Volume 41 [2006–07]

Pay, pal

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "Fuck Lars Ulrich — he can play drums on my balls with his teeth!" Them’s fighting words from the beefy bruiser in a tinsel page-boy wig, perhaps provoked only by four wannabe skids’ burning need to cover Metallica’s "For Whom the Bell Tolls" at last week’s first but — fortunately for your inner and outer sketched-out Priest hooligan with a nonironic mullet, prematurely weather-beaten mien, and herbally truncated short-term memory — not last "Hesher" night at the Parkside, where it’s now semiofficially installed after starting its smokin’ life at Annie’s Social Club. Still headbang or nod out to "Sweet Child o’ Mine"? All is forgiven and even drunkenly applauded at "Hesher," a metal karaoke and air guitar contest. Yet as delightful as it is to rock out with your crock out to such unrepentant cock-rock versions of "Eye of the Tiger" and "Round and Round," I couldn’t help but think that all of us ruddy walleyes were just cruising upstream against a current zeitgeist hell-bent on nailing culpables caught with their greasy paws in the cookie jar. How else to explain the crowds crowing to punish Paris or throw the book at I. Lewis "Lemme Scoot" Libby? Why else were latently Catholic viewers so outraged that Tony Soprano didn’t go down in a hail of bullets rather than simply cutting to black? After years of the Bush and Cheney show, the hordes have become less hesher than harsher.

Maybe we’re waiting for justice, answers, something to believe in — and perhaps the once-wronged and now recognized and fully redeemed Spoon’s Britt Daniel is ready to give it to us, just as he and other indie savants like Feist turn in their subtlest, slowest-growing recordings to date. In fact, the opening track of Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge), "Don’t Make Me a Target," could serve as the theme song for a rockin’ version of Chicago starring the most hated Hilton in America: it soft-shoes the bristly snarl of "Waiting for the Kid to Come Out," off last year’s reissued Soft Effects EP. In spite or perhaps because of the troubles he saw when he was pushed off Elektra, griping loudly all the way, Daniel has always sounded like one of the angriest dogs on the lot, barely leashed to those leathery pop hooks.

With Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Daniel ventures into other textures and tempos, moduutf8g his bark and bite with plangent pings and drastic pressure drops, floating in an echoey "The Ghost of You Lingers" and snapping suavely to the hand-clapping "Don’t You Evah." Though the infectious brass, Daniel’s streetwise taunts, and the band’s pugilistic punch conjure up memories of a certain cheesy piano man, as Sasha Frere-Jones of the New Yorker has pointed out, aligning "The Underdog" with Billy Joel’s "Only the Good Die Young," I’d venture that Daniel is less conjuring stereotypically cornball urban bluster pop straight out of some tourist fantasy of a Little Italy than continuing the same cranky conversation that began back around the hard-assed, grunge-era Soft Effects, now aged artfully into a modern-day Bobby Darrin–y hep cat. Much like the album’s cover girl, sculptor Lee Bontecou, Daniel’s finding new mettle — and much softer metals — with which to channel his rage.

FOLKLORE LURE Court and Spark and Hiss Golden Messenger honcho and teacher MC Taylor is answering the siren call of higher education and leaving the Mission digs he shares with his wife, Abby, to move to Chapel Hill, NC. "We both wanted a change of scenery, wanted to live in the country and have a garden. I got accepted to the grad program in folklore at UNC, so everything worked out perfectly," he e-mailed on the eve of a moving sale that promised "the craziest set of Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game books that you’ve probably ever seen — seriously." Taylor will continue the more improvisational HGM in his sweet home North Carolina, though sadly C&S will probably call it a day — but not before a finale July 6 at Cafe du Nord.

MICKI ON THE MEND? Many know Stork Club owner Micki Chittock as the Oaktown stalwart who moved the Stork from its cubby near the Tribune tower to its current Telegraph Avenue clubhouse. But how many, booker Joel Harmon wonders, have come through for Chittock since her serious van accident in April? Suffering from a broken femur, pelvis, back, and ribs, Chittock has three weeks left in intensive care before she’s transferred to a recovery room, Harmon e-mailed me, after doctors gave the club owner a 50 percent chance of recovery. Harmon has put together two benefit shows to ease the medical expenses, and he’s working on more because, he writes, "I’m thinking that in order for the Stork to survive, Micki has to survive." *

HEAR, YOU GO

SEX VID AND FUNEROT


Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll sweethearts sweat it out with kindred Northwestern miscreants. Wed/20, 9:30 p.m., $5. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

SEAN HAYES


The SF singer-songwriter whoops it up in honor of Flowering Spade, which found him in a groove with Etienne de Rocher. Thurs/21, 9 p.m., $18. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750, www.musichallsf.com

THE JOINT


Crown City Rocker Headnodic breaks out hip-hop, soul, and dancehall alongside Raashan Ahmad. Thursdays, 10 p.m., $5. Shattuck Down Low, 2284 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 548-1159, www.shattuckdownlow.com

WHITE MICE


Load Records rodents bite headliner Skinny Puppy’s butt; don’t be surprised if they also gnaw their way onto a bill at the Bakery in Oakland. Thurs/21, 9 p.m., $27.50. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 346-6000, www.thefillmore.com

SEA WOLF


Turn-of-the-century wolf moniker and contemplative songcraft. Fri/22, 9 p.m., $10–$12. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016, www.cafedunord.com

DEAD SCIENCE AND IMPLIED VIOLENCE


A Wu-Tang dance party ensues after the twisted pop eccentrics couple with the experimental-theater ensemble fixated on dance, politics, and illness. Fri/22, 9 p.m., sliding scale. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. (510) 444-7263, www.21grand.org

NOMO


Elliot Bergman’s free-funk, Afrobeat, and noise eight-piece fires up the mbira, gamelan, and glockenspiel. Tues/26, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

FEIST


The ex-Peaches sidekick issues a subdued, ambitious, and multitextured Reminder (Cherrytree/Interscope). June 26–27, 8 p.m., $25. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. (415) 346-6000, www.thefillmore.com

“Heart” attack

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FILM Angelina Jolie in blackface and a decent film? Both seem remarkable when one considers the cinematic caca generated by the Tomb Raider franchise star since her Oscar win for Girl, Interrupted (1999).

Decidedly weightier and more ambitious than the screwball Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), A Mighty Heart finds Jolie coated with a deep tan and kitted out in a faux pregnant belly as Marianne Pearl in an adaptation of the journalist’s 2003 best-selling account of the kidnapping and demise of her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

The part-French Jolie may be a more suitable choice than the last Marianne rumored to be slated for the project, coproducer Brad Pitt’s previous main squeeze, Jennifer Aniston, but surely there was a more apropos physical fit for the pixieish, caramel-skinned Pearl than the opulently Sophia Loren–like Jolie?

"I think that’s rubbish. It’s so superficial," A Mighty Heart director Michael Winterbottom says, talking a mile a minute in a blurry, nasal Lancashire accent and alternately basking in and ducking the uncharacteristically bright San Francisco summer sun in the Ritz-Carlton courtyard. "The first time I met Angelina was with Marianne, and in fact they knew each other already and they trusted each other already. They’re kind of similar in lots of ways and talked about the story in similar ways. And that’s what’s important, really — to have someone actually know the person they’re playing, especially with a story that’s as sensitive as this."

In many ways Winterbottom was perfectly cast as the director for A Mighty Heart. He’s an ex-documentarian noted for striking a balance between intimate love stories (2004’s 9 Songs, 2003’s Code 46); tales like his Manchester music scene snapshot, 24 Hour Party People (2002), that revolve around the pleasure principle; politicized narratives firmly embedded in a labyrinthine geopolitical landscape (2006’s The Road to Guantánamo, 2002’s In This World, 1997’s Welcome to Sarajevo); and literary adaptations (2006’s Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, 1996’s Jude).

"They’re also films about individuals as well," Winterbottom counters. And at times A Mighty Heart boils down uneasily as a Möbius strip of a meta–murder mystery — about the media, as documented by the media, intercut with shots of entangled Karachi phone and cable lines even as Brangelina paparazzi attempted to capture the couple’s every move and at least one scandal spun off the 2006 shoot (Mumbai residents charged the couple’s bodyguards with racism during filming at a school).

A Mighty Heart also reads somewhat like the flip side of Winterbottom’s previous release, The Road to Guantánamo, which blended dramatizations and documentarylike interviews with three British Muslims, a.k.a. the Tipton Three, who were held at Guantánamo Bay for two years before they were released without having been charged.

"In a way I think both stories are about people who are kind of victims of the extreme violence on both sides," the filmmaker says, describing both as post–Sept. 11 stories. "I think there are groups on both sides who want the violence to escalate."

Which gives Winterbottom impetus to carry on with his political-as-personal narratives, turning to the next in a series of Steve Coogan films, an adaptation of former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray’s memoir Murder in Samarkand. "We’re trying to do a comedy about the British ambassador in Uzbekistan being sacked because he didn’t agree about the use of information gained under torture."

A MIGHTY HEART

Opens Fri/22 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

Tastes like chicken

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FILM Always be suspicious of any documentary that starts off with this snippet of dialogue: "Is it real, is it not real?" In fact, for the first 10 minutes of American Cannibal, directed by Perry Grebin and Michael Nigro, I suspected I might be watching a mock doc. But nope, it’s real — more authentic than reality TV, anyway, which is the subject it chronicles via both insider insights (from showbiz types like Fox Reality Channel honcho David Lyle) and the tension-fraught journey of Gil S. Ripley and Dave Roberts, writing partners who turn to reality TV as their last make-a-buck resort. That chance comes in the form of skeezy Kevin Blatt, proud promoter of jailbird Paris Hilton’s sex tape, who bypasses their pitch Virgin Territory ("When you win it, you lose it!") in favor of American Cannibal, an extreme twist on Survivor that Ripley tosses out as more of a joke than anything else. Before he and Roberts can believe what’s happening, an American Cannibal pilot — presented to potential cast members as Ultimate, Ultimate Challenge, part of the show’s bait-and-switch tack — is in motion. Morals and friendships are soon tested, as is the idea that reality TV spells instant money and success for whoever can bring the last great idea to some new, more sensational level.

Seriously, though, would you actually eat someone’s finger for prize money, even if you were really, really hungry? Would anyone? American Cannibal the documentary proves far more fascinating than American Cannibal the failed reality show ever could have been. It does feel like America’s rabid urge to devour prepackaged reality has settled down a bit, but you and I both know it’s never going away. Representing the craze’s high end, American Idol vet Jennifer Hudson has an Oscar. At the low end, take your pick (wherefore art thou, The Littlest Groom?). But if Ripley and Robert’s American Cannibal — a show that was to strand constants on a desert island and starve them, then tell them they had to eat human flesh to survive — sounds so ridiculous that you feel kind of sorry it never made it to the airwaves so you could watch, you’re not alone. As doc interviewee and The Daily Show cocreator Lizz Winstead points out, "If the lowest common denominator was a muscle, it could kick the shit out of anything else."

AMERICAN CANNIBAL

June 22–28, $4-8

See Rep Clock for showtimes

Red Vic

1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/18/07)

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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/18/07): At least 36 Iraqis were killed today.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

At least 36 Iraqis were killed today in a battle between Shiite militiamen and British forces, according to the Associated Press. Reports of the dead were unable to tell how many were militiamen and how many civilians.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

65,411 – 71,665: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 3 June 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/47/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

U.S. military:

3,773: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

111 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

177 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

164: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

50,502: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (6/18/07): So far, $435 billion for the U.S., $55 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

Politics Blog

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SCENE: Summer 2007

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Bars of mystery

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Sometimes you just want to get into trouble: drink too much, dance too crazy, see the sun rise on a workday, do some ill-advised flirting, steal a kiss (or more) in a bar bathroom, follow a shot of Patrón with a cocaine back. It isn’t too hard to get into trouble in this city, where the only rule seems to be that there are no rules (except that last call’s at two, sigh). But sometimes you need a little push — and a little unpredictability — to explore the outer reaches of your comfort zone. A few weeks here and you already know a hundred places to get your drink on: swanky places, divey places, places with good music or music so bad it feels good. It’s hard to remain anonymous, however, when you’re sipping Fat Tire and smoking spliffs on the same outdoor patio you visit every Friday, or ordering Maker’s on the rocks from the bartender who’s best friends with your last lover. And when it comes to enjoying a bit of mischief, anonymity is key. You need the unknown. A puzzle unsolved. A night stretching out before you whose story has yet to be written — the most important element being that its setting has yet to be, well, set. Which is where I come in.

Just call me Nancy Drink, Cocktail Detective. My mission? To scour the city for bars of mystery: those places you’ve passed but never entered, places whose very names are enigmas, and places so random, so hidden, so far away or just plain weird that you’ve never heard of them at all. The places where no one would think to look for you.

CLUB WAZIEMA


This story starts with the enigma that is the Western Addition … oh sorry, NoPa. Which is it? The "scary" neighborhood of yore? Or the latest example of gentrification? Judging by Club Waziema, a charming Ethiopian restaurant and bar that’s a favorite of locals and virtually unknown to everyone else, the answer is both. There’s something decidedly laid-back, eclectic, and a little low-key — that is, a little Western Addition — about the place, with its red and white velvet wallpaper, low lighting in front, and a back room with a pool table that feels more like a hostel rec room than a hipster bar. But the family-run business is keeping up with the neighborhood’s growth, and hints of NoPa are creeping in: for example, the menu of microbrews listed alongside Ethiopian imports (skip the malty stout if you’re not a fan of Old English 40-ouncers; try the harrar instead). Still, this place isn’t exactly on the scenester radar yet — and it’s better for it. You’re really here for the fantastic eat-with-your-hands food and the spot’s off-the-beaten-path, what-happens-at-Club-Waziema-stays-at-Club-Waziema feel.

543 Divisadero, SF. (415) 346-6641, www.clubwaziema.com

FORBIDDEN ISLAND TIKI LOUNGE


With a name like Forbidden Island, I figured this must be just the joint to get into delightful, delicious trouble. I wasn’t wrong. Sprouting from an otherwise quiet street was a beacon of bamboo and booze, with a thatched ceiling and a menu of fruity rum drinks organized by strength. Enough Banana Mamacows or Macadamia Nut Chi Chis and there’s no telling what one might do — maybe even something as daring as smoking on the back patio past 9 p.m., when a neighborhood noise ordinance necessitates its closure. Nahhh … this place is still a bit too tame, a bit too Disney-does-Hawaii, for such bold moves. But a young’un celebrating a 21st birthday with a drink in a bowl could certainly do some damage.

1304 Lincoln, Alameda. (510) 749-0332, www.forbiddenislandalameda.com

BOW BOW COCKTAIL LOUNGE


What a strange, strange place. Where Forbidden Island’s kitsch is calculated, Bow Bow’s is completely organic. The tiny Chinatown joint has the size, shape, and ambience of a lunch counter — white walls, neon, and all. It also has karaoke, which you wouldn’t even know until you heard some drunk fucks at the end of the bar singing "Bohemian Rhapsody" … oh wait, those drunk fucks were my friends and I. There’s no stage. The screen showing lyrics is suspended between the bathroom doors. And the only person there who can sing worth a damn is the man in charge of the karaoke book (with English and Chinese selections, by the way), with a voice like Harry Nilsson’s. Everyone else seems to stumble in already drunk and high, ready to do in public what they’d normally only do alone in their car.

1155 Grant, SF. (415) 421-6730

LI PO COCKTAIL LOUNGE


Could this be the Bow Bow’s older, more sophisticated, yet seedier cousin? Perhaps. It’s just up Grant, casting its crimson glow onto the street. Inside, an homage to Buddha punctuates the L-shaped bar. Extra booths and a back room hide from the foyer. The usual alcohol selection shares shelves with unfamiliar liquors in small bottles with wooden tops, the ingredients written in Cantonese. The house drink is the mai tai, which is the color of roses and tastes like sweet tequila. And on the night that I visited, there on a cracked red bar stool, watching Asian television on the flat-screen TV, was the karaoke man from the Bow Bow. Coincidence? Was he following me? Or is there really some kind of connection between the bars?

916 Grant, SF. (415) 982-0072

RADIO HABANA SOCIAL CLUB


Some of the best mysteries are those hidden in plain sight. Like Radio Habana, the hush-hush restaurant-bar nestled sneakily into a corner at 22nd Street and Valencia. Radio Habana has no sign — and it’s particularly obscured by some new construction on Valencia. But if you keep an eye out for the intentionally skewed windowpane and the metal cockroach pinned to the door, you’ll find exactly the kind of place where time stands still, where novels are written, and where stories worthy of novels are perhaps played out. The highlights? Dioramas featuring Barbie dolls, cockeyed pictures, framed homages to John Lennon and Kafka’s Metamorphosis, homemade sangria, and delicious Latin-inspired food (from a quaintly small menu) served on gorgeous, long, rectangular plates.

1109 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-7659

DOGS BOLLIX


There’s nothing about the name of this bar that sounds appealing. I don’t want to enter a dog’s anything, much less drink in it. The consonants alone, rolling around in your mouth, taste bitter. So the mystery is, why give a place such a name? And why go here at all? Turns out this Irish bar’s moniker is a version of the across-the-pond phrase dog’s bollocks, which means, roughly, "the best ever" (though it does also translate as canine testicles). And though it’s rumored to be overrun by Marina-type college kids and sometimes smell like urine, I found it delightful late on a weeknight: dark wood, frothy Guinness, a pool table, a large, long bar where you can chat with the friendly, attractive (though Scottish!) bartender, and small nooks for more intimate conservations.

408 Clement, SF. (415) 752-1452

HIDDEN VINE


It was a dark and stormy night … no, wait, that was the Dark and Stormy cocktail I had at Le Colonial across the street after trying — and failing — to visit the Hidden Vine, a place so very hidden that it wasn’t even open. Apparently there was "no hot water." A likely story. Surely something unseemly was going on behind those closed doors. Nothing like a wine bar in the dark to inspire criminal activity. But that would have to wait for another investigation. I was on a very particular mission and couldn’t be distracted by just any old cries from the city’s dark underbelly, even if it was an underbelly filled with pinot noir.

1/2 Cosmo Place (at Taylor), SF. (415) 674-3567, www.thehiddenvine.com

BARLEY ‘N HOPS


Barley ‘n Hops is the kind of place you’d never stumble on. You’d have to know it was there, tucked away on the second floor of the 55 Parc Hotel. It has bright lights and carpet and an airport-lounge feel. Also a sports theme, with Angels autographs on the walls, a Giants helmet on a pedestal, and televisions blaring news and sports. But I’m not fooled by such sterile-seeming ambience. I know this is a place to make secret deals, to order a hit, to plot the overthrow of an evil dictator. Or to down a few shots of Patrón and get out before I’m tempted to thwart a coup.

55 Parc Hotel, 55 Cyril Magnin, SF. (415) 392-8000

WOULD YOU BELIEVE?


The first time I drove by this bar, I was on one of those strange adventures involving interpersonal dynamics and unreal drama that can’t be written about in a nonfiction format. The kind of day when my answer was, "No, dear bar, I wouldn’t believe." So of course, I had to return to this Richmond enigma as part of my search for tippling treasure. What is it, I wondered, that the bar didn’t think I’d believe? Turns out it’s that the place is so … well … normal. A bit divey, a bit upscale. Ridiculously attractive bartenders juxtaposed with middle-aged clientele rolling dice on the bar and locals playing pool in the sunken foyer. Perhaps I also wouldn’t believe that I’d find myself there on a Wednesday, swing dancing to the Rolling Stones and sipping a fantastic mojito and an impressive Godfather (whiskey and something …) before seeing dawn on yet another workday. But now, I believe. I believe.

4642 Geary, SF. (415) 752-7444

PHILOSOPHER’S CLUB


Those in the know call it "the Philly." I knew it only as the lone beacon of light in the otherwise dark and quiet West Portal neighborhood near the tunnel. From its name, you’d expect an interior wreathed by curls of smoke rising from cigarettes held by fedora-wearing men discussing Nietzsche and Kant. But the place is much more like a neighborhood pub. Unpretentious. Friendly. Comfortable. The light hanging over the pool table resembled a ’50s surfer station wagon. "Why is it called the Philosopher’s Club?" I asked the bartender, who’s also the owner. His answer, appropriately Socratic: "Why not?"

824 Ulloa, SF. (415) 753-0599

BAR 821


"If you found us, do not tell others." That’s the Bar 821 golden rule, a rule just begging to be broken if you’re a spirits sleuth like Nancy Drink. The forced speakeasy theme seems painfully pretentious — until you actually visit the tiny NoPa (yes, folks, where Club Waziema is headed, Bar 821 has already arrived) haunt. The spot offers affordable champagne cocktails, plenty of Belgian beers, and a small, swank, but surprisingly unsnooty interior perfect for intimate conversations. Get there early, though. The place stops letting people in at 11 p.m. Whether the bartenders kick you out then, though, is a nightly mystery …

821 Divisadero, SF. www.bar821.com

Summer splashdown

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Ra and I have never gotten along. As the sun god of the Egyptians, he says people should walk sideways with one hand up and the other down. I say people should walk forward, with hands by their sides. He says Jews should be slaves. I say Jews should be rich and powerful. He says door should be spelled soldier-falcon-cat … Things between us really came to a head over the whole Library of Alexandria fire mess, though. Words were exchanged, perhaps regrettably. Since then he hasn’t exactly been overly generous with his golden rays — to me or any other San Franciscan. It’s not that he’s completely shut us off. He teases us with just enough warmth, only to freeze us out once we thankfully shed our jackets. It’s his way of forcing us to be grateful to him. Jerk.

Now it’s June. Children are shrieking, lovers are lying, teenagers are doing drugs, and everyone and everything looks like a potential mate. It’s the time of year when I get the most fed up with Ra’s bait-and-switch shit. My psychologist suggests that the best way to deal with a bully is just to ignore him. I’m paying her to be right, and even if her tactic doesn’t get us more summer light, it may keep us from getting so flustered. Another thing that might help: a few drinks, ones that offer a little more than great flavor and good liquor. Even if we can’t have an actual summer, we can always down a few cocktails like those below, to which any eager marketing exec would attach the phrase "fun in the sun."

SANTIAGO SUN


Polk-Nob bar Rye is well known for its Honey Delight, a cocktail that mixes gin and bitters with honey and tangerine and orange juices and that reportedly tastes like Sunny Delight. Putting so much effort into something that tastes like Sunny D makes little sense to me, so I opt for the similarly juicy, rum-laden Santiago Sun. This drink has the same gritty sweetness that makes mojitos and caipirinhas so popular. But some of us get a little embarrassed ordering post-trendy mos and caips aloud these days; this cocktail will help you save face. It’s crisp and strong, with a fair share of citrus to keep the rum humble. The pummeled kumquats nestled at the bottom of the drink are perfect for nibbling on while you sit in Rye’s ultra-urban lounge pretending you’re Ernest Hemingway during one of those tempestuous Cuban summers.

Rye, 688 Geary, SF. (415) 474-4448

PAT PONG PUNCH


Hit Potrero Hill’s Lingba Lounge on the right night, and you’re in for a dance treat. Hit it on the wrong one, and you’ll be stuck in an empty, sleeked-out bar with uncomfortable furniture. On either occasion, though, there’s no reason to get stumped by Lingba’s menu of neo-island cocktails. Simply dive into the Pat Pong Punch, a mixture of bourbon and fresh tamarind and pineapple juices. This cocktail is great for its simplicity: the bourbon gets soaked in the sweetness but isn’t taken under. When the juices have washed away, the oaky bourbon is left resting easily on the tongue. On nights when you require something a little tackier — a little tikier — order the Shipwreck, a drink that comes in a coconut, or the Bowl of Monkeys, a drink that’s served ablaze. The price of a Bowl of Monkeys includes a Polaroid of the experience, so you should probably wait until your friends from Burlingame arrive before ordering it.

Lingba Lounge, 1469 18th St., SF. (415) 355-0001, www.lingba.com

SINGAPORE SLING (OR SO)


Remember the part in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Hunter S. Thompson says he was "drinking Singapore Slings with mescal on the side"? You might think such a cool line would have led to a proliferation of this lovely traditional drink. Yet slings in this city are rare. When I ordered one at the Hotel Utah recently, the bartender said he couldn’t make one because he didn’t have simple syrup. This is not even a typical ingredient. I got a nice approximation there anyway, with gin, bitters, brandy, and Cointreau. Some may point out that this is not really the recipe for a Singapore Sling, but in my experience that doesn’t matter much. The drink has a history that goes back to the first part of the 20th century, and the original recipe is long lost. Subsequent attempts to reconstruct it have created a wide variety of Singapore Slings. The excitement of ordering one and seeing what kind of fruity gin cocktail arrives may be more pleasurable than the drink itself.

Hotel Utah, 500 Fourth St., SF. (415) 546-6300, www.thehotelutahsaloon.com

CANTALOUPE MARTINI


The flavor of this Lush Lounge concoction resembles cantaloupe as much as the drink resembles a martini: not much at all. The most straightforward way to achieve a cantaloupe-flavored martini would have been to infuse vodka with the fruit. The Lush, for whatever reason, has come up with an intriguingly complex work-around, mixing watermelon liqueur, orange juice, citrus vodka, and lime. Surprise — it’s good. I’m glad no one informed these lushes that cantaloupe is far less citrusy than most of the ingredients used here, because the drink ends up as a pleasantly tart ode to a Tropical Watermelon Starburst (the purple flavor in the green pack).

Lush Lounge, 1092 Post, SF. (415) 771-2022, www.thelushlounge.com

PINK PUSSY


It’s possible to imagine that this little number, served at the Metro in the Castro, was born as a Cantaloupe Martini (see above), then evaporated down to its Starburst essence and reconstituted with liquor. It uses many of the same ingredients, but doesn’t taste like any particular kind of Starburst. It just has that sticky imitation-fruit feel going on that underlies all things Starburst. One of my favorite drinks in San Francisco is the cucumber gimlet at Bourbon and Branch, because it perfectly captures that soft but biting base flavor of cucumber. I find it equally remarkable that the Pink Pussy can so unerringly replicate an archetypal candy flavor (although it’s not too heavy and has enough alcohol to keep pace with its sweetness). But what’s in the drink may not be as important as what the drink’s in: a towering highball glass, a somewhat ironic play on the straitlaced aesthetic of early 20th-century modernism, considering the cocktail’s moniker.

Metro, 3600 16th St., SF. (415) 703-9750

BOURBON AND GINGER


Cocktails that taste like candy are fun, but after a couple sugar-rush headaches you start wanting something cleaner. The bourbon and ginger at Little Baobab isn’t your typical Jim Beam and ginger ale mixture — for one, it uses real ginger juice, which makes a world of difference. The juice’s lush tang stands up harder to the alcohol than any generous splash of Canada Dry could. The lack of carbonation is also surprisingly refreshing — the cocktail doesn’t taste watered down with air. It’s full and thick, with an insistent spiciness.

Little Baobab, 3388 19th St., SF. (415) 643-3558, www.bissapbaobab.com

LYCHEE LEMONGRASS FIZZ


Along with tasty if pricey sushi and a beautiful — if perhaps similarly pricey — waitstaff, the eternally hip Blowfish Sushi to Die For also offers this wonderful drink, which has the taste and smoothness of a lychee-ice-cream shake. Unfortunately, it’s not very alcoholic; you’ll need two to get a buzz. However, it’s soft and easy enough to lead you gently into the Japanese version of Tipsyville. Soda water provides a touch of sparkle, and lemongrass syrup spices it up, keeping repeated sips from slipping into monochromaticism.

Blowfish Sushi to Die For, 2170 Bryant, SF. (415) 285-3848, www.blowfishsushi.com

DOCTORED ORANGE CR&EME FRAPPUCCINO


If I can get this by the maniacal Guardian censors, I’ll recommend the Starbucks Orange Crème Frappuccino — although somewhat altered from what its makers intended. It’s a regular Frappuccino with the addition of the citrus flavor you might find in those Dutch orange chocolates, but Disneyed up. Get a large to share with your companions on the way to your first bar and throw in some Irish whiskey and a few caffeine pills. You’ll probably have spent the first part of your day drinking beers at your cousin’s graduation party or your step-aunt’s trailer or the garden party for your niece’s communion. This is a nice way to commit yourself to the evening, should there be any doubt.

Starbucks, every-freakin’-where. www.starbucks.com

Second nightlife

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It may sound cliché, but there’s no other way to put it: my nightlife sucks. With two shitty day jobs and a barely blossoming career as a freelance journalist, it’s nearly impossible for me to find enough time or money to enjoy this city after dark. It hasn’t always been this way: I used to spend my evenings gleefully cross-eyed, rubbing knees with random hedonists, pushers, and hell-raisers. I used to go skateboarding in night goggles and camp nude in the Tenderloin. Goddamn it, I used to have it all!

I’ve thus far managed to maintain sanity by telling myself that hard work produces success, but my self-imposed exile to the sunlit hours is rapidly taking its toll. Gray hair, bedroom alcoholism, and soul-crushing anxiety shouldn’t affect me for another 10 years or so. Yet here I barely stand at the ripe age of 28, a boring fucking wreck. In order to salvage some of my formerly wild personality — and rather than shoot myself or seek expensive therapy — I decided recently to take the plunge into the comprehensive virtual world of Second Life. Might as well throw down with some wart-nosed trolls and weirdo Wizards of Nardo, right? Pass the magick toad grog, Tinker Bell. Yep, I’m just that desperate.

A LITTLE HELP HERE?


With all the hype surrounding Second Life and its maker, Linden Labs, you’d think the game would be a fairly simple thing to pick up. Not so, my friend. The first obstacle I ran into was of the technical variety. After installing SL and choosing a sly code name (Justyn Jewell, natch), I thought I was good to go, but my poor old Dell crashed whenever I tried to wiggle my virtual buttocks. My friend Tony, a notorious group gamer at Stanford, hates it when I call him with computer questions but was surprisingly enthused about the opportunity to share his SL wisdom. He even agreed to come over that very night and lend me his vacationing roommate’s brand-new MacBook Pro until she got back. Score.

First lesson: customizing an avatar. Perversely, I chose the Boy Next Door body template and then altered its features to match my own. After some meticulous tweaking, Justyn Jewell was no longer your average joe. He was a tragically good-looking skinny white dude with slick brown hair and sleek black shoes. I also gave him a handlebar mustache, because I’m up-to-the-minute like that.

Tony spent the next few hours teaching me the basics. When he left that night, I was able to walk, fly, teleport, take a piss, and hold brief conversations. I was still having trouble picking things up, touching people, and not walking into corners, but it was too early to worry about socially acceptable advanced maneuvers. For a man who hadn’t touched a video game since Mario Bros. III, simply stumbling through SL’s intricate landscape felt like enough. Getting beyond that was going to be a bumpy road, but Tony promised to come back and teach me some more when the time was right.

AVATAR, AWAY!


My first few weeks with Second Life were just what I needed. Whenever my brain grew weary from writing another puff piece about the latest hair-removal technique ("Experience the smooth, toning pleasures of La Cage Aux Follicles"), I would log on and select one of the thousands of clubs from the Popular Place menu. Immediately, I’d shoot to an island dedicated to house, techno, hard rock, hip-hop, or what have you. Each venue was full of kitted-out avatars who acted as though they were at a real party. "Woo-hoo!" they would say. And "This party is sooo amazing!" I knew it was all fake, but I was getting a visceral thrill watching my doppelgänger mingle with squirrel people, virtual heshers, cocky shot-callers, and impossibly elfin ravers.

The possibilities kept me endlessly occupied. I started out mainly going to standard Ibiza-like situations but soon wound up frequenting a hip-hop club called Insatiable, where people ground to slightly less-than-cutting-edge tunes by Ludacris and Fat Joe. I tried to spice things up by talking to people wherever I went, but my standard greeting, "Whacha gonna do with all that ass, all that ass inside them virtual jeans?," was often met with a cold shoulder or yawn — even at Club Insatiable! The reason was obvious. While nearly everyone else had wild hairdos, tattoos, designer outfits, and sparkling electro-bling, I was still in stock attire, a boring newbie who didn’t know shit. It was time to get some gear.

Perusing boutiques in SL made me realize just how Vegas-like this virtual world can be. Everything is for sale. Shirts, pants, drinks, cars, body parts … Most items struck me as rather excessively priced or ephemeral, but a few choice pieces had me reaching for my Linden dollars, the coin of the realm.

One of my first stops was a store called Dicks and Pussies, where I somehow managed to score a free T — skintight, red and white, with the name of the store emblazoned across the chest. It was fine for walking around in an adult boutique, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the damn thing off. What would they say at Club Insatiable? In the hopes of finding a better free shirt, I teleported to a few other stores, but no luck. I was stuck looking like a freebie-grubbing douche bag until Tony could help me. Luckily, we had made a date for that night.

CLICK ON THE BLUE ONE


By 10 p.m., Tony and I were in an alcohol-fueled Second Life frenzy. After scoring some more Linden dollars, we flew around to goofy places like Hedonistic Isle, where you can gamble, listen to streaming audio, and lounge in lawn chairs. There were volleyball courts, bonfires, and beach toys all over the place, but I had other plans. Talking, dancing, and roasting electronic marshmallows were great and all, but what kind of nightlife would be complete without one-night stands?

I felt I had to act. "Hey Tony," I said. "How do you have sex in this place?" Tony stopped tapping at his keyboard and looked me dead in the eye. "I’m not exactly sure," he said. "Why don’t we find out?" I took a sip of my third real Jack and Coke and said, "Follow me."

Besides complimentary dorkwear, Dicks and Pussies has everything your perverted avatar could ever want. For less than a thousand Lindens (about $3) you can get a gigantic schlong with veins or a vagina with hyperrealistic stretch action. There were electric toys, erotic hairstyles, and even peekaboo lingerie. "All right, dude, I’ll buy you a vagina and myself a dick, but you have to show me how to put them on and work them," I said. "Fuck it, why not?" Tony said after a slight pause. That’s all I needed.

Within seconds Tony was wetting things with his brand-new vagina, and I was setting the flesh tones on my penis. "All right, man," I said. "How do you work these things?" I thought we would have to purchase some animation codes or something, but Tony knew a shortcut. Next to the showroom floor was a bedchamber with little balls hovering all over the place. Tony walked up to one and said, "Come on, dude, I’ll click on the pink ball. All you gotta do is click on the blue one, and we’ll be off."

Within seconds Justyn Jewell was balls deep in Tony’s avatar. Hilarious. Tony and I spent the rest of the night drinking and taking screen shots as our avatars explored each other’s software.

I passed out sometime around 2 a.m. and awoke the next morning to a pissed-off girlfriend. "What’s wrong, baby?" I asked. She refused to speak to me for an hour or so and then finally said, "I heard you last night. That was sort of weird that you fucked Tony."

I was immediately assaulted by a flurry of flashbacks: the sound of ice clinking in glasses, the sight of my avatar in the throes of passion, the giggles, the grunts … "Don’t say it like that," I said. "I didn’t fuck Tony. He was just, like, showing me how to have sex so I could buy some later." She stared at her coffee for a full minute and then said, "Well, I don’t know why you have to have sex at all. Is something wrong?"

The more I tried to explain that Second Life was just an entertaining outlet for when I was too busy to take her out, the worse it sounded. Why was I obsessed with that particular aspect of the game, anyway? And why, of all people, did I pick my friend Tony to experiment with? I waited until my girlfriend was in the shower before looking at the screen shots from the night before. Jesus Christ, what a pervert. Thanks a lot, Linden Labs! Now I have two shitty lives to deal with.

www.secondlife.com

Welcome to Summer Scene 2007

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Click here to go to Summer SCENE 2007: Our Guide to Nightlife and Glamour

It’s almost summer, and I feel shamelessly trendy. Not Bobby or big sunglasses trendy — or even Lindsay gray hoodie or Paris orange jumpsuit trendy (well, maybe a little). No, I wanna know. What’s going on in the wide and wicked world of fashionable nightlife? Make me care, dammit.

In New York, the wild, proudly heterosexual rich kids who run the überpopular Box are talking about opening an after-hours bathhouse. We can’t do that in San Francisco (it’s still illegal), but I love that the little downtown brats are hauling wet-het sleaze from their gilded water closets. In Syria, according to the New York Times, gentlemen’s clubs — and there really isn’t any other kind of club in Syria — have started Iraqi refugee–themed stripper nights. No, thank you. And in Europe, there are so many seven-foot-tall Danish, Turkish, and Ukrainian drag queens ruling the dance charts right now, it’s like some flamboyant aural Amazon gypsy carnival exploded. Stevie Nicks was right!

But what about here in the Bay? It seems like dance music is still going through what hip-hop went through 15 years ago — digging up the past, mixing it up with the future, dropping golden nuggets on the playlist. Pairing that turquoise off-the-shoulder cable knit with a fuzzy pink mini, tucking our leopard-print stockings into our pixie boots. Only now, at last, we’re edging our way slowly into the ’90s, with brassy neu rave air horns, sly acid bass lines, and e-fueled hyphy goofiness sidling up to the frosty early ’80s and offering to buy her a double Manhattan. My edge-of-’90s deep-dish DJ wish list for summer 2007: Leila K, "Got to Get"; Mory Kante, "Yeke Yeke"; Nicolette, "O Si Nene." And anyone who can find a way to slip on Guru Josh’s "Infinity (1990s: Time for the Guru)" with a straight face wins my vote for Queen of the Rave-iverse.

Yet things aren’t totally bass-ackward in clubland, although I fondly hope that the recent giant Vivienne Westwood fashion retrospective at the de Young fills the dance floors with gorgeous beaded corsets, golden safety pins, padded asses, ostrich feathers, crazy harlequin prints, and deconstructed plaids for years to come. (Did anyone else shed a tear when they came upon the famous sparkly platforms that made Naomi Campbell tumble to the runway? Tragic. I nearly threw my cell phone in sympathy. But that would be expensive.)

Techno’s making a huge and forward-looking comeback, ripping an electronic page from the mashup scene’s playbook and going live, helped by mind-boggling new software. It’s complicated, but it’s lovely. Indie rock DJs, like techno DJs before them, are discovering contemporary classical ("new music") and throwing rough street sounds and angular, alien textures into their sets. The dub scene is also booming, mixing high-tech breaks and ragga beats with Southeast Asian instrumentation and more than a little African flavor. And the queer kids? We’ve ceased embracing our inner Beyoncé so much and are turning to live bands and smoky cabaret to get our kicks. Rawk.

All of which just means anything goes. And lover, it’s going well. So make this summer work for you — however, whyever, whenever. It’s almost like democracy!

Poach the crowd,

Marke B.

marke@sfbg.com

Google in my bedroom

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION A couple of weeks ago Google announced its latest map widget with much fanfare. Called Street View, it’s an option on Google Maps that gives you (literally) a view from street level of the address you’re searching for. When you go to Google Maps, click "Street View" in the upper right corner (not all cities have it — try San Francisco or New York), and you’ll get a little icon shaped like a human that you can move around the city grid. Move the human into place, click it, and suddenly you find yourself looking at a picture of the houses on the street. You can navigate down the block with arrows, even turning your point of view left or right to get a full 360-degree view of the spot.

All the images on Street View were taken over the past few months by a camera mounted on a roving van. Later Google used special software to "knit" the discrete pictures together, creating the illusion that you’re seeing seamless images of streets. If this sounds futuristic to you, it’s not — a couple of years ago, Amazon made a similar service available via its search tool A9. But after Google hired Udi Manber, who ran A9 for Amazon, the service went downhill, and it’s now no longer available. Instead we have Google’s Street View.

When you first use Street View, it feels like Google has turned the real world into a video game. I recently took a "walk" all around a San Francisco neighborhood where I might like to live. By clicking the arrow, I moved down Guerrero Street, "looking" to my right and left at the houses and local businesses to figure out how many blocks my potential residence would be from crucial things like cafés and a grocery store. I felt like I was in the virtual world Second Life, except that I couldn’t fly and most of the people on the street weren’t giant centaurs with wings and magic powers.

Still, it was hard to take my eyes off the people on the street. Captured on film without their knowledge or permission, they’ll be online for all to see for at least a couple of years — possibly more. Some naughty bloggers over at Wired.com have already asked people to submit the best "street sightings" they’ve found on Street View. Several pictures of seminaked people sunbathing or undressing near open windows turned up right away, as did pictures of people pissing against buildings. Searchers also found a picture of somebody being arrested (Google took that one down), as well as a snapshot of two women on San Francisco’s Hyde Street who appear to be exchanging money for drugs. And there are thousands more like these.

What are the ethics involved here? Is this an invasion of people’s privacy? All the photographs were taken in public places, and therefore nobody in them has any reasonable expectation of privacy under the law. But then again, privacy laws weren’t written with Street View in mind. It’s lawful to eavesdrop on people on the street because they’re in public. But is it lawful to publish online in perpetuity a picture of someone that captures him or her making out with somebody at a bus stop? Soon, lawsuits may seek to answer that very question.

In the meantime, Google is hoping you won’t ask because you’re so impressed with the prettiness and usability of its shiny new thing. As I mentioned before, I’ve already found the service helpful in my search for a new place to live. It might also be good for figuring out the best places to park near your destination, or whether a hotel is as nice and well located as it claims to be. Mostly, though, I don’t know why anyone would consider Street View to be more of a useful tool than a slightly creepy toy. I suppose it could be a great way for stalkers and thieves to find houses that are isolated, shielded from the street by greenery, or accessible by bottom-floor windows without bars. One day, even burglars might find their targets by Googling.

For now, however, Google Street View only covers a few cities, and the interface is a little slow. But the van is still out there, taking pictures automatically, posting everything it sees online. And the interface will improve. Is the dubious convenience of this tool worth the privacy trade-off? Do you really want to walk down the street never knowing whether your furtive nose-picking or secret meeting with a colleague has been captured and broadcast to the Google-using public? *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who will not stop picking her nose furtively in public and reserves the right to be pissed if you publish a picture of her doing it.

All-consuming consumption

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Copping to her fashion juju at curtain rise, amid a litany of designer labels rattled off at the audience, Fe, the heroine of the sordid story to follow, makes a pretense of having broken the solemn rules of drama by giving her big secret away at the outset. In fact, there’s plenty of mystery yet in this intriguingly mercurial, restless hedonist (played by a charismatic, unstoppable Margo Hall), who anyway reverses herself in the next line when she coyly concedes the covert nature of her splendid appearance. "Face? François Nars. You can never go wrong with the French. François’s motto? ‘Makeup is not a mask.’ A load of tired crap, but I forgive him."

We never get more than a glimpse behind Fe’s mask, but then, appearances are what count — for all and nothing — in Fe in the Desert, the latest world premiere collaboration between Philippine-born American playwright, novelist, poet, and performance artist Jessica Hagedorn and Campo Santo and Intersection for the Arts. After the outwardly fearless but inwardly insecure title character reveals her deceptive fabulousness, she seeks the psychological safety of her estranged husband’s brand-new Cadillac Escalade, with its aloof suspension and promise of indestructibility, as she drives to their desert home.

Narrowly avoiding a head-on with a meat truck, Fe nearly loses her life. This puts her in an existentially acute mood for the duration of her subsequent adventure-nightmare in a seemingly empty Mojave, where she and husband Bill (a coolly flamboyant, then persuasively unhinged Danny Wolohan) are interrupted in their shaky reconciliation by two armed intruders. But even that irony is no proof against the power of the all-American Caddy to ward off bad spirits. The juju of the mighty Escalade — and of the general wealth of Fe’s ultimately helpless epicurean husband, and of showbiz, whose allure also figures significantly, if somewhat obliquely, in the narrative — may falter, but never dies.

The prequel to 2005’s Tenderloin-set Stairway to Heaven, also launched with Campo Santo, Fe in the Desert cunningly puts the usual codes of identity in playful motion (with their hierarchy of class, gender, and ethnic markers) to explore the deeper social and cultural context of Fe’s existential crisis. Indeed, the play’s spacious and opulent setting (as well as its predominantly comic mode) offers a seemingly stark contrast to Stairway‘s grim inner-city tale but in fact provides no escape from the same world of contradictions, which dramatically swoop down on the reconciling couple in the form of ex-cons Tyrone (a sophisticated sociopath with a thing for good English, smoothly played by Robert Hampton) and his volatile ghetto-Pygmalion protégé, Mook (a credibly wild Jonsen Vitug). On their trail follows an unlikely rescue party made up of a producer (Michael Torres, in an amusingly sly turn) and his foreign-born secretary (a solid Sara Hernandez).

The American desert here is at once full and all-encompassing, being the desert of capitalism, consumerism, haute culture, pop culture, and the Hollywood dream factory. This soup of oneiric consumption tends to undermine any hard-and-fast identity, including those cast in multiethnic hyphenates and hoary stereotypes. Instead, various strands of the cultures still referred to as high and low flow into one another with abandon, sometimes comically, sometimes violently, but always ecstatically.

That slipperiness partly excuses the rather thin construction of some of the play’s characters, but only partly, in a production that provides little real punch despite high-octane performances and director Danny Scheie’s ever-inspired staging of a story that loops repeatedly back in time, confutf8g multiple perspectives on the same horrific and absurd encounter. Fe, on the other hand, memorably realized by the always formidable Hall, has a certain staying power. In the desert of American dreaming, she’s at least a consummate survivor, a Prada-clad pioneer who never stops moving. *

FE IN THE DESERT

Through June 25

Thurs.–Sun., 8 p.m. (also June 25, 8 p.m.), $9–$20, sliding scale

Intersection for the Arts

446 Valencia, SF

(415) 626-3311

www.theintersection.org

Eat on the beat

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Once upon a strange, overly prepared, possibly paranoid post-9/11-related time not so long ago, I’d bring my lunch to shows at Shoreline Amphitheatre, then–Concord Pavilion, and all those other mammoth Sleep Train–sponsored yet intrinsically antisnooze behemoths. I’d pack a heaving Dagwood of cold cuts and assorted cheeses and energy bars into a backpack for random spates of balls-out rockin’ in burbs and office parks. What was I thinking? Guess I felt goofy partaking in those pricey, once-no-frills concession stands o’ paltry choices. Will it be a $7 Bud or $12 Corona, milady?

My only point in this pointless universe of sunburn, service fees, and loud, loud music is that it looks incredibly silly to come too correctly sometimes, especially when one takes in all-day musical twofers like the Harmony Festival and BFD in one fell weekend, hoping to study the cultural disconnect.

Still, the disjunction started way earlier, while at Harmony, cruising the many-splendored superwheatgrass concoctions, nut ices, and organic brown-rice-and-veggie-bowl stands (here somewhat more affordable than making a meal at a movie theater) and sticking out like a black-garbed Trenchcoat Mafiosa amid the dreadlocked sk8ter bois and Marin wealth gypsies with perfectly crimped hair. So too at BFD, playing arcade basketball backstage, studying Interpol and the Faint as they attempted to summon dark magic in broad daylight, and feeling peckish and jaded for noting the all-male standard-issue modern-rock lineups dominating the main stage.

I just didn’t go far enough in packing num-nums for all-day summer music lovin’ — after all, when in Rome and paying Rome’s hefty ticket prices, why not dress, smell, and quaff like those kooky Romans do? (And why not get a brain transplant while you’re at it?) As author Kara Zuaro might say, "I like food, food tastes good," but I also like saving nonexistent moolah and embedding myself seamlessly clad in average fan camouflage.

Hence a modest proposal for blending in at and sneaking grub into this summer’s shed performances:

THE SHOW: The Police, the Fratellis, and Fiction Plane. Wed/13, 6:30 p.m., $50–$225. McAfee Coliseum, Oakl. www.ticketmaster.com.

THE LOOK: Blond wig, placenta facial, an afternoon in the spray-tanning salon, tantric sex charm bracelet.

THE FLASK: Guinness-laced nut milk shake to please the food police.

THE SHOW: Gwen Stefani, Akon, and Lady Sovereign. Tues/19, 7:30 p.m., $25–$79.50. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. (650) 967-3000.

THE LOOK: Blond wig, stunna shades, ab-baring lederhosen, and a pout.

THE LUNCH BOX: A single Ricola in sympathy with Stefani, who claims to have been dieting since she was 10.

THE SHOW: Vans Warped Tour, including Bad Religion, the Matches, Flogging Molly, Pennywise, and Tiger Army. July 1, noon, $29.99. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. (650) 967-3000.

THE LOOK: Black T-shirt, faux-hawk, and black low-top Converse or checkerboard Vans — why not one on each foot?

THE BROWN PAPER SACK: Not Dog, PBR, Ritalin.

THE SHOW: Ozzfest, including Ozzy Osbourne, Lamb of God, Static X, Lordi, Hatebreed, Behemoth, and Nick Oliveri and the Mondo Generator. July 19, noon, free. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. www.ozzfest.com

THE LOOK: Black T-shirt, stunna shades, floppy shorts.

THE FANNYPACK: Seitan, cheddar cheese Combos, a quart of Gorilla Fart No. 666.

THE SHOW: Bone Bash VIII, with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Pat Traves, and Laidlaw. July 20, 5:45 p.m., $10.77–$59.50. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. (650) 967-3000.

THE LOOK: Uh, blond wig, floppy shorts, ab-bearing lederhosen.

THE TRUNK: Rice Chex and raisins, leftover tuna noodle casserole, Arkansas Buttermilk.

THE SHOW: Projekt Revolution Tour, including Linkin Park, My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday, HIM, and Placebo. July 29, 12:45 p.m., $24.50–$70. Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View. (650) 967-3000.

THE LOOK: Floppy shorts and tantric sex charm bracelet.

THE PLASTIC SACK: Fried ramen with faux duck, Kit-Kat, Sparks, and Tylenol.*

HIGH THERE

Pills and purists might accuse Sean Rawls of appropriating Aislers Set for his reggae-scented SF party supergroup Still Flyin’ — or simply appropriating Jah lovers’ rock sans the spirituality — but that doesn’t bum out the ex–mover and shaker of Athens, Ga.’s Masters of the Hemisphere on the June 5 release of an EP, Za Cloud (Antenna Farm): "Some people hear Still Flyin’ described to them and automatically think that it’s such a horrible idea for a band, which I can understand. But what we’re trying to do is just have a good time. Most bands aren’t into that."

When Rawls moved to SF in 2003, he simply asked everyone he knew — including AS’s Yoshi Nakamoto, Alicia Vanden Heuvel, and Wyatt Cusick — to join his new band. He didn’t think 15 unlikely suspects from groups like Maserati would accept.

After an East Coast tour this fall, Rawls aims to record an album of even dancier material, provided more instruments don’t get stolen by fans, as they have been in Sweden. "They also steal our beer. Either way it sucks," Rawls says. "We’re partying hard, and beer is a vital ingredient."

STILL FLYIN’ WITH ARCHITECTURE IN HELSINKI Sat/16, 9 p.m., $16. Bimbo’s 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, SF. (415) 474-0365

GET THE BREAD OUT

BOTTOM AND TARRAKIAN


The Bay’s metal maidens meet the Totimoshi spinoff group, as the latter toast a new EP, The Swarm (No Options). Fri/15, 9 p.m., $7. Annie’s Social Club, 917 Folsom, SF. (415) 974-1585

LADYBUG TRANSISTOR


Following the sad passing of drummer San Fadyl, the Brooklyn nostalgia rockers carry on, twanging sweetly on Can’t Wait Another Day (Merge). Fri/15, 10 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455

NO DOCTORS


The Docs are in with their third album, Origin and Tectonics. With Wooden Shjips, Fuckwolf, and Sic Alps. Fri/15, 10 p.m., $6. Elbo Room, 647 Valencia, SF. (415) 552-7788

SCISSORS FOR LEFTY


The SF combo skipped pants at BFD. Fri/15, 9 p.m., $13. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. (415) 771-1422

COOL KIDS


The Chicago duo kick out the streamlined boom-bap. Tues/19, 8:30 p.m., $8–$10. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016

SCARY MANSION


No creeps — just poignant, eerie rock from the Thunderstick-wielding Brooklyn trio. Tues/19, 9 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

Why a cherry?

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Chili, most of us would probably agree, is beer food rather than wine food — if we are to make such odious distinctions — and that would make a winery an unlikely setting for a chili cook-off. Still, wineries can have their chili-friendly atmospherics on early-summer afternoons; the air is warm and fresh but not hot, and small planes drift through it on their way to and from the Petaluma airport, just a few flat miles away, across the vineyards. That, at any rate, is the view if one is standing on the grounds of Sutton Cellars, which did host such a cook-off recently and does bottle a Rhône-style red table wine sturdy enough to stand up to all the associated meat and spice.

Chili, it turns out, is surprisingly adaptable. None of the four restaurants from the city involved in the cook-off (Nopa, the Slow Club, the Alembic, and Maverick) used a recipe, nor, for that matter, do they offer chili on their regular menus. Yet each entry was strikingly different — one quite spicy, another perfumed with smoke and fruit from a combination of (pre)grilled skirt steak and lime juice, the third friendly in a rather ordinary way, and the fourth devoid of meat.

I liked this last one, from Nopa, the best. Ground calamari was used in place of meat, and with long braising, the cook told me, the flesh acquired the texture of cooked hamburger. More interesting was the deployment of rice beans, which indeed looked like fat grains of rice and are a close relation of azuki beans. Nopa’s chili struck me as being, in its overall effect, a close relation of gumbo, while the lone non–San Francisco restaurant’s effort (from L Wine Lounge in Sacramento) was so thick with pork, duck, and duck fat as to resemble a cowboy cassoulet. That chili was also served with a cumin-and-coriander cherry on top — pitted, of course — for a touch of tasty weirdness, or maybe a nod toward dessert?

There were no desserts, of course, unless you count a block of cheddar cheese that quickly disappeared, leaving behind plenty of forlorn sliced bread. A loaf of bread, a jug — or goblet — of wine, and thou, thou being chili in many guises, scarfed happily at picnic tables while little planes buzzed in the distance.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Smells like DIY spirit

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

K Records founder and ex–Beat Happener Calvin Johnson once wrote in New York Rocker, "Rock ‘n’ roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages — they could be 15, 25, or 35. It all boils down to whether they’ve got the love in their hearts, that beautiful teenage spirit."

That sentiment still holds for the Olympia, Wash., native, who will turn 45 this November. The deep-drawling baritone is probably best known for spreading Beat Happening’s jangle-pop gospel from the mid-’80s to the early ’90s. Yet he also formed the recently reunited Halo Benders with Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch, as well as Cool Rays, the Go Team, and Dub Narcotic Sound System. He’s collaborated with groups such as the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Mount Eerie, Mirah, and the Blow and has helped organize the International Pop Underground Festival, in addition to the forthcoming Helsing Junction Sleepover in Thurston County, Wash. And throughout his quarter-century pursuit of youthful verve — whether as bandmate, producer, label owner, or festival organizer — Johnson has kept the company of those who share his distinct brand of DIY devotion. Rather than being concerned with aesthetics or lack of talent, he and his peers know it’s more essential to be sincere, truthful, and confident with what feels natural when it comes to music making.

Some of those chums include K alums Jason Anderson (Wolf Colonel), Kyle Field (Little Wings), and Adam Forkner (White Rainbow), the three of whom Anderson deemed the Sons of the Soil and who tagged along with Johnson as his backing band on a 2003 West Coast tour. Johnson said over the phone from his K Records headquarters in Olympia that Anderson approached him in 2003 about sifting through Johnson’s solo work and other projects and revamping them with a rock outfit. Johnson, who usually simply plays acoustic sets during his live performances, didn’t need much persuasion.

"The arrangements on some of the songs vary greatly from the recordings that I had previously done," he explained. "Particularly ‘Lies Goodbye,’ which on my solo album was just me with an acoustic guitar. And here it’s more of an upbeat, rocking number. That all came out of the fact that when we first started playing together, the arrangements all came naturally."

At the tour’s conclusion, the foursome agreed to enter Johnson’s Dub Narcotic Studio and lay down songs from their excursion. "It was just a band we put together for a tour, but then we were, like, ‘Oh, we’re all practiced up — why don’t we document this?’" Johnson remembered. The result of the sessions, released almost four years after the fact, Calvin Johnson and the Sons of the Soil (K) is a buoyant, funk-charged listen, updated by the quartet in a manner Johnson himself may never have envisioned. At times romantically soul-driven ("Can We Kiss"), at other times bluesy ("What Was Me"), the album mainly consists of high-spirited, bass-heavy rockers ("Tummy Hop," "Sand").

"I’m really happy with the way the record turned out," Johnson said, "because it was fun to make and I like the way the songs are interpreted."

Two live interpretations of "Tummy Hop" and "What Was Me," drawn from the band’s tour, pop up on the CD, both containing interludes during which the group quietly plays in the background while Johnson rambles on like a lounge singer. At one point during the latter, he states, "So people say to me, ‘Calvin Johnson … who are you?’"

I think it’s safe to say that question’s already been answered. *

CALVIN JOHNSON

With Julie Doiron

Fri/15, 6 p.m., $10

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

Patisserie Philippe

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Most of us have our favorite bistros, boîtes, bakeries, and pubs — but patisseries? That seems a little precious, and maybe hard to pronounce. And fattening, since patisseries are all about pastries, and pastries are all about — or largely about — butter and eggs and sugar, with some flour and yeast thrown in, not to mention chocolate, more often than not. Boulangerie is tricky to pronounce too for unschooled Anglophones, but boulangeries are about bread, and bread isn’t really fattening — unless it’s brioche, which is something you’d get at a patisserie, perhaps your favorite one.

Pâtisserie Philippe, which opened earlier this spring in a gigantic new building on the roundabout at the end of Eighth Street, is not a boulangerie, but it does have its boulangerie-esque elements. The handsome glass display cases are full of pastries, including tartes tatins and financiers, but they aren’t full of just pastries. There are panini too and baguette sandwiches and salads. If you said deli with a French accent, you would be striking near the heart of the matter. I don’t know how you say sports bar in French — le sports bar? — but there is one next door (not at all French), and it is loud. Pâtisserie Philippe, by contrast, is serene and civilized, and while you can’t get french fries with your panino, you won’t miss them, since you prefer a salad of mixed baby greens anyway.

The Philippe of Pâtisserie Philippe is Philippe Delarue, formerly of Bay Bread, the large and spreading consortium of bakeries and restaurants run by Pascal Rigo. Delarue’s place does resemble, a little, Rigolo, the Rigo restaurant in Laurel Village. The latter is bigger and has a more extensive menu (including wine), but while the food is good, it isn’t better than Pâtisserie Philippe’s. I was particularly taken by PP’s croque monsieur ($5.95), the classic grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich that here is caked with a béchamel sauce — a bit on the rich side, yes, but the sandwich is European in scale. It’s not huge, in other words; five or six bites and you’re done, and you’re well satisfied. If the sandwich were built out to American standards, it would be two or three times as big and perhaps worthy of the sports bar next door. But … inelegant. Anyway, there are plenty of other savories to sample, and the panini are quite large.

This has much to do with their being assembled on ciabatta bread. The name means slipper in Italian and refers to the loaves’ long, flat shape; sandwiches made from ciabatta are particularly well-suited to the panini press. Pâtisserie Philippe’s versions ($5.95) feature ham or chicken along with melted mozzarella and provolone cheeses. I liked them both but preferred the ham, which was a little more deep-voiced and assertive in the face of all that white goo. If neither appeals, there is a fine spinach quiche ($3.75 for a not inconsiderable slice) — a kind of open-face spanikopita, with a gorgeous flaky-tender, golden pastry crust.

Although the French aren’t known for their vegetarianism, Pâtisserie Philippe is surprisingly vegetarian-friendly. There is a vegetarian baguette sandwich, but even better is the wide array of salads and side dishes. You could make a nice little lunch out of these alone — perhaps a picnic lunch, if you can find a swatch of grass in the neighborhood other than the little lawn in the middle of the roundabout. (The host building, which seems to be at least a block square, or triangular, fills up what was once the parking lot for the handsome old Baker and Hamilton edifice and its warren of eclectic furniture stores.)

We particularly liked a pair of salads ($3.25 each for half-servings of about a cup) made from shreddings of roots that don’t often attain headliner status: carrot and celery root. We noted in each a texture like that of cappellini cooked al dente, and a firm but gentle embrace of well-mellowed vinaigrette. The potato salad (also $3.25) was good too, though heavily dotted with tabs of ham. And at the end of this road we find the drastically unvegetarian pork rillettes ($4.50), a mash of slow-cooked meat mixed with fat to become a ropy paste you spread on rounds of baguette and enjoy with cornichons, the little pickles. The rillettes were slightly undersalted, I thought, but did not lack for satisfying lipidity.

No consideration of a patisserie would be complete without a discussion of the sweets on hand. Plenty of familiar faces here, from a chocolate éclair ($2.50) — milk-chocolaty-ish — to an elaborately layered, single-serve apple tart ($3.50) — excellent pastry, mediocre apples — to a fine bread pudding ($3.75), laced with large blackberries and pregnant with custard. The one standout we found was a bouchée caramel ($2.50), a disk of brioche with a shortcake-like depression in the middle that was filled with caramel. It was a bit like a crème caramel with brioche instead of custard and no ramekin to have to clean up afterward. Here, it seems to me, was the no-muss-no-fuss wisdom of the sugar cone as applied to pastry: the serving vessel was itself edible, and delectable.

Pâtisserie Philippe’s greatest liability could be its location, in the middle of a dark-faced building a long block long with not much to distinguish the storefronts. I can’t say I mourn the erstwhile parking lot, but the design district, of all districts, seems like an odd place to raise such a boring building. *

PÂTISSERIE PHILIPPE

Mon.–Fri., 8 a.m.–6 p.m.;
Sat., 8 a.m.–5 p.m.

655 Townsend, SF

(415) 558-8016

www.patisseriephilippe.com

No alcohol

MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Moderne folk sans borders

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Some years after she took the City of Lights by storm, the great African American chanteuse Josephine Baker famously sang, "J’ai deux amours / Mon pays et Paris": "I have two loves / My country and Paris." For the neofolkish, introspective French singer-songwriter Keren Ann, the journey has been the opposite of Baker’s.

After establishing herself with a pair of fine, well-received folk-pop albums in her native France, Keren Ann went bicontinental, establishing a base in New York City, and started recording songs in English. I’m Not Going Anywhere (2003) was her critically acclaimed first English-language effort, for Blue Note’s Metro Blue imprint. That was followed by the superb 2005 English-French hybrid Nolita (named after her New York neighborhood north of Little Italy) and now her latest, a self-titled, all-English CD. Not content with having just deux amours, however, she has truly become a singer without borders. Though mostly recorded at her home studios and in commercial facilities in New York and Paris, the new album includes songs that were cut in Reykjavik and tapped members of the Icelandic Culture House choir; other tracks were laid down in Avignon in Provence, Los Angeles, and Tel Aviv.

In fact, when Keren Ann calls me for an interview in mid-May, she is ensconced in a Tel Aviv recording studio, working on — get this — a Christmas song for a Starbucks compilation. Any perceived irony aside, this fits into her plan of recording wherever and whenever the inspiration strikes her, as was the case throughout the making of Keren Ann.

"I mostly adapted the recording to other things I was doing," she says cheerfully in a lightly accented English that has become even more Americanized in the two years since I last interviewed her. "I didn’t want to schedule recording periods for the album. I’ve done that in the past, and I’m sure I’ll do it in the future, but it was more interesting to be able record wherever I was, whether I was working with a choir on another project or touring or being somewhere on vacation. I always carry tapes and hard drives with me, so I could record and add things.

"On this album, sometimes I wanted to re-create different studio environments I found myself in — like high ceilings in one, wood in another — and twist it around so it sounds homogenic." (I think she means homogenous. Although Keren Ann speaks English well, she does come up with the occasional charming syntactical curiosity — but rarely in her songwriting.)

Raised mostly in Paris by a Russian Israeli father and a Javanese Dutch mother, Keren Ann Zeidel knew from an early age that she wanted to be a singer-songwriter. Influenced by French singers she heard on the radio and on albums, she also gravitated toward confessional writers from across the Atlantic such as Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. While still a teenager, she started making tapes of her own songs on a four-track recorder. Indeed, she has always had a studio of some sort wherever she lives, and she knows enough about engineering to make elaborate demos at home or add overdubs to tracks recorded in conventional studios. Her two French albums were collaborations with the noted producer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Benjamin Biolay, and some of his innovative production ideas have clearly rubbed off on her.

Her albums are quietly powerful. Though her fragile voice rarely rises above a breathy whisper, her songs can still be quite intense, thanks to her often unusual arrangement ideas: effected guitars that bring to mind New York’s Bill Frisell and others, striking keyboard patches, atmospheric trumpets, elegant violin and cello, and stacks of ethereal backing vocals.

"I naturally have a melancholic side," she says, "and I like to mix that feeling with luminous melodies so there is a balance. It’s the same with the productions: I might want to have a quiet vocal with something more aggressive underneath it to balance it."

Asked about current influences in her music, she offers, "Not really much in the area of pop music. The person whose music has touched me the most, recently, is Phillip Glass. I love the way he gets so much emotion out of repetition and the way he builds his pieces."

She says she feels equally comfortable writing in English and French — "whichever one works best for the emotions I’m feeling at the time" — though she admits her choice is also affected by geography. "Any language is expressive," she adds. "Had I started writing in English, maybe for a challenge I would have needed to go to France at some point and write in French, because I like challenges and I like working with languages — I think they open up different aspects of your way of thinking and your character. I have that need to absorb and be absorbed by different surroundings and then take them into my work." (Blair Jackson)

KEREN ANN

With Jason Hart

Sat/16, 9 p.m., $15

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.musichallsf.com

Like breathing

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Oh, I gave up on Internet dating a long time ago. Like: March? Then, on June 1, this:

My response to his personal ad left him breathless, he said, because blah blah blah. (I’m paraphrasing.) But he definitely said "breathless." I know because I peed my pants when I read it. To leave someone breathless … that’s big. That’s every girl’s dream, or, at the very least, every transgender chicken farmer’s dream.

Touched (and wet and uncomfortable and stinky), I scoured my "Sent" folder for the response in question. It was dated March 19.

To leave someone breathless is huge. To leave them breathless for 71 days … that’s downright life threatening. I resisted the urge to write back and say: Breathe!!!! Immediately!!!! Where do you live?! What do you need?! I’ll be right there! Please stay alive!! I love you! Sincerely, Chicken Farmer.

My new strategy is to play it cool. For example, instead of asking guys out, I look at them. Instead of telling them I love them, if they do ask me out, I go, "… OK …" With as many dots as possible, and without even one single exclamation mark.

But they don’t, of course, ask me out. Generally speaking. I swear, ever since I unleashed myself on the straight male world, the marriage rate has risen. The divorce rate has declined. Traditional family values thrive. Statistics show this.

Or at any rate, I have eyes. I mean, I walk down the street, exuding sexuality and chicken shit, and people fucking cling to their partners. Previously blasé dates compose and perform extemporaneous sonnets, hands on hearts, in the middle of the burrito line. Noncommittal rocker boys drop down on stage-dive-scarred knees and propose marriage. Even gays and lesbians want in on it. Polyamory, until very recently all the rage, is out the window.

These two, moments ago, were throwing things through windows, packing bags. Then, out of the corners of half-closed and tearful eyes, they see me down below on the sidewalk, looking blurry but available, and they fall into each other’s arms and make passionate love for the first time in seven years.

Sometimes they don’t even have to see me. They sense me out there somewhere, looking for dates, and reconsider the harsh words on the tips of their tongues, or the crass act.

This is great! Without lifting a finger or so much as my skirt, I have inspired reconsideration, forgiveness, conciliation, peace, love, and, you know, compassion and shit. You think I’m on drugs, or drunk, or crazy, but tally it up and you’ll see: I’ve done more to promote peace and quiet and interpersonal harmony than Jesus and Doctor Phil put together.

Of course, I suppose if you factor in the Crusades, modern-day old-fashioned Christian violence, rapist priests, and, well, Dr. Phil … then everyone else in the world, even Mike Tyson, deserves some sort of peace prize too. So once again I have come crashing and clanging to the bottom of the page without actually saying a goddamn thing.

Except I think what I was driving at, before the train wreck, was that I didn’t e-mail back and profess anything or in any way return this guy’s breathlessness. The institution of marriage and the notion of traditional family values need me right now. I wrote back and said, in effect, "OK."

P.S. Who are you?

Because I didn’t have a clue. And still don’t, since he still hasn’t re-responded. I can wait. I’m patient, realistic, and good at math. On August 9 I give up. In the meantime: slow, deep breaths, and business as usual.

Speaking of which, my new favorite restaurant? Hide-a-Way Cafe. On Telegraph. Nice patio. Real nice patio. Go on a pretty day. East Bay Matt, who is now of course East Coast Matt, damn him, took me there. And I say took, even though I drove, because he paid, bless him.

Matt’s a genuine, PhD’d perfesser now, and that means that, yes, I love to sit for hours in a place with him and talk about sociological … things, and music scenes and communication and pedagogy. But also it means, when he offers to treat, I let him. I not only let him, I order a steak with my eggs.

It was only $8.50, same as an omelet! And it wasn’t a huge slab of meat, but it was good and juicy and tasty. And the taters were great, home fried with peppers and onions and, yeah: new favorite restaurant. *

HIDE-A-WAY CAFE

6430 Telegraph, Oakl.

Tues.–Fri., 7:30 a.m.–3 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 7:15 a.m.–3 p.m.

Cash only

No alcohol

Wheelchair accessible

Welcome to my pop nightmare

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Gazing disdainfully from the cover of their album Strange House (Loog), the Horrors greet listeners with the air of Edward Gorey characters on a smoke break. Together, they are a scarily beautiful organism: a slick plastic spider with 10 spindly legs and a penchant for manic, blood-soaked coffin rock. Their shows, in contrast, are short, riotous affairs that revolve around a schizoid brand of gothabilly and the shrieks and antics of lead vocalist Faris Badwan. The Horrors have graced the cover of NME, dumped garbage on industry bigwigs at South by Southwest, and amassed a throng of fans worldwide. They’ve also, of course, sent the pointy-shoe market skyrocketing.

The Horrors were born, appropriately enough, in the bowels of a rotting Victorian hotel, the home of the fashionable Junk Club in Southend-on-Sea in London’s neighboring Essex County, in the summer of 2005. Rhys "Spider" Webb, keyboardist for the Horrors, recalls that the transition from clubgoers to band was not a prolonged one. "We were actually sitting around a table, and it was, like, ‘Let’s go into the studio for rehearsal next week.’ Faris had a couple of cover versions he wanted to work on. We’ve been playing ever since, to be honest."

One of the covers that Badwan had chosen, Screaming Lord Sutch’s "Jack the Ripper," eventually became the Horrors’ debut single. It was paired with an original composition, "Sheena Is a Parasite," a bombastic microtune of a minute and 42 seconds, the tale of an enigmatically vile heroine set to a pulsating bass and a skittering, looped backbeat. The song attracted the attention of one Chris Cunningham, the creative force behind Aphex Twin’s infamous "Come to Daddy" and "Windowlicker" videos, who allegedly found it on MySpace. Cunningham had soured on videos and hadn’t made one in seven years when the Horrors caught his ear and sent him into a storyboarding frenzy. Webb remembers, "He contacted Polydor and said, ‘Who’s doing the video? I’d love to do it.’" The finished product shows Samantha Morton falling victim to her own exploding viscera amid a frenetic doomscape. Apparently not bothered by disemboweled women, MTV banned the video for its use of strobe lights, promptly creating more publicity for the piece — and the Horrors — than it would have otherwise garnered.

As heirs of death rock, the Horrors come across like the naughty grandchildren of the Birthday Party, with Badwan channeling bits of Nick Cave as he screams his ghoulish repertoire, his large frame weaving across the stage. (In fact, Bad Seed Jim Sclavunos appears in the credits for Strange House, having produced their single "Count in Fives.") But while blood pours out of their lyrics and violence peppers their shows, it is the Horrors’ love of music — all music — that grants them a sense of humor and keeps them from buying into their gloomy hype. A club DJ for many years, Webb explains that playfulness further, saying, "The music I like to buy could be Robert Johnson or the Sonics, the Contortions, or DNA." He recalls a group walking into the Horrors’ dressing room and getting a surprise: "I think they expected us to be listening to ’60s garage and punk and rhythm and blues, and they caught us all dancing to drum ‘n’ bass records."

In the song "Draw Japan," Badwan tackles manifest destiny as Bauhaus beats rush past and Webb’s organ hiccups away in counterpoint. "I will draw Japan with a ravenous pen / Hungry for oil and iron and tin," he barks. It’s almost more Christian death than the Cramps, a perfect example of the Horrors’ genre blend ‘n’ bend. The key to that meld is guitarist Joshua Third, a.k.a. Joshua Hayward, possessor of the Horrors’ hugest mane of hair and, coincidentally, a physics degree. Webb describes Third as "a bit of a mad scientist" who spends his free time "locked in his cupboard, building strange components." For a recent issue of the band’s fanzine, Horror Asparagus Stories, Third taught readers how to build their own effects pedal. Webb is already gearing up for the next edition, having created a compilation called "Top Tracks about the Unstable State of Human Minds."

For all their conceptual flourishes, the Horrors have encountered a backlash from people who take exception to their meticulously crafted aesthetic. Webb concedes, "If you see a band like us, it looks like this kind of package," but notes that their look is inspired by friends such as album artist Ciaran O’Shea, who worked with Webb before the Horrors existed. Detractors aside, the tacit test for the Horrors will be their upcoming US tour. Webb recounts being warned before their first transatlantic jaunt that crowds in the States would be anything but enthusiastic. Instead, he was happy that "we’ve never found that anywhere in the world. The music provokes the same kind of reaction wherever we are." *

HORRORS

Tues/19, 9 p.m., $13

Popscene

330 Ritch, SF

(415) 541-9574

www.popscene-sf.com

Take another letter

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I just saw Secretary yesterday, and then read your column that mentions the same movie and similar sentiment ["Thwang," 5/30/07]. My situation is a bit different because I’ve known how I feel for a while but never seen or experienced it. Also, I’m a stripper and rarely have sex but am extremely sexual. I’ve got a serious lust affair with the eroscillator but think I’ve maybe given up on a love that will be feminist but dominating and aggressive, too. In the movie, Maggie is looking through classifieds for a partner, and that is way too dangerous for me. How do I quiet the arguments between feminism and being truly submissive? Also, having to be seriously up-front about wanting some serious kink might kill the whole deal for me. Do these relationships actually happen in real life? How?

Love,

Sub Grrrl

Dear Grrrl:

Right. There was a moment when every other conversation, magazine article, and academic conference was devoted to exploring the conflicts and connections between radical feminism and radical sexuality. It was called "the ’80s." You probably missed it owing to not being born yet, but that stuff is still in print, and whatever isn’t is gathering dust in the sorts of used bookstores heavily populated by overweight cats and should be easy to find. Most of the best-known pro-kink feminists of the time were very, very lesbian (see Gayle Rubin on the academic side and Pat Califia for "literotica"), but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have anything to say to straight women.

Obviously, of all the possible permutations, male dominant–female submissive is likely the most discomfiting to you. But, happily, the flip side of the "this weird sex thing goes against every political, ethical, or religious principle I consider right and true" coin is so often the Big Hot. Go to any upscale S-M party (yes, these really do exist) in San Francisco or Seattle, and at least half the women crawling around their master’s boots begging to be punished ’cause they’ve been very bad are in real life junior partners at onetime all-male law firms, or teach gender theory at small but prestigious liberal arts schools. In other words, they are quite fully "empowered," thanks, which doesn’t keep them from voluntarily surrendering said power come Saturday night, and may in fact add to the appeal. The classic, even clichéd, old-style S-M enthusiast, after all, is a member of Parliament who reports like clockwork to the bawdy house every Thursday afternoon for a brisk caning …

Um, yes. Where were we? I’m not sure where you, who perform naked for sexually aroused strangers for a living, got the idea that playing the personals is particularly dangerous. Perhaps from the same episodes of Law and Order in which a few pieces of S-M gear stashed under a suspect’s bed signal that a severed head in a shoe box cannot be far off? I would never suggest that you meet someone for coffee and immediately go home with him to check out his cool dungeon. Far from it. But the meeting-for-coffee part is perfectly safe. After that, you proceed as normal, which includes sharing your interests and aspirations … which is the next place we’re going to have some trouble, I see.

If being up-front about your weirditude is a potential deal-breaker for you, then I suspect you are a spontaneity freak. They are common, but many or most can have the need to proceed by whim or fancy beaten out of them by a stern application of reality. Spontaneity is fun and sexy, but it’s also responsible for most of your unwanted pregnancies, a vast number of STD transmissions, and who-all knows what other havoc. It’s also inconsistent with S-M at any level more technically advanced than the (admittedly often completely satisfactory) bend-over-and-spank variety. If you do go ahead with this, and you do find someone worthy of your submission, you are going to have to talk about it, whether you want to or not. Not only is it unsafe to do S-M with people you know nothing about, it isn’t even fun. What if you want to wear a neat little skirt and heels while bending prettily over nearby furniture, while he wants you to be a bad puppy and sleep in a kennel in the kitchen? What if your idea of submission is saying, "Yes, sir," a lot, while his idea of domination includes branding irons and cattle prods? Can you see how this could get ugly?

In romantic fantasy, the heroine meets the rough but passionate and shirtless master of the manor when she fetches up at his door as a penniless et cetera. In real life, I’m sorry to tell you, she meets him online or at an S-M "munch" or through kinky friends or at a party. And then they talk. I’m sure you’d rather toss your hair tempestuously while a dark and stormy stranger bends you over his knee and yanks down your pantaloons, but you’ll get over it.

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.

Speed thrills

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Whither beauty? Withered on the prickly postmodern vine. Sour grapes, you say? Just look around: A chemical haze obscures formerly fragrant, now fallow fields of flowers across which long-legged lovelies strolled arm in arm under pin-striped parasols; poisonous waste washes up on the shores of previously pristine beaches where carefree bathers whiled away their weekends; and corporate conglomerates co-opt every available surface of soccer field and skating rink, once the open-air arenas of athletes for whom sport was merely child’s play dressed up in soft cotton jerseys and sensible shoes. Autumn afternoons no longer linger for a sun-dappled eternity, elegance is a disease of conceit, and Fred Astaire is long gone. With a tip of the woefully unfashionable top hat to Simone Signoret, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

But what good is sitting alone in your room? Slink over to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and spend many a restorative hour among the unknown pleasures of "Martin Munkácsi: Think While You Shoot!," a joyous retrospective that traces the rise and fall of beauty as a panacea, placebo, moral absolute, and vicious myth. The myriad surprises here refute rumors of beauty’s untimely demise, or at least temporarily revive those long-lost days of languorous lounging when everyone was gorgeous and speed meant velocity. Munkácsi’s photographs depict a world — not quite ours, but layered with remnants and reminders of what was and what again could be, when everything’s gone green — ceaselessly in motion. Neither the artist nor his subjects ever slowed down, hence the simultaneity demanded by the exhibition title. (For a guide on how best to experience the show on the first of the many visits it merits, check out the trio of would-be crooks racing through the Louvre in Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders.)

Born in Hungary in 1896 and restlessly embarking on peripatetic journeys around the world, camera in tow, until his 1963 passing, Munkácsi was a modernist master of photography whose remarkable yet often overlooked achievements encompassed the prewar innocence of Budapest and the privileged leisure of Weimar-era Berlin. He shot mining disasters in Alsdorf and the landing of the Graf Zeppelin in Brazil, the pastoral villages of the Lengua tribe and the fabulous glamour of old Hollywood. He was everywhere and always in good company, swimming with the in-too-deep denizens of Copacabana, hobnobbing with the Hearsts at San Simeon, and marching with military troops in Liberia.

Beauty — in form and function, as hallowed intention and blessed happenstance — suited Munkácsi’s joie de vivre. His exuberant images of motorcyclists careening through the countryside, operetta starlets kicking up their heels, naked boys running into the surf at Lake Tanganyika, and Louis Armstrong letting loose with an endless smile seem the very essence of life lived fully, without worry, and with a keen appreciation for surface perfection and the complex mélange of conviviality and yearning beneath. An unapologetic aesthete, Munkácsi — Jewish and in the wrong place at the wrong time — might even have been temporarily blinded by beauty to the ugly truths that eventually sent him packing for the States. How else to explain the eerily graceful compositions of army ranks lined up like statues at the opening of the Reichstag in Potsdam, the portraits of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels tainted with a veneer of Nazi chic, or the startling shots of Triumph of the Will director Leni Riefenstahl expertly traversing tricky ski slopes? These images work as reportage, of course, but crafted with Munkácsi’s customary élan, they are nearly too revealing — and pleasing — for comfort.

Munkácsi’s wanderlust, zest, and brilliant eye — his gift for homing in on kinetic narratives and telling details greatly influenced Henri Cartier-Bresson’s crucial notion of the "decisive moment" in photography — led him to document the oddly parallel ascendancy of fascism and fashion as era-defining movements that shaped the intertwined fates of Europe and America and motivated his own travels to far-flung locales. Whether studying the drape of a Halston headdress on a beachcombing model, observing Fritz Lang at work in his Berlin apartment, or conveying the gory excitement of a bullfight simply by training his camera on the spectators’ wildly expressive faces, Munkácsi applied his groundbreaking aesthetics to epochal scenes of 20th-century life. He shot while he thought, and beauty lies bleeding. *

MARTIN MUNKÁCSI: THINK WHILE YOU SHOOT!

Through Sept. 16

Mon.–Tues. and Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m.; $7–$12.50 (free first Tues.)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Calling in the feds

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› news@sfbg.com

An upscale Emeryville hotel embroiled in a nasty, yearlong labor dispute appears to have called on the owner’s conservative political connections to bring about an immigration audit of the hotel. Worker advocates say the move was an effort to intimidate immigrant workers involved in a campaign to enforce a living-wage law.

Kurt Bardella, a spokesperson for US Rep. Brian Bilbray (R–San Diego), told the Guardian that a representative of the Emeryville Woodfin Suites contacted Bilbray’s office for assistance Feb. 1.

The request came within weeks of Alameda County Superior Court and Emeryville City Council rulings requiring the Woodfin to rehire the 21 workers it fired just before Christmas, allegedly due to worker Social Security numbers not matching federal records. That injunction was in effect pending an investigation of workers’ claims that the hotel had retaliated against them for organizing to enforce Measure C, a living-wage law passed by Emeryville voters in 2005.

"We were contacted by one of the HR people at the Woodfin Suites," Bardella told us. "They told us about the situation" and explained that they "had no mechanism" to deal with it, he said.

Bilbray, who chairs the House Immigration Reform Caucus and is one of the most vocal opponents of the recent immigration bill, wrote directly to the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in February to request that it investigate the immigration status of Emeryville Woodfin Suites employees in order to "to create a mechanism for the employer to address this issue."

Bilbray represents the suburban San Diego district in which Woodfin Suites president Samuel Hardage lives. "We treated this as a constituent issue," Bardella told us.

Hardage is not only a constituent; he has consistently contributed to Bilbray’s campaigns for at least the past 13 years, donating $4,200 in 2006. A George W. Bush Pioneer, having raised $100,000 for the 2004 election, Hardage is also a major player in California and San Diego Republican politics.

Workers say the ICE audit was an intimidation tactic that should not have been used against them while they were trying to assert their rights, and ICE’s internal policies raise questions about whether the agency should have gotten involved in this labor dispute.

For months the Woodfin Suites has tried to justify firing workers who organized for better labor conditions by alluding to fears of reprisal by ICE. In a May 8 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, General Manager Hugh MacIntosh castigated the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE), a labor-affiliated think tank that supports the hotel’s workers, for "resorting to well-worn intimidation schemes to secure workers’ support for their organization drives."

The "fact that our hotel has been asked by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide employment records, coupled with the agency’s raids in the Bay Area, suggests that our actions are anything but voluntary," he wrote.

The Bilbray connection significantly undermines this claim and could be significant in a pending state lawsuit by the workers. It is against the law for an employer to fire workers for organizing for better working conditions, regardless of immigration status. Under current immigration laws, however, it is also common.

"Employers often contact immigration authorities … in order to avoid liability," Monica Guizar, an attorney with the National Immigration Law Center, told us. "It is a well-known and documented tactic that employers use to stymie union organizing campaigns [and] escape liability for vioutf8g workers’ rights."

In recognition of this abuse, memorandums from the Department of Labor and internal ICE regulations have been established to dissuade worksite interventions when a labor dispute is occurring. Advocates have successfully invoked these guidelines to terminate deportation proceedings and prevent raids in the past, but immigrant workers are still incredibly vulnerable.

ICE Special Agent’s Field Manual section 33.14(h) requires that agents use restraint where a labor dispute is in progress and the complaint about employees’ immigration status "is being provided to interfere with the rights of employees to … be paid minimum wages and overtime; to have safe work places … or to retaliate against employees for seeking to vindicate those rights."

Additionally, a 1998 memorandum of understanding between the Department of Labor and ICE (then known as the INS) directs immigration agents to "avoid inappropriate worksite interventions where it is known or reasonably suspected that a labor dispute is occurring and the intervention may, or may be sought so as to, interfere in the dispute."

Guizar confirmed that these regulations are still in place under ICE. Monica Virginia Kites, a spokesperson for ICE, declined to comment on these internal regulations.

At a noisy Saturday-morning picket in front of the Emeryville Woodfin Suites, Luz, a 42-year-old from Mexico City, told the Guardian that managers never questioned her immigration status during the three years she was a housekeeper at the hotel — until she started working with EBASE to enforce Measure C.

One day, Luz told us, her manager rushed her and other workers into the hotel’s attic, because "ICE was driving around outside and could come." According to Luz, the manager told them that "this could be a result of us supporting Measure C or working with EBASE."

The measure mandates a $9 per hour minimum wage for hotel workers and requires overtime pay for employees who clean more than 5,000 square feet of floor space during a shift. The Woodfin contributed $27,500 to an anti–Measure C campaign committee, filed two unsuccessful lawsuits that challenged its constitutionality, and then simply failed to comply with the law.

"They said we weren’t entitled to rights because we were immigrants," Luz recalled. "They started to say that our Social Security numbers didn’t match and that we would have to leave. This problem never came up until we asked for our rights."

In September 2006, Woodfin workers filed a class-action lawsuit seeking back pay. The Woodfin finally agreed to come into compliance with Measure C the following month, but it also told almost 30 workers that it had found problems with their Social Security numbers. On Dec. 15, the Woodfin suspended 21 workers and gave them two weeks’ notice that they were to be fired.

On the extensive Web site the Woodfin has devoted to the dispute, the hotel claims it was "forced to move to terminate their [workers’] employment" after receiving Social Security Administration "no-match" letters for them. "Today," it claims, "failure to act appropriately on a no-match letter may be considered evidence of an employer’s conscious disregard for the law."

This is false, according to Social Security Administration spokesperson Lowell Kepke. It is in fact "illegal for a company to fire an employee based solely on a no-match letter," he told us.

Because it has been so often abused, the letter itself states that employers "should not use this letter to take any adverse action against an employee…. Doing so could, in fact, violate State or Federal law and subject you to legal consequences."

An emergency ordinance returned workers to the Woodfin while the city investigated their retaliation claims, but on April 27 the hotel defied the ordinance by firing 12 immigrant workers, again citing problems with Social Security numbers.

The city issued a notice of violation; even probusiness city council member Dick Kassis, who opposed Measure C, called the Woodfin’s behavior "morally reprehensible" at a May 1 council meeting. On May 3 police arrested 38 people at a civil disobedience protest supporting the workers in front of the hotel, including Assemblyperson Loni Hancock and Berkeley city council member Kriss Worthington.

The almost maddeningly soft-spoken and reasoned Emeryville city council member John Fricke, who in February was the target of an unsuccessful restraining order filed by the hotel over his alleged "threatening" behavior, posed the following conundrum to us: why would a successful business continue to pursue litigation that is not cost-effective?

"I’m assuming their success is based on their business acumen," he said. Yet as a lawyer, he estimates that attorney fees are well above $100,000, on top of another $100,000 in fees borne by the city and at least that much in worker back pay. "You would think the wise business decision would be to cut one’s losses," he said.

One possible answer: EBASE organizer Brooke Anderson said this is actually an "ideological battle."

The Woodfin’s Hardage has spent more than $230,000 since 2000 to fund conservative politicians and ballot measures, including political committees that have taken antiunion and antitax positions on state and local ballot propositions, according to EBASE. He chaired the San Diego County Republican Party from 1995 to 1997 and has served as a fundraiser in several Republican campaigns.

Hardage cofounded the Project for California’s Future in 2001, which the Heritage Foundation describes as "a multi-year, multi-million dollar project" to prepare Republican candidates for California office and "represents a first-ever program to rebuild the conservative bench from the water board level on up."

The project’s cofounder is Ron Nehring, the passionately antilabor vice chairman of the California Republican Party and senior consultant to Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Nehring was also once director of government affairs for the Woodfin Suites.

A 2005 report by the Center on Policy Initiatives, a progressive think tank, names Nehring, Hardage, and Norquist among those who have helped the Republicans target San Diego as a model for their plan to radically cut government funding, permanently weaken labor unions, and privatize public services.

The ideological battle manifested itself at the Saturday-morning picket, which pitted roughly 15 College Republicans from Bay Area schools against 25 laid-off workers and supporters, each group with a bullhorn, separated by barricades and cops.

The Woodfin provided free rooms for the student counterdemonstrators, Ryan Clumpner, a UC Davis senior and chair of the California College Republicans, told us. Surrounded by signs such as "Quit ‘Stalin’: Get Back to Work," and "Respect the Law," Clumpner said he was "here supporting the Woodfin, which is being unfairly targeted by unions."

"I’ve actually done housecleaning," he said. Between semesters one summer, he said, he made $7 an hour cleaning rooms at UC Davis; immigrants supporting families in the Bay Area should also be content with this wage, he said. "If they want to make more, they can move up to supervisor positions," he said. "They’re here for a reason. This country is offering economic opportunities. The economic benefit is the reason they’re here, not the problem."

On the other side of the barricades, Luz said, "My idea is that you have to work hard and give a lot to the company so that they give something back to you in return. We gave them the best service, so they should give us reasonable salaries."

Retaliatory actions against immigrants organizing to improve their work situations have increased across the country in the past few years, just as high-profile raids have resulted in the detentions, arrests, and removals from the United States of thousands of immigrant workers.

The Woodfin is "an example of the need for just and fair immigration reform, coupling the legalization of undocumented workers in this country with strong labor- and employment-law enforcement," Guizar told us.

City Manager Pat O’Keefe told us that in the coming few weeks the city will be announcing a decision about its investigation into worker complaints and the Woodfin’s operating permit. *

Considering chloramine

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For three years, dozens of Bay Area residents have alleged the water disinfectant used in San Francisco and other cities causes a variety of symptoms ranging from asthma to fainting to rashes. The San Francisco Department of Public Health has spent more than $100,000 to study the chemical, chloramine, but it has not done a full scientific study that might prove or disprove a connection between the chemical and the reported symptoms.

Responding to the lack of scientific studies on the dermatological and respiratory effects of the chloramine, Assemblymember Ira Ruskin (D–Redwood City) introduced legislation to further study the chemical, but the measure was held up in the Appropriations Committee as the June 8 deadline for advancing it passed, frustrating those who hoped to finally get some answers.

Chloramine replaced chlorine in San Francisco’s water system in February 2004 after the Environmental Protection Agency tightened regulations against trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids, chlorine by-products that may be carcinogenic. Chloramine, which doesn’t produce high levels of these by-products, is the only other distribution-system disinfectant with EPA approval. It has been in use since 1917, and 29 percent of water utilities in the United States now use it. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission was the last major Bay Area water utility to adopt it, placing it in the water that also supplies nearby cities.

Soon after the switch, though, people began to report problems. Denise Johnson-Kula of Menlo Park said she fainted while taking a shower two days after the chemical was introduced.

"My sinuses filled up; my nose was running like a faucet… I coughed and wheezed until I could not breathe and slid down the shower," she told the Guardian. "I heard the doorbell like I was dreaming; I didn’t realize I was sitting on the bathroom floor."

After throwing out all her soap and shampoo and still having allergic reactions while bathing, she avoided the shower altogether. She still washed the dishes, though, and noticed she got rashes where the water touched her. Once she took herself completely off the water, Johnson-Kula’s symptoms went away.

She now avoids the city water altogether, spending $200 a month on bottled water and traveling more than an hour to take a shower on weekends. She started a group called Citizens Concerned About Chloramine, which claims more than 400 members and has led to the creation of similar groups in Vermont, New York, and Maine.

Other stories play out similarly. Jo Yang, 24, of Los Altos, for example, developed debilitating rashes across his body and face while drinking chloraminated water in San Diego in college. When he came home in 2005 to Los Altos, which was then using chloramine, his rashes didn’t clear up until he avoided the water. Marylin Raubitschek, 81, of San Mateo, says she is "very healthy," but days after chloramine was introduced, she got welts and scabs across her body. Once off the water, she said, her symptoms cleared up. Raubitschek is currently moving to a district that does not use chloraminated water.

In response to these allegations, the SFDPH spent six months from late 2004 to early 2005 studying the chemical. Although the SFDPH reviewed the available medical literature, the existence of complaints in other utility districts, and the chemistry of chloramine, it did not undertake a correlative study between the symptoms and the chemical. Such a study, it estimates, would require a sample of more than 142,000 people.

However, June Weintraub, a senior epidemiologist at the SFDPH, says the public health community would back a study if there were reason to believe the chemical might cause problems in some people. Part of the decision not to pursue further studies was based on an informal investigation into the dermatitis symptoms. Individuals were invited to call in to report symptoms and answer questions.

But Johnson-Kula says few knew about the investigation. Even as president of the CCAC, she did not know about it until there was a month left. She said that when people finally called in, "they were told the survey was over."

Seventeen people took the survey in the end. The results were published in a peer-reviewed journal and concluded that the symptoms were too heterogeneous to warrant further study. But Weintraub noted, "It is possible that people might experience different symptoms from the same irritant."

One SFPUC report adds that there was no change in the number of water-illness complaints between 2002 and 2006. The only change experienced was a decrease in dirty-water complaints.

"Given the evidence that we have available now, it absolutely points that there is not a public health concern," said Weintraub, who notes that 12 percent of people have dermatitis, which could explain the symptoms.

But how does that square with the city’s precautionary principle, which demands it err on the side of caution about the use of chemicals, even if that is not immediately cost-effective?

"There is less research on chloramine than on chlorine, [so] I don’t blame the SFPUC for moving over to chloramine," said Jennifer Clary, a water policy analyst at Clean Water Action. "[It’s] avoiding the devil you know for the one you don’t."

The precautionary principle may guide us to use chloramine, but it also demands we invest the resources to understand its potential effects. The recently defeated bill would have directed the UC Center for Water Resources to do a $140,000 study of the disinfectants used by the SFPUC and their by-products.

The director of the UC Center for Water Resources, Andrew Chang, told us, "If this study is not done, there is not much lost from a scientific point of view…. As far as we’re concerned, chloramine at the kind of level [one to two parts per million] is safe."

Marc Edwards disagrees. A professor at Virginia Tech, Edwards discovered that the switch to chloramine in Washington, DC, caused lead to be leached into drinking water.

"As a general rule … you ignore homeowner complaints at your own peril," he says. "More often than not, there is something to those complaints."

Edwards points to a recent case in Maui. Citizens were reporting rashes and breathing difficulties after chloramine was added to the water. He says authorities considered their stories "half-baked," but eventually the symptoms were linked to Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium whose presence was triggered by the addition of phosphates to the chloraminated water.

"Someone could and should be looking into this in a systematic and scientific way," Edwards said.*

A food bill for San Francisco

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OPINION You may not have heard about it, but Congress is busy deciding the fate of America’s food supply: what’s grown, how it’s produced and by whom, and how that food will affect our health and the planet. The roughly $90 billion Farm Bill, covering everything from urban nutrition and food stamp programs to soil conservation and agribusiness subsidies, will dictate much about what we eat and at what price, both at the checkout line and in long-term societal costs.

Despite valiant progressive efforts that may bring some change, the big picture is not pretty: increasingly centralized power over food, abetted by lax antitrust policies and farm subsidies that provide the meat industry and food-processing corporations with cheap raw ingredients; huge subsidies for corn and soy, most of which ends up as auto fuel, livestock feed, and additives for junk food, fattening America’s waistlines; and, despite organic food’s popularity, a farming system still reliant on toxic pesticides (500,000 tons per year), which pollute our waterways and bloodstreams while gobbling up millions of gallons of fossil fuel.

Closer to home, residents in poor urban areas like Bayview–Hunters Point are utterly deprived of fresh, nutritious food. These so-called food deserts — whose only gastronomic oases are fast-food joints and liquor marts — feature entire zip codes devoid of fresh produce. Government studies show this de facto food segregation leads to serious nutritional deficits — such as soaring obesity and diabetes rates — among poor people.

What’s to be done? Congress needs to hear Americans — urban and rural alike — who are demanding serious change, and shift our tax dollars ($20 billion to $25 billion a year in farm subsidies) toward organic, locally oriented, nutritious food that sustains farming communities and consumer health.

Locally, with leadership from the supervisors, a progressive San Francisco food bill could be a model for making America’s food future truly healthful, socially just, and sustainable — and encourage other cities to buck the corporate food trend. Such a measure could include:

•Organic and local-first food-purchasing policies requiring (or at least encouraging) all city agencies, local schools, and other public institutions, such as county jails and hospitals, to buy from local organic farms whenever possible.

•Incentives — backed by education, expanding markets, and consumption of local organic foods — to encourage nonorganic Bay Area farmers to transition to sustainable agriculture, while subsidizing affordable prices for consumers.

•Healthy-food-zone programs with targeted enterprise grants encouraging small businesses and farmers markets to expand access to healthy foods in poor neighborhoods identified as deserts.

•A city-sponsored education campaign discouraging obesity-inducing fast food and promoting farmers markets and other healthful alternatives.

•Zoning and other incentives for urban and suburban farming.

Ultimately, the city needs a food policy council — including farmers, public health experts, antihunger activists, environmentalists, and others — coordinating these efforts. The city needs a progressive food bill, merging the interests of urban consumers, Bay Area farmers, and environmental sustainability, for a policy-driven alternative to our destructive industrial food system. *

Christopher D. Cook

Christopher D. Cook is a former Guardian city editor and the author of Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis (www.dietforadeadplanet.com).

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