Cover Story Archives — Page 2 of 6 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Re-framed

Sasha Cuttler

November 26, 2013

LIT Forget the glossy one-sheets you’ve seen reproduced a thousand times. The colorful Alternative Movie Posters: Film Art from the Underground (Schiffer Publishing Ltd, 207 pp., $34.99) highlights creatively re-imagined posters for pop classics like 2004’s Mean Girls (styled as a retro YA novel); 1990’s Misery (a stark drawing of a shattered ankle); and 1984’s Gremlins (a box of instant oatmeal: “Just add water!”) It also includes interviews with each of the artists, most of whom are diehard movie junkies themselves. I spoke with the book’s editor, Matthew Chojnacki, to get the inside scoop on his new project.

SF Bay Guardian Your first book, Put the Needle on the Record: The 1980s at 45 Revolutions Per Minute, was about record-album art. Were movie posters a natural progression?

Matthew Chojnacki I’m a huge music fan, and I was going to a lot of music festivals and seeing concert-poster artwork all over the place. I noticed a lot of those artists were also starting to do movie posters. Since I also love movies, I thought this would be a cool follow-up to the first book, because it’s a similar idea: How do you boil down a whole album, or a whole movie, into one image?

SFBG How did you choose which posters to include in the book?

MC I had this big matrix of what I wanted. There are a lot of different styles of art in this movement. A lot of it’s minimalist, but on the flip side, a lot of it’s hand-drawn cartoons, like Mad magazine style. And a lot of artists are doing their own, unique thing — glow-in-the-dark ink, stuff like that. So I wanted to include a lot of different styles of art, but also genres of movies and decades of film.

Also, especially with cult classics, a lot of the posters have been re-done hundreds of times; I tried to find the best [examples] for films like Fight Club (1999) and The Big Lebowski (1998). It became a big curation project. I boiled something like 10,000 images down to just over 200, and I probably contacted 105 artists and 100 agreed to do it. Most artists got two pages that show their style, with an interview alongside, which shows what types of movies motivate them and their thoughts on why these posters are important.

SFBG What are the elements that make an effective poster, and why have these alternative posters become popular?

MC What movie posters do these days is generally just [publicize] the celebrity in the cast. What they used to be, and what this [alternative art] does, is give the spirit of the movie. There are a lot of great, classic posters like The Exorcist (1973) — it didn’t tell you much about the movie, but it was an effective way to get people to see it.

I think the motion picture industry has gotten kind of lazy. They know celebrity sells, of course, but they could tell you who’s in the movie and still make it a piece of art. There are some more visual directors who do this very well, like Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, or Tim Burton. It seems like they’re really involved with their marketing; their posters really pop, and give you the feeling or the emotion of what you might get with one of their movies.

But the other 95 percent of posters — you’ve probably seen those articles where they compare 100 action movies and they’re all done in the same exact way. It’s a regurgitation of the same concept. My point with the book is not only are these examples of cool posters, but also this is what it could be. It used to be a medium — just like album covers — where it took the project above and beyond. Even if the album or the movie was kind of crappy, there was still some collectibility around the imagery of these films. They used to put a lot of style and intrigue into these posters, and I think that’s something that can still be done while communicating that Will Smith’s in the movie.

SFBG Do you have a favorite poster in the book?

MC I think it’s all how you were raised. In the 1970s and ’80s, I loved hand-drawn posters, National Lampoon or Garbage Pail Kids-style, because they always revolved around T&A comedies or horror movies — R-rated movies geared toward underage people. I tend to like that kind of comic-book style. One of my favorite artists who hand-draws is Ghoulish Gary Pullin, who has a Big Lebowski and a Teen Wolf (1985) in the book. I really like his style; it’s way up my alley of what I used to like as a kid.

I love posters for movies that are kind of underrated a little bit. Everybody does Big Lebowski and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), but I love when, once in awhile, someone will pluck out a Teen Wolf or something a little more obscure, and do it in a really cool way. *

Facebook.com/AltFilmArt

Freedom is slavery, privacy is theft

Sasha Cuttler

November 26, 2013

LIT Reading a book is a simple, solitary pleasure. As I sat with the thick, hardback edition of The Circle by Dave Eggers in recent weeks, I could feel its weight on my lap and watch my bookmark slowly proceed through its pages. It was a precious, visceral experience to read it, something I savored like a juicy secret.

Those sensations and my desire to keep them to myself for awhile are anathema to the hyper-connected, technology-obsessed world that Eggers creates in this dystopian novel — a world that is far closer to the one we live in and are building right here in the Bay Area than many techophiles would like to admit.

In fact, I deliberately waited until just after I finished reading The Circle (Knopf/McSweeney’s, 504 pp., $27.95) to read any of its reviews, and one of the first ones to come up on my Google search was a scathing critique in Wired magazine headlined “What the Internet Looks Like if You Don’t Understand It.”

Without a sense of irony, the review parrots the perspective of the book’s protagonist — 24-year-old Mae Holland, who gets a coveted job at The Circle, a near-future Silicon Valley company that’s an amalgam of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and your bank — who dismisses concerns about privacy, corporate power, and the reductive, data-driven trivialization of culture by saying that critics just don’t understand the Internet.

You see, The Circle — like many of today’s real life tech companies and a large portion of the shiny, happy true believers who work at them — is saving the world from all the messiness and ignorance that preceded its rise. And if you don’t get that, or you don’t accept trading your personal information for the collective good, then you’re just crazy and resistant to the inevitable march of progress.

“Who but a fringe character would try to impede the unimpeachable improvement of the world?” Mae asks herself when The Circle’s biggest critics mysteriously turn out to have incriminating information on their computers.

Later, Mae and The Circle’s “Wise Men,” who prod her progression toward becoming the fresh young face of the company, reduce that faith in the digital collective to the Orwellian slogan: “Secrets are lies. Sharing is caring. Privacy is theft.”

And in the end, the naif-turned-guileless-villain could only see the goodness and virtue of living “in a world where everyone could know each other truly and wholly, without secrets, without shame and without the need for permission to see or to know, without the selfish hoarding of life — any corner of it, any moment of it. All of that would be, so soon, replaced by a new and glorious openness, a world of perpetual light.”

POWER OF FICTION

I understand how some critics can fault Eggers for being a little over-the-top in presenting The Circle’s technologies and ambitions, or with its characters being sometimes two dimensional messengers of the author’s takeaways, or with plot points that seem a little implausible (for example, it’s hard to imagine most politicians “going transparency” and wearing live cameras around the necks all day, every day).

But that’s really part of the fun with this book, and those supposed flaws actually prove to be skillful devices that develop the novel into an allegory of modern times in much the same way that George Orwell did in 1984, a comparison that Eggers was clearly aiming for.

Instead of the grim, top-down, thought-policing security state conjured up by Orwell as he observed the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, the dystopian world that Eggers creates is a cheerful if vapid, bottom-up, all-knowing security apparatus that supplants government itself.

Much like in 1984, it is average citizens who become the key agents of the security state, persuaded by propaganda and skewed visions of the greater good to spy on their neighbors. Or in the case of The Circle — and its cheap, small, wireless, and ubiquitous SeeChange cameras, or the TruYouth tracking chips implanted in children for their protection — the actions of people in every corner of the world.

Yet the real power and insights in this compelling work of fiction isn’t with its portrayal of the grand endgame, as creepy as that all might be (and I won’t even get into a couple of the chilling plot twists and scenes that come toward the end of the book). What intrigued me most was its reflection of the attitudes and motivations that are so prevalent in the tech world today, as we see all around us, and the perils in following through these incubating ideas to their logical ends.

Mayor Ed Lee and his main financial benefactor, venture capitalist Ron Conway, the libertarian-leaning investor in a huge cross-section of local high-tech companies (see “The Plutocrat,” 11/27/12), regularly present technology as the panacea for all that ails this complex, multi-faceted city.

“Dispution” is the main stated goal of this industry, whether it be Airbnb’s defiance of local housing, zoning, and tax laws to allow people to monetize their apartments; Lyft and Uber creating unregulated taxi services that threaten San Francisco’s long-developed taxi system; or the San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology & Innovation (sf.citi) pushing tech-based public-private partnerships “to find new solutions to historic problems facing San Francisco.”

In fact, a campaign video that sf.citi created during the mayor’s race two years ago was eerily similar to the thoughts Mae had one day while away from the safe and sanitized cocoon of the Circle campus: “Walking through San Francisco, or Oakland, or San Jose, or any city, really, seemed more and more like a Third World experience, with unnecessary filth, and unnecessary strife and unnecessary errors and inefficiencies — on any city block, a thousand problems correctible through simple enough algorithms and the application of available technology and willing members of the digital community.”

CLOSING THE CIRCLE

Eggers writes from a place of love for San Francisco, the city we watched him adopt through his breakout novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2001). He then founded the McSweeney’s publishing house and the 826 Valencia writing lab, mentoring new generations of young writers and encouraging our love affair with the printed word.

I got to know Eggers at events and coffee shops in our Mission District neighborhood, and he was generous with his time and advice as I was writing my own book, The Tribes of Burning Man (2010). Eggers spanned the first dot-com boom and the current one, his award-winning books are critically acclaimed for their penetrating insights into what makes people tick, and so his observations about the quirks and pitfalls of techie culture here in the Bay Area can’t be easily dismissed.

The tech industry does a lot of good and important work, but there are inherent dangers in the marriage of powerful technologies to the power-hungry capitalists who finance their ventures. And the mediating factor is the multitudes who use the technologies and what their expectations are. It is a triad reflected in a parable-like story toward the end of the book when a shark, an octopus, and a school of sea horses are put into the same tank (spoiler alert: the shark wins).

The mysterious Kalden, a Mark Zuckerberg-like character who helped create The Circle, explains toward the end that he and others were motivated by a desire to apply technological fixes to any problems they saw, often just to see what could be done, without really thinking through the wider and longer term implications of what they were doing.

“I was trying to make the web more civil. I was trying to make it more elegant. I got rid of anonymity. I combined a thousand disparate elements into one unified system. But I didn’t picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network,” Kalden tells Mae.

We all want to be seen and counted, to be connected to something greater than ourselves, and to be protected from lurking evils in our world. The Circle reminds us to careful what we wish for, and it also offers an intriguing prescription for what ails us.

At the end of the novel, Kalden tries to enlist Mae’s help is promoting “The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age,” which range from “We must all have the right to anonymity” and “Not every human activity can be measured” down to the final line, written in red ink: “We must all have the right to disappear.” *

The Presidio Strikes Back

Michael Redmond

November 19, 2013

joe@sfbg.com

On the coast of San Francisco’s national park, the Presidio, a battle is underway that may define what this unique place is really about.

Is the Presidio a historically significant natural area with a heritage worth celebrating and protecting? Or is the Presidio just the last great piece of undeveloped land in San Francisco, with the added benefit of being outside the jurisdiction of city regulators and taxes? Maybe it’s both.

The embattled parcel that could illuminate those questions is a 15-minute walk east from the Golden Gate Bridge, just off the beach of Crissy Field, which now houses Sports Basement. Once a slab of concrete and now a bustling waterfront teeming with bicyclists and joggers, it seems almost too beautiful and prosperous a place for a sporting goods store to be housed.

That may be why, a year ago, the powerful people who preside over the Presidio asked for a bevy of museum proposals to replace Sports Basement and its building.

For months, three teams with multi-million-dollar museum proposals hotly competed to rent the soon-to-be vacant property: an institute devoted to sustainability, an interactive science museum based around Presidio history, and a museum housing the extensive art collection of filmmaker George Lucas, the wealthy creator of the Star Wars empire.

Decisions made behind closed doors will seal the deal in the next few weeks and the winning pitch may shape the future of the Presidio. And like the Highlander, there can be only one. At least, that was the original thought.

Ultimately the decision won’t rest in the hands of the mayor, the Board of Supervisors, or any other elected official. For better or for worse, decision-making in the Presidio is entrusted to a seven-person “trust,” mostly appointed by the president of the United States: the Presidio Trust.

“I think, at times, you think that we all know what we’re doing,” Presidio Trust President Nancy Bechtle, appointed by President George W. Bush in 2008, told a crowd of hundreds at an Oct. 24 public meeting about the museum decision. “I don’t think that any of us have made up our minds on anything yet.”

But if recent reports from the San Francisco Chronicle are to be believed, the Trust is pushing to please everyone and disappoint no one. Citing anonymous sources, longtime media bromance Matier and Ross reported last week that the Presidio Trust was leaning towards Lucas’ museum proposal while feeling out alternative sites for the remaining projects.

Presidio Trust spokesperson Dana Polk admitted they were putting out feelers. “We don’t have specific sites identified, we’re just speaking to the teams to see if they are willing to consider other options,” she told the Guardian.

For a stretch of land that has moved slowly to bring in new development, each one a laborious and controversial process, the idea of allowing a trilogy of museums could have blockbuster implications for the Presidio and its tony surrounding neighborhoods.

As many advocates from different sides of the debate have said, any major development there could make the Presidio that much denser: bringing more cars, more tourists, and more San Franciscans to the remote northwestern corner of the city that many residents seem to ignore.

More than 400,000 annual visitors would flock to Crissy Field under any of the existing plans, while multiple proposals could more than double that. The two lead proposals, Lucas’ art museum and the Presidio Exchange, tell a tale of two Presidios. One is an interactive museum that celebrates the history of the natural setting of the park around it, and the other celebrates the digital history of the surrounding Bay Area.

It’s techies versus naturalists.

There are six criteria the Presidio Trust laid out for the projects, but only two of those divide the projects sharply: firstly, is it economically viable, and secondly does the project complement the Presidio as it is today?

Which proposal defines the Presidio’s present depends on how you see its past.

EMPIRE OF ART

Palo Alto of 1878 was as driven by technology as it is today. There and then, a young Eadweard Muybridge lined up a series of photo cameras with strings tied to their shutters along a racetrack, all to settle a bet. Do all of a racing horse’s hooves leave the ground as it runs?

The horse’s galloping legs pulled each string one by one, inadvertently making the world’s first series of sequential photographs (and yes, the hooves all left the ground). Out of technological advancement, cinema was born.

There’s a reason Lucas’ Presidio-based Lucasfilm studio houses a statue of Muybridge reaching to the sky. The man who pioneered Star Wars is really the man who pioneered the golden age of cinematic special effects, and he modeled his career after techno-artists like Muybridge. The heart of his proposed museum embodies that work.

Technology shapes art, Lucas believes, and film technology was birthed in the Bay Area.

“When I moved here in 1969 right out of college, I stayed here, I built my business here, I never made a film in Hollywood,” Lucas said at a public meeting on the mid-Crissy Field site, pitching his museum idea to the Presidio Trust and to the crowd. “I’m proud of being a San Franciscan.”

At 95,000 square feet, the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum is a love poem to the history of technological art. Statues of Star Wars and other cinematic characters line the walls in mock-ups. Promotional videos for the museum show kids staring excitedly at laptops and levitating X-Wings, the spacecraft of Jedi hero Luke Skywalker, with the push of a button.

In his videos and speeches about the museum, Lucas touts the Bay Area as a hub of cinema, promising his museum would draw Pixar and LucasFilm luminaries to teach and inspire the next generation of filmmakers. The museum has hands-on digital workshops cooked into the design of the building.

“This is our chance to show young people what cinematic design is,” Lucas said. He’s shown that dedication through his nonprofit, Edutopia, bringing digital lesson plans into public school classrooms.

But as much as Lucas values the technology of cinema he also values pop art, and Star Wars is the ultimate pop adventure fantasy.

Lucas said that storytelling art, “derisively called illustration,” never gets a fair shake in museums. Now is the time, and the main event in his museum would celebrate an artist made famous by Christmas cards and Boys’ Life Magazine.

The Star Wars director’s collection of Norman Rockwell paintings is widely known in the art world, touring the US and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. As with all art that appeals to the masses, ex-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown loves it.

“Lucas has what amounts to a museum of Hollywood, mixed with the kind of art you don’t need a curator to explain,” Brown wrote in a July edition in his Chronicle column, Willie’s World. “Think the Empire meets Middle America.”

Willie Brown isn’t the only luminary to back the Lucas proposal. At each public meeting and in every public letter written to the Trust, an empire of rich folks and techies sang songs of praise for the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum.

Mayor Ed Lee, tech venture capitalist Ron Conway, Pixar film director John Lasseter, Saleforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, MC Hammer, and Tim Ritchie, president of San Jose’s The Tech Museum of Innovation, all actively support the Lucas proposal.

The morals and mores of tech are all over the letter that Conway, the godfather of Silicon Valley, wrote to the Presidio Trust: “As you know, I have a passion for making and keeping San Francisco at the forefront of innovation. Certainly, there is no greater innovator around than George Lucas. His businesses have transformed the tech sector, specifically digital technology. San Francisco deserves this museum. It demands it.”

Though monied interests backed Lucas, it isn’t like he needs their cash. He pledged to personally finance the creation and operations of his museum.

The Star Wars franchise grossed more than $33 billion for Lucas, according to a study by Wired magazine. Lucas also owned Industrial Light and Magic, a pioneer in the special effects industry with a hand in everything from Back to the Future to the newest Harry Potter and Iron Man flicks. Now Star Wars and his special effects studios are owned by Disney, a deal penned just last year.

Some of that work came out of their studio in the Presidio, where the studio Lucas created pays $5.8 million annually in rent. The Letterman Digital Arts Center is one of two locations of ILM, and it’s an embodiment of Lucas’ plan for the area.

It’s a manicured campus, to be sure. A man-made creek runs down its center towards a serene pond, much lovelier than the swamps of Dagobah that Yoda called home. The white buildings with red shingled roofs confuse visitors into thinking they were erected by peoples long ago. And that’s the point, Lucas spokesperson David Perry told the Guardian.

“It looks like something that could’ve been built at the turn of the century,” he said.

Inside the Lucas museum is an homage to the tech history of the Bay Area, but the architecture’s Mission Revival style is an homage to the birth of San Francisco itself.

A LONG TIME AGO

Long before the rise of the hipsters, the first peoples to chill out in our foggy peninsula were the Ohlone tribes, dating back to the year 700. But the first who built what we know as San Francisco were Spanish soldiers driven by the fires of religion and conquest.

Lt. Col. Juan Bautista de Anza settled two areas when he first came to San Francisco in 1776: Mission Dolores and today’s Presidio. He argued with his superiors long and hard for settling the Presidio. They thought the fog and cold too harsh and inhospitable for colonization. How little things have changed.

Since the Ohlone were displaced or enslaved, the Presidio has long housed the military, segueing from the Spanish to the United States military, where it became an important installation during World War II.

Massive gun batteries sprouted on the hills of the Marin Headlands across the bay and in the Presidio, keeping a watchful eye to sea and airborne invaders from the west. Some of the barracks that housed the soldiers still stand today.

As recently as the ’90s, a lone cannon fired there every day as the flag was lowered, signaling the Marina and Richmond districts that evening was on its way. In 1994, the cannons were silent.

After the military ended its occupation of the Presidio, its fate remained uncertain. In what news reports at the time characterized as a Republican swipe against Rep. Nancy Pelosi, in 1996 Congress deemed that now San Francisco’s national park should be self-sustaining. Thus a novel quasi private-public institution was born: the Presidio Trust.

The Trust was mandated with making the Presidio a self-supporting entity, earning money with rents and development, and it has now finally achieved the goal of covering its own operating costs with no help from the federal government. It’s the only national park with a profit motive, and that changes the calculus of what’s built.

The Presidio is an entity in San Francisco, but not of San Francisco, in financial and political terms. Guardian investigations from Lucas’ first move to the Presidio catalogued an estimated $60 million in savings he achieved by not paying local San Francisco taxes. The new museum site may benefit from the same deal.

The Presidio of today is taking halting baby steps towards commerce. The main post houses a high school, a YMCA, and the Disney Museum. The cannon rests unused adjacent to a bowling alley.

The Presidio houses 3,000 residents, according to federal data, and 3,000 workers come in from the surrounding Bay Area to work. Since 1996, the area has transformed. But beyond just making money, the Presidio Trust is also tasked with maintaining its parkland and curating its past, and it’s that past that the other museum proposals celebrate.

The Presidio Exchange museum proposal focuses on the Presidio itself, its history and future.

OF AND FOR THE PRESIDIO

First off, this is not a rebels versus the empire tale. The Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy — a nonprofit affiliated with the Golden Gate National Parks Recreation Area — is at the helm of the Presidio Exchange site. Even though it isn’t George Lucas, its not a ragtag band of outliers either.

The Parks Conservancy built and currently maintains visitor attractions all over San Francisco’s national parkland, from the Warming Hut at Fort Point to Alcatraz. It has raised more than $300 million to support these projects since 1981, all in the name of curating its slice of important Bay Area history.

Its Presidio Exchange (PX) proposal is about about celebrating the area’s natural history. In physical terms, the PX architecturally embodies its name: A great big X. Each wing houses a different focus on Presidio’s natural world and history through interactive workshops, taking exhibit cues from local favorites like the Exploratorium.

One end houses “park place,” where arts will intersect with the environment. A great example that exists now is Spire, a construct of trees that forms a sculpted point near the Presidio’s Arguello gate. Another wing houses a demonstration kitchen, where food grown on-site will be fricasseed and fried in the name of education.

If the home and workplace are first and second spaces for people to live, the Parks Conservancy touts the PX as a “third space,” with a living room area built-in to look out on the water of the bay.

Stepping upstairs is a two-story spiral of differently angled screens, allowing visitors to choose their history lesson based on sightline — Ohlone or Spanish colonialists, or to ditch humanity altogether and learn about the ecosystem.

A third museum proposal, called the Sustainability Institute, has gained little political traction, but also follows the PX ideal of celebrating natural settings of the Presidio. That proposal describes it as “a place to explore the critical social, economic, and environmental issues of our time.”

More than celebrate history though, the PX also has spaces for visiting artists to perform in its “world stage.” Renderings of dancers litter its website. “It’s progressive and, most of all, inclusive,” said Janice Berger, a Parks Conservancy board member, in a promotion for the PX.

Nature aside, what the Parks Conservancy also does well is drum up support. At a public forum on the museum proposals on Oct. 24, a portion of the over 35,000 annual parks volunteers and networks that shaped the Golden Gate National Parks were united against the force that is George Lucas.

WHO IS IT FOR?

Those used to the public meetings of the Board of Supervisors would be in for a rude awakening at the Presidio Trust as the atmosphere was jovial and friendly, at least within the museum proposal fiefdoms. The meeting to discuss the mid-Crissy field site was divided into discernible camps: Tanned and weathered naturalists, upper crust folks with pocket squares in their coats, Presidio neighbors, and a handful of Lucas employees.

The windows of the former military cafeteria looked out onto the Golden Gate Bridge, and with the foghorn as musical accompaniment the commenters pleaded for their preferred Presidio project.

“Relatively speaking, the Lucas building is unrelated to the site,” former Presidio Trustee Amy Meyer said at the microphone, addressing the current board and the audience. The crowd thumped and cheered as she spoke.

Danya Sherman, who works in community engagement at Friends of the Highline in New York City, said the PX was like a sister-project with that train-track-turned-museum, with many of the same local benefits.

“Our plans were opposed by the mayor at the time, including much of the business community and others,” she said. “But after a tidal wave of community support, the High Line now is one of the top three most visited sites in New York. And its economic impact is estimated to be over $2 billion.”

“How do we get complete engagement?” asked Charles Jennings, questioning the Lucas proposal’s ability to do so. “Not just next door to the Presidio, but in the entire city?”

Ray Holland of the Planning Association of the Richmond said a coalition of neighborhood groups also thought the PX was the right way to go.

“They’re going to be some very tough [decisions] because all three of them are very solid proposals,” he said. “It’s our feeling that only one of them actually meets all of the criteria in your solicitations for those proposals, and that’s the Presidio Exchange.”

Becky Evans, local chair of the Sierra Club, lampooned the Lucas plan for not tying into the local natural area. Choosing the PX, she said would let the Trust “leave a legacy of something with monumental status.”

Over 30 speakers touted the benefits of the PX, but there were just a handful of Lucas supporters in tow that night, most of them his employees. Only two supporters for the sustainability institute spoke. Letters flew into the Trust as well, posted for the public to see.

As a general rule, parks and surrounding neighborhood groups sent letters of support for the PX, and tech groups and monied interests (like the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce) wrote in favor of the Lucas Cultural Arts Center.

At the end of the night, Presidio Trust President Bechtle told the Guardian that there were so many good reasons for each of the proposals she was flummoxed. She mimed her head bursting, hands flying outward.

As this issue goes to print, she and the board planned to meet privately to discuss interviews they conducted with project heads over the past two weeks. Perry, the Lucas project spokesperson, said Lucas made his case for over an hour to the board.

“This was about answering some of the individual board members’questions,” he said. Of the critique of not fitting with the natural setting like the PX, “I think it’s safe to say there’s not much in the Presidio now that was there in the beginning — including the eucalyptus trees.”

But other questions might provide a clue as to who’ll win the contract.

The Trust asked about compromise in the construction by scaling back the building to make it fit more harmoniously into the surrounding area. “Was there room for give and take in compromise?” Perry said Lucas was asked. “The answer was yes.”

Does that mean it’s in the bag?

With the serenity of a Jedi, Perry answered simply: “I can’t say.”

Throughout, all admitted the decision is difficult. Should the site be used as a beautiful backdrop for one man’s art collection to be enjoyed by all, or an inclusive science museum dedicated to the history and natural setting of the Presidio?

In just a few weeks we may see what the Presidio Trust’s vision is for the northwest corner of San Francisco.

Undocumented and unafraid

Michael Redmond

November 12, 2013

rebecca@sfbg.com

Business as usual means buses depart from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in downtown San Francisco every weekday, ferrying deportees from throughout the region to federal detention centers or the airport. Even in San Francisco, a Sanctuary City where local law enforcement agencies have limited cooperation with ICE authorities, life can be filled with uncertainty for those who lack legal citizenship status.

In recent years, many immigrant activists have taken the step of publicly revealing themselves to be “undocumented,” to sound a call for immigration reform and to push back against the fearful existence that the looming threat of deportation can create.

But the young people who are profiled here have taken things a step further, going so far as to risk arrest by protesting deportations and pushing for immigration reform, all while identifying themselves loud and clear as undocumented.

In the same vein as protesters who marched for civil rights, gay rights, free speech, or in anti-war movements before them, the undocumented youth are putting themselves on the line. Their mantra, chanted at top volume, is “undocumented and unafraid,” highlighting the ever-present possibility that they could face stiff penalties for their actions.

Nationwide, an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants remain in limbo as a push for federal immigration reform, which would create a pathway to citizenship for people in the country illegally, remains stalled in Congress. While community-led campaigns have yielded legislation that creates safeguards against deportation for young people who arrived with their parents as children, bureaucratic nightmares and forced deportations continue unabated.

Nearly everyone we interviewed for this article mentioned their grandparents while sharing their personal stories with the Guardian. While the politics and policy surrounding immigration reform are tremendously complex, the impact the current system has on people’s lives often boils down to problems like not being able to take a flight to visit an ailing grandparent because it would be impossible to return.

“It’s intense,” says Nicole Salgado, an American citizen who lives with her foreign-born husband in Mexico. “Because you know, it’s essentially an issue of trespassing, and so it seems to me like it’s a really harsh penalty for a civil infraction. No harm was done to a person, and that’s the case for the vast majority of people who are in this situation.”

ALEX ALDANA

Alex Aldana is nervous.

He’s stopped making eye contact, which is strange, because Aldana doesn’t normally break eye contact, and isn’t the nervous type. Since 2012, he’s been arrested seven times.

All seven arrests stemmed from acts of civil disobedience, each carried out to protest the same issue: immigration laws that he views as unjust, because they lead to forced deportation.

Aldana, 26, is an undocumented immigrant. He entered the US legally from Guadalajara, Mexico, in February 2003 on a work visa, but when the time on his visa ran out, he was left undocumented. It coincided with the departure of his father, a man Aldanda says deceived his family.

Like many other undocumented immigrants, he has been trying to give a largely misunderstood population a face. Unlike many others, he’s doing so in a way that carries a great deal of risk.

He’s part of the growing contingent of undocumented immigrants who are, as they say, “undocumented and unafraid.” And when they say it, they shout it.

Aldana participated in a sit-in inside Gov. Jerry Brown’s office. He’s faced the Ku Klux Klan at pro-immigration reform rallies in San Bernardino. He’s been a key link in a human roadblock created to halt a deportation bus in San Francisco. He’s been detained by ICE and local police departments. He normally comes across as fearless, but not on this day.

“This is probably the last crazy thing I’ll do,” Aldana says. “I have thought about it, I have planned it.”

Sometime in late November, he and an intrepid band of humanitarian crusaders plan on taking their fight to the southern US border for the first action of its kind.

The details — which they’re keeping intentionally vague — involve a group of activists crossing the San Diego-Tijuana border legally (many are still Mexican citizens, after all), before ferrying previously deported people back over the border into the United States.

Their hope is to create a spectacle to raise awareness, and even mentioning the planned action makes Aldana squirm a bit. He’s hesitant to disclose specific information; the wrong statement could end his journey before it begins, he explains.

And the timing isn’t perfect for community support, he adds. The last act of civil disobedience he engaged in — a human blockade that halted an ICE bus (see “On the line,” Oct. 23) — didn’t garner universal backing within the immigrant activist community.

“[Some] people are really backlashing the immigrant youth movement right now,” says Aldana. “They consider us harmful.”

But on the flip side, Aldana considers that community’s apathy toward deportation harmful. He doesn’t think that any approved immigration reform should even include deportation as an option.

“In the immigrant community, if you mention ‘immigration reform’ — not ‘conscious,’ not ‘comprehensive,’ just ‘immigration reform’ — then you hear, ‘Yeah, I support it,'” he says. “But what kind of immigration reform are we supporting? Are we supporting militarization? Are we supporting massive deportation? Because word by word, that’s what it says right now.”

The immigration reform package now being pushed by President Obama includes beefed up border security, a crackdown on the hiring of undocumented immigrants, and streamlined deportation procedures, along with a path to citizenship.

Aldana’s confidence in his activism belies a background drenched in fear.

“I never learned how to drive because of that fear [of being deported]. I never traveled because of that fear,” he says. “One of the reasons I never went to college was because ICE was in every bus stop, at least where I come from. When you lose fear, you do incredible things. I’ve been to like 30 states now.”

He started on the activism trail when he was still in high school in Coachella, advocating for women’s rights after watching his mother suffer through domestic abuse, but he didn’t start advocating for immigration reform until years later.

“I was very open about my sexuality and my gender identity very early on,” says Aldana, who identifies as queer. Yet he felt more self-conscious about sharing his immigration status. “Ten years after that, even when I was working for a nonprofit [in Southern California], I was really afraid saying I was undocumented, because my family depended on that job.”

More recently, Aldana has struck a balance between activism and bread winning, a lifestyle that will be put to the test in the coming month. He says he isn’t planning on coming back to the US for a little while after the protest at the border, but not for legal reasons. He just wants to have peace of mind for a moment, to be treated like any other American.

“My grandmother is dying, and I’m not gonna wait for any policy to deny what I couldn’t do with my mom’s mom,” says Aldana. “I think that when what makes us human is that vulnerability, that we really need to have those rights.”

He adds, “I really dislike when people say, ‘I’m gonna visit so-and-so because they’re really sick and they’re on the other side of the world.’ To me it’s like, why can’t I do that?” (Reed Nelson)

MAY LIANG

May Liang, a 23-year-old campaign organizer who accompanied her parents to the United States from China as a child, remembers the moment she realized there were other undocumented Asian families in her midst.

She was at a conference on issues surrounding the Asian Pacific Islander community at the University of California Berkeley campus, where she was a student. “Outside of each workshop, there’s this poster. This one said ‘undocumented Asian students.'” It struck a chord as she realized she wasn’t the only one.

It was one of the first meetings of ASPIRE (Asian Students Promoting Immigrant Rights through Education), a small but growing organization where Liang is now the first paid staff member. Her first undertaking was to plan out last month’s ICE bus blockade.

Now, she’s in the middle of preparing for a Thanksgiving Day vigil to be staged with others outside the West County Detention Center in Richmond, where undocumented immigrants are held in federal custody. Many in her community won’t get the chance to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with loved ones, she says, “because their families have been ripped apart by deportation.”

Liang wasn’t always an activist. She didn’t become aware of the barriers her immigration status presented until she became a teenager and started pursuing part-time jobs and a driver’s license, only to discover she lacked a Social Security number.

Not having an ID posed problems, but she’s quick to note that she had it easier than some of her fellow activists. “I walk around, and nobody suspects me because I’m Asian. In the media we see a lot of Latino people,” she explains. Nevertheless, “It was just like hiding a secret. I was trying to pass as something I knew that I wasn’t.”

One day, just as she was gearing up to go to college, her father called a family meeting. Their immigration status had been “pending” ever since they’d arrived on tourist visas and applied for green cards. But he’d just been notified that their applications had been denied.

“As soon as you get denied, you can’t be here,” Liang notes. “And so we were also ordered deported.”

They decided to fight it out in court, and the case dragged on until after she’d entered college.

“My family’s first court date was on the same day as a midterm,” she recalls. “It was really early in the morning, at the immigration court on Montgomery. I was in the waiting room, reading and studying. And then right afterward, I got on the BART and took my anatomy midterm. It felt really surreal.”

In the end, they were able to avert deportation, yet remained undocumented. As a full-time activist, Liang is thinking big. “For me, it’s like we need to change the system of immigration. One of the most important things we need is sort of a cultural shift as to how we treat people.”

Her first priority is to call for an end to deportations as long as federal immigration reform remains pending in Congress.

Liang is big on being inclusive. Laws such as the California DREAM Act, which aids undocumented students, and the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals can help youth like herself. Yet she doesn’t understand that piecemeal approach.

“Why is there a distinction being made, just because we’re younger?” she says. “These narratives were given to us. We did not create them. And it becomes divisive, because it really puts our parents under the bus.”

She’s also critical of the notion that immigration laws should treat people differently based on their nations of origin. “We like to say immigration is a Latino issue,” she says. “But it is also an Asian issue. It’s an American issue, because we are immigrants of America.”

Along those lines, Liang regards the work that she and other undocumented youth are engaged in as being a kind of patriotism, for a country that hasn’t yet accepted them as citizens.

“We actually love this country,” she says, “because it does have this sort of mentality of fighting for your rights, social justice, freedom of speech, and that stuff. In all that has happened in the history of this country, there are so many examples of things having been changed because of the people.” (Rebecca Bowe)

DAVID LEMUS

On July 21, 2008, David Lemus arrived in the United States at the age of 16.

He’d spent the previous two days marooned in the pick-your-poison expanse of desert spanning the southern border of the US.

All told, his El Salvador-to-California journey lasted a month, and he did the final two-day leg of the passage solo, carrying nothing more than a water bottle, tortillas, and beans.

He had no identification, he said, and no other personal items; nothing that could tie him to an existence he was supposed to be leaving behind. The goal was to be invisible, both to Border Patrol and any computers storing records.

He made the trip with his father and two younger brothers, but he’d last seen them in Mexico; the coyote guiding them across the border had informed Lemus and his family that they stood a better chance of making it if they split up. Lemus got in one car, next to a Honduran teenager who was roughly the same age, and his father and brothers got into another one.

He didn’t see his father and brothers again until October 2008. They were detained at the US-Mexico border and were deported back to El Salvador; their second trip took over four months, but they finally made it.

Lemus, his father, and his brothers were trying to reunite with his mother and sister, who had successfully completed the journey earlier that year. But as things went, Lemus was ferried across the border, let out in the desert, and traveled across a desert known for its potentially fatal landscape, all without his family.

It was a remarkable journey — hot, rugged, impossibly arid — made even more remarkable by the fact that Lemus, along with the rest of his family, is among the millions to complete it. Yes, millions.

But now, as a UC Berkeley student and member of the East Bay Immigrant Youth Coalition, Lemus is a key player in the “undocumented and unafraid” wave of activism that is under way in California, and he’s a long way from donning the invisible mask he felt he had to wear while crossing the desert.

“Undocumented and unafraid is probably the only thing owned by the undocumented community, where we can say, ‘This is our thing,'” Lemus said.

Lemus and his peers have been making waves in California since 2011, when an anti-ICE action in San Bernardino made national headlines. He was arrested alongside six other students in the demonstration, which he refers to as “coming out of the shadows.”

It was his first action of civil disobedience, and the rush of activism overwhelmed him. The second time he was arrested for civil disobedience was this past summer, while protesting President Obama and the slow pace of immigration reform.

“The first time was scary, because we didn’t know what was going to happen,” Lemus said. “But I also feel that that is the moment when you really wake up, because you see it for the first time.”

Lemus is a born agitator, someone who can’t sit idly by while an injustice is being committed. His face, almost eternally placid, contorts when he mentions things like the public perception of undocumented immigrants.

“People say that we are not only the shit stirrers, but that we created the shit,” said Lemus. “And that’s not fair. The way I see it is that most immigrants are here because of a lot of actions the US has taken in Latin America; military interventions in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Columbia, Venezuela. You know we don’t even have a currency in El Salvador anymore? We have dollars.”

Lemus doesn’t consider himself a DREAMer, a word used to describe students brought here as children who would receive protection from deportation under the federal DREAM Act, were it signed into law. He was born in El Salvador and remembers it well, in stark contrast to the DREAMers — and doesn’t know if he would even want to become a US citizen should the opportunity present itself, since he says he’s witnessed too much injustice at the institutional level.

What he won’t stop fighting for is what he calls, “not civil rights, but human rights. It would be unfair for us to want civil rights right now, because we need to get human rights first.”

For Lemus, that distinction is about valuing our basic humanity more than our citizenship.

“I don’t think a lot of people realize the amount of risk it takes to come here,” he said. “We leave everything behind in the process, and a lot of times we don’t get it back. We just want a better life.” (RN)

SITI “PUTRI” RAHMAPUTRI

Siti Rahmaputri, who goes by Putri, was 19 when she risked arrest by joining a handful of classmates in disrupting a meeting of the University of California Board of Regents.

A petite, soft-spoken UC Berkeley student, she hardly comes across as an agitator. Yet she joined the July protest to voice anger about the selection of Janet Napolitano, former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, as head of the UC system. For undocumented students like Rahmaputri, Napolitano is synonymous with deportations due to her former post as head of the agency that oversees ICE.

When they got word of Napolitano’s appointment, Rahmaputri and fellow activist Ju Hong joined with some students from UC Irvine and UC San Diego to call attention to the secretary’s role in deportations.

“We started chanting, ‘undocumented unafraid,’ ‘education not deportation,’ ‘no to Napolitano.’ Unfortunately, two of my friends got hurt — they were tackled down by the UC police. And at the end, the four of us stood there and really linked arms. We were screaming and screaming,” she recalls. In a matter of minutes, “everyone left except for us, the media, and the UC police. The UC Regents were just outside the door.”

She was charged with two misdemeanors, placed in handcuffs for several hours, and then released. But the whole time, Rahmaputri said she felt encouraged by supporters from ASPIRE and others.

“I heard people chanting from the outside: Let them go. Let them go. I didn’t want to seem scared, I wanted to seem confident, like here I am, getting arrested, so what?” she says. “I’m just standing for the things that I feel is right.”

Originally from Indonesia, Rahmaputri attended middle school and high school in San Francisco after coming to the United States with her parents at age 11. Not long ago, she and her parents narrowly averted deportation.

“They never really told me exactly that I was undocumented, but they gave me hints,” she says of her upbringing.

A couple years ago, not long after she’d enrolled in Diablo Valley College, her parents were notified — six months late, due to an incorrect address — that their green card applications had been denied.

“I lost a lot of hope. I didn’t really know what to do,” she remembers. “I talked to my counselor and asked, ‘should I keep going in school or should I start working instead to save money to go back to Indonesia?'”

In the end, they were able to defer deportation through letters of support and legal assistance from the Asian Law Caucus, but their immigration status continues to hang in the balance, and the possibility of eventual deportation still looms.

In early October, Napolitano agreed to sit down with Rahmaputri and nine other UC students to discuss policies affecting undocumented university students. The activists urged her to shore up sanctuary protections, by providing campus resources and incorporating better sensitivity training for UC police.

But it was a little awkward, Rahmaputri thought, because Napolitano’s office had made it a lunch meeting.

“She was just there eating her lunch, listening to our stories and our struggles and why we think she should not be here. And here she is, enjoying her meal. It was a weird conversation. She said okay, ‘I will look at it thoroughly. Give me time to look at it.’ So, she’s basically not giving us any answers.”

She and others plan to keep the pressure on by staging rallies whenever Napolitano makes public appearances, and they were planning an action for the Nov. 8 inauguration of the new Berkeley chancellor, Nicholas Dirks.

When her family was fighting deportation, Rahmaputri caught a glimpse of detainees in the ICE facility in downtown San Francisco when she was there to be fingerprinted. She was impacted by the sight of them being led around in shackles.

“It was time for me to reflect, that I have this privilege to be free, to be out here where I can speak my mind, and I am able to go to school and get educated,” she says of that experience. “At the same time, I want to represent others who cannot.” (RB)

Agitating in exile

An American citizen who was born and raised in the United States, Nicole Salgado holds a master’s degree, is a published author, and previously held jobs in the Bay Area as a high school science teacher and urban gardener. While she might seem like an unlikely person to be directly impacted by immigration laws, she’s essentially been living in exile in Queretaro, Mexico, for the past seven years.

She’s there because Margo, Salgado’s husband and the father of their daughter, is prevented from returning to the US from Mexico due to immigration laws.

“It really boils down to some pretty strict technicalities,” Salgado explained in a Skype interview. “There’s really not any way around it. My husband has a permanent bar that lasts 10 years, and we’re in year seven of that. And if there was no reform in the next three years, we would not be able to apply — just apply — for his return until 2016.”

They met in 2001, when she was 23.

“I worked for the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners. I was working on a project down the peninsula, in La Honda, and I met Margo through friends. We got really close really fast, and got engaged within a few months,” she said.

Salgado knew he was undocumented, “but I didn’t know what it entailed.” Simply getting married, it turned out, wasn’t going to put them in the clear.

As long as they remained in the US, Margo’s status was a source of anxiety. He didn’t have a driver’s license, but nevertheless had to drive in order to work.

“I was always really petrified when he would be working more than half an hour away from the house,” Salgado said. “Because I always knew that if there was just one little bit of racial profiling, or something wrong with the taillight or something, then he could get pulled over.”

They closely monitored the progress of proposed laws that could offer protection for undocumented immigrants, and went to immigration rallies. But in the end, they opted for joining his family in Mexico, because they did not want to live in fear.

Salgado co-authored a book with Nathaniel Hoffman, Amor and Exile: True Stories of Love Across America’s Borders, which explores the role that American citizens who are married to undocumented immigrants might play in the larger immigration reform efforts in Congress.

She’s also been organizing online. “We got together and we formed a sort of loosely organized forum of women, like myself who were in exile, or were separated from their spouses in the US,” she said. “We called ourselves Action for Family Unity.”

She acknowledges that adults who knowingly crossed the border illegally might have a harder time winning over the public at large than youth who were brought to the US as children. Yet she still believes the laws that have placed her in this situation are in need of reform.

“My basic premise is, you know, the US is a nation of immigrants, and we depend on immigrants every year as part of our economy and part of our society,” Salgado says. “And as an American citizen, I believe that it’s my right to be able to determine where I want to live, regardless of who my choice of spouse is.” (RB)

Guardians of Fospice

Sasha Cuttler

October 29, 2013

joe@sfbg.com

DEATH ISSUE Like in any hospital, the doctors at the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals shelter deal with the living and the dying on a daily basis. But in these halls, the dying often have no homes and no families — unless they’re lucky enough to leave through the front door.

The SPCA is a unique safe haven for the furred, a pioneering “no-kill” shelter. The distinction doesn’t mean no death, it means the staff actively avoids euthanization of animals that have a chance of being adopted, including those that are already in the process of dying.

The doctors, technicians, and support personnel have a unique challenge: While most pet owners — or pet guardians, the official replacement term San Francisco adopted in 2002 — deal with the death of a beloved pet once or twice in a lifetime, the people here learn to deal with losing the animals they love every week.

The term they use is “compassion fatigue,” and the specialists here have to learn how to manage emotions surrounding death of animals that number in the hundreds every year.

Dr. Kate Kuzminski, the director of shelter medicine at the SF SPCA, gives us a tour. Our first stop is a small checkup room, where two adopted kittens, Liam and Otto, are pacing on a table.

“Here’s your opportunity to see poopy kittens,” their guardian, Judy, says. Though she’s playful, diarrhea can be dangerous for kittens if left unchecked. Diarrhea leads to dehydration, which leads to death.

Kuzminski looks them over, pulling the unhealthily scrawny young cats by the scruff of the neck. They’re a dark, dusky grey, with poofy fur, and about the length of her hand. After just a minute of looking them over, she prescribes a treatment and moves on. The brevity of her visit seems callous at first, until she tells us that she has more than 300 animals clamoring for her attention.

The most vulnerable of the animals under her care are kittens, Kuzminski explains. “We have a great foster program, but without the foster program they would likely die,” she says. It costs thousands of dollars to care for one kitten for a few days.

Two kittens in beginning of life care at the SF SPCA snuggle.

Compartments along one wall hold about three kittens each, many hooked into little IVs that kept them hydrated. The kittens tumble and play with each other as she discusses their likelihood of living. The facility has an extraordinary success rate, she says, but sometimes there’s a limit on what the vets can do.

The kittens mew and meow in the background as she outlines their options.

When an animal is suffering, sometimes the answer is euthanasia. But for those with kidney disease, cancer, or other debilitating conditions, the SPCA’s “Fospice” program is sometimes the answer. Fospice is the combination of two ideas: Foster care, and hospice. It’s end of life care for homeless pets.

Alison Lane is the Fospice coordinator, overseeing 13 or so animals at any one time. “Most of these cats, and sometimes dogs, if they were in any other shelter, they’d be euthanized,” Lane says. “They’re hard to adopt out.”

The foster owners are provided free food and vet care for the animals they nurse into death. Photos of the pets and their owners are on Lane’s door — one cat watches fish float by on an iPad. The pets often last much longer in Fospice than they’re expected to, she says.

“Amore is only three years old but has congenital heart failure. She’s been out for three years now, the doctors were certain she only had three weeks to live,” Lane says. “But we’re not looking to extend their lives necessarily, we just want to make their quality of life better.”

The SFPCA’s hospice found homes for 1,045 cats and kittens and 115 puppies in 2012. But there are only a dozen or so animals in Fospice care. When one dog had to be euthanized just a few weeks ago, the staff held a “last day of life” party for her and the owner.

Laura Mullen, a foster technician, tells us it was healing for her and the staff.

“We had an Amber party, with balloons and flowers and she got hamburgers and all sorts of things. Amber had a good time, a good snack, and had her family around her. It ended on a happy note,” she said.

Mullen needed it more than most because she usually assists Dr. Kuzminski when an animal is euthanized. She says kitten season is often the hardest. Between December and March, they see anywhere between 30-40 kittens a day. Mullen is a 12-year veteran of the SPCA, so when the less experienced techs can’t handle it emotionally, she steps in to assist with euthanasia.

Dr. Kate Kuzminski is Director of Shelter Medicine at the SF SPCA.

First, they separate the animal into a room on its own. It’s very important the other animals don’t see the process, Mullen says. They sedate the animal, and touch its eyelids to make sure they are asleep. Then they administer the euthanizing fluid and watch it take its last breaths and check for a pulse with a stethoscope.

Kuzminski said when they euthanize an animal, they often email the volunteers, techs, and vets who spent the most time with them so they can say goodbye. Before she asks for a tech to help her ease an animal to its final sleep, she asks about how the person is feeling that day.

“I always check in with Lauren, ‘are you okay with doing this today?’ It’s easy to get burnt out,” she said. Kuzminski’s colleagues do the same for her. Though she’s seen a lot of animals through their last days, she says the hardest loss she’s dealt with on the job was a dog named Coco.

When Coco came in, she was already suffering. She couldn’t walk, and couldn’t eat. They amputated her leg. When her esophagus closed, they took turns feeding her intravenously. The small staff grew to love Coco. The team worked with her for six weeks, in shifts. Ultimately, she didn’t make it. When Coco was euthanized, Kuzminski was out of town on business.

“The difficult thing about when Coco died was I wasn’t here for my staff,” she says, her voice fluttering a bit as she speaks. “You really want to win.”

But sometimes, you don’t win. And with the short lifespan, fragility, and sheer number of animals in pet-loving San Francisco, the staff of the SF SPCA sees a lot of death. For Lane, it helps to think of death as a part of life, something she learned here.

“As sad as death is, it’s inevitable. We all try to make the death, the passing of this animal, as easy and as comfortable as we can make it,” she tells us.

When a pet passes, they give a card to the foster owners, but it’s not a condolence card. It’s a thank-you card. “I think I’m much less afraid of (death),” she says. “You get that feeling of, well, we’ve done everything we can, and now we say goodbye. It’s not an awful thing, it’s not terrible. It’s about how you’ve spent your life. “

Why won’t you let me go?

Sasha Cuttler

October 29, 2013

By Brian Smith

Dad was confused.

He was taking a combination of drugs that were keeping him alive and reducing his pain. His morphine dose was quite high.

The fact that he had even made it to 78 years old was amazing considering he survived California’s polio crisis of the 1940s. But now it was coming back. Post-Polio Syndrome weakens muscles that were previously affected by the polio infection. This brilliant man was atrophying both mentally and physically before our eyes. Eventually, he would not be able to breathe. And there was no cure.

“When do we go?” he asked us. “Where are the other attorneys? This is an important deposition.”

He was on a kind of mental auto-pilot, reliving 45 years of familiar work stress — not the way anyone wants to experience his final days.

“There are no more depositions,” my wife explained in soothing tones. “Your job is done. You were one of California’s finest lawyers and you helped build a respected firm in the Central Valley. You should be very proud of your legacy.”

“Why won’t you let me go?” he said with tears welling up in his eyes.

That cut straight to the issue at hand.

For months, father had been telling everyone who would listen that he was “done.” He wanted to die. His quality of life had become so bad (a collection of pills, oxygen machines, and bad cable TV he could no longer understand) that he had nothing left to live for and wanted to die peacefully in his own home, surrounded by loved ones.

But choosing when one dies is not an option in California. The law is quite clear. California Penal Code §401 says: “Every person who deliberately aids, or advises, or encourages another to commit suicide, is guilty of a felony.”

The circle of family taking care of Dad felt overwhelmed.

The visits by Medicare-supported home hospice nurses were welcome. They were heroic in their one clear mission: to reduce suffering. But hospice nurses are not in the business of ethically assisting someone to die. That remains controversial and illegal in California.

The local “death with dignity” group recommended the only method legally allowed in the state: The dying patient simply quits eating or drinking. In a few days, they slip into a coma and never wake up. But isn’t dehydration and starvation really a form of torture? For this to work quickly, not even slivers of ice to cool the mouth are allowed.

There must be a better way.

In Oregon, where a Death with Dignity Act passed in 1994, Dad would have gotten his wish. After confirming his desire to end his life with two witnesses, consults with two doctors, and after a short waiting period and verification that the patient is not depressed, a prescription for a lethal cocktail of drugs becomes legal in Oregon. The dying person can gather family and friends for a dignified ritual that ends with the self-deliverance from this mortal coil.

Sadly, for my dad in California, there would be no easy way out.

His mood turned angry as the weeks passed. He began lashing out at the assembled loved ones for the sin of keeping him alive. We had neither the skills nor the backbone to withstand the kind of misdirected vehemence this skilled litigator could deliver upon his loved ones in those final days.

Eventually, the family broke down and took the angry patriarch to a hospice facility with a staff fully trained in the arts of comforting the afflicted.

We know leaving the farm broke his heart. He had lived there his entire life. His family’s roots on the land go back to the Gold Rush. At the hospice, he died in less than four days.

It didn’t have to be like this. There must be a better way to die.

Why are there no better options for dying Californians?

Where aren’t the Baby Boomers (who are beginning to face this exact issue) demanding a Death with Dignity law?

Why must our elders endure so much suffering at the end of life?

Why won’t we let them go?

Brian Smith lives in Oakland. His family’s farm is in Stockton.

Reclaiming death

Sasha Cuttler

October 29, 2013

news@sfbg.com

DEATH ISSUE Death is the Grim Reaper come to collect his dues, a silent, bewildered specter bound in black, this undeniable truth that we avoid at all costs. But it doesn’t have to be.

Beginning in Northern California, a growing movement has mounted an attack against death as we know it. They call themselves “death midwives.” Part ferry operator for the dying, part guardian of those left behind, these home funeral guides are committed to transforming our experience of death.

“Most people in this country have no exposure to death,” Jerrigrace Lyons, a prominent death midwife based in Sebastopol, tells us. “The references they do have are negative; it’s frightening, it’s ghoulish, it’s a failure. We need something realistic that shows death to be beautiful and graceful, with a lot of compassion and love and honoring involved.”

The most expensive party you never wanted to have, funerals in America have become a multibillion-dollar industry. Between the fees for completing the necessary paperwork, transporting the body, embalming, flowers, headstone, and casket, funerals cost an average of $7,000. (This is excluding the price of a cemetery plot, an 8 by 4-foot piece of real estate that can cost $5,000.) The services only take a few hours.

“Everything happens so fast,” Lyons says. “People need more time.”

Nearly two decades and 350 corpses have taught her that there is nothing more important for a family than having time with the body to grieve. This is just one part of the death process that we have lost touch with.

“Death is such a sacred and holy thing, and we have commercialized it,” Heidi Boucher, a veteran death midwife in Sacramento, tells us. “The funeral industry has made it really mysterious and creepy, so people are afraid of death.”

Americans once took care of their dead in the privacy of their own homes. During the Civil War, embalming became popular as a way to preserve dead bodies. Meanwhile, more people were dying in hospitals, distancing the living from death.

When funeral directors established a monopoly on the legal right to embalm, we were separated even further from death. Today, most people have no idea what to do with a dead body. Even if they did, there are enough laws and restrictions around death to daunt almost anyone grieving over the loss of a loved one.

Paying someone thousands of dollars to deal with it no longer seems unreasonable. But handing our dead over to funeral homes might come at an even greater cost than we realize.

“When a body’s taken away, it’s taken out of the hands of the family,” Lyons explains. “There’s no direct care of the deceased, no personal involvement. There’s no way for the family to feel empowered by knowing that they’ve done everything they could to give their loved one a great send-off.”

TIME TO GRIEVE

Working as an ER and ICU nurse, Robin Russell saw a lot of death, but she was struck by how people feared death. No one wanted to talk about it, as if the word would summon the Angel of Death if said out loud.

Inspired by the open recognition of it with humor and color that she witnessed in Mexico during Dia de los Muertos, Russell began searching for a way to change how people understand death in this country. What she found was Lyons.

“I realized that one of the reasons we are so afraid of death is because it has been removed from us, by the body being taken away, filled with embalming fluids, made-up and dressed-up by strangers, and placed in a casket for a memorial conducted in an unfamiliar place, for an allotted period of time,” Russell says.

So she enrolled in Lyons’ death midwife certification program. As midwives offer care and support during and after births, death midwives give the same attention and guidance during and after deaths — from making sure that the dying are comfortable to counseling them about what is coming and helping them make arrangements.

When death comes, midwives turn their attention to the living, assisting the families and friends in caring for their loved ones at home. This can include helping them bathe and dress the deceased, preserving the bodies in dry ice, and completing all of the necessary paperwork to have a legal home funeral. With the aid of a death midwife, families can keep their dead at home with them for up to three days.

When Boucher first started working with the dying 30 years ago, she was one of few death midwives. But Americans have grown more environmentally and economically conscious in recent years, making home funerals increasingly appealing.

Death midwives offer funeral directors’ expertise at a fraction of the cost, sometimes for free. They advocate forgoing caskets in favor of cheaper, greener options like cardboard boxes or even just a shroud.

Expensive frills like elaborate flower arrangements and guest books are done away with, along with toxic ones like embalming. The movement is still very small — Boucher estimates that there are 100 death midwives in the US — but practitioners are optimistic about its future.

“Many people don’t know about this, but 99 percent of the ones I talk to who do are totally into it,” Boucher claims. “We just need to educate people. That’s the only way that anything’s going to change in this country in regards to how we perceive death.”

Lyons has taught 400 people and had 150 graduates from around the world since she started her death midwife certification program in 2000. In coming years, she foresees the home funeral movement growing as much as the birth midwife movement did in the ’60s.

“When the person’s kept at home for several days, it normalizes death a lot,” Lyons states. “The family is there, making everything beautiful and natural. There’s the comfort of the home, the privacy. And it isn’t just for the family. It’s also for the person in transition.”

PROCESSING DEATH

When Carol Singler had a home funeral for her father in 2012, she swore she could feel his spirit there with them. Lyons had made things easier for Singler in every way that she could, guiding her through the process and even driving her downtown to drop off the necessary paperwork. Lyons recommended a cardboard box that people could decorate instead of a casket.

“When somebody dies, it feels like if you could give them something of your heart, then you would know everything was at peace. This gave us the opportunity to do that,” Singler remembers. “Decorating the box with paint and collages, putting all of our love into it for my dad, we had tremendous emotional processing. We talked a lot about death and dying. By the time we finished, my nephew, who had taken the death really hard, was saying to me, ‘I never knew it could be like this. I don’t feel afraid of death anymore. I want to die like this.’ If my father had just been whisked away, that would have been the end of it. Nothing would have happened to really heal our hearts.”

Singler’s husband is dying of lung cancer. The doctors predict that he has a month and a half to live. She wants him have a home funeral assisted by Lyons too, so that their grandchildren can have the same opportunity to process their grandfather’s death.

Kim Gamboa’s teenage son Kyle committed suicide five months ago by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Another mother put her in contact with Boucher, and, within hours of Kyle’s death, she was at the Gamboas’ house, explaining and arranging things.

Boucher was prepared to answer the usual concerns about legality and decaying. Gamboa attended a home funeral a decade ago. At the time, she wondered how the family could stand having a dead body in the house. Once it was her own son’s funeral, however, she had no apprehensions. “When it is actually your loved one, you have such great comfort in having them home with you,” Gamboa explains. “I had wanted to do everything for him, for his soul, and then it turned out to be everything for us, and the community, to help us say goodbye.”

For three days, Gamboa and her husband kept their house open to everyone who wanted to visit Kyle. They placed his body in an open casket in their living room, surrounded by flowers and candles. Kyle’s many team jerseys hung on the walls and the pictures and letters his visitors brought crowded the fireplace mantel.

“I do not know how I could have dealt with this or the world without having all of that time to talk to him, to kiss him, to touch him,” Gamboa reflects. “Bringing everyone over provided incredible support and strength, and a sense of closure. We could all grieve and share the happy times that we had with Kyle. It gave us three more days with our son to say goodbye. I can’t even describe how much that helped.”

Among the archived

Sasha Cuttler

October 29, 2013

marke@sfbg.com

DEATH ISSUE The first one I land on, incredibly, is Paul Lynde. The lisping, bescarved Hollywood Squares comedian didn’t die of AIDS (heart attack, supposedly). But it was 1982, and rumors on the gay underground flew. Also, everybody was panicking. The obituaries editor at the Bay Area Reporter evidently thought a little cheering up was in order. So under the heading “Gay Favorite Paul Lynde Dies,” several of his signature risque quips are listed. Q: What’s the largest use of leather in this country? A: Party favors. Q: Is there any state in the Union where flogging is still used as a punishment? A: Oh God, I hope so!

A good laugh at a bad joke seems an inappropriate way to dive into the B.A.R. and the GLBT Historical Society’s great Online Searchable Obituary Database (obit.glbthistory.org). The database, launched on World AIDS Day, December 1 in 2009, by valiant volunteer Tom Burtch, archives scans of every obituary that’s appeared in the gay-serving newspaper roughly since 1980, which means the crux of the AIDS years. But if you hit the “view random obituary” button enough times — the faces, names, dates, stories, details, tributes touching or angry or awkward or all three whizzing past — you get a glimpse of the horrible cosmic joke that was AIDS, and the vibrant, heroic riposte that was the power of the local community in the face of almost 20,000 deaths. (The database contains thousands of obituaries. Don’t read them all at once.)

In those early years of the epidemic — I miraculously survived them — obituaries were the gay news. Outside of intimate friendships or gossipy bar-talk, there was no other way to learn the actual, true-life stories of other gay people: no shrugged-at gay storylines on reality TV or coming out applause on talk shows and gossip sites, no oversharing on Facebook, no breathless same-sex wedding announcements in the Times detailing the power-brides’ family lineage and corporate achievement. Back then we could barely shoehorn a drag queen into a sitcom.

It was often only in the brief paragraphs (and between the lines) marking a death that you learned life-defining, deeply human personal details about people around you, like you: this one trained as a classical oboist in Tallahassee, that one came from a long line of car mechanics, this one had three children in Hayward, that one broke up with his lover of 24 years right before he passed. Whose family stuck with them as they withered away. Who just ended it themselves. What medications may not be working anymore. What new disease to be afraid you would contract, too. Who might not have had any friends left to write more than the shortest sentence about their life.

Even though the obits archive also includes people who didn’t die of AIDS, it’s a glowing repository of the San Francisco gay-and-friends community’s stories, encompassing an age range from 19 to 95, from all walks of life. And, oh, what stories! Doris “Dori” Jennings, in her signature oversized glasses, ran Club Dori, the longest-running gay bar on Presidio, and dressed as a nurse every New Year’s Day to “help mend hangovers and break resolutions.” “A rave-head to the end,” Ralph McGee “was wildly gyrating, shiny black with sweat, at Come-Unity days before he died.” Albert Lee Little was survived by “master Bill, daddies Scott and Cliff, wife Starrly, sons Cale and Michael, and daughters Griffin and Sabine.”

Jay Freezer invented poppers. Jerry Jacks started the first gay and lesbian science fiction fan club, the Urania Society. Colin David Groom was Sister Unity-Harmony of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Jack Caster, who managed the AIDS Quilt tour, “loved opera and couldn’t carry a tune.” George “Gigi” Hanson “blew that one-horse town” of Idaho Falls. “Big Mama” McGowan has “taken his place at God’s right hand.” Adrien Keel died just before the 49ers game, wishing they would win — and they did.

Back when you could move here with only a backpack and a cute smile and make a new life for yourself, however short, the city was full of such characters. Of course it still is, if you look. And despite the waning of AIDS (it’s still with us!) I think many gay men still approach each others’ death with the same voracious curiosity about the details of their lives. The minute we hear from a friend of a friend’s feed about someone dying — especially in this time of skyrocketing LGBT suicide rates — we race to their Facebook page to glean what details we can. And if that person’s wall is set to public, we watch a dizzying, digital monument erected before our very eyes by a mish-mash of people from the deceased’s various stages of life. In the end, though, those monuments always look so similar, bristling islands of anguished and loving posts floating forever in cyberspace — just as final emails from loved ones linger like talking ghosts in our saved folders.

“What if there’d been Facebook during AIDS?” I’ve often wondered. Tom Burtch has said that he hopes his monumental project grows to become more interactive, where friends could upload photos and memories, “like a Facebook page for each person.”

But then, in the archive, you might hit upon an obituary written by the deceased himself, that tells you all you really need to know. Donald Boyd, born 1956, died 2006 of AIDS-related cancer: “This picture was taken about 10 years ago, when I was at my happiest, in the summer, in the sun, naked, by the water, with very good friends. I had a lot of good in my life, but I also had my share of bad. I look forward to eternal peace or even better, a reunion with lost friends and family.”

Maybe, in the end, the best stories are the ones we tell about ourselves.

Let’s talk about death

Sasha Cuttler

October 29, 2013

steve@sfbg.com

DEATH ISSUE Death comes for all of us, sometimes with advanced warning, other times suddenly.

Loved ones get a chance to say goodbye in fewer than half of all deaths, so I was fortunate to see my 92-year-old Grandma Elinor Bonin in the week between her massive heart attack and her passing on Oct. 7. And I was doubly lucky to catch her while she was still fairly stable and lucid, before she went downhill, wracked by pain, fighting for each breath, and wishing for the relief of death.

Her health had been deteriorating for years and she was ready to die, as she told me in her room at Sierra Vista Hospital in San Luis Obispo, the same hospital where my daughter Breanna and I were each born.

Grandma was already suffering from pneumonia and congestive heart failure when she had a massive heart attack in the early morning hours of Oct. 1. The prognosis wasn’t good, so she worked with my mom and others to craft an exit plan: creating an advanced care directive with do-not-resuscitate order, setting up home hospice care paid for by Medicare, and going home to die.

“I’m ready,” she told me — sweetly if wearily, with a resolute resignation in her voice — as we waited for the ambulance that would take her home from the hospital. “I just don’t want to live in agony anymore.”

We all want to believe that we’ll show that kind of grace, clarity, and courage as we greet death. Society is beginning to wake up to the realization that extraordinary efforts to prolong life as long as possible can be as inhumane as they are costly, finally opening up a long-overdue conversation about death.

As we explore in this issue, the Bay Area is the epicenter for evolving attitudes towards the end of life, from the death midwives movement and home funerals to the complex discussions and confrontations of taboos now being triggered by the Baby Boomers facing death, both their parents’ and their own.

“The reality now is we’re kickstarting the conversation about death. We’re at the very beginning of this,” says San Franciscan Suzette Sherman, who just launched www.sevenponds.com, an information clearinghouse designed to elevate the end of life experience. “Death is a wonderful part of life, it’s a profound moment.”

———-

We honor and celebrate death in San Francisco more than they do in most American cities. The AIDS crisis forced San Franciscans to grapple with death in once unimaginable ways. We continue to pioneer comforting passages with programs such as Hospice by the Bay and the Zen Hospice Project.

Our iconic Golden Gate Bridge has the dubious distinction of being the site of more suicides than any bridge in the world, with more than 1,200 people choosing to end their lives there, including 10 in August alone — a sad statistic considered local officials approved a suicide barrier in 2008, but they still have yet to find funding to build it.

Death Café salons that started in Europe have begun to catch on here, and from Latin America we borrowed and popularized Day of the Dead, which on Nov. 2 will fill the streets of the Mission District with thousands of people and Garfield Park with creative shrines to the dead.

“The way that we used to talk about death in the United States was as a sudden event. Now, it’s an anticipated event,” Death Café facilitator Shelly Adler told a small crowd that had assembled on Oct. 23 in the Great Room of the Zen Hospice Center. “The dying process is now thought of, not as something you can prevent, but as something you have a little control over.”

That’s what my grandmother had: a little control over her death, but not a lot. She was able to choose the place of her death, but not its time or manner, like she might have been able to do in Oregon or other places that allow the terminally ill to gather loved ones together and self-administer a lethal final cocktail.

I was able to get some final quality time with this amazing woman before she passed, watching her light up at the memory of teaching me to ride a bike, laughing at the distant thought of running alongside her wobbly five-year-old grandson. And then she laughed again when I said that I still ride my bike everywhere I go, and that I even brought it down with me in the car I borrowed from my girlfriend because I don’t own an automobile anymore.

It was the last laugh she had, my mom told me later. The next day, propped up in a rental hospital bed in her living room, was when she really began the slow, arduous descent into death. The pain and morphine sapped her spirit and fluid steadily filled her lungs, slowly drowning out the last of her life.

But longevity runs in my family, and Grandma could have hung on for days or weeks like that. Her husband, my 97-year-old Grandpa Bonin, had suffered a similarly massive heart seven years earlier, also looking for awhile like his time had come, but he fought his way back and was healthy and strong as he sat by her bedside. You just never know.

So, with pressing deadlines at work and lots of other extended family members flying in to say their goodbyes to Grandma, I said mine on Thursday evening, Sept. 26.

Four days later, I got the call from my mom, a voicemail waiting for me as I returned from yoga class. I was struck by the fact that Grandma died almost at the precise moment that I was finishing my shavasana, coming out of my corpse pose as my grandmother was permanently going into hers. It’s left to the living to ponder confluences like that and to search for meaning within the mysterious expanse of death.

That’s been the central preoccupation of religions for centuries, offering assurances to the flock that we needn’t fear death, that it’s a natural part of life, a view that has been reinforced by modern secular society as well, from atheists to ecologists.

So let’s confront death, bring it out of the hospitals and mortuaries and into the open. Let’s have the long-overdue societal conversations about it that we need to have. Let’s talk about death.

Janina Glasov contributed to this report.

Not for sale

Michael Redmond

September 3, 2013

news@sfbg.com

From the Chevron refinery explosion to deepening pain of the housing crisis, the city of Richmond has endured a lot.

Walk through Richmond’s Iron Triangle neighborhood and the signs of economic turmoil are everywhere. Homes there have been foreclosed or abandoned for years. Some windows are boarded up, others shattered. In lieu of decorations, signs bearing “DO NOT ENTER” warnings are posted on every other door. Bedding peeks out from beneath one of the abandoned homes.

Despite the neighborhood’s struggle, life goes on.

Families still live here. Just around the corner from the worst of the crumbling houses children ran after an ice cream truck, whose music could be heard blocks away. The ice cream man, Ank Talwar, said that the crumbling neighborhood had seen progress.

“It’s better than before,” he told the Guardian. Speaking through a metal barricade in his window, he said five years ago the neighborhood was nearly uninhabitable due to crime.

It’s that tenuous progress that Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin points to when justifying Richmond’s controversial plan to use eminent domain to seize over 600 underwater mortgages, which would allow families to make payments to the city instead of the banks.

The most important aspect of this plan, she says, is that those families get to stay in their homes.

DESPERATE TIMES

When Richmond’s plan to use eminent domain to seize mortgages was first unveiled, it triggered a national debate. It’s a legal tactic typically used by governments to seize land needed for public use — parks, freeways, or other major infrastructure projects.

The seizure plan’s opponents say that this is a twisted use of eminent domain and a government overreach meant to siphon money rather than benefit the public good. But however one views the city’s solution, nobody can argue that the underwater mortgages haven’t caused trouble for Richmond.

In a legal declaration, City Manager William Lindsay detailed the lingering pain in the wake of the housing crisis.

“According to the city’s research, Richmond has one of the worst situations in the country, with approximately 51 percent of homeowners underwater on mortgage debt,” he wrote. In the past three years, Richmond has been slammed by more than 2,000 foreclosures.

Like a spreading infection, the disease of debt doesn’t just affect homeowners.

There are hundreds of vacant homes in Richmond, Lindsay wrote, attracting rats, criminals, and dumping from neighbors. One of the abandoned properties the Guardian visited had a sea of garbage that filled the entire yard: mattresses, broken televisions, baby seats, and other abandoned items.

Property values took a hit too, which Lindsay wrote had a “catastrophic impact” on Richmond’s tax base, declining from $48 million in 2007 to $41 million in 2012, a more than 14 percent decrease. Lowered tax revenue forced Richmond to cut its city staff by about 200 workers.

Families were losing their homes, neighbors were living in wrecked neighborhoods, and the city hemorrhaged money. To put it bluntly, Richmond was desperate.

That’s where Mortgage Resolution Partners came in.

MRP is the brainchild of John Vlahoplus and Robert Hockett, two Rhodes Scholars who sought a way to rescue the economy from a growing problem: Busted mortgages were reducing the nation’s spending. More than 11 million homes are underwater throughout the United States, according to data from mortgage metric site CoreLogic.

That these mortgage loan investments were locked up in cities and held by big banks that Washington had recently bailed out made national action on the problem less likely, which led Vlahoplus to a novel solution.

“I thought, how would you fix this? Buy them,” he said. “How would you buy them? Eminent domain. Find someone with the incentive to do the economically rational thing, and that’s what it was.” This way, no national rescue would be needed and the solutions would come from the cities themselves.

The mechanics of the plan are anything but simple. Richmond offers anywhere from $180 to $150,000 to buy a bank loan that’s worth about $300,000 (but sometimes more). The homes themselves are usually worth $200,000 or so, hence the term “underwater,” as the borrowers usually owe much more than the homes are worth.

Richmond then offers the homeowner a new loan with lower, livable monthly payments, and MRP makes $4,500 in the transaction.

The sticking point is when the banks refuse to sell the loan to Richmond. That’s when the city invokes eminent domain, seizing the loan whether the banks want it to or not. Hence the controversy.

This move has already been challenged in court. Wells Fargo, on behalf of investors like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, filed a lawsuit in August to stop Richmond’s plan.

The suit paints a picture of a false Robin Hood, arguing that the plan pulls money from the banks’ and investors’ pockets, and funnels it directly into Richmond’s coffers. Wells Fargo alleges that McLaughlin’s strategy is an “unconstitutional scheme,” a “profit-driven strategy,” and would cause “substantial economic harm in Richmond and beyond.”

But at this point, it may be the only card Richmond has left in its hand. And the stakes, McLaughlin said, are high.

“We’ve seen the situation get worse and worse,” she said. “Having boarded up homes is in itself a blight, and often things go along with that like crime. People utilize these homes for drug activity and such. It’s a burden on the city, a burden on the community. People are dealing with the devastation of their neighborhoods going downhill.”

Though all of Richmond is affected when homes lose their value, those hardest hit by the housing crisis are the borrowers themselves.

UNDERWATER

Juan Sandoval is 45 years old, a father and a husband. After entering the U.S. from Mexico when he was 18, he built a life here. His single story home in the Belling Woods neighborhood is modest but welcoming, adorned with photographs of his wife and children. There are hints of the family’s Catholic faith — the Virgin Mary peers down from a shelf behind a VHS copy of Disney’s Dumbo.

Sandoval bought the house for $290,000 on a non-fixed rate a few years before the housing crisis. His home was last valued at $185,000, and now he owes the banks more than $450,000 on the mortgage. Sandoval is a prime candidate for McLaughlin’s planned eminent domain seizure — without it, he’ll soon lose his home, he said.

Only now returning to work after recovering from a back injury in his construction job, he’s slowly built up debt, and couldn’t afford to fix his house’s furnace. His guilt grew as his family shivered through the cold at night.

The debt started to give him nightmares.

“I would wake up at night and be ‘no that’s not happening,’ but it was happening,” he said.

Above is a 20 minute audio interview with Sandoval, which you can download or stream.

Things got better four years ago when his daughter, Celeste, was born.

“She came during a very bad time for us. I think she came for a reason, she held the family together,” he said. “We were having so many problems.”

He pays $1,500 a month toward his mortgage now, but that will soon balloon to $3,000.

After his work injuries as a subcontractor, “money was not coming in,” he said. The cost of his surgeries made it hard to make his mortgage payments, and so he asked for help. “I requested help from my bank, Central Mortgage this year.” But by a stroke of luck, “they lost the paperwork.”

After months of haranguing, the bank offered him a short sale.

But this is a home he wanted to keep for his family to live in, he said. As he looked over at a small pile of his daughter’s toys, a pink stuffed rabbit and a toy car, he contemplated his family’s future.

“It was too late for me, when I found out and figured out I made a mistake. The mistake I made was to trust the realtor with my family,” he said. But now, he thinks his family may have a chance to stay. “If they do that program I will keep my house, my payment will be less, I will have the money to do all the repairs I need.”

THE BIGGER PICTURE

It’s not just about helping out the 624 homeowners Richmond seeks to assist with their underwater mortgages, Vlahoplus said.

“The critical thing is this is not just about the borrower,” he explained. “Did someone do something morally correct and get (tricked) by some scummy mortgage broker? Or did someone sign something illegally? This is irrelevant.”

Instead, it’s really about the surrounding homes, the neighbors and the local economy, he said. And there is data to back this up.

A study by researchers from Princeton University and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, titled Household Balance Sheets, Consumption, and the Economic Slump, identified a direct tie between lower property values and shrinking credit rates. The study showed that those with lower property value spend less on automobiles, which economists recognize as a significant part of the nation’s economic contraction.

Homeowners in cities with fewer than 15 percent of mortgages underwater cut back a bit, the study found, but in zip codes where more than 50 percent of homeowners were underwater, consumers cut back their spending by five times as much.

Meanwhile, Richmond is slowly becoming immersed in underwater mortgages and foreclosures. In Sandoval’s neighborhood, seven other houses within view of his doorstep had been foreclosed in the past year alone.

One homeowner we spoke with, Morris LeGrand, 56, thinks it’s unfair that his underwater mortgage is dragging down the values of his neighbor’s homes, and that’s why he supports the eminent domain plan.

“All along when you talk to everyone on the street, everyone is struggling. Who wouldn’t want to see an improvement in their neighborhood?” he said.

And with modern mortgage structures, which have investors in small slices from all over the country, it can be complex to negotiate for the loans without the eminent domain puzzle piece. Many of the loans are part of private label securities, sold by bond trustees like Wells Fargo to private investors.

It’s akin to a form of high stakes gambling, Vlahoplus said, and everyone wants a piece.

Wells Fargo’s lawsuit shows more than 230 investors have claims to the homes Richmond intends to help. The list spans eight pages of the complaint, showing the far-reaching list of financial partners with skin in the game — assets they’ll protect at any cost.

In addition to Wells Fargo filing suit against Richmond, a cluster of Wall Street lobbyists clad in gray suits, acting on behalf of the investors whom Wells Fargo represents, flew into the economically depressed city for a face-to-face with McLaughlin.

“We met with them here at City Hall,” McLaughlin recounted. “They utilized their bullying tactics and put out threats to get us to back off. When we questioned them on an alternative solution to the problem (of foreclosures), they had none.”

They threatened to redline the city, McLaughlin said, a practice that basically means no investments or loans would be made in the city of Richmond.

And now it seems they’ve followed through with their threat.

Last week Wall Street rebuffed the refinancing of Richmond’s municipal bonds despite their A- rating, an unusual move that led the city to pull the bonds from the market.

The bonds are used by cities to fund public works, and lack of bond financing could mean a tough road ahead on new schools and infrastructure projects.

Standard and Poor’s released a report on eminent domain in Richmond from last week saying the tactic “may present inconsistencies in solving the root cause of the housing problem in the US, create unintended consequences for both borrowers and investors, and inadvertently limit mortgage lending activity.”

McLaughlin said she would fight Wells Fargo and Wall Street tooth and nail.

Channeling her activist past, the Green Party mayor led a rally outside Wells Fargo’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco on Aug. 15, flanked by 50 Richmond protesters bearing picket signs. After asking to speak with someone from Wells Fargo, she was met with locked doors and a runaround from a company representative.

High drama in banking with big showdown @WellsFargo HQ and #Richmond mayor, who was locked out http://t.co/815nRK7HR4 pic.twitter.com/qkhgPQcEEm

— Mark Calvey (@SFBizMarkCalvey) August 15, 2013

Vlahoplus said the lawsuits and threats were merely a signal that the bankers were scared, and in his estimation, what they fear is diffuse control — because it’s difficult for national companies to combat policy changes at the local level.

“(Financial industries) can control things in the White House with contributions to the right committee chair,” he said. If Washington or even state level government tried to swoop in and buy up mortgages, it’d be easier to stop. But if every local municipality suddenly had the power to do this, it would be tough to combat each one.

“It’s like Whac-a-Mole,” he said.

But Wall Street may soon have help. Richmond Councilmember Nathaniel Bates said he will introduce a proposal to withdraw the offers on the underwater mortgages in a council meeting Sept. 10. When it was revealed that a small number of the mortgages to be seized were from million dollar homes, he called the effort an “embarrassment,” and told the Guardian he could understand why investors would reject the city’s bonds.

“I don’t see this as redlining, (Richmond) is a risky investment when you have eminent domain hanging over people’s heads,” he said. “I tell you a lot of people are unhappy, and it’s going to be a packed house at the council meeting on the tenth.”

But despite the risks, other municipalities are already thinking of joining in. Wells Fargo’s lawsuit names the California cities of El Monte, La Puente, San Joaquin and Orange Cove as well as Newark, Seattle, and North Las Vegas — because all are considering joining MRP and using eminent domain as a tool to aid homeowners.

Wells Fargo’s lawsuit characterizes the plan as a “wealth transfer” that would “advance local concerns at the expense of an entire sector of interstate commerce that is critical to the health of the national economy.”

But in the view of homeowners like Sandoval and progressive-minded mayors like McLaughlin, the national economy has already hit rock bottom, and blame is on the banks.

“They caused the problem. They’ve been bailed out and haven’t been regulated, and haven’t been forced to do the right thing by the people they’ve impacted,” McLaughlin said. “I’m willing to go as high as the Supreme Court to settle this on behalf of our community.”

Brave new world

Michael Redmond

August 20, 2013

emilysavage@sfbg.com

MUSIC You’re watching a band live at the Rickshaw Stop, or Café Du Nord, or the Warfield, and you’re maybe a little tipsy, but it sounds like, really, really good right now. You feel inspired, mesmerized even, and looking around, you can tell your friends are feeling it too — sonic elation. It’s a rare moment in this town, that emotional connection between you and the artist, with so many other possible distractions. Speaking of which, you pull out your smartphone, tap, and swipe to automatically tip the band $5 extra. You get the fuzzy do-gooder feeling. You feel bold and connected, and perhaps still a bit drunk. Did she just wink at me? The future is now.

“Probably about a year ago we realized we made purchasing things very easy, which at the time was just admission into shows,” says WillCall co-founder and CEO Donnie Dinch, clad in a black WillCall T-shirt and grasping a glass of whiskey from an oversized wood booth in the Mission’s Dear Mom, which is around the corner from the WillCall office.

“The entire concert experience doesn’t end with getting in. There’s a lot of friction and noise; if you already paid to get in, you shouldn’t have to schlep around more cards.”

Hey there, concert industry 2.0 (or rather, 2k13). WillCall, and other concert convenience apps such as Thrillcall, Timbre, Bandsintown, and Songkick, have been vying to alleviate and embolden your smartphone ticketing experience for just a few years now.

In fact, WillCall and Thrillcall, both local San Francisco-based start-ups, each launched their apps in February of 2012. And in the past year and a half, they’ve independently seen raised profiles, their own buzzy pop-up shows, and likely more than a few confused consumer comparisons.

And re-upped versions of both, launching this summer and fall, could determine the future of these companies in differentiating their space.

At Dear Mom, Dinch is speaking of WillCall’s newest push to include a few more concert options within the app beyond tickets, or an “in-show experience,” which means not only purchasing tickets to a few select shows, but also swiping the app to buy merch, tip the band on stage, or create a custom festival package.

Thrillcall, meanwhile, is set to release its own version 2.0 in October. Along with a sleeker look (Thrillcall has been criticized for its less-than-flashy interface), there will be a slightly different system for the app, which now displays full concert listings for the night, but only offers deals and direct ticket purchases to a small handful of shows.

“The next version of the app is going to take all of the historical data we have, all of the input you want to give us, and it’s going to start manicuring that listing,” says Matthew Tomaszewicz, co-founder and head of product marketing and business development at Thrillcall. He’s a friendly and inquisitive Kevin Bacon-type sitting in one of the metal chairs in the floor-to-ceiling glass-walled lobby of the SOMA building where Thrillcall currently sets up shop on the 11th floor.

“We’re not at recommendations just yet, because there’s an interstitial step where we’re going to start putting out some stuff we think you’ll like, but the only way we can build recommendations is if people interact with it,” he says cautiously. “I’m a little careful about calling it recommendations because I don’t want to give that expectation of ‘oh, you said I’d like this.’ It’s more, OK, well, we culled a little bit here with some filters and lists of things you might like, and how will people respond?”

TIPPING THE SCALE

WillCall’s newest offerings seem the techy approach to the concert industry. Why can’t we just go to DIY house shows, get sweaty, meet the bands, buy a shirt off the table, and reminisce about it all in person, anymore? That still happens, but for a different demographic than would typically use these apps.

The kind of standard, everyperson concert-goer in a major city would likely discover new music on Spotify or Rdio, then buy tickets on a website. So the industry is becoming more tech-oriented anyway.

But concepts like “band-tipping” seem wayward, depending on the show — there’s a reason you usually tip a bartender, valet, or stripper and not the musicians. Remember that cover to get in to the show? The ticket you were sold? Some of that was for the band, and it will get a cut.

Dinch says he sees the new features as “like an extra, a ‘thank you,’ a ‘you deserve this,'” if someone is particularly enjoying a set and wants to give a little more, directly to the artist.

See, bands can no longer make money from albums sales thanks to file-sharing, low-paying online music streaming services, and a whole host of infected music industry problems, so these shows really are their biggest source of income, and a little extra here and there couldn’t hurt. Most bands don’t get $1.2 million in venture capital infusions like start-ups do.

Dinch says the idea came about during a casual staff conversation in the office’s “cozy room,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

The first time they tried it was at a Tanlines pop-up at the Rickshaw Stop with Aaron Axelsen, who runs weekly 18+ dance party Popscene. “We did it at first in a real hacky way…during the show we sent everyone a one-time thing that said like, ‘If you’re having fun, swipe to tip the artist’ and if they didn’t swipe, it was gone forever.” Nearly 50 percent of the crowd tipped $5 each. And it was money that went directly to the artist.

“Right around the time we did that we heard Amanda Palmer’s TED talk,” Dinch says, referring to the alt-rocker’s impassioned plea suggesting artists be directly supported by fans. “And I think people really do underestimate the generosity of the crowd. Or, at the very least, underestimate the guilt the crowd feels for not paying for music properly. But I think if people thought there was an easy way to give money directly to the artist, they would do it a lot more.”

Right now, the buying-merch function of the app is limited. If you buy something using your phone at the show, the item gets shipped directly to your home — that way you can, “still get sloshed and not worry about carrying a shirt or poster around.” Or if you don’t have cash, or don’t want to wait in line, all of these things are removed from the equation. However, can you still claim you “got it at the show,” when you actually ordered it online while at the show? Should that even matter?

“If it’s easy for me to buy some shit, I’m probably going to buy it,” Dinch says. “That sounds weird but if it’s like, three taps and I have a t-shirt…I probably wouldn’t wait in line for a long time, but I’d happily do this in five seconds.”

ORIGIN STORIES

Both WillCall and Thrillcall have those oft-repeated origin stories, as tech companies are expected to push these days.

The seeding of WillCall started while Dinch was living in Seattle a few years back and working on package design while learning “how to get good at making things on the Internet.” He was sitting at his friend and now co-founder Julian Tescher’s kitchen table listening KEXP when the Shout Out Louds came in the studio to play songs live. The band’s Seattle show was that night, and Dinch, a big fan, had no idea. Bring in Julian’s developer brother Patrick, along with an initial Silicon Valley investment of $50,000 from early-stage seed fund and incubator program 500 Start-ups, and ship the whole crew down to SF in 2011.

It since has expanded to seven full-time staffers, including chief communications officer K. Tighe, who is sitting next to Dinch at Dear Mom. The company also initially included well-known local promoter Steve Brodsky, who sadly died of cancer earlier this year. And after WillCall announced its version 2.0 last month, it also announced another round of funding, to the tune of $1.2 million in investments from the likes of Facebook and Spotify investor and fancy wedding-haver Sean Parker, and band manager Coran Capshaw.

Thrillcall, meanwhile, was first a concert listings and ticketing website, which began in 2008. “As the industry changed, and obviously everybody uses some sort of mobile device, but the ability to find that stuff through mobile devices is prehistoric compared to the web. So that’s where we moved the business because that’s where people are going,” Tomaszewicz says. Before that Tomaszewicz helped develop the first surfing app for Surfline.com. Thrillcall’s app launched with a bang at 2012’s Noise Pop festival, a sure in with the local indie pop community.

Both companies claim to be active and deeply connected to the local music communities, and for WillCall a lot of that credibility came from the connection to Brodsky.

Currently, WillCall is in San Francisco and last month launched in New York. Thrillcall is in SF, New York (where Tomaszewicz grew up), LA, and Chicago. Both are hoping to expand to other major national and even international cities within the year.

WHY BOTHER?

This is the million dollar question; why use any concert ticket apps on your phone, instead of going to the venue website or Ticketmaster, Ticketfly, etc. as you’ve been doing since the days of waiting in line at Tower Records?

Well, first of all there’s the ease. Tap the app open then tap to purchase tickets to a (possibly) supercool show in seconds. (Your credit card info is already there, they have your email address, and your friends are alerted to your ticket purchase if you so desire.) It’s fast, simple, and honestly, kind of fun. Though let’s just hope the shows available are bands you want to see.

Herein lies another possible problem, which is that the shows that are chosen, or “curated,” by the fine people at these companies might not be the right option for you, personally. Currently, WillCall lists a few shows through its app, and you have the option of going, but what if you don’t like said bands? At press time, the offerings were Monterey’s First City Festival, Sex Panther at Vessel, Paper Diamonds and Roach Gigz at 1015 Folsom, and Bells Atlas at Brick and Mortar Music Hall, among a few scattered others.

Maybe hop over to Thrillcall. While this app also only offers direct purchase to a handful of shows, many more are listed in a full calendar, and they’ll send you to a third-party ticketer if you click. At press time, Thrillcall’s exclusive is also, interestingly, Bells Altas at Brick and Mortar Music Hall, along with Bootie SF at DNA Lounge, and Rich Medina at New Parish. Perhaps there’s something there worth checking out, maybe not.

Thrillcall also might have a deal on a show, a cheaper price from the day before, although that kind of dynamic pricing happens rarely, Tomaszewicz says. “We did stuff for Live Nation and their Mayhem festival and we interested different fans because each day in the five days leading up to the festival we had a different kind of offer: VIP, or discount, or free parking. It’s another way to market the same show to a different group of people.”

Though as mentioned earlier, Thrillcall will soon be tailor-making your show options, based on the personal preferences you offer to them.

And there’s something that’s specific to these types of apps, regardless of preference: they offer a this-week or right-now idea of what to do at night. As WillCall’s K. Tighe points out, if you buy tickets months in advance — which is the current system for most concert-goers — you have no idea if you’ll feel like going out the night of that show. With these apps, it’s instant pleasure on the night you want.

“I think if you were forced to buy your ticket three months ahead of time with your finger on the trigger of your mouse, hoping the secondary market doesn’t get it before you, your expectations are through the fucking roof. You don’t even know if you want to see a show that day,” Tighe says excitedly. “So the idea that you decided, ‘hey I want to see a show tonight,’ you’re in the mood to have a good time. That’s a more natural approach to going to see live music than planning for months.”

And for venues, it solves the question of what to do with those last 50 or 100 tickets the night before the show, so it can be a win-win situation, if it’s played out right.

THE PROMOTER’S SIDE

“One of the interesting things, being forced to learn about marketing in the Internet age, is that your customers will tell you where they want to be and how they want to purchase and where they want to go to find out about things,” says Robbie Kowal, co-founder of Sunset Promotions (which runs Bay Area parties throughout the year like the annual Sea of Dreams NYE bash, and more frequent Silent Frisco events), and previously did PR for Optivo, a company that was developing technology for dynamic pricing. “As much as I would like people to just open our emails, they insist on making me talk to them on Facebook. So if our customer base, for instance, showed a lot of interest in one of these services, well then we would pursue it further, So far I think they are start-ups.”

“Start-ups” might just be another way of saying they don’t currently make any money, and would rather throw cash — including WillCall’s recent $1.2 mil of VC funding — at building up a user base. In fact, when asked how WillCall plans to make money at all, Dinch responded with this obfuscation, “Whenever you provide these tools that make it easier for people to go to shows, get merch, get drinks at the bar, I think you’ll see that the overall money spent on these things will be higher, you’ll see more revenue through the venue, through the door, that’s the bigger vision. So I think it’s fair for us to take a small percentage of those transactions.”

Adding, “We aren’t currently doing that, eventually we’ll do that. We wanted to figure out something that worked before we took money. But hopefully we’ve managed expectations with everyone that it’s not going to be forever free.”

In its most extreme form, engaging that active database of fans has involved booking, producing, and promoting shows that require fans to purchase the tickets mainly through the app instead of the venue’s box office or website. WillCall has done this at Rickshaw Stop with AraabMuzik and Thrillcall has at Brick and Mortar Music Hall with Thee Oh Sees. It’s a simple way to strong arm a fanbase of a hip act into at least trying your app and exchanging a little bit of information. Anyone without a smartphone (In this city? Ha, I know, right?) is presumably out of luck.

And building a user base can be an end in and of itself: “Remember Going.com?” Kowal asks, “Similar thing. It was an RSVP service, and they were throwing money around at promoters, and all it really was a user grab. Basically getting an entertainment-centric user base and eventually I think they sold the company to AOL. That’s a pretty smart business move.”

In the meantime it’s a deal for the smart (or smart phone-enabled) concert-goer, with tickets through WillCall being service charge-free. Venues — particularly ones specializing in live bands — have the most to gain from partnering with the deal. If you have five to six shows a week throughout the year, giving a portion of your tickets to a third party to promote and sell is a no-brainer. Particularly when it comes at no financial cost.

Currently WillCall is taking no cut out of the tickets they sell. Rickshaw Stop is a frequent listing and host of WillCall events, and Axelsen was very clear about his support of the relationship, saying “I am a big fan of WillCall! Great partners with Popscene and I see instant results each week with their reach and ability to generate an extra buzz around our weekly Popscene shows (and bring out last second bodies, too).”

APP CODA

Selling tickets — especially when they’re limited — isn’t easy. Storytime: In 2004 the Pixies were reuniting for a tour. One of the only shows for hundreds of miles was at UC Davis, and hardcore fans traveled just to buy tickets, camping out in front of the box office. At the same time, the ability to buy tickets online had only recently been introduced and many people rolled out of bed moments before the box office opened to snag tickets from their computer. No tickets were set aside for the physical box office, though, and consequently, when the show sold out almost instantly, most of the hardcore fans with the tents and sleeping bags were out of luck.

Coming out of a culture where people stand in line to buy phones (or in this city — ice cream) but expect ticket-buying to be effortless, the current wave of apps is in danger of emphasizing the worst problems of Ticketmaster or Craigslist, giving preference based mainly on access to technology, which could underscore broader economic issues. Here’s a contemporary paradox: people buying tickets for shows on smartphones to see crusty bands that don’t even have smartphones themselves.

The real key may be in combining the slickness of discovery apps with ticketing systems like Ticketfly or Eventbrite. “With their analytical tools, I can determine who my best and most loyal customers are,” Kowal says. “I think as the ticketing companies get better at what they do, as they begin to emulate the Ticketflys of the world, they may make a lot of these sort of start-up apps irrelevant or just end up snatching up whatever little pieces of technology they have and adding them to the ticketing system.”

But Dinch, at least, says he has no intention of selling his company to a broader ticket vendor. “I want this to be something that’s the next pivot point of how we think about music in everyday life. And maybe that’s audacious and stupid, but I’m fine for now. The bottom line is that I have no desire to sell this company to anybody and I’d rather slowly build it the right way.”

Get fresh

Michael Redmond

July 30, 2013

culture@sfbg.com

TABLEHOPPING Ahhh, the much-maligned San Francisco “summer,” the 62-degree, socked-deeply-in-the-fog days we love to hate on — but secretly cherish when the rest of the country is melting in 98-degree temps with sauna-like levels of humidity. But we are a hardy bunch. We proudly don our scarves with a flourish as we sit on patios drinking pitchers of beer, our stripy sweaters like badges of honor as we attend windy picnics in the park, eating corn on the cob (that was grown somewhere warm, definitely not here) while wearing fingerless gloves.

Since the calendar says it’s summer — even though some days almost require a parka — we have a restaurant summer salute for you: your cheat sheet of new restaurants with patios and sidewalk seating, plus recently opened spots that are just plain hawt, no matter what the temperature is. Oh, and a sneak peek at a couple places opening in time for Indian summer. Sunblock optional.

NEW PATIOS

Due to reopen this week is a revamped Ziryab (528 Divisadero. SF. www.ziryabgrill.com), with a brand-new look, and there will now be both the popular front terrace and a new back patio with greenery. Add in a fresh Mediterranean menu from chef Khalid al Morabet (think vegetable tagine, merguez flatbread), plus a new liquor license with cocktails from Zach Taylor, previously at Hog and Rocks. Dive into drinks like the Ziryab Manhattan, with date-infused Bulleit rye, lapsang souchong tea, and a touch of arak — yeah, it’ll keep you warm.

In the Castro, the owner of Italian hotspot Poesia recently opened Dante’s Table (544 Castro, SF. www.dantestable.com), which has a back patio and garden area fittingly called “Paradiso.” You can swing by for a menu of casual Italian dishes (pasta, Neapolitan pizza), plus summery classics like bruschetta with tomato or burrata and tomatoes. Bonus: full liquor! There’s a happy hour from 5pm–6:30pm, with $7 cocktails, and $5 bites (suppli al telefono, fried and cheesy risotto balls…) that you can enjoy before the fog rolls in.

On the waterfront, Michael Chiarello’s Spanish Coqueta (Pier 5, SF. www.coquetasf.com) has a few outdoor tables where you can watch joggers go by as you swill your gin and tonic and eat jamón iberico (we recommend you do this at lunch for maximum sun). If the wind picks up, there is the Bar5 space that flanks the restaurant, with a communal bar table, high leather chairs, and tiled floors. And it’s full of windows that open and let in fresh air and light, so it’s almost like being outside.

We have mentioned these other new patio-bedecked places in our weekly Tablehopping column, but here’s your reminder: in North Beach, there’s the latest location of Tacolicious (1548 Stockton, SF. www.tacolicious.com), serving tacos and margaritas — available by the pitcher, oh yeah — all day to put you in a Mexico frame of mind as you kick it in your sidewalk seats. Meanwhile, over in the Upper Haight (a.k.a. fog-bank city), there’s Sparrow Bar and Kitchen (1640 Haight, SF. sparrowbarandkitchen.com) with its spacious heated beer garden in the back. Order one of the burgers to pair with the 14 beers on tap. Lastly, the very-soon-to-open (and heated!) back patio at Rustic (3331 24th St., SF. www.rusticsf.com) in the Mission will help you pretend you’re a well-seasoned Italian man, or reaffirm your official status as one, playing on the two bocce ball courts while eating pizza.

HOT-HOT OPENINGS

With a name like Waiheke Island Yacht Club (Pier 29, SF. www.waihekeislandyachtclub.com), you practically assume your drink is going to be a Cape Cod, served by someone in a navy blazer with gold buttons. Far from it. This higher-end, pop-up restaurant in a Pier 29 shed is a New Zealand import, open until the end of the year. It sports an airy and spacious look, with low-slung leather chairs and a gleaming open kitchen. It’s unlike anything in the city. The modern cuisine features New Zealand ingredients, like lamb (of course) and a smashing venison dish. You’ll find inventive cocktails at the bar, such as the Red Snapper, a spin on a Bloody Mary that totally rocks. Or refresh with some beers from Kiwi import MOA.

Also on the waterfront, the Boulette’s Larder team just opened the minimalist and contemporary Bouli Bar (Ferry Building, SF. www.bouletteslarder.com) in the former Culinaire space, with a wood-burning hearth, more than six kinds of pizzas, a variety of meze and salads, and lunch to go. Of course you can expect organic and very carefully sourced ingredients galore, with interesting seasoning and spices. Yup, it’s all so bougie. And in case you’re wondering, Boulette’s is due to reopen in August.

Over in Jackson Square, the business crowd has a new spot to power lunch at Roka Akor (801 Montgomery, SF. www.rokaakor.com), while the after-work scene can take over the downstairs lounge. The focal point of the dining room is the robata grill encircled by a hypertrendy shou-sugi-ban counter made of charred birch wood finished by hand. The menu, by chef Roman Petry, has a wide range of Japanese-inspired dishes, from lobster and abalone miso soup to Wagyu beef and kimchi dumplings, plus nigiri sushi, steaks, and more.

COMING REAL SOON

The Divisadero Corridor, so foodie-hot, and with the August 14th opening of La Urbana (661 Divisadero, SF. www.laurbanasf.com), it’s going to really be en fuego. This stylish restaurant and bar will be giving us a taste of Mexico City, with an eclectic design highlighting so many custom touches — mucho contemporary cantina. The cutting-edge cuisine from chef Benjamin Klein will offer modern takes on traditional regional Mexican dishes; the bar is going to be all about mezcal, and there will even be a Mezcaleria, with over 30 mezcals for sale (soon).

Anyone who is a fan of the elegant Acquerello is getting excited to see what owner Giancarlo Paterlini’s son Gianpaolo is putting together for his new 1760 (1760 Polk, SF. www.1760sf.com) project on Polk and Washington. It’s going to be a chic yet comfortable 80-seat spot (read: no tablecloths), with a rocking wine program (of course), a full bar, and a modern, ingredient-driven menu by chef Adam Tortosa. Stand by for an opening in late summer.

Marcia Gagliardi is the founder of the weekly tablehopper e-column; subscribe for more at www.tablehopper.com. Get her app: Tablehopper’s Top Late-Night Eats. On Twitter: @tablehopper.

Striking Out

Michael Redmond

July 23, 2013

news@sfbg.com

Today marks 1,575 days since concession workers at AT&T Park have had a raise, during which time the San Francisco Giants have been fabulously successful, both on and off the playing field.

The 750 workers represented by UNITE-HERE Local 2 are currently involved in frustrating and fruitless negotiations with their employer, Centerplate, a South Carolina-based food service company contracted by the Giants to sell beer, garlic fries, and other overpriced consumables at games.

The Giants and its front office seem fairly unconcerned about the plight of workers who proudly don the team’s logo and pad its revenues. Not a single concession worker that we interviewed for this article said that they work for Centerplate — each of them said that they work for the Giants.

Since the last contract expired in March 2010, the Giants have won two World Series championships, raised the average ticket price by 20 percent, and have seen the value of the team shoot up by $223 million. The only thing that hasn’t improved are the wages of the concession workers.

Cashiers currently make $16.40 per hour, in-seat runners make $13.40, and some entry-level workers make just $10.45, which is actually less the city’s minimum wage. That’s only legal because those workers were under contract for $10.45 per hour when the wage increased to $10.55 at the beginning of this year. And Centerplate won’t even let Giants workers have a tip jar to augment their substandard wages.

Local 2 reports that revenue from concessions is divided up in a 55-45 split between the team and Centerplate (the Giants PR office disputes this number, but it won’t divulge the actual split). So when a fan spends $17 for a hot dog and 16oz beer, Centerplate and its workers get $7.65 and the Giants get $9.35, all of it pure profit. And the Giants executives even set the concession prices, not Centerplate.

But the team says the plight of these workers isn’t its problem. “We continue to urge both parties to get back to the bargaining table and to have productive discussions so the matter can be resolved as quickly as possible. This dispute is between Centerplate and Local 2, not the Giants,” is the team’s public position on the issue.

The Giants communications office responded with this stance to every question the Guardian asked about the issues involved: What have you done to “urge” Centerplate to settle the contract? Couldn’t the Giants force a settlement if it really wanted to? Why haven’t concessions workers shared in the team’s success and rising revenues? How can you claim to support the community if you can’t even ensure the people who work in your stadium are paid minimum wage?

The Giants had nothing to say about a petition signed by 600 of the workers urging the team and Centerplate to agree to a deal, instituting a company-wide no-comment policy on the standoff with concession workers.

“It would be nice if they would come in and talk—not be a mediator, but to know what we’re asking for and say why they’re not providing it or why they feel they shouldn’t provide certain information,” Billie Feliciano, who has worked as a Giants cashier for more than 30 years, told us. “They could talk to the president of the union on that if they wanted to. You know, we’re not asking you to tell us how you spend your money. We just want to know how much control you have of this situation.”

Feliciano and her fellow workers just want the Giants to be team players.

WHO’S IN CONTROL?

Contrary to what the Giants may say, there is one pressing issue—job security for the workers—that is nearly impossible for the workers and Centerplate to resolve. Every worker interviewed for this story has explicitly said that job security is their most important goal.

Even Centerplate says only the Giants can offer job security to concession workers. If Centerplate goes out of business or loses its contract, the concession workers will likely lose their jobs, which is why they’re advocating for a succesorship clause that would guarantee their employment in that scenario.

When The Guardian inquired with the Giants office about the issue, its spokesperson once again responded, “This is an issue between the workers and Centerplate, not the Giants.”

But with the Giants controlling who runs its concession and how much they charge the fans, is Centerplate just an easy scapegoat for squeezing more profits from workers? Because on the subject of health benefits and wages, the two camps are separated by a wide chasm.

In order to qualify for healthcare, the workers need to work at least 10 games in a month (they’re eligible for health insurance only from June 1 through December 1) to have coverage a month later, which means that the health and well-being of the 750 workers hinges on Major League Baseball’s scheduler.

Workers almost got denied coverage for August because June only had nine games, but they ended up qualifying because they worked a private event at AT&T Park for the biotechnology firm Genentech.

Yet Centerplate wants to raise the number of qualifying games to 12, while Local 2 wants to keep it at 10 and grant healthcare coverage to workers who work every game in months with less than 10 games.

On wages, Centerplate has offered 25-cent increase in hourly pay, no retro raises for the years worked under the expired contract, and a $500 bonus. Though Local 2 has not put out an exact number on their wage demands, its spokesperson says Centerplate’s wage offers are beyond unacceptable; they’re insulting.

Centerplate’s main message in this quarrel is its insistence that the concessions workers are among the highest paid in the nation and that they accrue more benefits than most part-time workers. But the workers say that claim is misleading given the high cost of living in the Bay Area.

“If we were living in Dallas, Texas, I’d say yeah, we’re probably overpaid. But we’re not,” Anthony Wendelburger, who has been a cook for three years, told us.

The Bay Area is among the most expensive metropolitan areas in the nation. Last month, the business consultant Kiplinger published a list of the top 10 most expensive cities in the U.S. San Francisco was third behind Honolulu and New York, with nearby San Jose in fourth and Oakland eighth.

The average concessions worker makes around $11,000 in a year while some make upwards of $13,000 during the regular season. Based on differences in the cost of living, we calculate (using www.bankrate.com) that $11,000 translates to $7,760 if they served food and drinks for the Seattle Mariners, $7,880 for the Chicago Cubs or White Sox, and $6,530 for the Atlanta Braves.

THE OLD BALLGAME

At the Giants-Padres game on June 18, a Tuesday, several hundred protesters gathered at a rally to show support for the Giants concession workers. Most were affiliated with Local 2, but a few off-duty concession workers came to join the demonstration.

They implored the fans—most whom seemed to be just learning about the dispute—to abstain from purchasing any concession stand products. The rally started an hour before game time engulfed fans waiting in line with chants of “No justice, no garlic fries!” and “Ain’t no protest like an union protest because an union protest don’t stop!”

Inside the stadium, 44 protesters (all of whom had purchased tickets) staged a sit-in in front the garlic fries stand situated behind sections 122 and 123. Their numbers withered as the game progressed and by the fourth inning, the area in front of the stand was cleared and business resumed, with 10 protesters arrested for refusing to disperse.

That protest followed a more significant action on May 25, when all of the 750 workers staged an one day strike, authorized by a 500-16 vote by workers. For that game, Centerplate employed volunteer workers who only got paid in tips. Yes, the scabs got the tips that the regular workers are being denied.

Food and drink service during that game was significantly slower than normal, as even the Giants acknowledged. There were reports of fans standing up to 40 minutes in line for a beer, which is usually more than two innings, an amount of playing time that few true baseball fan would ever give up for a beer run.

Critics—including several passerby fans who were loudly expressing their disdain for the demonstrators at the Giants-Padres game—say the workers should be content with what they have, perhaps assuming the workers were getting more from that $10 beer than they really are.

When Pearlie Jones started working concessions at Giants games 22 years ago, hot dogs were $3. Today they sell for twice that amount at the stand that Jones now manages.

We met Jones at the Local 2 building in the Tenderloin. She lives in Daly City, survives on unemployment during the off-season, and has no other source for health insurance. With nervous laughter, Jones told us she “prays to God during [the off season] that I don’t get sick.”

Wendelburger, who has to commute almost two hours each way to the ball park, works as a bartender during the off-season, although he can only get three days a week. When asked about health insurance during the off-season, this husband and father of two says, “Unless I’m going to die, I’m not going to see a doctor.”

But Jones says that as important as improved wages and healthcare benefits are to her and other employees, they really fear losing their jobs: “Our job security is the main issue that we’re pushing for right now.”

One issue that seems telling of the way Centerplate and the Giants are treating concession workers is on the issue of tips. The workers are currently not allowed a tip jar or a tip line on credit card receipts, a standard feature of food service, particularly here in the Bay Area, where even butchers and bakers have tip jars.

Ramirez says she’s utterly baffled by Centerplate’s stubbornness on the issue. “A tip line is something that doesn’t cost management anything and requires a small change in the computer system and is something the customers are actually demanding. We have a great experience with our fans and customers and they want to share their gratitude and they can’t,” she told us.

Another seemingly minor yet deadlocked issue is the request for benches for in-seat food runners. These workers currently have nowhere to sit for breaks or in between food runs, yet Centerplate has refused to budge on that issue.

When asked about these minor demands, a Centerplate spokesperson said that they have not seen any list of demands from Local 2, a statement disputed by workers and Local 2.

Centerplate has cast workers as greedy, even filing a lawsuit against Local 2 claiming that the union and the workers are trying to exploit the Giants’ World Series championships, an action that the union and its workers heard about from reporters, adding to the aura of mistrust hanging over these negotiations.

LONG STANDOFF

Both sides have accused the other of not operating in good faith, something they both hope will change when negotiations resume on July 29.

Centerplate says it wants to give the workers a contract, but blames the deadlocked negotiations on Local 2 head Mike Casey, who also serves as the elected president of the San Francisco Labor Council.

“Unfortunately, Local 2 and its leader Mike Casey have not responded to our economic proposal. Our employees, and Local 2 members, remain without a contract, raise, bonus, and health security all because of Casey’s failures,” Centerplate spokesperson Gina Antonini told us.

But the concession workers seem to strongly support Casey, who was on vacation and unavailable for comment. “I have tremendous faith in our Local 2 union leadership. Mike Casey is brilliant,” Patricia Ramirez, a line cook of 14 years, told us. “I think Casey and [Local 2 organizer] Alphonso Pines are leading us in the right way and I think we’re going to win because of their guidance.”

Centerplate seemed unaware of Casey’s local reputation and community support. “The entire labor community is supporting Local 2 and our message is clear: If you have to go to the games, don’t buy the food” San Francisco Labor Council Executive Director Tim Paulson told us.

Local 2’s tough, deliberate, long-term strategy is one that has paid big dividends numerous times in its history, even if it has resulted in long standoffs with management, as was been the case with hotel workers in San Francisco.

“We have seen plenty of times that they have deadlocked for a period of time, they hold out, they tend to fight as long as it takes, and they tend to win” said Ken Jacobs, chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

For their part, concession workers involved in the negotiations blame Centerplate lawyer and lead negotiator George Aude and his abrasive style for the impasse and the tense relations. Several workers we talked to cited Aude’s disrespectful demeanor, with one worker calling him a “giant hothead”.

In one of the negotiations, Aude made several irate comments, which Local 2 took as a threat. They say Aude demanded of the Local 2, “If you don’t stop all these actions you’ve been doing, we’ll offer you less money.”

We reached Aude to comment on the contract talks, he said simply “unsatisfied,” and when we asked for further details, Aude hung up and refused to answer our calls.

SUPPORTING THE TEAM

Mayor Ed Lee says he’s urging the two sides to settle the standoff and that he has offered to help, although he’s leaving it to the mediators involved. So for those keeping score, City Hall has offered help but the Giants organization has not.

Yet Lee’s half-hearted offer to help Giants workers belies his zealous efforts to promote the Giants and its brand. In February, Lee and the Giants launched a citywide anti-litter program called “The Giant Sweep,” named in honor of the Giants’ sweep of the Detroit Tigers in the 2012 World Series.

“Last year the Giants showed us that winning the World Series took a team effort that went far beyond individual heroics. It required the effort of every player, coach, manager, and support staff — not to mention the fans — to build a championship team. The same approach is needed to attack San Francisco’s litter problem. The Giant Sweep will help San Francisco remain a place where people want to live, work and visit,” the Mayor’s Office said in announcing the program.

Mayor Lee and Gavin Newsom awarded the Giants a “Key to the City” for their World Series wins. Pitcher Matt Cain was awarded a “Key” last year for his perfect game against the Houston Astros. Even disgraced slugger Barry Bonds was given a “Key” after passing Hank Aaron on the all time home run list in August 2007.

“You know, we usually give keys to individual dignitaries who have accomplished great things, whether it was the president of Ireland, or Tony Bennett, or even a Matt Cain on his wonderful perfect game in San Francisco,” Lee said during last year’s celebration. “We normally celebrate those individual accomplishments, but today, we’re gonna break with that tradition and present this key to the entire team and coaching staff, everybody involved in the Giants, the investors, their front office. Congratulations to a team that doesn’t know how to quit, never gives up, and defied the odds at every opportunity.”

Then the city spent nearly a reported quarter-million-dollars to throw its team a massive victory parade and San Franciscans went wild in celebrating the Giants, once again, as the concession workers waited to feel like part of the team.

Could Lee or other City Hall figures help solve the standoff? Other mayors have successfully intervened in situations like this before. In 2004, then-Mayor Newsom sided with the 4,300 picketing hotel workers after the hotels refused his request to end a lockout.

Less than a year before that, Newsom ran for mayor as a “business friendly centrist” who raised millions of dollars from the hotel industry and other downtown business interests. But when he saw that hotel management wasn’t being reasonable, he used the power of his office to help broker an agreement.

It would seem Lee could do the same thing if he wanted, particularly given that the Giants are currently asking the city for land and support to help grow its business.

STADIUM SPRAWL

The Giants organization is currently working on a $1.6 billion, 27-acre development project at Pier 48, located on the opposite side of Mission Creek from AT&T Park. The gargantuan project will include 1,000 housing units, 125,000 square feet of retail, 1.7 million square feet of office space, 2,690 garage parking spaces, and more than eight acres of public space. The project is on public land and will be subject to numerous approval processes, by both the city and the Port of San Francisco. Pier 48 and Seawall Lot 337 are some of the last valuable, easily developable sections of waterfront in San Francisco, so one might say the team is asking a lot from the community. And of course, Mayor Lee offered unqualified, enthusiastic support for the project, telling the Chronicle, “Among my highest priorities is to make sure our homegrown companies can stay, grow, and hire right here in San Francisco, driving job growth, improving our neighborhoods, and in this case our world-class waterfront.” But Lee, Centerplate, and the Giants seem to think that just creating jobs is enough, regardless of pay, benefits, and job security. “The success of a Major League Baseball club is measured by more than game-winning rallies and pennant drives. Beyond the box scores, a ballclub has a unique opportunity to create partnerships to improve the quality of life in its community,” the Giants proclaim on its community page. But for Giants workers, such sentiments have done little to improve their quality of life.

NUDE BEACHES 2013

Michael Redmond

July 16, 2013

culture@sfbg.com

Below you’ll find our annual update on the state of nude beaches in Northern California, along with detailed guides and directions to some of our favorites. For details on dozens more, please see our complete Nude Beach Guide at www.sfbg.com/nudebeaches, which we are in the process of updating.

While researching clothing-optional beaches in Jamaica in November, my girlfriend and I noticed that native Jamaicans don’t think anything of stripping down to their underwear to take a dip in a waterfall on a hot day — our driver did just that near one of the nation’s biggest cities, Ocho Rios — while visiting tourists can go topless or nude with hardly a complaint on Negril’s seven-mile long shoreline of shimmering white sand, at the west end of the country.

It made me wonder, what if the same tolerance existed here, where each beach has its own traditions and its own set of rules? Sometimes, it takes as little as a person moving some sand or staying after sunset to annoy our cops. In Jamaica and many other parts of the world, that would never happen.

For example, law enforcement actions recently hit two Bay Area nude beaches — Marin’s Red Rock and Steep Ravine — while most access to a third site, fan favorite Muir, near Stinson Beach, has been closed by authorities until November.

The good news: visits by rangers to both skinny dipping coves mentioned above have died back, while anti-nudity patrols at Monterey’s Garrapata Beach, which erupted in 2011, have been discontinued. And the Guardian is publishing three “secret” alternate ways that die-hard visitors can use to reach the nude section of gorgeous Muir Beach.

Red Rock was rocked by a ranger who reportedly used a crowbar to remove part of a sunbathing “terrace” that beach regulars had built by moving sand to create more “towel space.” He also cited two male beachgoers for violating Title 14, Section 4307, of the California Code Of Regulations, which bans removal of “earth” or “sand” from state parks.

The men are appealing their penalties, while their friends at the beach are asking for donations to pay for their legal fees. “We’re going to take up a collection,” says Stinson Beach attorney-teacher Fred Jaggi.

The ranger’s boss, Bill Lutton, a state parks superintendent for the Marin area who visited the beach after the busts, told us that “altering” and “changing the features” of the beach is a serious offense. “We consider ourselves the guardians of seven generations of users of California’s park system,” he says, “so we must protect the parks’ cultural and natural resources.”

Meanwhile, instead of being charged with destroying park property, several people at nearby Steep Ravine Beach, which is open from 7am until dusk, were cited last fall for soaking in its dangerous-to-reach nude hot springs after sunset by the same ranger who raided Red Rock. “A guy was handcuffed after mouthing off to the ranger, so he really deserved it,” says former springs frequent visitor Michael Velkoff, of Lucas Valley. “He almost took a girl away too.”

Citing “safety and lack of lighting” concerns, Lutton says the after-dark curfew at rock-strewn Steep Ravine, where numerous users have slipped and sustained cuts, bruises, and other injuries, “will be strictly enforced.”

And at Muir Beach, which is used by nudists as a gateway to a nude beach that begins on its north end, visiting hours have been officially eliminated until November 15, while crews improve its parking, toilets, and watershed.

“Don’t even think about visiting the beach,” urges Golden Gate National Recreation Area public affairs specialist Alexandra Picavet, who points out that users won’t have access to the beach, ocean, parking, restrooms, or garbage cans. “Find a new experience — the Bay Area has plenty — to try this summer and then you’ll really appreciate Muir Beach when it reopens.”

Because the main portion of Muir is blocked by fencing and being patrolled by rangers, anyone trying to reach Little Beach, as the nude area next to Muir is also known, will have to hike anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours to reach the shore and then continue walking to the naked area. Picavet says that if you stop for any length of time in front of the non-nude part of Muir, even to stand and admire the view or take a dip in the water, you’ll be cited.

While cops are tightening the use of beaches in Marin, they’re relaxing their hold in Monterey County. In fact, nudists at Garrapata Beach, close to Carmel, have something to celebrate: “nudie” patrols by rangers have ended, in part because the state ran out of money to fund them and because not a single complaint has been received in 2013.

“We’ve been complaint free,” says Sean James, who became acting state parks superintendent for the area in April and appears to be fairly tolerant of naturists. “I don’t see how just being nude would be threatening.”

Please be careful at our beaches. Two women in their 30s died June 30 after they were swept into the ocean by a wave near another popular nude beach, Bonny Doon. They were with two men when the wave swept the foursome into the water. The two men were rescued by a Coast guard helicopter after being stranded on some rocks and surrounded by a rising tide.

Of course, you don’t have to go to the sea to be nude. Our listings include naked lakes, rivers, waterfalls, reservoirs, and at least one meadow. Or how about hiking while wearing only your birthday suit? Au naturel “Full Moon Hikes” have been happening for several years. But the world’s first-ever “Supermoon Nude Hike” (named after a new or full moon which occurs with the moon within 90 percent of its closest approach to Earth) took place right here in the Bay Area the night before the brightest moon of 2013.

“I’ll never forget the hike,” said Raj, one of the walkers, after making the trek in the East Bay Hills, near Castro Valley, June 22. “I will think of it every time I see a full moon.”

Agrees Dave Smith, of San Leandro, who led it: “It was spectacular — one of the greatest hikes ever. Keep in mind we did it in moonlight, while even having to scramble on all fours down some rocks. I felt like Gollum in The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit.”

Want to join in the fun? More “Full Moon Hikes” will take place July 20 and August 18 (see our online listings below for Las Trampas in Contra Costa County).

Another idea to meet and socialize with fellow naturists: drop by Santa Cruz’s Bonny Doon Beach on September 21 or Lake Tahoe’s Secret Harbor Creek Beach on June 7, 2014, when visitors will be getting together to keep them clean by finding and removing trash.

Finally, you can help beachgoers and the naturist community by sending me your new beach discoveries, trip reports, and improved directions (especially road milepost numbers), along with your phone number to garhan@aol.com or Gary Hanauer, c/o San Francisco Bay Guardian, 71 Stevenson, 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105.

Our ratings: “A” signifies a beach that is large or well-established and where the crowd is mostly nude; “B” indicates places where fewer than half the visitors are nude; “C” means small or emerging nude areas; and “D” depicts spots that are in use, but not recommended.

SAN FRANCISCO

NORTH BAKER BEACH, SAN FRANCISCO

RATING: A

North Baker’s neo-hippie revival is continuing for a third straight season, with more art work springing up on the USA’s largest urban nude beach. Guitar- and drum-playing was added to the scene last year. This summer, a second so-called “art tree” made of driftwood and festooned with seaweed has appeared. “I call it the Sea Hag,” says Santosh, an organizer of alternative activities at the beach who also produces San Francisco’s annual How Weird Street Faire. “Anybody can add things to it. They bring mementos, flowers, anything you can think of. I tend it, but it attracts a life of its own. Several tourists per day usually drop by. One child looked up at the things dangling from it and asked, ‘Is it some kind of voodoo?'” Baker’s own “beach language” is also evolving. Last year, “duney,” which describes the site’s tent-like, shade-providing structures without walls, and “Baker Day” (when the sun’s out and it’s not too windy) came into usage. “Now, we’ve added ‘rock block’ and ‘cosmic volleyball,'” adds Santosh, who describes the former as any stretch of three Baker Days in a row, while cosmic volleyball allows visitors “to keep playing, even if the ball bounces off one of our driftwood poles.”

Directions: Take the 29 Sunset bus or go north on 25th Avenue to Lincoln Boulevard. Turn right and take the second left onto Bowley Street. Follow Bowley to Gibson Road, turn right, and follow Gibson to the east parking lot. At the beach, head right to the nude area, which starts at the brown and yellow “Hazardous surf, undertow, swim at your own risk” sign. Some motorcycles in the lot have been vandalized, possibly by car owners angered by bikers parking in car spaces; to avoid trouble, motorcyclists should park in the motorcycle area near the cyclone fence. Parking at Lincoln’s 100 or more nearby parking spaces was limited to two hours recently. But through June, there had been no reports of cops actually writing tickets for parking too long.

LAND’S END BEACH, SAN FRANCISCO

RATING: A

One of the better locales in the Bay Area to enjoy a little naked sunning without many people present, a visit to the little cove off Geary Boulevard known as Land’s End may make your worries melt away, at least during a quiet afternoon. Cops only occasionally visit it. But don’t be shocked if you see more clothed visitors than nudists — many locals and tourists who wander down to the sand don’t realize it’s a clothing-optional beach. Tip: on hot days, arrive before noon or there may be no unoccupied sand left on the little, semi-rocky shoreline. If possible, try to use one of the rock-lined windbreaks left by previous sunbathers. Pack a warm covering in case the weather changes.

Directions: Follow Geary Boulevard to the end, then park in the dirt lot up the road from the Cliff House. Take the trail at the far end of the lot. About 100 yards past a bench and some trash cans, the path narrows and bends, then rises and falls, eventually becoming the width of a road. Don’t take the road to the right, which leads to a golf course. Just past another bench, as the trail turns right, go left toward a group of dead trees where you will see a stairway and a “Dogs must be leashed” sign. Descend and head left to another stairway, which leads to a 100-foot walk to the cove. Or, instead, take the service road below the El Camino del Mar parking lot 1/4 mile until you reach a bench, then follow the trail there. It’s eroded in a few places. At the end, you’ll have to scramble over some rocks. Turn left (west) and walk until you find a good place to put down your towel.

GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE BEACH, SAN FRANCISCO

RATING: A

Mostly a gay male cruising scene, “Nasty Boy Beach” is also visited by some straight men and women. Though fairly rocky and packed with people on hot days, everyone seems to enjoy the trio of coves you can find by walking along the shore. Oh, and did I mention the view? If you want to feel immersed in a picture postcard of the famous bridge, then this is the place to plop down. On warm days, some users even swim in the usually chilly, undertow-plagued water. “You can sometimes go out over 100 feet during low tide,” says a woman.

Directions: from the toll booth area of Highway 101/1, take Lincoln Boulevard west about a half mile to Langdon Court. Turn right (west) on Langdon and look for space in the parking lots, across Lincoln from Fort Winfield Scott. Park and then take the beach trail, starting just west of the end of Langdon, down its more than 200 steps to Golden Gate Bridge Beach, also known as Marshall’s Beach. Despite recent improvements, the trail to the beach can still be slippery, especially in the spring and winter.

FORT FUNSTON BEACH, SAN FRANCISCO

RATING: C

Known as Fort Fun by its fans, this Golden Gate National Recreation Area sun spot, located south of Ocean Beach, attracts hang gliders, dogs and their walkers, and even from time to time a few naturists, the latter of which sometimes tuck themselves between the dunes on the shore. But not all is fun on its magnetic sands and the cliffs above them. A few months ago, a tussle between two dogs ended when a canine was stabbed by the owner of one of the pets. Besides pugnacious pooch protectors, watch out too for sharp winds, especially in March and October. And to stave off hassles from rangers, disrobers should stay away on weekends or when families or rangers are near. If anyone seems upset or gripes about you being au naturel, be sure to suit up fast since the authorities will bust naturists if they see them or they receive complaints. The good news: usually, only a few citations a year are issued at Fort Funston, so if you are discreet and stay in the dunes, you may be rewarded with a suntan without lines.

Directions: From San Francisco, go west to Ocean Beach, then south on the Great Highway. After Sloat Boulevard, the road heads uphill. From there, curve right onto Skyline Boulevard, go past one stoplight, and look for signs for Funston on the right. Turn into the public lot and find a space near the west side. At the southwest end, take the sandy steps to the beach, turn right, and walk to the dunes. Find a spot as far as possible from the parking lot.

CONTRA COSTA COUNTY

LAS TRAMPAS REGIONAL WILDERNESS, CASTRO VALLEY

RATING: C

Imagine tromping in the East Bay Hills naked at night, guided only by your flashlight and a representative of the Bay Area Naturists group, plus a few fellow travelers. And yes, mooning during America’s only Full Moon Hikes is permitted. “Those who haven’t experienced these incredibly beautiful, if slightly challenging hikes to the ridge at sunset really ought to put this on their calendar this year,” says organizer Dave Smith, of San Leandro, who’ll be leading trips starting at a Castro Valley nudist club on Saturday, July 20, leaving at 7pm (there will be a potluck earlier), and Sunday, August 18, departing around 6:30pm.

“It’s one of the greatest hikes in the Bay Area, rivaling any I know of,” tells Smith. “It’s right up there with the Palomarin Trail (from the Bolinas area, passing Bass Lake and Pelican Lake, to Alamere Falls, on the coast), the Cascades, and others. The walk is not hard, but it is challenging. We take it slow so everyone can make it. So far, no one has ever been hurt.”

“We usually leave an hour and a half before sunset and hike up to the top to catch the sunset and moonrise and then come back down in the moonlight,” he adds.

“Whether you are clothed or not, participating in the Full Moon Hike is a big treat,” says past hiker Jurek Zarzycki, who suggests walkers bring good hiking shoes, a flashlight (“Most of the time you won’t need it, because of the moonlight”), and bug spray. “And don’t forget to have some baby carrots with you to give to the horses that sometimes come out at night, so close that you may even feel their breath. Don’t worry, though, they’re very friendly.”

Organized by the Sequoians Naturist Club and the Bay Area Naturists, based in San Jose, walkers leave the property of The Sequoians fully clothed at dusk and walk through meadows and up hills until the moon rises, before heading back down the slopes completely nude, with their clothes folded neatly into their backpacks.

Directions: Contact the Sequoians (www.sequoians.com) or the Bay Area Naturists (www.bayareanaturists.org) for details on how to join a walk. Meet at the Sequoians. To get there, take Highway 580 east to the Crow Canyon Road exit. Or follow 580 west to the first Castro Valley off-ramp. Take Crow Canyon Road toward San Ramon .75 mile to Cull Canyon Road. Then follow Cull Canyon Road around 6.5 miles to the end of the paved road. Take the dirt road on the right until the “Y” in the road and keep left. Shortly after, you’ll see The Sequoians sign. Proceed ahead for about another .75 mile to The Sequoians front gate.

SAN MATEO COUNTY

DEVIL’S SLIDE, MONTARA

RATING: A

Despite the opening of the Tom Lantos Tunnels on March 25, 2013, nearby Gray Whale Cove, also known as Devil’s Slide, continues to function — and may, state officials think, soon attract even more visitors than in previous years. The reason: crowds soon will be coming not only to the beach, but also to a mile-long stretch of the old Highway 1 that was circumvented by the tunnels and is being turned into a walking and biking trail; it’s expected to open soon. To handle the larger attendance, workers will build new parking lots on either side of the highway, giving Devil’s Slide a parking area on the ocean side for the first time. The current parking lot on the east side of Highway 1 is still open. “We will also be improving the stairway (leading down to the beach),” says San Mateo coast state parks sector superintendent Paul Keel. Best of all, traditional use of the beach for clothing-optional sunbathing has been continuing, with few problems. “We’re not having an increase in (complaint) calls there,” says Keel.

Directions: Driving from San Francisco, take Highway 1 south through Pacifica. Three miles south of the Denny’s restaurant in Linda Mar, at 500 Linda Mar Blvd., Pacifica, and just past and south of the Tom Lantos Tunnels, turn left (inland or east) on an unmarked road, which takes you to the beach’s parking lot on the east side of the highway and to a 146-step staircase that leads to the sand. Another lot will “eventually” be opened on the ocean side (please see above). Coming from the south on Highway 1, look for a road on the right (east), 1.2 miles north of the old Chart House restaurant in Montara. Most naturists use the north end of the beach, which is separated by rocks from the rest of the shore. Wait until low tide to make the crossing to the nude area.

SAN GREGORIO NUDE BEACH, SAN GREGORIO

RATING: A

Now in its 47th year of operation, America’s oldest nude beach even has its own website and live webcam at www.freewebs.com/sangregoriobeach. The privately-run site is located next to San Gregorio State Beach. The beach often draws a large gay crowd, along with some nude and suited straight couples, singles, and families. On your first visit, though, you may be a little shocked by the provocative behavior that is sometimes happening in the driftwood structures on the slope leading down to the beach. Their walls aren’t completely closed. Some users even want passersby to observe them having sex inside the so-called “sex condos,” including Kerry, from San Francisco, who told us about her October 2012 visit with her partner, Lisa: “It was an exciting time. We’ve been to the beach six times. We have had men wander by and try not to stare. Other times, we have had men that more or less sneak up and peek through the wood at us while we are having sex. One time, we had three men who stood 15 feet away and watched intently as we went at it. We have not met anybody that we consider creepy. In fact, there have never been any words exchanged at all.”

Directions: From San Francisco, drive south on Highway 1, past Half Moon Bay, and, between mileposts 18 and 19, look on the right side of the road for telephone call box number SM 001 0195, at the intersection of Highway 1 and Stage Road, and near an iron gate with trees on either side. From there, expect a drive of 1.1 miles to the entrance. At the Junction 84 highway sign, the beach’s driveway is just .1 mile away. Turn into a gravel driveway, passing through the iron gate mentioned above, which says 119429 on the gatepost. Drive past a grassy field to the parking lot, where you’ll be asked to pay an entrance fee. Take the long path from the lot to the sand; everything north of the trail’s end is clothing-optional (families and swimsuit using visitors tend to stay on the south end of the beach). The beach is also accessible from the San Gregorio State Beach parking area to the south; from there, hike about a half-mile north. Take the dirt road past the big white gate with the Toll Road sign to the parking lot.

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY

GARDEN OF EDEN, FELTON

RATING: C

Are you looking for a gorgeous place to have a picnic? If you’re in the Bay Area, you won’t have to travel far to find the Golden State’s version of the Garden of Eden, a creekside skinny-dipping spot located in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, between Santa Cruz and Felton. Used even more by suited swimmers and sunbathers, many hikers are surprised when they come across naturists at the stream. Eden gets mixed reviews by visitors: some parts of the trail may be slippery, so watch your step and keep your eyes out for poison oak. To find Eden and two other clothing-optional swim holes on San Lorenzo River, check for vehicles pulled over on Highway 9, alongside the state park, which forbids nudity but only occasionally patrols the creek with rangers.

Directions: From Santa Cruz, drive north on Highway 9 and look for turnouts on the right side of the road, where cars are pulled over. The first, a wide turnout with a tree in the middle, is just north of Santa Cruz. Rincon Fire Trail starts about where the tree is, according to reader Robert Carlsen, of Sacramento. The many forks in the trail all lead to the river, down toward Big Rock Hole and Frisbee Beach; Carlsen says the best area off this turnout can be reached by bearing left until the end of the trail. Farther up the highway, 1.3 miles south of the park entrance, is the second and bigger pullout, called the Ox Trail Turnout, leading to Garden of Eden. Park in the turnout and follow the dirt fire road downhill and across some railroad tracks. Head south, following the tracks, for around .5 miles. Look for a “Pack Your Trash” sign with park rules and hours and then proceed down the Eden Trail.

Ox Trail, which can be slippery, and Eden Trail both wind down steeply to the creek. “The path continues to the left, where there are several spots for wading and sunbathing,” Carlsen says. The main beach is only 75 feet long and 30 feet wide, but fairly sandy. Carlsen’s favorite hole is accessible from a trail that starts at the third turnout, a small one on the right side of the road, about 4.5 miles from Highway 1 and just before Felton. A gate marks the start of the path. The trail bends left. When you come to the road again, go right. At the railroad tracks, go right. From here, look for the river down the hill on your left; many paths lead to it. Says Mike: “Within 10 yards, you can be in the water.”

BONNY DOON NUDE BEACH, BONNY DOON

RATING: A

Were anti-nudity signs really recently posted at Bonny Doon Beach, whose north end has been used for clothing optional sunbathing for decades? Yes, but officials took the warnings, which were placed at two trailheads leading to the sand, down just two months later. “We’re not planning to change anything,” says Chet Bardo, superintendent of state beaches in the Santa Cruz district. “The truth is that we get complaints on all sides of this issue. It’s not uncommon to get calls from people. This is California, after all, so what to local people might seem not that unusual sometimes turns out to shock people who are visiting from Iowa, who find it (nudity) a bit disconcerting.”

“The way I see it, unless there’s a problem (happening at the beach), it’s not a problem to us,” he adds. In fact, the only problem at Bonny Doon this year is that it has less sand than usual. A 15-foot long rock on the sand, along with a sloping cliff with rocks that jut out, separate the two sides of the cove — one clothed for clothed visitors and the other for nudes — known as Bonny Doon.

“In the short term, things at Bonny Doon are destined to continue the way they are,” says Kirk Lingenfelter, sector superintendent for Bonny Doon and nearby state beaches. “Ultimately it would be nice to see some level of improvement, maybe trail work or stair work,” adds Lingenfelter. “But before we’d even do that, there would need to be a General Plan or an Interim Use Plan, which we don’t have. And we also don’t have any funding for it.”

As for nudity, Lingenfelter says his rangers, who periodically patrol the beach, haven’t issued a single warning or citation for nudity since the state approved the acquisition of the beach in 2006. “We’ll respond to complaints we receive,” he explains, “but I can’t recall (receiving) a single complaint.”

Directions: From San Francisco, go south on Highway 1 to the Bonny Doon parking lot at milepost 27.6 on the west side of the road, 2.4 miles north of Red, White, and Blue Beach, and some 11 miles north of Santa Cruz. From Santa Cruz, head north on Highway 1 until you see Bonny Doon Road, which veers off sharply to the right just south of Davenport. The beach is just off the intersection. Park in the paved lot to the west of Highway 1; don’t park on Bonny Doon Road or the shoulder of Highway 1. If the lot is full, drive north on Highway 1, park at the next beach lot, and walk back to the first lot. Or take Santa Cruz Metro Transit District bus route 40 to the lot; it leaves the Metro Center three times a day on Saturdays and takes about 20 minutes. To get to the beach, climb the berm next to the railroad tracks adjacent to the Bonny Doon lot, cross the tracks, descend, and take a recently improved, sign-marked trail to the sand. Walk north past most of the beach to the nude cove on the north end. Alternately, Dusty suggests parking as far north as possible, taking the northern entrance, and, with good shoes, following a “rocky and steep” walk down to the sand.

2222 BEACH, SANTA CRUZ

RATING: A

Aptly named 2222, a mini-nude beach that takes its title from the house across the street, is still beautiful, still hidden from most passersby, and still attracts a small crowd of regular visitors who are in good enough shape to handle its sketchy, foreboding-looking path.

One of America’s smallest nude beaches, 2222 is so tiny it could probably fit in your yard. And that’s what makes it such a special place. You won’t see many people on the sand, which takes scrambling to reach and isn’t recommended for children or anyone who isn’t a good hiker. However, those who are able to make it down a sharp-angled cliff and past several concrete blocks on the way down may like the quiet and solitude that the beach offers. The most dependable trail begins on the southeast corner of the hillside overlooking the site. Even though there’s a walking path just above it, the beach can’t be seen from there. College students like to hangout here and, if they’re lucky, get a glimpse of a local juggler who sometimes practices his routines on the sand. Tip: for great accommodations, check out the West Cliff Inn, 174 West Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz, a bed and breakfast inn located a few blocks to the south; it’s somewhat pricey, but truly enjoyable.

Directions: The beach is a few blocks west of Natural Bridges State Beach and about 2.5 miles north of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. From either north or south of Santa Cruz, take Highway 1 to Swift Street. Drive .8 miles to the sea, then turn right on West Cliff Drive. 2222 is five blocks away. Past Auburn Avenue, look for 2222 West Cliff on the inland side of the street. Park in the pullout with eight parking spaces next to the cliff, on the west side of the road. If it’s full, continue straight and park along Chico Avenue. An overlook with two benches facing an interesting obelisk-style sculpture — where my girlfriend and I sat last year — is located between the parking area and the edge of the cliff. Bay Area Naturists leader Rich Pasco suggests visitors use care and then follow the path on the side of the beach closest to downtown Santa Cruz and the Municipal Wharf.

PRIVATES BEACH, SANTA CRUZ

RATING: A

Want to visit a beach with great sand and surf, plus a mix of suited and naked users? This year, the charge remains $100 — or $50 if you live nearby — for all the visits you want to make to Privates, which is one of the county’s best beaches, until May 31. If you go daily for a year, that’s about 27 cents a day. But there are also several ways people have used to circumvent the fee, which we explain below. Visitors include nudists, surfers, families, and local residents. “Everyone gets along,” says Brittney Barrios, manager/buyer of Freeline Design Surf Shop, which sells up to 600 beach passes to Privates a year. “It’s always very peaceful.”

“There’s a great swell happening here,” says a surfer we interviewed this summer. Security guards plus a locked gate keep most troublemakers out. With almost no litter or loud noise, and less wind than most local beaches, the site almost always provides a pleasant atmosphere for users. Do you want to bring your dog? It’s OK too.

To catch a game of Nude Frisbee or to start one, when you reach the bottom of the beach stairs, walk to the left until you see some people who aren’t wearing part or all of their swimsuits.

Directions: 1) Some visitors walk north from Capitola Pier in low tide (not a good idea since at least four people have needed to be rescued). 2) Others reach it in low tide via the stairs at the end of 41st Avenue, which lead to a surf spot called the Hook at the south end of a rocky shore known as Pleasure Point. 3) Surfers paddle on boards for a few minutes to Privates from Capitola or the Hook. 4) Most visitors buy a key to the beach gate for $100 a year at Freeline (821 41st Ave., Santa Cruz, 831-476-2950) 1.5 blocks west of the beach. Others go with someone with a key or wait outside the gate until a person with a key goes in, provided a security guard is not present (they often are there). “Most people will gladly hold the gate open for someone behind them whose hands are full,” says Bay Area Naturists leader Rich Pasco. The nude area starts to the left of the bottom of the stairs.

MARIN COUNTY

BASS LAKE, BOLINAS

RATING: B

“The lake was great,” says regular user Dave Smith, of San Leandro, about his visit to Bass Lake, near Bolinas, this year. “It was during spring break, so there were a lot of people on the trail that day. But we weren’t the only ones who were naked in the water. Several people were skinny dipping besides us.” Others, who don’t necessarily go nude, love Bass too, which, by the way, does not have any bass. San Rafael resident Marie described her November visit as “awe-inspiring” on a message board. She said the walk to get there “was worth every minute … the water while cool was exhilarating. I can’t wait to go back.” And Cindi, of San Anselmo, found the setting to be “rejuvenating, awesome, stunning, orgasmic … I would do it again and again.” Bass doesn’t attract as many nudists as it did 10 years ago. “When I first went, everybody was nude,” says Smith. “Today, though, you have to feel pretty comfortable with your own nudity to swim that way at the lake.”

Directions: Allow about an hour for the drive from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. From Stinson Beach, go north on Highway 1. Just north of Bolinas Lagoon, turn left on the often-unmarked exit to Bolinas. Follow the road as it curves along the lagoon and eventually ends at Olema-Bolinas Road. Continue along Olema-Bolinas Road to the stop sign at Mesa Road. Turn right on Mesa and drive four miles until it becomes a gravel road and ends at the Palomarin parking lot. On hot days the lot fills quickly, so come early. Says Smith: “We once saw hundreds of cars.” A sign at the trailhead next to the lot will guide you down scenic Palomarin Trail to the lake. For directions to incredibly beautiful Alamere Falls, 1.5 miles past Bass Lake, which empties onto a beach at the sea, please see “Elsewhere In Marin” in our online listings.

RED ROCK BEACH, STINSTON BEACH

RATING: A

The beach is in good shape this year. Warmer than usual weather in spring brought more people — 80 on one day — onto the sand earlier than usual, but, due to higher gas prices and a rough economy, crowd sizes remain down from a decade ago. “We’ve had fewer gawkers too,” says veteran visitor Fred Jaggi. “The beach is the mellowest it’s ever been.” If gawking remains down, then it would bring welcome relief. A 2012 visitor estimated the site had “25 percent nasty creeper grossness.” In another improvement, the trail is getting rave reviews. Foliage along the path has been pruned back since last year. “It’s clean of poison oak,” says Jaggi. “It’s a really easy walk now,” adds another visitor, Michael Velkoff. “You can’t beat it. I wear my sandals down there (instead of hiking shoes) while carrying a chair and backpack. If I can walk back up the trail at the end of the day, anyone can do it.” Rock climbing continues to be popular. Ultimate Frisbee, Double Disc Court (you throw two Frisbees at once), Befuddle (players toss the first disc softer and the second one harder), Nude Hearts, and Naked Scrabble are some of the other favorite pursuits on the sand. Tips: visit when the tide is low or early in the day; come before noon for the best parking. For the most sand space, drop by on a Monday, known as “Club Day” to the repeat visitors who like to gather then. And, if possible, bring a folding beach chair.

Directions: Go north on Highway 1 from Mill Valley, following the signs to Stinson Beach. At the long line of mailboxes next to the Muir Beach cutoff point, start checking your odometer. Look for a dirt lot full of cars to the left (west) of the highway 5.6 miles north of Muir and a smaller one on east side of the road. The lots are at milepost 11.3, one mile south of Stinson Beach. Limited parking is also available 150 yards to the south on the west side of Highway 1. Or from Mill Valley, take the West Marin/Bolinas Stage toward Stinson Beach and Bolinas. Get off at the intersection of Panoramic Highway and Highway 1. Then walk south .6 mile to the Red Rock lots. Follow the long, steep path to the beach that starts near the Dumpster next to the main parking lot.

MUIR NUDE BEACH, MUIR BEACH

RATING: A

Although the public part of Muir Beach has been closed since July 8, the small, quarter-moon shaped, clothing-optional beach just to the north of it is still technically open. This summer, the site was attracting 30-40 people a day, although it may get 100 on hot days. It’s one of the only Bay Area nude beaches that receives nearly as many female visitors as males. A variety of people share the cove, which has a more serene and less social atmosphere than nearby Red Rock. Finding it is usually easy: you park at the main Muir lot, walk north on the sand, cross over some rocks, and you’re there. Now, though, during improvement work lasting until November, visitors can’t park near Muir or enter it by foot. To reach the naked beach, you’ll need to hike up to several hours and not be able to use restrooms or garbage cans, which are ringed with fences. Once there, you must continue to the nude beach without stopping on the main beach, even to admire the view or swim in the water, or you will be cited.

Directions until 11/10: 1) Take the Coastal Trail to Muir Beach from the Tennessee Valley trailhead, then walk north until you come to a line of rocks marking the start of the nude area. Walk over the rocks. The roundtrip loop is just under 8 miles. See our web listings for details. 2) A hike of up to 30 minutes on the Coastal Trail begins at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, at 1601 Shoreline Highway, off Highway 1 just south of Muir Beach. But the Center’s parking lot is tiny, costs single-occupant drivers $5 to use on Sundays (when participation in the Center’s program is requested) and isn’t open to the public on weekdays or Saturdays, so staff are strongly discouraging its use for Muir access during the beach’s closure. Our online report has more info. 3) If you live on Cove Lane, near Pacific Way, you can still access the beach from Cove. Nonresidents can’t park on Cove Lane, Pacific Way, or other nearby streets during the closure period. Starting 11/10: From San Francisco, take Highway 1 north to Muir Beach, to milepost 5.7. Turn left on Pacific Way and park in the Muir lot (to avoid tickets, don’t park on Pacific). Or park on the street off Highway 1 across from Pacific and about 100 yards north. From the Muir lot, follow a path and boardwalk to the sand. Then walk north to a pile of rocks between the cliffs and the sea. You’ll need good hiking or walking shoes to cross; in very low tide, try to cross closer to the water. The nude area starts north of it.

RCA BEACH, BOLINAS

RATING: A

In a 1998 movie, visiting Jamaica was How Stella Got Her Groove Back. But if you’d like to revitalize your life, all you may need to do is spend an afternoon at awe-inspiring RCA Beach. Even though the site is isolated, don’t try to have sex on the sand; rangers ticketed at least one person for engaging in public sex here last fall. A single stopover at this relaxing oasis of tranquility will probably inspire you to keep coming back. “It hasn’t changed in decades,” says regular visitor Michael Velkoff. One problem: the cove is exposed to the wind. The good news is that there are lots of nooks that are sheltered from the wind. Some nooks, though, provide good shelter from the periodic breezes. Plus there’s so much driftwood on the sand that many people build windbreaks or even whole forts. Suited and unsuited men and women and families visit the shoreline. The beach seems far bigger than its one mile length because everyone is usually spread out on the sand. Adds Velkoff: “We’ll see six people on a Sunday. Everybody’s 30 yards apart. It’s amazing.”

Directions: From Stinson Beach, take Highway 1 (Shoreline Highway) north toward Calle Del Mar for 4.5 miles. Turn left onto Olema Bolinas Road and follow it 1.8 miles to Mesa Road in Bolinas. Turn right and stay on Mesa until you see cars parked past some old transmission towers. Park and walk .25 miles to the end of the pavement. Go left through the gap in the fence. The trail leads to a gravel road. Follow it until you see a path on your right, leading through a gate. Take it along the cliff top until it veers down to the beach. Or continue along Mesa until you come to a grove of eucalyptus trees. Enter through the gate here, then hike .5 miles through a cow pasture on a path that will also bring you through thick brush. The second route is slippery and eroding, but less steep. “It’s shorter, but toward the end there’s a rope for you to hold onto going down the cliff,” tells Velkoff.

LIMANTOUR BEACH, OLEMA

RATING: B

Would you like to walk a mile wearing nothing but your smile? At lovely Limantour, in Point Reyes National Seashore, you can do just that. Bring a pair of binoculars for watching birds, seals, and other wildlife. “I’ve been going there this year since the spring,” says Lucas Valley’s Michael Velkoff. “There are always whales and dolphins off shore, but recently we’ve been seeing porpoises too. It’s so beautiful at Limantour. I just head away from any people and put my towel down in the dunes or against a wall. A friend went a few days ago. Even though it was windy, she was very comfortable in the dunes. The best thing is that nobody bothers you. Of course, I carry a pair of shorts, just in case I need to put them on. I love it at Limantour. Plus it has tons of nice sand.” The long shoreline is one of America’s most beautiful beaches, yet few visitors realize the narrow spit of sand, between Drakes Bay and an estuary, is clothing-optional. The site is so big — about 2.5 miles in length — you can wander for hours, checking out ducks and other waterfowl, shorebirds such as snowy plovers (if you are lucky enough to see these endangered birds on the north end of the beach), gray whales (including mothers and their calves during spring), and playful harbor seals (offshore and at the north edge of the sand). Dogs are allowed on six-foot leashes on the south end of the beach.

Directions: From San Francisco, take Highway 101 north to the Sir Francis Drake Boulevard exit, then follow Sir Francis through San Anselmo and Lagunitas to Olema. At the intersection with Highway 1, turn right onto 1. Just north of Olema, go left on Bear Valley Road. A mile after the turnoff for the Bear Valley Visitor Center, turn left (at the Limantour Beach sign) on Limantour Road and follow it 11 miles to the parking lot at the end. Walk north a half-mile until you see some dunes about 50 yards east of the shore. Nudists usually prefer the valleys between the dunes for sunbathing. “One Sunday we had 200 yards to ourselves,” Velkoff says. But lately, the dunes have been more crowded.

Bands on the run

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

June 11, 2013

emilysavage@sfbg.com

MUSIC In an airy third-floor loft in SOMA, not far from the Sightglass Coffee flagship and an antique mall with a pennant flag twisting out front, 20 filmmaking teams shuffle across a makeshift finish line some time before 8pm Sunday evening. Exhausted, they hold in their hands a digital file, the physical evidence of a brand new project — a joint effort between Bay Area bands, directors, producers, and editors. Something of this magnitude would traditionally take weeks or even months to complete, but in this focused case, it was all completed in a thrilling 48-hour period.

Flash back to the start of the weekend; it’s Friday night in the lower-level grotto of Sports Basement on the Mission-Potrero border, and everyone is huddled near complimentary Lagunitas beer. There’s a buzzy sense of anticipation. The bands and solo artists — truly diverse in sound and geography — are waiting to hear which filmmaking team they’ll be paired with for the remainder of the weekend.

For this is the second annual Music Video Race competition, and they’ll only have a short time to complete the project. Sure, given modern technology such as iPhones, basic music videos can now be made in a day (see Kitty Pryde, or other web-bred artists), but this is about the competition within the timeframe; the race pits artists against one another to see who can come up with the best concept and execution in the allotted two-day period.

Among the crowd, there’s young and quick-tongued Mission rapper A-1, bouncy power-pop act Giggle Party, groovy Ethiopian blues Sun Hop Fat, forest country-folk Whiskerman, dancey electro-pop duo Happy Fangs, vintage jazz crooner Quinn DeVeaux, and dreamy “post-indie” Magic Fight.

The names of filmmaking teams and bands are yelled out, and the room grows loud with introductions. “Have a blast, and thanks for playing!” (The next time they’ll be in the same room together will be the screening Sat/15 at Rickshaw Stop.)

Magic Fight gets paired with first-time music video director Cory K. Riley, an eager young filmmaker who says he cashed in just about every favor he had for this production (along with some online donations and money from his own pocket). He has a crew of three or four with him at Sports Basement tonight. “We’re definitely the messier one to follow,” Riley tells me with a wink. After they’re paired, the band and the Riley crew walk outside on this warm weekend evening, and pop the Magic Fight CD into Riley’s hatchback. It’s the first listen. Until moments before, they were all strangers on the local independent arts scene.

The match up of the bands and filmmakers seems almost up to dumb luck when the pairings are read aloud, a split-second decision and boom! Now there are new teams racing across the Bay with wild costumes and characters. But it’s actually months of hard work for co-organizers Tim Lillis and Jacquelyn “Jax” Marker. They pore over submissions, choose the pairings, find the sponsors, and host the happy hours leading up to the weekend.

They came up with the idea for the Music Video Race in 2011, while having drinks at Lucky 13 before a Mister Heavenly show — you know, that band in which Michael Cera intermittently played bass. “It came about talking about our friends that were in bands that needed music videos, and also our filmmaking friends that were either in corporate jobs, not getting as much creative release as they may like, or our filmmaking friends that had been sitting on something for two years that had never seen the light of day,” Marker says.

Plus, Marker and Lillis had together participated in the 48 Hour Film Festival, so they knew the thrill of the creative weekend. (“It was horrible,” Marker says with a laugh, of their joint project for that fest, which also challenges filmmakers to come up with a quality product in two days. “I directed it, and I’m a really good producer, not so much a director.”)

For the Music Video Race, the key objectives of the project were to create something fun, collaborative, and finite — with a clear ending time. “With this there’s an element of control,” Lillis says. “The song is the control, right?” He likens the organization to something like a very dialed-in Treasure Island, where the bands shift like clockwork. “I’m kind of production nerd, as well,” he says. While Lillis now works as a freelance illustrator and plays in an as-yet-unnamed band in San Francisco, in his former life in Boston, he did event production for Kaiju Big Battel, which pits costumed Godzilla-type characters against on another in a traveling steel cage.

Marker grew up in Sydney and came to San Francisco in ’06 for what was going to be a one-month project for Mythbusters. She begged her producers to let her stay in SF, which she did until late ’11. Now she’s back in Australia as a TV producer there, but was here for two months in 2012 for the first Music Video Race, and flew in for 10 days to be back in SF for the race this year. In the months leading up to each, there was a lot of organizing via Skype.

The 2012 videos were screened at a sold-out Rickshaw Stop show, where doppio’s video for “Beware of Cobra,” directed by filmmaking team the Outer Avenues, won overall. But beyond that, the videos gained artists more recognition. WATERS’ Vidola Productions-created video for “Mickey Mantle” premiered on the popular music blog Consequence of Sound, and the French Cassettes “Mouth Drum” video nearly went viral, earning director Dalan McNabola a few additional music video shoots from the exposure.

There are actual prizes too, including recording time with an engineer at Studio SQ for the bands, gear rental from popular grip and electric house DTC for the filmmakers, classes through TechShop, Vimeo memberships, Bay Area Video Coalition memberships, and more. A panel of judges including Noise Pop staff, and Bay Guardian film editor Cheryl Eddy (who, full disclosure, accepted judging responsibilities after I began work on this story), will choose the winners.

Still, the real goals of the race are collaboration and artistic expression. “I don’t think anybody is looking for this weekend to make them famous,” Lillis say. In what feels like direct contrast to the ethos of the Music Video Race, elsewhere in the city this weekend was the Chipotle Cultivate Festival, a free outdoor concert in Golden Gate Park with “Chipotle Eats” meals available for purchase.

“This is a passion project for us,” says Marker. “We both have full-time jobs while we put this on. What do we get out of this? It was definitely the most fun weekend I had of 2012. It was a year of work into 48 hours. And it’s about what other people get out of it, you know?”

Depending on how this year goes, Marker and Lillis are hoping to expand the Music Video Race to other cities, including Boston, Austin, and Sydney so far, just based on their own personal connections in these places. But before that, they’ll need to get through the weekend of this second annual competition.

“[You hope that] everybody just gets along, but you kind of want some craziness,” Marker says.

“There are a lot of personalities in the room. But everyone comes to it with a good attitude,” Lillis adds.

#MVRSF

At 10am the next morning after the race kickoff, inside the stuffy SUB-Mission venue space, the Cory K. Riley cast and crew seems to have tripled in size. Along with Riley, there’s producer Stuart Griese, director of photography Ryan Thomas, gaffer Matt Stouppe (Thomas and Stouppe own their own company, RTMS), first assistant director Alun Lee, art director Norah Hoover, makeup artist Laura Grassi, and a likely half a dozen more milling about, at any given moment.

There’s professional lighting and camera equipment from DTC laced throughout the cavernous three-room space, a snack table at the bar near the front with chorizo and egg burritos, tortilla chips and hummus, a big bottle of OJ, fresh fruit. And there are colorful Cosby sweaters and other clothing on the center stage of the venue, splayed out by the band as possible wardrobe choices.

Soon enough, Magic Fight will be windblown with twigs, spritzed in the face with water, dragged on the ground, and surrounded by beautiful young women in island-print dresses and coolly detached expressions.

But long before that, the four men of Magic Fight are hanging out front of the electric blue building, eating breakfast and waiting to shoot the first scene of the as-yet-unknown concept. They have a naturally light and upbeat energy between them, frequently joking with one another, ribbing, making puns, laughing; you’d never guess they were such a friendly bunch based on the somber tone of the song we’ll hear repeated all day as the cameras roll.

“Grand Children,” is an emotional indie pop rollercoaster off the band’s April 2013 album Wooden Swords and Stolen Echoes. The chorus methodically repeats the lyrics, “I want to die,” as octaves slowly rise and fall like rolling waves beneath them. There’s the sound of literal waves subtly crashing beneath the track as well, along with Alex Haager’s distressed vocals and gentle ukulele plucking, Alex Pinto’s bass, Jeff Gist’s steady drumming, and Hernando Buitrago’s twinkling keys.

The band members agree they’re all a part of the Music Video Race because of Buitrago. “I went to the [Music Vide Race] screening last year,” he explains. “I saw that Tim had a gathering at Hotel Utah a month ago, and I went — no one else wanted to go with me, but I went.” All laugh in unison. “I met Tim and he was down with having Magic Fight in it.”

“It was one of our classic email conversations that start between the hours of 2am and 8am, which seems to be how we communicate in this band,” Pinto says.

“I seem to remember a lot of screaming and finger-pointing,” Gist adds with one of his frequent sly smiles.

“Hernando has really good ideas, so we trust him,” Pinto concludes.

Haager and Buitrago say they first met at the Little Shamrock in the Inner Sunset over a game of backgammon, which Haager lost. That was the only game they played, but they ended up playing music together, or so the story goes. The others knew Buitrago through mutual friend Jessica Nguyen, a.k.a the Bicycle Bánh Mì owner.

They’re each talented in their own right, all in their late 20s, having played in various bands before coming together as this foursome for the first time in October of 2012 at Public Works. Previously, Haager conceived of Magic Fight as some sort of an electro-pop solo project — there’s an old Myspace page out there to prove it. He also played in Berlin and Brooklyn based quartet Hungry, Hungry Ghost.

And Pinto plays in his own jazz trio — which actually played its last SF show the night of the Music Video Race shoot — and also organizes the experimental jazz SF Offside Festival. He’ll be leaving Magic Fight too, at the end of summer, when he moves with his wife to India on a Fulbright Scholarship, where he’ll be creating new music content in jazz studies with South Indian classical music at the Swarnabhoomi Academy of Music (his father grew up near the area). Though, he jokes, he may try to bring the band out to India for one show, his last performance with Magic Fight will be July 14 at Brick and Mortar Music Hall.

The band and I have kept up with others in the race through the hashtag #MVRSF on Instagram and Twitter. Everyone’s been posting photos and geotagging their locations, tweeting about their late nights and crazy shoots. But at this point, Magic Fight has yet to film a scene. “People were shooting all night long,” Buitrago says incredulously. “They were like, ‘Wrapping up! Four in the morning.'” Through the hashtag, we see scenes of ninjas in sports cars, bands playing in the park and at the beach, children with war-paint, balloons for days, and tiny voodoo dolls.

Later, Marker and Lillis tell me they were able to visit 11 different sets on Saturday: “We discovered A-1 literally underneath his apartment building covered in dust and cobwebs; Animal Friends were conducting some sort of healing ritual in a Mission apartment; we walked into a house in Oakland to find two guys from Battlehooch dangling another member out of a house window; we caught a werewolf arm wrestling a woman at dusk down past Third Street. Oh the funniest by far was rocking up to the parking lot at Secret Studios and finding what we first thought was an abandoned set but then heard the members of Giggle Party screaming from inside the parked box truck.”

“Magic Fight’s set up had the most manpower and fancy gear for sure.”

HURRICANE SEASON

An hour or so after Magic Fight finish hanging out in front of SUB-Mission with breakfast burritos, Haager is wearing one of his colorful knit sweaters inside the darkened middle room of the venue, and there’s a bright halo of lights aimed directly on his face. He starts on a depressed blue couch covered in braches, leaves, flora debris, gets up and walks toward the camera with a piercing yet forlorn expression, mouthing along to the words of “Grand Children.”

The impressively large crew walks backward, carrying heavy-duty film equipment, lights, and coiled chords. Two additional crew members hoist an industrial-strength fan near Haager and throw even more leaves near him and the pieces shoot across his chest, face, hair. A 20-second bit of “Grand Children” is playing in the background so he knows which words to mouth, but the fan is too loud now and he cracks a smile. Cut, back to one.

Once they get the shot, Haager is flat on his back on the cool ground and Gist and Pinto are pulling him. He’s again mouthing along, this time with a vintage mic in his hand, attached to a tiny amp on his chest. Riley sprays Haager with a bottle of water as he slides. Still, it’s not entirely clear what is going on here, what will bring this all together as a concept.

Many of the crew members are also unsure, but trust Riley’s vision. He seems to thrive in the chaos, pulled like taffy in different directions, and asked his opinion on every factor. Tall and thin, with dark arching eyebrows and a beanie pulled down over a shaved head, he’ll give copious high-fives, frequently ask how everyone is doing, and use the phrase “viciously entertaining” multiple times throughout the weekend.

It’s set designer-art director Nora Hoover who finally enlightens with what’s going on, and then it all clicks: the swirling chaos of water, leaves, branches, twigs, and pink flowers, the women in Hawaiian dresses and leis. Hoover and Riley were up early in the morning picking up most of these pieces at a prop warehouse in South San Francisco, in a situation Riley described to Hoover as “just like Supermarket Sweep.”

The music video would have a dystopic feel, sad yet hopeful: a thrashing hurricane in picturesque Hawaii.

It’s a set location Riley knows something about. He grew up on Kauai, and Hoover lived there for a few months one winter. The two — who met on the set of a Kacey Johansing music video — connected over this.

Riley tells me the concept grew while he, Hoover, and producer Griese drove around the Mission Friday night after they left Sports Basement, listening over and over to the Magic Fight song. As they drove, Riley threw out words and connections in a stream-of-consciousness manner — “rain! leaves!” — while Griese scribbled down the ideas.

“I had pinks, whites, greens,” Riley says of the set aesthetic. “It was [supposed to be like] the late ’60s, thinking of a postcard for those old airlines, like, ‘Come to Waikiki!’ I felt like there was a mod ’60s kind of feel to the sound, whoever recorded the [Magic Fight] album that way, and there’s a line in the song that said, ‘I’ve never been to Hawaii.'”

All of these elements come together in the late afternoon scene. Riley points to the back room, which is being dressed by Hoover and more set designers. He smiles then winks, “that’s going to be a little bit of a freak show.”

The backdrop is breathtaking. It’s lit up bright white, with a big, twinkly arch of pink flowers and branches, a large black circular bed on the ground also covered in leaves. The women in island dresses stand behind Haager and slowly hula. There are other ladies propped languorously behind him, lounging with outstretched legs in a wicker chair, or on a raised bed with a vintage suitcase behind the action. I later find out they were the girlfriends and close pals of the crew, called in that morning to help out. Leaves and other fragments fall from the balcony.

From behind the camera, it looks beautiful — but will it be enough to win the race? Riley, his crew, and the band will find out this weekend at the Rickshaw Stop, where all the videos will be shown for the first time, and Magic Fight just happens to be playing live. “Even if you lose the race, you end up with a video, which is winning,” says Haager.

MUSIC VIDEO RACE SCREENING

With Magic Fight and Animal Friend

Sat/15, 7:30pm, $12–$15

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

www.rickshawstop.com

ADDITIONAL SCREENING

Sun/16, 7pm, $10

Opera Plaza Cinemas

601 Van Ness, SF

www.landmarktheatres.com

Burning questions

Andrew Lam

June 4, 2013

steve@sfbg.com

A documentary called Spark: A Burning Man Story is arriving on the big screen, with dreams of wide distribution, at a pivotal moment for the San Francisco-based corporation that has transformed the annual desert festival into a valuable global brand supported by a growing web of interconnected burner collectives around the world.

Is that a coincidence, or is this interesting and visually spectacular (if slightly hagiographic) film at least partially intended to shore up popular support for the leadership of Burning Man as the founders cash out of Black Rock City LLC and supposedly begin to transfer more control to a new nonprofit entity?

Filmed during last year’s ticket fiasco — in which high demand and a flawed lottery system created temporary scarcity that left many essential veteran burners without tickets during the busy preparation season — both the filmmakers and leaders of Burning Man say they needed to trust one another.

After all, technology-entrepreneur-turned-director Steve Brown was given extensive, exclusive access to the sometimes difficult and painful internal discussions about how to deal with that crisis. And if he was looking to make a film about the flawed and dysfunctional leadership of the event — ala Olivier Bonin’s Dust & Illusions — he certainly had plenty of footage to make that storyline work.

But that wasn’t going to happen, not this time — for a few reasons. One, Brown is a Burning Man true believer and relative newbie who took its leaders at face value and didn’t want to delve into the details or criticisms of how the event is managed or who will chart its future. As he told us, that just wasn’t the story he wanted to tell.

“We got trusted by the founders of Burning Man to do this story,” he told us. “They were in the process of going into a nonprofit and they wanted to get their message out into the world.”

Two, Black Rock City LLC needed to sign off on the film for it to be distributed, given that the corporation controls the use of images from the event. “Could Burning Man have prevented us from distributing this film? Yeah, they probably could have,” Brown told us. And during my own experience writing and promoting a book about Burning Man, I learned that its leaders resent criticism and can make or break efforts to promote books or movies to the larger burner community.

Finally, as is increasingly the case with many documentary films, the filmmakers and their subjects are essentially in a partnership. Brown and the LLC’s leaders reluctantly admitted to us that there is a financial arrangement between the two entities and that the LLC will receive revenues from the film, although they wouldn’t discuss details with us.

Chris Weitz, an executive producer on the film, is also on the board of directors of the new nonprofit, The Burning Man Project, along with his wife, Mercedes Martinez. Both were personally appointed by the six members of the LLC’s board to help guide Burning Man into a new era.

Brown insists that these relationships had no influence on the film and that the LLC neither requested nor received any editorial changes. “I made it clear to them that I’m only going to do a film that is completely independent,” Brown said.

And his co-director, Jessie Deeter, is a respected journalist and veteran documentary filmmaker whose strong reputation lured estranged Burning Man co-founder John Law to participate in the film, offering the only real questioning of the event’s leadership (although it focused on the decisions in the late 1990s to continue growing the event, not on its more recent stewardship and questions of relinquishing some control to the larger community).

“I’m fair and I’m really proud of my reputation as a journalist,” Deeter told us, noting how important she thought it was to have Law’s contrarian voice in the film.

Still, both Deeter and Brown are also clear that they believe in the leadership of the event. “I found their intentions to be honorable and positive as they deal with difficult-to-solve problems,” Brown said, while Deeter later told us, “I believe in their intentions.”

More cynical burner veterans may have a few eye-rolling moments with this film and the portrayals of its selfless leadership. While the discussions of the ticket fiasco raised challenging issues within the LLC, its critics came off as angry and unreasonable, as if the new ticket lottery had nothing to do with the temporary, artificial ticket scarcity (which was alleviated by summer’s end and didn’t occur this year under a new and improved distribution system).

And when the film ends by claiming “the organization is transitioning into a nonprofit to ‘gift’ the event back to the community,” it seems to drift from overly sympathetic into downright deceptive, leaving viewers with the impression that the six board members are selflessly relinquishing the tight control they exercise over the event and the culture it has spawned.

Yet our interview with the LLC leadership shows that just isn’t true. If anything, the public portrayals that founder Larry Harvey made two years ago about how this transition would go have been quietly modified to leave these six people in control of Burning Man for the foreseeable future.

CHANGING FOCUS

As altruistic as Spark makes Burning Man’s transition to nonprofit status sound, Harvey made it clear during the April 1, 2011 speech when he announced it that it was driven by internal divisions that almost tore the LLC board apart, largely over how much money departing board members were entitled to.

The corporation’s bylaws capped each board member’s equity at $20,000, a figure Harvey scoffed at as ridiculously low, saying the six board members would decide on larger payouts as part of the transition and they have refused to disclose how much (Sources in the LLC tell me the payouts have already begun. Incidentally, author Katherine Chen claimed in her book Enabling Creative Chaos that the $20,000 cap was set to quell community concerns about the board accumulating equity from everyone else’s efforts, but Harvey now denies that account).

In that speech, Harvey also said the plan was to turn over operation of the Burning Man event to the nonprofit after three years, and then three years later to transfer control over the Burning Man brand and trademarks and to dissolve the LLC (see “The future of Burning Man,” 8/2/11).

Board member Marian Goodell assured us at the time that the LLC would be doing extensive outreach to gather input on what the future leadership of the event and culture should look like: “We’re going to have a conversation with the community.”

But with just a year to go until the event was scheduled to be turned over to the nonprofit board, there has been no substantive transfer, the details of what the leadership structure will look like are murky — and the six board members of Black Rock LLC still deem themselves indispensable leaders of the event and culture.

The filmmakers say that the transition to the nonprofit was one of the things that drew them to the project, but the ticket fiasco came to steal their focus, mostly because the nonprofit narrative was simply too complex and confusing to easily convey on film.

Deeter said they decided to close the film with Law and his questions of whether the event should have been allowed to grow so large. “We insisted on having John Law at the end to counterbalance that idea” of who would be leading the event.

As she said of the transition to a nonprofit: “You know that transition is a really, really complicated thing.”

TRANSITION TIME

Yes, and it’s something that seems to be made even more complicated by Harvey and Goodell, who offered dizzying answers to our questions about how the event and culture will be led going forward. All we can tell at this point is that it’s still a work in progress.

“We’re pretty much on schedule,” Harvey told me, noting that he still hopes to transfer ownership of the event over to the nonprofit next year. “The nonprofit is going well, and then we have to work out the terms of the relationship between the event and the nonprofit. We want the event to be protected from undue meddling and we want it to be a good fit.”

From our conversations, it appears that a new governance structure seems synonymous with the “meddling” they want to avoid.

“We want to make sure the event production has autonomy, so it can water the roads without board members deciding which roads and the number of tickets and how many volunteers,” Goodell said. “We did look at basically plopping the entire thing into the nonprofit, but if you look at what we’re trying to do out in the world, we don’t have any interest in becoming a big, large government agency.”

It was an analogy they returned to a few times: equating a new governance structure with bureaucratic tyranny. They rejected the notion that the new nonprofit would have “control” over the event, even though they want it to have “ownership” of the event.

“You just said the control of the event would be turned over to the nonprofit,” Goodell said.

“No, the ownership,” Harvey added.

“Yeah, there’s a difference,” Goodell said.

That difference seems to involve whether the six current board members would be giving up their control — which she said they are not.

“All six of us plan to stay around. We’re not going off to China to buy a little house along the Mekong River,” Goodell said.

“We want to make sure the event production company has sufficient autonomy, they can function with creating freedom and do what it does best, which is producing the Burning Man event, without being unduly interfered with by the nonprofit organization,” Harvey said.

“That’s why you heard it one way initially, and you’re hearing it slightly differently now, and it could go back again,” Goodell said. “We don’t think it’s sensible, either philosophically or fiscally, to essentially strip away all these entities and take all these employees and plop them in the middle of The Burning Man Project.”

In other words, Black Rock LLC and its six members will apparently still produce the event — and it’s not clear what, exactly, the nonprofit will do.

“We are giving up LLC-based ownership control, we are not giving up the steerage of the culture,” Goodell said. “That we’re not giving up. We’re more necessary now than ever.”

PLAYA AS BACKDROP

There are burners who see things in much simpler terms. Chicken John Rinaldi, the longtime burner and thorn in the LLC’s side, was interviewed for Spark but not included in the film. [CLARIFICATION: Deeter and Rinaldi had one phone conversation “on background,” she says, and both deny that he was “interviewed,” as Deeter had told us]. Rinaldi, Law, and others have repeatedly questioned why the LLC doesn’t create a more inclusive and community-based leadership structure, something that would seem appropriate for an event whose value is derived almost entirely by the volunteer efforts of burners, who acquire no equity in the event even after years of work.

But these aren’t the issues that Spark explores. In following both the leaders of the LLC and storylines involving two different art projects and a theme camp, the filmmakers say the film isn’t really about Burning Man at all, but what it brings out in people.

“This film is about ordinary people following extraordinary dreams,” Brown said at a press screening at the Roxie last month. “Burning Man is the context, but it’s not necessarily what it’s about.”

When I asked Brown about whether he paid the LLC for access and the right to use footage they filmed on the playa — something I know it has demanded of other film and photo projects — Brown paused for almost a full minute before admitting he did.

“We saw it as location fees. We’re making an investment, they’re making an investment,” he said, refusing to provide details of the agreement. “The arrangement we had with Burning Man is similar to the arrangements anyone else has had out there.”

Goodell said the LLC’s standard agreement calls for all filmmakers to either pay a set site fee or a percentage of the profits. “It’s standard in all of the agreements to pay a site fee,” Goodell said, noting that the LLC recently charged Vogue Magazine $150,000 to do a photo shoot during the event.

But the issue of paying subjects is a controversial one in the documentary film world, according to a couple of veteran Bay Area documentary filmmakers we interviewed (one spoke only on background). For documentaries that present themselves as journalism, documentary filmmaker Chris Metzler told us, “The rule is, you don’t pay a subject because it will corrupt the process and authenticity you’re trying to capture.”

That rule has become more of a guideline in recent years, particularly as technological advances have made it easier to become a documentary filmmaker. And even the guideline is a little squishy when it comes to interviewing consultants or powerful people who expect to be compensated for their time, or with wanting to ensure people of limited means can take part in a film’s promotion.

Metzler also said that a financial arrangement can influence a film less than an ideological or cultural affinity. That can be particularly strong in the Burning Man world, as Weitz told us, conceding that most art done on Burning Man ends up being at least a little hagiographic: “I think it’s inevitable whenever anyone writes about or makes a film about Burning Man, because we love it.”

Metzler said he simply doesn’t pay sources, but he also said the determining factor should be, “Does it change what you have access to and how people behave?”

TWO VIEWS

There are at least a couple ways for burner true believers to look at the event, its culture, and its leadership. One is to see Burning Man as a unique and precious gift that has been bestowed on its attendees by Harvey, its wise and selfless founder, and the leadership team he assembled, which he formalized as an LLC in 1997.

That seems to be the dominant viewpoint, based on reactions that I’ve received to past critical coverage (and which I expect to hear again in reaction to this article), and it is the viewpoint of the makers of this film. “They’ve dedicated their lives to creating this platform that allows people to go out and create art,” Brown said.

Another point-of-view is to see Burning Man as the collective, collaborative effort that it claims to be, a DIY experiment conducted by the voluntary efforts of the tens of thousands of people who create the art and culture of Black Rock City from scratch, year after year.

Yes, we should appreciate Harvey and the leaders of the event, and they should get reasonable retirement packages for their years of effort. But they’ve also had some of the coolest jobs in town for a long time, and they now freely travel the world as sort of countercultural gurus, not really working any harder than most San Franciscans.

Should the gratitude we feel toward them really be so much greater than the gratitude they feel toward us, the people who hold fundraisers and make sacrifices and toil for months on end for no compensation to give Burning Man its artistic, cultural, and financial value?

In that sense, it’s the community that has gifted Burning Man to the people who run it. So, as Spark claims, is the LLC really planning to gift it back? We’ll see. As Weitz told me when we discussed that idea and whether it’s really true, “I think everyone wants to live up to that phrase.”

Brown also told us that final phrase might have been a little wishful thinking, or perhaps a prompt for burners: “I wrote that card for the end of the film expressing the intention we heard from the Burning Man founders, but I also wrote it to show that it is a process that is just beginning, and we do not yet know the outcome. My bet is that the community will hold them to it.”

Guardian City Editor Steven T. Jones is the author of The Tribes of Burning Man: How an Experimental City in the Desert is Shaping the New American Counterculture (2011, CCC Publishing).

Vanishing city

Andrew Lam

May 21, 2013

239

rebecca@sfbg.com

On a recent Tuesday night, some of the city’s most influential developers, architects, and land-use lawyers gathered in a conference room at the ritzy W Hotel for a panel discussion, titled, “San Francisco’s Housing Crisis: Can the Tech Boom Help Us?”

It was a provocative question by any measure, but equally intriguing was the lack of even a hint of objection to the dead-serious framing of increasing unaffordability as a “crisis.”

Even among well-heeled property brokers at the event, which was hosted by San Francisco Magazine and the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition, there appears to be universal acceptance that the city stands at a crossroads.

“The question asks itself: Who gets to live in San Francisco?” Tim Colen, HAC’s executive director, stated by way of introduction.

To break it down into extremely simplified terms: High-salaried professionals easily make the cut, while tenants of modest means who lack stable rent control are more hard-pressed to find housing they can afford. Opinions on how to approach this problem differ sharply.

Colen and other panelists posited that the solution is to build as the city has never built before, aiming for the construction of 100,000 units in the next two decades. But panelist Peter Cohen of the San Francisco Council of Community Housing Organizations countered that today’s development projects aren’t being constructed for people who actually live in the city, 61 percent of whom make less than 120 percent of the Area Median Income.

The city’s real-estate market is invariably described by those who closely track it as “hot,” or “bubbly,” bringing to mind a cappuccino, perhaps, that induces a jittery feeling. Speculation abounds.

The ripple effect extends beyond residential units. All across the seven-by-seven peninsula that once represented a haven for misfits and iconoclasts, stories abound of arts organizations, nonprofits, and community gathering spaces getting priced out, pressured to move, or otherwise swept away due to economic circumstances beyond their control.

From 2009 to 2013, UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti noted, explosive job growth coincided with San Francisco bearing the third-largest spike in rental prices on average, nationwide. In 2011, San Francisco rents were 34 percent higher than they had been 2003; by 2012, they had jumped to 53 percent higher, according to a market analysis prepared by The Concord Group. According to San Francisco Rent Board data, 1,757 eviction notices were filed from March of 2012 to February of 2013, reflecting a 12-year high.

“The problem has serious social consequences,” Moretti said at the event, sounding for an instant like a tenant advocate. “There is a serious amount of displacement.”

Every upheaval is messy, every tenant-landlord rift is complicated, and circumstances vary case by case. But taking a broad view, the overwhelming consequence of San Francisco’s gale-force property market pressure is a cultural shift; the fabric of a longstanding community is unraveling. Below are a few stories of the people and projects that are finding they won’t be able to stay in the San Francisco spaces they occupy for much longer.

THE CORNER OF HAIGHT AND RESENTMENT

Jon Zuckman, better known as Jon Sugar, showed up for a May 15 court appearance on his pending eviction proceeding with an entourage in tow. He was flanked by LGBT housing activist Tommi Mecca, perennial political candidate and sex worker Starchild, and radical activist Jerry the Faerie, among others, all longtime characters of the city’s lefty, radical LGBT scene.

Judge James Robertson, citing a letter he’d received from Zuckman’s doctor, agreed to grant a 60-day continuance, “for the purpose of allowing the defendant to try and locate alternative housing.”

A former KPFA radio personality, comic, writer, and DJ, Zuckman moved to San Francisco in his early 20s and lived in the Haight for 40 years. He’s now 63. He played in a band, ran an underground sex venue called the Mini Adult Theater, helped organize against a Republican-led 1978 proposal to ban gay teachers from California schools, supported AIDS benefits and battered-women support groups, and founded GAWK, the Gay Artists and Writers Kollective. He’s getting evicted from the Stanyan Street apartment building he’s lived in for 25 years, and has no idea where he’ll go after that.

Officially, he’s being evicted for violating the terms of a legal stipulation hashed out with landlord Al DeLorenzi pertaining to a bedbug infestation treatment. Zuckman claims he notified his landlord about the pest problem two years ago and no action was taken until he phoned the Department of Public Health.

DeLorenzi told the Bay Guardian that Zuckman is to blame for the bugs and that he’s just trying to keep the infestation in check. “There is no comment, he can say what he wants to say about this and that,” DeLorenzi said when reached by phone.

Complaints filed with the city’s Department of Public Health reveal a host of issues associated with the property over the years, from mice to broken light fixtures to a malfunctioning door buzzer.

Zuckman lives with a roommate in a rent-controlled unit, paying considerably less than tenants who pay market rate to live in the building. “I live,” he tells people, “on the corner of Haight and resentment.”

Zuckman is disabled, and says he’s undergone seven surgeries on his foot, plus a knee replacement. Asked if he’s on a fixed income, he responds, “It’s broken. I am on disability. It’s $869 a month. My rent is $600. My phone and Internet is like $55 to $60. And the rest is like, party, party, party.”

Tony Robles, of the elder advocacy organization Senior Disability Action, submitted a letter to the court in support of Zuckman. Robles said his office has experienced a spike in demand for services lately. “We’ve been having a large increase in calls, and people walking in and wanting to know if there’s available housing,” he says, adding that most clients are seniors grappling with eviction. “A lot of these folks, they’re scared.”

For his part, Jon Sugar is trying to maintain his sense of humor. “If I curl into a ball and let out with great heaving sobs, it’s not going to help,” he says. He doesn’t know of any good answers for stemming the tide of evictions currently sweeping San Francisco. “There’s got to be other ways than throwing crippled old DJs out into the street,” he says. Then he lets out a laugh. “I crack me up.”

URBAN FARMS AND CIRCUS ARTS: MAKE WAY FOR DEVELOPMENT

On a recent Saturday, the collective that started Esperanza Gardens hosted an event at its tiny fenced-in San Francisco garden plot, billed as a “be-in.” Ukulele music floated in the air as several people painted sweeping brushstrokes onto a mural. Volunteers dished up organic pizza with donated ingredients, cooked in a handcrafted cob oven. A dreadlocked gardener named Ryan Rising was preparing to host a permaculture workshop. The sun was hot, and flowers bloomed in vibrant hues.

Esparanza Gardens was started four years earlier, and the suntanned gardeners gathered under the shade of a 20-foot high cypress that had been a wee sapling when they first started out. But the afternoon gathering was bittersweet; this was a farewell ceremony.

They’d always known the project would be temporary. “We definitely understood what we were getting into,” explained Jonathan Youtt, an urban farmer clad in purple overalls and a straw hat, who’s recently been devoting more time to an urban farming project in Oakland.

The landlord, Lloyd Klein, had granted rent-free use of the space to the underfunded farmers with the stipulation that they’d have to clear out when the time came. He’s since secured entitlements for an ultra-green, four-unit building for that lot and told the Guardian he hopes to break ground by July, if he can secure building permits in time. “We’re trying to accomplish a net-zero energy usage building,” Klein told the Guardian in a telephone interview. “It will create its own energy from solar.”

None of the gardeners seemed to harbor bitter feelings toward Klein, who sanctioned their all-volunteer effort, but all those interviewed expressed concern that the loss of Esperanza coincides with the loss of two other urban farming plots in San Francisco. This was a space where they’d raised bees, harvested produce together, and led workshops with groups of at-risk youth from the surrounding area.

“The loss of space to teach farming is what the issue is,” Youtt says. “Without that, we’re going to have a void. It’s tragic in light of what’s happening simultaneously.”

The Hayes Valley Farm, at Fell and Octavia streets, is also on its way to being cleared to make way for housing, an outcome that was anticipated from the start of the project. Another urban agriculture project on Gough and Eddy, called the Free Farm, also has to vacate by the end of the year, when a development project goes up on that lot.

For years, the produce grown at Esperanza and Free Farm has supplied the nutritious bounty that is freely distributed every Sunday at a Mission intersection via the Free Farm Stand. An urban farmer, who goes simply by Tree, spearheaded the all-volunteer project in 2008. “We wanted to make sure that low-income people have access to fresh, locally grown produce,” Tree explained when reached by phone. “Everywhere I look in the Mission, there’s new restaurants. But wherever there’s affluence, there’s always people thrown in the cracks.”

The loss of a sliver of urban farms is just one change that could dramatically transform that Mission District parcel, located on Bryant between 18th and 19th streets. The Esperanza garden plot is sandwiched up against an arts venue called Inner Mission, which has been hosting events like circus and burlesque shows and aerial arts performances in its recently renovated space since January. Inner Mission is located in the same building that previously housed CELLspace (“CELL” stood for Collective Exploratory Learning Lab), a famed underground San Francisco arts collective launched in the 1990s.

An online “obituary” penned for CELLspace by caretaker Devin Holt offered a glimpse into what it was like in the early days: “It was 1996 in San Francisco. A time when you could still find a room in the Mission for $300, and the dotcom boom hadn’t turned empty warehouses into prime real estate. When the screen printing business moved out, the dreamers moved in. … The early years at Cell were marked by chaos and construction. Dave X was known to test his flamethrowers behind the building on Florida St., Jojo La Plume created an open craft loft in the homemade mezzanine, and the Sisterz of the Underground offered free break dancing lessons for aspiring b-girls on the main space floor.”

On March 14, the Nick Podell Company, a development firm, submitted a project review application to the San Francisco Planning Department, city records show. The developer has initiated talks about a proposal to raze the warehouse where Inner Mission operates and erect a six-story, 166-unit apartment complex in its place, with parking for 141 vehicles. The company is under contract to purchase the property, according to company representative Linsey Perlov, but it has not yet changed hands. Klein declined to discuss the sale or development proposal at this stage, saying, “I’m not at liberty to speak about it.”

A statement distributed at the “be-in” noted that a group called Mission of the Commons envisions a crowd-funding project that would raise enough funds to purchase the warehouse, though details are sketchy on how exactly this would be accomplished. “Selling off this block to a developer will deeply disable our community, displace many,” the notice reads, “and perpetuate these very issues [of gentrification] we seek to mitigate and stop.”

MISSION BUILDING IS NO PLACE FOR RADICAL ACTIVISTS

The thwack of a stick against a Google-bus piñata at the 16th Street BART station attracted considerable attention on Twitter a few weeks ago during a May 5 event billed as a Mission Anti-Gentrification Block Party. It was organized in part because a 5,200-square feet collective space run by a group of activists is facing eviction from 3265 17th Street. Sometimes called the 17 Reasons building, the property houses Thrift Town, Discount Fabrics and several other businesses at Mission and 17th streets.

The activists signed a four-year commercial lease on the space in August of 2011. Since then, they’ve been using it as a Food Not Bombs cookhouse, where volunteers prepare giant vats of food for the homeless using donated ingredients, and serve it up weekly at the 16th and Mission BART station. The Food Not Bombs collective and two other collective groups, known as In the Works and Rincon, have used the space to host political events, fix bicycles, and provide a place where penniless activists can get projects off the ground.

“The whole point was to make an accessible space,” explained Chema Hernandez Gil, who is involved with the In the Works collective. “We don’t have that in the Mission anymore.”

Now, their idealistic endeavor is quickly spiraling toward a messy legal clash. This past April, Rick Holman, a managing partner at Asher Insights Inc. whose background is in investment banking and corporate finance, purchased the property. On April 10, leaseholders received a three-day notice to quit, the first step in an eviction, charging they’d subletted the space in violation of their lease terms.

In the Works collective members told the Guardian that the building’s locks were changed and they still haven’t been issued new keys, although they are able to gain access using a keypad. They’ve hired an attorney and are exploring their legal options. They view their plight as part of a wider trend of Mission gentrification.

“Every legitimate tenant who was asked has been issued keys,” Holman said when reached by phone. He declined to answer questions about the eviction, saying, “I’m respectful of these people and their privacy.”

TIME’S ALMOST UP FOR BOOKSTORE OF 41 YEARS

On May 8, Modern Times Bookstore Collective sent out an email blast inviting supporters to a town hall meeting to address the loaded question of what their future holds.

“For 41 years, Modern Times has had its doors open to activists, educators, rabble-rousers, queers, and scholars of all stripes,” the collective members of the bookstore wrote. “We’ve maintained our position as a progressive resource, stocking thousands of titles and collections that you’d be hard-pressed to find at most bookstores: queer theory, sex/uality, disability justice, well-curated and left-leaning section of libros en espanol, critical race studies, anarchy, radical retellings of US history, political economy, socialism, Raza studies, African American and Asian American history and analysis, criticisms of the Prison Industrial Complex, and global activism (just to name a few).”

There are myriad reasons why the bookstore is facing challenges, one being the declining market for print books. But there’s also been an erosion of the store’s membership and customer base; so many of the former shoppers have been priced out.

Collective member Lex Non Scripta described the collective’s community as “politically radical, rabble-rousing activists, artists, and a variety of just total weirdos.” But a lot of them “just can’t afford to be in San Francisco anymore,” they went on, singing a familiar tune. “There’s just been a huge shift over to the East Bay.”

On May 16, the bookstore held a town hall meeting with supporters to hash out possible future scenarios. “We don’t want to close. We’re all very attached to it,” they said. But at the same time, “we want a more sustainable model, and it’s hard to figure out what it looks like for books.”

The future of Modern Times remains unclear, and Non Scripta chalked it up to this: “Capitalism and community don’t really mix well.”

Small Business Awards 2013

Andrew Lam

May 14, 2013

Welcome to a tradition we hold near and dear at the Guardian — our annual round-up of independent businesses that represent the best of entrepreneurship here in the Bay. From a local sweet shop that’s defied the Nestle odds to become the Bay’s best-loved ice cream treat to the Castro’s best new spot for punting and catching, read on for our favorite small businesses now.

>>WOMEN IN BUSINESS: MOTHERSHIP HACKERMOMS

>>COMMUNITY SERVICE: UNIVERSAL MARTIAL ARTS

>>CULTURE CHAMPION: HI TOPS

>>LEGACY AWARD: LA VICTORIA BAKERY

>>SMALL BUSINESS ADVOCATE: BUSINESS ALLIANCE FOR LOCAL LIVING ECONOMIES

>>EMPLOYEE-FRIENDLY BUSINESS: R & G LOUNGE

>>GOLDEN SURVIVOR: IT’S IT

>>LOCAL MANUFACTURING: BABETTE

>>READER’S CHOICE: SHAMELESS PHOTOGRAPHY

Nordic track

April 23, 2013

arts@sfbg.com

SFIFF “The greatest Finnish movie ever made” — drop that phrase on someone (at least a non-Finn) and they will most likely make some crack suggesting there can’t possibly be enough of them for the distinction to matter. But Finland has had a rich and idiosyncratic filmmaking history stretching back to 1907. It hardly begins and ends with Aki Kaurismäki, the droll minimalist who was the first (and still only) Finnish director to regularly win international distribution.

Evidence of that isn’t so easy to find, or especially to watch, however. When a few years ago the Pacific Film Archive hosted a retrospective of fascinating 1930s-40s melodramas by Teuvo Tulio, it was like finding a time capsule left by a forgotten civilization — contents strange, exotic, and sort of wonderful. One yearned for more. But chances to see classic Finnish cinema haven’t exactly flourished since.

So it’s no great surprise that “the greatest Finnish movie” — so say many folk, including Kaurismäki — should turn out to be one that you’ve very likely never heard of. Mikko Niskanen’s Eight Deadly Shots, which the San Francisco International Film Festival is showing in conjunction with Finnish film scholar-director-programmer Peter von Bagh’s receipt of this year’s Mel Novikoff Award, is a five-and-one-quarter-hour rural tragedy starring Niskanen himself as a poor farmer doomed by both self-destruction and a ruthless social system. It’s not an “epic” in the usual sense of narrative expansiveness. Rather, it’s an intimate, deliberately rough-hewn drama that simply takes a very long—but never dull—time to run its course. The SFIFF catalog aptly compares it to Zola. A modern literary comparison would be to the Canadian novelist David Adams Richards, whose bucolic New Brunswick characters likewise stumble drunkenly from one bad decision to another, hemmed in by poverty and despair, yet ultimately achieving a kind of grandeur in their haplessness.

Niskanen was himself from a poor rural background, and such a handful that his father threw him out at age 13. Nonetheless he retained a strong connection to the culture of small farms that typified Finnish life in his youth but was nearly extinct by his death at age 61 in 1990.

Growing into strapping adulthood, he had some success as a 1950s stage and film actor. A man prone to have a hand in everything, he naturally progressed to operating behind as well as in front of the camera. His 1962 feature directorial debut The Boys was widely praised, and commenced a pattern in which his projects almost invariably (even when they were based on someone else’s life or fiction) contained elements of autobiography: in this case portraying a childhood lived partly under wartime privations.

Youth and country life were two of his major ongoing themes. They reached their combined popular apex in his 1967 Skin, Skin, whose sexy young protagonists on rural holiday reflected the era’s rapidly evolving mores to unprecedented box-office success.

Very different was Eight Deadly Shots, directly drawn from a true crime: After serial scrapes with the law (mostly over his illegal brewing of moonshine), an impoverished small farmer had a standoff in which he shot to death several police officers before turning himself in. Niskanen poured a great deal of himself into the story, supposedly going a bit berserk for real when the climactic sequences were filmed.

With its portrait of a well-intentioned but reckless, none-too-bright, alcoholic, eventually suicidal and family-endangering character — one that, by the way, the imprisoned real-life model found painfully accurate when Niskanen showed him the film — the black and white film finds pathos in protagonist Pasi’s steady march toward disaster. He’s too weak to save himself, yet a society in which a small-time farmer can no longer support his loved ones is as much to blame for his downfall as the hooch brewed in a tub in the forest.

The supporting performances (many cast with nonprofessional residents from the shooting locations) can be amateurish at times, but Niskanen’s own central turn is pretty epic. So is the drama he ekes from the minutiae of rural life — a scene of Pasi coaxing his stuck horse out of a snow drift takes on an urgency that could only be earned by a movie that’s made clear just how few resources (animal, vegetable or mineral) this family has.

Expected to be an 80-minute feature, Shots instead wound up being a TV miniseries. (It was later edited down to a two and a half hour feature that’s considered inferior.) It was wildly praised by everyone, even the country’s president. But the much-married, restless Niskanen never experienced such success again, gradually falling into depression and self-pity as various ventures failed to put him back on top. As von Bagh’s own three-hour TV documentary about the late artist makes clear, he was a very complicated man. But no doubt in Finland, like everywhere else, the really creative people are usually a little bit mad.

MEL NOVIKOFF AWARD: AN AFTERNOON WITH PETER VON BAGH

May 4, 3pm, $14–$15

Sundance Kabuki

EIGHT DEADLY SHOTS

May 5, noon; May 7, 12:15pm (includes 10-minute intermission), $10–$15

Sundance Kabuki

1881 Post, SF

festival.sffs.org

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

April 25-May 9, most shows $10-15

Various venues

Screening is believing

April 23, 2013

cheryl@sfbg.com

SFIFF Most contemporary Americans don’t know much about Uganda — that is, beyond Forest Whitaker’s Oscar-winning performance as Idi Amin in 2006’s The Last King of Scotland. Though that film took some liberties with the truth, it did effectively convey the grotesque terrors of the dictator’s 1970s reign. (Those with deeper curiosities should check out Barbet Schroeder’s 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait.) But even decades post-Amin, the East African nation has somehow retained its horrific human-rights record. For example: what extremist force was behind the country’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which proposed the death penalty as punishment for gayness?

The answer might surprise you, or not. As the gripping, fury-fomenting doc God Loves Uganda reveals, America’s own Christian Right has been exporting hate under the guise of missionary work for some time. Taking advantage of Uganda’s social fragility — by building schools and medical clinics, passing out food, etc. — evangelical mega churches, particularly the Kansas City, Mo.-based, breakfast-invoking International House of Prayer, have converted large swaths of the population to their ultra-conservative beliefs.

Filmmaker Roger Ross Williams, an Oscar winner for 2010 short Music by Prudence, follows naive “prayer warriors” as they journey to Uganda for the first time; his apparent all-access relationship with the group shows that they aren’t outwardly evil people — but neither do they comprehend the very real consequences of their actions. His other sources, including two Ugandan clergymen who’ve seen their country change for the worse and an LGBT activist who lives every day in peril, offer a more harrowing perspective. Evocative and disturbing, God Loves Uganda seems likely to earn Williams more Oscar attention.

>>Check out our short reviews of several SFIFF films of interest.

More outrage awaits in Fatal Assistance, Port-au-Prince native Raoul Peck’s searing investigation into the bungling of post-earthquake humanitarian efforts in Haiti. So many good intentions, so many dollars donated, so many token celebrities (Bill Clinton, Sean Penn) involved — and yet millions of Haitians remain homeless, living in “temporary” shelters. Disorganization among the overabundance of well-meaning NGOs that rushed to help is one cause; there’s also the matter of nobody trusting the Haitian government to make its own financial decisions. Peck, a former Minister of Culture, offers a rare insider’s perspective. Though the film’s voice-overs (framed as letters that begin “dear friend”) can get a little treacly, the raw evidence Peck collects of “the disaster of the community not being able to respond to the disaster” is powerful stuff.

There’s more levity sprinkled amid the tragedy (and bureaucratic frustration) contained in Ilian Metev’s Sofia’s Last Ambulance. If nothing else, this doc will make you extremely cautious if you ever find yourself visiting the capital of Bulgaria; its depiction of the city’s medical care is grim at best. An underpaid, harried trio — doctor, nurse, and driver — grapple with dispatchers who don’t pick up and drivers who don’t let ambulances pass, bad directions, outdated equipment, and other unbelievable situations that would be funny if lives weren’t hanging in the balance. Metev never films the patients, instead keeping his focus on the paramedics. Sarcastic nurse Mila Mikhailova is a standout, sweetly calming down an injured child, bluntly advising a drug addict, and joking about her love life with her co-workers. Only during rare moments of downtime does her exhaustion emerge.

>>Dennis Harvey on SFIFF’s Finnish angle.

More lives in chaos — albeit slightly more existentially — are depicted in A River Changes Course, which picked up a Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Cambodian American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam followed a trio of rural Cambodian families over several years, eventually crafting a vividly-shot, meditative look at lives being forced to modernize. Talk about frustrating: farmers grapple with a new worry — debt — so the eldest daughter heads to Phnom Penh to work in a factory. But the paltry wages she earns aren’t enough to offset the money they will have to spend on food, since they can’t farm enough to eat without her around to help. Elsewhere, a teenage boy who figured he’d grow up to be a fisherman takes a backbreaking planting job when the fish grow scarce; he confesses to Mam that he’s long since given up any dreams of getting an education. “Progress” has rarely felt so bleak.

Adding a much-needed dose of quirk to all of the above is Kaspar Astrup Schröder’s Rent a Family Inc., about Ryuichi, a Tokyo man whose business name translates to “I want to cheer you up.” He’s a professional stand-in, offering himself or any of his rotating cast of staffers to pretend to be friends or relatives in situations, including weddings, where the real thing is either not available or won’t suffice.

That premise alone would make for an intriguing doc — though there’s a disclaimer that certain scenes with clients are “reconstructed” — but Ryuichi’s career choice feels even more surreal once it’s revealed how dysfunctional his own family is; among a wife and two kids, he gets along best with the family Chihuahua. Though Schröder focuses on Ryuichi’s ennui at the expense of delving into, say, what it is about Japanese culture that enables the need for fake family members, the guy is undeniably fascinating. “I’m like a handyman, fixing people’s social engagements,” he explains — but he has no clue how to mend his own. *

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

April 25-May 9, most shows $10-15

Various venues

festival.sffs.org

Short takes: SFIFF week one

April 23, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

April 25-May 9, most shows $10-15

Various venues

festival.sffs.org

The Artist and the Model (Fernando Trueba, Spain, 2012) The horror of the blank page, the raw sensuality of marble, and the fresh-meat attraction of a new model — just a few of the starting points for this thoughtful narrative about an elderly sculptor finding and shaping his possibly finest and final muse. Bedraggled and homeless beauty Mercè (Aida Folch) washes up in a small French town in the waning days of World War II and is taken in by a kindly woman (Claudia Cardinale), who seems intent on pleasantly pimping her out as a nude model to her artist husband (Jean Rochefort). As his former model, she knows Mercè has the type of body he likes — and that she’s capable of restoring his powers, in more ways than one, if you know what I mean. Yet this film by Fernando Trueba (1992’s Belle Époque) isn’t that kind of movie, with those kinds of models, especially when Mercè turns out to have more on her mind than mere pleasure. Done up in a lustrous, sunlit black and white that recalls 1957’s Wild Strawberries, The Artist and the Model instead offers a steady, respectful, and loving peek into a process, and unique relationship, with just a touch of poetry. Fri/26, 1pm, and Sun/28, 6:30pm, Kabuki. (Kimberly Chun)

The Daughter (Alexander Kasatkin and Natalia Nazarova, Russia, 2012) Imagine a serial-killer tale as directed by Tarkovsky and you’ll get an idea of this fascinating, ambiguous Russian drama by co-directors Aleksandr Kasatkin and Natalia Nazarova. Someone is murdering teenage girls in what otherwise seems a tranquil village backwater. That’s one reason the almost painfully naïve Inna (Maria Smolnikova) is kept on a fairly tight leash by her gruff, conservative widower father (Oleg Tkachev), who expects her to perform all housekeeper duties and mind a little brother. When brash, borderline-trashy new schoolmate Marta (Yana Osipova) surprisingly decides to make Inna her best friend, she’s both a liberating and dangerous influence. Less interested in narrative clarity than issues of morality, spirituality, and guilt (at one point the killer confesses to a priest whose daughter he murdered — tormenting the cleric who is bound to confidentiality), this often-gorgeous feature is a worthy addition to the long line of somber, meditative Russian art films. Fri/26, 6:15pm, and Sun/28, 1pm, Kabuki; May 6, 9pm, PFA. (Dennis Harvey)

The Kill Team (Dan Krauss, US, 2012) Dan Krauss’ documentary chronicles the shocking case of a US Army unit in Afghanistan whose squad leader, one Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, encouraged his men to kill unarmed, unaccused civilians for fun, then cover it up as alleged self-defense. (He also collected severed fingers for an eventual bone necklace.) When subordinate Adam Winfield was disturbed enough by this to tell his parents (his father a Marine vet), and ponder informing officials, he was threatened with his own lethal “accident.” Once the scandal finally broke, he found himself on military trial for murder along with Gibbs and others. While sometimes a little too slickly made in a narrative-feature kind of way, this is a potent look at the vagaries of military justice, not to mention a military culture that can foster dangerously frustrated adrenaline junkies. As one of Winfield’s fellow accused puts it, Afghanistan was “boring as fuck” because they expected to be “kickin’ ass” when “instead we’re forced to help ’em build a well, or a school, or whatever.” Another shrugs “It was nothing like everyone hyped it up to be … and that is probably partly why, uh, things happened.” Fri/26, 9pm, PFA; May 6, 3:15pm, and May 7, 6pm, Kabuki; May 9, 6pm, New People. (Harvey)

Rosie (Marcel Gisler, Switzerland, 2013) Moms: can’t live with ’em … and can’t live with ’em. Roughly, that’s the predicament of successful gay writer Lorenz (Fabian Kruger) when his hard-drinking independent mater Rosie (Sibylle Brunner) keels over with a heart attack. His heart is with his tough old bird of a mother — unlike his more conventional sister (Judith Hofmann) — though a young, adorable fanboy of a neighbor (Sebastian Ledesma) is intent on competing for his attentions. Director and co-writer Marcel Gisler spares no warmth or care when it comes to filling out the story fully, as when Lorenz discovers that he has more in common with his seemingly inaccessible late father than he ever imagined. While Rosie paints a rosier, slightly more sentimental picture, imagine a warmer and fuzzier yet still renegade Rainer Werner Fassbender nursing a wisecracking, headstrong Emmi post-1974’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Fri/26, 9:30pm, Kabuki; Sun/28, 9pm, PFA; Tue/30, 6pm, Kabuki. (Chun)

You’re Next (Adam Wingard, US, 2011) The hit of the 2011 Toronto Film Festival’s midnight section — and one that’s taking its sweet time getting to theaters — indie horror specialist (2010’s A Horrible Way to Die, 2007’s Pop Skull, 2012’s V/H/S) Adam Wingard’s feature isn’t really much more than a gussied-up slasher. But it’s got vigor, and violence, to spare. An already uncomfortable anniversary reunion for the wealthy Davison clan plus their children’s spouses gets a lot more so when dinner is interrupted by an arrow that sails through a window, right into someone’s flesh. Immediately a full on siege commences, with family members reacting with various degrees of panic, selfishness, and ingenuity, while an unknown number of animal-masked assailants prowl outside (and sometimes inside). Clearly fun for its all-star cast and crew of mumblecore/indie horror staples, yet preferring gallows’ humor to wink-wink camp, it’s a (very) bloody good ride. Sat/27, 11:30am, Kabuki; May 1, 9:45pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

Thérèse (Claude Miller, France, 2012) Both Emma Bovary and Simone de Beauvoir would undoubtedly relate to this increasingly bored and twisted French woman of privilege stuck in the sticks in the ’20s, as rendered by novelist Francois Mauriac and compellingly translated to the screen by the late director Claude Miller. Forbiddingly cerebral and bookish yet also strangely passive, Thérèse (Audrey Tautou) looks like she has it all from a distance — she’s married to her best friend’s coarse, hunting-obsessed brother (Gilles Lellouche) though envious of her chum’s affair with a handsome and free-thinking Jewish student. Turns out she’s as trapped and close to death as the birds her spouse snares in their forest, and the suffocatingly provincial ways of family she’s married into lead her to undertake a dire course of action. Lellouche adds nuance to his rich lunk, but you can’t tear your eyes from Tautou. Turning her pinched frown right side up and hardening those unblinking button eyes, she plays well against type as a well-heeled, sleepwalking, possibly sociopathic sour grape, effectively conveying the mute unhappiness of a too-well-bred woman born too early and too blinkered to understand that she’s desperate for a new century’s freedoms. Sat/27, 3pm, Kabuki; Mon/29, 6:30pm, New People. (Chun)

Ernest & Celestine (Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, and Benjamin Renner, France/Luxembourg/Belgium, 2012) Belgian animators Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier are best known for the stop-motion shorts series (and priceless 2009 subsequent feature) A Town Called Panic, an anarchic, absurdist, and hilarious creation suitable for all ages. Their latest (co-directed with Benjamin Renner) is … not like that at all. Instead, it’s a sweet, generally guileless children’s cartoon that takes its gentle, watercolor-type visual style from late writer-illustrator Gabrielle Vincent’s same-named books. Celestine (voiced by Pauline Brunner) is an orphaned girl mouse that befriends gruff bear Ernest (the excellent Lambert Wilson), though their improbable kinship invites social disapproval and scrapes with the law. There are some clever satirical touches, but mostly this is a softhearted charmer that will primarily appeal to younger kids. Adults will find it pleasant enough — but don’t expect any Panic-style craziness. Sun/28, 12:30pm, and May 1, 7pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

Marketa Lazarová (Frantisek Vlácil, Czech Republic, 1966) An extraordinary evocation of medieval life, this 1966 black and white epic — considered by some the greatest Czech film ever made — is being reprised at SFIFF in honor of the festival’s late board chairman and generous benefactor George Gund, for whom it was a personal favorite. The violent struggle between pagan feudalist clans and rising Christian political forces in 13th century Eastern Europe is dramatized in brutal yet poetical form here. You will be very glad you didn’t live back then, or suffer the privations director Frantisek Vlácil and his crew did during an apparently very tough rural, mostly wintertime shoot. But you won’t forget this cinematically dazzling if sometimes opaquely told chronicle based on a classic Czech novel. Sun/28, 12:30pm, PFA; May 3, 8:45pm, New People. (Harvey)

Museum Hours (Jem Cohen, US, 2012) Feature documentaries Benjamin Smoke (2000) and Instrument (2003) are probably Jem Cohen’s best-known works, but this prolific filmmaker — an inspired choice for SFIFF’s Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, honoring “a filmmaker whose main body of work is outside the realm of narrative feature filmmaking” — has a remarkably diverse resume of shorts, music videos, and at least one previous narrative film (albeit one with experimental elements), 2004’s Chain. Cohen appears in person to discuss his work and present his latest film, Museum Hours, about a guard at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum (“the big old one,” the man calls it) who befriends a Montreal woman visiting her comatose cousin. It’s a deceptively simple story that expands into a deeply felt, gorgeously shot rumination on friendship, loneliness, travel, art history and appreciation, and finding the beauty in the details of everyday life. Sun/28, 5:30pm, Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Patience Stone (Atiq Rahimi, France/Germany/England/Afghanistan, 2012) “You’re the one that’s wounded, yet I’m the one that’s suffering,” complains the good Afghan wife of Patience Stone in this theatrical yet charged adaptation of Atiq Rahimi’s best-selling novel, directed by the Kabul native himself. As The Patience Stone opens, a beautiful, nameless young woman (Golshifteh Farahani) is fighting to not only keep alive her comatose husband, a onetime Jihadist with a bullet lodged in his neck, but also simply survive on her own with little money and two small daughters and a war going off all around her. In a surprising turn, her once-heedless husband becomes her solace — her silent confidante and her so-called patience stone — as she talks about her fears, secrets, memories, and desires, the latter sparked by a meeting with a young soldier. Despite the mostly stagy treatment of the action, mainly isolated to a single room or house (although the guerilla-shot scenes on Kabul streets are rife with a feeling of real jeopardy), The Patience Stone achieves lift-off, thanks to the power of a once-silenced woman’s story and a heart-rending performance by Farahani, once a star and now banned in her native Iran. Mon/29, 6:30pm, and Tues/30, 8:45pm, Kabuki. (Chun)

Peaches Does Herself (Peaches, Germany, 2012) Canadian-born yet the quintessential modern Berlin act — transgressively sexed-up electroclash slash-performance artist — Peaches delivers an expectedly high-concept live show in this nimbly cinematic concert movie. The first 15 minutes or so are absolutely great: raunchy, hilarious, imaginatively staged (completely with an orgiastically inclined dance troupe). But after a while it really begins to bog down in prolonged appearances by elderly burlesque-type standup Dannii Daniels, stilted ones by Amazonian transsexual Sandy Kane, and an attempt at a quasi-romantic-triangle narrative that is meant to be funny and outrageous but just kinda lies there. Diehard fans will be thrilled, but most viewers will hit an exhaustion point long before the film reaches its (admittedly funny) fadeout. Mon/29, 9:45pm, and May 2, 9:15pm, Kabuki. (Harvey) *

The San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 25-May 9 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; New People Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post, SF. For tickets (most shows $10-15) and info, visit festival.sffs.org.

Indicator city

Andrew Lam

April 16, 2013

steve@sfbg.com

When biologists talk about the health of a fragile ecosystem, they often speak of an “indicator species.” That’s a critter — a fish, say, or a frog — whose health, or lack thereof, is a signal of the overall health of the system. These days, when environmentalists who think about politics as well as science look at San Francisco, they see an indicator city.

This progressive-minded place of great wealth, knowledge, and technological innovation — surrounded on three sides by steadily rising tides — could signal whether cities in the post-industrial world will meet the challenge of climate change and related problems, from loss of biodiversity to the need for sustainable energy sources.

A decade ago, San Francisco pioneered innovative waste reduction programs and set aggressive goals for reducing its planet-cooking carbon emissions. At that point, the city seemed prepared to make sacrifices and provide leadership in pursuit of sustainability.

Things changed dramatically when the recession hit and Mayor Ed Lee took office with the promise to focus almost exclusively on economic development and job creation. Today, even with the technology and office development sectors booming and employment rates among the lowest in California, the city hasn’t returned its focus to the environment.

In fact, with ambitious new efforts to intensify development along the waterfront and only lackluster support for the city’s plan to build renewable energy projects through the CleanPowerSF program, the Lee administration seems to be exacerbating the environmental challenge rather than addressing it.

According to conservative projections by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the Bay is expected to rise at least 16 inches by 2050 and 55 inches by the end of the century. BCDC maps show San Francisco International Airport and Mission Bay inundated, Treasure Island mostly underwater, and serious flooding the Financial District, the Marina, and Hunters Point.

Lee’s administration has commissioned a report showing a path to carbon reduction that involves promoting city-owned renewable energy facilities and radically reducing car trips — while the mayor seems content do the opposite.

It’s not an encouraging sign for Earth Day 2013.

HOW WE’RE DOING

Last year, the Department of the Environment hired McKinsey and Company to prepare a report titled “San Francisco’s Path to a Low-Carbon Economy.” It’s mostly finished — but you haven’t heard much about it. The department has been sitting on it for months.

Why? Some say it’s because most of the recommendations clash with the Lee administration’s priorities, although city officials say they’re just waiting while they get other reports out first. But the report notes the city is falling far short of its carbon reduction goals and “will therefore need to complement existing carbon abatement measures with a range of new and innovative approaches.”

Data presented in the report, a copy of which we’ve obtained from a confidential source, shows that building renewable energy projects through CleanPowerSF, making buildings more energy-efficient, and discouraging private automobile use through congestion pricing, variable-price parking, and building more bike lanes are the most effective tools for reducing carbon output.

But those are things that the mayor either opposes and has a poor record of supporting or putting into action. The easy, corporate-friendly things that Lee endorses, such as supporting more electric, biofuel, and hybrid vehicles, are among the least effective ways to reach the city’s goals, the report says.

“Private passenger vehicles account for two-fifths of San Francisco’s emissions. In the short term, demand-based pricing initiatives appear to be the biggest opportunity,” the report notes, adding a few lines later, “Providing alternate methods of transport, such as protected cycle lanes, can encourage them to consider alternatives to cars.”

Melanie Nutter, who heads the city’s Department of the Environment, admits that the transportation sector and expanding the city’s renewable energy portfolio through CleanPowerSF or some other program — both of which are crucial to reducing the city’s carbon footprint — are two important areas where the city needs to do a better job if it’s going to meet its environmental goals, including the target of cutting carbon emissions 40 percent from 1990 levels by the year 2025.

But Nutter said that solid waste reduction programs, green building standards, and the rise of the “shareable economy” — with Internet-based companies facilitating the sharing of cars, housing, and other products and services — help San Francisco show how environmentalism can co-exist with economic development.

“San Francisco is really focused on economic development and growth, but we’ve gone beyond the old edict that you can either be sustainable or have a thriving economy,” Nutter said.

Yet there’s sparse evidence to support that statement. There’s a two-year time lag in reporting the city’s carbon emissions, meaning we don’t have good indicators since Mayor Lee pumped up economic development with tax breaks and other city policies. For example, Nutter touted how there’s more green buildings, but she didn’t have data about whether that comes close to offsetting the sheer number of new energy-consuming buildings — not to mention the increase in automobile trips and other byproducts of a booming economy.

Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and president of the BART board, told us that San Francisco seems to have been derailed by the last economic crisis, with economic insecurity and fear trumping environmental concerns.

“All our other values got tossed aside and it was all jobs, jobs, jobs. And then the crisis passed and the mantra of this [mayoral] administration is still jobs, jobs, jobs,” he said. “They put sustainability on hold until the economic crisis passed, and they still haven’t returned to sustainability.”

Radulovich reviewed the McKinsey report, which he considers well-done and worth heeding. He’s been asking the Department of the Environment for weeks why it hasn’t been released. Nutter told us her office just decided to hold the report until after its annual climate action strategy report is released during Earth Day event on April 24. And mayoral Press Secretary Christine Falvey told us, “There’s no hold up from the Mayor’s Office.”

Radulovich said the study highlights how much more the city should be doing. “It’s a good study, it asks all the right questions,” Radulovich said. “We’re paying lip service to these ideas, but we’re not getting any closer to sustainability.”

In fact, he said the promise that the city showed 10 years ago is gone. “Gavin [Newsom] wanted to be thought of as an environmentalist and a leader in sustainability, but I don’t think that’s important to Ed Lee,” Radulovich said.

Joshua Arce, who chairs the city’s Environmental Commission, agreed that there is a notable difference between Newsom, who regularly rolled out new environmental initiatives and goals, and Lee, who is still developing ways to promote environmentalism within his economic development push.

“Ed Lee doesn’t have traditional environmental background,” Arce said. “What is Mayor Lee’s definition of environmentalism? It’s something that creates jobs and is more embracing of economic development.”

Falvey cites the mayor’s recent move of $2 million into the GoSolar program, new electric vehicle charging stations in city garages, and his support for industries working on environmental solutions: “Mayor Lee’s CleantechSF initiative supports the growth of the already vibrant cleantech industry and cleantech jobs in San Francisco, and he has been proactive in reaching out to the City’s 211 companies that make up one of the largest and most concentrated cleantech clusters in the world.”

Yet many environmentalists say that simply waiting for corporations to save the planet won’t work, particularly given their history, profit motives, and the short term thinking of global capitalism.

“To put it bluntly, the Lee administration is bought and paid for by PG&E,” said Eric Brooks with Our City, which has worked for years to launch CleanPowerSF and ensure that it builds local renewable power capacity.

The opening of the McKinsey report makes it clear why the environmental policies of San Francisco and other big cities matter: “Around the globe, urban areas are becoming more crowded and consuming more resources per capita,” it states. “Cities are already responsible for roughly seventy percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and as economic growth becomes more concentrated in urban centers, their total greenhouse gas emissions may double by 2050. As a result, tackling the problem of climate change will in large part depend on how we reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of cities.”

And San Francisco, it argues, is the perfect place to start: “The city now has the opportunity to crystallize and execute a bold, thoughtful strategy to attain new targets, continue to lead by example, and further national and global debates on climate change.”

The unwritten message: If we can’t do it here, maybe we can’t do it anywhere.

ON THE EDGE

San Francisco’s waterfront is where economic pressures meet environmental challenges. As the city seeks to continue with aggressive growth and developments efforts on one side of the line — embodied recently by the proposed Warriors Arena at Piers 30-32, 8 Washington and other waterfront condo complexes, and other projects that intensify building along the water — that puts more pressure on the city to compensate with stronger sustainability initiatives.

“The natural thing to do with most of our waterfront would be to open it up to the public,” said Jon Golinger, who is leading this year’s referendum campaign to overturn the approval of 8 Washington. “But if the lens you’re looking through is just the balance sheet and quarterly profits, the most valuable land maybe in the world is San Francisco’s waterfront.”

He and others — including SF Waterfront Alliance, a new group formed to oppose the Warriors Arena — say the city is long overdue in updating its development plan for the waterfront, as Prop. H in 1990 called for every five years. They criticize the city and Port for letting developers push projects without a larger vision.

“We are extremely concerned with what’s happening on our shorelines,” said Michelle Myers, director of the Sierra Club’s Bay Chapter, arguing that the city should be embracing waterfront open space that can handle storm surge instead of hardening the waterfront with new developments. “Why aren’t we thinking about those kinds of projects on our shoreline?”

David Lewis, director of Save the Bay, told us cities need to think less about the value of waterfront real estate and do what it can to facilitate the rising bay. “There are waterfront projects that are not appropriate,” Lewis said. Projects he puts in that category range from a scuttled proposal to build around 10,000 homes on the Cargill Salt Flats in Redwood City to the Warriors Arena on Piers 30-32.

“We told the mayor before it was even announced that it is not a legal use of the pier,” Lewis said, arguing it violated state law preserving the waterfront for maritime and public uses. “There’s no reason that an arena has to be out on the water on a crumbling pier.”

But Brad Benson and Diana Oshima, who work on waterfront planning issue for the Port of San Francisco, say that most of San Francisco’s shoreline was hardened almost a century ago, and that most of the planning for how to use it has already been done.

“You have a few seawall lots and a few piers that could be development sites, but not many. Do we need a whole plan for that?” Benson said, while Oshima praises the proactive transportation planning work now underway: “There has never been this level of land use and transportation planning at such an early stage.”

The Bay Conservation and Development Commission was founded almost 50 years ago to regulate development in and around the Bay, when the concern was mostly about the bay shrinking as San Francisco and other cities dumped fill along the shoreline to build San Francisco International Airport, much of the Financial District, and other expansive real estate plans.

Now, the mission of the agency has flipped.

“Instead of the bay getting smaller, the bay is getting larger with this thing called sea level rise,” BCDC Executive Director Larry Goldspan said as we took in the commanding view of the water from his office at 50 California Street.

A few years ago, as the climate change predictions kept worsening, the mission of BCDC began to focus on that new reality. “How do we create a resilient shoreline and protect assets?” was how Goldspan put it, noting that few simply accept the inundation that BCDC’s sea level rise maps predict. “Nobody is talking about retreating from SFO, or Oakland Airport, or BART.”

That means Bay Area cities will have to accept softening parts of the shoreline — allowing for more tidal marshes and open space that can accept flooding in order to harden, or protect, other critical areas. The rising water has to go somewhere.

“Is there a way to use natural infrastructure to soften the effect of sea level rises?” Goldspan asked. “I don’t know that there are, but you have to use every tool in the smartest way to deal with this challenge.”

And San Francisco seems to be holding firm on increased development — in an area that isn’t adequately protected. “The seawall is part of the historic district that the Port established, but now we’re learning the seawall is too short,” Goldspan said.

BCDC requires San Francisco to remove a pier or other old landfill every time it reinforces or rebuilds a pier, on a one-to-one basis. So Oshima said the district is now studying what it can remove to make up for the work that was done to shore up Piers 23-27, which will become a new cruise ship terminal once the America’s Cup finishes using it a staging ground this summer.

Yet essentially giving up valuable waterfront real estate isn’t easy for any city, and cities have both autonomy and a motivation to thrive under existing economic realities. “California has a history of local control. Cities are strong,” Goldspan said, noting that sustainability may require sacrifice. “It will be a policy discussion at the city level. It’s a new discussion, and we’re just in the early stages.”

NEW WORLD

Global capitalism either grows or dies. Some modern economists argue otherwise — that a sustainable future with a mature, stable economy is possible. But that takes a huge leap of faith — and it may be the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change.

“In the world we grew up in, our most ingrained economic and political habit was growth; it’s the reflex we’re going to have to temper, and it’s going to be tough.” Bill McKibben writes in Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. “Across partisan lines, for the two hundred years since Adam Smith, we’ve assumed that more is better, and that the answer to any problem is another burst of expansion.”

In a telephone interview with the Guardian, McKibben discussed the role that San Francisco could and should be playing as part of that awakening.

“No one knows exactly what economy the world is moving toward, but we can sense some of its dimensions: more localized, less material-based, more innovative; these are things that San Francisco is good at,” he told us, noting the shift in priorities that entails. “We need to do conservation, but it’s true that we also need to build more renewable power capacity.”

Right now, CleanPowerSF is the only mechanism the city has for doing renewable energy projects, and it’s under attack on several fronts before it even launches. Most of the arguments against it are economic — after all, renewable power costs more than coal — and McKibben concedes that cities are often constrained by economic realities.

Some city officials argue that it’s more sustainable for San Francisco to grow and develop than suburban areas — thus negating some criticism that too much economic development is bad for the environment — and Radulovich concedes there’s a certain truth to that argument.

“But is it as green as it ought to be? Is it green enough to be sustainable and avert the disaster? And the answer is no,” Radulovich said.

For example, he questioned, “Why are we building 600,000 square feet of automobile-oriented big box development on Hunters Point?” Similarly, if San Francisco were really taking rising seas seriously, should the city be pouring billions of dollars into housing on disappearing Treasure Island?

“I think it’s a really interesting macro-question,” Jennifer Matz, who runs the Mayors Office of Economic Development, said when we asked whether the aggressive promotion of economic development and growth can ever be sustainable, or whether slowing that rate needs to be part of the solution. “I don’t know that’s feasible. Dynamic cities will want to continue to grow.”

Yet that means accepting the altered climate of new world, including greatly reduced fresh water supplies for Northern California, which is part of the current discussions.

“A lot of the focus on climate change has moved to adaptation, but even that is something we aren’t really addressing,” Radulovich said.

Nutter agreed that adapting to the changing world is conversation that is important: “All of the development and planning we’re doing today needs to incorporate these adaptation strategies, which we’re just initiating.”

But environmentalists and a growing number of political officials say that San Francisco and other big cities are going to need to conceive of growth in new ways if they want to move toward sustainability. “The previous ethos was progress at any cost — develop, develop, develop,” Myers said, with the role of environmentalists being to mitigate damage to the surrounding ecosystem. But now, the economic system itself is causing irreversible damage on a global level. “At this point, it’s about more than conservation and protecting habitat. It’s about self-preservation.”

The Cat Pack

Andrew Lam

April 9, 2013

caitlin@sfbg.com

PETS Lil Bub does not do corporate endorsements.

“I prefer going to my local pet store, so why would Bub endorse Petco?” says Mike Bridavsky, owner of the angel-faced, wide-eyed, underbite-blessed cat from Bloomington, Indiana who is one of the most prominent members of the Cat Pack, a term Bridavsky coins during our phone interview for the cadre of felines currently owning the Internet.

Who’s your favorite Internet cat? Surely you have one. Maybe it’s Maru, the Japanese Scottish fold with a panoply of oddly calming videos showcasing his cardboard box fixation.

At some point, surely, you’ve felt a kinship with that bubble-eyed scowlface Tardar Sauce, a.k.a. Tard, a.k.a. Grumpy Cat, a.k.a. 2012’s answer to the “Hang in there, baby!” poster cat.

If you’re into indie, you may hearing the meows from one of the lesser-known web celebs. Hermosillo, Mexico’s tutu-wearing Luna the Fashion Kitty, perhaps? Or Russia’s elusive Marquis of No No No Cat fame? Internet encyclopedia Knowyourmeme.com lists origin stories for 403 cat memes.

You’re under a rock with poor wifi coverage if you haven’t noticed: Though George Takei, gay marriage, and Jon Hamm’s penis are this moment’s runners-up to the throne, as the song goes, the Internet is made of cats. And some of those cats are making serious money.

Bridavsky rented out his recording studio as his primary source of income before photos of Lil Bub went viral and Vice shot the upcoming documentary based around his and Bub’s trip to the Internet Cat Video Festival in Minneapolis (a fest that is coming to Oakland May 11, more on that later.) He says he spends the long hours required to manage the career of a furry Internet luminary because of the sheer joy Lil Bub brings to the world.

“Bub’s always naked, she doesn’t wear stupid outfits.” Owner Mike Bridavsky tries to communicate his famous cat’s natural personality, unembellished. Photo by William Winchester Claytor

“People are like, ‘thank you for posting pictures of your cat, she gets me through my day,'” he says.

Located at the center of the hype storm as they are, the Cat Pack owners are hardly the ones to go to for explanations for why their beasts have become the Internet’s most important meme (sorry Beyonce.) Sure, they were the ones who posted the video or pics of their cat to the web initially — but most never expected to become part of a zeitgeist. ‘Net viralty is a mystery even to its anointed.

When Bub’s image started hitting aggregator sites like Buzzfeed and TheFW, “I was like, wow, she really has this effect on people,” Bridavsky says. It’s clear from speaking with him that he’s legitimately in awe of the little cat, who lives with dwarfism, bone disease that limits her mobility to an army crawl, “weird toes,” and no teeth.

“She’s had this effect on me since I got her, but I didn’t know it would transfer through photos on the Internet,” Bub’s owner opines. “She always looks like she’s in awe of what’s happening — like she’s from another planet and she’s seeing everything for the first time.”

Today, Lil Bub has more than 112,000 Facebook followers and an online store with totes, tanks, and mugs adorned with her furry face and protruding tongue. Despite her physical handicaps, she’s raised more than $30,000 for animal charities, according to Bridavsky. They only make public appearances at animal shelters or places sponsored by a shelter. Bub has been on Good Morning America, has an upcoming release being published by Penguin Books, and that Vice documentary debuts at the Tribeca Film Festival this month.

Unlike many of her Cat Pack cohorts, Bub’s character is unembellished by human touch. Bridavsky says he tries to make his own rules in his cat’s increasingly crazy fame funnel. “I’ve been sucked into this cat culture. But I feel like it’s a little more tastefully done with Bub. There’s no bad grammar, annoying fonts. Bub’s always naked, she doesn’t wear stupid outfits. It’s just about Bub, and being cool.”

All of Bub’s merch and production is done by his Bloomington artist friends, he says. “Everyone wants a piece of Bub, so I have a lot of muscle power. If Animal Planet wants a series on Bub [author’s note: this is a real thing], I can say yeah cool, but my friend is going to produce it.”

Yet Internet cats mean different things to different people.

CAT CULTURE

It is too early in the evening for people to be wearing animal suits, but there they are: two grown British men, astride a small stage at SoMa’s Butter nightclub at 7pm on a Wednesday. One poor, off-trend soul is wearing a bunny suit, but Chris “Meme Master Meow” Quigley sports a black-and-white Sylvester outfit to host “#kittencamp,” his traveling show from the UK that compiles the best Internet videos, for an open bar full of viral-loving tech heads. Sloshed attendees hold up “LOL” signs for the videos they like the most.

A bartender shakes his head at the geeky enthusiasm that suffuses the air. “I’m not sure what the hell is going on here,” he mutters, pouring another drink for a meme freak.

“#kittencamp” is not solely comprised of cat videos, but Quigley later explains to me in an email: “cats are the biggest meme on the Internet. The cat is essentially a device through which people communicate their emotions, creativity.” He owns two cat suits to reflect this fact.

There are various hypotheses for the popularity of Internet cats. British art philosopher and historian Michael Newall says cats look like human babies, inspiring adoration from us. But baby videos aren’t exactly popping off on Reddit.

The current crop of American celebri-cats is a reflection, not the origin point of our love of strange-looking kittens. Stephanie Karim, founder of Wonder Cat Rescue (www.wondercatrescue.org), says that “cats with cosmetics differences such as amputations, missing eyes, etc., have typically been easier to adopt out as long as there are no long-term medical needs.” She adds that the propensity to take home odd cats is more pronounced in San Francisco than the Central Valley, where Wonder Cat makes many of its rescues.

“Cats with the following conditions have always attracted attention and pulled at people’s heart strings,” writes one adoptions staff member from the San Francisco SPCA, before launching into a laundry list of conditions that include protruding tongues and cerebellar hypoplasia (a neurological condition that makes cats “wobbly.”)

Another popular thesis has to do more with cat people than the felines themselves. Issabella Shields Grantham is the executive director of the Great Wall of Oakland, the outdoor screening space destined to host the Internet Cat Video Festival when it comes to the Bay next month. The festival started last year at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, where 10,000 people amassed for the #catvidfest compilation of the Internet’s best cats. Grantham’s team expects 5,000 for the Oakland incarnation.

“One of the things we’ve found is that dog people get to walk their dogs, but cat people don’t really have a venue to celebrate their pets,” she tells me in a phone call. Grantham, whose interest in crowdsourced content for the Wall led her to #catvidfest, has seen the fest’s hype hit cat-focused eccentrics and Internet-focused hipsters alike. “This is about a desire that people have to hang out with other cat loves, celebrate cats, talk about cats.”

PRO CATS

One wonders how this grassroots desire for cat-person fraternization squares with the rising professional class of Internet meowmasters.

Maru, with help from his enigmatic owner known only as mugumogu, leads the pack with nearly 204 million Youtube views and an endorsement deal with Uniqlo. Grumpy Cat, the undisputed American queen of Internet cats, has appeared on Friskies commercials, buddied up with Anderson Cooper, and made a controversial appearance at this year’s South By Southwest, where the disgruntled, handicapped feline’s long hours of meeting-and-greeting in the Mashable-sponsored tent in the hot Austin climate led to the trending on Twitter of #freegrumpycat. (Maybe fear of hard questions was the reason why Tard’s owner Tabatha Bundesen didn’t respond to my pleas for an interview.)

“I find the idea of professionalizing memes quite odd — and it’s something that I’m kinda uncomfortable with,” writes Quigley. “Memes are a subculture thing and should live (or die) organically, powered by the will of the people online. As soon as you add in money, the value chain breaks.”

But regardless of what Quigley thinks, by and large the Internet cats are out to get big.

DO IT FOR THE EMOTICON

“He inspires something inside me,” says Anne Marie Avey of her famously eyebrowed rescue Persian who was left on the side of the road by his previous owner. The aspiring writer has crafted an Internet personality for Colonel Meow (Facebook fan count at time of press: 157,559; Twitter followers: 2,725; emoticon: ]:<), based around world domination, a love of scotch, and an antagonistic relationship with Avey’s golden retriever Boots.

Scotch, world domination, and foul hygiene mark Anne Marie Avey’s narration in her cat Colonel Meow’s various web endeavors. Photo by Eric Rosario

Avey started a Facebook page for Colonel Meow where she pairs photos of the cat with one-liners like “You may think I look cute … but I’m actually plotting the end of humanity.” The likes started rolling in during fall of last year and now Colonel Meow’s in a Virgin Atlantic TV spot with the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyle and yes, hobnobbing with Anderson Cooper (who apparently, Internet cats do it for.)

She knows not to push Colonel too hard — no sweaty Austin tents for this long hair. “He just went to Los Angeles County Museum of Art the other day and it was so much fun,” says Avey, who asserts that her star loves to walk on a leash and meet humans. “He loved it. But to do that every day … Is it hot out? He’s really furry. He’s going to be panting. There are conditions that you have to be aware of, because he is a cat.”

She’s also careful not to endorse certain pet brands. “I think it’s really important with all those recalls happening in the world to pay close attention to what your pet eats.” But ultimately, Colonel Meow’s fame is an important form of expression for Avey. She recently moved to Los Angeles with Colonel and her boyfriend to pursue her writing career.

Recently, she augmented the Colonel Meow brand with a celebrity news website (www.colonel-meow.com) — well, kind of. Items are limited to a photo and a pithy comment from the Colonel. Sample post: “Roger Ebert dies. But his horrible review of Scrooged lives on. Really, Roger? One star? It’s so entertaining! R.I.P.”

LUNA LAND

Rocio Grijalva isn’t going to lie — the seven hours (by her estimate) she spends each week on the Internet hyping her cross-eyed Persian Luna translate to kitty kibble in the bank.

Luna the Fashion Kitty (shown here in front of her closet)’s owner Rocio Grijalva uses her cat’s fame to raise awareness about rescue Persians. Photo by Rocio Grijalva

“Luna came into my life when she was 2.5 months old, because a mouse broke into my house,” she wrote me in an email. “Long story short, I don’t let Luna hunt mice, she only hunts for sales.” Nowadays, Facebook gives LunAddicts the daily chance to see the kitty’s new hairbows and fur friends — real Persians cats in shelters who need to be adopted.

“My goal is to raise awareness towards Persian cats,” writes Grijalva. “Persians are being mistreated, and end up in shelters or in the streets. The survival rate for a Persian in the wild is very low, since they need a lot of maintenance.”

At a little over 15,000 likes, Luna has her own calendar, but she’s not yet on the level of say, Grumpy Cat. Nonetheless, “Luna gets a lot of fan mail with all kind of presents, from dresses to food,” writes Grijalva. “I don’t remember the last time I bought treats for her. Luna’s fans are more than generous and we are forever thankful to each one of them.”

KITTY LOVE GOES IRL

Consider this the moment in recent history to be a proud crazy cat lady, regardless of one’s gender. Events like “#kittencamp” and the Internet Cat Video Festival, which will make a tour of 10 US cities this year, are proliferating, leaving feline fanatics with evermore options beyond the headphones and computer necessary for a “squeeeee!” search.

The trend is exciting in light of the fact that many traits that have been associated (through a 2010 University of Texas at Austin study, y’all) with cat people may also pre-program them to spend mega-hours in the blue robot light of the computer. Those who lean feline tend to be more introverted, neurotic, yet more open to new experiences than dog lovers.

For further proof that cat culture is expanding past the computer screen, one need only listen to the festival lineup that Grantham has planned for May 11 at her Oakland manifestation of catdom.

The first incarnation of the Internet Cat Video Festival was in Minneapolis in 2012 (shown above). It attracted 10,000 attendees.

#catvidfest will be screened on the vast Great Wall of course, but the day’s other offerings include an aerial “kitten duet” performance by dance troupe Bandiloop, an appearance by Klepto Cat (the San Mateo kitty famed for compulsive burglarizing of the neighbors), cat arts and crafts, seven local animal shelters offering on-site adoptions, Pet Food Express’ foster kitten program, and two separate areas for feline-related vendors (one is specifically for local enterprise, like Unido, an Oakland company that makes cat-patterned infinity scarves.) The entire event is a benefit for the East Bay SPCA.

“Watching Youtube videos is usually a very personal experience,” writes Quigley. “So as soon as you watch them in a public context, it changes things.”

For Grantham, it really is more about the watchers rather than the watched. She’ll be peeping you more than Bub’s angelic visage rendered large on the downtown Oakland wall: “To me, it’ll be more fun watching the audience than watching the cat videos.”

OAKLAND INTERNET CAT VIDEO FESTIVAL

May 11, 3-10pm, $10

Great Wall of Oakland

Broadway and W. Grand, Oakl.

www.oaklandcatvidfest.com

CORRECTION: In the print version of this story, Grumpy Cat is referred to as “the undisputed American king of Internet cats.” Tardar Sauce, a.k.a. Grumpy Cat is, of course, a girl. The Guardian regrets the error.

123...6 Page 2 of 6