in many of our lifetimes for San Francisco to grow its transit system. While critics talk about alternate uses for the $940 million dollars of federal funding, the reality is we cannot redirect those dollars. The funding process for the subway is nearing the finish line after an arduous ten-year competitive federal application process. Given the federal budget, re-starting that application process may not merely mean a multi-year delay, it will likely mean there will be no funding to apply for and the loss of 30,000 jobs over the life of the project.

We urge all the mayoral candidates and our media pundits to tone down the rhetoric around the subway. We should not let short-term thinking and the heat of political passion of this campaign season kill a project that has had broad support for 20 years and will provide new transit that we desperately need for our city’s future.

Ultimately the subway is an issue about justice and access to jobs. Justice for some of the most densely populated neighborhoods in San Francisco, where 80% of the residents don’t own cars and rely entirely on public transportation. And we’re talking about the potential loss of thousands of construction jobs and access to jobs for those who need the transit to their workplaces.

Stand firm, San Francisco, for jobs and justice.

Rev. Norman Fong is the incoming director of the Chinatown Community Development Center. Mike Casey is the head of UNITE HERE Local 2.

 

On Guard!

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news@sfbg.com

BART’S CRACKDOWN

For weeks now, protesters have descended on Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stations to denounce the fatal July 3 shooting of homeless passenger Charles Hill by a BART Police officer, and to call for the agency’s long-controversial police force to be disbanded. Commuters have had to contend with service disruptions and delays, and costs to the transit agency have exceeded $300,000. Yet it isn’t just bullhorn-wielding protesters who’ve been thrust into the spotlight — BART’s police force is also facing scrutiny for its conduct under pressure.

BART drew the ire of numerous media outlets after a Sept. 8 protest when transit cops detained members of the press along with protesters on suspected violation of California Penal Code Section 369i, which prohibits interfering with the operations of a railroad. Most journalists were eventually released, but the protest resulted in 24 arrests.

Although BART police later contended that they issued dispersal orders prior to closing in, many who were encircled and detained (including me) insisted they’d heard no such announcement. BART police also instructed San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) officers who were on hand to assist to seize reporters’ SFPD-issued press passes — a move that SFPD spokesperson Troy Dangerfield later told the Guardian was an error that went against normal SFPD protocol.

In a Sept. 10 editorial, the San Francisco Chronicle blasted BART police for placing Chronicle reporter Vivian Ho in handcuffs despite being informed that she was there as a journalist. Ho’s experience was mild compared with that of Indybay reporter David Morse (aka Dave Id), who told the Guardian he was singled out for arrest by BART Deputy Police Chief Daniel Hartwig and isolated from the scene — even though Hartwig is familiar with Morse and knows he’s been covering protests and BART board meetings for the free online publication. Asked why Morse was arrested when other journalists detained for the same violation were released, BART spokesperson Jim Allison told us, “The courts will answer that, won’t they?”

No Justice, No BART — a group that was instrumental in organizing the Sept. 8 protest — telegraphed to media and police at the outset that they intended to test BART’s assertions that people’s constitutionally guaranteed rights to free speech would be upheld as long as they remained outside the paid areas of the station, in what was dubbed a “free speech zone.” (Rebecca Bowe)

 

CHRON VS. WIENER(S)

Scott Wiener tried to do something eminently reasonable, and ask the naked guys in the Castro to put down a towel before they sit on public benches. Although the Department of Public Health hasn’t made any statements about the issue (and people put their naked butts on public toilet seats without creating major social problems), it’s pretty much an ick factor thing — and using a towel is an unwritten (sometimes written) rule at almost every nudist resort in the country.

The whole thing is a bit ironic, since it’s already illegal for fully clothed poor people to sit on the street — but so far, it’s not illegal for naked people to sit on benches. So far.

Wiener’s move set off an anti-nudity campaign at the San Francisco Chronicle, starting with columnist C.W. Nevius suggesting that the nudies are all perverts: “If these guys were opening a trench coat and exposing themselves to bystanders in a supermarket parking lot we’d call them creeps.” A Chron editorial called for a new law banning nudity in the city (an excellent use of time for a police department that already says it can’t afford community policing). The national (right-wing) press is having a field day. The commenters on sfbg.com are arguing about whether the pantsless men are shedding scrotal hair, or whether they’re mostly shaved. For the record, we haven’t checked.

And for the record, in a couple of months it’s going to get way too cold and rainy for this sort of thing anyway. (Tim Redmond)

 

HERRERA’S SMACKDOWNS

City Attorney Dennis Herrera has always been limited by his office’s neutral role in criticizing city policies and officials. But as a mayoral candidate, he seems to have really discovered his political voice, offering more full-throated criticisms of Mayor Ed Lee and his policies than any of the other top-tier candidates.

“I think it’s kind of liberating for him that he can talk policy instead of just about legal issues,” Herrera’s longtime spokesperson Matt Dorsey, who recently took a leave from his city job to work on the campaign full-time, told the Guardian.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Herrera’s shift began a little more than a month ago when Lee bowed to pressure from Willie Brown, Rose Pak, and other top power brokers to get into mayor’s race, prompting Herrera’s biting analysis that, “Ed Lee’s biggest problem isn’t that he’s a dishonest man — it’s that he’s not his own man. The fact is, if Ed Lee is elected mayor, powerful people will continue to insist on things. And I don’t think San Franciscans can be blamed for having serious doubts about whether Ed Lee would have the courage to say no.”

Herrera followed up last week by providing an example of something Lee and most other mayoral candidates don’t have the courage to say no to: the Central Subway project, with its runaway price tag and growing number of critics that say it’s a wasteful and inefficient boondoggle that will worsen Muni’s operating budget deficit.

“Fiascos aren’t born that way. They typically grow from the seeds of worthy idea, and their laudable promise is betrayed in subtle increments over time,” was how Herrera began a paper he released Sept. 8 called “It’s time to rethink the Central Subway,” in which he calls for a reevaluation of a project that he and the entire Board of Supervisors once supported.

He notes that the project’s costs have tripled and its design flaws have been criticized by the Civil Grand Jury and numerous transit experts. “Let’s look at this thing and see if it still makes sense,” Herrera told us, a stand that was greeted as blasphemy from the project’s supporters in Chinatown, who called at least two press conferences to decry that they called a “cheap political stunt.”

While the stand does indeed help distinguish Herrera from a crowded mayoral field, he insists that it was the grand jury report and other critiques that prompted him to raise the issue. “Good policy is good politics, so let’s have a debate on it and let the validity of the project stand or fall on its merits,” he said.

Herrera and fellow candidate John Avalos were also the ones who called out Lee on Sept. 2 for praising Pacific Gas & Electric Co. as “a great company that get it” for contributing $250,000 to a literacy program, despite PG&E’s deadly negligence in the San Bruno pipeline explosion and its spending of tens of millions of dollars to sabotage public power efforts and otherwise corrupt the political process.

“It shows insensitivity to victims’ families, and poor judgment for allowing his office to be used as a corporate PR tool. No less troubling, it ignores the serious work my office and others have done to protect San Franciscans from PG&E’s negligence,” Herrera said in a prepared statement.

Now, his rhetoric isn’t quite up to that of Green Party mayoral candidate Terry Baum, who last week called for PG&E executives to be jailed for their negligence, but it’s not bad for a lawyerly type. Herrera insists that he’s always wielded a big stick, expressed through filing public interest lawsuits rather than campaign missives, “but the motivation in how I do either is not really different.” (Steven T. Jones)

 

JACK IS BACK

The mayor’s race just got a new player, someone who is guaranteed to liven things up. His name is Jack Davis — and he’s already gone on the attack.

Davis, the infamous bad boy of political consulting who is so feared that Gavin Newsom paid him handsomely just to stay out of the 2003 mayor’s race, has been keeping a low profile of late. But he’s come out of semi-retirement to work for Jeff Adachi, the public defender who is both running for mayor and promoting Prop. D, his pension-reform plan.

Davis and Adachi first bonded when Adachi ran against appointed incumbent Kim Burton in 2002. Now, Davis has begun firing away at Mayor Ed Lee, with a new mailer that calls the competing Lee pension plan a “backroom deal.” The piece features a shadowy figure (who looks nothing like Ed Lee) slipping through a closing door, a fancy ashtray full of cigars and an allegation that Lee gave the cops a sweet pension deal in exchange for the police union endorsement.

Trust us, that’s just the start. (tr)

 

PENSION PALS

Meanwhile, Adachi sent Lee a letter on Sept. 8 challenging him to debate the merits of their rival pension measures — Lee spearheaded the creation of Prop. C, with input from labor unions and other stakeholders — sometime in the next month.

“I believe there is a vital need — if not an obligation — for us to ensure that the voters of San Francisco understand both the severity of our pension crisis as well as the significant differences between our two proposals,” Adachi wrote, later adding, “As the two principals behind the competing ballot measures, I hope that we can work together to increase awareness of this important issue and work toward a better future for our city.”

Lee’s campaign didn’t respond directly to Adachi, but Lee’s ever-caustic campaign spokesperson Tony Winnicker told the Guardian that the request was “the oldest political trick in book” and one they were rejecting, going on to say, “Voters deserve to hear from all the candidates on pension reform, not just two of them.”

Perhaps, but given the mind-numbing minutiae that differentiates the two measures, some kind of public airing of their differences might be good for all of us. Or I suppose we can just trust all those dueling mailers headed our way, right? (stj)

For more, visit our Politics blog at www.sfbg.com.

Editor’s notes

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tredmond@sfbg.com

If you want to put more money in the pockets of working people, cutting the federal payroll tax — which, for many, is a larger tax burden than the income tax — makes perfect sense.

If you want to create jobs, cutting the payroll tax for businesses is a risky proposition.

Most new jobs in the United States are created by small businesses — and the payroll tax, while significant, isn’t a dramatic hindrance to job growth.

I work for a small business, and I ran the numbers with our controller, and if the Obama stimulus bill passes, the Bay Guardian will probably have enough extra money to hire one part-time employee — as long as we don’t pay that person much more than the city’s minimum wage. That’s something, I suppose. But even multiplied by the millions of small businesses in the country, there’s no guarantee it will lead to millions of jobs — particularly since so many small businesses in this country are deeply in debt, scraping for profits and likely to use the extra money for something other than hiring.

And a lot of big businesses already have the cash on hand to hire new workers, but they aren’t doing it.

That’s because businesses don’t make hiring decisions based just on taxes and cash — they hire people when they need workers to fill demand for their products and services. And the fundamental problem with the American economy today is that the very rich, who don’t spend most of their money, keep getting more of it, and the middle class doesn’t have enough to stimulate demand.

Here’s what makes me crazy: The government knows how to create jobs. If that’s what Obama wants to do, why not just .. do it?

Let’s say you want to create a million new jobs that pay a living wage (say, $50,000). If, instead of hoping that the private sector will be the middleman, Obama directed federal, state, and local governments to hire people to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, teach in public schools etc, that would cost …. oh, about $500 billion.

So for $447 billion, you might only get 800,000 jobs. But that increased economic activity, and the demand it would create, would almost certainly lead to more jobs, probably at least another 400,000 jobs. That’s more than a million; the unemployment rate just dropped a full percentage point, and the recovery is well under way.

Why is nobody even talking about this?

Cops go after the press

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EDITORIAL The BART Board and the new general manager, Grace Crunican, have become so clueless it’s almost mind-boggling. For weeks, demonstrators have been taking to the BART stations to complain about a policy that never should have been in place (the shutoff of cell phone service during an earlier demonstration). The response of the BART Police (and, unfortunately, the San Francisco Police Department) has been so heavy handed and out of scale that it’s just making the situation worse.

For starters, BART could have easily avoided most of the trouble if the agency had simply apologized for cutting off phone service and instituted a policy to ensure that it would never happen again. And the new civilian police auditor can go a long way to establishing public credibility by expediting review of the shooting of Charles Hill and releasing a report quickly.

But BART is doing nothing but further agitating the protesters — and the events of Sept. 8 were a case in point.

The BART Police, with the help of the SFPD, began arresting people who were doing nothing but protesting in an area that BART had previously said would be open for demonstrations. The activists were peaceful — loud at times, but peaceful. And the police had nothing to charge them with except an old state statute that bars interference with the operation of a railroad.

The arrests came without warning — as Rebecca Bowe reported on sfbg.com, the police never declared an unlawful assembly, never warned protesters that they would be arrested if they didn’t leave and never followed normal, proper, legal procedures.

Then the cops went after the press. Reporters who were wearing passes issued by the SFPD were told to line up and present their credentials — at which point the San Francisco cops confiscated the press passes. That left reporters in a bind — if they stayed around to continue to cover the events, they would be subject to arrest. If they left, they’d miss the story — which may have been exactly what BART had in mind.

The episode is just the latest evidence that the BART police lack the training and experience to handle difficult situations. Crunican needs to get a handle on this immediately — and the BART Board, which has been far too hands-off when it comes to police abuse, needs to demand tighter procedures and more direct and effective discipline for the subway system cops.

The SFPD brass knows better than this — and while some officers privately say that detaining the press was a mistake, Chief Greg Suhr has been silent on the issue. He needs to speak out, now — apologize to the reporters and announce a policy change that strictly limits the ability of officers to arrest or detail credentialed journalists (and that bars the confiscation of press passes in all but the most unusual circumstances).

Meanwhile, the incident raises again a question the Society of Professional Journalists, and San Francisco officials, ought to be taking up: Why are the cops the ones who issue credentials for reporters?

Banking on misfortune

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news@sfbg.com

Unemployed San Franciscans are now receiving monthly benefit payments through a mandatory Bank of America debit card. While presented as a benefit to both recipients and the state, the initiative is the latest chapter in a long history of banks profiting off of the less fortunate.

In July, the California Employment Development Department (EDD) began distributing Bank of America debit cards to all California residents who receive unemployment benefits, “in what is one of the largest pre-paid card programs in the nation,” EDD spokesperson Dan Stephens tells the Guardian.

The cards, a result of a recent contract Bank of America won to implement the EDD’s new debit card system, replace the monthly unemployment check residents receive. The cards are also being used for disability insurance and paid family leave payments.

“We wanted a faster, safer, more convenient way for our customers to access their benefits,” Stephens says. But figuring out the new system takes time, usage fees can surface, and complaints have arisen.

“Now I have against my will been forced to become a B of A customer, which I don’t like,” says Cliff Liehe, a part time business teacher at City College who collects unemployment benefits during the summer. “I don’t want to do business with B of A. I hate them, and there’s a lot of staff members that feel the same way, throughout the state, not just City College.”

Liehe says that he dislikes B of A because it has a “corporate philosophy that I’ve disagreed with,” as well as, “terrible customer service and high fees.” Bank of America, the largest bank in the nation, angered the public by receiving a $20 billion federal bailout after buying Merrill Lynch in 2009, in the wake of the financial meltdown from which banks quickly recovered but the average American still hasn’t.

Money can be accessed on the debit card through purchases, unlimited ATM withdrawals, or transferred to a bank account. Liehe opted to have the money transferred to an account independent from B of A, but says he found the process challenging, and the information and instructions difficult to find.

Bank of America is not paying the EDD, but the new system will save the EDD approximately $4 million in initial savings due to decreased paper, printing, mailing, and check processing costs, Stephens tells the Guardian. He remains vague about the EDD’s plans for this money, but does make it clear that the agreement is a “no-cost contract” between parties.

However, Bank of America’s participation is far from charitable. “B of A is covering its costs through fees paid by banks and merchants who honor the cards. Interchange fees are received from businesses that use the ATM network,” Stephens says.

With 1.7 million Californians receiving unemployment benefits and using their cards at ATMs and retail establishments, Bank of America will be receiving a percentage off all this money spent, as well as gaining more than a million new customers, unless recipients have the know-how to have their money transferred to a different bank. This adds up to a substantial potential profit for America’s richest bank.

“We generally don’t comment on the profitability of individual programs or products, but we are pleased to be working with the EDD to provide more secure and convenient benefit payments to its constituents,” bank spokesperson Jefferson George told us.

What consumers don’t consider when using a credit or debit card to make purchases is that with each purchase, the merchant is paying a percentage back to the bank or other credit card processor. Here at the Guardian, for instance, we lose a significant percentage of our ad profits when advertisers pay with a credit card. With MasterCard and Visa, we lose 3.5 percent of the sales amount, and with American Express it’s 4.15 percent, on top of monthly processing fees.

“The issues with credit card charges in general is that it’s all about the small print,” says Hut Landon, Executive Director of Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. As with the Bank of America EDD card, unadvertised fees can occur through usage of debit and credit cards. On top of a base percentage, merchants must pay fees for rewards cards, mileage cards, and are sometimes charged for transactions, Landon explains. There is even a fee for manually entering credit card information instead of swiping it. The debit card fee is sometimes less, but merchants still could be suffering from the EDD’s new system.

“While this may be a good situation for Bank of America,” says Landon, “[for merchants] its definitely not a good deal.”

Joel Bleskacek, co-owner of Potrero Hill favorites Plow and Ruby Wine, tells the Guardian he pays between 1.5 percent and 3 percent for credit card transactions at his restaurant and wine store. That’s a significant amount of money lost with each transaction, money that goes directly to the banks or credit card processors. “For what we’re paying at the restaurant, I could hire a general manager to work if we only accepted cash,” Bleskacek says. But credit cards are more popular than cash at both his establishments. “A vast majority is credit card sales. People don’t seem to carry cash anymore. Same at the restaurant. An overwhelming majority of sales are through the credit card machine.” Credit card company’s earnings quickly add up. “Basically 2.5 to 3 percent of our entire economy is going to credit card companies…,” he says. “Somebody’s making some money.”

A new progressive agenda

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Over the past three months, the Guardian has been hosting a series of forums on progressive issues for the mayor’s race. We’ve brought together a broad base of people from different communities and issue-based organizations all over town in an effort to draft a platform that would include a comprehensive progressive agenda for the next mayor. All told, more than 100 people participated.

It was, as far as we know, the first time anyone tried to do this — to come up with a mayoral platform not with a few people in a room but with a series of open forums designed for community participation.

The platform we’ve drafted isn’t perfect, and there are no doubt things that are left out. But our goal was to create a document that the voters could use to determine which candidates really deserve the progressive vote.

That’s a critical question, since nearly all of the top contenders are using the word “progressive” on a regular basis. They’re fighting for votes from the neighborhoods, the activists, the independent-minded people who share a vision for San Francisco that isn’t driven by big-business interests.

But those of us on what is broadly defined as the city’s left are looking for more than lip service and catchy phrases. We want to hear specifics; we want to know that the next mayor is serious about changing the direction of city policy.

The groups who endorsed this effort and helped plan the forums that led to this platform were the Harvey Milk LGBT Club, SEIU Local 1021, the San Francisco Tenants Union, the Human Services Network, the Community Congress 2010, the Council of Community Housing Organizations, San Francisco Rising, Jobs with Justice, and the Center for Political Education.

The panelists who led the discussions were: Shaw-san Liu, Calvin Welch, Fernando Marti, Gabriel Haaland, Brenda Barros, Debbi Lerman, Jenny Friedenbach, Sarah Shortt, Ted Gullicksen, Nick Pagoulatos, Sue Hestor, Sherilyn Adams, Angela Chan, David Campos, Mario Yedidia, Pecolio Mangio, Antonio Diaz, Alicia Garza, Aaron Peskin, Saul Bloom, and Tim Redmond.

We held five events looking at five broad policy areas — economy and jobs; land use, housing and tenants; budget and social services; immigration, education and youth; and environment, energy and climate change. Panelists and audience participants offered great ideas and the debates were lively.

The results are below — an outline of what the progressives in San Francisco want to see from their next mayor.

 

 

ECONOMY AND JOBS

Background: In the first decade of this century, San Francisco lost some 51,000 jobs, overwhelmingly in the private sector. When Gavin Newsom was sworn in as mayor in January 2004, unemployment was at 6.4 percent; when he left, in January 2011, it was at 9.5 percent — a 63 percent increase.

Clearly, part of the problem was the collapse of the national economy. But the failed Newsom Model only made things worse. His approach was based on the mistaken notion that if the city provided direct subsidies to private developers, new workers would flock to San Francisco. In fact, the fastest-growing sector of the local economy is the public sector, especially education and health care. Five of the 10 largest employers in San Francisco are public agencies.

Local economic development policy, which has been characterized by the destruction of the blue-collar sector in light industry and maritime uses (ironically, overwhelmingly privately owned) to free up land for new industries in business services and high tech sectors that have never actually appeared — or have been devastated by quickly repeating boom and bust cycle.

Instead of concentrating on our existing workforce and its incredible human capital, recent San Francisco mayors have sought to attract a new workforce.

The Mayor’s Office has, as a matter of policy, been destroying blue-collar jobs to promote residential development for people who work outside of the city.

There’s a huge disconnect between what many people earn and what they need. The minimum wage in San Francisco is $9.92, when the actual cost of living is closer to $20. Wage theft is far too common.

There is a lack of leadership, oversight and accountability in a number of city departments. For example, there is no officiating body or commission overseeing the work of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development. Similarly the Arts Commission, the chartered entity for overseeing cultural affairs, is responsible for less than 25 percent of the budget reserved for this purpose

There’s no accountability in the city to protect the most vulnerable people.

The city’s main business tax is highly regressive — it’s a flat tax on payroll but has so many exceptions and loopholes that only 8,500 businesses actually pay it, and many of the largest and richest outfits pay no city tax at all.

 

Agenda items:

1. Reform the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to create a department with workforce development as a primary objective. Work with the San Francisco Unified School District, City College and San Francisco State to create sustainable paths to training and employment.

2. Create a municipal bank that offers credit for locally developed small businesses instead of relying on tax breaks. As a first step, mandate that all city short-term funds and payroll accounts go only to banks or credit unions that will agree to devote a reasonable percentage of their local loan portfolios for small business loans.

3. Reform procurement to prioritize local ownership.

4. Link economic development of healthcare facilities to the economic development of surrounding communities.

5. Link overall approval of projects to a larger economic development policy that takes as its centerpiece the employment of current San Francisco residents.

6. Enforce city labor laws and fund the agency that enforces the laws.

7. Establish the Board of Supervisors as the policy board of a re-organized Redevelopment Agency and create community-based project area oversight committees.

8. Dramatically expand Muni in the southeast portion of the city and reconfigure routes to link neighborhoods without having to go through downtown. Put special emphasis on direct Muni routes to City College and San Francisco State.

9. Reform the payroll tax so all businesses share the burden and the largest pay their fair share.

10. Consolidate the city’s various arts entities into a single Department of Arts & Culture that includes as part of its mandate a clear directive to achieve maximum economic development through leveraging the city’s existing cultural assets and creative strengths and re-imagining San Francisco’s competitive position as a regional, national and international hub of creative thinking. Sponsor and promote signature arts programs and opportunities to attract and retain visitors who will generate maximum economic activity in the local economy; restore San Francisco’s community-based cultural economy by re-enacting the successful Neighborhood Arts Program; and leverage the current 1-2 percent for art fees on various on-site building projects to be directed towards non-construction-site arts activity.

 

 

LAND USE, HOUSING AND TENANTS

Background: Since the office market tanked, the big land-use issue has become market-rate housing. San Francisco is building housing for people who don’t live here — in significant part, for either very wealthy people who want a short-term pied a terre in the city or for commuters who work in Silicon Valley. The city’s own General Plan calls for 60 percent of all new housing to be below-market-rate — but the vast majority of the new housing that’s been constructed or is in the planning pipeline is high-end condos.

There’s no connection between the housing needs of city residents and the local workforce and the type of housing that’s being constructed. Family housing is in short supply and rental housing is being destroyed faster than it’s being built — a total of 21,000 rental units have been lost to condos and tenancies in common.

Public housing is getting demolished and rebuilt with 2500 fewer units. “Hotelization” is growing as housing units become transitory housing.

Planning has become an appendage of the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development, which has no commission, no public hearings and no community oversight.

Projects are getting approved with no connection to schools, transit or affordable housing.

There’s no monitoring of Ellis Act evictions.

Transit-oriented development is a big scam that doesn’t include equity or the needs of people who live in the areas slated for more development. Cities have incentives to create dense housing with no affordability. Communities of concern are right in the path of this “smart growth” — and there are no protections for the people who live there now.

Agenda items:

1. Re emphasize that the Planning Department is the lead land-use approval agency and that the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development should not be used to short-circuit public participation in the process.

2. Enact a freeze on condo conversions and a freeze on the demolition of existing affordable rental housing.

3. Ban evictions if the use or occupation of the property will be for less than 30 days.

4. Index market-rate to affordable housing; slow down one when the other is too far ahead.

5. Disclose what level of permanent affordability is offered at each project.

6. Stabilize existing communities with community benefits agreements before new development is approved.

 

 

BUDGET AND SOCIAL SERVICES

Background: There have been profound cuts in the social safety net in San Francisco over the past decade. One third of the city’s shelter beds have been lost; six homeless centers have closed. Homeless mental health and substance abuse services have lost $32 million, and the health system has lost $33 million.

None of the budget proposals coming from the Mayor’s Office have even begun to address restoring the past cuts.

There’s not enough access to primary care for people in Healthy San Francisco.

Nonprofit contracts with the city are flat-funded, so there’s no room for increases in the cost of doing business.

The mayor has all the staff and the supervisors don’t have enough. The supervisors have the ability to add back budget items — but the mayor can then make unilateral cuts.

The wealthy in San Francisco have done very well under the Bush tax cuts and more than 14 billionaires live in this city. The gap between the rich and the poor, which is destroying the national economy, exists in San Francisco, too. But while city officials are taking a national lead on issues like the environment and civil rights, there is virtually no discussion at the policy level of using city policy to bring in revenue from those who can afford it and to equalize the wealth disparities right here in town.

Agenda items:

1. Establish as policy that San Francisco will step in where the state and federal government have left people behind — and that local taxation policy should reflect progressive values.

2. Make budget set-asides a budget floor rather than a percentage of the budget.

3. Examine what top city executives are paid.

4. Promote public power, public broadband and public cable as a way to bring the city millions of dollars.

5. Support progressive taxes that will bring in at least $250 million a year in permanent new revenue.

6. Change the City Charter to eliminate unilateral mid-year cuts by the mayor.

8. Pass a Charter amendment that: (a) Requires the development of a comprehensive long-term plan that sets the policies and strategies to guide the implementation of health and human services for San Francisco’s vulnerable residents over the next 10 years, and (b) creates a planning body with the responsibility and authority to develop the plan, monitor and evaluate its implementation, coordinate between policy makers and departments, and ensure that annual budgets are consistent with the plan.

9. Collect existing money better.

10. Enact a foreclosure transfer tax.

 

 

YOUTH, IMMIGRATION, AND EDUCATION

Background: In the past 10 years, San Francisco has lost 24,000 people ages 12-24. Among current youth, 5,800 live in poverty; 6,000 have no high school degree; 7,000 are not working or attending school; 1,200 are on adult probation.

A full 50 percent of public school students are not qualified for college studies. Too often, the outcome is dictated by race; school-to-prison is far too common.

Trust between immigrants and the police is a low point, particularly since former Mayor Gavin Newsom gutted the sanctuary ordinance in 2008 after anti-immigrant stories in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Some 70 percent of students depend on Muni, but the price of a youth pass just went from $10 to $21.

Agenda items:

1. Recognize that there’s a separate role for probation and immigration, and keep local law enforcement from joining or working with immigration enforcement.

2. Improve public transportation for education and prioritize free Muni for youth.

3. Create family-friendly affordable housing.

4. Restore the recreation direction for the Recreation and Parks Department.

5. Implement police training to treat youth with respect.

6. Don’t cut off benefits for youth who commit crimes.

7. Shift state re-alignment money from jails to education.

 

ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Background: When it comes to land use, the laws on the books are pretty good. The General Plan is a good document. But those laws aren’t enforced. Big projects get changed by the project sponsor after they’re approved.

Land use is really about who will live here and who will vote. But on a policy level, it’s clear that the city doesn’t value the people who currently live here.

Climate change is going to affect San Francisco — people who live near toxic materials are at risk in floods and earthquakes.

San Francisco has a separate but unequal transportation system. Muni is designed to get people downtown, not around town — despite the fact that job growth isn’t happening downtown.

San Francisco has a deepwater port and could be the Silicon Valley of green shipping.

San Francisco has a remarkable opportunity to promote renewable energy, but that will never happen unless the city owns the distribution system.

 

Agenda items:

1. Promote the rebirth of heavy industry by turning the port into a center for green-shipping retrofits.

2. Public land should be for public benefit, and agencies that own or control that land should work with community-based planning efforts.

3. Planning should be for the community, not developers.

4. Energy efficiency programs should be targeted to disadvantaged communities.

5. Pay attention to the urban food revolution, encourage resident owned farmers markets. Use unused public land for local food and community gardens.

6. Provide complete information on what parts of the city are fill, and stop allowing development in areas that are going to be inundated with sea level rise.

7. Prioritize local distributed generation of electricity and public ownership of the power grid.

8. Change Clean Energy San Francisco from a purchasing pool system to a generating system.

Transportive

2

MUSIC One way in which to think about the development of what could now be called “ambient electronic music” is to trace the attempts by musicians who fall under that banner to work against and around time.

Terry Riley’s legendary all night concerts of the late ’60s and early ’70s were enabled by a simple tape delay mechanism he dubbed the “time lag generator,” which repeated and echoed the notes Riley repeatedly sounded whether on organ or saxophone. Brian Eno devised Ambient music as a way to make the passing of “free” time — whether spent (as in Eno’s case) bed-ridden recovering from an injury, or, as with his breakthrough 1978 album Music for Airports (EG), waiting for a departing flight — less noticeable. And experimental duo Coil took things to new extremes when they claimed that the slowly evolving synthesizer drones on their composed-under-the-influence-of-psychedelics 1998 release Time Machines were meant to “dissolve time.”

It is fitting then, that J.D. Emmanuel prefers to be thought of as a time traveler rather than as a musician (the self-designation is practically everywhere you look on his website). There is something undeniably transportive about listening to Emmanuel’s expansive meditations for synthesizer and electronic keyboard. Clusters of notes gradually coalesce and dissolve around a dominant drone. Occasionally, he’ll introduce field recordings of environmental sounds — birds, lapping waves, wind — into the mix, but these serve as compliments to the synthesized elements rather than as sonic footholds of the outside world (the point of Emmanuel’s music isn’t to hold on to anything, but to drift).

But, as is now so often the case, were it not for the Internet (another sort of time machine) far fewer listeners would be drifting along. The three LPs of ambient music that Emmanuel self-released in the early to mid ’80s were long considered grails for private press collectors until a Belgian label did a limited re-release of Wizards, Emmanuel’s second album from 1982, in 2007 (followed by its inevitable distribution on file-sharing networks). A compilation of electronic works from 1979-82 followed in 2009, and last year Important Records re-issued Wizards to a wider audience and much critical acclaim which lead Emmanuel to start playing concerts after a near three-decade hiatus.

His closing night set is undoubtedly one of the anticipated highlights of the 12th annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, whose location at the Brava Theater should provide a comfortable venue for time traveling without moving.

Emmanuel expressly admits that his own musical approach was greatly shaped by listening to Riley and Steve Reich in 1970. Riley, is in many ways, the Kevin Bacon of electronic music, and his name — along with Reich’s and that of their New York minimalist associate LaMonte Young — make up a cannon unto themselves, leading to inevitable comparisons when discussing younger artists working in a similar vein. The appearance at SFEMF by another elder statesman of drone, Bay Area composer Yoshi Wada, who will be performing with his son Tashi Wada (a composer in his own right) actually brings things full circle.

The elder Wada moved to New York in 1967 and got introduced to drone music via Young and later studied with Pandit Pran Nath, the great North Indian singer who was also Young’s teacher at the time. Their influence is audible in the sonorous, shimmering drones heard on EM Records’ steady output of re-issues of Wada’s two official albums and various concert recordings from the ’70s and ’80s. The younger Wada has very much continued to in his father’s footsteps, exploring harmonic overtones and dissonance in his own practice, and their joint headlining performance on Saturday night is bound to be resonant in more ways than one.

 

12TH ANNUAL SAN FRANCISCO ELECTRONIC MUSIC FESTIVAL

Sept. 8-11

Brava Theater

2789 24th St., SF

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 3rd St., SF.

(415) 641-7651

www.sfemf.org

Instant replaya

0

SUPER EGO Dear burners,

I am absolutely NOT BITTER that I couldn’t join you this year. And I certainly DID NOT wrap myself in a hot-pink bedsheet, spin around until I saw Ganesh, puke up 23 packets of Tasty Bites, and throw a fistful of chickpea flour in my roommate’s face, screaming “Rites of passage, bitch!” so that I could virtually burn. And then I didn’t fist-pump to vintage Bassnectar, nor construct a 12-foot flashing Alexander Wang Summer 2011 fun-fur ankle strap high-heeled sandal in our foyer out of wire hangers, chicken bones, old Dell motherboards, and tuck tape.

Does anyone have a couch I could crash on? Preferably one of those big red lips-shaped ones?

In a sort-of pathetic attempt to even things out a bit, here’s what you missed: a gaggle of the hottest nerds in the world cruising Zinefest; the best Bloody Mary ever at my new-old favorite bar, Little Shamrock; Optimo DJs blowing minds at Public Works by dropping one of the first industrial tracks, Liasons Dangereuses’ “Los Niños del Parque”; German frenzy-whipper Matthias Tanzmann slaying with Maxwell-sampling summer smash “Entrance Song” by Eats Everything at Mighty, the supernova heat-explosion of Oakland Pride … and I’m not even on Sunday evening yet. So, you know, nyah.

ARAABMUZIK AND DJ FUNK

Young Rhode Islander Abraham Orellano, a.k.a. Araabmuzik, is actually of Dominican-Guatemalan descent – his crew dubbed him Araab when he was a teen. (Why? Because he’s so fine like the rest of us Arab brothers?) But beyond the Google-gold moniker, Araab’s emblematic of a neat trend right now in our frantic niche-crossover times: he’s a hip-hop beatmaker (Cam’ron, Duke Da God) with a touching love for poppy old dance music, using his genius manual dexterity with big-buttoned, retro-looking Music Production Center devices in his live act to melt dance floors into stunned lumps of woah.

This year’s Electronic Dreams album subtly warps goofball “Night at the Roxbury”-type ’90s dance anthems like Future Breeze’s “Why Don’t You Dance With Me” and Starchaser’s “So High” – and even gabber-house noise-blast “Underground Stream” by Nosferatu – into haunting documents of a young man’s often-lonely street life. Araab’s polishing songs I spent a good part of my life running in terror from into weird mirrors of interiority, fusing futuristic bedroom-producer headspace with retro big-room boom. And the dude’s just getting started.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeJcUz7nSYk

Also headlining this month’s Lights Down Low party is DJ Funk, a Chicago booty-bass legend who pioneered the “ghetto house” sound that still holds the Midwest underground in its filthy, rump-slapping grip. Funk’ll get the panties wet; up to you to rip ’em off.

Fri/9, 9:30 p.m.-3 a.m., $15. SOM, 2925 16th St., SF. www.som-bar.com

VIRGO FOUR

The word “timeless” sure gets thrown around a lot in this retro-minded era. And I’m fine with that, as long as the hype keeps fuelling comebacks like Virgo Four’s. At the moment, timeless, in techno terms, is almost a spatial distinction – and records like the Chicago duo’s wonderful “Vision” from 1989 really do sound like something that steps swiftly out of the distant past and into tomorrow’s speakers.

Merwyn Sanders and Eric Lewis expertly stroked the house-techno-acid nexis of the time with a series of releases that now serve as a few vinyl collectors’ 401ks. They’ve been relatively silent in the 20-odd years since, but from what I’ve heard on the virtual grapevine, their reunion DJ sets are deep and smoking. Honey Soundsystem and the No Way Back boys are pairing up to present this one, so the party should be mixed-crowd, no-attitude bliss.

Fri/9, 10 p.m.-4 a.m., $15. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com

TRUCK RELAUNCH WITH CHRISTEENE

One of San Francisco’s cutest macho gay bars is having a makeover-do-over, with new co-owner Matt Bearracuda from the West Coast’s insane Bearracuda bear dance parties joining already-owner Paul Miller at the helm. Apparently, a new menu, new parties, new faces are in store (and I bet a lot of those faces will be fuzzy in a good way).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkL9Fpp1FF4

First up, the actually insane trash drag rapper r&b clown-whore Christeene (www.christeene.org) performs some “opening” numbers. I don’t really “get” her, which just might be an endorsement!

Sat/10, 8 p.m., free. 1900 Folsom, SF. www.trucksf.com

Original sin

0

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Early this year came the announcement that Brian De Palma was hot to do an English remake of Alain Corneau’s Love Crime, saying “Not since Dressed to Kill have I had a chance to combine eroticism, suspense, mystery, and murder into one spellbinding cinematic experience.” Apparently he thinks his intervening decades’ meh-to-awful “erotic thrillers” Body Double (1984), Raising Cain (1992), Femme Fatale (2002), and Black Dahlia (2006) don’t compare (a good call, that).

The results, should they come to fruition, may well prove a landmark in the annals of lurid guilty-pleasure trash. (Although you could argue it can’t possibly get any guiltier than Femme Fatale already managed.) And who doesn’t want to wish De Palma well in nostalgic salute to 1976’s Carrie, 1973’s Sisters, 1974’s Phantom of the Paradise, 1983’s Scarface, and such? But with the original Love Crime finally making it to local theaters, it’s an opportune moment to be appalled in advance: because there is no way he’s not going to pour the equivalent of greasy massage oil, Hershey’s Syrup, and vermilion stage blood over what is a neat, dry, fully clothed model of a modern Hitchcockian thriller, one more Rear Window (1954) than Psycho (1960).

No doubt in France Love Crime looks pretty mainstream. But here its soon-to be-despoiled virtues of narrative intricacy and restraint are upscale pleasures, an occasion to get just a little dirty at a Landmark, as one can feel both high-minded and devilish reading a Patricia Highsmith novel. Ludivine Sagnier, France’s limpid answer to Chloë Sevigny, plays assistant to high-powered corporate executive Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas). The boss enjoys molding protégée Isabelle to her own image, making them a double team of carefully planned guile unafraid to use sex appeal as a business strategy. But Isabelle is expected to know her place — even when that place robs her of credit for her own ideas — and when she stages a small rebellion, Christine’s revenge is cruelly out of scale, a high-heeled boot brought down to squash an ant. It doesn’t help that Isabelle has by now fallen in love with Philippe (Patrick Mille), who is Christine’s boy toy and may merely be enlivening the other woman’s bed on loan.

Halfway through an act of vengeance occurs that is shocking and satisfying, even if it leaves the remainder of Corneau and Nathalie Carter’s clever screenplay deprived of the very thing that had made it such a sardonic delight so far. The rest is a question of whether that crime (which really doesn’t have much to do with “love”) can be covered up or not, a matter that holds interest but stretches story and performance credibility somewhat. Nonetheless, this is pulp fun of an elegant and intelligent type. With Scott Thomas’ inherent frostiness — which she is actor enough to completely lose on other occasions — ideally employed as the chic superior anyone would eventually want to strangle, Love Crime has no need of the naked writhing across desktops and Playboy “lesbian” frissons very likely to surface as “improvements” in the forthcoming Brian De Palma joint.

Corneau (who died at age 67 last August, just after the film’s premiere) had an interesting, diverse, not-always-distinguished career, some highlights being the 1979 Jim Thompson adaptation Série Noire and 1991’s glacial costume-drama hit Tout les Matins du Monde. No masterpiece, Love Crime closes the book on his career not with a bang but with a crisp, satisfying snap. 

LOVE CRIME opens Fri/9 in Bay Area theaters.

 

Earth mover

1

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC I didn’t mean to bring the earthquake to Eleanor Friedberger’s Brooklyn — it just felt that way when I rang a few weeks ago, minutes after her ‘hood shivered and shook like it was attempting a weak imitation of, well, San Francisco. “Actually it sounded like someone was stomping on my roof,” she says wryly, phasing in and out over the line as if spirited away by unexplained forces.

A coincidence, too, that she closes her first, wonderful solo long-player, Last Summer (Merge), with a number titled “Early Earthquake,” a minimalist love song that evokes early solo Lou Reed and spins from those ground-bending emotions that hit far too soon, far too hard. “It was an early earthquake and my heart’s trembling just for you / And when the walls came crumbling down / You know I was waiting right here for you,” she sings with her charmingly verbose hipster-priest phrasing, in a feather-light voice.

“Early Earthquake” ends with a sliver of exotica culled from an optigan. “It’s almost like a toy for adults,” Friedberger says of the ’70s-era instrument. Her brother, Matthew, used one on a song for their band, the Fiery Furnaces, and, she adds, “I said if I ever found one I’d buy it.” That she did, from “an expensive music store in Brooklyn — not very cool,” she murmurs.

That brand of disarming, hyper-self-aware honesty — dotted with a dry, playful sense of irony — runs like a startling thread throughout Friedberger’s conversation, making me wanna be instant BFFs. I can see us now: telling the truth about birthdays (“Always bleak,” Friedberger declares of her Sept. 2 birthday, though she’ll be in the Bay Area that week, so bring her a gift), laughing that she’d make the perfect Patti Smith in the film version of Just Kids, scaring ourselves with the spooky effects in “Inn of the Seventh Ray,” pondering the puzzle of Google-ing dates in “Scenes from Bensonhurst,” and cruising through the borough with the rubbery-bass-bumping “Roosevelt Island” blaring. The latter is the closest thing to a genuine summer song on Last Summer; Friedberger agrees — it’s built to be pouring out of “a Buick, definitely an American car, if there are any of those left,” she says.

Last Summer is the solo record she’s always wanted to make — and when she had the time and summoned the confidence that comes with age and experience, she did, writing the songs last summer and recording them that fall, in Brooklyn. “I felt it was now or never. I always thought I’d regret if I didn’t do something myself,” Friedberger says. “There was no lightning bolt of inspiration—I don’t believe in that.

And in contrast to all those who refuse to ‘fess up to the autobiographical nature of their work, Friedberger offers, “All of it is drawn from my personal life — no imagination used. I’m trying to decide if it’s lazy or brave, I don’t know.”

In the same spirit of full disclosure, she opens the album with an infectious ditty called “My Mistakes,” climaxing with a gloriously cheesy tenor sax solo. “I was trying to copy a Van Morrison-sounding saxophone solo,” she freely admits, though it was a fight trying to get sax player Dylan Heaney to agree. “He has a jazz school background and wanted to do something new or original. I don’t believe in that, though — I’m all for copying.”

Yet Friedberger, whether solo or with the Fiery Furnaces, still manages to have one of the most original voices of her generation. Perhaps it stems from the creative support of a sib. “We have this musical language that I just don’t have with anybody else,” she says of Matthew. “But at the same time, we constantly feel like we need an excuse to do something together — because we’re not a normal band. There has to be an elaborate thought process that justifies it.”

“That’s getting tiring. So it’s liberating to make something that’s small and personal. For me, it’s more about expressing my tiny pathetic feelings.” Slight pause. “I’m kidding.”

ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER

With the Kills and Mini Mansions

Fri/9, 8:30 p.m., $29.50

Fox Theater

1807 Telegraph, Oakl.

(510) 302-2277

www.apeconcerts.com

 

Boxing Room

1

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE It does make a difference, I must say, when you step into a restaurant and find the people at the host’s station smiling and nodding at you, riffling their stack of menus before showing you to your table — instead of not. The last time I made an attempt on Citizen Cake, a few years ago, at lunchtime, I found myself confronted by a rather steely-eyed maitre d’ who advised me, in a spirit of what I took to be barely suppressed glee, that there was no possibility of seating my party of two even though the restaurant was all but empty. I left and did not look back.

If only for a marked change in tone, the Boxing Room, which opened recently in Citizen Cake’s old haunt at the corner of Gough and Grove, is a welcome turning of the page. Just as welcome is the remodel of what was once a shirt factory into a wonder of woodiness, from the ceiling of exposed joists to the impressive swaths of sauna-like blond paneling along the rear wall. Best of all is the long, sinuous bar in place of Citizen Cake’s boxy, glass-and-steel dessert cases; the bar’s reassuring jiggle, like a well-banked S-curve on a freeway, softens the hard, high angles of the space. And while the floor (of poured concrete) is of a cold hardness that usually means reverberant noise, that isn’t the case here. Even when the restaurant is nearly full, it’s possible to have a pleasant conversation without having to raise your voice.

Are there bitter cold nights in New Orleans? The Boxing Room is one of the latest entrants in what seems to be spate of bayou-themed spots in our chilly city. As at Roy’s, I felt a slight dissonance in eating the food of some faraway warm place while awaiting the little tongues of clamminess that would slither into the dining room every time somebody came in the front door. (The front door is gorgeous, incidentally, a masterwork of glass and iron, but very heavy and unwieldy.) The restaurant belongs to the Absinthe group, and the chef is Justin Simoneaux, whose name speaks for itself, at least if you speak French.

The obvious question is how Boxing Room’s food stacks up against that of Criolla Kitchen, the new, Louisiana-accented successor to Baghdad Cafe in the Castro. As we might expect, there is considerable overlap, including red beans, handlings of mirliton (the cucumber relative), various versions of the po’boy, and fried chicken. The cooking of the Mississippi Delta is well-defined and has, for North America, deep historical roots. If there’s a meaningful difference between the two menus, it’s probably Boxing Room’s upmarketiness; a couple of the main dishes pop the $20 boundary.

But most of them don’t, and the tapas-like nibbles called lagniappe are just $5 each. (This might be a small joke, since the word supposedly means, more or less, “gift.” Maybe the modest charge is the equivalent of shipping and handling.) Of these, the one that particularly caught our eye was the small cast-iron pot of Cajun boiled peanuts. We were expecting something flamingly spicy — Cajun is one of those words — and were surprised to find the legumes mildly seasoned and rather soggy, like the bits of wood that splinter from old decks in rainy weather. At first this was disappointing, but in true bar-food fashion, the peanuts built up a subtle momentum and, by the end, were nearly addictive.

You may have had grilled Monterey Bay squid ($9) before, but you probably haven’t had it like this — with tasso (a form of spicy cured pork), fried okra, and aioli made with roasted garlic, all of it brought together into a voluptuous faux-stew. Just as good, if more conventional, was a little cast-iron pot of red beans and sausage ($6) — all the cast-iron pots, incidentally, amount to a small detail that makes a big impression — while a green-tomato ratatouille ($5) seemed underpowered, though beautifully diced.

Apart from the occasional small smear of foie gras, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a savory item as rich as the fried-oyster po’boy ($18). The quite-large oysters had been battered with corn meal and slathered with mayonnaise before being snuggled between slices of fabulously fresh baguette — a kingly sandwich. The throw weight was increased slightly by a small litter of hushpuppies on the side.

“Gumbo” is derived from the West African word for “okra,” and there was okra aplenty in the gumbo ($9), along with andouille coins and shreds of chicken in a thick, smoky broth. Okra is like cilantro: You either love or hate its unmistakable flavor. As I happen to love it, I loved this gumbo. But it isn’t for doubters.

The dessert menu includes beignets ($7), and they’re fine — shaped like hamantaschen here. A livelier choice would be the pralines and cream ($7), a sundae of vanilla ice cream embellished with chunks of praline, candied almonds, and little squares of blondie bar — a ghost of pastries past? 

BOXING ROOM

Continuous service: Mon.-Wed., 11:30 a.m.-midnight; Thurs.-Fri., 11:30-1 a.m.; Sat., 5 p.m.-1 a.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.-midnight

399 Grove, SF

(415) 430-6590

www.boxingroomsf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DS/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Happy accidents

0

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC What’s so funny about sweetness and light? Bright, explosive jolts of jubilance and snappy uplift? Everything and nothing, Givers might say. The Lafayette, La., band embraces an ecstatic fun-for-all aesthetic on its debut, In Light (Glassnote) — though sultry-voiced vocalist-percussionist Tiffany Lamson still feels a need to defend her group’s rollicking, bubbling bliss bombs.

“This is the era where we need to support each other as a human race,” she says from Lafayette as Givers readies itself to hit the road for a tour that lands in SF Sept. 7. “There’s not enough space to be a band that sings about depressing shit and stuff that’s negative toward others. That era is kind of over.”

Still, Lamson, 23, sounds the teeniest bit defensive. “We do get the whole happy coin — that we’re obsessively happy,” she continues, “which is fine. I’m not going to say we’re not. If you come in the van with us for a couple days, you’ll see we’re more like a family. We have our trials and tribulations in turn that help us grow, though we generally love life and try to be happy. Who doesn’t want to be happy?”

So there — hater nation can just go suck on Givers’ generous odes to joy. As Lamson and band co-founder, vocalist, and guitarist Taylor Guarisco yelp, “I choose life!” in In Light‘s final word, “Words,” a shimmering backdrop of elastic West African-inspired guitar, glassy synth textures, and punchy polyrhythms sing out behind them in affirmation.

“The stigma is that the only thing we provide is surface-level statement,” adds Lamson. “There’s deeper roots and introspection, too.”

That music flowed forth immediately, the first time in 2008 that Lamson and Guarisco, both studying music at the University of New Orleans, played together at a friendly, last-minute fill-in show in Lafayette. Drummer Kirby Campbell, trumpet player Josh LeBlanc, and keyboardists Will Henderson and Nick Stephan joined them, improvising two hours of music. “We were just friends who all played in different bands with each other,” recounts Lamson. “It was a magical thing. We were having a really naturally good time, and we were just moving around with these instruments, being free, playing any instrument we wanted to at the moment.”

That night’s music continued to resonate for Givers, providing the basis for the self-produced In Light when the combo sat down to assemble the album last January. “We spent a lot of time arranging the songs and working on them, so they could be the best they could be for the record,” Lamson says. Engineer Ben Allen (Animal Collective, Cee-Lo) and mix engineer Chris Coady (TV on the Radio, Beach House) helped the process along.

Those veterans might have helped to make In Light an album with surprising dimensions, with fresh angles on shiny, happy sounds, but the band would likely look to their upbringing in southwest Louisiana, steeped in the music of the Cajun-zydeco capital of the world, as having a greater impact. “We were born and raised in this environment, this very rhythm-oriented environment,” explains Lamson.

“It plays a huge part in the way that we play music and the way we live ourselves. Without putting cliches on it, there’s a huge sense of unity — it’s such a diverse area, and you have West African music and Haitian music, and those all soak into Cajun and zydeco culture. People live life a lot slower here — there isn’t the hustle and bustle, and people tend to slow down and appreciate things.” She chuckles. “Maybe it’s the heat.”

GIVERS

With Kopecky Family Band

Sept. 7, 8 p.m., $10–$12

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

 

Ativanitude

0

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Some people wanted closure, so we went around the circle and each said what we got out of our 10 days of writerly camaraderie, intense productivity, and snorkeling. OK, chicken farmer, here’s where you thank the people who brought you here and lick the asses of all the new, important writerly friends you’ve made, I thought. Which should have been easy, because I did love my new friends and got a shitload of good work done in Mexico; but exhaustion and head problems got the better of me, and by the time my turn came the circle was already aslosh with gratitude, spinning its wheels in good vibes and wonderfulness. I was suffocating. I was drowning. I was dizzy. And it was my turn to say what I got out of it.

“An ear infection!” I said.

If I’d have stopped there it would have been funny, but I’d been out of my stomach for four days and couldn’t stop bitching and whining: My head felt like it was going to explode every time I nodded, the smell of toast made me want to puke, and if I bent down to scratch a mosquito bite I would pass out, I was so dizzy. How the hell was I supposed to get in the van that was taking us all to the airport next morning, let alone fly in an airplane at 39,000 feet with entirely clogged ears? Did anyone have any decongestants?

Heads shook in sympathy. People promised to check their pill collections before going to bed.

“The food was really really good,” I added.

Then it wasn’t my turn to speak anymore, and the circle continued to gush toward closure. Hard to say how many enemies I’d made, but — since everything else in the world is hard to say too –hey, who’s counting?

At the airport, I wasn’t the only one having a nervous breakdown. Irene was scheduled to land in New York at the same time some of us were. The East Coast was closed. Flights to other places were full.

And, worse, the Starbucks where we awaited our fates was playing squirrely jazz.
I set up a little Ativan dispensary at our table. See, here’s where being a complete spaz comes in handy: I’d been tracking the hurricane for half a week, and had already changed my return trip from JFK to Pittsburgh. So alls I had to worry about was my head exploding before reaching cruising altitude.

It didn’t!

Hedgehog was waiting for me at the bottom of the escalator by baggage claim, big smile. She’d left her
stupid movie one day early, drove to Pittsburgh, and got us a nice hotel room near the airport and even nearer to one of the satellite Primanti Bros. To which she immediately whisked me for a pastrami and French fry sandwich and a romaine salad, also with French fries. As if I weren’t loopy enough already.

“Not as good as Giordano’s,” I declared, “but better than the original Primanti.”

The fizzy water did not have French fries in it.

Hedgehog set a half-full bottle of West Indies Creole habanero sauce on the table between us. “I didn’t know what you’re supposed to take with you in an evacuation,” she said, “but I grabbed this.”

“I like your style,” I said, putting it mildly while pouring my favorite hot sauce all over everything.

“You did the right thing.”

She liked my ativanitude, she said.

And we went to our hotel room, made category 4 love,
and in the morning drove back to New York where we had dinner plans and US Open tickets. After this we head back west, finally, stopping only for nephewish weddings, state fairs and I guess gas and shit.

We might go to a Steelers game.

Meanwhile, in time for football season, Giordano’s has opened a restaurant in the Mission, without me.

It’s where Ti Couz used to be, on 16th Street at Valencia, and rumor has it they have pieroghis.

So my question to you, Mr. Earl Butter, is why the hell are you still eating at Valencia Pizza & Pasta?

Keep it raw

0

emilysavage@sfbg.com

MUSIC Does the Godfather of Punk really need an introduction? It’s Iggy Pop. He’s been doing this — this meaning spitting out underground ethos in a signature growl and writhing shirtless — for nearly 50 years. With the untimely death of original Stooge guitarist Ron Asheton, Pop regrouped and tapped Raw Power-era player James Williamson to rejoin the band a couple of years back.

I spoke to Pop in Paris over the phone — his current world tour was supposed to land in San Francisco on Sept. 12 and 13. As we were going to press, however, we were informed that the ever-wild Pop broke his foot and his appearance here will be rescheduled, with new dates TBA Dec. 4 and 6 at the Warfield. We wish him a speedy recovery!

SFBG: What songs are you playing this tour?

Iggy Pop: All of Raw Power, some of Funhouse, some songs from the eponymous debut the Stooges, and some stuff that was too hot to handle, too raw for the times — stuff that came out on bootlegs in the ’70s like “Cock in My Pocket,” “Open Up and Bleed,” “Head on the Curve.”

SFBG: And James Williamson is on guitar?

Iggy Pop: Yeah, it’s James. The three principles in the group are James, myself and [drummer] Scott Asheton, — [Scott] had a medical emergency…after our appearance at the Hellfest. He’s now home — he’s benched for the rest of the year. I expect he’ll fully recover and be back next year. His replacement on drums is somebody that grew up listening to our records — Toby Dammit. And Mike Watt is with us, and Steve Mackay. Mike’s there being Mike, you know?

SFBG: I do. At this point in your career do feel pressure to maintain this ‘Wild Child’ image?

Iggy Pop: You mean you’ve noticed my style? [Laughs]. It’s interesting. I feel a desire to — [screams] “still do that, BABY!” — at certain times when it’s going to do me good. And I can’t think of a better time than when the Stooges are cranking, and there are a bunch of people who are sick of this shit-soup that white rock has become and want to see some action. I let some of those elements live and breath, and I always feel good about it.

I don’t think there’s so much an image I have to live up to because one of the beautiful things about being me and about being the Stooges is that we never, ever received any legitimate or uncontested exposure from either the official music industry, when it existed, or the official media. We’re more popular now than we ever were. I’m 64 and I’m just starting to hit a career peak. I consciously try to introduce as many new things as I can into what I do and try to keep moderating it. My hair’s not gray, I haven’t lost interest in life.

SFBG: So what are you looking forward to in the future? The future being later tonight, and six months down the line?

Iggy Pop: [Laughs] well, later tonight, my wife’s with me, and I’m going to open half a bottle of Bordeaux, watch the French news, and practice my French. I’ve made a small album of my own [Existence] that’s along the lines of [2009’s] Préliminaires so I’m working on seeing if I can bamboozle some record company into putting that out. But I’m also working on [Stooges] stuff with James. He’s a real prolific talent, and wasn’t playing music for something like 37 years — he’s got a lot of pent-up energy. It’s funny because he’s an eminently sane, responsible family man who has become a very successful tech executive in San Jose. But he has still reserved his unreasoning, adolescent, spiteful side for our group — so out it comes!

SFBG: How did you end up on American Idol?

Iggy Pop: Well, my agent was begging and threatening — and I’m the sort of person that likes to take a dare. I don’t know how many times I’ve slunk past the television set when that thing was on fuming, “this stinks, what a bunch of shit this is, look at these people — they might as well be parrots!” Yet, behind all that you’re always thinking, “I can do better than that.” I thought of all 102 reasons why I shouldn’t do it, but you’re being offered a chance to do one of your own songs…on the same stage, with the chance to do it your way. I did it for that. To give four minutes of my life and put that on the record in America.

SFBG: On that same note, what was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame experience like for you, finally getting inducted in 2010?

Iggy Pop: It always reminds me of that movie Carrie. She didn’t start out wanting to be homecoming queen, did she? They keep nominating you, and I didn’t ask, nobody asked me if I wanted to be nominated. So then with every nomination comes the rejection, so you start feeling all like, “fuck!” Then you start looking around and think, “well there’s a silly-ass prick and he’s in the Hall of Fame” and “there’s a no-talent weasel and he’s in the Hall of Fame” — why the hell can’t I be in the Hall of Fame?

Shortly after Ron and Scott and I started working together again I said, “are there any specific things you want to accomplish?” And both said, “well, I want to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That would be the big thing.” So at that point I started doing things that would tend to let that happen. I did a couple of Grammy-related events. And then we did Madonna’s [induction]. I figured if the voters for this thing didn’t know who we were before, they’d know now. It’s a shame, Ron was really pissed when they didn’t induct us the next year — he hated doing the Madonna song but I didn’t mind. Hell, we could do “Happy Birthday” and it would sound good, too. It would sound like us. 

Roeg, warrior

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM It’s grown obvious in ways it couldn’t have been originally that from 1970 to 1980 Nicolas Roeg was the most adventuresome English director, even if then as now his work seems less “British” than just about any colleague you could name. Perhaps not quite knowing where he was coming from — in any sense — made Performance (1970), Walkabout (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), and Bad Timing (1980) messy, strange, and interesting in ways that then felt borderline gimmicky, as disjointed as they were deliberately dislocative. Yet all those qualities have helped the films age beautifully. In fact they’ve scarcely dated at all, perhaps because their lateral rather than linear storytelling, seemingly contrary audio and visual cues, and pervasive cultural unease reflect a mindset familiar enough now but very strange those decades ago.

That remarkable run comes to mind because of Earth‘s return in a newly struck 35th anniversary print that offers the complete 139-minute “director’s cut.” That version has in fact been available for years — the heavily-cut original U.S. theatrical release is doubtless harder to find now — but remains full of surprises. Even after so long a span, it’s a science fiction movie unconventional enough to annoy the hell out of many professed sci-fi film fans. But then their template was formed the next year by Star Wars (1977), then shortly thereafter by Alien (1979) — two expressions of sci-fi rooted in comic books and ’50s monster movies respectively, spawning innumerable imitations since equally focused on action over ideas.

The Man Who Fell to Earth, stubbornly, has no interest in spaceships, let alone battles or creatures. Instead, its subject is human society, which from the title character’s viewpoint really is nothing for our planet to brag about. It’s still an alien piece of filmmaking because Roeg wants us to view earthly life with fresh eyes that gradually dim from amused curiosity to the cynicism of a reluctant émigré forced into permanent residency in a land he despises.

In his first major film role, David Bowie plays Thomas Newton, who turns up in the American Southwest out of the blue — no one realizes at first quite how literally — with ideas for “toys” of extraordinary technological advancement that quickly make him a very, very wealthy man. Amassing money seems to be his only real interest, toward a goal he eventually reveals to hand-picked confederates including patent attorney Buck Henry and technician Rip Torn, plus singularly dim companion Mary-Lou (Candy Clark). That goal is constructing a space vehicle capable of returning Newton to his planet, which is dying from drought. (Our protagonist’s decline is charted in his changing beverage choices, from precious water to the cheap consolation of alcohol.) He intends no harm. But despite all efforts at evading notice, he inevitably attracts invasive government attention as a freak of potential scientific, capitalist, or militaristic use.

Taking considerable liberties with Walter Tevis’ novel, Paul Mayerberg’s screenplay and Roeg’s direction enlarge several subsidiary characters, add a number of new incidents, and minimize Newton’s backstory. Yet when Earth was first released in the U.S., its 20-minutes-shorter edit removed much of the more outré inventions — including a whole lotta sex scenes, mostly between college prof Torn and myriad female students — oddly re-asserting the story’s science-fiction emphasis. Yet what remains fascinating about the film, beyond Bowie’s silvery performance and Roeg’s arresting stylistic strategies, is that it’s every bit as much a stunned observation of mid-decade middlebrow Americana as the same year’s Nashville. Like a Tibetan monk transplanted to a papier-mâché dinosaur theme park, Newton is agog at a vigorous garishness that’s as invasive as the probes eventually stuck into his body. Chocolate chip cookies, evangelical hysteria, Elvis musicals, and Mary-Lou’s ever-changing hairdos are all an equal amazement to him. The people around him age decades, but he never does, and strangely neither does the culture; when Clark and Torn visit a record store in their twilight years, it’s still selling Jim Croce records to Me Decade longhairs. Newton’s tragic fate is to be trapped in a space-time warp of alien triviality.

Famously crossing over to direction from cinematography (on movies like 1967’s Far From the Madding Crowd and 1968’s Petulia), Roeg brought a sensibility to his own projects that owed less to film and theater than to modern still photography, experimental cinema, and the literary avant-garde. Before anyone else thought likewise, his soundtracks felt like wildly unpredictable (but apt) mix tapes.

None of his features strictly fit any genre they’re aligned to, when there is one. Don’t Look Now is less interested in the supernatural than the psychological deterioration of a marriage. Bad Timing is still under appreciated as the decade’s more disturbing follow-up to Last Tango in Paris (1972), wherein male control of the female sex object grows increasingly desperate and destructive. Performance, co-directed with the late Donald Cammell, was supposed to be a Swinging London snapshot a la Blow-Up (1966) — fashionable, arty, a little kinky, with Mick Jagger acting as lure. It turned out such a druggy, gender-bending mindfuck that Warner Bros. initially refused to release it. A processing lab destroyed some “obscene” footage without permission; even without that, audiences walked out, demanded refunds, even vomited. Performance no longer shocks, but it’s still subversive.

After 1980, Roeg’s output grew steadily less compelling. After years of silence suddenly there was 2007’s Puffball: The Devil’s Eyeball, a seriocomic semi-fantasy curio based on a Fay Weldon novel. No one saw it; they didn’t miss much. At 82, it’s quite possible Roeg won’t make another feature. Yet that single decade of remarkable work still points forward, and has influenced many of the more interesting younger directors’ approaches to style and storytelling since.

 

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH opens Fri/9 in Bay Area theaters.

An American blindness

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After the first jetliner crashed into the Twin Towers on that September 11 morning, a friend of mine and his 11-year old daughter climbed up to the roof of their Manhattan home to look around. Just then the second plane struck, the young girl fell backward, and went blind from shock.

It took more than a year of examinations and therapies before this girl came out of her blindness to look around.

That’s what happened to America itself ten years ago this Sunday on 9/11, though it might be claimed many of us were blinded by privilege and hubris long before. But 9/11 produced a spasm of blind rage, arising from a pre-existing blindness as to the way much of the world sees us. That in turn led to the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan again, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and, in all, a dozen “shadow wars” according to The New York Times.

Bob Woodward’s crucial book, Obama’s Wars, points out that there were already secret and lethal counterterrorism operations active in more than 60 countries as of 2009. From Pentagon think tanks came a new military doctrine of the “Long War,” a counter-insurgency vision arising from the failed Phoenix program of the Vietnam era, projecting U.S. open combat and secret wars over a span of 50 to 80 years, or 20 future presidential terms. The taxpayer costs of this Long War, also shadowy, would be in the many trillions of dollars — and paid for not from current budgets, but by generations born after the 2000 election of George W. Bush. The deficit spending on the Long War would invisibly force the budgetary crisis now squeezing our states, cities and most Americans.

Besides the future being mortgaged, civil liberties were thought to require a shrinking proper to a state of permanent and secretive war, so the Patriot Act was promulgated. All this happened after 9/11 through Democratic default and denial. Who knows what future might have followed if Al Gore, with a half-million popular vote margin over George Bush, had prevailed in the U.S. Supreme Court instead of losing by the vote of a single justice? In any event, only a single member of Congress, Barbara Lee of Berkeley-Oakland, voted against the war authorization, and only a single senator, Russ Feingold, voted against the Patriot Act.

Were we not blinded by what happened on 9/11? Are we still? Let’s look at the numbers we almost never see.

 

CASUALTIES OF WAR

As to American casualties, the figure now is beyond twice those who died in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. on 9/11. The casualties are rarely totaled, but are broken down into three categories by the Pentagon and Congressional Research Service. There is Operation Enduring Freedom, which includes Afghanistan and Pakistan but, in keeping with the Long War definition, also covers Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Second, there is Operation Iraqi Freedom and its successor Operation New Dawn, the name adopted after September 2010 for the 47,000 US advisers, trainers and counterterrorism units still in Iraq. The scope of these latter operations includes Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. These territories include not only Muslim majorities but, according to former Centcom commander Tommy Franks, 68 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and the passageway for 43 percent of petroleum exports, another American geo-interest which was heavily denied in official explanations.

A combined 6,197 Americans were killed in these wars as of August 16, 2011, in the name of avenging 9/11, a day when 2, 996 Americans died. The total number of American wounded has been 45,338, and rising at a rapid rate. The total number rushed by military Medivac out of these violent zones was 56, 432. That’s a total of 107,996 Americans. And the active-duty military suicide rate for the decade is at a record high of 2, 276, not counting veterans or those who have tried unsuccessfully to take their own lives. In fact, the suicide rate for last year was greater than the American death toll in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Pentagon has long played a numbers game with these body counts. In addition to being painfully difficult and extremely complicated to access, there was a time when the Pentagon refused to count as Iraq war casualties any soldier who died from their wounds outside of Iraq’s airspace. Similar controversies have surrounded examples such as soldiers killed in non-combat accidents.

The fog around Iraq or Afghanistan civilian casualties will be seen in the future as one of the great scandals of the era. Briefly, the United States and its allies in Baghdad and Kabul have relied on eyewitness, media or hospital numbers instead of the more common cluster-sampling interview techniques used in conflict zones like the first Gulf War, Kosovo or the Congo. The United Nations has a conflict of interest as a party to the military conflict, and acknowledged in a July 2009 U.N. human rights report footnote that “there is a significant possibility that UNAMA is underreporting civilian casualties.”

In August, even the mainstream media derided a claim by the White House counter-terrorism adviser that there hasn’t been a single “collateral,” or innocent, death during an entire year of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, a period in which 600 people were killed, all of them alleged “militants.” As an a specific explanation for the blindness, the Los Angeles Times reported April 9 that “Special Forces account for a disproportionate share of civilian casualties caused by western troops, military officials and human rights groups say, though there are no precise figures because many of their missions are deemed secret.”

 

STICKER SHOCK OF WAR

Among the most bizarre symptoms of the blindness is the tendency of most deficit hawks to become big spenders on Iraq and Afghanistan, at least until lately. The direct costs of the war, which is to say those unfunded costs in each year’s budget, now come to $1.23 trillion, or $444.6 billion for Afghanistan and $791.4 billion for Iraq, according to the National Priorities Project.

But that’s another sleight-of-hand, when one considers the so-called indirect costs like long-term veteran care. Leading economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes recently testified to Congress that their previous estimate of $4 to $6 trillion in ultimate costs was conservative. Nancy Youssef of McClatchy Newspapers in D.C. — in my opinion, the best war reporter of the decade — wrote recently that “it’s almost impossible to pin down just what the United States spends on war.” The president himself expressed “sticker shock,” according to Woodward’s book, when presented cost projections during his internal review of 2009.

The Long War casts a shadow not only over our economy and future budgets but our innocent and unborn children’s future as well. This is no accident, but the result of deliberate lies, obfuscations and scandalous accounting techniques. We are victims of an information warfare strategy waged deliberately by the Pentagon. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal said much too candidly in a February 2010, “This is not a physical war of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants.” David Kilcullen, once the top counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, defines “international information operations as part of counterinsurgency.” Quoted in Counterinsurgency in 2010, Kilcullen said this military officer’s goal is to achieve a “unity of perception management measures targeting the increasingly influential spectators’ gallery of the international community.”

This new war of perceptions, relying on naked media manipulation such as the treatment of media commentators as “message amplifiers” but also high-technology information warfare, only highlights the vast importance of the ongoing WikiLeaks whistle-blowing campaign against the global secrecy establishment. Consider just what we have learned about Iraq and Afghanistan because of WikiLeaks: Tens of thousands of civilian casualties in Iraq, never before disclosed; instructions to U.S. troops to not investigate torture when conducted by U.S. allies; the existence of Task Force 373, carrying out night raids in Afghanistan; the CIA’s secret army of 3,000 mercenaries; private parties by DynCorp featuring trafficked boys as entertainment, and an Afghan vice president carrying $52 million in a suitcase.

The efforts of the White House to prosecute Julian Assange and persecute Pfc. Bradley Manning in military prison should be of deep concern to anyone believing in the public’s right to know.

The news that this is not a physical war but mainly one of perceptions will not be received well among American military families or Afghan children, which is why a responsible citizen must rebel first and foremost against The Official Story. That simple act of resistance necessarily leads to study as part of critical practice, which is as essential to the recovery of a democratic self and democratic society. Read, for example, this early martial line of Rudyard Kipling, the poet of the white man’s burden: “When you’re left wounded on Afghanistan’s plains/ And the women come out to cut up what remains/ Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains/And go to your God like a soldier.” Years later, after Kipling’s beloved son was killed in World War I and his remains never recovered, the poet wrote: “If any question why we died / Tell them because our fathers lied.”

 

A HOPE FOR PEACE

An important part of the story of the peace movement, and the hope for peace itself, is the process by which hawks come to see their own mistakes. A brilliant history/autobiography in this regard is Dan Ellsberg’s Secrets, about his evolution from defense hawk to historic whistleblower during the Vietnam War. Ellsberg writes movingly about how he was influenced on his journey by meeting contact with young men on their way to prison for draft resistance.

The military occupation of our minds will continue until many more Americans become familiar with the strategies and doctrines in play during the Long War. Not enough Americans in the peace movement are literate about counterinsurgency, counterterrorism and the debates about the “clash of civilizations”, the West versus the Muslim world.

The more we know about the Long War doctrine, the more we understand the need for a long peace movement. The pillars of the peace movement, in my experience and reading, are the networks of local progressives in hundreds of communities across the United States. Most of them are voluntary, citizen volunteers, always and immersed in the crises of the moment, nowadays the economic recession and unemployment.

This peace bloc deserves more. It won’t happen overnight, but gradually we are wearing down the pillars of the war. It’s painfully slow, because the president is threatened by Pentagon officials, private military contractors and an entire Republican Party (except the Ron Paul contingent) who benefit from the politics and economics of the Long War.

But consider the progress, however slow. In February of this year, Rep. Barbara Lee passed a unanimous resolution at the Democratic National Committee calling for a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan and transfer of funds to job creation. The White House approved of the resolution. Then 205 House members, including a majority of Democrats, voted for a resolution that almost passed, calling for the same rapid withdrawal. Even the AFL-CIO executive board, despite a long history of militarism, adopted a policy opposing Afghanistan. The president himself is quoted in Obama’s Wars as opposing his military advisors, demanding an exit strategy and musing that he “can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.” At every step of the way, it must be emphasized, public opinion in Congressional districts was a key factor in changing establishment behavior.

As for Al Qaeda, there is always the threat of another attack, like those attempted by militants aiming at Detroit during Christmas 2009 or Times Square in May 2010. In the event of another such terrorist assault originating from Pakistan, all bets are off: According to Woodward, the U.S. has a “retribution” plan to bomb 150 separate sites in that country alone there, and no apparent plan for The Day After. Assuming that nightmare doesn’t happen, today’s al Qaeda is not the al Qaeda of a decade ago. Osama bin Laden is dead, its organization is damaged, and its strategy of conspiratorial terrorism has been displaced significantly by the people-power democratic uprisings across the Arab world.

It is clear that shadow wars lie ahead, but not expanding ground wars involving greater numbers of American troops. The emerging argument will be over the question of whether special operations and drone attacks are effective, moral and consistent with the standards of a constitutional democracy. And it is clear that the economic crisis finally is enabling more politicians to question the trillion dollar war spending.

Meanwhile, the 2012 national elections present an historic opportunity to awaken from the blindness inflicted by 9/11.

After more than 50 years of activism, politics and writing, Tom Hayden is a leading voice for ending the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan and reforming politics through a more participatory democracy.

Fresh and Easy displacement

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OPINION You could cut the hate with a knife. All eyes were on my fumbling fingers, unable to sign my WIC coupons fast enough with one hand while holding my 13-month-old son with the other. “Somebody’s using welfare checks to pay for their food,” A 20 something man in a polo shirt shouted into his phone next to me.

I spend so many days like this while trying to shop as a poor mama, its hard to even think about them. The life of a poor parent in the U.S. is always a scarcity model rollercoaster ride of hate, system abuse, subsistence crumbs and criminalization, best exemplified in the supermarket experience where the so-called paying customers suffer through the bother of waiting for poor parents to pay with our WIC coupons, working poor mamas to pay with payroll checks or indigenous elders to count out their multiple coupons.

I began to reflect on this when I heard about the new fresh and Easy Markets opening in the Bayview-Hunters Point, the Mission and the Portola district. It’s a new supermarket chain from England that by policy doesn’t accept WIC coupons.

WIC — the federal Women, Infants and Children’s program, is not welfare, but rather a supplemental program that allows low-income parents to get milk, grains, cereal and other basic foodstuffs. It’s a program used by many working poor as well as mamas on government crumbs so we can feed our children a balanced diet.

The Bayview, Mission, and Portola neighborhoods are peopled with a lot of multi-generational, multi-lingual mamas, and families in poverty like mine, who need access to affordable fruits and vegetables and non-hormone-filled meat like Fresh and Easy has, but are these stores really being built for us?

Like so much of San Francisco and the whole Bay Area, these communities are under attack from redevelopment and gentrification efforts. Removal and evictions of poor families and elders happen everyday in the city to make way for the corporate veneer of Lennar and John Stewart properties, condominiums, lofts and the rich young people who they are built for.

So who is Fresh and Easy for? They don’t take coupons, personal checks or WIC — and like their Whole Paycheck counterparts, they don’t hire union employees, or ultimately many employees at all, as they have the new self-pay check-out stands.

Fresh and Easy claims it doesn’t except the manufacturers’ coupons for the same reasons it doesn’t accept paper personal checks, W.I.C. vouchers, or cash payroll checks: That elimination of manual paper processing, combined with its self-service checkout system, saves money.

Pressured by community members who protested outside the Bayview store on its opening day, Fresh and Easy CEO Tim Mason now claims that Fresh and Easy in the Bayview will eventually begin taking WIC.

As this poor mama tries to move out from under the lie of criminalized government crumbs and the non-existent, bootstraps centered, corporate underwritten American dream, I have come to realize our collective, self-determined liberation begins with growing our own food in our poor neighborhoods with people-led community gardens, taking back stolen indigenous land and resources with organized poor people led/indigenous people-led efforts and whenever we have the energy, after all the other things we have to do to survive in this capitalist society fighting the exclusion and removal efforts of us by the smooth talking corporations who don’t see us as part of their grand profit-making plans.

Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia, daughter of Dee and mama of Tiburcio is the co-founder of POOR Magazine/PoorNewsNetwork and author of Criminal of Poverty: Growing up Homeless in America

Mayor Lee and PG&E

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EDITORIAL Pacific Gas and Electric Company is the number one corporate criminal in San Francisco. The company’s malfeasance caused the deaths of eight people and destroyed an entire neighborhood in San Bruno last year. The National Transportation Safety Board, in a report issued August 30, denounced PG&E’s “integrity management program without integrity” and blasted the company’s efforts to “exploit weakness in a lax system of oversight.”

That doesn’t even address the fact that PG&E has been operating an illegal monopoly in San Francisco for more than 80 years, engaging in an ongoing criminal conspiracy to violate the federal Raker Act. Or the fact that the utility spent $50 million of ratepayer money on a ballot initiative aimed at eliminating consumer choice in the electricity market.

So why was Mayor Ed Lee out at a PG&E public relations event Sept. 1 praising the “great local corporation” as a “great company that gets it?”

Well, the mayor’s campaign press spokesperson, Tony Winnicker, says that PG&E was at the event to donate $250,000 to a program for at-risk youth, and that the mayor was only recognizing that, for all its flaws, the utility “also [does] something good for our public schools and low-income kids.”

That’s not enough, and that’s not acceptable — and the mayor should apologize to the residents of San Francisco, San Bruno and everyplace else in California where the giant corporation has done serious and lasting damage.

It’s nice that PG&E gave a contribution to a program that helps Soma kids learn to read and to play baseball. We support the RBI program and its goals. Never mind that the $250,000 is about 0.005 percent of the money that the utility spent trying to block public power in California. Never mind that PG&E pays such a low franchise fee that it robs of city of millions of annual tax dollars that could fund programs like this one. It still sounds like a large sum, and to the nonprofit program at Bessie Charmichael School, it is.

But there’s a reason PG&E gives money to community groups and programs like this all over town — it’s a way to buy support and respect. Corporate largess of this sort is a relatively cheap public relations strategy — and for the mayor not to see that is embarrassing.

It’s a particularly notable conflict of interest, too — Lee’s top patron and biggest political supporter, Willie Brown (who knows a bit about corruption himself) has been on PG&E’s payroll as a private attorney for the past several years, earning about $200,000 a year.

Most of the candidates for mayor have been taking a gentle approach to Lee, and that makes a certain amount of sense — in a ranked-choice voting environment, negative campaigning often backfires. But there’s nothing inappropriate about saying that the mayor of San Francisco has damaged his own reputation and the reputation of the city by allowing himself to be used at a PR tool by PG&E. Remember: He didn’t just show up and thank the utility for the money. He called PG&E a “great local corporation,” which is, quite simply, false. This ought to become an issue in the race, and Lee should be forced to explain his position on public power, his ties to Brown and PG&E and his willingness to put aside years of malfeasance in the name of a small contribution.