› paulr@sfbg.com
Somewhere in the enchanted realm of West Marin stands the Olema Inn, and in its rustic-chic dining room, at the end of a warm weekend afternoon, a few of us gathered recently for an early dinner. Under the aging sun, the garden glowed a brilliant green, and the dining room, with its many windows, fresh white walls, and wood-plank floors stained a rich coffee color, seemed invitingly cool and uncomplicated. Heat stimulates some of us but enervates others, and as a descendant of peoples from bleak and snowy lands, I generally tumble into the latter bin.
Heat, among other things, can be an appetite killer for the enervated, and while this can never be altogether a bad thing in our land of overplenty, it might be seen as an issue in a fabulous restaurant. (The Olema Inn, we were assured by our local guide, was “the Chez Panisse of west Marin.”) Fortunately, the menu was a tripartite arrangement, with the middle section given over to an array of sub-entrée-size plates that turned out to be more than sufficient for the several members of our overheated party, especially when preceded by a soup or salad and accompanied by a well-chilled pinot gris.
It was agreed by acclamation that restaurant portions are often much too big — especially in the matter of starches — and the cause of a not-inconsiderable amount of after-hours distress. A happy antidote to this syndrome has been, in recent years, the tapas or small-plate phenomenon. Many trendy people have wearied of small plates and even carped about them in print, but this does not change one of small plates’ basic virtues: the providing of worthy food in modest but not tiny amounts whose overall effect is to convince the body that it’s taken in more than it really has.
We do not have to have small plates everywhere, because alternative solutions are already in place. Many restaurants offer half pours from their by-the-glass wine lists, while many others offer to split plates for sharers, for a nominal or no charge. How about, then, offering half-size main courses — a split dish for one? I hate and do not understand the Anglophone abuse of the word entrée, which means “entry” or “starter” in French, but I would accept the term halftrée if it meant the option of less massive main dishes. You couldn’t do this with every dish, of course, but you could probably pull it off with a surprisingly large number — half, at least.
Volume 40 Number 45
August 9- August 15, 2006
The halftrée
Mood elevation
› paulr@sfbg.com
Among proper names that suggest height or loftiness, few have a grander pedigree than Ararat, the moniker of the mountain or mountain range where, according to the book of Genesis, Noah’s ark was supposed to have made landfall after riding out the flood. Today’s Mount Ararat, a volcano rising nearly 17,000 feet above sea level, lies in northeastern Turkey, near that country’s borders with Iran and Armenia. Perhaps Noah and his menagerie washed up there, perhaps not; biblical scholars seem to love a good controversy, and various contrarian speculations bring the ark to ground on this or that mountaintop in Iran.
Whatever. While we wait for intrepid researchers to sort it all out with their satellite photos and expeditions and deconstructions of scripture, we can enjoy ourselves at Ararat, a Mediterranean tapas place opened by Koch Salgut in March at a Castro location not quite 17,000 feet above sea level but far enough above the street — 18th Street, if it matters, and for the people watchers among us it does — to provide a definite aerie experience. For a number of years the space housed North Beach expatriate la Mooné, and while that restaurant didn’t set any longevity records in the Castro, it did survive long enough in its comfy second-story digs to suggest that lack of a street-level presence isn’t necessarily fatal — not, at least, in a location with as much foot traffic as you find at 18th Street and Castro. Look for the sidewalk placard and the broad white staircase in need of a paint job and you are there, in a dining room the shape of a fat L with a groined ceiling and surveillance-friendly windows.
The chef, Caskun Bektas, has cooked in Istanbul, so there is a definite Turkish-metropolitan spin to the food. He turns out some dishes you aren’t likely to come across anywhere else, but even the more usual “Mediterranean” stuff confirms the sharp rise in Castro cooking standards in recent years. Despite the many distractions of the neighborhood’s street theater, people expect better food and know what to look for — and at Ararat, they are getting it.
Oddly, the one item on the menu we weren’t enthusiastic about is the first one listed and bears a distinctively Turkish name. It is ezme ($7), a mushy blend of barbecued eggplant, tomatoes, lemon juice, garlic, and roasted red bell peppers. We found it to be a little bitter, which is hardly an unfamiliar issue when dealing with eggplant.
But … the rest of the tapas (“mezes” is the authentic term) ranged from good to superb. (You can get a mixed platterful with warm pita triangles for $13; individually, they are all in the $5 to $7 range.) Falafel, tabbouleh, dolma, and hummus were all as expected, while the savory pastries — flutes of whole-wheat filo dough filled with feta cheese and herbs and crisped in oil — were like something from a Pepperidge Farm package and seemed to expand the field of possibilities for a cuisine that has come to occupy a spot in this country much like the one Mexican food held a generation ago. Restaurants serving the foods of the eastern Mediterranean have proliferated in recent years, and more and more people like the food and are comfortable ordering it, at least if they stay within the well-lit bounds of the familiar: dolma, shawarma, and falafel, nothing weird or unpronounceable, please.
Speaking of which: I have never had a preparation quite like Bektas’s signature dish, beyti kebab ($16). I have eaten and loved kebabs of various kinds, of course, and I like lavash (the Syrian flatbread), so I expected I would like “lavash rolls filled with delicate ground sirloin served with garlic flavored yogurt and marinara.” And I did. But I did not expect the beauty of the form. The lavash had been rolled around the meat like a wrapper — the meat wasn’t ground, incidentally, but it was surpassingly tender: filet mignon? — and then the package had been cut into thin coins that fanned out nicely on the plate. It was a little like a miniature beef Wellington, with yogurt instead of mushroom sauce.
The kitchen’s other savory showstopper is a shrimp casserole ($8), a crock of prawns swimming in a thick tomato sauce with bits of green bell pepper, caramelized onions, and mushrooms under a cap of melted mozzarella. This dish seemed more Provençal than Turkish, but it disappeared so fast it was hard to be sure. Running respectable races in the same heat were kakavia ($10), a stew of salmon, clams, mussels, shrimp, and scallops in a watery pepper-paprika broth, and kalamarika ($8), batter-fried calamari accompanied by batter-fried slices of lemon and potato, which were hard to tell apart without biting into them.
Also respectable, if not quite memorable, were a braised lamb shank ($18) served with couscous and an herbed tomato-Chianti sauce and mercimek kofte ($6), a hummus relative with red lentils substituted for chickpeas. Weaker — in fact disappointing — was the Ararat salad, a fey compilation of mixed greens, dried apricots, and walnuts, with a crotton of fried goat cheese on top. The promised balsamic vinaigrette was undetectable. Were we being set up for dessert?
If so, we must be grateful, for the dessert menu too includes a sublime dish: the nightingale’s nest ($5), a coil of baklava filled with lavender honey and finished with whipped cream and scatterings of crushed pistachios. Baklava so often flirts with being a cliché, like flan, but in imaginative and conscientious hands it can sing a lovely song, an ethereal melody from on high. SFBG
ARARAT
Dinner: Mon.–Fri., 4–11 p.m.
Continuous service: Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.
4072 18th St., SF
(415) 252-9325
www.ararat-tapas.com
Full bar
Somewhat noisy
AE/MC/V
Not wheelchair accessible
Blog menace
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION Last week at the infamous computer security conference Black Hat in Las Vegas, Bob Auger announced what should have already been obvious: reading blogs isn’t safe. A security engineer with SPI Labs, Auger quietly revealed (www.spidynamics.com/assets/documents/HackingFeeds.pdf) that the mere act of checking out somebody’s RSS feed could allow bad guys to steal money from your bank account, post Web spam from your computer, and snoop on everything you’ve written anonymously in that online porn community you secretly visit. This is the new dark side of all that nice free speech that’s been enabled by bloggish technologies.
Generally, free expression advocates worry about how businesses and governments censor the confessional, unedited style of bloggers. And they’re right to be concerned. People posting personal rants have gotten fired for writing mean things about their bosses and been sued for criticizing litigious maniacs. But these bloggers are receiving traditional retributions for speaking openly. They say bad things about someone or some corporate entity, and that person or entity smacks them down.
As Auger and other researchers demonstrated at Black Hat, we’re about to see a new threat to free expression. Massive groups of people will be punished not for what they say online but for using particular tools to say it. Auger researched several popular RSS readers — programs used to pull blog content onto your computer — including Bloglines, RSS Reader, Feed Demon, and Sharp Reader, and discovered that many of them could be turned into delivery systems for malicious code designed to force computers to, for example, post spam on other people’s blogs.
Known generally as “cross-site scripting” and “cross-site request forgery,” the attacks work by covertly moving data from one location to another. And it could get worse than spamming. As Auger pointed out, everything you type into your banking Web site could get reposted elsewhere, thus allowing the bad guys to read your passwords and have fun with your money.
And blogs can spread their malicious code as quickly as they spread news. If I were a bad guy and wanted to steal a bunch of passwords, I would hide some malicious code inside a comment on a popular blog. As soon as your reader downloaded that comment, you’d be infected. Or I would start a blog that sounded particularly interesting (or pornographic), tempt a bunch of people into subscribing to my feed, and inject naughty code into their computers that way. When you consider how many people automatically repost other people’s feeds onto their own blogs in a “what I’m reading” section or something like that, it’s clear how bad things could get.
But even worse, in the process of using the Web’s fastest free-speech engine to wreak havoc, the people injecting nasty code into blog feeds could undermine free speech itself.
Feed injection poses a whole new set of problems for people who want to promote free expression. We’re dealing with a mechanism of censorship that isn’t even aware of itself as such. People who do these hacks may not have our best interests in mind — they’re trying to lie, cheat, and steal — but as an unintended consequence, they may also choke off a powerful avenue of open communication. If people begin to associate using blogs and feeds with being ripped off and spied on, many may stop reading them. Government and business couldn’t have asked for a better self-censorship catalyst. Speaking out, no matter what you say, will turn you into a victim.
Luckily, there are fixes for the speech-stopping problems that Auger found — just as there are legal and social remedies for traditional forms of censorship. After talking with Auger, developers at Bloglines fixed many of the bugs he pointed out. Other vendors are working on fixing them too. And fixes for a lot of cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery attacks can be borrowed from more protected programs. So people making feed readers simply need to start thinking about security issues and using these fixes when they release the next version of their software.
As ever, what the geeks at Black Hat remind us is that free speech isn’t just a matter of political freedom — it’s also about technical freedom. Getting your message out means being prepared to defend yourself ideologically — and digitally too. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who has tragically been forced to stop using different silly e-mail addresses each week to defend herself against insane volumes of spam.
ALT.SEX.COLUMN
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I’m a 50-year-old man who has gone without sex for too long now. To me, my ex-wife’s 35-year-old niece is the true personification of the “MILF.” She’s had her two kids, got divorced, and still looks as hot as she did at 18, when I first developed an incredibly deep infatuation. Since I was still married to her aunt, I couldn’t indicate this in any way. Now I can’t stop thinking about her. I know it’s holding me back from pursuing other opportunities, but I’ve found that I really need her … bad! I guess my questions are, how appropriate would it be for me to make my thoughts and overwhelming feelings known to her? If appropriate, how should I approach this? I don’t want to freak her out, but how should I tell her that I’ve had the hots for her for 17 years now and would do anything to go to bed with her at least once?
Love,
Not Really Her Uncle!
Dear Unc:
We’ll get to your questions, but first, “… the true personification of the ‘MILF’”? She “still looks as hot as she did at 18”? Can we talk about this? I know that new parents are notorious one-note bores and I swear I’m not one and will keep writing about other topics, but while I’ve got you, this MILF business has got to go. First off, nobody looks as good as they did at 18 (and frankly, we could all live without the pressure) and second, what does it even mean, “MILF”? By specifying the “mother” in “mother I’d like to fuck,” does the speaker intend to make a distinction between the rare mother worth fucking and the unfuckable masses? Or is it really the “mother” part that intrigues, that sexy whiff of fecundity, that milkshake that brings all the boys to our yard? My personal suspicion is that it’s the latter masquerading as the former, that the fascination with the pregnant or baby-toting Heidi Klum or Angelina Jolie is not fueled so much by the fact that they still look “hot” as by the implication that if somebody knocked them up, then so, by extension, could you. But I may be getting a little theory-addled here.
I bring all this up not so much out of a wish to render my readers walleyed with boredom, but because I was so touched by a new blog called “Shape of a Mother” (shapeofamother.blogspot.com) that I’d take pretty much any opportunity to mention it, even in a column about wanting to fuck your ex-niece-in-law (which, by the way, whatever). The concept is elegantly simple: have a baby or have had a baby or in a few cases don’t have had a baby, take a picture of your transformed body, write a few notes about how you feel about the changes, and Bonnie, the blogger, will post it. The result is an extraordinarily moving document, whether you see it as political (I surely do) or as mere documentation or even as art. It reminds me, in a gut-punch way — not a “wasn’t feminism fun?” way — that sisterhood not only was but can still be powerful. Also, when my absolute best self is not in ascendance, that my own recently ravaged body is not really so ravaged, comparatively. In your faces, stretch-marked bitchez, I got off easy!
No, seriously, this sort of normalization by exposure — see Joanie Blank’s pussy-picture book, Femalia, for a similar and similarly successful tool for fostering self-respect and even self-love among women who may have been feeling freakish, ugly, and ashamed of their perfectly normal bodies — works. It may be the only thing that does work, and it’s way cheaper than therapy. All it takes is seeing unretouched women (two- or three-dimensional, either way) who don’t have a modeling contract or sex with Brad Pitt. It works on men too, although men as a group seem less inclined toward this sort of collective feel-betterism. They can still be cured of a lifetime of self-loathing by mere exposure to the unglamorized truth (it’s five and a half to six and a half inches, dudes).
Let’s get down to it: this woman is not your relative, your ex-wife is not your wife, and nobody cares. Oh, and she doesn’t want to fuck you, so it’s time to give it up already.
What you have here is not a crush or a fancy but something verging on obsession and by definition unhealthy. If you insist on trying to get somewhere with her, you should really leave out the part about thinking dirty thoughts about her since she was 18. That’s pretty skeevy, pops. If I were her, I’d change the locks.
Ask her out, decently. Emphasize interest over obsession. Try not to sound like you have a secret room in the basement plastered with her photographs, and then take no for an answer. We can only hope that her rejection breaks the spell. She isn’t the one holding you back, you know.
Love,
Andrea
SFBG
How to fix the sewers
EDITORIAL Every time it rains heavily in San Francisco, millions of gallons of barely treated sewage flow into the bay. The city’s ancient sewage system has only one set of pipes — the stuff that’s put down the toilets and drains and the stuff that comes out of the clouds use the same underground pathways — and when there’s too much precipitation, the old pipes and storage tanks get overwhelmed, and there’s no place for the putrid mix to go but into the local waterway.
The raw shit is obviously unhealthy for people and for aquatic life: the bay doesn’t flush well, which means our sewage sticks around awhile. Even in dry weather, the city’s sewage system frankly stinks. Residents who live near the antiquated sewage treatment plan in Hunters Point have to smell it every day. A full 80 percent of the city’s wastewater winds up in a treatment plant in Bayview that everyone agrees is a relic from the 1950s that at the very least needs to be upgraded substantially.
There’s really no way to get around it: the politics of sewage is the politics of poverty, power, and race. As Sarah Phelan reports (“It Flows Downhill,” page 15), the west side of town has a well-constructed treatment center that doesn’t issue any odors at all and handles only a fraction of the city’s sewage. The heavy shit, so to speak, gets dumped on an area that has way, way too much of the city’s nuisances already.
In the meantime, it’s entirely reasonable for San Franciscans to ask why this environmentally conscious city makes such an awful mess of the basic problem of disposing of stormwater and human waste.
So the planning process that’s now underway for overhauling and upgrading the city’s wastewater system is an opportunity to undo decades of environmental racism and take a totally different approach to handling the water that comes into and flows out of San Francisco.
The first step, as Alex Lantsberg points out in an op-ed (page 7), is to stop looking at all that water as a problem. Water is a resource, a valuable resource. This city has constructed an elaborate system to bring freshwater into town from the Tuolumne River, 200 miles away. And yet, the fresh, potable rainwater that falls on the city creates a crisis every winter. There’s a serious disconnect here.
Take a look at a satellite photo of the city and you see a lot of flat rooftops and concrete roadways that together make up a huge percentage of the topographic landmass of San Francisco. These are places that now simply allow rainwater to run off into the storm drains. There’s no reason that those roofs can’t collect that water into cisterns, which could turn that rain into sources of drinking water, water to wash with, water to irrigate plants … water that otherwise would have to be sucked out of a high Sierra watershed.
There are vast amounts of space in the city where concrete — street medians, building fronts, sidewalks, etc. — serve as nothing but conduits for sloshing rainwater. With a little creativity, some of that area could be filled with plants that could absorb some of the rain — increasing green space and making the city a better place to live in the process.
And with modern technology, there’s no reason that all of the streets have to be impermeable concrete. As city streets are torn up, there are ways to look at pavements that are less than watertight, allowing some of the rain to soak in.
There are, in other words, ways to make San Francisco a model city for handling wastewater in an environmentally sustainable way. That won’t be the cheapest way to get the system repaired, but in the long run, it’s the only reasonable approach.
There are also ways to end the injustice that comes from living in the southeast neighborhoods and getting the worst of everyone else’s crap. If the city is about to spend more than a billion dollars upgrading its sewers, a key part of the project must be eliminating both the fecal outflows and the noxious odors that come from the Hunters Point treatment plant. If the more recently built west-side plant can be odor-free and avoid releasing untreated waste, this one can too.
Fixing the sewer system — and rebuilding the Hunters Point treatment plant — isn’t going to be cheap. To its credit, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is pushing to levy new charges on developers whose buildings add to the sewage burden. But in the end, there will have to be some sort of citywide water and sewer rate hike.
There’s going to be a huge fuss when that’s proposed. It ought to be set up so that big commercial users pay more than small businesses and residents, but in the end, it has to raise enough money to do this right. Trying to fix the sewers on the cheap will just leave us with the same stinking mess that the southeast has suffered under for decades. SFBG
Public power: step one
EDITORIAL Finally, after years of talk and a fair amount of delay, San Francisco is prepared to move forward and take a significant step toward public power. The supervisors are on board, the mayor’s on board — even the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which has never been much of an advocate for public power, seems to be on board.
So the goal now ought to be approving the Community Choice Aggregation program, putting it into action, and using it as a springboard to a real public power system.
Community Choice Aggregation creates the equivalent of an energy co-op. The city can buy power in bulk, directly from generators, and resell it to residents and businesses at lower rates than the private monopoly Pacific Gas and Electric charges. It will, of course, save the ratepayers some cash — and with PG&E’s soaring rates sucking hundreds of millions of dollars out of the local economy and hammering small businesses, that’s a great thing.
But the overall point of this ought to be getting the city into the business of selling retail electricity — and getting the public used to the idea that running an electric utility is something local government tends to do well. Public power cities all over California have lower rates and more reliable service than cities that deal with PG&E. PG&E’s public relations crew and expensive political consultants try to obscure that fact every time a full-scale public power measure goes on the ballot.
The problem is that CCA doesn’t entirely get San Francisco out of PG&E’s control. The giant utility still owns the lines, polls, and meters, so the city will have to pay to deliver its power through that system. If the system breaks down, we’ll have to rely on PG&E to fix it. And if PG&E continues to handle the billing functions, most residents may never realize that there’s been a dramatic change in the local grid.
As a first step, the supervisors need to demand that the city handle the billing functions, so that ratepayers see a bill coming from the city of San Francisco, not PG&E. That will reinforce the fact that this is public power and that the city, not the private monopoly, is responsible for the rate decrease.
Then public power advocates need to set a target date for another electoral campaign to kick PG&E out of town altogether. SFBG
{Empty title}
› tredmond@sfbg.com
Bad social failures eventually come back to haunt you. That’s what’s happening in the California prison system, where decades of lock-’em-up legislation, stupid drug laws, and governors who are terrified of the political consequences of paroling inmates have filled the jails with aging prisoners who require extensive medical care. Tens of thousands of people will die in state prisons in the next few years, not of murder or abuse but because they’re serving life sentences — and it’s going to cost a fortune to take care of them in their declining years. The state may have to set up special geriatric cell blocks and hospital wards for inmates who did something pretty bad a long, long time ago and never got another chance at life.
And so it is, apparently, with San Francisco’s homeless population.
According to a new study by the University of California, San Francisco, the median age of the city’s homeless people has gone from 37 in 1990 to about 50 today. The thousands of people who live on the streets are getting older and older — and their health is failing. Many of them, it seems, have been there at least off and on since the 1980s, when the federal government under Ronald Reagan stopped spending money to help cities provide low-cost housing.
If the study, reported in the Chronicle on Aug. 4, is accurate, there are some important policy conclusions that we need to be looking at. For starters, it suggests that many of the homeless people in San Francisco are not arriving here because of friendly programs and attitudes; we are not a “magnet” for the homeless. In fact, the people living on the streets are … San Franciscans. Some have been living here as long as I have. They are part of our community, part of our city. They just don’t have a roof over their heads or a place to go and shut out the world.
Then there’s the fact that harsh cutbacks in spending on low-income populations only create more, and more intractable, problems. The aging homeless are going to need a lot more expensive medical care over the next few years, and the only way they’re going to get it is at taxpayer expense. By the time the baby boomer generation of homeless people has died, I bet San Francisco will have spent so much money on caring for them in their later years that it would have been cheaper to just give them all a decent welfare payment, health insurance, and a decent place to live.
Building housing is expensive. Building so-called supportive housing — residential units with social services on-site — is more expensive. Treating people in hospitals who are literally dying of homelessness is even more expensive than that.
You want to be a cold-eyed conservative? The cheapest solution is to radically raise the general assistance payment to the point where homeless people can afford an apartment. That also happens to be the most humane.
Once upon a time, what a lot of homeless people needed was cash, not care. Cash, not care. Now they need care — and the people who elected Gavin Newsom and who complain about the homeless are going to be paying for that care. SFBG
Thinking outside the pipe
OPINION Although it’s named the SF Sewer System Master Plan Project, San Francisco’s long-term wastewater program deals with a lot more than sewage. It addresses stormwater runoff as well as the used water that drains out of our residential and commercial sinks, toilets, showers, and washing machines. It offers us a choice between the high road of environmental justice, sustainability, and the emerging green economy and the heavily engineered “pump-and-dump” approach that has defined the city’s sewage and stormwater management practices since San Francisco was first settled.
The high road views the water that we use and that falls on our city as a resource that is too good to waste. San Franciscans now have a once in a generation opportunity to put that idea into practice through a range of innovative technologies, design techniques, and “out of the pipe” thinking. Just a few of the possibilities: building compact facilities to treat our wastewater closer to where it is first generated and where it can be reused, rather than pumping it all into one community where it can become a nuisance; transforming our streets, parks, and school yards into a network of green, healthy corridors that are vital parts of our drainage management system; and harvesting stormwater through green roofs, cisterns, and permeable surfaces.
The high road not only creates jobs for the skilled trade workers who will be needed to rebuild and upgrade the system but also provides opportunities for training and employment for younger and lower-skilled workers to maintain our green infrastructure. While many of the Public Utilities Commission staff have embraced these alternatives, public support will be critical to overcoming the institutional bias for the status quo.
Today stormwater and sewage are considered waste to be made invisible, quickly pumped somewhere for treatment, then dumped. The resulting wastewater system places 80 percent of San Francisco’s sewage treatment burden — and its accompanying problems — in the already mistreated Bayview–Hunters Point neighborhood. During rains the water that falls on the streets is quickly routed down storm drains and toward the city’s treatment facilities. Under normal circumstances the stormwater and sewage are treated, then discharged 800 feet offshore into San Francisco Bay and into an “exemption zone” in the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary, four and a half miles into the Pacific Ocean.
But rains overwhelm the system between 10 and 20 times every year, resulting in neighborhood flooding and overflows of more than a billion gallons of minimally treated sewage and stormwater along our waterfront annually. Since the rains are diverted into pipes instead of being absorbed into the ground, the west-side aquifer that supports Lake Merced and Pine Lake is starved of water.
The planning process now underway gives us an opportunity to address these problems. The sewer master plan provides a variety of ways for San Franciscans to get involved. They must do so to build the type of wastewater system that we can be proud of. SFBG
Alex Lantsberg
Alex Lantsberg is cochair of the Alliance for a Clean Waterfront (sfcleanwaterfront.org) and chair of the Public Utilities Commission’s Citizens Advisory Committee. For more information, contact him at lantsberg@gmail.com.