Trash

Midnight Specialists: Midnight Mass

0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The funniest line in movie history didn’t pass from the lips of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), or Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977). That honor belongs to Taffy Davenport (Mink Stole) of Female Trouble (1974), who responds to the advances of her dentally challenged stepfather thusly: "I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, who will die for your sin of omission?

The savior of midnight movies in San Francisco, Peaches Christ, that’s who. If she can fit it into her busy schedule, of course.

Joshua Grannell, the surprisingly subdued and clean-cut gentleman behind the character of Midnight Mass’s holy hostess, says so during coffee talk about the author of that historical piece of dialogue, John Waters, and the massive undertaking that is the Mass’s special 10th-anniversary season at the Bridge Theatre. Mink Stole and Tura Satana will kick off the summer program on Friday, July 13, with Waters’s equally quotable Desperate Living (1977; "Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"), while Waters will introduce Female Trouble the following evening. Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira, will be on stage for both nights of Midnight Mass’s closing weekend.

Grannell was particularly keen on landing Waters, the only one of the four cult deities appearing this summer who has never done Midnight Mass before, because the director unknowingly played a role in the genesis of the show.

Back when Grannell and his friend Michael Brenchley were film students at Penn State, they brought Waters to campus to do a monologue performance. "John told us about the Cockettes," Grannell remembers. "He encouraged us to move to San Francisco and told us how much fun Divine and Mink had here."

The pair took his advice, arriving in 1996 in the city, where they would eventually become infamous as Peaches Christ and her silent sidekick, Martiny. One decade later, when Amoeba Records asked Peaches to introduce Waters at a promotional appearance for his CD A Date with John Waters (New Line Records), Grannell seized the opportunity to remind the trash auteur who he had been in college and who he’d become. Waters was aware of Peaches through Stole, who has appeared at Midnight Mass four times. "He kind of screamed and went, ‘Oh, I know Peaches!’<\!s>" Grannell says. The rest is scheduling history.

When Grannell moved to San Francisco, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) had just left the Kabuki, and there was no midnight show in town. Peaches Christ, a character originally known as Peaches Nevada in Grannell’s senior-thesis film project, Jizzmopper: A Love Story, had already been appearing at the Stud’s Trannyshack for a year when Grannell pitched the Midnight Mass idea to Landmark Theatres, owners of the Bridge. (Grannell used to be general manager of the Bridge and is now paid by Landmark just to be Peaches.) At the time, he was told that midnight movies didn’t work in San Francisco.

Though Midnight Mass’s focus has always been on movies, it serves up a unique form of live spectacle. "Peaches is literally 20 people," Grannell says to me more than once, as much to emphasize the scale of the productions as to give due credit to people such as the show’s amazing costume designer, Tria Connell. During the summer of 1998, the debut season of Midnight Mass offered such entertainment as audience makeovers (for the first of many Female Trouble screenings), a Sal Mineo–<\d>inspired wet Speedo contest (in conjunction with the incredible Who Killed Teddy Bear? [1965]), and a ladies-in-prison parody sketch (for Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House [1971]).

"Landmark said, ‘We’ll give you one season, one summer, and we’ll reevaluate,’<\!s>" Grannell says. It didn’t take an abacus to see that the church of Christ was turning away as many people as were filling the seats. The first Midnight Mass humbly featured a Satana look-alike contest in celebration of the buxom spine snapper of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Ten years later, Satana herself regularly appears at Midnight Mass. The still-star-struck Grannell recently attended her birthday barbecue in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by enough Meyer actresses to leave the ground of a decent-size backyard completely untouched by the sun. On his way back to SF, he was invited to stop by Peterson’s house, where she cooked him a spooky vegetarian dinner. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would know these women," he says. "It’s just so surreal for me."

Peterson and Satana seem pretty jazzed about their relationship with Grannell and Peaches too. Both icons make a point of noting the intense — sometimes alarming — devotion of Midnight Mass audiences. "There was one little guy who just cried the whole time," Peterson says, recalling a meet and greet after her appearance last year. "He stood there in front of me and just cried and cried and cried. I don’t know if he was crying because he loved me or [because] I was making him miserable."

Peterson spins some funny tales, including one about almost running over a bicycling Waters in Provincetown, Mass. But when it comes to Midnight Mass, Satana might earn bragging rights. Between pleasantly digressive reminiscences about her days as "the numero uno tassel twirler" in gentlemen’s clubs around the country (including a four-month stint at North Beach’s Condor Club, where she worked with exotic-dancing foremother Carol Doda before "the problem with the guy caught in the piano"), she told me about a fan at her first Mass who refused to be inconvenienced by a heart attack. "He wouldn’t let the paramedics take him away until he got my autograph," she insists.

Grannell has his own ER anecdote, of course. It was the summer of 2004. Peaches was showing Mommie Dearest (1981) and offering mother-versus-daughter mud wrestling as an aperitif. "Martiny and I were Chastity versus Cher," Grannell remembers. "We did this whole ridiculous buildup where I was singing Cher songs and she was out there with an acoustic guitar doing, like, Tracy Chapman and 4 Non Blondes." While fighting in the mud — an improvised cocktail of soft drink syrup, water, and popcorn — Brenchley dislocated his shoulder. He left the stage and was taken to the closest hospital. After declaring himself the winner and quickly introducing the movie to a crowd that wasn’t any the wiser, Grannell went to visit his injured sidekick, looking like a streetwalker who’d just taken part in a hog-chasing contest. He braced himself for the treatment he would get at the admitting window. "I walked in, and two male nurses came up to me and said, ‘Ms. Christ, she’s going to be fine,’<\!s>" Grannell says. "They knew exactly who Peaches Christ was and even how she might come to be covered in slop. They treated me like royalty."

That type of reception is indicative of Peaches’s breakout popularity. Midnight Mass has traveled to Seattle three times since 2005 and went to New York in 2006. (Grannell says there’s even a nightclub in Ireland that bears Peaches’s name.) The de Young Museum is hosting "A Decade of Peaches Christ" in September. And a new television show, Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass, produced by Landmark-owning Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, is also set to air in August on the HDNet Movie Channel. Peaches will introduce her favorite movies, which will be shown uninterrupted in high definition, with footage from the live shows.

As for Midnight Mass, the upcoming season includes a screening of Xanadu (1980) that will feature drag queen Roller Derby and a sing-along (as if that wouldn’t happen anyway), a 10th-anniversary presentation of Showgirls (the 1995 movie Peterson admits to loathing and walking out of with friend Ann Magnuson), and Coffy (1973, a soon-to-be personal favorite of anyone who sees it).

The last thing I ask Grannell is the despised but inevitable question put to all movie mavens. I actually wait until a couple of weeks after our initial interview before finally deciding to e-mail him about it. "Oh god! I really don’t think I have just one favorite movie," he responds. "But my favorite John Waters movie is Female Trouble. My favorite slasher is Freddy Krueger. My favorite ’80s comedy is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure [1985]. My favorite actress is Joan Crawford and my favorite movie of hers is Strait-Jacket [1964]. I could go on and on…. Do you want me to?"<\!s>*

MIDNIGHT MASS

Desperate Living (1977), with Mink Stole and Tura Satana in person

July 13, midnight, $12

Female Trouble (1974), with John Waters in person

July 14, midnight, sold out

Midnight Specialists: Midnight Mass

0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The funniest line in movie history didn’t pass from the lips of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), or Alvy Singer in Annie Hall (1977). That honor belongs to Taffy Davenport (Mink Stole) of Female Trouble (1974), who responds to the advances of her dentally challenged stepfather thusly: "I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, who will die for your sin of omission?

The savior of midnight movies in San Francisco, Peaches Christ, that’s who. If she can fit it into her busy schedule, of course.

Joshua Grannell, the surprisingly subdued and clean-cut gentleman behind the character of Midnight Mass’s holy hostess, says so during coffee talk about the author of that historical piece of dialogue, John Waters, and the massive undertaking that is the Mass’s special 10th-anniversary season at the Bridge Theatre. Mink Stole and Tura Satana will kick off the summer program on Friday, July 13, with Waters’s equally quotable Desperate Living (1977; "Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"), while Waters will introduce Female Trouble the following evening. Cassandra Peterson, a.k.a. Elvira, will be on stage for both nights of Midnight Mass’s closing weekend.

Grannell was particularly keen on landing Waters, the only one of the four cult deities appearing this summer who has never done Midnight Mass before, because the director unknowingly played a role in the genesis of the show.

Back when Grannell and his friend Michael Brenchley were film students at Penn State, they brought Waters to campus to do a monologue performance. "John told us about the Cockettes," Grannell remembers. "He encouraged us to move to San Francisco and told us how much fun Divine and Mink had here."

The pair took his advice, arriving in 1996 in the city, where they would eventually become infamous as Peaches Christ and her silent sidekick, Martiny. One decade later, when Amoeba Records asked Peaches to introduce Waters at a promotional appearance for his CD A Date with John Waters (New Line Records), Grannell seized the opportunity to remind the trash auteur who he had been in college and who he’d become. Waters was aware of Peaches through Stole, who has appeared at Midnight Mass four times. "He kind of screamed and went, ‘Oh, I know Peaches!’<\!s>" Grannell says. The rest is scheduling history.

When Grannell moved to San Francisco, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) had just left the Kabuki, and there was no midnight show in town. Peaches Christ, a character originally known as Peaches Nevada in Grannell’s senior-thesis film project, Jizzmopper: A Love Story, had already been appearing at the Stud’s Trannyshack for a year when Grannell pitched the Midnight Mass idea to Landmark Theatres, owners of the Bridge. (Grannell used to be general manager of the Bridge and is now paid by Landmark just to be Peaches.) At the time, he was told that midnight movies didn’t work in San Francisco.

Though Midnight Mass’s focus has always been on movies, it serves up a unique form of live spectacle. "Peaches is literally 20 people," Grannell says to me more than once, as much to emphasize the scale of the productions as to give due credit to people such as the show’s amazing costume designer, Tria Connell. During the summer of 1998, the debut season of Midnight Mass offered such entertainment as audience makeovers (for the first of many Female Trouble screenings), a Sal Mineo–<\d>inspired wet Speedo contest (in conjunction with the incredible Who Killed Teddy Bear? [1965]), and a ladies-in-prison parody sketch (for Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House [1971]).

"Landmark said, ‘We’ll give you one season, one summer, and we’ll reevaluate,’<\!s>" Grannell says. It didn’t take an abacus to see that the church of Christ was turning away as many people as were filling the seats. The first Midnight Mass humbly featured a Satana look-alike contest in celebration of the buxom spine snapper of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Ten years later, Satana herself regularly appears at Midnight Mass. The still-star-struck Grannell recently attended her birthday barbecue in Los Angeles, where he was surrounded by enough Meyer actresses to leave the ground of a decent-size backyard completely untouched by the sun. On his way back to SF, he was invited to stop by Peterson’s house, where she cooked him a spooky vegetarian dinner. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would know these women," he says. "It’s just so surreal for me."

Peterson and Satana seem pretty jazzed about their relationship with Grannell and Peaches too. Both icons make a point of noting the intense — sometimes alarming — devotion of Midnight Mass audiences. "There was one little guy who just cried the whole time," Peterson says, recalling a meet and greet after her appearance last year. "He stood there in front of me and just cried and cried and cried. I don’t know if he was crying because he loved me or [because] I was making him miserable."

Peterson spins some funny tales, including one about almost running over a bicycling Waters in Provincetown, Mass. But when it comes to Midnight Mass, Satana might earn bragging rights. Between pleasantly digressive reminiscences about her days as "the numero uno tassel twirler" in gentlemen’s clubs around the country (including a four-month stint at North Beach’s Condor Club, where she worked with exotic-dancing foremother Carol Doda before "the problem with the guy caught in the piano"), she told me about a fan at her first Mass who refused to be inconvenienced by a heart attack. "He wouldn’t let the paramedics take him away until he got my autograph," she insists.

Grannell has his own ER anecdote, of course. It was the summer of 2004. Peaches was showing Mommie Dearest (1981) and offering mother-versus-daughter mud wrestling as an aperitif. "Martiny and I were Chastity versus Cher," Grannell remembers. "We did this whole ridiculous buildup where I was singing Cher songs and she was out there with an acoustic guitar doing, like, Tracy Chapman and 4 Non Blondes." While fighting in the mud — an improvised cocktail of soft drink syrup, water, and popcorn — Brenchley dislocated his shoulder. He left the stage and was taken to the closest hospital. After declaring himself the winner and quickly introducing the movie to a crowd that wasn’t any the wiser, Grannell went to visit his injured sidekick, looking like a streetwalker who’d just taken part in a hog-chasing contest. He braced himself for the treatment he would get at the admitting window. "I walked in, and two male nurses came up to me and said, ‘Ms. Christ, she’s going to be fine,’<\!s>" Grannell says. "They knew exactly who Peaches Christ was and even how she might come to be covered in slop. They treated me like royalty."

That type of reception is indicative of Peaches’s breakout popularity. Midnight Mass has traveled to Seattle three times since 2005 and went to New York in 2006. (Grannell says there’s even a nightclub in Ireland that bears Peaches’s name.) The de Young Museum is hosting "A Decade of Peaches Christ" in September. And a new television show, Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass, produced by Landmark-owning Internet billionaire Mark Cuban, is also set to air in August on the HDNet Movie Channel. Peaches will introduce her favorite movies, which will be shown uninterrupted in high definition, with footage from the live shows.

As for Midnight Mass, the upcoming season includes a screening of Xanadu (1980) that will feature drag queen Roller Derby and a sing-along (as if that wouldn’t happen anyway), a 10th-anniversary presentation of Showgirls (the 1995 movie Peterson admits to loathing and walking out of with friend Ann Magnuson), and Coffy (1973, a soon-to-be personal favorite of anyone who sees it).

The last thing I ask Grannell is the despised but inevitable question put to all movie mavens. I actually wait until a couple of weeks after our initial interview before finally deciding to e-mail him about it. "Oh god! I really don’t think I have just one favorite movie," he responds. "But my favorite John Waters movie is Female Trouble. My favorite slasher is Freddy Krueger. My favorite ’80s comedy is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure [1985]. My favorite actress is Joan Crawford and my favorite movie of hers is Strait-Jacket [1964]. I could go on and on…. Do you want me to?"<\!s>*

MIDNIGHT MASS

Desperate Living (1977), with Mink Stole and Tura Satana in person

July 13, midnight, $12

Female Trouble (1974), with John Waters in person

July 14, midnight, sold out

Finally, a real Chicken takes on Newsom

0

chicken.jpg
Chicken John’s was among the first “Faces of Burning Man”
the Chronicle ran as part of their series a couple years ago.

By Steven T. Jones
We’ve seen people dressed as chickens mocking Mayor Gavin Newsom and progressives who are too chicken to run against him, but now we have Chicken John announcing that he’s running for mayor. You know Chicken John, right? The showman, the provocateur, the facilitator of art and innovation, the guy with the fake mustache and the cool bus and Army Street address and the truck that runs on trash, the MC of the Ask Dr. Hal Show. Yeah, THAT Chicken, aka John Rinaldi. Well, he’s decided to run for mayor and called upon the San Francisco underground to rise up and support him. Will they? Will Chicken follow through if they don’t? What issues will this enigmatic political newbie stake out? Will Newsom debate him? I don’t know the answer to any of this or, frankly, how I feel about it. But there is one thing I do know: the mayor’s race just got a helluva lot more interesting.
Chicken’s announcement follows:

Rock ‘n’ read

0

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Anyone who’s thumbed through the oodles of zany organ, squealing chipmunk, and queasy-listening albums from the ’50s onwards knows this to be true: every generation has its version of Muzak, whether its members like it not — thanks to clueless parental units. And the class of 2025 will undoubtedly have vibe ‘n’ synth instrumental renditions of "About a Girl," "D’yer Mak’er," and "Cherub Rock" dancing in their heads — no thanks to the Rockabye Baby! series on Baby Rock Records that appears to be multiplying like bunnies monthly. What next — sleepy-time Mentors? But what would baby lend an ear to once he or she started dabbling in books, student-body politics, and witchcraft? In other words, WWHPLT — what would Harry Potter listen to?

Boston’s Harry and the Potters have been working off that premise for the past three years, touring the country’s finest libraries. After outgrowing San Francisco’s main library and drawing several hundred to their show at the Civic Center last year, they’ve decided to get booked, adult-style, at Slim’s, alongside Jurassic Park IV: The Musical, which dares to pick up where the last dino blockbuster left off.

So, I tease, you’re doing a real tour this time? "Why is playing libraries not a tour?" the older, seventh-year Harry, Paul DeGeorge, 28, retorts by phone as he hauls T-shirts into the cellar of the Tucson Public Library, the site of that night’s show. "It’s actually a lot more work, because we set up our sound system every day."

He may be playing in a basement, but DeGeorge and his brother Joe, who appears as fourth-year Harry, aren’t playing to our baser instincts. "I thought this would be a great way to play rock to a whole new audience that doesn’t experience that," he explains. "If Harry Potter had the cool effect of getting kids to read more, maybe we can get kids to rock more too!"

The proof is in his now-20-year-old sibling. DeGeorge started feeding his younger brother Pixies, Nirvana, They Might Be Giants, and Atom and His Package CDs when the latter was nine, and apparently the scientific experiment paid off. "I could see the effect immediately. By the time Joe was 12, DeGeorge says, "he was writing songs about sea monkeys that referenced the Pixies" — and popping up in the Guardian in a story about early MP3.com stars.

And what about the silly kid stuff on Baby Rock Records? "I’d rather hear the original songs," DeGeorge opines. "Instead of Nine Inch Nails for babies, I’d just make a good mixtape for my baby. You can do ‘Hurt’ and just lop off the ending. It’s supereasy — anyone can do it!" Read it and weep, Trent.

SERPENT SPIT "So the proctology jokes remain." Thus came the news from filmmaker Danny Plotnick that Nest of Vipers, his freewheeling podcast highlighting the wit and storytelling chops of such SF undergroundlings as Hank VI’s Tony Bedard, the Husbands’ Sadie Shaw, singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet, and Porchlight’s Beth Lisick, was now officially off the KQED site and fully independent (and available through iTunes). "I had a contract for six episodes to be distributed by KQED," Plotnick e-mailed. "Ultimately they released eight episodes. They didn’t renew the contract because the show was too edgy for them."

Unfortunately, that also means the customer-service episode that triggered those treasured proctology-convention yuks, which was supposed to go up on the public station’s Web site on June 15, has been delayed till July 1 as Plotnick figures out new hosting.

But at least the assembled vipers will continue to writhe unchecked. Inspired by Plotnick’s favorite sports talk shows, Nest of Vipers aims to issue a weekly breath of venomous, randomized air in an ever-constricting radio landscape. "So often on radio there’s a bunch of experts pontificating about whatever," he told me earlier. "This is more about real people talking about real experiences," or like hanging with the gritty raconteurs at your favorite dive bar. The next episode, for instance, sounds like a doozy: Bucky Sinister talks about working the phones at PlayStation on Christmas morning, and Bedard has a yarn about biting into a Ghirardelli chocolate bar and finding a maggot — thinking it’s his big payday, he returns it to the company. You have been served! *

HARRY AND THE POTTERS

With Jurassic Park IV: The Musical

Fri/29, 8 p.m., $12

Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF

(415) 522-0333

www.slims-sf.com

NEST OF VIPERS

www.nestofviperspodcast.typepad.com

www.myspace.com/nestofviperspodcast

GET INTO THE BAND

CAVE SINGERS


Seattle Matador starlets break out the rustic initial Invitation Songs. Wed/27, 9 p.m., $8–$10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

ORGANIZED GRIND


Jamin and J-Dubber combine protest gangsta with ye olde funk and minihyph on Grind Pays (Organized Grind). Thurs/28, 10 p.m., call for price. Fourth Street Tavern, 711 Fourth St., San Raphael. (415) 454-4044

BRIAN ENO’S 77 MILLION PAINTINGS


Partake in the Hot Jet’s imagescape of "visual music." Fri/29–Sun/1, 8 p.m.–2 a.m., $20–$25. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

ALBUM LEAF AND ARTHUR AND YU


Incoming Korg attack! James LaValle’s gorg dream orchestrations cavort with Lee and Nancy–esque vocals. With Under Byen. Sat/30, Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. (415) 522-0333, www.slims-sf.com

AUDRYE SESSIONS


The Oakland combo parties over its new CD — after vocalist Ryan Karazija spent a very unlucky Friday the 13th in April being brutally mugged and left in a pool of blood with a fractured skull after a Minipop show at Mezzanine. Sat/30, 10 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

RACCOO-OO-OON


On Behold Secret Kingdom (Release the Bats), the night critters generate a fine squall of free jazz, noise, drone, and jungle psychedelia. Knocking over trash cans never sounded so intentional. Tues/3, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

Tamale soup

0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Some week for the chicken farmer. Starts out in the city, my hand in a late-night pot of boiling water, fussing with unthawable frozen tamales, and ends in moonlight in the woods, digging a very sober hole for a very dead chicken.

Foxes have found me.

In other news, there’s a spot on the back of humans, below the neck, below the first few vertebrae, between shoulder blades, the soft, special niceness of which will haunt me now for the rest of my life. I woke up one week ago with my nose there, and I nuzzled and kissed and breathed in the catastrophic smell of someone else for a change. It was way too early to even wonder where I was.

I was in a strange bed, with an even stranger stranger, whose waking words were, "Don’t write about the tamales."

Still in that same sweet spot, I had no intention of ever leaving, let alone writing about tamales. I smiled and spoke into it. I said, "Okay." I was thinking that there would be more meals together, more sober ones, with every chance in the world for redemption and reduction sauces. No need to dwell on drunken, emergency snack-food soup.

Oof. This is going to make a weird country song. My new best friend is the bottle. But it ain’t me doing the drinking. It’s everyone else in the world, and it will be interesting to see how many times out of 10 they already have a girlfriend. They’re in love. Why one would want to drink enough to forget that spectacular fact, even for one night, both baffles and thrills me. And that’s why you will find me now in bars.

In search of temporary sweet spots between shoulder blades.

Neither forgetter nor forgettee, I’ll be the designated driver. You’ll invite me in. Whether you have a long-distance lover or nothing but dead and doomed chickens to occupy your mind, a body gets tired of sleeping alone. I know that, and I know things happen in bars that have absolutely no relevance in the world outside bars. No problem.

If it hurts a little, so does life. A lot! Like one minute you’ve got your eyes closed and headphones on and telephone ringer off, and you’re recording your heart out into a microphone, imagining a small cult following, and the next minute, click track marching in place behind you, you’re chasing a fox through blackberry bramble, tripping over tree trash.

It did let go of the chicken, and my farmerly diligence was rewarded by getting to lie in the dirt and watch my penultimate hen die a slow, useless death. This took days. I’m hungry and scratched, and I need a bath.

In retrospect, I should have Dr. K’d her immediately. But retrospect is easy. She wasn’t bleeding and didn’t look broken. She didn’t seem to be in pain, but it’s hard to tell with chickens — unlike chicken farmers, who put it in the newspaper.

My new favorite chicken, by virtue of being the last one standing, was my least favorite only yesterday. It’s the egg eater. Chickens are intensely social animals. They go around together, they have their pecking order, and at night they line up on the roost, all tight and snuggly, for warmth. Or, for all we know, for love, comfort, reassurance …

Teeth hurt. Thorns hurt. Biting into a dumpling full of scalding pork juice hurts. I didn’t do this, by the way. I’m a patient and paid professional Shanghai dumpling eater. It happened to a personal friend of mine, in Millbrae. She grew up there and still knows where to go.

The Shanghai Dumpling Shop, for example, rocks — even the things we got that weren’t dumplings, and weren’t pork buns, and weren’t "lion head" meatballs. I’m thinking of the "bean curd sheets" with spinach. It was like fettuccini, and it was miraculously, meatlessly delicious.

Wednesday we went. Lunch time, and it was like an oasis, a rest stop, a catchy chorus or bridge. We all need little islands of sanity (or, in other words, rivulets of warm pork juice on the tongue) in the middle of our crazy work weeks full of chasing foxes, being foxy, and digging deep holes in the moon.

I have one last, live chicken to be with, and I’m going back outside now to be with her. Sorry I wrote about the tamales. *

SHANGHAI DUMPLING SHOP

Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–3 p.m. and 5 p.m.–9 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–3 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.–9 p.m.

455 Broadway, Millbrae

(650) 697-0682

MC/V

Beer

Wheelchair accessible

From the ashes

0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"They may label you, try to classify you, and even call you a crazy bitch — but don’t flinch, just let them," Honey of Radio Phoenix says to the women of New York City after her black feminist–run station gets bombed by government agents, after her comrade in arms is found dead in her jail cell, as the fireworks are about to go off in a certain tall tower in Lower Manhattan.

There’s no denying the evocative weight of that last image these days. But Lizzie Borden’s 1983 Born in Flames — and in particular, advice like Honey’s — comes to mind every time I watch a film in which grrrls are running riot in the street or on the radio or in the clubs, a slowly but surely growing subgenre as the decades pass (at least in my home video collection).

In the thin line of plot running patchily through Borden’s vérité-style feature, surfacing at the Roxie Film Center on June 22, the War of Liberation has brought about a single-party system run by Socialist Democrats, the postrevolution economy is in the toilet, and working women are bearing the brunt of the mass layoffs that have ensued. Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield) is the leader of the Women’s Army, a loose circle of radical lesbian feminists — or vigilantes, as they’re called on the nightly news — who, among other pursuits, patrol the streets on bicycles with whistles at the ready in search of men behaving badly.

Norris begins to see their basically peaceful efforts to gain equality going nowhere and becomes convinced that armed struggle is the only way to get the government’s attention and force a change. When she dies in jail, the news sends a charge through the gathering underground, bringing together disconnected feminist forces that have long kept their distance. Borden’s aim, perhaps unrealistic and perhaps naive, is to present an expanding patchwork of radicalized women unified across lines of class and race in the face of overarching sexism.

You couldn’t call the women of Born in Flames riot grrrls with a straight face. The spiky commentators at Radio Regazza — trash-talking, white punk-rock counterparts to Radio Phoenix’s Honey — look familiar, but this is the second wave of feminism personified (evidenced, for one, by an unquestioning opposition to sex work). But if Borden’s point in setting Born in Flames in a future United States run by socialists, of all things, is that nothing much has changed for the second sex postrevolution, there’s a parallel in watching as a new clan of young women is born in flames onscreen every few years.

Such latter-day films — Kristine Peterson’s 1997 Slaves to the Underground, documenting the Portland DIY scene of the early ’90s; Barbara Teufel’s 2003 part-fiction, part-doc Gallant Girls, set amid the direct-action anarchopunks of late-’80s Berlin — regularly surface at the Frameline fest. And this year adds a couple more to the pack: closing night’s Itty Bitty Titty Committee, a tale of teen radicalization by But I’m a Cheerleader‘s Jamie Babbit (who cites Born in Flames as an inspiration), and the Spanish film El Calentito, by Chus Gutiérrez, set in 1981 on the eve of a coup d’état by Fascist vestiges of Francisco Franco’s gang. These, as well as Flames contemporaries Times Square (Allan Moyle, 1980) and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (Lou Adler, 1981), are filled with rude girls hijacking the radio waves or the stage, flinging out slogans and manifestos, and screaming bloody murder. Though only Borden’s future radicals are prepared to cause it. *

BORN IN FLAMES (Lizzie Borden, US, 1983). June 22, 10:30 p.m., Roxie

Gunning for Boots

0

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Where have all the outlaws gone? Now that Paris Hilton seems like the highest-profile sorta-one-hit wonder to run afoul of the law, it’s easy to believe that pop’s rep for rebellion is seriously in question. (And with Warner Bros. jettisoning the overexposed jet-setter, who knows if she should even make the tally?) Yet just how disturbing or subversive is it to glom on to corporate punks like Good Charlotte or hitch your fortunes to soaking-in-it onetime gangstas like Snoop "Soul Gravy Train" Dogg? How revolutionary is it to play music your parents might approve of, à la white-bread soul poppers Maroon 5?

But those petty pop-crit worries wane on hearing about the Coup mastermind Boots (né Raymond) Riley’s Memorial Day misfortune. In the early-morning hours, long before most locals were firing up the grill and chugging microbrews, Riley was looking down the wrong end of a San Francisco Police Department gun barrel while innocently attending a get-together at a friend’s warehouse in SF’s Dogpatch-Waterfront zone. Why? Likely for nothing more than driving while black.

Riley had just parked his car near the warehouse when he was blinded by flashlights, and he realized that he was surrounded by cops. "They were saying, ‘Don’t fucking move, don’t fucking move,’ and came straight at me," Riley told me from his Oakland home, where he had just fed his kids their Sunday breakfast. "They put my hands above my head, searched me, and searched my car, even though they were looking for someone who was stealing tires. You know, if they had a description of a light-skinned black man with a big Afro and sideburns, maybe they should have taken me in. But they were yelling, ‘Are you on probation? Do you have a warrant?’ And every time I said no, they said, ‘Don’t lie to us. Don’t fucking lie to us.’"

Neighbor Hoss Ward had been walking his dog by the warehouse when he spied officers with flashlights lurking between parked cars amid the trash on the street. "I thought that was weird. They didn’t question me, but I’m a white man," he said later, verifying that Boots parked, got thrown against his car, and had guns pulled on him. "It’s not unusual for someone to pull up in a beater car," Ward said. Yet this incident smelled like racial profiling: "That’s what the vibe felt like."

"I walked over there and said, ‘What the hell is going on?’" recounted Riley’s friend Marci Bravo, who lives at the warehouse. Eventually Riley was released, but, Bravo continued, "It was really messed up. We fire off fireworks, burn things in the street, and there’s been no problems with cops. They’ve actually come and hung out before.

"It’s just a nasty case of police profiling."

In the end, Riley said, the officers didn’t even check his ID. At press time, police representatives had not responded to inquiries about the incident, and Riley was planning on filing a grievance with the city watchdog agency the Office of Citizens Complaints, a process that the longtime activist is, unfortunately, familiar with. After a 1995 Riverside performance with Method Man, Riley and kindred local hip-hoppers Raz Caz, E-Roc, and Saafir were pulled over and pepper-sprayed in their car seats following a yelling argument at a club. Then there was the incident during the Coup’s 2006 tour around, ironically, their Epitaph album Pick a Bigger Weapon. Shortly after the tour manager urinated next to a semi at a Vermont rest stop, the tour vehicles were stopped by plainclothes officers who claimed to be surveilling a cocaine deal in the truck. "Half the band woke up with guns in their faces," the Coup leader recalled.

Riley’s experiences in and out of our enlightened — for some — city bring home the ugly, everyday reality behind the entertaining anecdote with which the Arcade Fire’s Win Butler regaled the Greek Theatre crowd June 2: he was almost arrested for the first time that day when Berkeley police dragged him out of a rec facility for arguing over the use of a public basketball court. "They called for backup and everything," Butler marveled onstage.

"There are stories all the time," Riley offered matter-of-factly. "Everyone knows you used to get fucked with in San Francisco and Berkeley."

"Usually it’s not anything with me specifically being a rapper," he continued. "I might have even more protection because of that. Like at this get-together, somebody came up and said, ‘Don’t you know who this is? This is Boots Riley.’ They might not have known who I am, but they realize this isn’t the regular case where they can do whatever they want." *

ALIGN YOUR CHAKRAS, CAMPERS

Talk to underground trance DJs, and they’ll point to the Harmony Festival as the hot spot forest ravers will be orbiting. Indeed, one of the main organizers, Howard "Bo" Sapper — who, along with Sean Ahearn, Scott McKeown, and Jeff Kaus, is putting on the 29th music and camping fest — agrees that a healthy, fire-breathing portion of the expected 40,000 at the three-day event will be die-hard burners drawn to the seven-year-old techno tribal night. Sapper also points proudly to the diversity of the musical lineup, including Brian Wilson, Erykah Badu, Rickie Lee Jones, the Roots, Common, moe., and Umphrey’s McGee. "I’m not sure if we’re going mainstream or the mainstream is coming to us," Sapper said, listing the green exhibits and this year’s theme, Promoting Global Cooling. "It’s part of the paradigm shift going on in America."

OVERNIGHT MUST-HAVES


Earplugs

Air mattress

Plenty of water

Patience

HARMONY FESTIVAL

Fri/8–Sun/10, $20–$500

Sonoma County Fairgrounds

1350 Bennett Valley Road, Santa Rosa

www.harmonyfestival.com

I just wanna testify

0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

In high school I was a band geek. OK, not quite: I was never cool enough to make it into the inner circle of the Blackbirds Marching Band, and so — odd duck that I was — I’d be left flapping around on the outer margins of the football stadium bleachers while all the hilarity and revelry that a pack of gangly teenagers in polyester and feathery headgear can muster would carry on without notice of me and my forlorn little trumpet. I ain’t saying you need to shed a tear or anything, but I did drop band hot potato–style mid–sophomore year and switched to a cappella choir, became a theater fag, and found my badge to wear in the relentlessly status-conscious gauntlet that is the American high school. I never picked up that trumpet again.

Which I suppose means I might still be working through those high school slights every time I throw myself full force into the ecstatic horn frenzy of the Gomorran Social Aid and Pleasure Club, but what the hell. Add these East Bay bacchanalians to the serious brass lovefest being led by the likes of DeVotchKa, Beirut, and a Hawk and a Hacksaw, and I think I’ve hit just the therapy I need. Look around: suddenly trumpets, trombones, and tubas are the new guitar. Welcome back to band camp, I tell myself, only this time it’s cool.

Let the healing begin!

And what better way to introduce our six romping, stomping Gomorrans than with a call for rejuvenation? The band name itself is a gospel to them, a platform from which to preach their party-as-catharsis convictions while shaking out some of the most deliriously crooked New Orleans ragtime you’ve ever heard. It’s more than just a name — it’s a way of life.

"The funny thing is, the name existed for probably six months before we were technically even a band," chief songwriter and banjo-playing vocalist Beebe says, chuckling, at a Mission coffeehouse. (At the risk of provoking flashbacks of high school football coaches, members prefer to be called by their last names.) "My brother Adam created the concept, artwork, Web site, everything … even had us all listed in the lineup before we’d even played a note!"

"Yeah, we each ended up finding out when we’d bump into a friend who’d say, ‘Oh, I heard you’re in a new band,’" tuba player Kirley says. "Eventually, we all discovered we were in a band together, so we figured, let’s do it!"

In addition to Beebe and Kirley, four others learned of their band membership: Davis (trumpet, vocals), Lehnartz (clarinet, vocals), Knippelmeir (trombone, vocals), and Westbrook (trash drums). But before we leap to any Maurice Starr–mastermind comparisons, a few facts: all six were already good friends who lived together, as they still do, in a house in Oakland. All were musicians who shared a passion for old-time sounds, particularly those blaring out of New Orleans. All of them have called the Crescent City home at some point. Putting together a band was a natural next step … unless, of course, you’re of a more spiritual bent and wish to call it destiny.

A kind of spirituality does figure prominently in the Gomorran ethic, albeit one that preaches the virtue of whiskey and encourages audiences to bear witness as well. Once a tent-revival level of rapture has been reached, Beebe invites members of the congregation onstage for faith healings, which feed the cycle of sin and salvation. "If I take in some sin, it’s gonna get disbursed," he jokes, bandmates nodding to show they’re willing to share the burden.

Judging from their recent self-released eponymous debut, bearing such a heavy load is not a problem. Recorded in an abandoned hotel and featuring a drum kit culled from junkyard roamings — "I’d much rather put it together myself than have some fancy kit," Westbrook says — the album wobbles with rickety charms while exuding the moxie of a midnight bender in the making. From the clattering pot-and-pan rhythms of "The Westbrook Two-Step," inspired by the train tracks outside the drummer’s workplace, to the humidity dripping from each frantic note of the klezmer-Dixieland fusion workout "Klanzmeirtong" to the boozy testimonial "Whiskey Paycheck," the Gomorrans celebrate wild abandon with, well, wild abandon. They might be playing ragtime, but they’re by no means a ragtime band: "We’re definitely rock ‘n’ rollers playing jazz, not the other way round," Lehnartz explains.

And with this comes the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, I assume? Beebe gives some illuminating confirmation when I ask what inspires their songwriting: "Sleep deprivation, definitely."

Hmm, all that sin disbursing will do that, won’t it? *

"MISHAP SCIENCE FAIR"

With the Gomorran Social Aid and Pleasure Club, Top Ramen, James Call and the Missing Teens, and Brian Kenny Fresno

Fri/8, 8 p.m., $8 or free with erupting papier-mâché volcano, robot, or perpetual motion machine

12 Galaxies

2565 Mission, SF

(510) 595-7188

www.12galaxies.com

Nerves of Chrome

0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Whatever happened to all the cyberpunks? Once upon a Blade Runner, it looked like neo-noirists and novelists from the early 1980s were finally getting turned on to George Orwell’s vision, predicting a dystopian, nightmarish future in which humans were subject to conditioning and control. Even musicians were getting it: perhaps inspired by Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (Buddah, 1975), such artists as Suicide, Throbbing Gristle, and Pere Ubu were dabbling in a postapocalyptic music world by the close of the ’70s. But if there was one band that dared to define the genre back then, Chrome was it.

Lauded by critics and fans as one of the pioneers of industrial rock, the San Francisco outfit coupled psych-punk and electrodub with lyrical themes of alienation, paranoia, and ’50s sci-fi cinema, though its sound mirrored bands like the Sonics and Wipers when drummer Damon Edge and bassist Gary Spain came together in 1976. Following the release of its debut, The Visitation (Siren), later that year, the group folded once its members realized the album was a sales flop. Everything changed, however, once Spain and Edge hooked up with Helios Creed, a guitarist whom Spain had jammed with during the early ’70s. As Creed explained over the phone, "Chrome was the only band that was doing something I was interested in … space rock, punk rock, and the sci-fi kind of thing."

"It was really psychedelic, and it wasn’t in to be psychedelic back then. It was just punk and Budweiser," he continued. "Psychedelia would remind punks of the hippies, so they wouldn’t want anything to do with that. And I said, ‘Well, that’s great, ’cause acid punk doesn’t exist.’"

Creed also revealed that a falling-out during the recording sessions for Chrome’s sophomore effort, Alien Soundtracks (Siren, 1978), resulted in Spain’s exit in 1977 and subsequently ushered in a radical shift away from the band’s protopunk beginnings.

"Damon started playing some tapes that they had made a year or two before that were outtakes from The Visitation, and I said, ‘God! This stuff is fucking great!’" Creed said, laughing. "I liked it better than The Visitation, and I suggested that we make stuff like that and integrate it into our punk set."

Alien Soundtracks‘ 1979 follow-up, Half Machine Lip Moves (Siren), adhered to this formula as well. Joining scratchy, three-chord guitars and trash can–like drums with Creed’s growled vocals and an excess of waterlogged-sounding effects, the result mirrored some otherworldly murky realm. By the time Creed and Edge’s final collaboration, 3rd from the Sun (Siren), was released in 1982, the combo was heading in a more gothic direction, similar to that of contemporaries Killing Joke and Swans.

Chrome remained a duo until its ’83 demise, though the bandmates adopted a taped drum machine nicknamed Johnny L. Cyborg as their third member and briefly enlisted John and Hilary Stench from Pearl Harbour and the Explosions. During this period the group was primarily a recording project and only played live twice, to sold-out crowds in San Francisco and at a Bologna, Italy, festival. Edge moved to Europe to start another version of Chrome, while Creed remained stateside to work on his solo career, angry that he was left behind.

After Edge died in 1995, Creed carried on with the band because he felt he was just as entitled as his ex-bandmate to put out Chrome records. Since 1996, Creed has recorded a handful of full-lengths under the Chrome moniker but tends to focus more on his solo material. His current West Coast tour will include Chrome and Helios Creed songs, and he revealed he hasn’t ruled out a future full-on Chrome tour. Creed also wanted to set the record straight about his strained partnership with Edge.

"Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate Damon. We just went through some shit," he clarified. "I forgive and love everybody." *

CHROME

With Battleship

Sat/9, 9:30 p.m., $12

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Budget battle brews

0

By Steven T. Jones
Mayor Gavin Newsom may be content with a “back to basics budget” that focuses on clearing the streets of trash, potholes, and poor people, but progressives are preparing to push for a more forward-thinking plan that addresses low-income housing and other long-term needs. Supervisors Chris Daly and Tom Ammiano (both of whom sit on the Budget Committee) today introduced a measure to restore some of Newsom’s proposed cuts to health services and the $33 million in board-approved affordable housing spending that Newsom blocked last month. Daly put out a statement today saying, “When Gavin Newsom claimed he couldn’t build affordable housing, because the City didn’t have the money, he was lying to the people of San Francisco. The money is available. It is only a matter of priorities.”
onerincon.jpg
Image from www.onerinconhill.com
San Francisco has built lots of million-dollar condos on Newsom’s watch, but almost no affordable housing, a situation that threatens the city’s socioeconomic makeup.

Hole in the street

0

› news@sfbg.com

It was warmer than usual that Saturday morning in Golden Gate Park. Peter Cummings woke up behind a bush, took his shirt and shoes off, put on his headphones, and staggered down the hill with a bottle of whiskey and a big smile on his bearded, dirt-stained face. He sat down on the bench at Stanyan and Hayes and greeted passersby in his usual charmingly rambunctious way. For the past seven years, this had more or less been his daily routine.

The only thing that made this day different was the food and the heroin. That morning Cummings skipped breakfast. He usually went to the corner deli to buy some bread and soup, but not this particular Saturday. Then, around 2 p.m., a couple guys walking down the hill found Cummings convulsing in a quiet nook behind a fallen log. One of them gave him CPR and a Narcan shot, and a couple others ran across the street to St. Mary’s Medical Center to get the paramedics. But it was too late.

Hundreds of homeless people die every year in San Francisco, and many of them leave our world silently and with little impact on the city. But the loss of this particular alcoholic, bipolar, homeless man changed the landscape of one San Francisco neighborhood. As Gavin Newsom’s administration aggressively pursues its 10-year plan to abolish chronic homelessness, this man’s legacy shows how someone living in the park may actually be a good thing — if not for himself, then at least for the community.

"He watched out for me," Cirrus Blaafjell, who lives in the neighborhood, told the Guardian. "Some of the guys would harass me when I came out here at night to walk the dogs, and Pete would yell at them, ‘Leave her alone. She’s a nice person!’" When University of San Francisco student Amanda Anderson was followed through the park one day by a seedy character, Cummings launched his own inquiry. "Who tried to hurt Amanda? I’m gonna beat his ass when I find him!" Cummings yelled into the trees.

Even certain city officials agree. "He did seem to keep all the other drunks in line," Officer John Andrews of the San Francisco Police Department told us. "A lot of times when we had a problem, he’d come around and say, ‘Hey, Andrews, we’re taking care of things. Don’t worry.’ If someone was really intoxicated, he’d take them into the bushes. And he never argued with anyone."

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development considers people to be chronically homeless if they’re alone, disabled, and have been sleeping on the streets or in shelters for a year straight or intermittently for three years. Newsom’s initiatives aim to put all 3,000 chronically homeless residents of San Francisco into permanent homes by 2014. "It’s a concept based on Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point," Angela Alioto, the chairperson of the 10-year plan, explained. "If you take care of those who are the most chronic and use the most resources first, you will tip the scale of the whole problem."

But the Coalition on Homelessness, a nonprofit advocacy group, disagrees. "The phrase chronically homeless is misleading," director Juan Prada told us. "Chronic makes you think of general health issues, so you create an impression that homelessness is a condition. We see homelessness as a systemic failure to address poverty and the lack of housing."

Cummings, who lived in the park for the past seven years, was definitely chronically homeless. But had he survived another seven years to see the mayor’s initiative come to fruition, he may not have ever accepted the helping hand. "I live here by choice," Cummings once told me. "I have money, I have a place to go. I just like it here."

The corner of Stanyan and Hayes is almost never quiet. Belligerent drunks, ambulances speeding to the emergency room half a block north, and road-raged drivers blaring their horns at a badly designed left turn are part of the daily ruckus. Cops show up regularly. "People would call us about trash and shopping carts or about drunks yelling and screaming and fighting each other," Andrews told us. "And you have all types of guys up there in the horseshoe pit."

Hidden amid the trees in the northeast corner of Golden Gate Park, the horseshoe pit is known as a gathering place for hardcore drug users. Nothing remains of its original incarnation except some rusty equipment and a faded life-size mural of a horse. Today it’s a haphazard jumble of used needles, sleeping bags, and seedy characters often too messed up to talk. Despite having this hub as his home, Cummings stayed relatively drug-free for the past four years. And between his Veterans Affairs and Social Security checks, he was bringing home about $3,000 a month. Instead of paying rent, Cummings used his income to buy liquor for himself and food for everyone in the park. "Where does all my money go?" he used to ask people walking their dogs as his friends munched on hot dogs and piroshkis on the grass behind him.

"He used to buy cartons of milk and leave them quietly next to people who he thought would need it," remembers Jerry, a 52-year-old chronically homeless man and one of Cummings’s best friends.

Cummings kept his past well hidden from his park friends, but when he died, dozens of people in the Upper Haight–North Panhandle area came out with stories about him from the past two decades, back to a time when he was sober, happily married, and a model member of the community.

"People used to call him the mayor of Cole Valley," said Jacob Black, a cab driver. "He knew everybody in town."

Cummings was born in Melrose, Mass., on March 11, 1954. He lived there with his parents and two siblings until his father, an engineer at a forklift company, was transferred to Oregon in 1971. "[Peter] picked on me a lot, but I always outsmarted him," younger brother Rick Cummings, who is a sales rep in the health care industry, told us. "It was a typical brotherly thing." Cummings joined the Coast Guard at age 20 and developed a lifelong love for the ocean while stationed in Hawaii and Guam. He was honorably discharged in 1978 when he injured his knee on an open hatch cover.

For the next couple years, Cummings wandered around Northern California, growing pot and mushrooms in the mountains and sleeping on the beach. "He always attacked me for my middle-class, suburban lifestyle," Rick says. "He never wanted that." For most of the ’80s, Cummings lived under a seedy bridge in downtown Portland, with a heroin addiction and early symptoms of bipolar disorder. He ended up in San Francisco, where he decided to give sobriety a shot. As Rick said, "He had it together enough mentally to know that he had to either get cleaned up or die."

Once in San Francisco, Cummings took lithium for his bipolar disorder, joined Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, and by all accounts stayed sober for almost 14 years. For the first time in his adult life, everything was going really well. He got married to a beautiful Peruvian woman, rented an apartment in Cole Valley, bought a used Jaguar and a Boston whaler, which he took out for salmon fishing in the bay, and was constantly surrounded by a solid group of friends. He even worked as a drug rehab counselor at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics.

Cummings was known among AA and NA circles as a handsome, spiritual role model with a killer sense of humor who always brought fresh fish to barbecues. "When I got sober, I was living on the streets and hated life," friend Dana Scheer says. "Pete reached out to me as he did to countless people. He was like a sober guru to me — I knew him as a very stable, rock-solid person."

Then, around 1998, things started to go downhill. His AA sponsor died of cancer; his wife left him; and the VA screwed up his bipolar meds. Cummings became increasingly isolated. He stopped attending meetings and moved out of the Haight, first to work as a building manager in SoMa and then to pursue a love interest in Mill Valley. "I went over to visit him one day, and he was drinking Coors," Scheer says. "This was my mentor from AA, so it was a little bit shocking." When Scheer left that evening, Cummings gave her a few of his belongings, including a stack of blankets. "I thought that was significant, because he always took care of me," Scheer says. "Blankets symbolize warmth and comfort, and he had always given me that. That was the last time I saw him before he ended up on the street again."

Cummings returned to the Haight around 2000, but this time he was drunk and high and incoherent. "When you’re that kind of addict, you don’t just start drinking a little wine," Scheer says. Cummings eventually ended up at the horseshoe pit, where he was reunited with some old AA friends who had also relapsed. And that’s where he lived for the last seven years of his life.

Despite recent city efforts to abolish camping in Golden Gate Park, Cummings continued to live in the bushes, often changing location to avoid getting caught. "It’s completely illegal for people to live in the park," Rose Dennis, director of communications at San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Department, told us. "But if you’ve been on the streets for seven years, you become resilient."

Alioto told us she has no problem with homeless people not wanting a roof over their heads. "If a person truly wanted to live on the street, there is nothing we can or should do," she told us. "They have a constitutional right to live and travel."

On the outside, Cummings the homeless guy was nothing like Cummings the sober guru, but he continued to help people with drug and alcohol problems. "Peter helped a lot of kids get out of bad situations," Jerry told us. "He was in the Coast Guard, so he knew all the vital signs. He saved a lot of lives, including mine — twice. I owe him a pair of Levi’s from the time I bled all over his after falling down a 30-foot cliff."

Cummings apparently overdosed just a few feet south of the horseshoe pit that had seduced him back into this lifestyle. The week after Cummings died, the Hayes entrance of Golden Gate Park was eerily quiet. "The park is like a cemetery," Jerry said with tears in his eyes. "Everyone’s walking around like corpses." His homeless friends scattered to mourn the loss of a friend and source of nourishment in their own way. "When you’re living on the streets, people are dying left and right," Scheer says. "And when that happens, you just want to get loaded and forget about everything."

Residents of the North Panhandle didn’t have a reason to stop here anymore either." I used to sit on the bench and just talk to him," Christian Blaafjell says. "He was crazy, but he was great. I miss him." Even Andrews is well aware of the impact Cummings’s passing will have on the community. "He was the leader of this pack," he says. "I don’t know what’s going to happen to these guys over here." He pauses. "Hopefully, they’ll leave."

The sight of Cummings limping down Hayes Street might have looked bad for the city, but the services he offered to its most fallen people were indispensable. "Maybe he was just doing his job," says James Warren, a friend from Cummings’s AA days. "Maybe what he learned from the program, he took to the streets. Pete took his legacy, generosity, love, and compassion back to the streets so that they might know that there was a better place and that he’d been there. I know I wouldn’t have made it through if it wasn’t for him." *

Peter S. Cummings died May 5 in San Francisco. He is survived by his parents, Richard and Nancy; his sister, Pam; his brother, Rick; and dozens of friends.

Nuclear greenwashing

0

› amanda@sfbg.com

Patrick Moore’s presentation isn’t as slick as Al Gore’s. The slides he shows lack a certain visual panache and don’t compare to the ones in An Inconvenient Truth. Moore himself seems a little frumpy, particularly as he peers out across the audience recently gathered in the Warnors Theatre in Fresno.

But attendees paid $20 to hear the former Greenpeace leader extol the benefits of nuclear energy as a clean, safe, reliable, economic, and — perhaps most important to the current political and media focus on global warming — emissions-free source of power.

It’s hard to imagine Moore at the helm of an inflatable boat steering into the line of a whaling ship’s fire, but that iconic Greenpeace image is exactly what he wants you to associate with him. The Vancouver, British Columbia, native is quick to tell you he’s a former leader of one of the most effective international activist organizations ever. But he said he’s older now and wants to be for things instead of against them.

What’s Moore for? Warding off the warming of the world. What does he think will do it? More nuclear power plants.

If there’s any great and unifying issue thrumming through the national psyche, defying political party lines and flooding the media filters these days, it’s global warming. While leaders argue left and right about nearly every issue that comes before them, there is at least consensus that something must be done about climate change.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger jumped on that bandwagon last September when he signed into law Assembly Bill 32, mandating a 25 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020.

Thirty-one states recently agreed to join a voluntary greenhouse gas emissions registry similar to California’s, 10 northeastern states are creating a cap-and-trade market, and already half the country has laws requiring that a certain percentage of local power portfolios come from renewable energy.

The alternative-energy troops who’ve long been waiting in the trenches have stepped up to fight, armed with the tools they’ve been honing for years: solar panels, wind turbines, tidal power, and biofuels. They say new options and innovations abound for weaning the country off its fossil fuel habit.

But there are already critics who say those approaches aren’t going to be enough — and that we need to go nuclear against this planetary threat. And now they have some unlikely new allies.

Maybe you’ve seen the headlines touting the new nuclear push, running in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and all the daily syndicates. They all claim the same questionable facts: Nuclear power is clean and emissions free. It’s safe, reliable, and cost-effective. It isn’t contributing to global warming — and these days even the environmentalists like it.

James Lovelock, the renowned Gaia theorist, thinks nuclear energy will be essential to power the developing world. On a Sept. 13, 2006, airing of KQED’s Forum, he told host Michael Krasny, "I would welcome high-level nuclear waste in my backyard."

During the hour-long program he said the dangers of radiation were exaggerated; there wasn’t that much waste generated; and in order to mitigate the increasing effects of climate change, we should "look at nuclear as a kind of medicine we have to take."

Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, thinks nothing is more doomsday than global warming and told the Guardian he advised Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to start touting nuclear power as a solution.

"The nuclear industry needs a new green generation," he told us. "My fellow environmentalists ought to be grateful to the nuclear industry for supplying 20 percent of our electricity."

And then there’s Moore, the 15-year Greenpeace veteran who once put his body in the way of a seal hunter’s club and wrote in an April 16, 2006, Washington Post op-ed, "My views have changed and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.

"Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely."

The bio for the Post piece identifies Moore as cochair of "a new industry-funded initiative, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which supports the use of nuclear energy."

It’s one of the few articles that make such a disclosure, although more probably should. A survey by Diane Farsetta, a senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy, came across 302 recent articles mentioning Moore and nuclear power as a possible option for mitigating the effects of global warming.

Only 37 — a mere 12 percent — said he’s being paid to support nuclear power by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a national organization of pro-nuke industries that’s hired Moore to front its nuclear renaissance.

Only the Columbia Journalism Review has drawn the further connection that Hill and Knowlton has been paid $8 million to help the NEI spread the word that the nukies have the silver bullet for solving global warming.

Hill and Knowlton knows a little something about pushing dangerous products. The company created the tobacco industry’s decades-long disinformation campaign about the effects of smoking. Veterans of that campaign then helped ExxonMobil try to bury the truth about global warming.

Before laughing these folks out of the reactor room, consider this: Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, who’ve been against nukes in the past, are now suggesting nuclear energy needs to be considered in light of global warming.

Al Gore and Hillary Clinton have also made similar recent murmurings. Of all the major 2008 presidential candidates, only Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards have offered up energy plans that don’t include more nukes.

Eight states are working on pro-nuclear legislation, and although a bill to lift the moratorium on new plants in California was shot down in the Assembly’s Committee on Natural Resources, its sponsor, Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine), told us he intends to introduce it again and again until it passes.

In the meantime a private group of Fresno investors has signed a letter of intent with a nuclear power company to put a 1,600-megawatt nuclear plant in the San Joaquin Valley. So far the only thing stopping the group is the state’s 30-year-old moratorium, which says no new nuclear power plants may be built in California until a permanent solution to the waste is established. The investors are already working on a November 2008 ballot measure to end the ban and allow new nuclear plants.

A new nuclear plant hasn’t been built in the United States since 1978, when concerns about safety, cost, and the long-term waste management challenge (nuclear rods will still be deadly hundreds of thousands of years from now) overwhelmed the industry.

But if there were ever an opportunity for a nuclear renaissance, the threat of climate change has created one. And the poster child is Moore, a relatively innocuous Greenpeace exile who’s traveling around the country with a B-movie version of Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, speaking to communities and drumming up what he calls a grassroots coalition of mayors, business leaders, and community activists. He’s steadily convincing them we need more nuclear power by trading the classic doomsday scenario of a massive radioactive explosion for the creeping killer global warming.

"I’m aghast," Dr. Helen Caldicott, an Australian who helped found Physicians for Social Responsibility and is one of the most prominent international critics of the dangers of nuclear energy, told us.

Caldicott, who’s authored several books on the subject, most recently Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer (2006), said, "I’ve never seen a propaganda exercise which is so fallacious. Both the politicians and the media are buying it."

She and other nuclear watchdogs who’ve been patrolling the industry for more than 30 years say it’s anything but a safe, reliable, economic, and emissions-free silver bullet.

Let’s look at the facts.

SAFETY


When it comes to safety, Moore told us, "US nuclear power plant employees enjoy the so-called healthy worker effect: people employed at the plants have lower mortality rates from cancer, heart disease, or other causes and are likely to live longer than the general population."

To support this claim, he cited a 2004 Radiation Research Society study of 53,000 workers. After reviewing it, Caldicott said, "I’m very suspect. There’s nothing here about people who are living with cancer."

Caldicott admits there’s a void of data about the health of nuclear workers and people who live near plants. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn’t mandate baseline studies of cancer rates in areas surrounding the sites of nuclear facilities.

But people living near Three Mile Island, the Pennsylvania plant that came within minutes of a catastrophic meltdown in 1979, demanded studies, which found evidence of increases in thyroid cancer in the region. And Caldicott, in her recent book, pointed out that there are a number of things the government doesn’t want to admit. "To this day there is no available information about which specific isotopes escaped nor the actual quantity of radiation that was released," she wrote, going on to detail how, for lack of sufficient data about the distance the radiation may have spread, scientists studied the rates in the livestock of nearby fields and found supporting evidence that the plume of poison spread as far as 150 miles away.

And of course, there’s Chernobyl, where a 1986 nuclear-plant disaster caused lasting health problems and contaminated a huge swath of what was then the Soviet Union.

The unavoidable fact is that the industry thus far has had two terrible, nightmarish accidents, one of which was catastrophic and the other very nearly so.

And every part of the nuclear-power cycle involves serious health risks.

"You want to get really sad?" asked Molly Johnson, a lifelong environmental justice activist and San Luis Obispo County resident. "Go to New Mexico, go to Arizona, see the families that are dying because of the uranium mining. Their water is irradiated from the uranium tailings that are still there…. Why would we continue that?"

These days intentional attacks are even more of a concern. But Moore isn’t sweating. He said he thinks a plane colliding with a power plant is unlikely, even though the 9/11 Commission Report found that al-Qaeda operatives at one point considered aiming for the Indian Point reactor in New York.

Even if a jet hit a plant, Moore insists, the plant would be strong enough to withstand a collision. "If you drove an airplane into that, it would just be one messed-up airplane you’d have to deal with," he said.

Not exactly, say the critics.

"He is just dead wrong about reactor security. Breathtakingly misinformed," said Dan Hirsch of Committee to Bridge the Gap, a public interest group that’s been studying nuclear power and proliferation issues for nearly four decades. "Virtually no reactor containment in the US was designed to withstand a hit by a jumbo jet. Significant parts of the plant essential to preventing a meltdown are outside containment anyway."

Hirsch is speaking of power lines, which transmit electricity from the plant and also carry electricity to it — power that’s used to keep dangerous components cool and safe. If that power were cut off for any length of time, a meltdown could occur in the pools where explosive spent fuel is kept.

These spent-fuel storage areas — essentially big swimming pools where radioactive waste is kept underwater until a long-term storage facility is built — rely on a steady pumping of water to cool the superheated waste. All you’d have to do is stop that water pump, and there’d be a meltdown. And the storage areas don’t necessarily have the same fortified structures as the reactors.

Hirsch said, "A successful attack on a nuclear plant or, even worse, a spent-fuel pool would be the worst terrorist event to ever occur on earth by far, capable of killing over 100,000 people immediately and hundreds of thousands of latent cancers thereafter, contaminating an area the size of Pennsylvania for generations."

There’s no immediate solution in sight for long-term storage, so these pools of deadly waste will likely remain on reactor sites for many years.

San Luis Obispo County’s Mothers for Peace recently sued the NRC over the newly established laws regarding protection against terrorist attacks, which only require plants to be able to ward off five potential external terrorists on the ground. It took 19 people to pull off the Sept. 11 attacks. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that power plant operators must also consider the possibility of an air attack when designing spent-fuel storage tanks.

Mothers for Peace is fond of noting that existing security measures aren’t what you’d call foolproof. During a recent earthquake, 56 of 131 sirens in the San Luis Obispo area — designed to alert residents of a possible accident at the plant — didn’t go off because the power was out and they aren’t backed up by generators or batteries.

When Mothers for Peace and the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility brought the failure to the attention of the NRC, the agency said that nothing is perfect and that the sirens over the course of 1,000 hours worked 99 percent of the time.

"Except the five hours you’d actually want them to work," David Weisman of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility said.

Nuclear power is either a creeping killer or a sitting bomb. Wind farms and solar-panel arrays are not leaching poisons into the environment. They’re not direct targets for terrorist attacks, and if they were, the result wouldn’t be all that horrible. Imagine cleaning up a bombed wind farm versus a nuclear power plant.

"Wind farms are on nobody’s list of targets," Weisman added. "If a windmill falls and there’s no one there to hear it, do you need an emergency evacuation plan?"

RELIABILITY


A centerpiece of the pro-nuke argument is that nuclear power is a baseload source, meaning it can generate energy all day, every day. Solar and wind, of course, rely on the cruel (and unpredictable) forces of nature to generate power.

But one could argue the same about nuclear power plants. They’re run by people — and the record of those operators isn’t encouraging.

Moore expressed great confidence in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: "They have very, very stringent requirements and regulations. It’s all there for anybody to see. All of these reactors are inspected regularly. There is no reason in my estimation to suspect the NRC of anything other than being a responsible watchdog agency. If you want to take the time to dig into it, you can find out what’s going on."

David Lochbaum does take that time — and he’s found out a lot. After working for 17 years as a consultant to the NRC, he joined the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) as a nuclear-safety engineer. He spends his days combing NRC reports and documents and compiling studies on the safety of the industry. His experience and research have caused him to conclude that the commission can’t stay on top of the 103 plants in the country.

"We get a lot of calls from workers in the plants, and NRC employees that have safety issues they’re afraid to raise," he said. "We had three calls last week. That’s a little more than usual, but we usually get 50 to 60 whistleblower calls a year." He said sometimes the workers have already raised the issue internally but need an ally to force a remedy at the plant. Other times they’re afraid to speak about what they’ve seen without fear of retaliation.

Lochbaum authored a September 2006 study for the UCS titled "Walking the Nuclear Tightrope" on the issues of safety and reliability. It’s a chilling read; it carefully outlines how regulators have been complicit in allowing plants to operate far longer than they should and how these overstressed plants eventually have to be shut down for years to restore safety standards. He found that in the last 40 years plants have ground to a halt for a year or more on 51 occasions. In most cases it wasn’t a spontaneous incident but an overall decaying of conditions that compromised safety.

"Some observers have argued that the fact no US nuclear power reactor has experienced a meltdown since 1979 (during which time 45 year-plus outages have occurred) demonstrates the status quo is working successfully," Lochbaum wrote. "That’s as fallacious as arguing that the levees protecting New Orleans were fully adequate prior to Hurricane Katrina by pointing to the absence of similar disasters between 1980 and 2004."

One of the most recent and chilling examples is the 2002 outage of the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio, where a hole the size of a football was discovered in the vessel reactor head. Only a half inch of steel remained to prevent a massive nuclear meltdown. The plant was overdue for a shutdown and an inspection and had been granted the extension by the NRC.

When asked what he thought about that close call, Moore said, "I didn’t think it was a close call. I thought it was a mechanical failure that should have been caught sooner. It was caught long before it became an accident or anything like that."

"When you say close call, that means that nothing actually happened," he concluded.

But when there’s a facility where an accident could lead to mass deaths, even close calls are grounds for concern. That’s why we have to hold nuclear plants to such high standards. And the fact that plants have to close so often to avoid disastrous accidents doesn’t say much for the reliability argument.

EMISSIONS


This may be the issue on which the pro-nukers make the most headway. Moore cites a number of international studies, posted on the NEI’s Web site, that show nuclear plants competing only with hydropower when it comes to emitting the lowest level of carbon dioxide. Even solar panels and wind turbines, when one factors in the entire energy process, emit more greenhouse gases, according to these studies, though all these power sources release significantly less than burning coal or natural gas.

The anti-nuke crowd says a true study has never been completed that quantifies the CO2 emissions from mining uranium and turning it into usable nuclear fuel. Both are heavily energy intensive. Additionally, they argue that transporting waste will incur even more CO2 emissions, whether it’s shipped across the sea for reprocessing in Europe or trucked across the country for burial in Yucca Mountain.

But the waste itself is also a huge issue. Although nuclear power plants don’t have bad breath, they do emit toxins — and it’s an unresolved issue as to where to put them. The current forecast for opening the Yucca Mountain repository is 2021. Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada opposes building the facility, and he’s pushing a bill that would require plants to keep the crud in their backyards.

"They’ve had 50 years to work on the waste issue," Weisman said. "And the best solution they’ve come up with is, who do we not like enough to send it to?"

Either way, Moore thinks waste is not a problem. If anything, it should be reprocessed — he likes to call it "recycling." Under that process, spent fuel is bathed in acid to separate out the usable plutonium. That can be followed by vitrification — a complex, energy-intensive process of suspending the highly radioactive and corrosive acid in glass, which is then sealed in expensive trash cans of steel and concrete and buried underground for at least 300 years, after which point he predicts it should no longer be a problem.

"It makes more fuel," he said.

Actually, Hirsch said, "it makes more weapons-grade plutonium." He argues that the last thing the nation should do is allow nuclear-plant operators to separate the plutonium and put it on the market, where it can be leaked for bomb making.

Additionally, there are a number of waste sites around the country that are slowly emitting what they’ve been designed — or not designed in some cases — to contain.

The worst is probably in Hanford, Wash., where decades’ worth of reprocessed spent radioactive fuel pushed the area beyond Superfund status into a "national nuclear waste sacrifice zone.

"Hanford is the most contaminated site in North America and one of the most significant long-term threats facing the Columbia River," Greg deBruler, of Columbia Riverkeeper, wrote in the Fall 2006 issue of Waterkeeper, the group’s quarterly journal. "It’s difficult to comprehend the reality of Hanford’s 150 square miles of highly contaminated groundwater or its 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste sitting in 45-year-old rotting steel tanks."

Much of that waste includes leftover reprocessed spent uranium fuel, which ate through its casks and poisoned the community’s drinking water.

Moore said, "It’s not as if everyone is dead. The nuclear waste has been contained."

Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

ECONOMICS


"The economics of nuclear power are well proven around the world. It is one of the most cost-effective forms of energy," Moore said.

Just check the record. Of the 103 reactors that were built in the United States, 75 ran a total of $100 billion over budget. India more recently went 300 percent over budget on its 10 reactors. Finland is already 18 months behind and $1 billion over on a reactor.

Given this track record, the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration "Annual Energy Outlook 2005" reported that "new plants are not expected to be economical." They’re so risky, in fact, that not a single plant could have been built without the 1957 Price-Anderson act, which moves the liability for a nuke plant off its owners and onto US taxpayers. "If they were really economical, they’d be able to get insurance," Weisman said. The bill was recently renewed.

The nuclear industry forges on unperturbed, claiming that new plants have been streamlined for easier construction. Additionally, the siting and licensing laws for plants have been changed to speed up the process by precluding public input. (Given the industry’s safety record so far, that’s not comforting.) Experts predict it will now take 10 years to build a new nuclear plant. Thirty-four licenses are currently pending at the NRC as utility companies race to secure the $8 billion the federal government set aside for subsidies.

"Imagine how many wind turbines that could buy," said Harvey Wasserman, a longtime anti-nuke activist who recently authored the book Solartopia, which outlines a plan for completely renewable energy by 2030. In fact, renewables are far cheaper. Building the facilities to create one gigawatt of wind power costs about $1.5 billion; about two gigawatts could replace the Diablo Canyon Power Plant.

THE BOTTOM LINE


In the end, it comes down to money, and that’s where nuclear power may be the most vulnerable.

Sam Blakeslee, a Republican Assembly member from San Luis Obispo, introduced a bill last year that calls on the California Energy Commission (CEC) to conduct an in-depth study of the true costs of nuclear power to assess its viability as part of California’s future energy plans. The bill passed unanimously, and Schwarzenegger signed it.

"This will be cradle to grave," said Weisman, of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, which has focused its scrutiny on the industry’s costs.

The group has long been suspicious of PG&E’s financial woes, which came to a head this past March when the California Public Utilities Commission allowed the company to use $16.8 million from ratepayers to fund its in-house study of relicensing its two nuclear plants. "The licenses won’t be up until 2023 and 2025, so why are they looking at relicensing now — and why does it cost $16.8 million when the state’s study is projected to cost $800,000?" Weisman asked.

Assemblymember Mark Leno (D–San Francisco) is introducing a bill this year that will undercut PG&E’s study before the CEC’s analysis is completed, which is expected to occur around November 2008.

"Our very simple idea here is that before any relicensing of our aging nuclear power plants can proceed, the CEC study be completed," Leno said. "Clearly, PG&E is very eager to move forward its relicensing process. They have many years to accomplish that task."

Leno said the stakes are too high and the inherent risks of the toxins already accumulated in seismic zones along the coast need to be carefully weighed against the prospects of generating even more waste. "We should proceed with absolute caution, forethought, and consideration."

NOWHERE TO RUN


Those risks, that caution, are something that never leaves the minds of the people who live in the plants’ fallout zones, areas as vast as a steady breeze or trickling flow of water can make them. That’s really the problem with nuclear power plants. After 50 years there are still too many unknowns. In Moore’s lectures and during interviews and debates, the former Greenpeace activist likes to say more people are killed by car accidents and machetes than by nuclear power plants, but that mocks the magnitude of a meltdown.

A car accident kills at most a few people. A machete attack might kill one person. A nuclear accident has the potential to inflict casualties in the tens of thousands, maybe even millions, and to render entire cities uninhabitable. And while most of the time, most of the plants may be perfectly problem free, it only takes one accident to wreak environmental havoc.

These days opposition to nuclear energy isn’t about mass protests in the streets. "When KQED calls and asks for the sounds of a protest, I say that’s not how it happens," Weisman said while showing a DVD of a Jan. 31 San Luis Obispo County Planning Commission meeting that droned on for more than 12 hours. The meeting ultimately resulted in what he’d hoped for: a continuing delay of PG&E’s permit to site new dry-cask storage tanks for thousands of tons of nuclear waste accumuutf8g at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. He and Rochelle Becker, the group’s director, sat through the whole thing. "That’s what protesting is now," he said.

Becker, a pert, soft-spoken woman with the aging visage of the youngest grandmother in the room, said correctness is crucial. "Never, ever exaggerate. When they want to talk about safety issues and isotopes, we refer them to someone else because we don’t have that expertise. All we have is our credibility, and if we lose our credibility, we don’t have anything."

THE PLUTONIUM PAYCHECK


Which makes what Moore is doing look like such a travesty.

"Maybe we should hire Hill and Knowlton," joked James Riccio, Greenpeace’s nuclear-policy analyst in Washington, DC, on thinking about gearing up for a new wave of anti-nuke activism.

To Riccio, Wasserman, Weisman, Hirsch, Caldicott, and many others who spoke with the Guardian, Moore is nothing but a dangerous distraction who’s getting the wrong kind of attention. Wasserman disputed Moore’s credentials as a Greenpeace founder in the Burlington Free Press article "The Sham of Patrick Moore."

When questioned by the Guardian, Moore called Wasserman a jerk. Moore said he’s still an activist — and in addition to parroting for the nuclear industry, he runs a sustainability consulting company, Greenspirit Strategies, which advises industries on controversial subjects like genetically modifying organisms, clear-cutting, and fish farming. His clients include hazardous waste, timber, biotech, aquaculture, and chemical companies, in addition to conventional utilities that process nuclear power and natural gas.

Moore insists he’s not hiding anything. "In every interview I do the reporter already knows that I’m cochair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition and that I work for the nuclear industry," he told us.

But Moore did not identify himself as such during a lengthy interview with us until we asked. The disclosure was also missing during the long biographical presentation given to the folks in Fresno on Feb. 22, which did include pictures of his Rainbow Warrior days. Again, on May 24, Moore didn’t mention his plutonium paycheck during a radio debate on KZYX. Neither did the moderator, and it was only when Hirsch, his debating partner, got a moment to speak that it was revealed. "Let’s be clear here, Patrick," Hirsch said. "You’re being paid by the industry." *

Joseph Plaster, Andrew Oliver, and Sam Draisin helped research this story.

L’Bel of the ball

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By Molly Freedenberg

We get press releases all the time asking us to consume things, listen to things, attend things, write about things – from the International Conference of This and Such (no, I usually don’t go) to caffeinated vodka (damn straight I’m going to try that one…). But unless these releases have something to do with what I’m working on right this second — as in, I’m invited to a press conference on proper pool enjoyment techniques the week I’m doing Summer Guide — or they’re offering me something I actually really want — as in, Hey! Have this pair of oxblood knee-high boots from Fluevog for free! — they usually go into the Pile o’ Papers to be Looked at and Thrown Away Later.

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Forty feet o’ spa goodness

But not when I got the invite for a mini-facial, skin consultation, and make-up application from the cosmetics company L’Bel. I mean, hey. The release said “Mobile Spa.” I imagined it something like a fancy pizza delivery service: “Hello, I’d like to order a facial, a hand massage, and some flattery. Please hold the speech about how quitting smoking would be better for my skin. Please drop these off at 135 Mississippi in Potrero Hill at 2pm. Oh, wait. That’s nap time. How about 3?” Who can resist that? Not me, the girl whose vanity (I mean, uh, whose dedication to the health of her skin) is only matched by her supreme laziness.

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Ain’t no trash in this trailer

Fresh fruit from old punks

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

FULL CIRCLE Once upon a time, at Kezar Pavilion in San Francisco, the Dead Kennedys blew the Clash off the stage. I think it was early spring 1980. I didn’t pay much attention to dates in those days, but I remember this much — I was there.

On that night the DKs delivered their fat, funny broadsides with a joyous abandon that few bands of the era could match. Vocalist Jello Biafra — who finished his set drenched in sweat and wearing only his underwear’s elastic waistband — was simply inspired. The group was tight as a drum, and their material — most of which appeared on Fresh Fruits for Rotting Vegetables (Alternative Tentacles, 1980) — was first-rate. Songs such as "Holiday in Cambodia" and "California Über Alles" were politically sharp and lifted by the group’s sarcastic humor — which is to say the band delivered a hilarious, politically pointed good time.

The Clash never got cozy with their American audience. That evening they were self-conscious and too obviously under control — burdened by political points rather than delivering them. The band’s hard-edged working class–oriented politics, which evolved into complex internationalism, was hard for many to access. For comparison, try finding music by the Bay Area’s Dils, whose somewhat dry, hunt-and-peck rhetoric was as close to a domestic analogue as the Clash spawned.

That was nearly 30 years ago. Today Joe Strummer’s dead, Topper Headon looks dead, the DKs — minus Biafra — are an oldies act, and Biafra is an outspoken spoken word artist who, on his latest three-CD opus, In the Grip of Official Treason, compares DK guitarist East Bay Ray to deposed California governor Gray Davis.

Still, the Clash’s music holds up — as does Biafra’s delight with the absurdities of America’s hypocrisies. Our safe American homes don’t feel quite so secure, and bad news keeps leaking through cracks in the wall, which makes checking in with the Clash and Biafra relevant. The former’s somewhat vestigial but still cool Singles Box (Sony) was released late last year (there are so many discs that you could drop a few behind, say, a CD case and not miss ’em for a month or three). The compilation is simply superb, especially because it revives much of the band’s pre–London Calling material.

Nearly 30 years down the road, the Clash’s material has aged little. Perhaps the band just wanted fame, and the principals were as ignorant as the rest of us. Julien Temple’s recent documentary about Strummer, The Future Is Unwritten, undercuts that premise. But even the most cynical punks tended to clam up when it came to the Clash. To say the band wasn’t about albums before and after 1979’s fabulous London Calling (Sony) is a cop-out. Combat Rock (Sony, 1982) was a fully realized and wildly popular triumph, as much as three-disc Sandinista (Sony, 1981) was kind of a soporific mess. Nevertheless, punk rock — for aesthetic and financial reasons — wasn’t primarily about making albums.

Which means that hearing the Clash’s singles, along with the B-sides, as streamlined things unto themselves places a person right in step with what mattered from the only band that mattered. Just give a listen to "White Riot" or their simply brilliant cover of the Bobby Fuller Four’s "I Fought the Law."

Do you have to own this collection? Well, if you’ve got most of the band’s material, you can pass. This one might be best appreciated by fiends, collectors, and the idle rich. Yet it’s amazing how satisfying this music is, and not as a nostalgic exercise in golden protest. The Clash, born in defiant reaction against the musical mainstream, never made peace with it, their major-label contract and midcareer success notwithstanding. Their music delivers.

After all these years — and at this awfully nervous moment in history — it’s also a good time to consider Biafra’s new spoken word collection, a seriously timely 210-plus minutes of sardonic, smart, and occasionally funny political commentary. When he exited the DKs, Biafra drifted away from music as the principal vehicle for his wit and insight. Although he never moved far from punk, his work today seems to follow in the footsteps of social critics such as Paul Krassner.

On Grip (Alternative Tentacles), which consists of live material from various performances, Biafra offers uncommon observations about common household pests such as George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the wars on Iraq and on terror, and other familiar American vulgarities. Careening through a club while the Dead Kennedys were playing doesn’t, in most respects, share much with sitting down and listening to Biafra tear into the fabric of imperial America. What hasn’t changed, however, are the drive and acerbic wit that Biafra brings to the stage — then and now. *

DIRKFEST

Jello Biafra MCs the celebration of Dirk Dirksen’s life, with SF Mutant All Stars, the Contractions, White Trash Debutantes, No Alternative, and others

June 8, 8 p.m., $25

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

Nude beaches

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› culture@sfbg.com

In 1967, Northern California gave birth to America’s first nude beach, at San Gregorio, near Santa Cruz. Now, 40 years later, there’s great news coming from the sand: in the biggest surge in more than a decade, clothing-optional beaches and other skinny-dipping sites are booming once again. Check out our miniguide below. And in the near future, visit an expanded version on the web that includes our unveiling of a pristine cove near Capitola and directions to a place where you can take a naked full-moon hike.

The one bummer? The popular Red White and Blue Beach, in Santa Cruz County, is closing in the wake of the retirement of owner Ralph Edwards.

San Francisco County

LAND’S END BEACH


Tucked away among craggy cliffs, patches of sand, and some of the Bay Area’s best scenery, a nude beach is the last thing you’d expect to find within a short walk of the end of Geary Boulevard. But on warm days, Land’s End usually draws dozens of visitors.

HOW TO FIND IT Go to the end of Geary, and park in the dirt lot up the road from the Cliff House. Take the trail at the far end of the lot. A hundred yards past a bench and some trash cans, the path narrows and bends, rises and falls, and eventually becomes the width of a road. Don’t take the road on the right, which leads to a golf course. Instead, keep going past another bench, and as the trail turns right, take a left toward a group of dead trees. Where there’s a stairway with a Dogs Must Be Leashed sign, descend and head left to another stairway, which leads to a 100-foot walk to the cove. Alternately, follow the service road below the El Camino del Mar parking lot a quarter mile until you reach a bench, then take the trail there. It’s rough in spots, and at the end you’ll scramble over rocks.

THE BEACH Rocks and little watery grottoes. Look for some good sandy areas away from the beach’s entrance. For the best sunbathing spots, walk west (left). Some visitors build little rock windbreaks, which provide protection from blowing sand.

THE CROWD The quarter-mile-long cove gets up to 30 visitors on the warmest days, with up to 80 percent gay male usage being fairly standard. One visitor counted six or so nudes, all men, during a May visit.

PROBLEMS Long walk, random "sex patrols" by rangers, reports of drug use, public sex on trails and nearby. Fog and wind. Quite rocky. Swimming not allowed. Trails other than the main one are unsafe and may be closed and have poison oak.

GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE BEACH


Overrun by fans undeterred by its slippery and often dangerous trails, the Golden Gate Bridge Beach usually turns into a mob scene on summer weekends. The waves don’t break as hard here as at Baker Beach, so on the nicest days in low tide, you can go out up to 50 yards. A favorite activity: watching the sunset while staring toward the site’s namesake, the Golden Gate Bridge. But don’t visit if you’re looking for privacy and solitude. "I had to stop going there because it’s such a pickup scene," frequent visitor Joseph Friday says.

Also known as Nasty Boy Beach and Marshall’s Beach, the shoreline here features a trio of adjacent coves. In the spring, check for beautiful flowers on the bluffs. Drawbacks include some poison oak on the path (often trimmed back by volunteers), which is otherwise unmaintained and becomes a muddy bluish goo after rainstorms. Golden Gate National Recreational Area rangers strongly recommend that visitors stay away from the trails and avoid swimming.

HOW TO FIND IT Go to North Baker Beach, park in the main lot, and walk north along Lincoln Boulevard, passing the sand ladder that leads to North Baker. Just north of the ladder trail, look for a dirt road with a gate leading to Battery Crosby. Follow it, then hike up the trail immediately on the south (left) side of the old fort to the top of the bluff. Rangers recently added some rails that make the path a little easier to follow. Take the trail straight west as it goes downhill toward the ocean (wear long sleeves and pants to protect against poison oak). At a small crumbling concrete bulkhead, the trail heads north along the bluffs and eventually down a shorter, steep section with small steps cut into the gully. The main path ends at the south end of Golden Gate Bridge Beach.

THE BEACH Three small rocky beaches located below Fort Winfield Scott. The main beach trail tends to be slippery, heavily eroded, and dangerous.

THE CROWD During the week, Golden Gate Bridge Beach attracts dozens of users. On weekends, (mostly nude) usage soars to between 100 and 300 visitors on the hottest days.

PROBLEMS Slippery, crumbling, sometimes muddy, and poison oak–edged trails. Trash, rocks, wind, fog, unsafe swimming conditions, sex on the beach, too many people often jammed into too little space.

San Mateo County

DEVIL’S SLIDE


Now that its main access road, landslide-prone Highway 1, is finally reopened, visitors are flocking back to one of California’s only state beaches that officially permit nudity. Called Gray Whale Cove State Beach, the site known to many users as Devil’s Slide draws maybe 200 people on warm days — about 25 percent of them nude.

Nude use is especially popular on the north end of the long sandy shore. If you like Frisbee, it’s easy to find somebody to play with at the cove. Signs, though, warn about dangerous surf. There’s no lifeguard on duty. Dogs are prohibited. The beach is open all year and is one of the only California state parks that doesn’t accept an Annual Day Use Pass.

HOW TO FIND IT From San Francisco take Highway 1 south through Pacifica. Three miles south of the Denny’s Restaurant in Linda Mar, turn east (inland, or left) on an unmarked road, which will take you to the beach’s parking lot, from which a 146-step staircase leads to the sand. Coming from the south on Highway 1, look for a road on the east (right) 1.2 miles north of the Chart House restaurant in Montara.

THE BEACH A 300-foot-long site surrounded by orangish sandstone cliffs on one side and the beautiful Pacific Ocean on the other. Devil’s Slide is a great place to read, tan, jog, play Frisbee, and watch (true to its state beach name) gray whales, pelicans, and surfers.

THE CROWD Tourists, families, surfers, and naturists all use the beach.

PROBLEMS Influx of suited visitors, cold water, fog, wind, long walk to the beach. Landslides sometimes close Highway 1, three great white sharks seen in the ’80s. Parking fee. Some sexual activity reported in north cove area in recent past. Rangers have made a few arrests.

SAN GREGORIO


A visit to San Gregorio combines history with recreation. Approaching its 40th anniversary, clothing-optional, privately run San Gregorio is America’s oldest nude beach, founded right next door to San Gregorio State Beach, where nudity is not allowed. The huge property attracts some nude and suited straight couples, singles, and families. First-timers are sometimes a bit put off by the driftwood structures on the sandy slope leading down to the beach, which are used by some visitors as sex condos. Others relish San Gregorio’s scenery. There are two miles of soft sand and tide pools to explore, as well as a lagoon, a lava tube, and, if you look close enough on the cliffs, the remains of an old railroad.

HOW TO FIND IT From Tunitas Creek Way, south of Half Moon Bay, the beach is about a mile up Highway 1. Around 100 yards north of Highway 84 on 1, take the dirt road past the big white gate with the Toll Road sign. Go a few hundred feet, and just after the 55 mph sign on your right, turn left on the dirt road (look for the address 19429 above the fence) and head 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. 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.

THE BEACH You’ll find caves, cliffs, driftwood structures, and a beach full of clean, rolling sand. Pets are OK (though dogs are not allowed on weekends or holidays); fires, cameras, and overnight camping are banned. Swimming is not recommended. There are toilets in the parking lot.

THE CROWD On the warmest days, 50 to 200 visitors may be spread along the sprawling beach, which is so large that it never feels crowded. Straight couples and families tend to hang out on the south end of the beach, gay men on the north side.

PROBLEMS Fee, wind, riptides, cold water, summer fog, sex on the beach or in driftwood condos, not much of a social atmosphere. *

For more nude beaches, please check out our official guide, which is in the process of being updated.

Don’t Trash California

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By Sarah Phelan

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Slow is how I was feeling in all this heat, as I drove towards the Bay Bridge, direction San Francisco, and maybe it was because I was driving slowly, too, that I saw the huge illuminated “Don’t Trash California” sign that’s been newly installed on the approach to the toll gates.
Brought to us by Toll Roads, an Orange County and SoCal-based organization that has partnered with Caltrans, the sign is obviously intended to stop people trashing our state (at least physically, if not verbally).
Nice touch, I thought, as the driver in front of me tapped cigarette ash out of his window, and a plastic bag flew across six lanes of freeway traffic. It’s time people stopped dumping shit out of car windows. Maybe if they could see where their shit ends up, they’d give more of a shit about their shit.Maybe we need Al Gore to make another documentary, following the path of a fast food wrapper from your car and into someone else’s lneighborhoods and into the waterways that lead to the giant silver mobius that is the World’s Ocean.
Or maybe we could just use our friggin’ imaginations. The kids in West Oakland WON’T enjoy finding your beer can in their back yard. Nor will the sea lions at Pier 39. And it won’t help feed the starving polar bears.
And if the California Department of Transportation, Division of Maintenance, didn’t have to spend more than $40 million just to clean up litter on freeways and highways, maybe they’d have more dough for fixing the pot holes that drivers are always complaining about.
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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. *

Vino, verde, vici

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Fuck green — I want emerald, I want turquoise, I want veridian. I want shades of chartreuse cascading down the sides of my highball glass and mint cream swirling at the lip of my rim. Mmm. I was going to write this week about how much I’m head over loafers for Lil Mama’s clover new vid, "Lip Gloss," and what the deal is lately with so many trash-tragic newbie chicks wearing flip-flops and fleece to the clubs (did I miss a memo from Target?), but it’s the Green Issue — yay for Earth! — so I’m going in on the recent trend toward "green" cocktails.

Green cocktails? Easy! All you have to do is down eight or nine shots of Fernet, and — voila! — you’re green. And let’s not even get into how some drinks instantly recycle themselves. Yet in terms of mixology, green usually means organic — juices, vodka, ice cubes, fruit flies, what have you. Organic, however, doesn’t necessarily mean green: it probably took five tons of jet fuel to plop that native Guangdong lychee into your tropical Bellini. Conundrums! When it comes to partying green, it seems, the snifter of a conscious tipple is somewhat bruised with environmental irony. It’s environy.

But if you can snag some local fresh-squeezed mixer, shake it with small-batch liquor, and consume only what you need — not hard, since organic cocktails are kind of freakin’ pricey — you can still get three sheets to the wind and not feel like you’re littering. Usual suspects such as gourmet vegetarian legend Millennium (milleniumrestaurant.com — house-infused kumquat–star anise gin, anyone?) and the snuggly bar at Roots Restaurant (theorchardgardenhotel.com) in the grandly green-built Orchard Garden Hotel have been in on the organic, fresh-brewed tip for a while. And a few surprising spots have begun wearing their green hearts on their sleeves too. Vesuvio (vesuvio.com) in North Beach is bursting with ecofriendly drinks such as the Pojito, a mojito with local-made 209 gin and organic Pama pomegranate liqueur. SoMa restaurant Coco500 (coco500.com) features a nifty lemongrass Bloody Mary, with lemongrass-infused organic vodka, organic tomato juice, and sriracha (sun-dried chili paste).

As for less immediately intoxicating spirits, Yield Wine Bar (yieldsf.com) offers a vast array of biodynamic, sustainable, and organic wines with some of the more harmful of the 250 chemicals involved in production filtered out — that’s almost as many chemicals involved as in the first 10 minutes of a drag queen’s night out. Harmful. Wine’s pretty easy, of course — we live in wine heaven, and the products of conscious vintners such as Beringer (beringer.com) and Five Rivers Ranch (fetzer.com), as well as those from distributors such as the Organic Wine Co. (ecowine.com), can be found all over. Beer’s getting in on it too: local foam-meister Anderson Valley Brewing Co. (avbc.com) pumps out the suds from a solar-powered brewery, even.

But the green drink ground zero in San Francisco has to be Elixir in the Mission. Not only does it foreground organic cocktails, but the whole Elixir enchilada is officially green certified by the city in terms of recycling, cleaning, and waste disposal — the first bar of its kind. H., Elixir’s wryly gregarious owner, mixes up fierce experimental environmental drinks at the bar’s monthly green drink happy hour, which brings in an enthusiastic crowd of ecoliquor seekers (who are also really into baseball, judging from the reactions to the big-screen TVs). At a recent green grog gathering, he whipped me up a luscious Eldersour, using organic Square One rosehip-infused vodka and elderflower syrup, and a kick-ass — I can’t believe I’m seriously about to type this word — GreenTeani, a Square One martini with organic green tea infusion and lime zest. It was gone in a minute — gulp.

"There’s the green side of our business — stuff like installing low-flow toilets and making sure we recycle as much as possible," H. says. "And then there’s the organic side, with the drinks, that people seem to be getting really into lately. The little things you can do every day to feel like you make a difference matter more and more, the principle of it — even if it’s related to being a bar or going out. Nobody can be perfect when it comes to environmental stuff. I mean, I drive an old BMW to work — and it doesn’t run on used fryer oil. But it’s paid for."

After a few more GreenTeanis and a quick trip to the low-flow, I had to admit that I certainly felt better about my environment. Global warming? Pshaw. Everything was just ducky. Now where can I get an organic date? *

GREEN DRINK HAPPY HOUR

Second Thursdays, 6 p.m.–late

Elixir

3200 16th St., SF

(415) 552-1633

www.elixirsf.com

>

Clean isn’t always green

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

There’s no more symbolic and tangible an issue for elected officials than clean streets.

Not everyone can see firsthand how well local schools are operating, whether nonprofits receiving city grants are spending the money wisely, or if every board and commission is complying with open-government rules.

On the other hand, everyone knows when the streets are filthy, and if a grease-soaked, wind-tossed burger bag slaps you in the face on your way to the ballot box, you’ll angrily remember it.

But clean doesn’t inherently equal green. Street sweepers don’t magically cause dirt to disappear. Where do the used condoms, food wrappers, trails of frothy malt liquor, puddles of urine, auto exhaust particulates, oil and gas residue, toxic chemical spills, and arching piles of trash go after being sucked into a street sweeper’s collection bin?

Well, two places really. When haulers and street sweepers at the Department of Public Works pick up junk from the streets, as much as possible gets recycled at a site on Tunnel Avenue.

"DPW separates materials we pick up for recycling [furniture, appliances, construction debris, etc.], which as recently as 2003 went to the landfill," department spokesperson Christine Falvey told the Guardian.

Then, however, the street sweepers all congregate at a DPW maintenance yard on César Chávez Street, where workers hose charming layers of sludge off the inside reservoir panels of the trucks and out onto two grates — little more than storm drains, which ultimately empty into the bay.

Harvey Rose, chief budget analyst for the Board of Supervisors, released a comprehensive management audit of the DPW in January. Buried on page 149 is a description of what San Francisco does with all this waste scrubbed from the city’s asphalt surfaces and left clinging to the inside of street sweepers.

For the audit, Rose’s office hired health and safety experts from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the San Francisco International Airport to conduct an inspection of the maintenance yard.

We recently requested a copy of the report, and it shows that the foul and possibly toxic liquids removed from the trucks — still swirling with smaller debris that slipped through the grates — wind up in the city’s sewers.

A capture basin below the drains, which the SFPUC cleans out once a week, gathers some of the smaller debris such as trash and gravel. But the basins lose their treatment capacity once they’re a third full, and auditors noted that the basins were almost overflowing when they visited. And despite the presumably high concentration of pollutants in the waste liquids (uninhibited runoff from the streets is a chief contributor to water pollution), no special attention was being given to their handling.

"There are no measures in place to prevent an acute discharge of a collected hazardous material," the analyst’s report concluded, "or to reduce the chronic influx of pollutants generated from this activity."

In other words, the city is cleaning crud off the streets, where people can see it — then dumping it into the bay, where it’s a lot less visible.

In the DPW’s official response to the audit, director Fred Abadi did not dispute how poorly the agency was treating discarded waste from street sweepers and vowed to link the catch basin to a multichambered oil-grit separator, as auditors proposed. Falvey admitted that sometimes night-shift sweepers dumped their entire loads at the César Chávez yard, but she said that habit stopped after the audit was released. The DPW is currently in the market for an oil-grit separator, she added, and the maintenance yard’s drains that receive material from the sweepers have been covered with metal nets.

Of course, all that flushing also requires a lot of water — and that’s in scarce supply right now. San Francisco is experiencing its fourth driest winter on record, and to fill the region’s water needs, there’s talk of diverting more precious flow from the Tuolumne River, threatening fish and wildlife (see "Draining the River").

The DPW’s "street flushers" can each hold 3,200 gallons of water and use about 15,000 gallons of freshwater every business day to cover an average of 25 routes.

In comparison, three average San Francisco households would have to cease using water for an entire month to equal the amount of water used to clean local streets each day. The DPW’s Bureau of Street Environmental Services used 5.6 million gallons of water last year, according to figures provided by water officials. The agency used 90.8 million for landscape maintenance, mostly irrigation for street medians, which during droughts in the late ’80s was temporarily outlawed to conserve water, according to SFPUC spokesperson Tony Winnicker. San Francisco is not there yet, but "for now we would just like everybody to cut back," Winnicker said, "and certainly the city has room to do that as well."

There are costs involved in not cleaning the streets. The Maryland-based Stormwater Center, funded in part by the Environmental Protection Agency, argues that it’s not clear how much street cleaners help remove surface pollution before it runs directly into the oceans. The center says, however, the runoff could be reduced by 5 to 30 percent with the right modern trucks and aggressive maintenance.

Street sweeping as a municipal function historically began as a matter of aesthetics. Unmanageable layers of trash and slime on the street are unsightly and generally not considered to be a part of good public policy, to say the least.

More recently, though, cities have looked at how street cleaning can also help green their locales. "They still want to pick up trash and litter, which was the original idea," said Jim Scanlon, a program director for the Alameda Countywide Clean Water Program. "But it’s moving a little bit more toward wanting to pick up the finer particles because of the pollutant-reduction capabilities."

To its credit, the DPW has planted several thousand trees in the city over the past three years at the direction of the mayor, helping to contain burgeoning stormwater during heavy rains that would otherwise overflow into the ocean. It’s a strategy lauded by groups such as San Francisco Planning and Urban Research. And elsewhere at the César Chávez maintenance yard, auditors noted the DPW’s good housekeeping, including its storage of toxic materials.

But scooping up noxious sludge in one place and pouring it out somewhere else isn’t exactly the sort of green behavior that Mayor Gavin Newsom likes to talk about. *

Assault on batteries

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The urban forager is generally looking for something to eat, but this does not have to be the case. While there is an undeniable pleasure in bringing edibles (blackberries, nasturtiums) home to the table from the metropolitan wild, there is also satisfaction in gathering up rubbish and disposing of it properly. And just as the city is a remarkably fertile place, so too is it rich in articles it would be better off not being rich in.

We have all seen the plastic water bottles rustling in the gutters like autumn leaves — husks emptied of their pricey elixirs and tossed away. They are easy enough to pick up and put in the nearest blue recycling bin, and that was how I started. But once I began to see the gutters as traps for stray Evian bottles, I began to notice that they hold other sorts of trash, less conspicuous but more worrisome. They hold an awful lot of batteries, in particular, with a decided tilt toward the AA size. I would like to think that even blithe people do not make a practice of throwing objects as thick with toxic chemicals and heavy metals as batteries on the sidewalk or into the street, but I seldom travel more than three blocks by foot or bike without finding at least one, often smashed or mangled by traffic.

My little foraging project for the past six months or so (since winter is a bleak time for urban food hunting; the weekday chef’s menus have heavily featured cabbage and broccoli) has been to collect all the discarded batteries I come across and put them in an old measuring cup on the pantry counter. When the cup fills, every few weeks or so, I take it to Walgreens and empty its contents into the recycling pail. Batteries do not belong in landfills almost as much as they don’t belong in the gutters, and by accepting them and sluicing them into the recycling stream, Walgreens is performing a large, if undersung, public service.

My hope is that once people start to notice that yes, there are AA batteries all over the gutters and yes, they can be picked up and recycled, people will pick them up and recycle them. Walgreens stores are easy to find in these parts, and a city whose streets are cleansed of old batteries will be a better city.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Property wrongs

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› news@sfbg.com

For decades the narrow strip of land at the corner of Fulton and Stanyan streets in the Inner Richmond sat abandoned, accumuutf8g weeds and trash. At some point in the distant past, neighbors say, it had been a nice lawn, but no one remembers exactly when that was.

"I walk past it every morning," 75-year-old Kathleen Russell, who has lived in an apartment overlooking the lot for 34 years, told the Guardian. "I kept hoping somebody would put a lawn in or something, something that was pretty. But it was just left vacant and unattended."

Last year the Department of Public Works posted a sign declaring the vacant land blighted after receiving repeated complaints. Then in January a small group of neighbors began transforming the lot into a community garden. They cleaned up the garbage, cut down the weeds, and planted vegetables. Soon after, the DPW sign disappeared and was replaced by fava beans, garlic, and lettuce.

Justin Valone, who lives down the street from the piece of land, helped initiate the garden. "The response from the community has been amazing," he told us enthusiastically. "We’ve had nothing but support from neighbors. It’s been a real catalyst for getting to know everyone in the neighborhood."

Only one person seems to take issue with the project: the landowner. While visiting San Francisco from her out-of-town home, Aileen O’Driscoll discovered the guerrilla garden on her property and was less than thrilled. She also found neighbors using a hose from her building to water the plot without permission. O’Driscoll told Citywide Property Management, which takes care of the lot and the adjacent apartment building, that she wanted them off her land. She refused to speak to the gardeners directly and did not respond to our inquiries.

Carol Cosgrove, co-owner of Citywide, has been responsible for returning the lot to its unkempt state. "I think beautification of the city is important. I agree with it completely, but I think that personal property and private property is still important," she told us. "Instead of taking something aggressively and taking the water and not even bothering to seek out who the owner is and ask permission or to give a proposal to, this could have been done more responsibly."

Citywide got in touch with Valone and told him to stop using its water (which he did) and to remove the plants (which he didn’t). In response, gardeners began trying to generate broader support for the garden. They went door-to-door with a petition. Some neighbors asked Citywide to leave the plants alone.

Still O’Driscoll refused to talk. The San Francisco Parks Trust contacted the property managers to show there is organizational support for the garden. District Supervisor Jake McGoldrick’s office called too, offering to help mediate a deal between the two groups. The gardeners even agreed to lease the unused land. Citywide says it has presented the case to the owner many times, but O’Driscoll won’t budge and won’t offer an explanation.

"I can’t really speak for her, but she doesn’t want the garden there right now," Cosgrove said.

Gardeners are frustrated by her unwillingness to talk to them. "We could address her specific concerns, but without knowing what they are, we can’t do anything," says Becky Sutton, another garden organizer.

When they felt negotiations were going nowhere, garden supporters began holding a constant vigil at the lot, hoping for the chance to speak to the landowner directly. Groups of friends and neighbors stayed by the garden for days, talking to passersby and getting more signatures on the petition. Currently they have more than 300.

The benefits of the garden would extend beyond the 1,300-square-foot plot, advocates assert. "Green space in San Francisco is very valuable to all residents," said Jude Koski, director of the San Francisco Garden Resource Organization (SFGRO), a local community gardening organization that is willing to help broker a deal over the land. "It is a wonderful way to engage the community. It’s an opportunity for people to come together who wouldn’t otherwise be coming together." According to a 2004 survey by the Recreation and Park Department, 47 percent of San Franciscans would like to see more community gardens in the city.

The two sides have reached something of an impasse: O’Driscoll wants the garden gone, Citywide says it has no choice but to follow her orders, and the gardeners don’t want the lot to go back to dirt and weeds.

But even if they lose this lot, the gardeners see the fight as ongoing. "We want to see this garden not just be bound by the concrete that is all around it but be something that will inspire people and help them know they can utilize vacant land in their neighborhoods," Valone said. "People can take responsibility for beautifying and creating important and useful resources for themselves and their neighbors in the space around them. Whether you’re a renter, whether you own land or not, you can still take responsibility for land and utilize it." *

FEAST: 6 green bars and bistros

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The road to hell is paved with recycled soda cans. I know you mean well, turning off the water while you brush your teeth and sorting your trash, but don’t you know it takes more than that now? We’re saving the world, yo, and boy, does it need saving. So what else can you do besides buy your toilet paper at Trader Joe’s? How about support green businesses — and green restaurants in particular? Because with all the day-to-day hard work and heartache it takes to run such a place, it ain’t easy being … well, you know. Luckily, the world has people like Ritu Primlani, founder and executive director of Thimmakka’s Resources for Environmental Education. Thimmakka’s mission is to help restaurants conserve water and energy, prevent pollution, and minimize solid waste — and then reward them for their efforts by publicizing them as certified green businesses. And though some of the classic do-gooders are on the list — Chez Panisse and Café Gratitude among them — Thimmakka also makes a special effort to work with lesser-known, ethnic, and lower-brow venues. The following is a small set of Bay Area bars and clubs that have undergone Thimmakka’s greening program and come out a healthier shade of jade. For more, in the Bay and elsewhere, visit www.thimmakka.org. (Molly Freedenberg)

ELIXIR


Far from being your typical dive, this Mission saloon is all about going above and beyond. It organizes charity bartender nights, hosts meetings of green-leaning politicos, and impressed Thimmakka with its myriad of earth-friendly measures: using rechargeable batteries, ultralow-flush toilets and double-sided printers, reusing recycled content in construction materials and tabletop covers, and letting dry waste sit for a day or so (to save trash bags). Plus, there’s nothing like a good pour of Stella to help you forget for a moment that global warming is going to kill us all.

3200 16th St., SF. (415) 552-1633, www.elixirsf.com

TASTE OF THE HIMALAYAS


Wonder what Nepalese food is like? It’s a lot like Indian food but lighter, fluffier, and, in the case of this Marina eatery, greener. Though stark and a bit lonely during the day, this is the kind of place that could be cozy and festive when packed on a weekend night. And there’s every reason for it to be — the greens are surprisingly spicy, the garbanzo bean stew both sweet and savory, the naan so airy it’s positively gravity defying, and the service as friendly as friendly could be. Plus, it’s Thimmakka approved.

2420 Lombard, SF. (415) 674-9898, www.himalayanexp.com

RAMBLAS TAPAS BAR


Not just a home of tiny plates of food and large pitchers of sangria, Ramblas is also an exemplar of green goodness. It has discarded grease and oil picked up to be reused as biodiesel or soap. It donates electronic equipment. It uses a special vent that keeps grease away from the roof so it doesn’t wash into storm water. And all its chard and spinach are organic. Feel that high? It’s not just the fruity wine-and-spirits concoction you had with dinner. It’s the buzz of environmental righteousness.

557 Valencia, SF. (415) 565-0207, www.ramblastapas.com

BISTRO LIAISON


This Berkeley bistro stays true to the French tradition of well-portioned, perfectly seasoned, richly flavored delights. But it shucks the age-old restaurant convention of waste, waste, waste. Among its other envirofriendly accomplishments, Liaison manages to recycle and compost 80 percent of its solid waste. C’est responsable!

1849 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 849-2155, www.liaisonbistro.com

SAN MIGUEL


The shabby exterior and faded sign aren’t doing San Miguel any favors, but inside this Mission eatery is a kitschy, cozy, Disneyland-does-Guatemala affair with maps under glass on the tables, rows of Latin American tchotchkes hanging from the corrugated tin ceiling, and a soundtrack of music that can only be described as south of the border polka. And in addition to doing good for your taste buds (try the sour and savory salpicon), this place is doing good for the planet. It uses potpourri and a special degreaser instead of Pine-Sol and aerosols, it’s outfitted its bathrooms with special aerated taps, and it’s learned how to identify and repair leaks. So go ahead: have your camarones asados with a side of environmentalism.

3263 Mission, SF. (415) 641-5866, www.forored.com/sanmiguel

BLONDIE’S BAR AND NO GRILL


"Really? Blondie’s?" That’s the response I get when I tell people this Mission dance club is one of Thimmakka’s darlings — not because the walls are papered with Styrofoam and baby seal eyes or anything, but because the scene is so far from the hemp and hacky-sack culture usually associated with envirofriendliness. But it’s true. This bastion of Yelp.com ambivalence serves organic vodka, reduces paper waste by posting bulletins on a board rather than handing out individual letters or memos, conserves water with special dishwasher systems, and reduces chemical pollution by using a diluted pesticide that’s 200 times less toxic than Raid. Best of all, though, Blondie’s encourages people to get out of their cars by having parking for bikes — no big surprise if you know owner Nicole Dewald’s mother was a major player in getting bike lanes and one-lane streets in the city. "It’s their claim to fame," Primlani said.

540 Valencia, SF. (415) 864-2419, www.blondiesbar.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

Douchebags in Fall Out Boy might get sued again for ripping off yet another band

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By G.W. Schulz

falloutboy1.jpg

It’s tough to come up with your own musical concepts and ideas when your schedule is loaded with photo sessions and magazine interviews inquiring about your sex life on behalf of thousands of barely legal teenage girls.

How does Fall Out Boy have time to write music these days? They’re everywhere ‘cept behind their instruments. They’re on the cover of Rolling Stone. They’re on the cover of Spin. Shit, the New Yorker even ran a piece on them, dutifully highlighting in the photo that one guy who insists on liberally applying mascara and not wearing a shirt. You’re no Iggy Pop, douchebag. Who is their publicist fellating to get all this good press, by the way? Do people still buy this trash? Most of all, why is Microsoft Word telling me not to use “fellatio” as a verb, or even “douchbag” as a noun? Perhaps the new Word version in Microsoft Vista will list “Fall Out Boy” among the alternatives for “douchebags.”

Anyway, it looks like Nicholas Hans of the now-defunct Knives Out is considering legal action against Fall Out Douche for ripping off the image that appeared on a shirt Knives Out was selling a few years ago in 2001 while on tour.