Golden Gate Park

Web Site of the Week

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Every day in San Francisco there are group bicycle rides or other events that peddle a healthy lifestyle, as this calendar shows. This week’s highlights: TV Turnoff Week is April 23-29, and there’s a much anticipated Critical Mass ride April 27. And stay tuned for www.bikesummer.org.

David Butcher rides a pedal-powered generator through Golden Gate Park on Earth Day, showing how human energy can be used to create usable electricity, as part of the Sustainable Living Roadshow during the Green Apple Festival on April 22.

Paul Fenn wonders why the Chronicle ran a front page PG&E ad while covering a major CCA story in half a paragraph on page 27

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

I asked Paul Fenn, architect of San Francisco’s community choice aggregation plan and a national expert on CCA power, if the Chronicle/Hearst had contacted him about the announcement of the CCA plan last week (no) and what he thought about its coverage His answer:

“During Earth Day week and the height of the national debate on Climate Crisis, the San Francisco Chronicle failed to show up at a major City Hall press conference on April l7 on a plan to implement the largest municipal solar public works project in history–to be built by the City in San Francisco. The Chronicle blacked out not only the statements of sponsoring Supervisors Ammiano and Mirkarimi, but CCA law sponsor Senator Migden, Assemblyman Leno, and the head of Greenpeace USA, who called the Community Choice Aggregation Plan the world’s leading solution to Climate Crisis.

“Instead of informing its readers about an event that Ross Gelbspan called a ‘globally important event’ and Helen Caldicott called a ‘world leader,’ the Chronicle chose to cover a debate on restricting car access in Golden Gate Park–the equivalent of covering a bar brawl after a declaration of war. All they gave us was half a paragraph on page 27–I could not help noticing a large green PG&E ad on the Chronicle cover page that day.”

Fenn is founder and director of Local Power, an Oakland-based group promoting CCA power. For more information, go to his website at local.org.

Eco trip

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER So you wanna live clean, go green, and leave a low-impact footprint on this embattled Earth — yet you also want to bring the noise, bust a move, and get the rock out? It’s worth wondering about on Earth Day, when everyone seems to be looking to what they can change while the powers-that-be hold their apocalyptic course. Some might argue that a decadent pop lifestyle clashes with the color green — and even those who want to tour consciously must pay a price.

"It is a lot of work," said Oakland musician John Benson, whose veggie oil–fueled bus and curbside shows are a model for ecopunks who want to burn less petroleum and more french fry grease. He has converted vehicles for about five bands so far and plans to attend the Version Festival in Chicago to demo veggie-run vehicles, but Benson and his converts are learning that culling free fuel from oil Dumpsters behind truck stops can be dirty and time-consuming work.

"Bands that are really glamour conscious get really bummed out," he explained. "There’s a time loss and a filth factor, and when you’re on a tour, you’re conscious of making the next show." Also with used oil, "you get dead rats, sweet and sour sauce, and the occasional ball of hair," he added. "You have to be prepared to pull over and pull it out. Be prepared to get your favorite suit covered with rat droppings. It’s a fashion hazard."

Still, creating a cleaner planet doesn’t have to be a filthy business, despite the fact that even green-minded musos such as Smog Veil Records honcho Frank Mauceri admit, "Traditionally, the music industry has not been a green industry. It’s not a business that’s been sensitive to the environment."

Nonetheless, Mauceri, who fought Chicago’s city hall to install an electricity-producing wind turbine and solar panel system atop his new headquarters, and others are trying to buck tradition. San Francisco singer-songwriter Kelley Stoltz’s recent Below the Branches (Sub Pop, 2006) sported a Green-e label, tagging the full-length as the first to be recorded with all-renewable energy purchased through offsets from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour similarly created a climate-neutral solo album, On an Island (Sony, 2006), through an arrangement with the CarbonNeutral Co., planting trees in response to the carbon emissions produced during the disc’s making.

But what can you, humble musicmaker and fan, do? I did a little chatting, Web searching, and non-ozone-depleting cogitating for just a few suggestions on how to green your music enjoyment.

THE TROUBLE WITH CDS Are digital downloads the real green deal for music consumers? Part of Smog Veil’s green initiatives involves eliminating jewel cases and using all-paper Digipaks, eventually moving to solely digital downloads. But the digital divide continues to be an issue — so the nonwired music lover might want to purchase music from bands such as Cloud Cult who have packaged their CDs in 100 percent postconsumer recycled paper with nontoxic soy ink. And those still attached to the shiny plastic discs can turn to Green Citizen (1-877-918-8900) for recycling. Meanwhile old-school DIY-ers such as Benson make a plea for analog: "People are finding bulk tapes in thrift stores and recording over them in the spirit of recycling."

DELIVERY SYSTEM BLUES You’ve proudly purchased that ecofriendly download, yet what to do when the trusty iPod breaks? Apple has a recycling program: any US Apple store will accept old iPods and offer a 10 percent discount on a new player. Nonetheless the highly toxic e-waste generated by all MP3 makes and models continues to worry environmentalists. Cart those busted players to the aforementioned Green Citizen or call pickup artists such as E-Recycling (1-800-795-0993).

LIVE WASTE "Music is a catalyst," Perry Farrell recently told me from London. "It can bring people together and make change fashionable. I’d love to see everyone buying recycled paper and buying hydrogen fuel cell cars." Farrell has done his part with Lollapalooza, which introduced solar-powered stages and came up with fun ways to encourage recycling (audience members gathering the most recyclables have scored backstage passes). Bonnaroo and the Vans Warped Tour have powered stages, generators, and buses with biodiesel. Still, efforts can be as simple as the Green Apple Music and Arts Festival (not to be confused with the SF bookstore). Founder Peter Shapiro is using the fest to promote Earth Day with shows in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City this year while providing city venues with environmentally friendly paper products, garbage bags, and cleaning materials and offsetting the carbon dioxide emissions produced by the festival, making it the largest carbon-neutral event in the country. He told me that he hopes "we’ll get people to think about it for 30 seconds, maybe go buy an energy-efficient lightbulb, maybe carpool or walk to the next show."

GET IN THE VAN Not all young bands can afford to buy carbon dioxide emission offsets and convert to biodiesel when they go on tour, like Barenaked Ladies, Pearl Jam, Gomez, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young — let alone slap their name on a biodiesel company the way Willie Nelson has with BioWillie. But that doesn’t mean musicians have to stop spreading the green love. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin’s Philip Dickey says his Springfield, Mo., group is aiming to convert its touring van to veggie oil someday, but until they can afford it, they’re trying to do their part. "No one in the band has a car. We all ride bikes when we’re in town, and when we’re touring, there’s five of us in a van. Pollution sucks, and pollution coming out of our van sucks. But it’s not like one person in an SUV. We also have a new song called ‘Bigger Than Your Yard’ about how everyone has to have a car." *

GREEN APPLE MUSIC AND ARTS FESTIVAL EARTH DAY EVENT

With Bob Weir and Ratdog, Stephen Marley, the Greyboy Allstars, and others

Sun/22, 11:30 a.m., free

Golden Gate Park

Fulton and 36th Ave., SF

Other events run Thurs/19–Sat/21

For a schedule, go to www.greenapplefestival.com

SOMEONE STILL LOVES YOU BORIS YELTSIN

Tues/24, 8 p.m., $14–$15

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

>

Go green!

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PARTIES, EVENTS, AND BENEFITS

"Arcadia: 2007" California Modern Gallery, 1035 Market; 821-9693, www.fuf.net. Mon/23, 6pm, $125-$350. This soiree and art auction — featuring work by more than 100 artists and hosted by Jeffrey Fraenkel, Gretchen Bergruen, and Thomas Reynolds — will benefit Friends of the Urban Forest, a nonprofit organization that provides financial, technical, and practical assistance to individuals and neighborhood groups that want to plant and care for trees.

"Away Ride Celebrating Earth Day" Meet at McLaren Lodge, Golden Gate Park; (510) 849-4663, www.borp.org. Sun/22, 1:30pm, free with preregistration. The SF Bike Coalition and the Bay Area Outdoor Recreation Program join forces to host this moderately paced ride open to all levels of riders. They provide a helmet and a handcycle or tandem bike. You bring a sack lunch and water. Kids also get to decorate their wheels — bike, wheelchair, or skate.

"Biomimicry: The 2007 Digital Be-In" Mezzanine, 444 Jessie; www.be-in.com. Sat/22, 7pm-3am, $15 presale, $20 door, $100 VIP. Turn on, tune in, log out. In the spirit of the 1967 human be-in that epitomized San Francisco’s hippie generation and made Haight Ashbury famous, counterculture artists and activists have been hosting "The Digital Be-In" for 15 years. This year’s combination symposium-exhibition-multimedia-entertainment extravaganza focuses on Biomimicry as it relates to technology, urban development, and sustainability. There’ll be no Timothy Leary here, but the event will feature live music, DJs, projections, and appearances by modern hippie celebs such as Free Will astrologer Rob Brezsny and Burning Man founder Larry Harvey. Or join in the simultaneous virtual be-in in the Second Life online world. The revolution will be digitized.

"Earth Day Fair" Ram Plaza, City College of San Francisco, 50 Phelan; 239-3580, www.ccsf.edu. Thurs/19, 11am-1:30pm, free. View information tables set up by the CCSF and citywide environmental organizations, as well as a display of alternative fuel vehicles.

"EarthFest" Aquarium of the Bay, 39 Pier; 623-5300, www.aquariumofthebay.com. Sun/22, 12-4pm, free. View presentations and engage in activities provided by 20 organizations all dedicated to conservation and environmental protection, with activities including live children’s music, a scavenger hunt, and giveaways.

"McLaren Park Earth Day" John McLaren Park’s Jerry Garcia Amphitheater, 40 John F. Shelley; www.natureinthecity.org. Sun/22, 11am-7pm, free. What would Jerry do? Commemorate the park’s 80th anniversary with an all-day festival featuring birding hikes, habitat restoration projects, wildflower walks, tree planting, an ecostewardship fair, food booths, a live reptile classroom, puppetry, performance, music, storytelling, and chances to make art.

"$1 Makes the World a Greener Place" Buffalo Exchange local stores; 1-866-235-8255, www.buffaloexchange.com. Sat/21, all day, free. Buy something, change the world. During this special sale at all Buffalo Exchange stores, proceeds will benefit the Center for Environmental Health, which promotes greener practices in major industries. Many sale items will be offered for $1.

"People’s Earth Day" India Basin, Shoreline Park, Hunters Point Boulevard at Hawes, SF. Sat/21,10am-3pm. What better place to celebrate Earth Day than with a community of victorious ecowarriors? Help sound the death knell for the PG&E Hunters Point power plant with events and activities including a community restoration project at Heron’s Head Park, the presentation of the East Side Story Literacy for Environmental Justice theater production, and a display about Living Classroom, an educational and all-green facility expected to break ground this year. Want to get there the green way? Take the no. 19 Muni bus or the T-Third Street line.

BAY AREA

"Berkeley Earth Day" Civic Center Park, Berk; www.hesternet.net. Sat/21, 12-5pm, free. Earth Day may not have been born in Berkeley (it was actually the idea of a senator from Wisconsin), but it sure lives here happily. Celebrate at this community-sponsored event, which features a climbing wall, vegetarian food, craft and community booths, valet bike parking, and performances by Friends of Shawl-Anderson Youth Ensemble, Alice DiMicele Band, and Amandla Poets.

"Earth Day Celebration" Bay Area Discovery Museum, 557 McReynolds, Sausalito; 339-3900, www.baykidsmuseum.org. Sat/21, 10am-5pm, free with museum admission. Happy birthday, dear planet. This Earth Day connect your family to the wonders of &ldots; well &ldots; you know, with a variety of special activities, including seed planting and worm composting, birdhouse building, a bay walk and cleanup, and presentations about insects from around the planet. For a small fee, also enjoy a birthday party for Mother Earth with games, face painting, crafts, and cake.

"Earth Day on the Bay" Marine Science Institute, 500 Discovery Parkway, Redwood City; (650) 364-2760, sfbayvirtualvoyage.com/earthday.html. Sat/21, 8am-4pm, $5 suggested donation. This is the one time of year the institute opens its doors to the public, so don’t miss your chance for music, mud, and sea creatures — the Banana Slug String Band, the Sippy Cups, fish and shark feeding, and programs with tide pool animals, to be exact. You can also take a two-hour trip aboard an MSI ship for an additional $10.

"Earth Day Restoration and Cleanup Program" California State Parks; 258-9975 for one near you, www.calparks.org. Sat/21, times vary, free. The best way to celebrate Earth Day is to get involved. Volunteers are needed at California State Parks throughout the area for everything from planting trees and community gardens to restoring trails and wildlife habitats, and from installing recycling bins to removing trash and debris. All ages welcome.

"E-Waste Recycling Event" Alameda County Fairgrounds, 4501 Pleasanton, Pleasanton; 1-866-335-3373, www.noewaste.com. Fri/20-Sun/22, 9am-3pm, free. The city of Pleasanton teams up with Electronic Waste Management to collect TVs, computers, monitors, computer components, power supplies, telephone equipment, scrap metal, wire, and much more. There is no limit to how much you can donate, and everything will be recycled.

"The Oceans Festival" UC Berkeley, Upper Sproul Plaza (near Bancroft and Telegraph), Berk; Fri/20, 5pm-7pm, donations accepted. This event, sponsored by CALPIRG, Bright Antenna Entertainment, and West Coast Performer magazine, is meant to bring awareness to the problem of plastic in our oceans and to raise money, through donations and food sales, for the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. Featuring music and dance performances, as well as presentations by a variety of environmental organizations.

"People’s Park 38th Anniversary Celebration" People’s Park, Berk; www.peoplespark.org. Sun/22, 12-6pm, free. Celebrate the park with poetry, speakers, music, art and revolution theater, political tables, a Food Not Bombs lunch, clowns, puppets, and activities for children.

LECTURES, DISCUSSIONS, AND WORKSHOPS

"Green Capital: Profit and the Planet?" Club Office, 595 Market; 597-6705. Wed/18, 6:30pm, $8-15. Can sustainable business renew our economy and save the planet? Can activists ethically exploit market systems? Environmental pioneers, from corporate reps to conservationists, will bust the myths and reveal realities of profitable environmental solutions at this panel discussion cosponsored by INFORUM; featuring Peter Liu of the National Resource Bank, author Hunter Lovins (Natural Capitalism), Steven Pinetti of Kimpton Hotels, and Will Rogers of the Trust for Public Land; and moderated by Christie Dames.

"An Inconvenient Truth 2.0 — A Call to Action" California State Bldg, 455 Golden Gate. Thurs/19, 6:30-9pm, $5 suggested donation. An updated version of Al Gore’s PowerPoint presentation will be screened by Sierra Club director Rafael Reyes, then followed by a discussion of the impact of global warming and a progress report on national legislation by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.

"The Physics of Toys: Green Gadgets for a Blue Planet" Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon; 561-0399, www.exploratorium.edu. Sat/21,11am-3pm, free with admission. The monthly event focuses on the earth this time around, giving children and adults an opportunity to build pinwheel turbines and other green gadgets. Materials provided.

BAY AREA

"Agroecology in Latin America: Social Movements and the Struggle for a Sustainable Environment" La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 847-1262, www.mstbrazil.org. Wed/18, 7:30pm, donations accepted. Get an update on Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, the alliance between environmental and social justice movements in the Americas, struggles for Food Sovereignty, organized peasant response to global agribusiness, opposition to genetically engineered crops, and more. Featuring guest speaker Eric Holt-Gimernez, executive director of Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy.

ART, MUSIC, AND PERFORMANCE

"Bio-Mapping" Southern Exposure Gallery, 2901 Mission, SF; (415) 863-2141, www.sf.biomapping.net. Sat/21, 6:30pm, $8-15. Everyone says going green feels good — here’s the chance to prove it. Participate in Christian Nold’s social-art project by strapping into a GPS device and skin censors. Then take a walk or a bike ride while the sensors record your feelings and location. Nold uses the data to make an "Emotion Map" of the city, which you can check out online. (Can’t make Saturday? Nold’s also there Thursdays and Fridays through April 28).

"ReCycle Ryoanji" San Francisco Civic Center Plaza; blog.greenmuseum.org/recycle-ryoanji. Thurs/19, 4-6pm, free. Judith Selby Lang, local students, and visitors to the Asian Art Museum have sewn together thousands of white shopping bags to make their own version of Japan’s most famous and celebrated garden as both an art exhibition and community education project. The 18-foot-by-48-foot scale replica of the raked sand and rock garden can be seen at this reception for the project and on display across from City Hall until Tues/24. (Take that, American Beauty.)

"Green Apple Music and Arts Festival" Venues vary; www.greenapplefestival.com. Fri/20-Sun/22, prices vary. Green Apple combines fun and education with a three-day, ecofriendly music festival in cities across the country. San Francisco’s festival includes shows by Yonder Mountain String Band, New Mastersounds, Electric Six, Trans Am, and others at venues across the city, as well as a free concert at Golden Gate Park. Green Apple provides venues with environmentally friendly cups, straws, napkins, paper towels, and compostable garbage bags, as well as doing its best to make the entire festival carbon neutral.

UPCOMING EVENTS

"San Francisco New Living Expo" Concourse Exhibition Center, Eighth Street at Brannan; 382-8300, www.newlivingexpo.com. April 27-29, admission varies according to day and event. Touting 275 exhibitors and 150 speakers (including Starhawk, Marianne Williamson, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and ganja-guru Ed Rosenthal), the sixth annual version of this event promises to energize, educate, awaken, and expand consciousness. You won’t want to miss the environmental activism panel discussion April 28 at 3pm — or the exhibition hall’s special crystal area.

BAY AREA

"Harmony Festival" Sonoma County Fairgrounds, Santa Rosa; www.harmonyfestival.com. June 8-10, $125 plus $50 per car camping pass. This festival is so green it’s almost blue — in fact, its tagline is "promoting global cooling." There’s a waste diversion effort, a whole Green Team monitoring the EcoStation, compost cans, and tips on how to be an ecofriendly attendee. Plus, it just looks like fun. With Brian Wilson, the Roots, and Common performing and Amy Goodman and Ariana Huffington speaking, how can you miss it?

"Lightning in a Bottle" Live Oak Campground, Santa Barbara; 1-866-55-TICKET, www.lightninginabottle.org. May 11-13. $95-120. It ain’t just a party. It’s a green-minded, art-and-music-focused campout in a forest wonderland. Organized by Los Angeles’s the Do Lab with participation from tons of SF artists, this three-day event is powered by alternative energy, offers ecoworkshops in everything from permaculture to raw foods, and encourages rideshares — including a participant-organized bus trip from San Francisco. Also featuring performances by Freq Nasty, Bassnectar, Vau de Vire Society, El Circo, and other DJs and artists from San Francisco and elsewhere, LIB attempts to change the precedent that festival fun has to be ecologically disastrous.

"Sierra Nevada World Music Festival" Mendocino County Fairgrounds, Boonville; www.snwmf.com. June 22-24, $125 plus $50 per car camping pass. Peace is green, right? I mean, what about Greenpeace? And peace is what this festival, which promotes "conscious" music, is all about. Plus, a range of representatives of environmental and social issues will be tabling at the festival — and registering voters.

BEYOND

"Burning Man" Black Rock City, Nev.; (415) TO-FLAME, www.burningman.com. Aug 27-Sept 3, $250-$280. With its Leave No Trace philosophy and its hippie roots, Burning Man has always been greener than most. But this year it’s getting even more explicitly so with the theme the Green Man, focusing on humanity’s relationship to nature (even though there is no nature on the dry lakebed surface). A pessimist might suggest this year’s theme is just another excuse to waste resources on leaf-themed art cars and that "Leave No Trace" usually translates to "Leave Your Trash in Reno." But an optimist might say this is Burning Man acknowledging and trying to address such issues. Either way, air out your dust-filled tent and pack some chartreuse body paint — it’s going to be an interesting year in Black Rock. *

Love machine

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW To look at the formally austere self-portraits made by the American artist Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) at various points throughout his career, you might surmise, from the repeated images of his stiff, unsmiling visage, that he toiled in obscurity for dry, dusty decades as an administrative underling at a low-level law firm, forever obsessed with organizing his paper clips, pausing from his tedious task only long enough to clean his spectacles on a crisply starched pocket handkerchief and tie the laces of his uncomfortable shoes, polished deep black the previous evening while listening to news of the Lindbergh kidnapping on his wooden Philco tube radio. As the crotchety stepfather of modernism, Sheeler cultivated a stern yet slightly mewling look of quotidian routine, as if neither he nor any other mere individual should assume particular importance amid the daunting technological advancements of his era. Like all true-blue men of meager means in the early part of the 20th century, Sheeler was enthralled with industrial progress and glorified all things steel and chrome. If this clerk allowed himself one indulgence, it was basking in the cult of the machine.

If modernism taught us anything, however, it’s that appearances can — no, should — be deceiving. Hat, coat, and desk chair notwithstanding, Sheeler was no paper-pushing nine-to-fiver. Indeed (a word I imagine he uttered frequently, accompanied by a nearly imperceptible tilt of the head), this self-proclaimed precisionist was rather radical in behavior, artistic methodology, and aesthetic philosophizing — though always politely so. Working with deliberate pacing and patience as a filmmaker, photographer, and painter and alarmingly proficient at drawing and printmaking, Sheeler established a unique dichotomy between new and old, rendering the former as oddly antiquated and the latter as the cat’s pajamas. Fittingly, his remarkable body of work remains strikingly contemporary; thus the "Charles Sheeler: Across Media" exhibition, handsomely installed in the upper galleries of the appropriately angular de Young Museum, has not the aged patina of a haphazard retrospective begrudgingly granted to a doddering éminence grise of yesteryear but the luminous sheen of a classy chassis careening into J.G. Ballard’s Crash by way of the icy David Cronenberg adaptation. Sheeler is Vaughan, so turned on by cogs and shafts, bolts and pylons, that he becomes the ghost in his own machine.

Born in Philadelphia, Sheeler studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, then booked passage for Paris, where he looked askance at Pablo Picasso’s and Georges Braque’s cubist conundrums before returning to the States, plonking down a fiver on a Brownie camera and taking up commercial photography with an emphasis on architecture.

In 1920, Sheeler collaborated with photographer Paul Strand on Manhatta, a six-minute city-symphony film ostensibly based on portions of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass yet excising virtually all traces of the bearded bard’s insatiable lust for life in favor of abstractions formed by bridges, skyscrapers, and the sun setting over the Hudson River. Widely considered the first American avant-garde film, Manhatta screens repeatedly in the gallery and is surrounded by related photographs that further reveal Sheeler’s New York state of mind.

Sheeler soon settled in a rented farmhouse in Doylestown, Penn., with fellow artist Morton Shamberg, but it was the home’s 19th-century stove that Sheeler referred to as his "companion," so enamored was he of its utilitarian exactitude and sensuous shape. Comfortably ensconced in the farmhouse, Sheeler spent years deftly rendering his kitchen and bathroom in ink, paint, and the darkroom’s chemical bath.

Having gained a reputation as a fastidious exemplar of precisionism, Sheeler was hired by the Ford Motor Co. to photograph and make paintings of its factories. Soon after, Fortune magazine commissioned Sheeler to produce a half dozen paintings that "reflect life through forms and trace the firm pattern of the human mind." Naturally, Sheeler looked not to living things for inspiration but to objects simultaneously beautiful in their simplicity and threatening in their potential to destroy: waterwheel, railroad, airplane, dam, steam turbine, and hydroelectric turbine (he really loved turbines).

Among many other career and exhibition highlights are the iconic, ironic American Landscape, in which human-made structures — cylinders, silos, smokestacks — have entirely supplanted natural splendor (score one for culture); experimental photographs of the interior of an 18th-century Quaker fieldstone house; and the dazzling The Artist Looks at Nature, from 1943, in which Sheeler paints himself in the process of sketching his 1932 drawing Interior with Stove, which in turn was based on his much earlier photograph The Stove. In this singular work, Sheeler links various media in which he excelled, positions himself in a perfectly logical space-time continuum, and moves into the realm of the uncanny. For an artist who implicitly championed the places, products, and processes of capitalism and whose every invisible brushstroke stoked the fires of the first corporation generation, this tricky bit of derring-do signals a metarebellion against the industry under whose wheels Sheeler’s entire century would soon be crushed. It’s enough to make you fall in love with that old stove all over again. *

CHARLES SHEELER: ACROSS MEDIA

Through May 6

Tues.–Thurs. and Sat.–Sun., 9:30 a.m.–5:15 p.m.; Fri., 9:30 a.m.–8:45 p.m.

De Young Museum

Golden Gate Park

50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, SF

$6–$10 (free first Tuesday)

(415) 750-3614

www.thinker.org/deyoung

>

The fun keeps dying

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By Steven T. Jones
How Weird Street Faire’s fate got even worse since my last post, with the San Francisco cops now saying the organizers need to cough up $23,833 in fees, to be paid before the May 6 event. What is this, a shakedown? Somebody call a cop. Or maybe someone at City Hall should call off the cops.
banner5.jpg
Unfortunately, the city’s punitive approach to its most beloved street fairs and festivals only got worse last night when Recreation and Park Department staff convened members of the Outdoor Events Coalition to say they’re recommending substantially increased special event fees, so big that events like Bay to Breakers, Love Fest and other events could cease to exist. Rec and Park, an increasingly incompetent department that has bungled its way into a $2 million budget deficit, say they need big bucks to cover their costs and wipe out the red ink. Their proposal calls for charging $50,000 to use the Golden Gate Park polo field, $25,000 for Civic Center Plaza, and $12,000 for Mission Dolores Park. And on top of all this, the city has banned booze from the Haight Ashbury Street Faire of all places. Last year, we warned that fun in the city was under siege. Now it’s starting to look comatose.

The fun keeps dying

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By Steven T. Jones
How Weird Street Faire’s fate got even worse since my last post, with the San Francisco cops now saying the organizers need to cough up $23,833 in fees, to be paid before the May 6 event. What is this, a shakedown? Somebody call a cop. Or maybe someone at City Hall should call off the cops.
banner5.jpg
Unfortunately, the city’s punitive approach to its most beloved street fairs and festivals only got worse last night when Recreation and Park Department staff convened members of the Outdoor Events Coalition to say they’re recommending substantially increased special event fees, so big that events like Bay to Breakers, Love Fest and other events could cease to exist. Rec and Park, an increasingly incompetent department that has bungled its way into a $2 million budget deficit, say they need big bucks to cover their costs and wipe out the red ink. Their proposal calls for charging $50,000 to use the Golden Gate Park polo field, $25,000 for Civic Center Plaza, and $12,000 for Mission Dolores Park. And on top of all this, the city has banned booze from the Haight Ashbury Street Faire of all places. Last year, we warned that fun in the city was under siege. Now it’s starting to look comatose.

Frock you: Givin’ it for Viv — and Funky Chicken 4 Life!

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This just in from drag icon Juanita More and more …

A More Perfect Union: Mr. David and Fauxnique Stage a Fashion Uprising

vivienne.jpg
Uprising, upfrocking

This Friday, two of my favorite performers — Mr David and Fauxnique — have put together a fashion extravaganza in honor of fashion luminary Vivienne Westwood’s show at the De Young. It’ll be a punkrock-drag-drunk-politico-darlings revolution — full of SF’s most flamboyant underground stars. All up in DeDe Wilsey’s DeDe Young garden no less.

Friday, April 13, 2007
6 – 8:30 PM / Show @ 7 PM
de Young Museum / Wilsey Court
Golden Gate Park
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
SF, CA 94118
Free

PLUS — FUNKY CHICKEN: Dining Out For Life (after the jump)

Stop the McGoldrick recall

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EDITORIAL Jake McGoldrick isn’t perfect, but he’s been a pretty good supervisor most of the time, and the recall effort launched against him by a Geary Boulevard merchant is baseless and inappropriate.

The recall is a potent weapon, part of the Progressive Era reforms that gave California the initiative and the referendum. But it can also be easily abused to threaten an incumbent who has done nothing wrong except show political courage on tough issues.

And that’s exactly what’s happening here: McGoldrick, who represents a relatively moderate district, is taking the lead on two key attempts to challenge the city’s car-driven transportation culture. He’s the author of a measure that would close Golden Gate Park to cars on Saturdays, at least for a six-month trial — something the trustees of the de Young Museum have been fighting bitterly. And he’s the chief backer of a plan to add bus-only lanes to Geary Boulevard, which would create a relatively cheap, efficient rapid transit system along one of the city’s main commute arteries.

Those positions have angered a small group of people, led by David Heller, who owns a beauty supply store on Geary and is adamantly opposed to anything that would reduce car traffic or parking on the street. Heller — who ran unsuccessfully against McGoldrick in 2004 — now wants to recall the supervisor, who has less than two years left in office anyway. Heller insists that McGoldrick is defying the will of the voters, because a majority of District 1 voted against Saturday road closures in 2000 and because McGoldrick hasn’t adequately addressed the concerns of some merchants who fear the loss of parking spaces under the transit plan.

Let’s get a couple things straight: the 2000 ballot had a pair of competing road-closure measures that left a lot of voters confused — and the museum people ran a misleading campaign that helped muddy the waters even more. The vote that year was hardly an accurate reflection of how San Franciscans or people in the Richmond view weekend road closures.

In fact, the car-free Sunday in the park is one of the city’s most popular regular events — and a study commissioned by Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is not a fan of road closures, showed that the traffic and parking impacts on the neighborhoods are almost nonexistent. McGoldrick has been willing to stand up to the mayor and the powerful museum board on this, and that’s a good thing.

The Geary transit corridor is tough: any solution that improves transit on the road — and that’s a priority for the city — will leave less room for cars. But that’s the direction the city has to go in. Public transit will only be effective in this city if it can operate quickly and reliably on routes such as Geary — and that can’t happen without some disruption to car travel. The proposal McGoldrick supports would close one lane to cars (possibly by eliminating street parking) and dedicate it to buses only; the buses would have the ability to control traffic lights and would thus in theory be able to operate almost like underground or elevated trains, avoiding the delays caused by car traffic. Digging a subway below Geary would cost several billion dollars and take years; giving buses one exclusive lane in each direction is cheaper and can be done fairly quickly.

No, it won’t be painless, and it’s not perfect — ideally, there probably ought to be a light-rail line on Geary — but in an era of global warming, with all the costs associated with the use of private cars, it’s imperative that San Francisco move aggressively toward improving transit. McGoldrick is absolutely right to be looking for ways to encourage people to get out of their cars — and punishing him for it by forcing a recall campaign is a serious mistake.

Heller needs about 3,000 signatures to move forward. Don’t sign the petition. *

Gore speaks, conveniently

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Intern Sam Devine snuck into Al Gore’s recent local event. Here’s his report

On Tuesday night Former Vice President Al Gore appeared at the Nob Hill Masonic Center in an event sponsored by City Arts and Lectures and the California Academy of Sciences. He spoke in discussion with John McCosker, Chair of Aquatic Biology at the Academy, on the recently championed topic of global climate change.

Copies of Gore’s books, including “An Inconvenient Truth”, were for sale in the lobby. A few minutes after 8p.m. the lights went down in the sold-out Masonic Auditorium. Greg Farrington, Executive Director of the California Academy of Sciences, gave a brief introduction; noting that the Academies’ soon-to-be Golden Gate Park building will be one of the first publicly owned “green” buildings in the nation.

Gore and moderator McCosker took the stage and sat down in the artificial living room habitat – cushy red chairs and a round wooden coffee table with tulips. Gore wore a blue suit with the standard democrat blue tie and choice Tennessee footwear – cowboy boots. It’s safe to say that no one can recall the clothing McCosker wore -– his black-and-white Wicked-Witch-of-the-West socks eclipsed all else.

ranting-al-gore.jpg
Ranting Gore
Photo from uglydemocrats.com

Compromising position

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By Steven T. Jones
With the Healthy Saturdays measure headed for an April 9 hearing by the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use and Economic Development Committee, Mayor Gavin Newsom has decided to step in and try to broker a compromise. Mediating between the two sides will be his chief of staff and former labor negotiator Phil Ginsburg, who has asked Sup. Jake McGoldrick to delay the committee vote by a week to accommodate his planned vacation. McGoldrick agreed. Newsom had signaled his plans to veto the measure, which would close some Golden Gate Park roads to cars on Saturdays as well as Sundays, but swing vote Sup. Bevan Dufty might be willing to override the veto this year. Advocates on both sides had called for Newsom to get involved to avoid another fight at the ballot box — where whoever loses was likely to try to take it. Some fear this is just a last minute stall tactic by a mayor who expects consensus on an inherently polarizing proposal. But press secretary Nathan Ballard said that’s not the case, telling the Guardian: “The Mayor has asked Phil Ginsburg to try to broker a compromise in this matter. He has already had productive meetings with both sides. We’ve asked
Supervisor McGoldrick to delay the final committee vote until the negotiations are complete. The Mayor is cautiously optimistic that the parties will be able to reach a good result.”

Wing clippings

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS My new favorite person is this guy Doc who I play baseball with. He’s not a medical doctor. He knows about chicken wings. We weren’t even on the same team, and he said between innings, "Have you ever been to San Tung?"

"Never heard of it," I said.

"Best chicken wings," he said.

"Where?"

"Irving," he said. "Between 11th and 12th."

We were in the Golden Gate Park, Big Rec. That put chicken wings pretty much almost exactly on my way home to Sonoma County, give or take a block.

It was a good game, my favorite kind, a pitcher’s duel, nothin’-nothin’ (nothin’-nothin’-nothin’-nothin’) … but I’m not a nihilist or a sports writer. Wait a minute, am I a nihilist? I can’t keep things straight anymore, damn it. Hold on. [Sounds of papers rustling, drawers opening and closing, coffee spilling.] Where’s my identity?

Chicken farmer!!! People have been writing to me and saying, Chicken Farmer, what about Houdini? Houdini being my famously wayward escape-artist chicken, and "what about" being that I was going to eat her, I said, if I couldn’t figure out how she was doing it — "it" being finding her way into the neighbors’ flower bed and being generally disrespectful to the colors, smells, and natural beauty of it.

"It" being said flower bed.

Damn, I really do need to learn to write. No I don’t. I need to learn to chicken farm because, no, I never did discover her escape route. This, in spite of 24-hour surveillance cameras, stakeouts, and the clandestine cooperation of two "plants" on the inside.

Houdini’s a genius. Nevertheless, I didn’t eat her, not yet. Thanks for asking. She was saved by my chicken farmerly surrealism. I’m not a genius, but I do know how to deflect criticism by not making any sense whatsoever. I bought the neighbors an amelioratory bag of wild bird seed, some oranges, and a package of pretty stickers, and informed them in a letter that I was transsexual and should thenceforth be referred to as Ms. Chicken Farmer, if they please.

Essentially, this was a stalling tactic, designed to buy me and Houdini another week, at least, while my neighbors wobbled and just generally lost sleep.

Not long into that week, when Houdini was next found by me to be luxuriating among the forbidden flowers, I held her down and clipped her wing. It was a desperate measure but not necessarily cruel. Chickens are flightless birds to begin with. What do they need wings for?

Well, balance. It’s more like a haircut than surgery, see? You’re only clipping the feathers, and only on one wing, so that afterward they feel all asymmetrical and artsy and don’t crave flowers anymore. Theoretically.

It’s working, but it’s also only a matter of time, I know. Feathers molt and grow. And smart animals, with the possible exception of me, only get smarter.

So I’m packing up the pickup truck, all dolled up for a gig, when my neighbor comes strolling over with his hands in his pockets … thanks for the seeds, you shouldn’t have, and congratulations.

"I don’t know," he said, checking himself. "What do you say to a trans person? Is that what you say?"

"Congratulations is nice," I said, loading up my steel drum and stand. I like my neighbor Dave. We get along, chickens in flower beds notwithstanding.

"So what do your groupies think about this?" he said. He knows I’m in a band but not what kind, apparently.

I smiled. "Dave," I said, "my groupies are 80-year-old shut-ins with bad eyes and Alzheimer’s. Not that they could ever quite tell if I was a boy or girl, but …"

"Well, congratulations," he said. "You’ve got the hair for it, anyway."

And he went back to his flower bed, and I went to my gig, and Houdini gazed into the chicken coop mirror and felt progressive.

Every time I have to clip a chicken’s wing, I can’t help fantasizing that some day, if there is a god, we will have genetically modified chickens that regenerate missing parts. So that chicken farmers can clip off more than just the feathers. We will harvest chicken wings like asparagus and eat like kings or college students.

But there’s not a god, of course, and that’s where San Tung comes in handy. Doc was right. *

SAN TUNG

Mon.–Tues. and Thurs.–Sun., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

1031 Irving, SF

(415) 242-0828

Takeout available

Beer

MC/V

Bustling

Wheelchair accessible

>

From cabin to castle

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› news@sfbg.com

San Franciscans love Camp Mather just the way it is, if its popularity is any indicator. They love the stuffy dining hall, the rustic wooden cabins, murky Birch Lake, and the basic layout of a camp established in the 1920s for the workers who built the nearby Hetch Hetchy dam.

Families are eagerly awaiting the reservation notices being mailed out this week by the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department telling them if and when they’ll be spending seven days there this summer. But the Friends of Camp Mather have been less than pleased with other news about their favorite vacation spot.

Persistent fears that Rec and Park intends to privatize the camp — which started in 2003 when the department asked for a study on the subject — led to a Board of Supervisors resolution in January declaring that the city “opposes working with private sector property developers on any plans for Camp Mather in the future.”

Rec and Park head Yomi Agunbiade told the supervisors the department “has no plans to sell or contract the camp at this point” and “there is no proposal to fully privatize Camp Mather now.” Such qualifiers were hardly comforting to the Friends of Camp Mather, who have been having a hard time getting straight answers from the department about its current financial situation and its plans for the future.

We now understand their frustration. Last month the Guardian made a Sunshine Ordinance request of the department to get documents that break down the $20 million figure Rec and Park has been using publicly to quantify the current capital needs at Camp Mather.

In our back-and-forth with department spokesperson Rose Dennis, we learned the department is now estimating that Camp Mather needs closer to $36 million. And she told us that “if we don’t get this money, we will have to shut it down, and then the kids won’t have a place to go.”

Yet the department is unable to provide a basic account for its claimed capital needs, except for a database filled with numbers for which there appears to be little support. Many of these numbers seem wildly inflated and are contradicted by other Rec and Park documents.

It’s unclear exactly what’s going on here. Maybe the big numbers are scare tactics or inflations designed to push the $150 million general-obligation bond that the department hopes to send to voters next year. (In the bond, Rec and Park claims to need a staggering $1.7 billion.) Or maybe, as Dennis said, they are “preliminary numbers” that are likely to be pared back and shouldn’t have been made public in the first place.

But whatever the case, it’s understandable that some Camp Mather regulars are freaking out and fearing their favorite vacation spot is in jeopardy. And this whole episode raises questions about what’s going on at Rec and Park.

It should have been a simple request to have a public agency break down the millions of dollars it says it needs. But that didn’t prove to be the case either for us or for the Friends of Camp Mather, despite city laws that require full disclosure of all public documents, whether the agency wants to oblige or not.

“At this time we have not wanted to provide detailed information on each property, but we have provided the ‘overview’ information (tab 1) to the Friends of Mather as per their request (which may have led to the questions). The Comet data is being reviewed right now and is not finalized,” Rec and Park planner Karen Mauney-Brodek wrote in a March 8 e-mail to Dennis, which we obtained with our Sunshine request.

That attachment includes five capital-need figures: $9.4 million for all cabin buildings, $7.8 million for all other buildings, $16.2 million for the park site, $2.6 million for bathing facilities, and $479,971 for storage structures — a total of $36.6 million. It also includes a second column with “facility value” figures, which differ little from the first column, but it does not include an explanation of the numbers or what they’re derived from, other than “COMET data,” which stands for Condition Management Estimation Technology.

We pushed for and ultimately received a fuller account of that data and a spreadsheet assigning repair and replacement costs to facilities all over Camp Mather. But that only raised more questions for which we still haven’t received good answers.

The COMET data indicated that some of the simple wooden cabins, which are essentially shacks with no foundation or plumbing, would cost up to $199,068 to replace, more than the price of building a large single-family home. This is in stark contrast to a 2003 study the department commissioned from Bay Area Economics, which estimated the cost of each cabin at about $16,000. There was no explanation in the document for such astronomical figures.

“Most campers would be distressed to come to camp and find all the historic cabins completely revamped,” Robin Sherrer, president of the Friends of Camp Mather, told the Guardian.

When asked to justify and explain the numbers, Dennis talked about “escautf8g contingency factors” and used other bureaucratic jargon but was unable to simply say why a $16,000 cabin would suddenly cost $200,000. But we did learn the COMET data had come from a study by the local firm 3D/I.

We asked for that study, but Dennis said the department didn’t have it. Any day now, Dennis said, 3D/I will be giving the department “10 huge binders” of data it developed for various Rec and Park properties from November 2006 to January 2007. Officials will then process that data to present to the Rec and Park Commission in May or June. It is interesting to note that 3D/I also computed the data for a long list of Rec and Park projects, not just Camp Mather.

Among the other capital needs the department is claiming: almost $100 million for the yacht harbor, $102 million for a recreation center, $150 million for playgrounds, and a whopping $572 million for Golden Gate Park.

That list was scheduled to go to the Recreation and Park Commission on March 15 to support a discussion of the $150 million general-obligation bond that the department is seeking, but the list was pulled at the last minute because it needs more documentation.

As Dennis told us, “The president of the commission had it pulled because it was a little sparse.” *

 

THE COCKS OF CORPORATE WOLVERINES: Punk’s Not Dead. It’s just rotting in Dede Wilsey’s asshole.

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By G.W. Schulz

Poor 7×7 magazine. They try so hard to sound authoritative on all the subjects they cover. And to be sure, they’re quite good at publishing photo spreads of wealthy philanthropists forcing bleached-white terrified grins like hostages hearing a your momma joke from a bank robber.

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But if the subject doesn’t involve skin-tight “Juicy Couture” maternity jeans (page 16 in the April issue), or how to get naked with a stranger using feng shui (page 54 in the April issue – it’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds), then their coverage is likelier to fall flat on its face with an embarrassing thud.

For instance, punk rock is all the rage these days at San Francisco’s rag for the richest. A magazine like 7×7 understands counterculture and punk rock about as well as a dog understands irony. They’ll just never quite get it. (Do we really have to point any of this out?)

But with the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park hosting an exhibit for queen-of-the-punk-aesthetic fashion guru Vivienne Westwood, and the documentary Punk’s Not Dead appearing at the upcoming SF International Film Festival, the city’s opulently rich have decided shit is all about curling your lips and pumping your Prada purses defiantly in the air.

Healthy Saturdays gaining ground

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By Steven T. Jones
Environmentalists and alternative transportation activists are winning some key endorsements in the run up to next month’s second annual Healthy Saturdays showdown. Mayor Gavin Newsom vetoed the Golden Gate Park road closure to cars last year and doesn’t seem interested is pushing for a compromise on a measure he criticizes as too polarizing (ironically, his detachment from the issue is precisely what’s feeding the polarization). But last year’s swing vote on overrriding the veto, Sup. Bevan Dufty, has indicated an openness to supporting it this year. And that became all the more likely last night when the San Francisco Democratic Party County Central Committee (DCCC) endorsed the measure. They join other key Dufty allies in endorsing the measure, including the Harvey Milk Democratic Club and Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, as well as the Young Democrats club and both Senate contenders: Mark Leno and Carole Migden. The first committee hearing on the measure is April 9.

Will Newsom have a legacy?

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Over the past four years Mayor Gavin Newsom has enjoyed high poll ratings, but he has been unable to deliver any signature piece of legislation. His most celebrated actions were symbolic: marrying same-sex couples and walking the picket line with the striking hotel workers.

With only months to go before he is up for reelection, Newsom is hoping free wi-fi will be that signature bill. But unless he quickly changes his tactics, his legislation will go up in flames.

From the moment Newsom announced his wi-fi vision, the supervisors have been asking for input into the deal. At every meeting, the mayor’s representatives have dodged or stalled. The Board of Supervisors asked Newsom’s negotiators not to present it with a take-it-or-leave-it deal; the mayor’s staffers did just that. So it’s no surprise that the board seems hesitant to give the contract the benefit of the doubt. Newsom has responded by lambasting the board as "obstructionist" rather than by working with the supervisors to address their concerns.

Although there are good points to the proposal, there are also problems.

• Service will be slow.

• There’s no enforceable guarantee the network will cover the parts of the city that need it the most.

• The contract is effectively a monopoly, and it’s long. We’re likely to be stuck with this contract for 16 years.

• Penetration into apartment buildings and above second floors will be virtually nonexistent without the purchase of expensive extra equipment.

These are all legitimate public policy reasons to question the mayor’s proposal. But instead of working with the supervisors, he trashes them to every group and editorial board that will listen.

The board is exploring another possibility that the mayor should look at instead of his current effort: municipal wi-fi. Although the mayor has rejected that avenue, there are strong public-policy reasons for pursuing such a strategy.

Unfortunately, the people who will suffer the most from the mayor’s refusal to deal with the board are those who need a city network the most: schoolkids who can’t get online to do their homework; unemployed folks looking for a job; non-English speakers seeking city information; and anyone who needs free training or support.

Wi-fi, of course, is only one of the issues on which Newsom has given the board the finger. His repeated veto of foot patrols showed more loyalty to the Police Officers Association than to the needs of residents of high-crime areas. His continued refusal to consider a Saturday road closure trial in Golden Gate Park doesn’t serve anyone other than a few wealthy donors. The voters even went so far as to pass Proposition I, which demanded that Newsom meet with the board. The mayor has responded with highly managed events at which the supervisors cannot appear as a group.

Instead of trying to ram through a flawed wi-fi deal, the real legacy Newsom could create — one that would truly benefit us all — is that of a strong working relationship with the Board of Supervisors. *

Sasha Magee

Sasha Magee is a San Francisco activist who writes at LeftinSF.com.

Super Index: The Bay Area by the numbers

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Total acreage of San Francisco: 30,080

Estimated number of people in San Francisco: 739,426

Ratio of dogs to children in the city, give or take 10,000 kids: 1:1

Ratio of acres for off-leash dog play to those of children’s playgrounds: 7:1

Approximate percentage of San Francisco Department of Recreation and Park land considered natural areas: 25

Number of acres managed by Rec and Park versus number of acres of parking space (on and off the streets) managed by the city: 3,480:1,291

Number of cars in San Francisco, as represented by the number of registered automobiles in 2005: 373,115

Total number of city-managed parking spaces: 334,625

Number of temporary art parks created in empty parking spaces during 2005 for PARK(ing) Day: 18

Month in which the next PARK(ing) Day event will take place: September

Ratio of the size of a city parking space for a compact car to the Dark Room SF stage: 1:1

Estimated number of homeless people in San Francisco versus total number of shelter beds: 6,248:1,514

Estimated number of shelter beds that go empty every night: 100

Decline in the number of homeless people in the city, based on 2003 and 2005 volunteer city-run counts: 2,392

Areas not included in the volunteer counts: the beach, the Presidio, railroad encampments, Golden Gate Park, Stern Grove, and the Sunset District

Projected release date of the numbers from the 2007 homelessness count: March 30

Number of public garbage cans unbolted and stolen from Oakland sidewalks in the past year: 75

Cost of each can: $1,500

Number of feet of freeway guardrail stolen in the Bay Area in the past year: 32,000

Total cost to replace the aluminum: $86,000

Number of bars in San Francisco versus number of independent bookstores selling new books: 2,870:33

Rank of San Francisco among cities for most bookstores per 10,000 people: 1

Rank of the city by the bay for most drunk metropolitan area: 20 (tied with Oakland)

Rank for most literate, in comparison with New York City: 10 versus 49

The index was compiled by Chris Albon, Angela J. Bass, Deborah Giattina, Christopher Jasmin, and Elaine Santore. For sources, see www.sfbg.com.

Super List Index Sources:

(1) and (2) US Census Bureau

(3) Dog Advisory Committee of the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department and US Census Bureau

(4) and (5) San Francisco Recreation and Park Department

(6) San Francisco Recreation and Park Department and San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority

(7) California Department of Motor Vehicles

(8) San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority

(9) and (10) The REBAR Group, www.rebargroup.org

(11) San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority and Dark Room Theater

(12)–(14) and (16) San Francisco Department of Human Services

(15) "Green and Red Apples: The 2,392 Disappeared Homeless in San Francisco," by Matt Gonzalez, San Francisco Bay View, 2/23/05

(17) and (18) "Oakland Trash-Can Bandits Nab 75th ‘Fancy Trash Can’," by Momo Chang, Oakland Tribune, 8/9/06

(19) and (20) California Department of Transportation

(21) California Alcohol Beverage Control

(22)–(24) University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, Marketing and Media Department

(23) "America’s Drunkest Cities," by David M. Ewalt, Forbes, 8/22/06

Superlist No. 827: Disc golf courses

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› superlists@sfbg.com

While golf has traditionally provided an escape for wealthy elitist types, people in our progressive city may find that land alteration, plant destruction, constant mowing, and excessive watering spoil the purpose of being out in nature. But disc golf, played much the same as traditional golf, successfully coexists with other park uses and doesn’t require intensive landscaping. Perhaps because California is the birth state of disc golf, plenty of free courses dot the Bay Area. All of these use metal target baskets and also have free parking (except at Stafford Lake, where it costs $3 to $8). So grab your long-range, overstable driver and extradistance putt discs, and hit these local fairways. But remember: if you’re a beginner wanting to be taken seriously, don’t call it Frisbee golf.

The Aquatic Park Disc Golf Course (80 Bolivar Drive, Berk. 510-981-6700) at the foot of Bancroft Way is a long and flat 18-hole course that runs alongside Aquatic Park Lake. Players must work the first nine holes with the lake on the right, then turn around and toss their discs through the last nine holes over the same ground with the lake on the left. Though it’s rated an intermediate course, approach strategies on certain holes require throwing discs out over the lake and counting on a good hook to pull them back onto the green. Even seasoned veterans are likely to lose a disc (if not two or three). Short and long tees are provided on most holes. The park is open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., so break out those glow-in-the-dark discs for a night game.

Perfect for beginners, the Chabot Disc Golf Course (1898 Estudillo, San Leandro. 925-228-0308), situated off Interstate 580 in the Chabot Regional Park, is a short and mostly flat nine-hole course with dirt tees and fixed pin positions. Most holes are fewer than 200 feet, and the park is open from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The Moraga Commons Disc Golf Course (1149 Moraga Road, Moraga. 415-420-5425) is a long and scenic nine-hole course that winds over and around a beautiful hillside. Open from dusk until dawn, the intermediate-level course has mostly dirt tees and fixed pin positions and challenges players with several long uphill and downhill holes. The brick tee on hole six provides an adequate spot to launch your 431-foot shot down the hill and across the pathway.

Lucchesi Park provides a flat and open space for the Petaluma Disc Golf Course (320 N. McDowell Blvd., Petaluma. 707-836-1170), a nine-hole beginner course that winds around a small lake. The terrain is good for those just starting out or looking for an easier practice course. Playing competitively is challenging, however, as there is no course map and some of the holes aren’t marked. Check it out between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m.

San Francisco Disc Golf Club founder Greg Quiroga promises city players a world-class 18-hole experience come March 31 with the reopening of the Golden Gate Park Disc Golf Course (Marx Meadow, Golden Gate Park, Fulton and 25th Street, SF. www.sfdiscgolf.org), which has been closed for reconstruction since December 2005. The project marks a unique collaboration between the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department and Quiroga’s group, which raised all the money for the course and donated all the labor. Tees are concrete with fixed pins.

The Stafford Lake Disc Golf Course (3549 Novato Blvd., Novato. 707-836-1170) is a huge 18-hole course for advanced players that winds up and over several steep hills, offering several alternate pin and tee positions. The first five holes are particularly long and can be discouraging for novices. Arrive early and bring water and snacks to consume while playing this scenic monster course, which is home to the Bay Area’s longest hole, stretching 1,044 feet. And don’t let your car get locked in when the lot closes at 8 p.m. (5 p.m. during winter months). *

What’s the matter with the De Young?

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All around the world, popular museums are situated in public parks with wonderful results for both the museums and the parks.

But here in San Francisco, the venerable de Young Museum is waging an intense and irrational battle to prevent more San Francisco families and visitors from enjoying Golden Gate Park — even at the expense of its own reputation and financial well-being. Our organizations are baffled.

The museum’s leadership is doggedly fighting a community proposal called Healthy Saturdays, which would extend the popular Sunday recreational space in the park to Saturdays on a six-month trial basis.

Why would the de Young fight this when its own figures show that museum attendance increases on car-free Sundays in the park?

Why, when a recent city study (available at www.goldengatepark.org) shows that car-free space does not significantly affect parking availability or traffic in the neighborhoods and doubles park usage, boosts local business, and helps drive traffic to (and pay off the debt for) the de Young’s unfilled 800-car garage?

Why, last spring, did the de Young spend thousands to send misleading letters to its members, falsely claiming that Healthy Saturdays would "severely compromise" access to the museum? Dozens of disgruntled de Young members pointed out the letter did not mention that the garage is accessible from outside the park and that visitors have front-door, drop-off access every day.

All of the high jinks and mistruths are especially baffling given the de Young’s past endorsement of the concept. In 2000 the museum supported and funded Proposition G, which called for car-free Saturdays just after the garage was opened. According to their ballot argument, de Young leaders believed the Saturday proposal "ensures access to the de Young Museum for all San Franciscans including families with children, seniors and the disabled; [and] ensures the maximum enjoyment and minimum inconvenience to park users."

At times the de Young has claimed that it is fighting out of concern for disabled access, but the tactics of the museum folks suggest otherwise. Why did they not actively support Supervisor Jake McGoldrick’s legislation, which passed unanimously last year, to add more accessible parking, drop-off zones, and a free accessible tram in the park on Sundays?

And why are museum leaders suggesting that the car-free space be moved out to the west end of the park, far from transit, the parking garage, and local businesses?

Finally, if the de Young were working in good faith to improve its own attendance and revenue (and we all want a successful de Young Museum), why would this partially public-funded museum deny city officials’ requests to make its attendance figures public, relenting only after a Guardian reporter filed a Sunshine Ordinance request? The figures, when they were begrudgingly shared last year, showed a boost in de Young attendance on car-free days — which of course brings us back to our original question:

Why is the de Young fighting so intensely against its own interests and those of Golden Gate Park visitors? *

Amandeep Jawa, Rick Galbreath, and Leah Shahum

Amandeep Jawa, Rick Galbreath, and Leah Shahum represent, respectively, the League of Conservation Voters, the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club, and the SF Bicycle Coalition.

Ending the road-closure stalemate

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EDITORIAL There’s really only one way to look at Mayor Gavin Newsom’s response to Saturday road closures in Golden Gate Park: the fix has been in from the start. The mayor is willing to discard his own evidence, break his word, ignore the obvious facts, and damage his environmental credentials — but he won’t risk offending the rich society swells who run the de Young museum.

It’s been 40 years since the city began shutting down a stretch of JFK Drive to cars on Sundays, and by any account it’s one of the most popular regular programs in the city. On nice days the park is packed with bikers, joggers, skaters, walkers, families. There are free swing dance lessons. It’s one of the few opportunities for young kids to learn to ride bikes in a safe environment.

But the trustees of the museum, such as socialite Dede Wilsey, are adamantly opposed to expanding the road closures to Saturday. Their arguments make little sense: since there’s now an underground parking garage, there really isn’t any problem finding a place to park or getting access to the museum.

Yet under pressure from the de Young folks, the mayor vetoed legislation last year to expand the road-closure program to Saturdays, saying he didn’t have enough information on how the program would impact traffic and parking in surrounding neighborhoods. He asked for a study; the study was done. As Steven T. Jones reported ("Unhealthy Politics," 3/7/07), the evidence clearly shows that road closures have minimal negative impacts on anyone.

Newsom’s response: nothing has changed. He’s still opposed to Saturday closures.

So either he was lying last year when he said he wanted more data or he’s ducking today when he says the study hasn’t changed his mind — or he’s just afraid that going against the will of the almighty de Young board will tarnish his political star with the movers and shakers in town. In the end, it doesn’t matter: the mayor apparently can’t be moved on this, and the only way Saturday road closures will happen is if eight supervisors — enough to override a mayoral veto — support Sup. Jake McGoldrick’s road-closure bill, which has been reintroduced and will be heard in committee soon.

The measure got seven votes last time, and since it’s highly unlikely Sups. Sean Elsbernd, Michela Alioto-Pier, or Ed Jew will defy the mayor, the swing vote is Sup. Bevan Dufty.

Last time around he voted to uphold Newsom’s veto, but now he says he’s keeping an open mind. Dufty has a strong tendency to support neighborhood programs and services, and it’s clear that most of the neighborhood people are behind road closures — and now that the city’s own study shows there are no associated parking or traffic problems, this ought to be an obvious one for him. Dufty should announce that he’ll support McGoldrick’s bill — and end this stalemate for good. *

SATURDAY

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March 3

MUSIC

Steve Porter

A porterhouse is a choice cut of meat, but to nutritionists it’s a fatty, cholesterol-filled food best eaten sparingly within a balanced diet. For DJ-producer Steve Porter, it’s his diverse and energetic style, best showcased on his new 57-track club album, Porterhouse Volume 2 (EQ Recordings), which fans previously savored on 2006’s mix LP Porterhouse and 2005’s Homegrown (both Fade Records). What makes Porter house popular is that it is no mono diet. (Joshua Rotter)

With DJs Eli Wilkie and Friz-B
8 p.m., $15
Ruby Skye
420 Mason, SF
(415) 693-0777
www.rubyskye.com

VISUAL ART

“Vivienne Westwood: 36 Years in Fashion”

Vivienne Westwood, the iconoclastic British fashion designer, could have been speaking of her own when she remarked, “You have a much better life if you wear impressive clothes.” Indeed, her work has shaped the very culture whose conventions she set out to subvert. In 1970, Let It Rock, her first clothing store, opened in London, and it wasn’t long before her outrageous and provocative designs found their way onto the backs of punk bands such as the New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols. (Nathan Baker)

Through June 10
9:30 a.m.-5:15 p.m., museum admission plus $5 surcharge
De Young Museum
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
Golden Gate Park, SF
(415) 750-3614
www.famsf.org

Car-free support

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› steve@sfbg.com

Sup. Jake McGoldrick plans to reintroduce his Healthy Saturdays legislation this week and told the Guardian he’s confident that a new city study paves the way for its implementation by this summer.

Healthy Saturdays — which would create a six-month trial Saturday closure to cars on the same streets in the eastern portion of Golden Gate Park that are now closed Sundays — was approved by the Board of Supervisors last May but vetoed by Mayor Gavin Newsom, who ordered a study of the impacts of the Sunday closure.

That study by the Transportation Authority and Department of Parking and Traffic brought great news for Healthy Saturday supporters, concluding that road closure is extremely popular with park users and has no significant negative impact to attendance at the park’s museums, access by those with disabilities, availability of adequate parking, or traffic congestion at the intersections around the park.

"It spells out a very positive picture," McGoldrick told us. "Anecdotally, we knew all this, but now we have the empirical data laid out."

The study found that closing the roads encourages 40 percent more nonvehicular trips to the park. Almost 40 percent of those surveyed said the road closure makes them more likely to visit the park, while 10 percent said it made them less likely, and the rest said it had no impact.

"I see no good reason why this shouldn’t fly through the board and Mayor’s Office," Leah Shabum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, told us. "The report shows without a doubt there are no negative impacts to creating car-free spaces in the park."

Yet the proposal last year drew strong visceral reactions from opponents in adjacent neighborhoods, some representatives for those with disabilities, and those affiliated with the de Young Museum and other cultural institutions in the park — some of whom say they still aren’t satisfied with the report’s conclusions.

A group called Park Access for All sent out a press release urging the city to reject closure. Member Ron Miguel of the Planning Association for the Richmond said the city shouldn’t do anything until the Academy of Sciences reopens late next year. And disabilities advocate Tim Hornbecker said he was concerned that the city still hasn’t put in place a tram and other improvements that were approved along with Healthy Saturdays last year.

Those improvements have stalled at the Recreation and Park Department, which answers to the Mayor’s Office. The Guardian asked Newsom about the report Feb. 15, and he said, "I haven’t seen that," and ignored further questions. Newsom spokesperson Peter Ragone told us, "We’re in the process of digesting it and deciding how to move forward."

But Healthy Saturdays advocates point to statements Newsom made after the veto, noting that the study seems to satisfy all the concerns he expressed. Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, told us, "It should be a no-brainer. All the original objections cited by the mayor are addressed…. At this point, holding it up would be obstreperous." *

The Healthy Saturdays report is available at www.goldengatepark.org.

Return of Healthy Saturdays

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By Steven T. Jones
The city’s long-awaited study of road closures in Golden Gate Park was released yesterday, offering clear evidence that closing JFK Drive to cars on weekends is extremely popular and has no significant negative impacts to attendance at the park’s museums, access by those with disabilities, or traffic congestion in the intersections around the park. Mayor Gavin Newsom last summer vetoed the Healthy Saturdays six-month trial closure after a deceptive opposition campaign that was waged by De Young Museum directors and advocates of unfettered automobile access to the park. At the time, Newsom pledged to study the issue and support it if there was empirical evidence supporting closure, which there now seems to be. Asked about the report today by the Guardian, Newsom said “I haven’t seen that” and ignored further questions on that and other topics. Newsom communications director Peter Ragone told us, “We’re in the process of digesting it and deciding how to move forward.”
Sup. Jake McGoldrick, who sponsored the legislation last spring, said he will reintroduce it at the board meeting this Tuesday and was confident that we’ll see Golden Gate Park partially closed to cars this summer. “It spells out a very positive picture,” McGoldrick told us. “Anecdotally, we knew all this, but now we have the empirical data laid out.”

Practical aggression

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS The reason I keep a dream journal is not because I think my dreams mean anything. It’s because where else do you get to write a sentence like He’s always so brittle when he comes back to life and not even blink?

Cheap Eats!!!

This week’s dreamy food-for-all begins on the baseball field. Big Rec, Golden Gate Park. A beautiful summery day for July or August. For early February, it was surreal. I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

On TV, Super Sunday countdown; and by way of a more appropriate pregame show, six dudes were playing touch football in deep left field, creating for us a sort of nebulous, moving home run fence. The center-field fence was a soccer match, and in right field it was ultimate Frisbee.

Some of the guys I play ball with don’t even know I’m a girl. They think I’m just cool or weird. Which I am and am, of course, so I let it ride. Bob ribbed me because my earrings didn’t match my socks, or they did — I forget which. Letting it ride, I lined a double over third. I like being on base mainly because I get to chat with the other team’s players. Weather, restaurants … you know, music.

"Yeah, I have to leave early today," I said to their shortstop, Dave, taking my lead. Then I got all embarrassed because I thought he’d think I was leaving early to watch the Super Bowl. So I clarified: "Book club."

I felt certain he’d have wanted to know what book we were reading, but the batter got a hit, and I had to run. Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson, Dave. That’s what I was discussing with my girlfriends over tea and cake while elsewhere in the world Tony was drinking beer and Carlos was winning $500.

The water was the exact same shade of blue as the sky, creating the effect of horizonlessness, according to Robinson. The metaphorical significance of which, according to Kirsten, was a blurring of the line between life and death. It made so much sense. I almost jumped up, pumped my fist, and spilled my tea, but I didn’t. They’re alive, and they’re not alive!

Almost exactly in sync with the winding down of tea and cake and literature, a loud cheer wafted through the open window from an apartment building across the street, signifying, I guessed, the end of the game.

Remember when I was practically a sportswriter? At dinner at Chilli Cha Cha on Haight and Fillmore (Thai Noodle and Food Café is the subtitle), I sat with my back to the TV so that Kirsten’s boyfriend, Peter, who had also missed the game, could watch highlights.

We split a spicy grilled beef salad (Peter and me), and Kirsten poured a whole order of rice into her coconut milk soup, creating a pasty, tasty mess. My favorite thing in the world right now is duck noodle soup, and I turn to it often. My new favorite "food café" floats some spinach in it, and I love them for that. The deep, dark broth, the comfort of noodles, and the ridiculous juiciness of duck, that lovely layer of fat between the skin and the meat … that’s where I want to live.

The night before, in a bar, I’d almost got in a fight, I was saying. A drunk guy kept pinging my steel pan with his fingers. I had to grab his wrist and hold it and I didn’t know what was going to happen. But I felt ready and willing. I would have punched and kicked and clawed in defense of my baby.

Which was weird, I was saying, because before I switched fuels, I was a mess in this situation. On T, I would shake, shut down, and lose the ability to speak or swallow, let alone fight. It didn’t make sense.

"Testosterone affects aggression," Peter said, looking down from football highlights. "Defense is something else entirely." He looked back up.

Wow. He was right. Outside of television sets, football stadiums, and certain select craniums, Peter was absolutely right, and I was going to have to vote for Hillary.

But why do I keep dreaming about Dom, my best friend, teammate, bandmate, and comrade, who died almost 20 years ago? Our dreams are peopled by pieces of ourselves supposedly. And he’s always so brittle when he comes back to life. *

CHILLI CHA CHA

Daily, 11 a.m.–11 p.m.

495 Haight, SF

(415) 552-2960

Takeout and delivery available

No alcohol

AE/MC/V

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

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