Volume 41 Number 21

February 21 – February 27, 2007

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The rise and fall of the Donnas

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

The Donnas have every right to be bitter — and the general nonexistence of delectable male groupies is just one item on a laundry list of spoilers. "Seriously, if there were hot guys throwing themselves at me, I would take advantage of them!" complains vocalist Brett Anderson, lounging on the patio outside engineer Jay Rustin’s Sherman Oaks recording studio, where the Donnas are recording their next album.

What’s the issue on this mild winter day in an intensely girly garden paradise cluttered with poodle-haired pups, dive-bombing hummingbirds, and wildly whistling songbirds? The unequal treatment undergone by one of the most celebrated and derided groups of female rock musicians to hit the country’s pop radar since the Go-Go’s. Essentially, "it’s not the same!" Anderson and guitarist Allison Robertson yelp simultaneously.

"It’s much harder for a girl to get a blow job," adds Robertson, ever the analytical Donna, even in matters of quickies. "A lot of guys on the road in rock bands don’t always bang every girl — they just get blow jobs really fast. Guys can do that. It takes 10 minutes or five minutes. But with girls, it’s just not the same. We all know — it’s a little more involved. You need a little more privacy usually, I dunno."

Their tour bus just has tiny bunks shielded by curtains. "Literally, a Porta Potty is more private than a bunk," says Anderson, still the wisecracking, immaculately turned-out amazon in a sweater, skinny jeans, flats, and Springsteen T.

Once Palo Alto’s misfit all-girl rockers from Jordan Middle School, San Francisco’s punk-metal-pop sweethearts on Lookout!, then Atlantic’s up-and-comers splashed all over MTV, the Donnas are now, 13 years along, veterans at the ripe ages of 27 and 28 who can say they’ve been and done that and seduced, if not 40 boys in 40 nights, then thousands of listeners. Today labelless, off their well-worked and beloved touring circuit, and working through a Saturday on a disc with nary a flunky pushing a pop agenda, the Donnas are free, though their trajectory has been tough — littered with put-downs (some said they were the products of a Svengali in the form of Radio Trash–Super*Teem label owner Darrin Raffaelli, who initially collaborated with the teen band once called Ragady Anne then the Electrocutes), innuendo (who could ignore the unsettling amounts of older stalker dudes at their shows?), and rumor. "A lot of people think we’ve gotten dropped and we owe [Atlantic] thousands of dollars and we can’t pay them back!" Robertson explains. "Also that we’re broke and we’ve broken up."

"Also that we’re lazy," Anderson jumps in, imitating an imaginary slurring, boozy Donna. " ‘Oh yeah, we’re working on our record. Gimme another beer!’ "

Contrary to conjecture, it turns out that the Donnas weren’t dropped from Atlantic but left amicably, deciding not to renew in the face of pressure to go more pop after 2002’s Spend the Night failed to take off on rock radio despite much MTV play for their video "Take It Off" and 2004’s Gold Medal failed to remedy matters. "Our big joke was that we were making Gold Medal so Spend the Night would go gold," Anderson quips. Fortunately, the women who once aced their high school courses and recorded their first 7-inches after hours at a local Mailboxes Etc. are used to driving themselves — even when they couldn’t operate a motor vehicle.

"They started when they were in seventh grade," Anderson’s mother, Bonnie, says over the phone from Palo Alto. She’s one of a contingent of Donnas parents including Robertson’s musician dad, Baxter, and bassist Maya Ford’s English instructor father, John, who founded Poetry Flash. "We had to drive. We were the roadies. Mostly we drove them to different shows, unloaded them, watched them, and went, ‘Omigod,’ and loaded ’em up again. We lived vicariously through them."

But then, the Donnas’ career has been marked by such disjunctions: they were the good students who got into UC Santa Cruz (Robertson and Ford), UC Berkeley (Anderson), and NYU (drummer Torry Castellano) as well as sexy, nice girls-gone-bad who foregrounded female desire, fast tempos, and crunchy metal-fleck glam rock licks, fashioning a sound that might have emerged from Rikki Rockett and Vince Neil if they took the rock train to the next gender. All appetite and attitude, riding the tension between the needs to please and be pleased, the Donnas projected the carefree party-hard image that presaged Andrew W.K. while undergoing their share of trauma and drama, starting with a car accident on the cusp of 2001’s Turn 21 (Lookout!) and continuing through the trouble-plagued Gold Medal sessions, which saw Castellano’s painful case of tendonitis, Anderson’s ravaged vocal chords, Robertson’s divorce, and ordinarily prolific lyric writer Ford’s dry spell. "I kind of ran out of ideas and just got depressed," Ford says on the phone in Los Angeles. "I think I felt, like, a lot of pressure, and it’s never a good situation to be under the gun."

But the Bay Area–bred band stuck together, even when they always felt like outsiders amid Lookout!’s East Bay punk scene. "The thing that’s the most impressive about the Donnas is that through all of this, being teenagers, being best friends, having dreams of school and different careers, parental pressure to pursue those, highs and lows in terms of record sales and attention, they’ve stuck together," says manager Molly Neuman, once the drummer of riot grrrl groundbreakers Bratmobile and a force behind the now-catalog-driven Lookout! alongside her ex-husband, Christopher Appelgren.

The frustrating thing — even on this Grammy weekend, as the Dixie Chicks were getting ready to receive their dust collectors across town — was hitting the wall on rock radio as so many other female bands have. All the while they were dancing backward, away from the on-air jokes about synchronized periods and D-cups and being told repeatedly, " ‘We don’t play female rock on our rock station,’ " unless it’s Evanescence or No Doubt, Robertson says.

After trying Atlantic’s pop strategy and working with songwriters such as Dave Stewart ("You write songs with a guy who’s had these number one hits, and you see he still has to sit and go, ‘Dog, no. Frog, no’ — that’s nice," Anderson says. "You feel like, ‘Oh shit, he has to do that too’ "), they’re hoping to strike a balance with the new record, cooking up hard rock ear candy that satisfies a craving for sweet riffs and hard-to-shake hooks without falling prey to the monochromatic hardness of, say, Spend the Night. The songs they’ve tracked so far focus on Donna favorites — partying and dancing — with glances at the equalizing effects of nightfall and the loneliness of the road. And perhaps the gumption that gave these women the courage to face prove-it punks and surly sods every night on tour, the same sassiness that some mistake for brattiness, has been tempered with time.

"We were listening to old records and thinking, ‘Shit! Like, we’re scary!’ " Anderson says, laughing.

"This album," Robertson says softly, "is more like ‘Come party with us.’ " *

DONNAS

With Boyskout, Bellavista, and Push to Talk

March 2, 9 p.m., $20

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

Sonic Reducer will return next week.

Views of Iwo Jima

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima has been met with near-unanimous stateside praise for its humanistic portrayal of the infamous 1945 battle. It became the first film primarily in the Japanese language to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar — on Feb. 25 it vies for an Academy Award in that category and three others. Eastwood himself has called it a "Japanese film." But how have Japanese audiences and critics responded?

There’s been a spate of Hollywood productions set in Japan in recent years — Lost in Translation, The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, to name a few. Each film scored various degrees of commercial success in the United States, but most Japanese audiences agreed that the portrayals of Japanese ranged from well-meaning but a little bit off to downright offensive. With the exception of The Last Samurai, which rode Tom Cruise’s popularity, none performed particularly well at the Japanese box office.

Letters was met with considerable anticipation as soon as the production was announced. Word spread that Eastwood was considering having a Japanese filmmaker direct the project. (He reportedly muttered, "Akira Kurosawa would’ve been perfect.") Once it was confirmed that Eastwood would be taking the helm himself, there were equal amounts of excitement and skepticism. In Japan, Eastwood had been one of the most highly regarded American filmmakers for many years, particularly after Unforgiven, whose fresh treatment of the western genre resonated with samurai movie fans. Yet given the track record of American directors taking on Japan, some suspicion was inevitable.

Letters‘ companion piece, Flags of Our Fathers, opened first, to generally rave reviews, with solid if unspectacular box office numbers. Letters made its world premiere in Tokyo on Nov. 15, 2006, and opened theatrically Dec. 9, 11 days ahead of the US release. To date it’s grossed more than $41 million in Japan (and still going strong), as opposed to a mere $10 million in the US, despite the Oscar nomination and the praise heaped on the film. (Flags, by comparison, grossed $33 million here and $29 million in Japan.) Pop star Kazunari Ninomiya, one of the notable cast members, helped draw a younger audience, many of whom reported having been averse to war movies until taking the leap with this film.

A quick survey of published reviews and blogs in Japan indicated that critics and audiences alike have responded with extremely, if not unanimously, positive comments. Historians have indicated that with the exception of some minor inaccuracies, the film is well researched and essentially true to the events that occurred, while film reviewers have already anointed it a masterpiece for our times. Here’s a sampling of some comments found:

"If one were to see this film without any prior knowledge of its director or production team, there would be no reason to believe this isn’t a bona fide Japanese film."

"When the two films are seen together, there’s a chemical reaction that’s never before seen in the history of cinema."

"Seeing the American soldiers fill the beach, I’d wonder if Doc [from Flags] is somewhere in that crowd. That’s when I realized the effect that seeing both films can have."

"Japanese American writer Iris Yamashita deserves tremendous praise for the incredible detail with which she depicts what is, for her, essentially a foreign story."

"My generation grew up watching films that showed the ugliness and cruelty of Japanese Imperial soldiers, so I didn’t know how to respond to seeing such proud and beautiful Japanese soldiers in Letters."

To be sure, some have also pointed out blemishes. Chief among them is lead Ninomiya’s all-too-modern speech, which for some Japanese viewers sticks out awkwardly from an otherwise well-executed deployment of the language used during World War II. Cast members Tsuyoshi Ihara and Ryo Kase (who delivers the finest, most underrated performance in the film as the former military police officer Shimizu) have mentioned in interviews that the tight time frame from casting to filming prevented them from being fully prepared for their period-specific roles, and they admit details of the era were missed. Many of the cast members reportedly crowded inside Ihara’s hotel room to watch a DVD demonstrating proper Imperial soldier salutes.

That said, those same actors praise Eastwood for keeping his eye on the big picture and focusing more on the characters’ emotions than the period details. They also give him credit for being extremely open to ideas from the cast. "He’s always standing next to the actors," Kase says. "And if we suggest trying something different, he would always say, ‘OK, let’s try it.’ " Ken Watanabe is said to have personally taken on the task of adjusting the translated dialogue on set to sound more natural and accurate.

It’s not surprising, then, that one of the most often heard comments from Japanese viewers was the following: "Tough to admit, but this is a more Japanese film than even a Japanese director might create." More than a few critics and bloggers have pointed out their mixed feelings that such a remarkable "Japanese film" was made by an American filmmaker. The comments range from expressions of frustration and embarrassment — "Why couldn’t this masterpiece of a portrait about the Japanese experience have been made in Japan?" — to one of gratitude: "The film was made possible only because of an outside perspective like Eastwood’s."

The comments are similar to those I heard while traveling to Japan five times during the past two years as a coproducer of the new HBO documentary White Light/Black Rain, directed by Steven Okazaki. We were there to shoot interviews with survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many documentaries — both in Japan and the US — have tackled the subject before, but surprisingly few have focused on the stories of survivors. Filmmakers, peace activists, and survivors all expressed appreciation for our endeavors but admitted embarrassment that an American production was taking on the important duty.

Indeed, many seem to concede the Japanese film industry is currently incapable of producing films like Letters or White Light that dare to expose the horrific consequences of war. The increasingly conservative society has seen a recent surge in the movement to remove Article 9 of the Constitution, which forbids the nation from maintaining an army, navy, or air force. Reflecting the growing nationalism and the call for remilitarization, recent Japanese blockbusters such as Aegis, Yamato, and Lorelei depict the Japanese military defending the nation in war or against terrorism, though they stop just short of glorifying battle. Even warriors from a different age — the samurai — appear to be gaining in onscreen popularity once again.

In this climate, Letters appears to have had a cathartic effect on the Japanese audience. What many had felt yet couldn’t fully voice, the film spoke loud and clear. Though the awareness of the Pacific War had been waning among the younger generations, the success of the film has spawned new books and TV documentaries renewing interest in the period and sending people rushing to try to visit Iwo Jima. (Because of the US military presence on the island, access is extremely limited.) Most important, Eastwood’s dual-film concept has more than accomplished its objective of offering a perspective from both sides of the battle. Japanese reviews of Flags often mentioned some degree of surprise at seeing the hardships encountered by American soldiers during the war and their ability to emotionally identify with the American characters. And Letters, in turn, has been embraced in Japan. As one blogger wrote, "That the film’s creators broke down the walls of race and language to make this film that has moved so many people on both sides may be the best response to war yet." *

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA

Now playing in Bay Area theaters

For a discussion between Taro Goto and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa about Letters from Iwo Jima and the films of Clint Eastwood, please go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Academy fight song

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First things fuckin’ first: I know I’m not the only film fan who’s still pissed about Crash winning over Brokeback Mountain in 2006’s Best Picture race. In fact, let’s change the subject before I punch the nearest preachy ensemble drama (look out, Babel!). Cinemaniacs actually have a bigger problem this year, with the prospect of an Academy Awards ceremony chockablock with predetermined winners. You might as well time your corner-store run during the Best Actor and Best Actress awards, cause there’s zero mystery about who’s gonna snag those trophies (this way you can actually watch the People Who Died montage for once). But who else will win besides Forest Whitaker and Helen Mirren? Can we make it through four hours of entertainment-related programming without mentioning Anna Nicole Smith? And are there any showdowns worthy of honorary Oscar recipient Ennio Morricone’s iconic The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly score?

Best picture: Surprisingly, who’ll go home with the biggest O is anyone’s guess. The choices are Babel (which won the Golden Globe), The Departed (a big-budget box office hit), Letters from Iwo Jima (stellar movie, but Clint Eastwood’s already got like 57 of these things), Little Miss Sunshine (the little indie that could?), and The Queen (a good movie made great by Mirren’s performance). I’m aiming at my Oscar dartboard (it’s taped on a Crash poster) and picking Babel. Or Little Miss Sunshine. Or The Departed. Yep, I’m useless.

Best director: If Martin Scorsese doesn’t win for The Departed, I’m shaving my hair into a Mohawk. Paul Greengrass (United 93) I could maybe live with. But if Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel) gets his mitts on Marty’s trophy, it’s Bickle time.

Supporting actor: Frankly, I’m just psyched that the Academy chose to nominate The Departed ‘s Mark Wahlberg (funny, bitchy) instead of going the predictable route with Jack Nicholson (over-the-top in a bad way; what the fuck was that Tony Montana scene about anyway?). Despite mutterings about how Norbit‘s hideous existence is gonna harm his chances, Eddie Murphy’s Dreamgirls comeback will prove hard to beat, what with the singing, dancing, and acting chops — and nary a fat suit in sight.

Supporting actress: It’s Dreamgirls‘ J-Hud all the way. Insert your own "and I am telling you" pun here. Think she’ll thank Beyoncé in her acceptance speech?

Foreign-language film: Pan’s Labyrinth is on a roll. Give Guillermo del Toro his much-deserved due. You know you loved Blade 2 as much as I did.

Original screenplay: Even with the hokey thing about the stag, The Queen, written by the havin’–a–banner year Peter Morgan, is pretty appropriately regal. But the superfreaky Little Miss Sunshine contains the line "Do what you love, and fuck the rest," which may be kind of a cliché but is endearing enough to win me over. Kind of like the movie itself.

Adapted screenplay: Wizard sleeves! Vanilla faces! Gypsy tears! Wa wa wee wa! Oh, all the nominees in this category are deserving, but if they don’t give this to Borat genius Sacha Baron Cohen and his crew, the Academy will have chosen wisely. Not.

Documentary: Al Gore will never be president, but he can win an Oscar. (Or at least his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, can.) He’s kind of like Ronald Reagan in reverse.

Costume: I almost want to say Curse of the Golden Flower, for the sheer fact that it made Gong Li’s knockers defy gravity. However, I think the sequin-per-capita rule applies here: Dreamgirls, you may not have snagged a Best Picture nom, but getting snubbed has never looked so glamorous. (Cheryl Eddy)

ACADEMY AWARDS

Sun/25, 5 p.m., ABC

www.oscar.com

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Mussel systems

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› paulr@sfbg.com

When last we looked in on Aqua, the prospect seemed rather marbly and banklike, and the menu included paella. Paella is not a dish you should order even at most Spanish restaurants, let alone at a high-end seafood house, but a member of my party went ahead and ordered it anyway — in the heedlessness of youth — and was afterwards disappointed. "What did you expect?" I asked, from the unassailable position of someone who’d opted for Pacific swordfish grilled in a sheath of prosciutto, the sort of dish you’d expect to find, and enjoy, at a place like Aqua. "I don’t know," was the glum rejoinder.

Years passed, youth faded, and we did not return. The meteoric George Morrone, who’d been in the kitchen when Aqua opened in 1991 and was the chef during our visit — which is what tells me it was in ’91 or ’92 — gave way after a few years to Michael Mina, who ran the show for more than a decade until he left to open his eponymous Union Square restaurant in 2004. His successor was Laurent Manrique, he of the recent foie gras kerfuffle. Manrique does offer foie gras on his Aqua menu, but the offer is a muted one: there is no foie gras cart plying the dining room (whose look, incidentally, seems to have been softened to tones of a summer twilight). There had been such a cart at Campton Place, Manrique’s previous gig. When the foie gras cart and the cheese cart were simultaneously at large in that rather snug dining room, one had a brief vision of dandified bumper cars.

You (which is to say, I) would not necessarily expect a chef renowned for his treatments of foie gras to be the ideal head of a kitchen largely devoted to the cooking of seafood. And yet if this is a paradox, it is a spectacularly successful one; for much (and maybe most) seafood needs a certain amount of dressing up to show well, and at Aqua, Manrique’s instinct for meatiness results in plates of fish neatly balanced between elegance and muscularity.

Part of the Manrique magic has to do with bold spicing. Ahi tuna tartare, for instance, has become something of a commonplace in the past decade. The fish’s reddish purple flesh looks a lot like beef and has its own sort of intensity. But the dish becomes special at Aqua when the cubes are mixed with Moroccan spices (these weren’t specified but had a currylike aura) and a quail egg yolk as a binding agent. (Aqua’s à la carte menu is, like the paella, a thing of the past; today you choose three courses for $72 or a more elaborate tasting menu, with optional wine pairings, for $109.) Across the table, meanwhile, a plate of albacore carpaccio — tissue-thin bolts of flesh looking almost like ice shavings — arrived under a colorful bloom of Fresno chile rings, slivers of daikon radish, and bits of fried shallot: springtime on the tundra.

A whiff of curry subtly recurred in the buttery chardonnay jus our server poured around a grilled filet of walu, one of those marvelously meaty white fish from the deep waters around the Hawaiian Islands. The fish wore a straw hat of pommes alumettes (crispy filaments of potato), while a few quartered baby artichokes lurked at the bottom of the plate. Even meatier was sturgeon, cooked en papillote (in a paper bag) and presented as three cylinders — a kind of faux roulade hedged with braised baby spinach and finished with a rich duck jus, also poured by the server from a small pitcher.

Even if you confine yourself to the more modest prix fixe — and we found three courses to be just the right amount of food — you will be given a few extra treats. There are the warm breads — olive, sourdough, multigrain — in constant circulation through the dining room. There is the amuse-bouche, for us a tripartite presentation on a handsome rack: a lemon oil–slicked sliver of Monterey Bay sardine on celery coins, a profound wild-mushroom soup capped with gratinlike pine-nut pesto, and a smoked-ahi croquette with a perfect and crispy golden crust, despite its fingernail size. And there are the postprandial petits fours, tiny tarts, macaroons, and meringues (including a purplish gray one of taro root) that reach the table as a final bit of punctuation (not counting the bill, of course), at the end of dessert.

You could, if you wanted, dispense with dessert and just double-dip from the list of first courses. But if you do need a sweet fix beyond and before the petits fours, Aqua’s choices won’t disappoint. For the most part they don’t sound spectacular, nor do they have much to do with the restaurant’s aqueous theme. But they are exemplars of their kind, among them the chocolate tart, like a round of bittersweet fudge nested in a butter crust and ringed by a salad of blood orange and mandarin segments, and the Meyer lemon soufflé, lanced with a spoonful of pomegranate seeds and redolent of the citrus’s unmistakable orangey acidity.

I was saddened to find both Maine skate and Atlantic cod on the menu. The latter, in particular, is a decimated species, as the British journalist Charles Clover indicated recently in his book The End of the Line; surely there is something comparable to be had from the better-managed and far nearer Pacific fisheries. For all the hullabaloo about Manrique and his beloved foie gras, no one has suggested that duck and geese are in danger of extinction. But he and Aqua, given their international stature, have a special role to play in ensuring that today’s seafood houses will have seafood to serve tomorrow. *

AQUA

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5:30–10:30 p.m.; Sun., 5:30–9:30 p.m.

252 California, SF

(415) 956-9662

www.aqua-sf.com/aqua

Full bar

Not noisy

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

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Me and my bitches

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I have long, pretty, curly hair, and there’s always food in it — and often branches and leaves and stuff — because I’m a chicken farmer. I spend my days crawling around in the bushes, looking for eggs.

At the famous Womyn’s Music Festival in Michigan, trans women (MTFs, women who were It’s-a-Boyed at birth) are not welcome. I knew that. What I didn’t know, until Bitch magazine told me, is that trans men (FTMs, men who were It’s-a-Girled at birth) are welcome. To explain their quirky exclusionism, the festival heads have invented a new category of people called womyn-born-womyn.

Well, dang, that ain’t me either….

It’s almost enough sometimes to make a chicken farmer feel a little lonely. In the world. In the woods, I am on top of the world, and I’m working on a new song that says so. It’s called "A Thousand Feet above You." Which is what I am, in a purely topographical sense, assuming you live at sea level.

I’m going to put on my own music festival for chicken farmers–born–chicken farmers. I’m going to play my great new song to an audience of none. And it’s going to be sad and weird and safe and healing and … safe … and …

I’m so confused!

But then the food comes, and everything makes sense again. The cheese on Lisa’s enchiladas is moving! It’s so hot it bubbles up. And my own plate of beef and beans and rice is so big and so heavy-looking that I could cry. It’s hot too. Sizzling. You can hear it. In the kitchen, instead of an oven, they have secret access to the center of the earth, and the food is not cooked so much as volcanoed.

Our meals seem to be trying to say something to us. I bend my ear to my plate and do, indeed, learn something that goes universes beyond anything else I’ve ever learned. It’s like a dream, untranslatably wise. Ever the poet, I lift my head, look Lisa in the eye, and begin to search for words. Exact words with precise meanings … even as the understanding itself is retreating irretrievably into a steamy, dreamy sort of nebulousness.

"You have beans in your hair," Lisa says.

It’s gone. Gone. But I have to grab onto something, or I might disappear too. "That’s it! Never try and listen to your food," I say, or pronounce. In italics. Out in the air like that it seems somehow small, incomplete. "If you have long hair," I add, wiping mine off with humility and grace and a napkin.

Don’t worry, dear reader, this isn’t a date. (Or, if it were, it ain’t no more, Ms. Beanhead.) It’s more like a journalistic summit: Bitch magazine vs. Cheap Eats. Except right off the bat you can tell that, refried ends notwithstanding, we’re on the same exact side!

How can this be? Bitch is a smart, cool, feministic take on pop culture. Beyond my decided preference for root beer, I don’t even know what pop culture means. No TV. I don’t listen to the radio. Most of the records I like are at least 60 years old. And I don’t subscribe to any newspapers or magazines or spend a lot of time online. I can’t remember the last movie I went to or rented. And I can’t afford the opera or ballet or real restaurants. (And by real, of course, I mean unreal.)

In short: I’m a chicken farmer. When I’m not having lunch with my new friend Lisa at my new favorite restaurant, Mexicali Rose, in Oakland, I’m crawling around on my hands and knees in mud and chicken shit, looking for eggs. I have branches and leaves — and now refried beans — in my hair.

What’s more, I’m trans, and that translates to misogyny, according to some feminists. Believe it or not, I’ve heard this. And like everything else I’ve heard, there’s a part of me that is willing to believe it.

Fortunately, there are 40 trillion other parts of me. And 40 trillion other voices. And when Bitch and Cheap Eats put our little blabbers together last week and clicked forks — and mind you, I was born with "male privilege" and a little tiny wee-wee, and Lisa is practically a vegetarian, for crying out loud — I swear it was like we were long-lost sisters.

Is there a word for this? Inclusion? Openness? Warmth?

So, OK … August. Who wants to go to Michigan with me? *

MEXICALI ROSE

Daily, 10 a.m.–1 a.m.

701 Clay, Oakl.

(510) 451-2450

Takeout available

Full bar

MC/V

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

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Spectator pumps

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Most of the sex I’ve had with my girlfriend has been pretty bad, all thanks to my stupid brain. I go back and forth between impotence and premature ejaculation. Initially, I thought it was physical, but it’s become evident that it’s primarily a mental thing. You know how if someone says, "Don’t think about elephants," all you can think about are elephants? This is the same idea. If I’m confident and stay in the moment, everything goes well and lasts more than long enough for us both to be happy. If I think, "What if my boner goes away?" — it usually does. If I stress that the sex is going to be bad and my girlfriend is going to be unsatisfied, I usually come too quickly. I’ve looked into counseling and hypnotherapy, but they’re expensive and I’m broke. Can you offer any advice?

Love,

Mind-Bending Sex, but Not the Good Kind

Dear Kind:

You are such a textbook case of the classic performance dysfunctions (performance anxiety and spectatoring) that I immediately thought of the big-name researchers and writers on the subject. On my way to getting you some links to Helen Singer Kaplan and Masters and Johnson, though, I was distracted by a book called You Can Be Your Own Sex Therapist. I haven’t read it, but I like the title and appreciate the sentiment. (Felled by god-awful neck pain, I eschewed chiropractors, acupuncturists, and conventional doctors and went the DIY route with a foam pillow and a book called Heal Your Own Neck. I also diagnosed my own depression and used to clean my teeth with dental tools I bought at the flea market, so make of this what you will.) I also like and often recommend The New Male Sexuality, by the unfortunately late Bernie Zilbergeld, PhD.

If you could afford to see a sex therapist, chances are the therapist would introduce you to the concept of "sensate focus," the exercises designed to encourage you and your partner to give and receive touch for its own sake, without getting all goal-oriented about erection or orgasm. The therapist would help you identify what is distracting you and coach you through learning to stay present and enjoying what’s actually happening instead of projecting your anxieties into the uncomfortable near future. While working with a therapist is probably ideal, even seeing an intern for a sliding-scale fee can end up costing you some serious bucks. See if there’s such a clinic handy and if you can afford some sessions with an intern (don’t worry, they’re supervised); and if that doesn’t seem feasible, get a book and do it yourself. Your dysfunction is supernormal. It should be superfixable too.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My boyfriend is 18 and less sexually experienced than I am. I find myself constantly spelling out to him what to do. I can see how this could occasionally be erotic, but we’re both getting frustrated. He doesn’t seem to be learning how to satisfy me very fast. Even worse, I’m taking antidepressants, and one of the side effects is delayed orgasm. Is it fair for me to expect more effort from him? Should I just accept that sex is going to be mediocre for a while?

Love,

Tappy-Foot

Dear Tappy:

Is that an "until I’m off the pills" while or an "until my boyfriend shapes up" while? You didn’t mean a "sex will be mediocre as long as I’m with this guy but I’m going to stick it out until something better comes along" while, did you? I hope you didn’t, but I fear you did.

Sex educators are forever bugging people to communicate more during sex. "Tell him what you want," they urge, "He can’t read your mind!" I say it too, of course, but I also often imagine an outcome much like yours: two essentially unsuited people endlessly nagging each other (or one nagging the other, whichever) to do it a little harder, slower, longer, or better. Helpful suggestions are all very well (vital, actually), but if there’s no spark, you’re not going to ignite one by rubbing two things together until everybody’s exhausted and dispirited.

I don’t mean to say you should give up right now. You should talk to him sometime when he isn’t down there grinding away in whatever dull and vaguely irritating way he’s grinding. And don’t tell him you need to talk to him about how lousy he is in the sack, either. Raise it as a communication issue, and see how that goes. Then you can give up.

I should caution you, however, against making it his problem that you are experiencing some extremely common, but regrettable, side effects of medication. That is not his fault, any more than being so tragically young is his fault. Both will get better with time.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

The other shoe

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› steve@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom has never answered questions about his illicit affair with his appointments secretary Ruby Rippey-Tourk — and even now, with city money involved, he’s sticking to the stonewall.

The Guardian on Feb. 15 broke the story that the city had paid Rippey-Tourk more than $10,000 months after she left her job (see "Newsom Aide Got Paid," www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics).

But the mayor refused to even acknowledge questions I directly put to him earlier that day, just as he has since he confirmed media reports of the affair Feb. 1, when he issued a short statement and took no questions.

"We are confident that this matter was handled appropriately and humanely," he said in the prepared comments his Office of Communications put out.

But there are lots of legitimate questions that arise from payroll records we’ve obtained, which show Rippey-Tourk received more public money than she was entitled to during 2005, when the affair occurred, and 2006. Were public funds converted into hush money? Who was involved? What pressure was applied?

City Attorney Dennis Herrera offered some hope of accountability Feb. 15 when, in response to questions from the Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other media outlets about the payments, he announced an investigation.

"With the full cooperation of the city officials involved, the City Attorney has already begun the process of reviewing the paid leave to Ms. Rippey-Tourk to assure that it was done properly under City laws and procedures," Herrera’s office wrote in a statement as he left for vacation.

The payroll records show that she received $21,755 in paid leave last year for 534 hours of work that she didn’t do. That amounts to about 13 1/2 weeks of paid time off, well more than the 10 days vacation time and 13 days of sick leave to which she was entitled. And it includes a lump $10,155 payment that she received in September.

City law allows employees with "a life threatening illness or injury" to receive paid leave if coworkers are willing to donate their vacation and sick days to the cause. And Sam Singer, a spokesperson for Rippey-Tourk and her husband, Alex Tourk (who worked as Newsom’s deputy chief of staff and later as his campaign manager before resigning last month when he learned of the affair), said that’s what happened.

While Rippey-Tourk was in substance abuse treatment from May through July 2006, Singer told the Guardian, Tourk — who says he was unaware at the time that his wife had been having sex with the mayor — asked city officials whether there was a way to get paid for what began as a period of unpaid leave.

"Several of her coworkers donated their sick time to Ruby during this time of personal crisis," Singer told us.

Asked why Rippey-Tourk didn’t return to her good city job after leaving rehab in July, Singer said, "She just felt it was a chapter in her life that was over, and she wanted to move on." Asked whether Rippey-Tourk may have felt uncomfortable returning to work for a boss who had bedded her during a time when she was having problems with alcohol, Singer refused to comment.

But Sup. Jake McGoldrick, who has called for Newsom’s resignation, said the entire episode was unseemly and the mayor showed poor judgment for someone in a position of authority whom Rippey-Tourk trusted. "I think he took advantage of someone who was in a very vulnerable position," McGoldrick told us.

There are other questions about Rippey-Tourk’s tenure at the city. Payroll records show she never worked a full week in 2006. And her 7 1/2 weeks of unpaid leave in 2005 also appear to be more than she was entitled to. She received $80,195 in compensation in 2005, up from $63,522 the previous year, which was her first in the Newsom administration. The Chronicle also reports that more than half of Rippey-Tourk’s time sheets weren’t signed by her supervisor, as required.

And the Mayor’s Office has refused to answer questions about who donated their leave time to Rippey-Tourk, whether they were asked to and if they knew about the affair, and whether the city has been exposed to a sexual harassment suit by her or employment discrimination suit by other employees. *

Lisa Nowak, astronaut

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION I live in a world where there are sensationalistic news stories about female astronauts going on possibly murderous rampages. Let me tell you why this makes me a happy person.

But first let’s recap. Lisa Nowak is a former astronaut who two weeks ago attacked Colleen Shipman, a woman whom she considered a romantic rival. What Nowak did was violent, stupid, and wrong — as well as fairly typical for a crazed stalker. But the facts of the case were undeniably salacious headline bait. Nowak is famous for flying in the space shuttle, so you’ve got the celebrity angle. She committed a crime for love, which is always sort of thrilling; and the way she did it was bizarro. As you’ll recall from newspaper accounts, she zoomed to a rendezvous with Shipman in a grueling, 12-hour cross-country trip, wearing adult diapers so she wouldn’t have to take bathroom breaks (something she no doubt learned on the shuttle). She’d packed her trunk with a BB gun, a mallet, rubber hoses, and garbage bags. When she attacked Shipman with pepper spray, she was wearing a strange wig and freaking out.

Now charged with attempted murder, Nowak has been widely described in the press as having developed some sort of post-space traumatic syndrome because she knew she would never fly the soon-to-be-retired shuttle again. And this is where I start to feel happy. It would have been easy for pundits and sensation-loving journalists to paint Nowak’s situation as an example of why women crack under the pressure of being astronauts. But you know why they couldn’t do that? Because there are too many female astronauts, such as Eileen Collins and Bonnie Dunbar, who didn’t crack and are leading perfectly normal lives. Even better, there are men such as early astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who did crack up — in a big way — when he got back to Earth and had to shed his "hero" identity. Aldrin became an alcoholic and was consumed with depression for many years after his moon walk, and he’s talked about this openly in some of the stories about Nowak.

Nearly every story I’ve read about Nowak’s actions — in both small and large publications — has attributed her breakdown to stress over having such a high-profile job. There are no hints that she suffered from girly nerves or that women can’t juggle home life and work life. Instead, the entire situation is reported exactly the way it would have been if she’d been a famous man who lost it for reasons that have nothing to do with gender. I like living in a world where we explain women’s sensational crimes in the context of their careers rather than their gender or their families.

The other thing that makes me happy about the Nowak case is that it confirms something I’ve always known to be true: women can be as physically dangerous as men. In courtrooms and pop culture, women have traditionally been viewed as essentially passive, capable of violence only under extraordinary circumstances. As a result, women have often gotten lighter sentences than men for everything from murder to battery. Ann Jones’s sociological study Women Who Kill is in large part a chronicle of how judges have refused to convict women of murdering their children because the ladies are considered victims of postpartum depression. (Men under similar circumstances are given harsh penalties for filicide.)

In a twisted way, the public reaction to Nowak’s assault on Shipman — the fact that she was accused of attempted murder and that her violence was taken seriously — is heartening. Nobody is framing this incident as a catfight; nobody is saying Nowak is innocent because she was going through menopause or something absurd like that. She is being treated like the dangerous and potentially homicidal person that she is. Nobody is fishing around for a way to let her off the hook because she’s a chick.

I like living in a world where women are dangerous. Even better, I like living in a world where people acknowledge that women are dangerous, so they’re less likely to fuck with us. By the same token, when women do go on violent rampages, I want them held responsible for their actions and punished the same way men are. That’s not p.c. equality. That’s the real thing. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who has paid for her violent crimes.

Car-free support

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› steve@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the port turns

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› news@sfbg.com

Another setback to the Port of San Francisco’s plan to allow development of Piers 27–31 has brought about a new round of soul-searching at the beleaguered agency, as well as calls to change what may be allowed along the waterfront.

Last month the port’s latest private development partner, Shorenstein Properties, withdrew its plan for a mixed-use facility that relied on large amounts of office space to recoup the cost of renovating the dilapidated piers. The State Lands Commission, which watchdogs new waterfront construction for adequate maritime and public recreation uses, signaled in November 2006 that it would not support the office-heavy design. The port’s previous development partner, Mills Corp., pulled out last March after half a decade of public Sturm und Drang over its plan for a shoreside mall.

For years the Port Commission has looked to Piers 27–31 as a magic bullet for its financial woes. The port receives relatively little money from actual port operations, and as an enterprise fund department, it receives no subsidies from the city’s General Fund. Moreover, when the state transferred jurisdiction to the agency by way of the 1968 Burton Act, it handed down a good deal of debt and deferred maintenance.

Estimates now put the cost of fixing the port’s crumbling piers and properties at around $1.4 billion, with the vast majority of those costs not yet funded. With construction costs rising between 8 and 10 percent every year, port and city officials are starting to realize that even if Shorenstein’s plan eventually makes it through the gauntlet of government agencies and public oversight, the one-time infusion of cash it would provide would not be enough.

"It is a pretty dire situation," the port’s executive director, Monique Moyer, said at a Feb. 13 commission meeting. "And we do need all hands on deck" to try to solve the problem.

Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin, whose district includes Piers 27–31, has answered Moyer’s call. In the last several weeks, he has floated two new ideas that could have a wide-ranging impact on the 7 1/2 miles of shoreline under port control. As reported in the San Francisco Business Times, Peskin told a Hotel Council luncheon on Jan. 17 that he and Moyer have been discussing hotel development on the city’s piers, something Proposition H, passed by voters in 1990, currently prohibits.

Peskin told the Guardian his hotel concept is in the very early stages and stems from the fact that the State Lands Commission considers hotels to be allowable uses of waterfront property. He stressed that the proposal, which would require a new ballot initiative, is "not by any means a wholesale abandonment of Prop. H." It would instead seek to designate certain piers for hotels after consulting with neighborhood groups and other stakeholders.

"The question is are we willing to have a couple [or] three of them in the right places? That’s it," Peskin said, voicing his opinion that the "right places" would probably fit somewhere between South Beach and Pier 27. "Fisherman’s Wharf does not need any new hotels."

Peskin’s second idea involves replacing much of Shorenstein’s proposed office space at Pier 27 with a year-round cruise ship terminal. For years the port had a public-private partnership similar to the one with Shorenstein to build a new terminal at Piers 30 and 32. But its development partner, the Australian firm Lend Lease Corp., backed out of the deal last year. Shorenstein officials did not answer numerous requests for comment, but Peskin told us the company has expressed some interest to him in going forward with a cruise terminal design.

Not surprisingly, hotel industry representatives enthusiastically backed Peskin’s plan to revisit Prop. H. Hotel consultant Rick Swig highlighted the benefits of letting hotel developers rehab the waterfront. Any new hotels would be "built with somebody else’s money," he reasoned, "and generate tax fund money which goes to the General Fund of the city of San Francisco."

Others weren’t so excited. John Rizzo of the Bay Area chapter of the Sierra Club lamented the port’s reliance on private development as a means of solving its problems.

"There’s this massive infrastructure [problem], and the city [is telling] the port that you have to go out and find money with the resources you have, and what can they do? The resource they have is the waterfront, and the only thing they can do is develop it," he told us.

Rizzo called for the port to "be freed from [the] financial restrictions" of its enterprise agency status in order to preserve valuable open space from development. "We’re forcing [the port] to take this waterfront and put big buildings on it, and that’s not really what we want."

Jon Golinger of Citizens to Save the Waterfront, one of the groups that actively opposed the Mills Corp. mall, also cited problems with the port’s reliance on development. The infrastructure crisis, he told us, is "a bigger problem, and we can’t develop our way out of it alone. Certainly one project at a time is not working for the port or the community."

Neither Rizzo nor Golinger will comment on Peskin’s ideas until their groups have studied them. But Golinger did say, "Any big ideas like hotels need to be part of a much bigger solution." For example, he cited the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, which receives funding from a dedicated half-cent city sales tax. He added that other port agencies are partially subsidized by public money, such as the Port of Portland in Oregon.

Port officials seem to be coming to grips with the magnitude of their predicament and the failure of their reliance on private development. The conclusion to the latest update on the port’s 10-Year Capital Plan puts it bluntly: "The Port’s private/public partnership development model is broken."

At the Feb. 13 commission meeting, port staff proposed several new methods for finding cash, including tapping into future city Recreation and Park Department general obligation bonds. Moyer told the commissioners that such an arrangement would be a "paradigm shift" in the way the port funds projects, not only because it would use the city’s bond money, but also because the agency does not want to reimburse the General Fund, as it has been obligated to do since its inception.

One thing all parties agree on is something must be done. As Peskin told us, "The fact of the matter is, if we do nothing, we’re going to lose a lot of these resources." *

The guns have won

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With President George W. Bush proposing to push the price tag for the Iraq War up to nearly $600 billion — more than was spent on the Vietnam War — while seeking new cuts in our health care safety net, it would appear the debate over guns and butter is over. The guns have won.

Polls before the last election found that the two issues foremost in voters’ minds were the war and our ever-worsening health care crisis. More than ever, the two issues seem linked. With record budget deficits, substantially inflated by spending on the war, resources for health care and other critical domestic needs are increasingly starved.

On the same day the president was proposing another $245 billion to prosecute the war this year and next, which would bring the five-year total since the war began to a staggering sum of $589 billion, he also called for slashing $78.6 billion from Medicare and Medicaid over the next five years.

In addition, Bush wants Medicare recipients to pay higher premiums for prescription drugs and doctors’ services and is proposing to eliminate annual indexing of income thresholds, effectively another $10 billion in cuts.

Expanding children’s and preventive health programs and addressing "personal responsibility" by tackling childhood and adult obesity are supposedly atop everyone’s short list of health care priorities. But these now appear to be collateral damage.

Bush is seeking a $223 million reduction in spending for the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the elimination of a preventive health services block-grant program, $99 million a year to the states, used for obesity prevention and programs for chronic health conditions.

He’s also seeking millions in reductions for the National Cancer Institute, at the very moment some progress has been made in fighting cancer, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for disease surveillance monitoring of bird flu and other approaching epidemics.

That’s just the cuts. There’s no mention of additional funding to address the national blight of 47 million uninsured Americans, another 17 million underinsured, the increased closure of public hospitals and clinics, including in half of the nation’s poor counties that no longer have a health center, and all the other dismal statistics that have dropped our country to 37th in the world in health care indicators.

Imagine for a moment how else we could have spent $589 billion.

With those same dollars you could buy health insurance for all the nation’s uninsured people for the next three years. Or you could fund the current federal program of spending on HIV/AIDS antiretroviral drugs for the next 60 years. Or you could cover the cost of educating an additional 39.2 million registered nurses.

And while there’s plenty of money to send more troops into harm’s way, veterans are feeling the pain of cuts in our nation’s health spending. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, 263,257 veterans were denied enrollment for Veterans Benefits Administration health coverage in 2005. To cut costs, enrollment has been suspended for those deemed not to have service-related injuries or illnesses.

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom," Dr. Martin Luther King said. And, he might well have added, endangering the health security of its citizens at home. *

Deborah Burger

Deborah Burger is president of the California Nurses Association.

Fighting the Monster

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› news@sfbg.com

On Valentine’s Day, Yi Jun Huang, a smiling 65-year-old Chinese immigrant, walked into the Apple store near Union Square and handed the manager a large chocolate heart and a pink valentine as about 40 laid-off Monster Cable workers and their supporters rallied outside. It was one of several appeals to electronics stores to honor a boycott and stop carrying Monster products.

Huang had worked in a Monster Cable factory producing high-end audio cables for 16 years and was fired last October with more than 120 mostly Chinese immigrant workers when the company decided to outsource their jobs.

"The production manager openly told us that production was moving to Mexico," Huang said.

Now, despite a boycott launched by the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA), a slew of protests by the workers, and a resolution passed Feb. 13 by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors urging the company to address worker concerns, Monster Cable still refuses to budge.

"A multibillion-dollar company should not springboard off their workers for the sake of profit and then kick them to the curb," said Shirley Lorence, an organizer with Rise Up, a caucus within the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. "That’s wrong."

The recently laid-off workers have an average tenure of eight years, with many having around 15 to 20 years, according to the CPA. Many workers are in their 40s and 50s. With these layoffs, Monster Cable broke from its previous policy of providing four weeks’ severance pay plus one week for every year of service, and it did not offer job placement, retraining, or community support for any of the workers.

The Board of Supervisors resolution asks Monster Cable, which spent $6 million buying the naming rights to the city-owned Candlestick Park, to give $2 million for a Worker and Community Transition Fund and its workers a more generous severance package.

"The problem of outsourcing is something we have to make a statement on," said Sup. Jake McGoldrick, who sponsored the resolution, which passed 8–3, with Sups. Michela Alioto-Pier, Sean Elsbernd, and Ed Jew in opposition.

Elsbernd took issue with asking a company to provide a more generous severance package than what the city itself offers. Jew thought the city was being too hard on a native company in a competitive field.

Leon Chow, chair of the CPA, was very disappointed that Jew, being the only Chinese American on the board, opposed the measure. He and others said Monster appears to be financially healthy and the outsourcing was based simply on greed.

"We saw no evidence that times are tough," Huang said. "We know their sales are up to a billion dollars annually. We’re the ones who work there, and there have been no signs that things are slowing down."

But CEO, or "Head Monster" as he calls himself, Noel Lee wrote in a Feb. 9 letter to the board, "We have to yield to the competitive nature of the marketplace where global sourcing is the norm." *

Sink or swim

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› sarah@sfbg.com


Click to view the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission subsidence map (PDF)

Will rising seas destroy San Francisco’s sewers? Should condos South of Market be on stilts? Could the huge Coca-Cola bottle at the Giants’ ballpark one day bubble with seawater? Can anyone explain why San Francisco still doesn’t have flood insurance?

As temperatures rise, snow packs vanish, and sea levels surge, San Francisco is waking up to its own inconvenient truth: surrounded on three sides by water, paved with concrete throughout, and erecting condo towers faster than you can say "bamboo," the city by the bay is particularly vulnerable to climate change.

With a recent California Climate Change Center report predicting sea levels will rise between four inches and three feet by 2100, San Francisco can expect increased flooding and damage to vital infrastructure and the destruction of fragile ecosystems and low-lying neighborhoods.

The evidence of impending doom is already there.

Addressing a climate change summit last month, Tom Franza, assistant general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, revealed that seawater already tops the city’s weirs for about an hour during very high tides. Franza expects this salt water intrusion, which threatens to kill helpful microbes that digest our solid waste, to get worse as sea levels continue to rise.

So what steps is the city taking to combat climate change?

The SFPUC is already building safety valves on floodgates and pushing for environmentally friendly development toward a future where green roofs, grassy swales, and permeable sidewalks will help stop rainwater from inundating already stressed sewers. It’s also working with the Departments of Planning and Public Works to map blocks and lots that are already sinking — known officially as subsidence — and therefore especially vulnerable to flooding from rising seas.

It comes as a shock to learn that the Planning Department doesn’t already have maps of areas that are prone to floods, but zoning administrator Larry Badiner told the Guardian, "In the past, floods were related to free-running streams, and since there aren’t any in San Francisco anymore, it wasn’t an issue."

Senior planner Craig Nikitas did confirm for us that city planners are working with the SFPUC and the DPW to flag blocks and lots prone to sinking, a phenomenon associated with rising seas that city officials don’t quite understand.

"If I had to guess, I’d say [they’re sinking] because most are on sandy soils or fill and over time there’s been a settling of sand or because of subterranean flooding," Nikitas said.

As the city’s subsidence map shows, the problem is biggest in SoMa and along the bay — where concrete-intense development is on the rise.

In the future, Nikitas told us, "If a developer comes in to do something in those areas, the system will flag it, and builders should pay extra attention to drainage and elevation, using raised entrances three steps up from the street and trench drains and installing sump pumps if there’s a subterranean garage."

As small a step as subsidence mapping sounds, it’s a sea change for city planners. SFPUC principal engineer Jon Loiacono recalls how in the past he was trained to say, "If flooding happens on your property, it’s your problem."

Loiacono remembers only one instance when the SFPUC built a pump station in response to a developer’s concerns. That was almost a decade ago.

Advising developers about the perils of building in flood-prone areas sounds obvious, but with that step comes responsibility that threatens to drown the city fiscally. Asked who’ll pay for flood damage, Loiacono pointed to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"FEMA is currently mapping San Francisco, but the city would have to join FEMA’s flood insurance program to get coverage," Loiacono said.

Surprised that the city doesn’t already belong, the Guardian called FEMA’s Oakland-based spokesperson, Frank Mansell, who revealed San Francisco is the only city in the Bay Area that isn’t part of FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Participating in the FEMA mapping program would allow residents to qualify for federally subsidized flood insurance and get rebuilding grants after a disaster. FEMA’s Henry Chau says San Francisco will have to raise its standards "slightly higher" to join the agency’s flood insurance program.

Noting that FEMA’s San Francisco map is due this summer and includes development that lies in the city’s floodplains — development FEMA strongly discourages — Mansell said he doesn’t know why San Francisco doesn’t belong. But he does know cities that do must build to code and enact ordinances to ensure people aren’t living in flood zones. He said cities that do build in flood zones must take preventive steps such as raising buildings.

"If cities don’t comply with FEMA’s requirements, they’re put on notice and could be removed from the flood insurance program," Mansell said, adding that disasters such as Hurricane Katrina illustrate why private brokers won’t sell flood insurance.

But as FEMA digitizes and puts its maps online and predicts that 92 percent of US residents will belong to the NFIP by 2010, not everyone is singing its praises. San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission executive director Will Travis faults FEMA’s flood maps for not factoring in climate change.

"Instead, FEMA looks to the past to determine floodplains. As a result, their maps are inadequate and show less inundation than is already occurring," Travis told us. The BCDC just released maps that show a two-meter sea level rise in the bay that would put the San Francisco and Oakland airports and the Giants stadium underwater.

"But we won’t allow the Giants’ ballpark to flood, SFO to be underwater, and San Francisco to become Venice," Travis said. "Instead, sea walls and levees will be built. It’ll require more investment in infrastructure and shoreline protections. The point of the maps is to show people what could happen and get them to take action. Sea level rise doesn’t belong in the realms of science fiction. It’s happening now."

With the California Climate Change Center reporting a seven-inch rise in the bay since 1900 — and the feds refusing to address the role of carbon emissions in climate change — Travis predicted that insurance companies will have the biggest impact in land use planning.

"There’s always an effort to shift costs from the private to the public sector, and from there, from the local to the state to the federal government," Travis told us. "But insurance companies are looking at potential huge losses and won’t be offering policies at all, or offering them at very high prices."

Mansell defended FEMA’s flood maps, arguing that they’re used primarily for insurance and so can’t be used for forecasting.

"We look at existing data," Mansell said. "Otherwise everyone’s premiums would be unpredictable and probably high. FEMA does encourage communities to build to the highest standard, which means the 100-year flood event that has a 1 percent chance of occurring. And FEMA doesn’t conduct the studies. The Army Corps of Engineers does."

Army Corps spokesperson Maria Or confirmed that her agency collects data at different times of the year — data showing the climate has been changing and helping forecast what those changes will mean.

"But we can’t base maps on pure speculation," Or told us. "We continuously look at new data and reanalyze the situation based on that new information. The more relevant question is how often a FEMA map is updated."

Mansell said it takes FEMA one to two years to create a flood map, using computer models, precipitation and tidal patterns, rivers and stream flows — and tracking how much concrete is laid down in an area and how much is built in a floodplain.

"Areas are mapped and remapped and show three levels of risk — low, moderate, and high risk," he said. Based on these ratings, FEMA reviews flood insurance premiums once a year.

But with FEMA the main hope of covering sea rise–related flood damage, experts such as Dr. Peter Gleick of the Oakland-based Pacific Research Institute join the BCDC’s Travis in accusing FEMA of having "failed miserably in integrating climate change into its planning."

"BCDC included climate change in their maps. FEMA did not. Why aren’t there flood maps everywhere around the country that integrate climate change?" asked Gleick, who produced a map 17 years ago showing the impact of a one-meter sea level rise on the bay.

"It’s a little depressing to have been working for two decades on this," Gleick conceded. "I’m glad people are starting to pay more attention and accept that sea level is going up, because the impacts will depend on how we react and how quickly, but we’re decades too late to prevent bad things from happening."

Outraged by President George W. Bush’s we-can’t-afford-to-unilaterally-cut-greenhouse-gases argument, Gleick said, "They’re putting short-term economic gain ahead of long-term survival." But he praised California for establishing a cap to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

In light of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that suggests a 10- to 20-foot sea level increase in the next 1,000 years, Gleick observed, "That means hundreds and millions of people will be potential refugees. So we better reduce our greenhouse gases starting now. We can’t prevent some change, but we hope to prevent disastrous sea level change."

Gleick said he’s worried that we won’t protect low-income areas or move fast enough to prevent damage, a shortcoming that will also have devastating environmental impacts.

"Marshes and wetlands have no place to retreat, since the areas around them are already built up," he explained. "Bay Area communities should make parks, bay and coastal trails, and wetlands bigger, so they’ll have greater protection 50 years from now. And if you’re developing a building that’s supposed to last for 50 years, you need to design it now for the changes that are to come." *

The next mad rush to the sky

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EDITORIAL For much of the history of this newspaper, the battle to keep San Francisco from turning into another Manhattan was a defining element in local politics. It had all the makings of urban drama: shifty-eyed developers looking to make a fast buck, sleazy politicians willing to bend over in any direction for campaign cash, a corporate power structure devoted to greasing the path for unlimited growth, citizen activists revolting over the block-by-block destruction of their neighborhoods … all played out on the stage of one of the world’s greatest cities.

We watched while Joe Alioto moved forward with redevelopment south of Market and office buildings downtown in the early 1970s. We joined anti-high-rise activists twice in ballot measure campaigns to slow the building boom, without success. We saw Dianne Feinstein push through in just a few short years more new office space than in all of downtown Boston, an entire new city of glass and steel towers — and we helped promote the campaign to slow down with Proposition M in 1986.

We exposed the fundamental lies behind the developers’ arguments by demonstrating that intensive office development cost the city more in services than it provided in revenue, reporting on how the boom would drive up rents, choke the streets with traffic, overwhelm Muni, and create ugly canyons where there were once human-scale business districts.

Then we showed that all those new buildings weren’t even creating jobs.

In the 1990s we spoke out against the economic cleansing that came with the dot-com boom.

But of late, the development battles have shifted a bit. Progressives, who were once united against downtown growth, are a bit more slippery around the latest construction boom, because this time the massive skyscrapers are set to be filled not with corporate offices but with housing. And in San Francisco today, it seems difficult for almost anyone to be against new housing.

But it’s time to take a hard look at the new rush to the sky.

When the folks at the Planning Department talk about the new urban area that’s being discussed for South of Market, they use words such as "slender, graceful towers." The idea: high-rises aren’t that bad if they’re less bulky; that way, they don’t interfere with view corridors and don’t block out the sun. In fact, the way some planners are talking about these new buildings is almost rapturous — tall condo complexes, they say, will stop suburban sprawl, prevent global warming, create exciting new neighborhoods and public spaces, and give new definition to the city skyline.

But let’s look at what they’re really talking about here.

There are, at the moment, at least 11 new buildings either proposed, under construction, or in the planning pipeline in South of Market that would bust the city’s current height limits. (And those limits are hardly skimpy — in most areas they range from about 350 to 500 feet.) And that’s just the start: the Planning Department is moving quietly to substantially raise height limits in a broad swath of San Francisco, making way for the biggest high-rise rush since the 1980s.

If the move succeeds, the skyline will develop what the Planning Department calls a new "mound" south of downtown, anchored by at least one building 1,000 feet high (almost a third taller than the Transamerica Pyramid). A single slender tower is one thing; when you put more than a dozen (and they aren’t all slender) in a cluster, you get a wall — a wall that cuts the city off from the bay, shatters the natural topography of the area, and frankly, makes the city feel less like a community and more like a concrete jungle.

Just look at the picture on this page, part of a graphic presentation the city planning staff has put together. That hardly appears to be a few shapely structures. It’s a huge new conglomeration of New York–style high-rises, and they don’t fit in San Francisco.

And what’s the point of all this? The way the developers and their allies would have us think, this is all about solving the city’s housing crisis and creating vibrant new neighborhoods. But take a look at what sort of housing is being proposed here.

All the new high-rises the Planning Department is reviewing will contain what’s known as market-rate housing. That translates to condos selling for prices far beyond the reach of most San Franciscans. So far, not one developer has agreed to put a single unit of affordable housing in the new towers; all of them plan to meet the city’s demands for below-market units by building cheaper apartments somewhere else. The new neighborhoods are going to be nothing but very wealthy enclaves, the equivalent of vertical gated communities. Families who are being driven out of San Francisco by high housing costs won’t find refuge here; the housing is designed for singles, childless couples, retired people — and world travelers who want a nice San Francisco pied-à-terre.

Is this really the kind of new neighborhood the city ought to be creating?

Then there are the economics of this madness. Providing the infrastructure for all these new residents (and we’re talking more than 10,000 new residents in this one part of town alone) will be expensive — and if anyone really thinks that development fees will cover those costs, they haven’t paid attention to four decades of San Francisco budgets.

Environmentalists and urban planners these days love to talk about density, about building more residential spaces in urban cores. That’s the best alternative to suburban sprawl: Dense neighborhoods encourage transit use and walking. Housing near workplaces translates to less driving, less pollution, less congestion.

All of which is fine and actually makes sense. But density doesn’t have to mean 80-story buildings. North Beach, for example, is a very dense neighborhood, one of the densest urban areas in the United States. It’s also a wonderful neighborhood, with open space, friendly streets, and a human-scale feel.

And it’s a diverse neighborhood: everyone in North Beach isn’t young, single, and rich. There’s a mix of rental and owner-occupied housing and, despite years of brutal gentrification, still something of a demographic mix. It’s a place that feels like a neighborhood. This new conglomeration of high-rises won’t be.

If, indeed, San Francisco wants to add 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 new residents, they don’t have to live 1,000 feet above the ground. There are ways to do density — on perhaps a slightly less massive scale — that don’t impact on the views, skyline, and economics of the rest of the city.

But city officials need to ask some tough questions first. Why are we doing this? Are we rezoning South of Market to meet the needs of developers and high-profile architects, or is there a real urban plan here?

The answer seems alarmingly simple right now. Dean Macris, who led the Planning Department in those awful high-rise boom years under Feinstein, is at the helm again, and although he’s supposed to be an acting director, he shows no sign of leaving. The department is in full developer-support mode — and that has to end. The Planning Commission needs to hire a new director soon, someone who understands what a neighborhood-based planning vision is about.

Meanwhile, most of this new rezoning will have to come before the supervisors, and they need to start holding hearings now. This is a transformation that will be felt for decades; it’s sliding forward way too fast, with way too little oversight. And it needs to stop. *

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I made it through the week without anyone calling to complain about my analysis of the mayor’s race, so maybe for once I got it right: unless Gavin Newsom drops out or a third strike drops and it’s pretty bad, we already know what things are going to look like in the fall.

So we might as well get on with it: Matt Gonzalez and Ross Mirkarimi should get together and talk it out, then one of them should just go ahead and announce.

For a long list of reasons, there has to be a real mayor’s race this fall — and Tony Hall plus a few nutcases against Mayor Newsom doesn’t count. The progressives need someone to rally around, to get the old troops out and in the streets and some new ones trained and energized. We need to keep Newsom on the defensive, to keep our issues out there, to hold him accountable not just to his donors but to the rest of the city.

Never discount what a good challenge can do: there are a lot of reasons why Sup. Bevan Dufty has moved a few steps to the left over the past few months, but one of them is absolutely the fact that he had a progressive candidate running against him in the fall.

Besides, I actually think Newsom can be defeated.

Just look at his record. Since he hasn’t accomplished much of anything, he’s vulnerable on almost everything. Other than same-sex marriage, his major legacy at this point seems to be trying to hand out the city’s information technology infrastructure to Google and EarthLink. Go team.

And the city’s two leading Greens both have a distinct advantage at this point — nobody is going to accuse them of jumping into the race to take advantage of Newsom’s personal problems. Long before city hall got all steamed up, Mirkarimi and Gonzalez were talking about running — on the issues.

Gonzalez can raise a lot of money. Mirkarimi has done something few progressives ever pull off: turning public safety into one of our top issues. Like almost all candidates, they both have strengths and weaknesses, but in the end, it looks like one of them is going to be our contender this fall, and that’s not at all a bad thing.

We went after District Attorney Kamala Harris a couple weeks ago when she tried to make some changes in the pretrial diversion program that would have cut back on its effectiveness. Harris did the right thing; she and Public Defender Jeff Adachi reached an agreement that preserved the best of the program, which tries to steer first-time misdemeanor offenders into counseling and out of the criminal justice system.

Harris didn’t have to do that; the program is entirely under her control, and she could have told Adachi (and us) to take a hike and done it her way. But she showed that she’s a reasonable DA who is willing to listen.

Now, however, the thugs at the Police Officers Association are attacking her for her willingness to include misdemeanor noninjury assaults on cops as crimes that are eligible for diversion. (This is typically stuff like someone spitting at an officer or brushing against him or her during an arrest. We’re not talking about serious assaults here.)

Harris is standing up to the POA, but the rest of the city, including the mayor, needs to get behind her. *

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