Volume 41 [2006–07]

Toolin’ around the Bay

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Nothing’s ever straightforward for Bay Area hip-hop. After the hyphy-fueled buzz of the past three years, the road to major-label glory remains beset by difficulties. The unexpected delay of Mistah FAB’s Atlantic project, the loss of the Federation’s lead single for their Warner/Reprise album due to sample-clearance issues, the lack of a firm date for Clyde Carson’s Capitol disc — all have fostered a certain amount of frustration as the Bay waits for a new artist to shine on the national level alongside Too $hort and E-40.

While Bay Area acts try to jump into the majors, however, a major-label act has suddenly jumped into the Bay, as crunk pioneer Pastor Troy has released his new album, Tool Muziq, through local powerhouse SMC Recordings. Departing from Universal after three albums followed by a flurry of underground releases over the past two years, the Atlanta resident has chosen the independent route despite the interest of imprints like Interscope and Cash Money in his continued viability as a hitmaker.

"It’s a fool," Troy says by phone. "I like to say what I want to say without worrying if it’s going to be cut off by the bosses. On an independent label, you’re really at your own discretion."

Well, almost. While SMC allows Troy the creative freedom he lacked on his heavily A&R–<\d>ed Universal full-lengths, the rapper narrowly averted a showdown with several retail chains that threatened not to carry the album under its original title, Saddam Hussein.

"I came up with the name because I felt like I’m comin’ back into the game," Troy explains. "I keep that military edge to my music. And Saddam, everything he was going through, as much controversy as his name was sparking at the time — I was, like, ‘I’m gonna call my album Saddam Hussein!’ He’d just been executed and everything."

I confess I’ve always been a fan of rappers using the names of dictators notable for their defiance of the United States. In gangsta rap, names like Noreaga and our own J-Stalin are a positive advance in political consciousness compared to the glorification of Italian American mobsters. While Troy insists the title wasn’t politically motivated, the threat of retail censorship raises First Amendment issues not unlike those faced by Paris when he was forced to conceal the provocative cover of Sonic Jihad (2003) — portraying a jet on a collision course with the White House — under a plain black sleeve.

"It’s no big deal," Troy says. "We just switched the title before we ran into a brick wall." Despite the brouhaha, however, "Saddam," produced by Young Jeezy hitmaker Shawty Redd, remains the lead single. "Who am I?" Troy screams over the intro. "I’m the motherfuckin’ president! And I … will … live!" The recentness of Saddam’s execution, combined with the Pastor’s army-of-one style of crunk, lends an undeniable potency to this invocation. Yet it’s also hilarious — Saddam as Skeletor — and essentially devoid of political content: like many raps, "Saddam" is primarily about its rapper, though it’s amusing to imagine Saddam shouting, "I don’t want your bitch, nigga!" as Troy does here. But instead of a rock opera devoted to the late Sunni strongman, Tool Muziq is an extraordinarily well-rounded hip-hop album, and Troy’s ability to flow over a wide variety of tracks — from the gangsta R&B of "Wanting You" to the conscious-thug, letter-from-jail-themed "Hey Mama" — demonstrates a technical virtuosity well beyond that of your average crunk MC.

"Everybody knows crunk is my specialty," Troy says. "But you just can’t crunk ’em to death. You got to give them good listening. I had a 50-year-old woman tell me she’s waiting on the album to drop. Goodness gracious! I gotta cater to a lot of people."

The addition of Pastor Troy to SMC’s roster is an unexpected but welcome event for Bay Area hip-hop, insofar as he lends a national profile to the local label’s increasing reputation. Evolving out of RT Entertainment, which helped Moedoe move 36,000 units of Keak Da Sneak’s Copium (2003), and then Sumday Entertainment, responsible for Messy Marv’s 28,000-selling Disobayish (2004), SMC concentrates on Bay Area acts, even as it looks strategically to other regions. In 2005 the label dropped its first official releases, Block Movement, by B-Legit, and Speaking Tongues, a solo album by Bizzy Bone of Los Angeles’ Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, which sold 40,000 copies. SMC’s connection to Troy goes back to last year, when it served as third-party distributor for his 40,000-seller Stay Tru (845 Ent.). The rapper was so pleased with the label’s performance, he decided to cut to the chase for Tool Muziq.

"We’re going to keep having a relationship together," Troy confirms, as he and SMC are working out the details for a new release by Troy’s group D.S.G.B. "They needed a guy like Pastor Troy to shake it up for real."

And while Troy has no intention of leaving the Dirty South, his new connection to the Bay offers the tantalizing prospect of further collaboration between the regions’ related genres.

"Hyphy and crunk — it’s the same kind of music to me," Troy says. "I’m sure SMC will have me get down with Messy Marv. I want to go out there and go dumb!"

www.myspace.com/pastortroy

Kabul City

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› paulr@sfbg.com

War, although unfortunate in almost every way, can pay some ex post facto dividends in foodland. (Emphasis on post.) Would we have the Slanted Door today if misguided policies founded on ignorance and false premises a half century ago had not led us into Vietnam? War creates refugees, and if the war is an imperial one, the refugees allied with the imperial power tend to seek refuge in the home territory of that empire — homeland is the homey term we use today — often bringing with them little besides culinary knowledge. Of course, the moral equation here is absurd; who would not vote to give up the Slanted Door, and all the rest of the excellent Vietnamese restaurants that have opened here in the past generation, if by doing so we could undo the Vietnam War? But we can’t. The most we can do is look for some sort of redemption in food we might well never have heard of, let alone tried, but for the warmongering of fools in positions of power.

Fisherman’s Wharf — I speak of the neighborhood, not the pier proper — is a curious place for an Afghan restaurant, but that is where we find Kabul City, which opened in May across the street from a large open space at Beach and Taylor that should be a public square but is instead a parking lot filled with Hummers. The area is the Vatican City of local tourism; it is in but not of the city and so different from it, physically and metaphysically, as to constitute nearly a separate jurisdiction. The restaurant’s windows do afford an appealing view, from an unusual, backside angle, of Russian Hill. Better to keep one’s gaze fixed there than on the spectacle nearer at hand, with its general sense and look of cheerful vulgarity. Would these rushing tourists, I wondered, be interested in Afghan food? Afghanistan has been an unhappy place for a long time, and a great deal of travel has to do with escape from reality.

As for the locals: experience suggests that they — or we — go to considerable pains to avoid the neighborhood. Yet Kabul City is worth braving the knickknack shops and Hummers for. The restaurant’s food is distinctive, well prepared, and fairly priced, and the setting (at least once you’re safely inside) is neither grubby nor overwrought. It’s far too early to say whether Afghan cooking will find the same vogue Vietnamese cuisine has attained in this country, but it’s not too early to say that if Kabul City is a glimpse of tomorrow, tomorrow isn’t looking hopeless. (I should also note here that for the moment, Kabul City is also the only Afghan restaurant in town, since the Helmand, on Broadway at the foot of Telegraph Hill, remains closed after a February landslide. The Bay Area’s biggest Afghan community, meanwhile, is in Fremont.)

Although much of Afghan cuisine, as presented by Kabul City, turns on familiar Middle Eastern cues, there are also dishes you aren’t as likely to have seen before. In the former category are kabobs — grilled meat in various guises. Tekka kabob ($12.99; $6.99 at lunch) consists of charbroiled lamb chunks served with salad and basmati rice, while shami kabob (same prices) looks like a pair of skinless, seasoned-ground-beef sausages. The rice is good, but the Afghan flat bread (called naan but baked in square rather than round loaves) is better, especially when dipped in the accompanying yogurt-cucumber sauce.

Yogurt, in fact, is put to all sorts of clever uses. It turns up pureed with cilantro as a sauce for pakowra ($4.99), deep-fried, peppery slices of potato that look like the soles of pink bedroom slippers. It is folded into badinjon burani ($4.99 as a starter), a baba ghanoush–<\d>like mash of panfried eggplant. And it appears mixed with garlic and mint as a topping for kadu burani ($7.99), chunks of panfried pumpkin. The squash here really did seem to be pumpkin, so points for complete disclosure, but the dish would have been better — less stringy, more intensely tasty — if another orange-flesh squash, like butternut, had been used.

One of the most striking preparations on the menu is mantu ($12.99), a plateful of steamed dough pillows stuffed with seasoned ground beef and onions and presented under a blanket of yogurt sauce flecked with green peas and diced carrots. The pillows reminded me of ravioli, of course, but also — because of the their pleated tops — of shu mai, the little Chinese dumplings that so often figure in dim sum services. Afghanistan shares a border with China, so the similarity probably isn’t coincidental. It’s also landlocked, which goes some way toward explaining the lack of seafood on the menu.

The restaurant’s owner, Syed Ahmadi, presides over the front of the house with mystical grace. In theory he could have plenty to do, since Kabul City isn’t small. An entire corner of the space, in fact, is given over to a slightly elevated platform laid with beautiful rugs and pillows and set with low tables you recline rather than sit at. The Last Supper was enjoyed in this fashion, as was the infamous banquet in Kandahar in October 2001 presided over by Osama bin Laden and captured on video for a still-stunned world. Afghanistan was a battlefield then and still is today, but tomorrow, as Scarlett O’Hara once told us from the midst of our own traumatic war, is another day.*

KABUL CITY

Daily, 11:30 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

380 Beach, SF

(415) 359-1400

www.kabulcitysf.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Pleasant noise level

Wheelchair accessible

To get to the other side

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Florentina Morales Espanola, 88, is going to pray for me every day for the rest of her life. She showed me where she goes to church and told me the name of it, but I forgot. She has 63 grandchildren in the Philippines.

I came down for the weekend with Mr. and Mrs. Mountain, and we did everything on "Indian time," which means you get there when you get there, according to Sam. And sometimes not even then, according to me. You take the scenic route, the coast, the trees … places where time turns into time. Sidewalks.

Missed the trans march completely, threw down our blanket anyway in Dolores Park, and sat there being bumpkins in our straw hats and ponchos for about 10 minutes, then went to eat hamburgers.

Mountain V’s new favorite restaurant is BurgerMeister, at Church and Market. Mine too. The bacon cheeseburger was so good I forgot to even put ketchup on it until it was almost gone. And the garlic fries were so generously garlicked I could have gotten a to-go container and made spaghetti for a week.

Late and alone for the big parade, I cruised the banks of the bedlam for beautiful people. Which was like trying to find hay in a haystack.

You know how every now and then, against all odds (like lack of sleep and garlic breath), your radar is just … on? I didn’t know where I was going. I willy-nillied my way toward Market and practically straight into the arms of Florentina Morales Espanola. She was standing about four feet high, staring into the backs of, say, 10,000 people. On the other side of the street there were 10,000 more.

I have no idea what I’m talking about, mathwise. But I’m pretty small too, so I looked at my new favorite person and smiled. She was wearing a pink wrap and a colorful scarf.

"I can’t see anything," she said. Tiny voice. Accent. She looked more like a feather than a bird, and I fantasized about hoisting her onto my shoulders, wearing her like jewelry. Instead, I offered to clear a path to the front row.

"I’m just waiting," she said, "to cross the street."

This information floored me. Just waiting. To cross the street. "I’m a chicken farmer," I said. "Where is it you’re trying to get to?"

Her son’s house. Minna and Natoma.

"You’re not here for the parade?" I said. "You have to go around. You have to go down to Van Ness and cross over there."

She looked at me like I was crazy. "Too far. I’ll wait," she said.

I looked at her like she was crazy. "Do you know how long that will be?" I asked. She didn’t. "Hours," I said. "What’s your name?"

"Florentina Morales Espanola."

I had to bend down and lean close to understand all this, and I took her hand. I took both of her hands and looked into her eyes. "My name is Dani," I said. "I’m a chicken farmer. My specialty is why, not how. But if you wait here, Florentina, I’ll go see if there’s any way we can get to the other side. OK?"

"I don’t hate anyone," she said. "All people are good."

"I get that," I said. "You have a beautiful name. Me, I love everyone."

"OK," she said. "Me too. Thank you for helping me, Dani. I was praying. God pushed you to me."

The first sober person I found was a BART cop, who said the only way was to go down into BART and up the other side. The escalators were not working. By the time we got down and over and up, I knew about Florentina’s grandchildren. I knew she lived alone. I knew how old she was, and she laughed when I said, "Eighty-eight? You don’t look a day over 87!" We had told each other, "I love you," several times, and on Seventh Street between Market and Mission, we hugged and kissed and hugged good-bye, and that was when she promised to pray for me. I said I’d pray for her too, and I was totally lying!

Back in BART, I wrote her name in my journal and cried a little, then went and found my mountains and told them, and now I’ve told you too so that, God be damned, Tom, Dick, and Harriet now know about the miracle of Florentina Morales Espanola. So maybe that’s like a prayer. Or maybe I’m just bragging about helping an old lady cross a street.

Or maybe it’s just another thing that happened to happen while I was kinda paying attention. *

BURGERMEISTER

Daily, 11 a.m.–midnight

138 Church, SF

(415) 437-2874

Takeout available

Beer and wine

Credit cards not accepted

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

Up there

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea,

I’m a muff-diving dyke, sort of. The first few times with my new girlfriend, I enjoyed her taste. However, most recently she tasted much different — and, frankly, worse. I almost blurted out that she might have a yeast infection (luckily I caught myself before completely ruining the mood). Curious, the other day I tasted myself, and I had a similar terribly pungent, unappealing taste. I know my body well enough to know I don’t have a yeast infection! So now I’m wondering, is it related to menstrual cycles? Previous physical activity? Sharing of bacteria and yeast?

Love,

Wannabe Diver

Dear Muffy:

Could be any of those, with yeast less likely since it doesn’t like sour things itself. Of course, I could be misinterpreting "terribly pungent" to mean terribly sour, or maybe you meant … OK, stop me there. See, this is why even proper medical personnel are discouraged from attempting to diagnose things in absentia — you don’t want them to do it wrong, and frankly, you don’t want me doing it at all.

The pH of the vagina does change over the course of the menstrual cycle, getting higher (more neutral) at ovulation, when the vagina welcomes sperm whether or not its owner thinks that’s a good idea (and whether or not there are any sperm present or expected, like, ever), and more acidic at either cycle end, when any sperm that wandered by would be doomed anyway, so we might as get it over with. The thing about menstrual cycles, though, is that they’re cyclic, so whatever she tastes like on, say, day twenty, she’d have tasted that way last month too. I’m not diagnosing, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear you had a mild, mutual bacterial infection, but you’ll never know unless you get it checked out. You could sneak off discreetly and get fixed up, of course, but that’s not going to help her any, so, much as you might like to gloss this over in the interest of romance and mood maintenance, I’m afraid I can’t let you off that easily. You’re going to have to do the "Hey honey, I couldn’t help but notice …" thing, but hey, so what? It’s all in a day’s relationship work, is it not? And you are in one of those, are you not?

I ask because I couldn’t help noticing something myself, and unlike you I am not loathe to bring up uncomfortable truths, no matter how conversation-stopping. So hey, dudette, how come you could recognize your girlfriend in a blind taste test, while she wouldn’t know you from, you should pardon the expression, Adam? Is this lack of reciprocity part of some larger plan, or is she being kind of a piglet about this? And if it’s the latter, well, don’t you have more to talk about than who tastes nasty all of a sudden?

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My gyno prescribed estrogen cream (Estrace) to combat chronic yeast infections apparently brought on by vaginal dryness he says may be associated with my long-term use of the pill. He said it wouldn’t have any effect on my male sex partner, but then he also said an IUD was more effective than tubal ligation, so I don’t know whether to believe him. The Rx insert says nothing; the Mayo clinic suggests that estrogen cream could have an effect on my partner, and also that it is harmful to condoms (which we use in addition to the BCPs because I really don’t want kids). Plus, you know, there was that House episode a few weeks ago where a guy ‘s hormone cream seeped through his skin and made his kids sick.

Love,

Bad Medicine

Dear Med:

Wow, really, there was nothing in the insert? Because while I couldn’t turn up anything superspecific, there is no question that the Estrace people themselves say to "avoid exposing your male sexual partner … by not having sexual intercourse right after using these medicines. Your male partner might absorb the medicine through his penis if it comes in contact with the medicine." Unless you’re both some kind of demented, round-the-clock, insatiable sex monkeys, it really shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out the time of day that you’re least likely to find yourself suddenly and spontaneously exposing your partner to conjugated estrogens, and apply the cream then. As for oral ingestion, dunno, but it should be equally avoidable. Apply in the morning, get head at night, or vice versa.

The creams are indeed harmful to condoms, just by virtue of being greasy, and I’m appalled that your doctor wouldn’t mention that, or any of this, really. He isn’t really wrong about the IUD, incidentally, but he’s very wrong not to mention sex when prescribing something you put up your lady parts. He may be wrong about more than that — any chance you could see somebody else? As for the doc on TV, well, I adore the show for the quips and the sexy crip, but you could get better medical information from This Old House or maybe Animal House. Estrace has a 1-800 line, you know.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Never mind the steampunk

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION If someone were to hold a knife to your throat and ask what the aesthetic sensibilities of the computer age are, you’d probably babble something about the iPod and its curvy, candy-colored precursor, the iMac. You’d think of the typical PC laptop, dumb and square and black, and you’d wonder whether this question about aesthetics was actually a trick. Because there are no computer age aesthetics.

Of course I’m exaggerating. There are a million interesting designs for consumer electronics and computers, but most don’t call attention to themselves. Computer aesthetics say "I am functional" — even the iPod Shuffle’s, whose colorful clip-on version kids attach to the gold chains around their necks as techno-bling.

But your Gateway computer, with its stalwart rectangular tower, is not the last word in how technology can look. Think of the crazy dial phones from the 1920s, with their curlicues and shiny brass and polished wood handsets. Or recall early radios, with their curving wooden exteriors meant to look like fancy furniture. And if you really want to see some seriously decorated machines, just check out pictures of devices from the 19th century, when everything from radiators to dynamos was covered in filigree and iron flowers and stamped, embossed shiny crap. For the record, I fucking love embossed shiny crap.

I think the search for an over-the-top tech aesthetic is driving the current craze for steampunk, a design and fashion style that combines Victorian sensibilities with contemporary gizmos. The ideal steampunk device would probably be a coal-powered cyborg, such as the creatures found in the novels of British fantasist China Miéville. In the real world, one of the most popular steampunk tinkerers is Jake von Slatt, who recently rebuilt his desktop computer as a vision in brass, marble, and old typewriter parts. He even offers a step-by-step guide to making your own functioning steampunk computer on his Web site, the Steampunk Workshop. Whenever von Slatt produces a new creation — a telegraph sounder that taps out RSS feeds, for example — pictures of it are always wildly popular on social news site Digg and elsewhere on the Web. Geeks who might not know what the word aesthetic means are instinctively drawn to the way von Slatt has made artifice from functionality. I expect to see cheap, knockoff steampunk computers for sale any day now.

As steampunkish critic John Brownlee has pointed out in several articles on the topic, steampunk designers tend to reverse-engineer ordinary electronics — say, a computer keyboard — and enhance them with parts that look antique. The idea is not just to create machines whose beauty goes beyond functionality. It’s also, Brownlee contends, to recall an era when amateurs could contribute meaningfully to the development of science and technology. We live in a time when no single human being can fully comprehend the Windows operating system. No wonder we’re nostalgic for the days when beachcombers could be naturalists and tinkerers could invent the telephone.

I think the popularity of steampunk also expresses our collective yearning for an era when information technology was in its infancy and could have gone anywhere. In 1880 we hadn’t yet laid the cables for a telephone network, and computer programming was just an idea in Ada Lovelace’s head. Nineteenth-century technology was often operated by factory laborers, and it meant backbreaking work and the ruination of healthy bodies. Information technology, to the 19th-century mind, would be something that set us free from brutal assembly lines.

One hundred years later, I wish it were so. Information technology has its own brutal assembly lines, mind-numbing data work that cripples our fingers with repetitive strain injuries and mangles our backs with the hunched postures required to work at a computer all day long. Seen from this perspective, steampunk is an aesthetic that tells the truth about us. We are no better off than our Victorian ancestors, bumbling into the future with crude technologies whose implications we barely understand. But let’s make our devices pretty, at least. Let’s remember the days when the machines that now cage us promised liberation. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd whose flat is full of servers and anaglypta.

Citizen planning

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› sarah@sfbg.com

The Eastern Neighborhoods Plan has become a high-stakes battleground involving anxious developers stalled by a temporary building moratorium, progressives who want more affordable housing, concerns about dwindling light-industrial spaces and an exodus of African American residents, environmental justice, and a list of other issues that are central to this sprawling section of the city.

But the folks in the neighborhood known as Western SoMa are just happy that they’re no longer a part of that mess. Instead, they’re excitedly experimenting with a new approach to planning using an innovative and largely untested grassroots model.

Five years ago, when the city Planning Department first announced its intention to rezone the Eastern Neighborhoods, a group of disenchanted SoMa residents decided that they wanted to secede from that process and develop an independent, more comprehensive, community-based plan.

"A lot of us were offended by the Planning Department’s top-down, autocratic process," Jim Meko, who later became chair of the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force, told the Guardian. "It was a bad process for everybody, but it was particularly bad for SoMa because the neighborhood had already been rezoned in the 1990s."

Meko survived three major demographic shifts within three decades: the AIDS epidemic that decimated SoMa’s gay community, the live-work loft zoning loopholes that gutted the artistic community, and the dot-com crash that displaced many techies. He feared that the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan would impose a "one-size-fits-all mode that treated all of SoMa like postindustrial wasteland."

So Meko set his sights on pressuring the Planning Commission to split his neighborhood from the rest of the Eastern Neighborhoods, which include the Mission District, Eastern SoMa, Showplace Square, Potrero Hill, and the Central Waterfront. Western SoMa is bordered by Mission and Bryant, 13th and Fourth streets, and Harrison and Townsend.

That dream became a reality in February 2004, and that November the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force formed, with a stated objective to "recommend zoning changes that will preserve the heart and soul of their neighborhood, while planning for the realities of 21st-century growth."

Since beginning its work in 2005, the 22-member task force has met as often as five times a month and has created a values statement; a set of planning principles; committees focusing on business and land use, transportation, and arts and entertainment; and a committee that integrates a variety of issues.

Its June 28 town hall meeting was the first time the task force threw the doors open to the community at large, although the occasion happened to come on the heels of a high-profile budget battle between Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Chris Daly, whose district includes SoMa and who helped set up the task force.

Within five minutes of Meko’s kicking off the meeting, a small but vocal group of attendees began to heckle him midspeech. Perhaps they were there to confront Daly, who had been slated to attend but was out of town. Whatever the reason, while accusing Meko of "having an agenda" and "using the bully pulpit" to present his own views, this faction was anxious to know how many task force members are property owners and which particular group of them would be dealing with crime, the fight against which Newsom has made a top budget priority.

For one wobbly, tension-filled moment, it felt as if this first crack at a citizen planning forum might crumble. But then another participant saved the day by requesting a simple but basic meeting ground rule: no personal attacks.

From that moment, the mood in the room lightened. Pretty soon the rest of the 150 residents who had gathered in the multipurpose room of Bessie Carmichael School on Seventh Street to share their thoughts on Western SoMa were talking about what they liked and what could improve. Even the hecklers quieted down and seemed to meld into the discussion.

As Planning Commissioner Christina Olague put it at the meeting, "This is possibly one of the most exciting things going on in planning. No one understands the heart and soul of a neighborhood like the people who live there. We hope this is a model other neighborhoods will adopt, because a neighborhood plan without the involvement of neighbors who live and breath a community is chaos — just a bunch of buildings zoned in a language no one can read or feel."

But while residents were happy to create lists of neighborhood needs — more parks, bike lanes, affordable housing, child care facilities, and trees; wider sidewalks; and fewer homeless people — they were less keen on the idea of increasing building heights. One proposed means of financing improvements would be to increase allowable heights from 40 to 65 feet in some places.

Some locals complained about partygoers who urinate in the streets and play music loudly in cars instead of going home when the clubs close. But a youthful resident politely pointed out that "it may not be possible to stop young people from being young."

In the face of requests from senior citizens for more dinner theater and fewer nightclubs in SoMa, task force member and nightclub owner Terrance Allen observed that it’s probably only possible to "nudge existing conditions."

Recalling the battle that broke out between residents and partygoers after city planners decided to put affordable housing next to the wildly popular nightclub 1015 Folsom, Allen said, "You don’t want to start a war by putting subsidized housing next to the city’s biggest nightclub." Or as Meko put it, "We don’t want to set up conflicts by putting family housing across from the Stud."

By evening’s end, the consensus was that the meeting was a success. "We have much more in common than we have apart. That’s the whole key," said Marc Salomon, who sits on the task force’s transportation committee. As Meko told the Guardian the next day, "Wasn’t it a fantastic experience? It was the closest thing to a cocktail party without a bartender."

Meko said the task force is eager to complete its work and is shooting for having a draft plan ready by the next town hall meeting, on Oct. 24.

"But we need to do more community outreach," he added, noting that there weren’t many Filipinos at the first meeting even though they have a large presence in Western SoMa. "We’re looking at what SoMa could be like in 20 years. The other Eastern Neighborhoods are watching, and they are envious." *

The truth about housing money

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OPINION Just as in war, in 2007 San Francisco budget politics, truth is the first casualty.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the assertions by Gavin Newsom’s campaign minions that the mayor’s current budget proposal contains a $217.5 million city investment in affordable housing.

The purpose of these claims is to imply that Newsom has voluntarily allocated local tax dollars for this critical need — and that no more should be spent on affordable housing, especially some $10 million for lower-income rental housing production for families with children proposed by Supervisor Chris Daly and the Board of Supervisors.

The facts tell a different story.

First, the impression that this $217.5 million is all local tax money the mayor has voluntarily invested in affordable housing is false. Some $20 million is federal and state money that can be spent only on affordable housing. Another $25 million comes from local sources and also must be used for affordable housing. And $48 million comes from tax-increment funds mandated by a 2005 supervisors policy to go solely toward affordable-housing development.

So about 40 percent ($93 million) of the affordable-housing funding that the Mayor’s Office talks about was money that by law had to go to affordable housing. It wasn’t Newsom’s choice.

Nearly a third of the mayor’s budget for creating affordable housing — some $60 million — is in fact allocated to fund his Care Not Cash program, which was supposed to pay for itself. Indeed, more than twice as much money, $31 million, is earmarked to pay for privately owned, leased residential hotel rooms for temporary housing of the homeless (not producing one new affordable home) as is budgeted for the production of new, permanently affordable lower-income family rental housing ($15 million). The fact is, the 2007–08 Newsom budget cuts $24 million in funds earmarked for new affordable-housing production for families and seniors.

What is most distressing about the half-truths and nontruths in the affordable-housing budget battle of recent days is that the unity between the mayor and the Board of Supervisors — crucial to the expansion of affordable-housing opportunities for San Franciscans and which has characterized the city since the George Moscone administration (some 25,000 permanently affordable homes have been produced in the past 20 years, a figure unmatched in any other mayor American city) — has been placed in peril for short-term political advantage.

But cooler heads have prevailed inside and outside City Hall. Sometimes it is better to shut up and do what needs doing and let the credit fall where it may.

Which is why, when the dust settled last week, no one shouted about the $10 million that was quietly added back into the budget for permanently affordable family-housing production.

But we should all be clear: if we want San Francisco to be as economically diverse as we all claim, then we have only just begun to find the funds needed for more affordable housing. While it may or may not be true that you can never be too rich or too thin, it is most certainly true that San Francisco never allocates enough for affordable housing. *

Calvin Welch is an affordable-housing advocate who lives in San Francisco.

Web Site of the Week

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www.ushistory.org/declaration


"Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Once upon a time, on a July 4 long ago, a group of American malcontents and revolutionaries set a high standard for what a government must safeguard. At a moment when we seem to have forgotten those ideals, it’s a fine time to peruse this comprehensive Web site.

Green City: People versus death monsters

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› steve@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Pedaling or walking along a Panhandle pathway is the essence of green, a simple act of sustainable living and connection to a natural area within an urban core. It’s a calming, transformative activity — at least until you get to Masonic Avenue and the telling words painted on the path: "Death Monsters Ahead."

The death monsters, a.k.a. automobiles, that bisect this three-quarter-mile-long green runway into Golden Gate Park would be jarring even if traffic engineers had made that intersection the best it could be. Instead, it’s closer to the opposite — dangerous, illogical, and frustrating for all who must navigate it, a testament to what happens when the primary intersection-design criterion is moving cars rapidly.

After getting word of a rash of bicycle- and pedestrian-versus-car accidents at the Masonic-Fell intersection in recent months, Walk SF and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition reinitiated (two years ago, it was the same story) a voluntary crossing-guard program on Saturdays and weekday evenings and lobbied City Hall to finally do something.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi took up the cause, announcing at the June 26 Board of Supervisors meeting, "I find it simply unacceptable that the city has ignored the problem to the point where a volunteer program has become imperative. Traffic safety is a baseline city responsibility."

Mirkarimi is asking the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which has responded to years of complaints about this dangerous intersection with only minor and ineffective tinkering, to finally make a substantial change. He and the activists want a dedicated signal phase for pedestrians and bikes and a dedicated left-turn lane for cars coming off Fell.

It doesn’t take a traffic engineer to see what’s wrong with this intersection. Cars trying to turn left onto Fell from busy Masonic regularly get stranded by a red light and are stuck blocking the crosswalk. Even more dangerous is when bikers and walkers cross on their green light only to find cars — which also have a green light — turning left from Fell Street, cutting across their path.

The problem is vividly illustrated with too much regularity. I can still picture the female bicyclist who flipped through the air and crumpled to the ground a few feet from me after getting hit hard by a motorist. It was almost three years ago, but it remains a vivid, cautionary memory.

I was riding my bicycle west on the Panhandle trail, even with the motorist. Our eyes locked, his anxious and darting, and I knew he might try to cut me off, so I slowed. Sure enough, the driver made a quick left in front of me and hit the bicyclist coming from the opposite direction, who assumed that the green light and legal right-of-way meant she could continue to pedal from one section of parkland to the next. Instead, she joined a long list of Fell-Masonic casualties, to which attorney Peter Borkon was added May 19, a few days shy of his 36th birthday.

Borkon was on his road bike, training for the AIDS Life Cycle ride, when he cautiously approached the intersection, slowed, and unclipped from his pedals. When the light turned green, he clipped in, crossed into the intersection, and then, he says, "I was run over by a Chevy Suburban."

He was hit so hard that he broke his nose and gashed his face on the car, an injury that resulted in 15 stitches, and was thrown 10 feet. The fact that he was wearing a helmet might have saved his life, but he nevertheless went into shock, spent a day in the hospital, and is still waiting for the neurological damage to his face to heal.

How dangerous in that intersection? When I asked the MTA for accident statistics, a response to the criticisms, and a plan of action, public information officers Maggie Lynch and Kristen Holland first stonewalled me for two days and then said it would take two weeks to provide an answer.

Maybe Mirkarimi will spark a change, or maybe the MTA will just keep doing what it’s always done: plod along at a bureaucratic pace with tools ill suited to an evolving world that must do more to facilitate walking and bicycling as safe, attractive transportation options, even if that means delaying the death monsters.*

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

The golf club

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› news@sfbg.com

For the better part of a century, San Francisco’s public golf courses have offered players relatively inexpensive rates, belying the view of some that this is an elitist sport incompatible with progressive civic governance. But since a botched revamp of the Harding Park course several years ago, golf operations have landed in the rough, siphoning large sums from city coffers every year. Now Mayor Gavin Newsom and his Recreation and Park Department claim that private businesses would do a better and cheaper job of running three of the city’s most valuable links.

Sup. Jake McGoldrick and other privatization opponents say outsourcing control of the Harding, Fleming, and Lincoln courses would inevitably lead to less access for the general public and higher costs. "A lot of folks don’t realize that the Golden Gate Yacht Club and the St. Francis Yacht Club are public assets that are now run as private membership clubs, elitist things," McGoldrick told the Guardian. "That’s certainly the way this could go."

McGoldrick has called for the formation of a Golf Course Task Force to explore nonprivatization solutions, including converting some of the courses into parks or open space, as the Neighborhood Parks Council has urged. On July 10 the Board of Supervisors will decide between McGoldrick’s plan and Rec and Park’s "hybrid management" resolution, which would award leases of 20 to 30 years for the courses. Political handicappers say the vote could go either way.

In addition to their concerns about prices and accessibility at privately run links, McGoldrick and others have serious reservations about who will run the courses if the mayor’s plan succeeds. No one we spoke with could name potential bidders with any certainty, but if the past is prologue, the choice is likely to involve political cronyism.

Golf advocate Sandy Tatum engineered the deal that turned Harding Park over to the management of Kemper Sports, which has been accused of overspending public funds and turning the course into a huge drain on the city treasury. Kemper also rents space to Tatum’s First Tee program. More recently, another nonprofit started by Tatum and former city attorney Louise Renne initiated and funded a study for Rec and Park that recommended more privatization by turning over courses to entities such as theirs.

The SF Weekly, which has run stories critical of the city’s golf privatization scheme, revealed a 1990s deal that privatized a city-owned course near Burlingame and, in what it deemed a corrupt selection process, handed control of the course to former Willie Brown staffer Tom Isaak.

In 2004, Tom Hsieh, one of Newsom’s key campaign consultants, submitted the sole bid for control of Gleneagles Golf Course in McLaren Park. Neither Hsieh nor his business partner, real estate investor Craig Lipton, had ever run a golf course before winning the contract for Gleneagles. But what really raised eyebrows around City Hall were the terms of the deal. Any lease of more than 10 years would have needed approval by the Board of Supervisors, so Hsieh and Lipton were given a nine-year contract.

"That was a very obvious and blatant end run around the contract requirements of the Board of Supervisors," McGoldrick told us. Hsieh, he went on to say, "is one of the mayor’s good buddies, and he got himself a nice contract out there."

Rec and Park spokesperson Rose Dennis defended the lease agreement with Hsieh, telling us, "At the end of the day, he legally got the concession. It wasn’t like it was put down to a nine[-year contract] to screw anybody. That would suggest a level of sophistication that Rec and Park just doesn’t have."

Reached for comment, Hsieh bristled at the suggestion that he landed the contract because of his ties to the mayor, writing in an e-mail that the mere suggestion was "a scurrilous attack motivated by politics." Hsieh did not answer our repeated requests for information about wage levels at the Gleneagles course and the number of groundskeepers employed there. McGoldrick and sources in the industry assert that one of the main ways private managers would make money from the other courses would be to reduce labor costs.

Sup. Sean Elsbernd, one of the privatization plan’s strongest backers, conceded that some past golf contracts have been "questionable," specifically in the case of Hsieh’s deal. But he said the supervisors would oversee the leasing process this time to avoid cronyism and the kind of spending excesses allegedly committed by Kemper Sports. They would also mandate that new managers continue to employ union employees.

Unlike the city, Elsbernd argued, private businesses could invest large sums of money in rehabilitating the courses, especially Lincoln. "When it gets that kind of [cash] infusion," Elsbernd said, the course "is going to see a turnaround in revenue so that you can actually justify charging higher fees."

That is exactly the kind of scenario privatization foes fear: more exclusive golf courses on public land that raise greens fees beyond ordinary people’s means. "These courses are untapped gold mines," said golf instructor, former pro, and activist Justin Hetsler, who has formed a nonprofit group, Golf San Francisco, to lobby against the mayor’s plan. "But every penny spent at the courses should go back into them, not into someone’s pocket as profit." As for capital improvements, Hetsler, who also works as an accountant, argued, "The courses’ future revenue streams can secure credit for improvements. That does not require privatization."

For McGoldrick, this debate is about far more than golf courses. "I don’t even play golf," he told us. The push to outsource control of the links, he said, reflects a larger philosophical battle about what to do with publicly owned resources. "The mayor is a pro-privatization kind of guy. That’s his MO…. We’re seeing this happen all over the place, not just San Francisco. But for me, it’s just painful to watch city assets [be] given away. It really kicks me in the gut." *

The ethics of Ethics

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Part one in a Guardian series

› amanda@sfbg.com

Back in 2002, Carolyn Knee did what many other citizens of San Francisco were doing — she volunteered her time and energy campaigning for a ballot measure she hoped would pass.

Five years later the retiree living on a fixed income has found herself threatened with $26,700 in fines levied by the Ethics Commission enforcement staff, who turned up several alleged violations of campaign finance laws during a random audit of San Franciscans for Affordable Clean Energy, the committee for which Knee was a volunteer treasurer.

At a June 11 probable cause hearing before the Ethics Commission, investigator Richard Mo itemized several infractions, including failure to report $19,761 in contributions on time, in addition to another $9,500 that came in right before the election but wasn’t reported until afterward; failing to notify two organizations that they were major donors who needed to file as such (one of which was the Guardian); not providing all the required information about two donors; and disparities between bank account statements and campaign finance reports.

Mo alleged Knee had "cooked the books," saying she "takes no responsibility" and "claims she was ignorant of the law, passes the blame on to her personal accountant. She cites her inexperience as a treasurer when in fact she served as treasurer for one prior committee."

It sounds like a litany of campaign crime, with Knee as the linchpin, but she maintains that none of it was intentional and that many of the reporting mistakes were made by her accountant, Renita Lloyd-Smith of the Simon Group, a company she’d hired to handle the complicated ledger of campaign finance reports. "Perhaps I was wrong in placing confidence in someone I had to hire because I didn’t know the rules," Knee told the Ethics Commission. "It was all in good faith. It was all done in love of my city. But I’ll never do it again."

Those words have a dual meaning: Knee hopes never to make another financial mistake, and she’ll never again take on the risk of steering the financial helm of a grassroots campaign.

Ethics Commission hearings such as this are usually held in closed session, but this one was opened at Knee’s insistence because she suspected she’s not the only one who’s had difficulties handling campaign finance laws or negotiating fair settlements. It was the first publicly aired probable cause hearing in the commission’s 13-year history, and both commissioners and attendees walked away with questions after issues of perceived bias and a lack of timeliness in the investigation were raised, as well as the possibility that the fines being threatened are inflated and arbitrary.

"There’s only one department in the city and county of San Francisco with no oversight — Ethics," Joe Lynn told the Guardian. Lynn is a former Ethics commissioner and staffer who still watchdogs the agency and has been openly critical of the laxness he perceives there.

His question is one of many about the commission: How does the staff conduct its investigations? Should smaller campaigns staffed with volunteers be handled differently than larger, more professionally managed operations? If resources are tight, should Ethics be more focused on going after the big guys? If the commission had more resources, would the public benefit from both a greater understanding of campaign laws and a more open, honest, and just government?

SFACE raised a little more than $100,000 during the 2002 election season (including about $29,000 from the Guardian and editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann), but the measure it supported — Proposition D, which would have allowed the city to set up its own public power system and break ties with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. — failed.

PG&E spent more than $2 million defeating Prop. D, $800,000 of it in the final days of the race, which campaign attorney James Sutton, the treasurer of the utility’s front group, San Franciscans Against the Blank Check, didn’t report until nearly a month after election day, a violation of campaign finance laws. That act likely scored SFACE’s opponents the win.

The Ethics Commission staff launched an investigation, and in 2004, Sutton’s old law firm was fined $100,000 — the largest amount ever levied by the city for breaking election laws. The state Fair Political Practices Commission also slapped Sutton with $140,000 in fines for vioutf8g the Political Reform Act (see "Repeat Offender," 10/27/04).

At Knee’s recent hearing, Lynn, who was once a finance officer for the Ethics Commission, pointed out she was being fined 14 times what Sutton was fined, and if the same formula had been applied, his fine would have been nearly $1.5 million. "You can’t change the standards arbitrarily," Lynn cautioned the five commissioners. "You need to establish standards for these fines, and you need to keep them across the board."

According to the governing law, which mirrors state mandates at the FPPC, commissioners may levy a fine of up to $5,000 or three times the amount of the violation, whichever is greater. Knee’s fine could be as much as $230,000, and Sutton’s could have been $2.4 million — about the same amount that it costs to run the Ethics office for a year.

The Ethics Commission has never imposed the maximum fine, and executive director John St. Croix doesn’t like to draw comparisons between campaigns. "They’re like snowflakes, very different," he said.

A review of the past three years of enforcement history, posted on the commission’s Web site, bears out this truth and shows fines ranging from a sliver to as much as half of the contested amount. In many cases, fines are dismissed completely for financial hardship reasons. The commission does not abide by a formula, fearing that would handicap it during negotiations, but a number of considerations are weighed, including the experience of the campaign treasurer, the appearance of intent, the overall outcome of the election, and a willingness to make right.

Eric Friedman, spokesperson for New York City’s Campaign Finance Board, considered by many good-government activists to be the national gold standard for ethics groups, said its members use similar tactics for settlements, but "the structure that they follow is precedent. They’ve seen pretty much everything at this point." New York’s board is about five years older than San Francisco’s and audits all campaigns.

According to investigator Mo, the $26,700 in fines pointed at Knee was an "opening salvo" designed to inspire negotiations, which have not been smooth. Knee and her pro bono lawyer, David Waggoner, initially offered $500 to settle. Ethics continued to press for more, but Knee didn’t flinch. "I don’t think I should have to pay anything," she said, pointing out that Oliver Luby, the commission’s current fines officer, recommended a complete waiver of all fines. St. Croix said Luby doesn’t work in the enforcement division and doesn’t know all the facts of the case. The current settlement offer from Ethics is $267, which Knee is willing to accept if the commissioners agree.

It’s unclear how often such hardball is played. "Frankly, we took that settlement because that’s what they were willing to pay," St. Croix said of the Sutton case. So too with a $17,000 fine imposed on Andrew Lee for a variety of campaign finance violations (see "Enforcing Equity," 5/2/07). St. Croix said that was what Lee was willing to pay on the spot.

"I’m not sure we could set a standard," said Commissioner Eileen Hansen, who thought both the Lee and the PG&E fines were too low and said if that’s the bar, it should be raised. She pointed out that the law does provide guidance, but read literally, it could mean exorbitant fines for the same slipup echoed through a whole season of paperwork. "I think it’s a good thing to have the law," she said, but "some should pay the maximum amount and some should pay less."

"I’m happy to pay $250 to get it out of the way," Knee said. "This has taken so much of my time and energy." When asked about her audit experience, she replied, "I would never do this again. It totally discourages grassroots" campaigns.

A legal assistant for 25 years, Knee was not a professional accountant but did have experience doing some bookkeeping. "The IRS is like kindergarten compared to the Ethics Commission," she said.

David Looman, a professional treasurer who’s currently managing about 10 campaign accounts and undergoing three audits by the Ethics Commission, agrees that the potential liability is a huge risk. "Twenty years ago when I started in politics in this town, nobody paid for a treasurer. Nobody had a lawyer. Nowadays you’d be crazy not to do both," he said.

The audits in Looman’s cases involve small grassroots campaigns similar to the one Knee oversaw. "There’s no good business principle for why these people should be audited," Looman said. "The fewer resources you have to employ, the more intelligent your decisions should be for how to employ them. Here they are auditing my $12,000 committee when there are clear miscreants running around."

Part of the Ethics Commission’s charter calls for mandatory audits of all publicly financed campaigns, and St. Croix said the agency does as many random audits as resources allow. Last year, he recalled, more than a dozen were completed. With full financial backing, St. Croix said, he would audit all campaigns. He said, "It’s funny. People know they’re going to get audited and they still try to get away with stuff."<\!s>*

Next: what does the Ethics Commission need to rein in the most frequent and flagrant violators?

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Fourth of July week is supposed to be slow; when I worked for a daily newspaper, we used to do long stories on the fireworks displays just to fill space on the pages. Not here. There’s so much going on it’s hard to keep track of it all, but here’s a quick rundown on what San Francisco is facing this week:

A bill that would lift a veil of secrecy hanging over police misconduct cases is stuck in the Assembly Committee on Public Safety — and Fiona Ma is one of those holding it up. Ma is a protégé of John Burton, who wasn’t easily intimidated, but she’s acting as if she’s terrified of the police lobby, which has mounted a major effort to kill the bill. It’s crazy — Ma has a fairly safe seat, and unlike some Democrats in marginal districts, she doesn’t have to fear that the cops will back a Republican against her. This is one of the worst moments in her career in Sacramento thus far, and she needs to get off the fence and back the bill when it comes up for reconsideration.

The long-awaited draft environmental impact report for the Eastern Neighborhoods zoning project just came out, and it says just about what I and many others had expected: following the proposals that the City Planning Department is putting forward would wipe out a fair number of blue-collar jobs and would not provide anywhere near enough affordable housing to meet the city’s stated needs. This ought to be a central issue in the mayor’s race (if there ever really is one); I’m not willing to accept as inevitable the loss of working-class San Francisco, and neither should the mayor.

Mayor Gavin Newsom finally signed the Community Choice Aggregation bill (see page 10) — but not with the sort of fanfare you’d expect for a program that could profoundly change the city’s energy future. Sen. Carole Migden has come forward with a bill to ensure that the power from city-owned renewable-energy projects is available to the city and doesn’t have to go into Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s maw.

Speaking of Migden: who exactly is paying for all those billboards with her face on them, touting her leadership? As we discuss on the www.sfbg.com politics blog, it’s a fascinating question. Michael Colbruno, a spokesperson for Clear Channel, which owns the billboards, refuses to say. He insists that the ads are simply "issue advocacy," which means nobody has to disclose who paid the tab. I’m not going argue campaign law with Clear Channel, but I suspect that Migden knows who gave her this nice present, worth tens of thousands of dollars. Perhaps she’ll share that information with the rest of us.

In the meantime, the folks at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce — those great champions of open government who love privatization and refused to support the Sunshine Initiative — have a sunshine measure of their own. They want the supervisors to hold hearings before placing anything on the ballot. That’s a direct attack on some recent ballot measures the chamber didn’t like.

I’m all for hearings. Hearings are good. But the law would require that the hearings be held 45 days in advance of the ballot, and that would be a serious drawback for progressives who want to get measures that couldn’t pass the board on the ballot. Frankly, I’m dubious about the chamber’s motives.*

Don’t privatize the golf courses

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom has been trying to sell off or privatize city assets for years, and his latest effort is aimed at San Francisco’s three public golf courses (see J.B. Powell’s story, page 16).

Harding, Lincoln, and Fleming aren’t in the greatest shape, and the city poured a bunch of money into spiffing up Harding a few years back and didn’t get much return. So the mayor — with the surprising support of progressive supervisors like Aaron Peskin — wants to hand the links over to private contractors.

That, of course, will mean higher fees at the few places where golfers who aren’t rich can still afford to whack a few balls. It will probably means cuts in unionized city staff. More important, it’s another giveaway of valuable public assets — on the grounds that city officials don’t seem to know how to manage them.

As Sup. Jake McGoldrick, a privatization foe, points out, the Golden Gate Yacht Club and St. Francis Yacht Club were once public assets, and they’re now elitist institutions run as private membership clubs. The golf courses would be the same.

Yes, the courses need some upgrades, which means some public money. But public golf courses around the country are crowded with players who can’t afford (or don’t qualify for) private clubs; there’s no reason the city of San Francisco can’t do just as well as a private contractor in making improvements, generating revenue, and managing the facilities.

If the city really wants to get out of the golf course business — which we think is a mistake — then the supervisors ought to consider the proposal that the Neighborhood Parks Council has put forward and turn some of the links into parks and open space. But this mad rush to privatization — selling off parks, golf courses, and other public assets — has got to end. The supervisors should go along with McGoldrick’s proposal to set up a task force to study the management of the city golf courses and reject the mayor’s privatization move. *

City College’s funny money

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EDITORIAL There’s an excuse for every dollar of bond money that the San Francisco Community College District board has misspent in the past 10 years: The cost of construction materials has gone up (thanks to Hurricane Katrina and the rapid industrialization of China). State grants weren’t what the administration expected. One staffer did a bad job with price estimating. The list goes on and on.

But in the end, the truth remains: City College officials have lied to the voters. They’ve taken $130 million in bond money that was supposed to go to one set of projects and moved it to other projects. And they’ve gone $225 million over budget on three bond acts — so they’re preparing to come back to the voters for a fourth infusion of cash.

And all of this has happened without the performance audit that state law requires for community college bonds.

As G.W. Schulz reports on page 15, City College administrators say they never intended to shift the bond money around like tokens in a three-card monte game. It’s just that some projects weren’t ready and some needed more money and some changed in priority — and of course, according to the district’s lawyers, it was all perfectly legal. Maybe so — but it’s awfully fishy and even at best is a serious violation of public trust.

When the voters approve a bond act to pay for, say, a new performing arts center at City College, there’s an implicit assumption that the taxpayer money they agree to spend will actually be used for what they were told. That may not always be exactly possible; once a big institution starts on a half-billion-dollar spending program, a few things won’t turn out the way they were supposed to. That’s why the law allows a little wiggle room. But in the end, overall, most of the money ought to go for what the voters were promised.

And in ballot arguments and presentations to the community over the years, the City College administration and the board have offered a very explicit set of proposals. We’ve seen all those presentations; never once has Chancellor Philip Day or one of the board members told us that the voters would be writing in effect a blank check — that the specific projects listed on the bond act might or might not be completed, or that the money might be shifted somewhere else at the whim of the board at some later date.

That, sadly, is exactly what’s happened — on a massive scale. More than 25 percent of the bond money has been "reallocated" — earmarked for one project, then spent on another. The most obvious and most controversial has been the gym (which City College likes to call a "wellness center"). As we first reported Sept. 22, 2004 (see "Field of Schemes"), the trustees shifted $53 million that we’d been promised would be spent on an arts center and other projects to the gym, which includes a pool so expensive to operate that it’s going to be leased out in the afternoons to a private school across the street.

The wellness center may be a perfectly worthy project (the pool nonsense aside), but it’s not what the voters were told they were approving. And it’s hardly the only example. In one case, Schulz reports, the City College staff clearly knew before election day that the information in the ballot handbook was inaccurate and the money would be spent in different ways than what the voters were promised.

State law requires that public agencies conduct performance audits of these large bond projects — but that’s never been done at City College. Only now, with the District Attorney’s Office crawling all over campus and criminal charges possible, has the board finally approved an audit.

Meanwhile, the college board still hasn’t adopted the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance — which isn’t surprising, since all of this has the feel of a series of backroom deals. Even some trustees, like Milton Marks III, who don’t outright oppose the reallocations say the money was moved without the board getting proper information from the administration.

City College is too important an institution to have its future (and the needs of the students and faculty) jeopardized by these kinds of political games. The board’s performance audit needs to move forward apace — and the trustees ought to hire someone like Harvey Rose to do a full financial audit of where the money’s gone, why the budget is so badly busted, and what can be done to clean it up.

If the district attorney is investigating possible wrongdoing in some of the campaigns, she might have her staff look into the bond reallocations too. And if indeed this is all legal, then the state Legislature needs to change the law and require that institutions using bond money pay at least a modicum of attention to what the voters were promised when it comes time to start writing checks. *

The City College shell game

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Part one in a Guardian series

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

The motto of San Francisco’s community college is "The truth will set you free."

For taxpayers, that’s a painful irony. Since 1997, the district has moved around $130 million in bond money in a fiscal shell game, taking funds that the voters were told would go to one set of projects and spending the money on others.

The half-billion-dollar bond program is now at least $225 million over budget, in part because of what the school admits was shoddy planning, and City College is considering asking voters to approve yet another set of bonds to catch up.

And all of this happened without a detailed performance audit.

Among the transfers and overruns we’ve discovered in a review of the bond program:

•<\!s>City College made up for a planned gym’s mammoth budget shortfalls by transferring more than $53 million from other projects, like the new Performing Arts Center, improvements to the Balboa Reservoir (that massive, sunken eyesore of a parking lot west of the Ocean Avenue Campus), and an academic partnership with San Francisco State University.

•<\!s>Construction on the Performing Arts Center was supposed to begin in 2004, but it’s gone nowhere. According to the school’s most recent estimates, the center now will cost $125.8 million, an increase of 152 percent from the original $50 million.

•<\!s>Two new campuses planned for the Mission and Chinatown neighborhoods are now running a combined $78 million over budget. School administrators this May requested an additional $6 million to complete the Mission campus. Plans for the Chinatown facilities were originally unveiled in 1997 to voters, who were later told construction would begin in 2006. Today the designs are mired in a political battle with neighborhood residents, and City College hasn’t broken ground on the project.

In at least one case, the school has acknowledged that a $1.3 million reallocation took place without prior authorization from its independently elected overseers, the Board of Trustees. Administrators later asked the board to consent to the transfer retroactively.

"We’re always asked to take this money and move it from here to here," complained trustee Milton Marks III, one of the few consistent critics on the board who in the past voted against such reallocations. "It may be justified…. But when I ask if there are programmatic changes, nobody can answer me."

The school calls the transfers "reallocations," and as of May the administration and the board had agreed to shift the bond money five times.

In one case, administrators asked for $70 million in transfers mere weeks after the 2005 election in which voters authorized the school to sell $246.3 million in bonds.

That January 2006 reallocation strongly suggests the office of Chancellor Phil Day knew the school wouldn’t be able to complete the projects described to voters but never corrected the ballot handbook or told the media and the public the truth.

Day agreed to a Guardian interview, then canceled it, citing a schedule conflict. But in board meetings he and his staff have insisted that the transfers were perfectly legal.

The school’s lawyers say reallocations are acceptable under Proposition 39, a state ballot measure passed by voters in 2000 that lowered the threshold in California for passing school and community college bonds.

Other districts have also relied on reallocations as the cost of construction materials has increased globally in recent years due to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing expansion of China’s economy.

But the San Francisco school has argued the logical extreme — that it can transform voter-approved projects in virtually any way it deems necessary.

"What obligation do we have in our reallocation considerations about making sure that those things get delivered — all of those projects we listed in both [the 2001 and 2005] bond measures?" former trustee Johnnie Carter asked during a meeting Jan. 12, 2006.

"You have no obligation to complete any of those projects," Mona Patel, a bond advisor for the school, responded. "You can complete one of those projects. You can complete all of those projects or anything in between…. It’s solely within the board’s discretion."

Despite that explanation, City College’s woefully short budget projections mean the school might have to return to voters a fourth time to secure funding for two projects already promised the last time City College went to the ballot, in November 2005.

One of those planned facilities was supposed to house a stem-cell-technology training program lauded by Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2005 as a way to help locals compete for jobs in the Bay Area’s growing biotech and life-sciences research industries. The school stripped $25 million authorized by voters from that project and directed it mostly to two other projects running a combined $105 million over budget.

Marks and new board member John Rizzo have urged an expansive performance audit of the bond money, which they say is required under Prop. 39 but had never been completed.

Rizzo and Marks both told us that if unforeseen construction costs, a low number of project bidders, and the lethargy of state regulators are all problems contributing to unpredicted costs, school administrators need to come up with a plan to fix the situation. But the performance audit proposed by Rizzo and Marks would first identify which problems are most severe. Not having it, Rizzo said, "is like flying blindly. We’re just writing checks."

Peter Goldstein, vice chancellor for finance and administration, insisted to us that state law, as interpreted by the school, doesn’t require the type of audit called for by Rizzo and Marks. It simply requires that the school prove it isn’t spending money on projects not presented first to voters. He added that the reallocations weren’t simple but said he couldn’t answer from memory specific questions about the 2005 bond election, including why the school chose to pursue tens of millions of dollars in reallocations so soon afterward, in January 2006.

"They’ve been very difficult decisions for both the administration and the board," Goldstein said. "[This has] not been some kind of snap judgment. We’ve really had to search and try to make sure there wasn’t some way to contain costs otherwise."

The trustees often seem just as confused as the voters may be about the cost overruns. The trail is laid out in thousands of pages of bond proposals and ever-changing explanatory documents, all complete with glossy schematics and computer-generated students looking gleeful as they head off to class at one or another of the new facilities.

The section of City College’s Web site dedicated to its bond projects is difficult to follow. A brief summary of the projects appears in voter guides, but the full bond proposals are filed with the San Francisco Department of Elections, and you’d have to go there to copy or read the tomes, which contain a lot of qualifying paragraphs that look like this one, which refers to an academic building planned in conjunction with San Francisco State University:

"The college will aggressively pursue state and federal funding to support the ‘joint-use’ concept with San Francisco State University. If funds are not forthcoming, the ‘local’ funds will be utilized to support the construction of the new Child Care Center and the new Student Health Service Center."

Such fine-print disclaimers enabled Chancellor Day and Vice Chancellor Goldstein to later depict multimillion-dollar transfers away from academic construction as entirely legal, even though the Child Care Center and health clinic never appeared as official stand-alone projects in bond proposals presented to voters.

Between 2001 and 2005 the school asked for a total of $40 million to construct in tandem with SFSU the joint-use facility, which was slated to include new classrooms and laboratories where students could work toward bachelor’s degrees in education, health care, and child development. The project is now $26 million over budget and remains in the design phase. Since 2003 about $20 million that voters were told was going to the project has been reallocated to other projects facing increased costs.

A facilities manager at San Jose–Evergreen Community College District, Robert Dias, was incredulous when we presented our findings to him. He said he’d heard of cost overruns statewide but "not to this extent."

"We have experienced rising costs, but we planned for it," Dias said. "Construction costs were going through the roof, but we did creative things to manage it."

On the other hand, Fred Harris, vice chancellor of the California Community College System, based in Sacramento, said the figures didn’t necessarily surprise him and that the state as a result has adjusted its guidelines for what individual school districts can claim as costs.*

Nuggets of Water

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COLIN BLUNSTONE

One Year

A genuine lost classic from 1971 — full of feathery, jazz-inflected vocals and sublime melodies — from the dejected Zombies vocalist after he had resigned himself to life behind a desk at an insurance office. "She Loves the Way They Love Her" picks up precisely where Blunstone’s disassembled ensemble left off, with weaving boogie-woogie and an angelic chorus that dips its wings in soul’s waters. Utterly gorgeous string arrangements by Chris Gunning and occasionally Tony Visconti, plenty of production help from ex-bandmates Rod Argent and Chris White, and Blunstone’s limpid songwriting make One Year necessary listening for pop romantics. And the chamber elegy "Misty Roses," the up-on-the-downbeat "Caroline Goodbye," and the impressionistic "Smokey Day" — driven skyward by intertwined vocals from the three ex-Zombies — are bound to besot those who swoon over Odessey and Oracle, Nick Drake, and other assorted instances of beauty and sadness. (Kimberly Chun)

ANNE BRIGGS

The Time Has Come

Mythologized among British folk vocalists like Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, depicted as something of an enfant sauvage of the ’60s folk scene in Joe Boyd’s memoir White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, and valorized by indies like PG Six and Isobel Campbell, Anne Briggs put down so little recorded music that it’s hardly any wonder she’s nearly disappeared into the dirt and mists of remote Scotland, where she’s said to be currently sequestered. But this, her last, exquisite album (1971), embellished with little more than and acoustic guitar and the occasional bouzouki, shows what the fuss was about, as Briggs wraps her pure, unpretentious pipes round the original title track — also recorded by her partner in music and lifestyle, Bert Jansch, as well as Alan Price and Pentangle — and "Wishing Well," her dark take, cowritten with Jansch, on the seduced and abandoned leitmotif of "Blackwater Side." Traditional English folk songs rarely get as mesmerizing as her ghostly version of "Standing on the Shore." (Chun)

ELAINE BROWN

Seize the Time

Polemical music has the potential to either go down in the songbooks and history tomes as an artifact linked forever with a critical place and time or fail miserably, stumbling over its grandiose ambitions (e.g., the many anti–George W. Bush CDs of recent vintage filed in ye olde circular file). The music on the powerful Seize the Time hasn’t yet taken its place next to "This Land Is Your Land," but it does offer an invaluable snapshot from the front lines of the black power movement. Elaine Brown’s robust delivery of odes penned for fallen Black Panther brethren, the party’s national anthem, and entreaties to continue the struggle finds handsome, tempered accompaniment at the hands of jazz pianist Horace Tapscott. A moving, amazingly graceful document. (Chun)

GIOVANNI FUSCO

Music for Michelangelo Antonioni

Nino Rota’s ornate Federico Fellini tunes have gotten the deluxe reissue treatment, Goblin’s spook sounds have been revived as often as Suspiria‘s Elaina Marcos, and Ennio Morricone sections in record stores are rightfully enormous. Even Pino Donaggio’s scores have had worthy second lives. But until now Giovanni Fusco’s subtler work for a director who avoided music whenever possible, Michelangelo Antonioni, has been easiest to find on DVD. Dominated by the flute flights from 1959’s L’Avventura, this collection closes with Fusco’s casino rockabilly and protoambient contributions to 1964’s Red Desert. A pioneering work in terms of its blurring of diegetic and nondiegetic sound, that film is also the great prototype for Todd Haynes’s Safe, in which malaise-ridden Antonioni muse Monica Vitti utters the great line "My hair hurts." (Johnny Ray Huston)

GILBERTO GIL

Gilberto Gil

A letter of exile from London in the wake of months of unjust imprisonment imposed by the Brazilian government, this English-language recording possesses a warmth and sensitivity one wouldn’t expect from someone who’d been through Gil’s trials. But Gil rarely made a show of his anger, usually expressing it through pointed spoken or written words or musical metaphor. A sublime example here of the last is the cover of Blind Faith’s "Can’t Find My Way Home," on which the Tropicalista leader’s voice is pure, refreshing, and vibrant while singing words of solitude and alienation. Elsewhere, his pop folk makes time for Volkswagen blues, shampoo chats, mushroom trips, and existential thoughts about Kodak moments. (Huston)

FRED NEIL

Fred Neil

A lightly sparkling hoot, "Everybody’s Talkin’ " — made famous by Harry Nilsson when Fred Neil refused to rerecord it for Midnight Cowboy — may be the biggest commercial hit on this album, but the first track, "The Dolphins," is the real, pulsating heart of this wonderful disc. The narcotic serenade to those lucky enough to escape into the wild yonder was memorably nicked for the last season of The Sopranos and encapsulates this Piscean songwriter’s lifelong identification with the sea creatures. The flighty Neil needed to be gentled into the studio by producer Nik Venet and harbored among friendly foils to produce this remarkably organic, mostly live recording, which brought out the best blues-folk writing from the rarely bottled artist. (Chun)

NICO

Desertshore

Aside from her femme fatalism with the Velvet Underground, Nico might be best known musically for the one-of-a-kind Teutonic Californian frisson of her pairing with Jackson Browne on 1967’s Chelsea Girl. But the VU’s John Cale was her right-hand man for most of her career, right on through to the practically postmortem version of "My Funny Valentine" on 1985’s Camera Obscura. This 1970 collaboration includes the layered psychedelia of the title track (on which spoken interludes add extra layers in a manner many indie rockers have imitated), the ballad "Afraid" (addressed narcissistically to herself or forebodingly to her son, Ari?), and of course the one and only "Janitor of Lunacy," which mopped the floors for generations of goths to come. Two tracks here were featured in La Cicatrice Intérieure, a film by Philippe Garrel. (Huston)

JACK PALANCE

Palance

Sauntering the line between camp and cool with winking menace, the Shane star takes his opportunity to coin a few memorable countryisms in the absurdist, Marty Robbins–esque "The Meanest Guy That Ever Lived." "I ruled like a king and they / All did my thing / ‘Cause the foot was in the other / Shoe, shoe, shoe / ‘Cause the foot was in the other shoe," Palance sing-snarls, laying into those "shoe"s like a deranged Shangri-la with rabies. Aided and abetted by lush production from ex–Hank Williams bassist and Nashville publishing czar Buddy Killen, Palance gets to really sink his actorly teeth into the juicy, who’s-sorry-now melodrama of Dottie West’s "Hannah." (Chun)

THE SOFT MACHINE

The Soft Machine

Volume Two

Albums so wide and deep they threaten to engulf you with their sheer twists, teetering turns, and utter invention. Drummer Robert Wyatt’s frisky fills gets equal time alongside organist Michael Ratledge and bassist Kevin Ayres on the high-chair-rattling "Joy of a Toy" and the toy-piano-tricked-out "So Boot If at All" on the raw-edged eponymous debut, which must have sounded like a tripindicular aural telegram from the outer edges of the universe when it rolled forth in late 1968. Thanks to the departure of Ayres and the arrival of onetime roadie Hugh Hopper, Volume Two gets off the pop leash and takes an exhilarating yet elegant romp through the wide-open fields of fusion. (Chun)

Black planet

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Heralded as one of the most important reissues of this year, the two-disc Music of Idris Ackamoor on the Em label shines a light on Ackamoor’s long-neglected Bay Area contributions to free jazz. But Water’s appreciation of local improvisation predates Em’s work: in 2003, the imprint put out CD versions of Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music and Black Rhythm Happening, a pair of standout 1969 recordings by San Jose’s Gale and his Noble Gale musicians and singers. Both might be described as sprawling if their vast reach weren’t so dramatically composed. On Ghetto Music, which includes a track called "Fulton Street," 16 people come together to form one ebbing, flowing, raging, soul-stirring musical entity.

As Gale whipped up gale-force storms on the West Coast, on the East Coast the lovably hulking Sonny Sharrock performed an even more extraordinary feat in giving birth to Black Woman, a recording so radically fierce that the world still hasn’t caught up with it — though Water has done its part by reissuing it. The duets between Sharrock’s guitar and his wife Linda’s voice have to be heard to be believed. She’s as octave-hopping wild as Yoko Ono with melodicism and Yma Sumac without the kitsch, and he’s the Jimi Hendrix and Robert Johnson whom no one knows about, patenting a skronk that’s never been bettered. Sharrock once lived across the street from Sun Ra, yet he and his wife discovered their own feminist black planet. The US space program reached the moon in 1969, but in my mind, the Sharrocks’ trip was — and is — greater. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Hot, sexy, and dead?

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

What is Water?

The best reissue independent in the country? A label fueled by Cat Power and other wistful girls strumming plaintive guitars? Perhaps the ’60s and ’70s reissue imprint — along with Runt, its Oakland distribution parent company, and its associated sister labels — got to where it is because owner Filippo Salvadori had the foresight to put out the first LP, 1995’s Dear Sir, by the ageless, Karl Lagerfeld–anointed troubadour Cat Power, née Chan Marshall, foreshadowing Water’s releases by femme folkies such as Judee Sill and "Windy" songwriter Ruthann Friedman, once lost but now passionately hailed by fans like Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart, respectively.

Or maybe the Runt-Water phenomenon all started with a simple scenario familiar to music fans of a certain age when, back in the plastic age before cable, the Web, IM, MySpace, text messages, and the lot, as Pat Thomas — longtime Runt staffer and Mushroom drummer and onetime respected San Francisco folk label Heyday owner, a "detective and general errand boy" who’d track down artwork, master tapes, and families that own publishing rights — puts it, "The only thing to do was smoke a joint and listen to an album. So you really got into your albums. That was your entertainment."

And that was the reason why Thomas and the rest of Salvadori’s small staff would later lovingly dust off and rerelease those precious artifacts from the lazy days of endless summer, multiuse gym socks, wood-grain stereo consoles, and just three channels on the boob tube, unearthing and restoring previously unheard gems along the way. As monolithic major labels tighten their catalogs and slap together cookie-cutter reissues with cut-rate art, it’s come down to indies like Seattle’s Light in the Attic and Coxsackie, New York’s Sundazed, and Runt (named after Salvadori’s favorite Todd Rundgren LP) and its imprints Water, 4 Men with Beards, Plain, and DBK Works to dig into swelling back catalogs and curate with the care that makes true music geeks and retro hipsters want to snag everything they issue. Those Water releases range, dizzyingly, from Terry Reid, the man who would have been Led Zeppelin’s lead vocalist had he been more career minded, to a recent series of majestic Milton Nascimento ’70s releases to Sonny Sharrock’s screaming early endeavors and the Flaming Lips’ Restless albums on pink, blue, and clear vinyl.

"There’s not one fucking record on there that isn’t interesting," says Patrick Roques, who has worked for Water as well as Blue Note. "Everything on the catalog, you want to have. It reminds me of Factory, growing up: anything you saw with that label, you wanted to buy it. All that music that came out on Water is important."

And in the recent years of industry downturn, the music has gotten lost while major labels have largely focused on reissuing albums digitally — sans the careful packaging and new liner notes that Runt takes pains to deliver — rather than physically. "The way the market is going for all labels and with fewer places to sell physical CDs, we can’t put out as many as we used to," says Mason Williams, A&R director at Rhino/Warner Bros., which made its name as an independent reissuer, continues to put out handsome reissues, and now works with Runt, among other indies. "More and more smaller labels have started in the last few years and are working with other labels to reissue deep catalog stuff."

"When I was a teenager [in the ’70s]," Thomas continues, "I could go to JC Penney and Sears and buy any album by the Stones or the Beatles or the Who from the classic rock back catalog. Now if you go Target or Wal-Mart, you’re only going to get ‘Best of’s. Even multimillion-selling bands — you can get the best of Led Zep, but you can’t get Led Zeppelin IV. This is forcing labels to tighten up their catalog because places like that aren’t ordering it." The closure of Tower, one of the biggest stockers of back-catalog albums, didn’t help. "Eventually, it’s going to reach a point that legendary items aren’t going to be available on CD."

That’s where Runt comes in. The latest Elliott Smith collection of tasty, previously unreleased scraps wafts through Runt’s spacious brick loft and warehouse as Salvadori burns me a copy of Water’s latest release, Judee Sill’s Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972–1973, beneath a Dr. Seuss–like shadow man painted by staffer Nat Russell, who fronts Birds of America and runs Isota Records, which is also distributed by Runt. Life is beautiful, as the Roberto Benigni film title goes, on this sun-dappled day a few rolling blocks from the Parkway, and the man from Arezzo, the same small town the Italian dark comedy was set in, is talking about 4 Men with Beards’ upcoming vinyl releases of iconic albums by the Flying Burrito Brothers, Tim Buckley, John Cale, the Velvet Underground, Nico, the Replacements, and, as chance would have it, Smith — all with pricier gatefold packaging, if the LPs originally had it, and careful remastering at Fantasy. That sense of dedication reached its height with the release of Public Image Ltd.’s Metal Box on immaculately canned vinyl. "It was really crazy, but we really did it," Salvadori says, peering through thick black-rimmed spectacles as he picks up an original Metal Box, purchased off eBay and now significantly diminished in resale value thanks to the characters scrawled on its silver surface at the Chinese factory that duplicated it. The Runt crew procured the music rights from Warner Bros. before being told that the packaging permissions were owned by EMI/Virgin, which, it turned out, only had OK in the UK. Eventually John Lydon himself delivered the approval.

That journey — tracing a slab of decades-old wax on its manifold trajectories, to its multiple owners — is only one of many Salvadori has made. After his initial Cat Power success, he moved to Berkeley to study English in the mid-’90s. The touch-and-go world of struggling indies brought him back to Europe to distribute friends’ labels. Then, around 2001, Salvadori and his fellow collector-geek pal Thomas decided to take their major-label contacts and get into the reissue business themselves, beginning with such offbeat releases as the Holy Modal Rounders’ The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders and the Zodiac’s Cosmic Sounds. Licensing albums from labels like Rhino/Warner Bros. seemed mutually beneficial, Salvadori recalls: "For us it’s fine if we move a few thousand. Sometimes we get lucky and move more than several thousand, but for them it probably wouldn’t be worth it."

Water also seems to be sparking revivals in the music of Sill and Reid, who remain the label’s biggest sellers, as well as Ruthann Friedman, who began recording with Banhart and in early July had her first Bay Area show in aeons. Think of Runt, Water, and its offshoots as the logical extensions of your older sibling’s mysterious yet well-loved record collection, guiding you toward what you must listen to next, be it a cry from Albert Ayler, a Cluster and Brian Eno collabo, or a forgotten solo disc by Neu’s Michael Rother. Still, Salvadori hopes to someday get back to his roots, despite the costs and risks associated with nonreissues, i.e., newer artists, with … say, have you heard the Moore Brothers, on Plain? "We didn’t get too much luck yet, but I always hope the next record is going to be the one," he says. "They’re so good! So hopefully people are going to eventually say, ‘Hey, this is good.’ I always hope …" *

www.runtdistribution.com

RUTHANN FRIEDMAN AND MUSHROOM WITH EDDIE GALE

With Bart Davenport

July 13, call for time and price

Starry Plough

3101 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 841-2082

www.starryploughpub.com

Politics Blog: nuts

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@@http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics@@

When she comes

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Turns out I have an aptitude for accidental deletion. My most recent masterpiece entailed the loss of three weeks’ worth of all-day, every-day home recordings, 11 songs and about 10 gigs of GarageBand files: gone and unbacked-up. In fact, to illustrate my flair for spectacular failures, it was in the act of attempting to back up the files that I deleted the whole folder.

In other words, I’ve spent the last month neglecting my friends, missing deadlines, and annoying the bejesus out of Weirdo-the-Cat for nothing. When I finished hyperventiutf8g, I went outside and sat with Houdini.

Yep, that’s the one, my last-left chicken I was telling you about, the escape artist and egg eater I meant to have for dinner months ago.

I’ll be traveling for most of July and August, and then again in the fall, so there’s no restocking my flock until probably next year. In the meantime, I can’t even give Houdini away, in good conscience, on account of her antiestablishment ways. And it’s not like she’s gonna taste any good, either.

She’s an ugly fuck, half plucked already from entanglements with fences, flower gardeners, and realism in general. Dusty, ragged, balding, thorn-stuck, and stinking, she is all the way out of this world.

Other day, to give you an example, I saw Houdini in the coop, pecking hay, and I safetied her up for the night. I closed the chicken door, locked the people door, checked the egg-get hatch. Everything was secure, I swear, and in the morning when I went to let her out, she was already there — out — standing on a log, looking at me like, "What?"

"I love you," I said. And I opened up her coop so she could go in and get water.

Still don’t know how she did it, and neither do any of the skunks, weasels, foxes, possums, and bobcats who scratch and circle and knock every night, looking for a chink in the armor, a breech of security, a chicken-farmerly slip.

So this time I was sitting on the log with her, head in hands, warm, woodsy evening. Right behind us the smoker was smoking, barely — my dinner long ready. In light of what had just happened indoors, however, appetite was out of the question.

"You do realize," I said to Houdini, "that you are dead."

She looked up at me in that quizzical, twist-necked, tilt-headed, one-eyed way that chickens have. "And you?" she said.

"I’m going away," I said.

She looked at me like, "Ah, ‘going away,’ as they say."

"I mean it," I said. "I may be dead, but you are dead dead." I sang "The Midnight Train," "Ghost Riders in the Sky," "The Lonesome Valley," and "Oh Death" but stopped short of "St. Louis Blues," because that’s always the last little ditty I sing to my chickens, when the water’s aboil and the ax is sharpened. Believe me, if you’re a chicken, you shudder to hear the Chicken Farmer sing, "I hate to see … that evening sun go down."

I did "go away" (as they say), next morning. But it was only a practice run up to Oregon. Garden party, and a backyard barbecue for mostly kids. Sad and distracted the whole time, I became probably the first person ever to burst into tears during "Coming ‘Round the Mountain." And it wasn’t even the "kill the old red rooster" verse that got me, "when she comes."

It was the one about having to record all those bass lines and uke parts, steel drum, harmonies, and tissue-comb harmonica solos all over again, and you don’t even have no friends left to back-pat you ’cause you blew them all off all month, "when she comes."

At least that’s what I thought he was singing. My brother does make up stuff. (Runs in the fambly.)

On the way back home to Houdini we hit Granzella’s to cheer up a bit. This is that famous Italian joint with the long wooden porch in Williams, up in olive country, off I-5. It’s a restaurant, deli, and sports bar, and I don’t care how hot and humbled and beaten you are from the air-conditionerless road, if you can’t get cheered up in a triangle like that, then Jack, you dead.

Pesto pizza with roasted red peppers, artichoke hearts, and fresh tomatoes. And they got muffuletta spread at the salad bar! Where you camping this Fourth of July? If it’s up north, check out my new favorite restaurant. *

GRANZELLA’S

Daily, 6 a.m.–10 p.m.

451 Sixth St., Williams

(530) 473-5583

Full bar

AE/DISC/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Icky parts

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I don’t like the amount of vaginal discharge I produce. It isn’t really abnormal, and it doesn’t smell, but I just don’t like seeing it in my underwear. I use the Nuvaring, which can change a woman’s discharge, but I don’t think that’s it. Is there a way to limit this stuff? The vagina’s a mucus membrane, and I’ve heard that dairy increases mucus; should I drink less milk?

Love,

Not a Drip

Dear Drippy:

Definitely, but only ’cause milk is gross. Personal taste aside, though, not only do I promise that milk is not mucus forming, I found a real, peer-reviewed journal article called "Milk Consumption Does Not Lead to Mucus Production or Occurrence of Asthma" to prove it to you. (I wasn’t even thinking about asthma, but while we’re at it, milk is apparently not asthma producing either. Good to know.)

There are many things one does do not wish to see in one’s underwear, many of which do not bear mentioning and none of which can be willed away by the power of positive thinking. I suggest not looking.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

You mentioned guys who wear "manties" as opposed to something more manly like boxer shorts [5/9/07]. I’m well aware that women generally find boxer shorts sexier than manties or briefs. My problem is, I’m susceptible to jock itch, (tinea cruris), and find that boxers don’t wick moisture away efficiently, which leaves me vulnerable. Therefore, I (gulp) usually wear briefs or manties (and yes, I use talc as well). What I wonder is, do women ever get jock itch? Even more to the point, could it be considered an STD? If a man has a moderate to severe case, it looks like you’ve got leprosy down there, and it seems like the interested party would want to know what the hell is going on. I’ve never heard a woman complain about jock itch or catching it from her partner.

Love,

Itchy Pants

Dear Pants:

Women certainly do get something similar — no doubt you’ve known at least one woman who not only feels comfortable discussing her yeast infections in public but also seems utterly uninterested in shutting up about them. One thing I can say for men — OK, I can say many things for men, but not now, I’m busy — is that they rarely bring up their crotch rot (actually ringworm, which is actually fungus) in mixed company. Yay, men.

Women can and do get all manner of "feminine" itchies but are generally less susceptible to jock itch and athlete’s foot (just lucky, I guess). It can happen, though, and ringworm is transmissible skin to skin as well as by "fomite" (shared towels and the like). Isn’t it funny, then, that it’s never classified as an STD, STC, or STI? Just another handy illustration of how the entire concept of sexually transmitted disease is socially constructed and has little biological validity, I guess. But that is another lecture, as is the one where I implore you to tell your partners what’s going on down there and not force them to politely pretend they didn’t see anything.

What I really wanted to say here is that not even you, Itchy McCrotchrot, need wear "manties" in the sleezy-shiny-skimpy bikini banana-sling way that I define them. I’m not entirely sure you ought to be wearing tighty-whities either. They may be more comfortable by virtue of being more absorbent, but are you sure absorbency is really what you’re looking for in an underpant? If I were you, I’d hike myself down to REI or some other place specializing in outfitting you for the sort of activities that require fancy moisture-wicking underwear and buy some. They even make boxers, callooh, callay!

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

You might have suggested to Itchy that Scratchy [5/9/07] grow a beard. It’s natural, and many women and men find it most exciting to have a beard between their thighs.

Love,

Hairy Krishna

Dear Hairy:

Rilly? Have you spoken to many of them personally?

There is, of course, a niche market for beards. My biggish, beardedish husband and I dragged my family of origin to the Russian River, a very, very gay resort area, last summer, at the same time the Bears (oh, look it up) were having their annual Teddy Bear’s Picnic and Hootenanny or whatever, which led to many hijinks and much hilarity and confused my father thoroughly.

There are women who specifically dig beards as well, but most either dig the guy who wears the beard, agree that a particular beard looks nice on a particular guy, or love the man but hate the beard. Few love the beard more than the man — let’s put it that way — and "it’s natural" is not altogether persuasive, considering the many things that are natural but don’t look nice stuck to your face. Thanks for the suggestion, though!

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Double trouble

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Rosie O’Donnell, in a recent New York Times article about the TV star’s video blog, has been outed as a woman of many personalities. The piece notes the shades of O’Donnell’s various public talk-show personae, from closeted lesbian girl next door to outspoken View-er, and surveys her current makeup-free webcam self. Yet O’Donnell is simply following what legions of the less famous do via MySpace pages and YouTube postings: compose and experiment with low-budget media selves.

Artists, along with actors, have, in theory, a slight advantage in exploring this territory. They must consider the formal constraints of presentation in a gallery, yet plenty have managed quite well by dressing up as new incarnations drawn from their imaginations or obsessively charting personal information. In exhibition spaces, this stuff either hits a universal note or collapses under the weight of vanity.

The current exhibits by Alice Shaw at Gallery 16 and Kelli Connell at Stephen Wirtz Gallery walk that taut psychological tightrope and thankfully keep their balance. Both artists work with photography, a medium conducive to entertainment and realism. Both shows are seductive, witty, and disturbing as they extend dialogues put forth by artists such as Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, and Nikki S. Lee, who in different eras effectively confounded ideas of fixed identity by taking on different roles in their photographic projects.

Shaw immediately suggests schizophrenia by titling her solo exhibition "Group Show." It includes three bodies of work, all by Shaw and all addressing the notion of reflected or fractured selves. One of her identities is a photographer, and the first series involves appropriating works by 19th-century photographers Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, and E.J. Bellocq, whose images of prepubescent girls and New Orleans prostitutes, respectively, employed a nascent medium to indulge visual preoccupations. Using lenticular printing — the plastic layering that creates the postcard illusion of a winking Jesus — Shaw fuses works by each artist to reveal nearly identical poses and create a compact narrative of ripening sexuality. First you see a young girl standing in a nightie; with a slight shift in view, you see a more mature woman doing the same. The juxtapositions of the photographers’ works also recall tales of twins separated at birth who unknowingly go down parallel paths.

The second series follows a previous body of work in which Shaw sought out mirror selves. She developed her own character by photographing herself with a male grocery store clerk, friends, dates, her dad (artist Richard Shaw), and even Matt Gonzalez. The results are collected in a Gallery 16–published book, People Who Look Like Me (2006). For this show, she sought the opposite of herself, a self-described "small, white, middle-aged woman": a leggy young African American tranny named Ryhanna. The pair, in separate shots, strike similar boudoir poses in a sparsely furnished Victorian, subtly mirroring the Dodgson-Bellocq images hanging across the gallery. The two models appear in various states of undress, makeup, and sauciness, though both play on their mixture of male and female traits. The artist sometimes seems most confident posing in a wife beater, while Ryhanna appears equally self-assured showing off lace panties and her penis. Shaw’s artistic demeanor is deadpan, so there’s a comic appeal to these images. Both seem to ham it up for the lens, which also effectively channels discomfiting racial overtones and the way a different personality arises when we stand before the camera.

Connell doesn’t pose for her large, glossy photographs in "Double Life," but the pictures immediately suggest an intimate form of role playing. In each of her photographs, there are two figures seen in the midst of psychologically and sexually charged moments. They are enmeshed in a serious discussion, poised for a kiss or a fuck, or lighting sparklers on a grassy field. As in Sherman’s work, all quickly conjure narratives. Are they a happy couple or about to break up? Straight or gay? Eventually you realize that all the figures are the same woman, a friend who has been the artist’s exclusive model for the past few years.

As the 33-year-old Connell is part of a generation that has few qualms about Photoshop magic, her work is less about seamless digital manipulation than about hefty psychosocial concerns in contemporary life. Connell has said her pictures are an "honest representation of the duality or multiplicity of the self." She does this by literalizing the myth of Narcissus, a tale that involves longing, incest, and the curse of delusion. The convincing reality of the pictures also heats up dialogues about homosexuality, cloning, and, ultimately, the highly constructed nature of identity. Without ever needing to appear on TV. *

ALICE SHAW: "GROUP SHOW"

Through July 12, free

Mon.–Fri., 9 a.m.–5 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.–5 p.m.; and by appointment

Gallery 16

501 Third St., SF

(415) 626-7495

www.gallery16.com

KELLI CONNELL: "DOUBLE LIFE"

Through July 14, free

Tues.–Fri., 9:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Sat., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Stephen Wirtz Gallery

49 Geary, SF

(415) 433-6879

www.wirtzgallery.com

Turning the tides

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› amanda@sfbg.com

On June 19 the Board of Supervisors cast its final ayes in favor of San Francisco’s new plan for public power, Community Choice Aggregation, which allows the city to own or purchase as much as 51 percent of the electricity for its residents and businesses from renewable sources. The plan’s goal is to meet or beat the rates of the city’s current provider, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which draws 13 percent of its power from renewable sources. CCA has become the popular choice for public power fans, who have long pushed the city to get a divorce from PG&E’s monopoly.

But across town the same day, it looked as if Mayor Gavin Newsom was renewing nuptial vows with the $12 billion utility. In front of the charming backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge, Newsom announced a partnership between the city and PG&E to look into tidal power. He promised "the most comprehensive study yet undertaken to assess the possibilities for harnessing the tides in San Francisco Bay."

PG&E committed as much as $1.5 million, which will bolster $146,000 from the city and a $200,000 grant from the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

The news conference had public-power advocates wondering about Newsom’s real commitment to renewable, locally owned power. "I’ve asked all the members of the Board of Supervisors," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian. "That press conference — nobody knew it was taking place." He said a mayoral aide later apologized that his office hadn’t been informed, but he added, "I don’t think it was a mistake that it occurred on the same day as the vote for CCA."

The Mayor’s Office said the scheduling was purely coincidental and had been on the books for at least three weeks, but it did not issue a news release about the news conference, and no media advisory was sent to us.

Parties involved in the deal say it will bring more money to researching a shaky, untested technology — even if it means that the power any project generates could be controlled by PG&E. "We’re always going to have that issue of ownership later, and I’d rather get the research data into the public domain," said Jared Blumenfeld, director of the city’s Department of the Environment (SFE).

Blumenfeld insisted that the deal would give the public direct oversight of all research, including work done by the private utility. The memorandum of understanding between San Francisco, PG&E, and Golden Gate Energy, which holds the permit license for tidal energy in the bay, makes it clear that all information will be shared by all parties and open to public scrutiny.

Newsom made a similar announcement in September 2006, when he called for the creation of a Tidal Power Advisory Group and allocated $150,000 for a feasibility study through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the SFE. But that program hasn’t gone far — and the little that has happened is secret.

A review of the agendas and minutes of SFPUC and SFE commission meetings shows only scant and passing mention of tidal power. The Tidal Power Advisory Group eventually came to fruition as one of five subcommittees of the Clean Tech Advisory Council, a 16-member board of local "green" business executives, entrepreneurs, and environmental experts that was formed at the call of the mayor in November 2005. Chaired by William K. Reilly, an Environmental Protection Agency administrator under George H.W. Bush, the council neither announces meetings or agendas nor makes public its minutes.

A special subcommittee devoted to tidal and wave energy has worked closely with the SFPUC to advance a feasibility study. The contract for that study went without bid to URS Corp. and will continue in conjunction with the new PG&E partnership.

URS, an international engineering, design, and construction firm based in San Francisco and formerly run by Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, has a long history with the city. The tidal power study was not subject to competitive bids and was awarded to URS because the company had undertaken significant computer models of the entire Bay Area for a past proposal to fill in part of the waterway to extend runways at San Francisco International Airport, Blumenfeld said. That plan was shot down, but the environmental impact report it spawned contains information relevant to studying tidal power.

Additionally, URS has an as-needed work agreement with San Francisco, Blumenfeld said, "and everything moves glacially" in regard to contracting with the city.

The kind of tidal power being considered — called "in-stream" and analogous to a wind farm of water-pushed turbines — is such a new technology that there is only one deployment in the world that’s generating more than one megawatt of energy. One megawatt is enough to power about 1,000 average homes. The Electric Power Research Institute released a study in 2006 concluding that the Golden Gate has the potential to generate 237 megawatts but suggesting that only 15 percent of that — about 35 megawatts — would be available without negative environmental impact.

"I think that number’s made up, personally," said Mike Hoover, a partner at Golden Gate Energy. "We know the energy that’s coming in and out of the bay is more than that."

URS, which has conducted no other tidal power studies in the United States, may support those findings, but the outlook at this point doesn’t bode well. "It appears EPRI used optimistic assumptions on water velocities," the SFPUC’s Power Enterprise director, Barbara Hale, wrote to officials in the Mayor’s Office and at the SFPUC and the SFE. "Our feasibility study estimates around 10 MW extractable power, peak, and five MW on average with a commercial plant." Additionally, Hale wrote, the cost per kilowatt-hour could be closer to 20 cents than the 5.5 cents the EPRI predicted.

Hale told us it’s difficult to say how much power would make dropping a pilot project into the bay feasible, and the best-case scenario has a pilot project four or five years away. An actual grid connection of any significance would be several years in the future.

Then there’s the huge issue of who would own the power. San Francisco Bay is considered a public trust — and under any reasonable policy scenario, the power generated by its tides should belong to the public.

After hearing about the mayor’s handshake with PG&E, Mirkarimi introduced legislation at the June 19 board meeting that would require any power harnessed in the bay to be publicly owned. He said tidal technology is still at an "embryonic stage," but the memorandum of understanding "that was unilaterally devised by the mayor and the PUC at the exclusion of the Board of Supervisors demonstrates an early intention to give the new technology to the profiteers, and that alarms me."*

Smoke and mirrors

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› news@sfbg.com

Compassion and Care Center employee and longtime medical marijuana activist Wayne Justmann proudly displays a framed "keep up the good work" letter from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–San Francisco) in the second-story medical cannabis dispensary in San Francisco.

"Patients can sit and relax and get away from the problems of the world," Justmann told the Guardian in describing this half pharmacy, half community center, which features AIDS information brochures, a DSL Internet connection, the makings for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and marijuana priced at $18 for an eighth of an ounce.

The CCC, which has been open both legally and illegally since 1992, is one of the numerous medical cannabis dispensaries that are having a hard time getting through the city’s onerous approval process. Under guidelines that the Board of Supervisors approved and the mayor signed in November 2005, all of the dispensaries have until July 1 to get the required permits, but none have successfully done so.

The supervisors recently voted to hold off enforcement for the dispensaries that have already applied for permits, which 26 of the 31 or so clubs had done at press time. Pending legislation by Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier would set a new deadline of Jan. 1, 2008, while also effecting procedural changes that could make it difficult for many facilities to ever get permits. She is proposing more stringent disability access requirements and wants to give the Mayor’s Office more control over which clubs must abide by them.

Justmann and many others in the medical marijuana community interviewed by us see the pending legislation as a mixed bag. It would remove the police inspection from an approval process that now requires clubs to deal with six city departments, easing some concerns of proprietors in this quasi-legal business. Yet the legislation would also require all clubs to meet the Americans with Disabilities Act’s standards for new construction, which could prove logistically difficult and prohibitively expensive for most dispensaries, which are in older buildings. For example, the CCC would need to build an elevator in the aging building where it rents space.

Alioto-Pier told us the amendment — which will be heard by the Planning Commission on July 12 and the board thereafter — is necessary to place medical cannabis dispensaries on par with other medical facilities. "Specifically because they are medical, the board felt it’s important for MCDs to be accessible," she told us. "It’s what I think should have been across the city."

Under the amendment, dispensaries would have to ensure that their bathrooms, hallways, and front doors were wide enough for wheelchair access and that they had limited use–limited access elevators, which would disqualify vertical or inclined platform lifts. While dispensaries like ACT UP’s could aim to spend "tens of thousands of dollars" to meet the standards, co-owner Andrea Lindsay told us, others wouldn’t be able to comply, such as those that couldn’t afford the expense or whose landlords wouldn’t allow extensive remodeling jobs.

The CCC is accessible only by stairs and does not have the money or permission to do the work that the amendment would require. "Still, we provide the necessary services to the patient," Justmann said. He also cited the financial gamble in spending large sums on a business that — unlike other health care facilities — always stands the risk of being shut down by the federal government.

Stephanie (whom we agreed to identify only by her first name), an HIV-positive patient of the CCC for the past three years, told us the new accessibility standards could make affordable marijuana less accessible. "The places that will be able to be kept open will be price gougers," she said. "I won’t be able to afford it."

Some MCDs unable to meet the new standards could apply to the Mayor’s Office on Disability for waivers, giving Mayor Gavin Newsom — who has publicly said there should be fewer MCDs in town — more authority over medical marijuana. That arrangement would be a change from the procedure for other projects, which must submit waiver requests to the Access Appeals Commission, which is part of the Department of Building Inspection.

Kris Hermes of Oakland’s Americans for Safe Access expressed his skepticism about the switch. "The main concern of the people is that the MOD will have the ultimate discretion," he told us. But Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who sponsored the Medical Cannabis Act in 2005, seems to be supporting the Alioto-Pier legislation. "It’s important that the MCDs are consistent with other health care facilities and businesses," he told us. "We want to do everything in our power to make this not so cost prohibitive."

No dispensaries have acquired a permit yet, although five now have "provisional permits." Many MCDs in the waiting line cite red tape and already stringent requirements as barring them from recognition as official businesses. Clubs must pay $6,691 for a permit and cannot generate "excessive profit" when in business.

"I don’t know what we need to do next," said Lindsay, who paid ACT UP’s fees six months ago. "The city’s new to the process. We’re new to the process. It’s frustrating on both sides."

For Kevin Reed, owner of the Green Cross Dispensary, meeting the new standards would be a hard task to accomplish in the next six months. As he told us, "You’d pretty much have to knock down a building and rebuild it."*

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