Volume 41 [2006–07]

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (3/7/07)

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Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

70 Iraqi civilians were killed today in the second day of violence targeting Shiite religious pilgrims, according to the New York Times

Source

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

58,022 – 63,800: Killed since 1/03

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.

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 4 March 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/32/

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

Antiestablishmentarianism attitudes among Iraqi religious groups is fueling intolerance and violence towards homosexuals in Iraq, according to the UN.

Source: http://www.gaypeopleschronicle.com/stories07/february/0202071.htm

U.S. military:

3,414: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: 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:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/2007.01.html

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source:http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

151: 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.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2013034,00.html

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.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6293807.stm

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.

Source: http://www.unhcr.org/iraq.html

U.S. Military Wounded:

47,657: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

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

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (3/7/07): Bush asks congress to approve $622 billion for 2008. So far, $406 billion for the U.S., $51 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.
Compiled by Paula Connelly

Bush asked congress to approve $622 billion for defense spending, most for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a $2.9 trillion budget request for 2008, according to Reuters.
Source: http://today.reuters.com/

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.”

Abolish PG&E Corp.

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OPINION Pacific Gas and Electric Corp. is a holding company whose only property is Pacific Gas and Electric Co., a regulated utility. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) exercises little regulatory oversight over PG&E Corp. Oversight by federal authorities has been curbed by recent legislation, which abolished most of the consumer protections of the New Deal’s Public Utilities Holding Company Act. To protect ratepayers and stockholders, PG&E Corp. should be abolished and its corporate charter revoked.

All of PG&E Corp.’s income comes, in effect, from tax minimization strategies, which allow PG&E Corp. to keep revenue that would otherwise be paid as income taxes. What are the consequences?

• The creation of the holding company constitutes a legal money-laundering strategy that has greatly benefited the holding company. A 2002 brief by California’s attorney general says that PG&E Corp. collected $663 million in net revenues from 1997 to 1999 by avoiding payment of income taxes.

• From 2000 to 2004, Mark Bumgardner of the CPUC’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates (DRA) wrote in a 2006 report, "PG&E Corporation has been able to save $683 million in Utility taxes…. Since the benefits of being able to write off unprofitable affiliates for tax purposes is [sic] solely for the Holding Company’s benefit, DRA allocated 100% of the tax department’s costs to PG&E Corporation."

• Top officers at PG&E Corp. made out like bandits: President Robert D. Glynn’s total pay skyrocketed from $2 million in 1998 to $34 million in 2003, despite the fact that he led the company into bankruptcy.

• Almost all of PG&E Corp.’s revenues from 2001 to 2004 came from its regulated utility. PG&E Corp. got to keep an extra $1.346 billion from 1997 through 2004 by taking advantage of the tax benefits available to utility holding companies, if the attorney general and the DRA’s Bumgardner are correct.

The CPUC and the legislature created the holding company in a series of decisions and laws in the mid-1990s. However, the idea that deregulation California-style would bring competition and lower electric rates has proved to be false. Abolish the holding company, and this lucrative PG&E Corp. tax dodge ceases to exist.

To deal with PG&E’s high rates and unresponsive electric service, San Francisco public power activists and public officials tried to take over PG&E’s San Francisco grid in 2001 and 2002. In Yolo County, just west of Sacramento, activists and elected officials worked for years to drive out PG&E and replace it with electrical service from the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. The SMUD charges 30 percent less than PG&E and far exceeds PG&E in the use of solar and wind power per customer. PG&E spent a record $50 per customer — at least $15 million, on 300,000 voters in Sacramento and Yolo counties — in November 2006 to turn back the public power challenge.

For others in Northern California, a return to traditional regulation as it functioned before the deregulation disaster may be the best that can be expected. Abolishing the holding company — a step the CPUC has the power to take — would be a good place to start.

Dan Berman

Dan Berman is the author of Who Owns the Sun? and is a longtime public power activist in Northern California. He lives in Davis and can be reached at danmberman@gmail.com.

The sunshine posse

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› amanda@sfbg.com

On Saturday mornings, with roughshod regularity, a handful of San Franciscans gather at the Sacred Grounds Cafe on Hayes Street to swap strategies and catch up on their political triumphs and setbacks. They don’t look like a powerful bunch, and they aren’t household names, but they’re changing the way the city handles public records, meetings, and information.

All of these folks started with one simple request for what ought to have been public information. All of them ran into a stone wall. They eventually found one another at hearings in front of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, where they took their cases and debated the minutiae of the law that grants them access to what they’re looking for.

For Wayne Lanier, it started with a $600 tax for neighborhood beautification. James Chaffee and Peter Warfield were seeking reform at the San Francisco Public Library. Kimo Crossman wanted more transparency in the city’s wi-fi deal with Google-EarthLink. Michael Petrelis was trying to find a keyhole into local nonprofit AIDS agencies. Allen Grossman thought the city’s attorneys should shelve their redactive black ink. And Christian Holmer — he just considers sunshine a part of his job.

They’ve been working together loosely during the past year or so — and in most cases, they’ve won. Their ongoing battles also show how the city’s laws and practices badly need reform.

Collectively, the sunshine crew considers the issue of metadata its biggest victory of the year (see "The Devil in the Metadata," 11/15/06), because it forced city officials to abandon their fear of the unseen electronic data that is generated whenever they hit send or open a new word-processing document.

Paul Zarefsky, a deputy city attorney with the City Attorney’s Office, argued that electronic documents could be rife with redactable goods and hackers could use this data to crack into the city’s server. According to him, this was ample reason to only release public information as a paper document or a PDF. The sunshine activists said this was an environmental waste and a very un–user friendly format in this age of electronic searches. The task force and Rules Committee of the Board of Supervisors agreed, found the city attorney’s arguments specious, and demanded agencies follow the letter of the law and release documents in an electronic format.

Some departments still aren’t doing that, which is a problem these citizens have discovered: the Sunshine Ordinance, though very good, could be much better and is overripe for reform.

The ordinance, adopted by voters in 1993, grants San Franciscans far more traction and power than the federal and state open-records laws by setting deadlines and offering the forum of the task force for addressing complaints when documents are not forthcoming.

When a citizen makes a request for a public document, it’s often because somebody sees something from the kitchen window while washing dishes and says, "Huh, I wonder what’s going on."

For Wayne Lanier, that moment came when he received a bill from the city for $600 after he improved the sidewalk and installed some planters in front of his house on Fell Street. Lanier had gone through the proper planning and permit process and was confident everything he’d done was within the law. So why was he being fined?

With a little research, Lanier discovered that an ordinance, recently passed by the supervisors at the urging of the mayor, inadvertently took into account sidewalk fixtures such as planters when taxing property owners and merchants for putting up signs and cluttering rights-of-way. Lanier began to research how the law came to pass.

"I was told there were various meetings with the mayor," Lanier said. "I didn’t know when they were. So I started using the Sunshine Ordinance as a means to getting the mayor’s calendar. First I wrote a rather chatty letter asking for it, and there was no response. So I wrote a more formal request and also said maybe you ought to make your calendar public. The governor of Florida’s done it. It’s quite easy to do."

But it wasn’t easy for room 200. Lanier filed his original request March 3, 2006. A year later he has not received what he asked for. He’s been told by the Mayor’s Office of Communications that the calendar can’t be released because it tells exactly where Gavin Newsom is supposed to be and who is going to be protecting him. Lanier has urged the office to make the document public at the end of each week, once security concerns have passed. That hasn’t happened.

In addition to losing portions of the mayor’s calendar during a staff turnover and heavily redacting the few calendar items it has made available, the Mayor’s Office has not set or followed a policy regarding public access to this public document. But Lanier’s original request has not been dropped. Christian Holmer picked it up.

Holmer is sunshining for sunshine. A manual laborer by day, Holmer’s been a longtime resident of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and became volunteer coordinator of the San Francisco Survival Manual, a manifestation of the 40-year-old Haight Asbury Switchboard, once a clearinghouse of services and information for city residents. The modern-day equivalent is part of a public information pilot project approved in 2004 with the support of 10 members of the Board of Supervisors that encourages the sharing of all city documents in an open forum. Holmer makes regular and massive requests for all manner of information from a variety of agencies, urging them to employ the technological ease of e-mail to send him documents as soon they’re created by the city — in effect, CCing him on everything.

Holmer says the point is not only to compile a library of city documents but to establish best practices for the agencies that are supposed to provide information when the public requests it. By encouraging this free flow of information that takes, according to him, only a few keystrokes and mere seconds to disseminate electronically, Holmer hopes a culture of openness is being cultivated.

"You push a department to a certain level of compliance, and it raises all the boats," Holmer said.

James Chaffee began seeking public information about the San Francisco Public Library in 1974, long before the Sunshine Ordinance was born. The tall, professorial man has a habit of employing erudite references from literature, philosophy, and film in his regular newsletters decrying the secret actions of the Library Commission. His writings have received attention and acclaim in the national world of library news.

"The original library commissioners would be shocked if they could see the openness that exists now," Chaffee says.

He’s pushed for more weekend library hours and successfully brought enough attention to block the public library’s plans to purchase costly and suspicious radio-frequency identification tags and grant the task of collecting overdue fees to a debt agency.

Peter Warfield, executive director of the Library Users Association, and Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, picked up the radio-frequency issue and ran with it, making public records requests that might substantiate the library’s argument that thousands of dollars in workers’ compensation claims for repetitive stress injuries would be remedied by an investment in the expensive new technology.

The library wouldn’t turn over any documents, so Tien and Warfield went across the bay to Berkeley, which doesn’t have a Sunshine Ordinance (though the city is currently working on one). The Berkeley Public Library gave enough information to fully debunk the claims. Of more than $1 million spent on five years of workers’ comp, just 1 percent was for repetitive stress injuries. The Chaffee-Warfield-Tien efforts halted a nationwide move toward employing this potentially privacy-invading technology.

Then there’s Kimo Crossman.

Crossman is regularly criticized for his public records requests, which some city agencies feel are voluminous and burdensome. "I’ve had to stop the office a couple times. There are 300 people in this office," said Matt Dorsey, spokesperson for the City Attorney’s Office, which receives almost daily requests or reminders of requests from Crossman, the length and breadth of which bring some city departments to their knees.

Technology is Crossman’s interest, and he made his first public records request of the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services in September 2005, for contracts and related documents between the city and Google-EarthLink.

"As an interested citizen, I wanted to participate in the wi-fi initiative," Crossman told us. He received his request — with 90 percent of the information redacted. The DTIS claimed attorney-client privilege and the need to protect proprietary information to keep Crossman from seeing more than a fraction of the data.

Even though a specific section in the Sunshine Ordinance allows for the release of a contract when there are not multiple bidders and today the deal is strictly between the city and Google-EarthLink, the DTIS still refuses to hand over the documents Crossman wants. DTIS spokesperson Ron Vinson continues to cite the advice of the City Attorney’s Office.

The city attorney’s relationship with sunshine is a problem, according to Allen Grossman, a retired business lawyer. Grossman’s requests for information have transcended their original intent — some Department of Public Works permits for tree removal near his home on Lake Street. They have become an inquiry into why so many departments regularly employ the City Attorney’s Office to represent them when it’s a direct violation of section 67.21(i) of the Sunshine Ordinance. That section states the city attorney "shall not act as legal counsel for any city employee or any person having custody of any public record for purposes of denying access to the public." The public lawyers are permitted only to write legal opinions regarding the withholding of information, which must be made public.

"The whole purpose of that section was to level the playing field and get the lawyers out of it," said Grossman, who says the office ghostwrites letters denying access, putting citizens who may not have legal counsel to advise them at an unfair advantage. It’s not in keeping with the spirit of the law.

Dorsey defends City Attorney Dennis Herrera, pointing out that deputy city attorneys no longer represent departments at the task force when there’s a complaint. They’re still writing those letters, though.

"When we give advice on sunshine, it’s a matter of public record. We will prepare a written cover-your-ass statement," Dorsey said. "To some we would appear as the bad guy, but I yield to no one on our commitment on sunshine in this city."

Bruce Wolfe, a task force member who’s seen scores of departments employ the ghostwriting tactic, said, "There is one area that concerns me greatly — the use of attorney shield. The question is what is the city attorney’s role? The advice is important because that’s something every other department can use, but it shouldn’t just be some way to squiggle out of providing records."

Dorsey related a recent case in which KGO wanted access to Muni documents that identified the names of operators. "We provided the documents, but we redacted the names. If we lose to KGO in front of the task force, we have to turn over docs. If we lose to a court that finds we violated privacy, we’re on the hook for potential substantive damages. These results can get very expensive for taxpayers. There’s an act of balance that has to occur."

Many task force members, activists, and citizens agree that the ordinance and task force are wonderful tools but still lack the necessary bite. The task force has no power to review documents and determine if a department’s secrecy claims are true. And when a department is found in violation, there are no specific fines or penalties that the task force can levy.

But some are still happy the body even exists. "We have a great Sunshine Ordinance Task Force," said Michael Petrelis, who has been trying to find information about local AIDS nonprofits and advisory boards that are usually exempt from public records law — unless they receive city funding. Petrelis found that avenue into these organizations, and when they don’t comply with records requests it’s still a boon for him, because filing a complaint requires them to come and be accountable in front of the task force, an open hearing that Petrelis can also attend. "I have learned so much at those meetings, just observing," Petrelis said. "The task force process is so valuable in all its beautiful permutations." *

TUESDAY

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March 13

MUSIC/DANCE

Queen Anne’s Revenge and Black Cactus Choir

Since pirates are all the rage, you may have already guessed that local trio Queen Anne’s Revenge is named for Blackbeard’s notorious frigate, surely the setting for many a bloody and brutal act. However, these guys keep the peg leg count on the low end, favoring instead a garage-pop sensibility heightened with curious synth glissandi and warm vocals floating somewhere between Love and Rockets and Zombies territory. Also performing is the Black Cactus Choir, an experimental dance troupe pushing the boundaries of physical expression with brain wave–nourishing choreography. (Todd Lavoie)

With Brittany Shane
9 p.m., $7
Hotel Utah Saloon
500 Fourth St., SF
(415) 385-2100
www.thehotelutahsaloon.com

VISUAL ART

“Moby Dick: Chapter 44 or 78,744 times”

Justin Quinn is transcribing Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into the letter e. So obsessive-compulsive they might wear out that nautical chart maker Captain Ahab, Quinn’s graphite drawings and prints have graduated from boxlike and crosslike maze formations to large and elaborate jellyfish shapes? The e in Quinn’s SF show “Moby Dick: Chapter 44 or 78,744 times” could stand for exile. Quinn tries to turn it into poetry. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Through April 12
MMGalleries
101 Townsend, suite 207, SF
(415) 543-1550
www.mmgalleries.com

MONDAY

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March 12

MUSIC

Youth Group

It’s no small feat that Aussie gossamer popsters Youth Group were able to rescue Alphaville’s overwrought new wave flashback-grenade “Forever Young” and miraculously twirl it around into a glistening, gently unfolding four-minute pageant. Better yet, their latest release, Casino Twilight Dogs (Anti-), gushes with 11 other exquisitely crafted charmers destined to draw inevitable, but understandable, Shins comparisons, while elements of that glorious synergy achieved by English pop-anthem geniuses James with producer extraordinaire Brian Eno bubble up. (Todd Lavoie)

8:30 p.m., $13
Slim’s
333 11th St., SF
(415) 255-0333
www.slims-sf.com

VISUAL ART

“Seeing Memory”

If we live in an age of cynicism, one in which an existential leap of faith, to borrow from Søren Kierkegaard, is necessary to imbue with meaning this unbright rock we call earth, then Creativity Explored is a safe house in our land of dread. This inspirational Mission gallery and studio provides a venue for people with disabilities, many of whom are nonverbal, to create and express themselves. “Seeing Memory” — curated by Larry Rinder, California College of the Arts dean — is an exhibit of recent work by member artists exploring the images and mechanisms of memory. (Nathan Baker)

Through April 6, free.
Creativity Explored Gallery
3245 16th St., SF
(415) 863-2108
www.creativityexplored.org

SUNDAY

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March 11

EVENT

Dr. Sketchy’s Anti Art School

Luckily for artistically challenged people like me, Dr. Sketchy’s Anti Art School encourages such behavior. I’m sure my figures won’t look much better while I’m listening to the event’s promised “slutty jazz music” and participating in drinking and drawing contests, but who cares? (Elaine Santore)
4–7 p.m., $10
Stud
399 Ninth St., SF
(415) 637-8657
www.skidroche.com

MUSIC

SFJAZZ Collective

Listening to SFJAZZ Collective’s suave Live 2006: 3rd Annual Concert Tour: Original Compositions and Works by Herbie Hancock (SFJAZZ), you’ll know that this “Monk and Beyond” performance, launching SFJAZZ’s spring season, is gonna be a hot one. New trumpeter Dave Douglas joins SFJAZZ artistic director and tenor and soprano sax machine Joshua Redman for a deep look at the wonderfully madcap music culled from the brilliant corners of Thelonious Monk’s mind. (Kimberly Chun)

3 and 7 p.m., $20–$65
Herbst Theatre
401 Van Ness, SF
1-800-225-2277
www.sfjazz.org

SATURDAY

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March 10

MUSIC

Chanticleer

If you’re not a fan of contemporary choral ensembles, then you’ve probably never heard of Chanticleer, but scrupulous classical music fans know that this San Francisco choir operate at the pinnacle of their trade. Next month they will premiere And on Earth, Peace: A Chanticleer Mass (Warner Classics) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Here’s your chance to catch them on the home field. (Nathan Baker)

8 p.m., $25–$44
Also Sun/11, 7 p.m.
First Unitarian Church
1187 Franklin, SF
(415) 392-4400
www.cityboxoffice.com

MUSIC

Qui

Since the mighty Jesus Lizard had a brief flirtation with overproduced nu metal and broke up, live music has been missing a certain je ne sais quoi, to the tune of a whiskey-drunk Texan in shitkicker cowboy boots with his balls in his hand by the name of David Yow. While they might not be Jesus Lizard Mach 2, Yow’s new band, Qui, have that stripped-down, broken-glass noise rock edge that’s guaranteed to scare the kids. (Duncan Scott Davidson)

With Replicator
10 p.m., $7
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
(415) 923-0923
www.hemlocktavern.com

FRIDAY

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March 9

MUSIC

“Video Games Live”

To gamers, there is no touching longtime Nintendo composer Koji Kondo. Kondo, a classically trained musician, scored such games as Super Mario Bros. and the Legend of Zelda, which some might say are more culturally relevant, in this digital age, than Beethoven’s Fifth. Hear for yourself when Kondo takes the stage at “Video Games Live,” an interactive multimedia concert featuring orchestral and choral renditions of popular video games, from Mario to Final Fantasy, synched to cutting-<\h>edge visuals. (Joshua Rotter)

8 p.m., $38.50–$65
Nob Hill Masonic Center
1111 California, SF
(415) 776-4702
www.videogameslive.com

MUSIC

George Michalski and Friends

My résumé has nothing on George Michalski’s. He’s recorded with Blue Cheer, performed at Whiskey a Go Go with the first white band signed to Motown (Foxtrot), and played the role of Barbra Streisand’s favorite pianist. Disco lovers should recognize that it’s Michalski who scored the dramatic soundtrack for the couture slasher The Eyes of Laura Mars. I’m not even going to get into Michalski’s connections to Don Johnson or Shields and Yarnell. I’ll just say he’s recently been working with Eddie Fisher, he has a new album called San Francisco that’s devoted to the city, and he’s celebrating the 50th anniversary of his first piano recital with this show. (Johnny Ray Huston)

8 p.m., $18
Larkspur Cafe Theatre
500 Magnolia, Larkspur
(415) 924-6107
www.georgemichalski.com

THURSDAY

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March 8

MUSIC

Hiss Golden Messenger

The most remarkable thing about Hiss Golden Messenger is not its personnel — members of the Court and Spark, Oranger, and the Mother Hips — but that the sum of its parts sounds much different than one might imagine given their respective histories, none of which hint at the reverbed, spliff-friendly jams born of this incarnation. While it’s true that, between them, these guys have played every gin joint from Willits to Escondido, this is just their second show together. (Nathan Baker)

With Citay
9 p.m., $7
Make-Out Room
3225 22nd St., SF
(415) 647-2888
www.makeoutroom.com

FILM

Night of the Lepus

If the words “giant killer rabbits” aren’t enough to convince you to travel to the East Bay to see a movie, then you are truly beyond hope. Night of the Lepus, perhaps the glorious nadir of all monster movies, has bunnies in spades. An experiment in bunny population control in the Southwest goes horribly awry, resulting in a radiated breed of hopping Godzillas that terrorize model train sets and devour poorly blue-screened actors. (Matt Sussman)

9:15 p.m., $8
Parkway Speakeasy Theater
1834 Park, Oakl.
(510) 814-2400
www.parkway-speakeasy.com

MUSIC

Born/Dead

There is an old adage: if you can talk, you can sing; if you can walk, you can dance. Add that if you have an ax to grind, you can wield a guitar. It’s a philosophy, and Oakland anarcho-punks Born/Dead are its champions. Don’t look to them for brainless entertainment. Born/Dead have a message to their madness: no one gets out alive. They’ll be challenging the status quo with Pittsburgh, Pa.’s Behind Enemy Lines, among others. (Nicole Gluckstern)

With Behind Enemy Lines, Peligro Social, Nightstick Justice, and War Trash
7 p.m., $6
Balazo18 Art Gallery
2183 Mission, SF
(415) 255-7227
www.balazogallery.com

WEDNESDAY

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March 7

FILM

Altman Tribute: McCabe and Mrs. Miller and 3 Women

This installment of the Castro Theatre’s Robert Altman tribute features two epics centering on the feminine mystique. McCabe and Mrs. Miller, from 1971, is a messy, unmelodramatic revision of the western. Similarly fixated on abstractions and identity, 1977’s 3 Women is dreamlike and hard to hold, with its title characters reutf8g in ineffable and sometimes mythic emotional situations. (Sara Schieron)

McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 2:15 and 7 p.m.
3 Women, 4:35 and 9:20 p.m.
$9 for double feature
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
(415) 621-5288
www.castrotheatre.com

EVENT

Ellen Forney

Gritty, hilarious, incisive as the business end of a rapidograph, Ellen Forney makes cartooning seem as gloriously easy and fun as, well, scribbling in the margins of your college-ruled notebook during a heinously boring high school lecture. Whether she’s teaming with Dan Savage or simply waxing poetic — riotously — on the perfect music to die by in her new comics anthology, I Love Led Zeppelin, Forney is always beautifully perceptive about the pop-rockin’ alterna-culture she bolts from. I’m sure she’ll spring a few life lessons when she gives a multimedia performance promoting the volume. (Kimberly Chun)

7 p.m., free
Booksmith
1644 Haight, SF
(415) 863-8688
www.booksmith.com

Guardian, ACLU seek ICE records

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The Bay Guardian, the ACLU of Northern California and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights have filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking documents related the recent immigration raids in California.

The detailed request asks for a long list of documents explaining “Operation Return to Sender,” an Immigration Customs and Enforcement crackdown that had led to 13,000 arrests nationwide.

“Some of the abusive practices reported extensively in the press include: illegal entries and searches by ICE agents, misidentification of ICE agents as member of local police forces, inappropriate tactics related to children including conducting round-ups near schools and leaving minor children unattended upon their parents’ arrest, ethnic profiling, violations of due process and abusive treatment,” an ACLU press release notes.

“When the Mayor of Richmond describes the ICE raids as imposing a ‘state of terror’ and parents are afraid to send their children to school, civil rights organizations must investigate possible civil rights violations,” said Julia Harumi Mass, staff attorney of the ACLU-NC. “The first step is to see all the records regarding the planning and implementation of Operation Return to Sender in northern California.”

The Guardian has worked with the ACLU in the past on federal FOIA requests, most recently seeking information about clandestine Pentagon spying on local peace groups.

Below is the press release:

ACLU Seeks Records on Immigration Enforcement Actions
in Northern California

Groups Investigate Possible Civil Rights Violations

SAN FRANCISCO – The ACLU of Northern California, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request today seeking records reutf8g to recent enforcement actions conducted by U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE). The ACLU-NC has requested expedited processing because of the urgency of this issue to members of several northern California communities.

The ACLU-NC is seeking documents regarding the recent ICE actions undertaken as part of “Operation Return to Sender” in Contra Costa, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, San Benito, San Francisco, and Fresno counties to name a few. Operation Return to Sender was launched in May 2006 and has led to the arrest of at least 13,000 people nationwide.

Some of the abusive practices reported extensively in the press include: illegal entries and searches by ICE agents, misidentification of ICE agents as member of local police forces, inappropriate tactics related to children including conducting round-ups near schools and leaving minor children unattended upon their parents’ arrest, ethnic profiling, violations of due process and abusive treatment.

“When the Mayor of Richmond describes the ICE raids as imposing a ‘state of terror’ and parents are afraid to send their children to school, civil rights organizations must investigate possible civil rights violations,” said Julia Harumi Mass, staff attorney of the ACLU-NC. “The first step is to see all the records regarding the planning and implementation of Operation Return to Sender in northern California.”

The ACLU has reviewed a number of complaints concerning ICE conduct that raise serious concerns about racial profiling and other constitutional violations. Finding out the truth about the raids—which are reportedly resulting in the arrest and deportation not only of “fugitives” with criminal histories, but many residents whose only unlawful actions relate to being in the country without authorization—is particularly important as Congress takes on the question of how to address the vast numbers of undocumented immigrants who currently live and work in the United States.

“If the federal government is going to spend taxpayers dollars on a very questionable enforcement action, the public has the right to know the details of how it was implemented — and particularly how local law enforcement agencies in cities like San Francisco, which has a policy of not co-operating with ICE, were involved,” said Tim Redmond of the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Mass added: “We are seeking expedited processing because of the urgency of this issue. ICE enforcement actions have been widely reported in the press and have raised serious concerns about federal misconduct. The reports have caused widespread anxiety in communities throughout northern California.” If expedited processing is granted, the ACLU FOIA request would be processed “as soon as practicable,” and prior to the agency’s large backlog of less urgent requests.

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights is accepting calls from members of the public who believe they were victims of abusive and unlawful ICE enforcement tactics. The ACLU-NC will be working with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights to evaluate information from the public as part of their investigation into the raids.

For a copy of the FOIA visit www.aclunc.org.

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (3/6/07)

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Casualties in Iraq

Iraqi civilians:

Over 100 Iraqi civilians were killed today in bombing attacks that targeted Shiite pilgrims heading to Karbala for a religious celebration, according to the New York Times.

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

57,805 – 63,573: Killed since 1/03

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.

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 4 March 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/32/

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

Antiestablishmentarianism attitudes among Iraqi religious groups is fueling intolerance and violence towards homosexuals in Iraq, according to the UN.

Source: http://www.gaypeopleschronicle.com/stories07/february/0202071.htm

U.S. military:

3,411: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: 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:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/2007.01.html

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source:http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

151: 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.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2013034,00.html

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.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6293807.stm

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.

Source: http://www.unhcr.org/iraq.html

U.S. Military Wounded:

47,657: Wounded since 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

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

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (3/6/07): Bush asks congress to approve $622 billion for 2008. So far, $405 billion for the U.S., $51 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.
Compiled by Paula Connelly

Bush asked congress to approve $622 billion for defense spending, most for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a $2.9 trillion budget request for 2008, according to Reuters.
Source: http://today.reuters.com/

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.”

The “ire” in “satire”

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TELEVISION Nowhere is it written that conservatives can’t be funny. Conservatives can, in fact, be absolutely rip-roaringly funny. Take South Park, which is conservative in its own smug libertarian way, or anything ever done by Christopher Buckley or Mike Judge (whose last film, Idiocracy, is as conservative as it is bitingly hilarious). So when Fox News trotted out The Half Hour News Hour, its version of Comedy Central’s liberal vanguard The Daily Show, there was no guarantee that it was going to be terrible. But it was. So terrible that there has been speculation among right-wing bloggers that the show is an evil Democratic plot to prove Republicans can’t do comedy. They may have a point. This show has a Metacritic.com score of 14, the lowest score a show has received in the site’s history. It has less than half the score of Pepper Dennis. Yes, it’s that bad.

Produced by Joel Surnow and Manny Coto — who also created 24, America’s favorite source of torture porn — The Half Hour News Hour debuted Feb. 18. The opening skit, set in January 2009, featured newly elected President Rush Limbaugh and Vice President Ann Coulter. Limbaugh gloated that "the grown-ups are finally back in charge" and that he was glad "Howard Dean has finally gotten the medical attention he so clearly needed." This statement was odd, considering Limbaugh’s recent prescription drug problems; it could have been funny if it contained even a single iota of self-awareness. The scene only made sense in the show’s context of the Republicans being out of power for years — meaning that their simply being in a position of authority is a joke in itself. Since two branches of government are firmly in Republican control and the other only changed hands a couple months ago, this reveals more about the forever embittered, always-the-underdog Republican psyche than it does anything reutf8g to humor.

The rest of the show involved jokes that were both stupidly obvious and hardly topical, such as making fun of Ed Begley Jr.’s electric car (1987 called — it wants its joke back) and the ACLU defending hate groups (1957 called — ditto). Even worse, The Half Hour News Hour never mentioned George W. Bush. It’s understandable that Fox doesn’t want to go after its own, but for a show that’s supposed to be topical, that’s unforgivable. Maybe Fox should stop trying to be funny and go back to being unintentionally hilarious, like it is with the rest of its programming. (Aaron Sankin)

www.foxnews.com/specials

“Rust” never sleeps

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Between Kirsten Greenidge’s rumbling and ambitious Rust and Chantal Bilodeau’s titilutf8g if more staid Pleasure and Pain, a metatheme is already emerging from the Magic Theatre’s annual three-play Hot House festival. Both Greenidge and Bilodeau merge a contemporary identity-focused story line and a fractured mise-en-scène to explore the porous border between mundane reality and individual and collective fictions.

Rust centers on a troubled patch in the high-flying career of football star Randall Mifflin (Mikaal Sulaiman). The Mighty Miff, to his fans, has temporarily retired for vague reasons having to do with the corruption of the game’s ideals, setting off a controversy embodied by two comically artificial-looking TV sportscasters (Eric Fraisher Hayes and Lance Gardner) complete with navy blue blazers, puffy microphones, plastic hairdos, and even banks of stadium floodlights strapped to their backs. Miff, meanwhile, stays home in edgy seclusion playing video games and collecting antique mammy-shaped cookie jars (and other fixtures of a commercial culture once saturated with antebellum black caricatures). To the growing concern of his wife (April Matthis) and friends (Nicole C. Julien and Donald Lett), it becomes clear Randall is being haunted over the phone by the ghosts of product icons Aunt Jemima, here known as Ella Mae Walker (Cathleen Riddley), and Uncle Ben, or Mr. Peale (L. Peter Callender), who plead with him to deliver the race.

A subplot features a yuppie brother (Gardner) and sister (Matthis) in the process of selling their late parents’ old house. Out of one wall steps a life-size version of Mary-Mary-Anne (Julien), a pickaninny the brother instantly recognizes from childhood as Farina, the cereal icon, one of many racist commercial images their mother bitterly pasted behind the wallpaper in a kind of symbolic burial. Mary-Mary-Anne leads the siblings on a hunt for the cookie jar now in Randall’s possession, as the two plot strands come together — along with an eerie set of lantern-wielding Gold Dust Washing Powder twins, Omas (Lett) and Snipe (Hayes) — in an antique shop operated by a drunken dealer named Gin George (Callender).

Setting these grotesque caricatures in motion among flesh-and-blood moderns is just one of the ways Greenidge’s uneven but vital, imaginative, and ambitious comedy theatrically realizes the uneasy blending of stereotypes and real life. It does so in a way particularly reminiscent of Suzan-Lori Parks’s work. As the enduring force of blackface caricature, and the white supremacist ideology behind it, threads its way into the present day, it becomes clear that the subtle negotiations and compromises attendant on personal and collective identity in 21st-century American culture stand in need of a little schooling, if not an exorcism.

The protagonist in Bilodeau’s Pleasure and Pain has her own problem with private demons bearing down on her social world. Peggy (Jennifer Clare) is an attractive, perky, semiawkward, almost unbelievably sheltered 21st-century young woman groping toward a more or less ’50s-style sexual awakening with an overactive fantasy life she half worries, half hopes will leave her "out of control." Needless to say, she gets her ambivalent wish. Her daydreams — ruled by a strapping dominator (Andrew Utter) dressed in casual S-M gear — soon spill out into her workaday world, which is split between secretarial duties alongside former babysitter and comically unguarded confidant Ruth (a sharp and amusing Catherine Smitko) and a prematurely settled home life with her schluby fiancé (Max Moore).

Not exactly new territory. Pleasure and Pain lacks anything like the imagination — let alone psychological or social import — of Luis Buñuel’s Belle du Jour or even a film by Catherine Breillat. Its limited journey is fairly dull. All the passing allure of bare midriff and lash could have come out of a Good Vibrations catalog circa 1978. *

PLEASURE AND PAIN RUST

Through April 1

See Web site for schedule, $20–$45

Magic Theatre

Fort Mason Center, bldg D, third floor

Marina at Laguna, SF

(415) 441-8822

www.magictheatre.org

>

Vettin’ the vets

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Four world premieres during the two-week run of "ODC/Dance Downtown" prove there’s something to be said for long-term creative leadership. Both artistic director Brenda Way and co–artistic director KT Nelson have been with the company since before it relocated to San Francisco 31 years ago. And yet neither of them shows any sign of artistic burnout.

In Program One, Nelson’s free-spirited Scramble, set to Bach’s (overamplified) Cello Suite no. 6 in D Major, was an easy charmer for two couples in various combinations. Anne Zivolich and Daniel Santos — ODC’s most balletically elegant dancer — opened the piece on a note of airborne high; their antics were nicely balanced by the slow movements of Elizabeth Farotte and Justin Flores. With an evocative video by Hiraki Sawa and a serviceable score by David Lang, Way’s A Pleasant Looking Woman in Sensible Clothes contemplated the fear that has entered the daily lives of ordinary people. Sawa’s video of domesticity, which was invaded by a mounting number of toy airplanes, created a growing sense of terror and suffocation — one that the choreography only partially reflected.

The 1999 piece Investigating Grace concluded the evening on about as inspiring a note as one would wish. Surely, this extraordinarily beautiful and musically astute setting of Bach’s Goldberg Variations is one of Way’s enduring masterpieces. (Rita Felciano)

ODC/DANCE DOWNTOWN

Through March 18, $10–$40

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater

701 Howard, SF

(415) 978-ARTS

www.ybca.org, www.odcdance.org

>

God chillin’

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER O brother, where art thou, blog-worthy, buzz-besieged bands? Whither the classes of 2004 and ’05? As memory fades and fads pass, the Klaxons and Beirut had best look to the respective fates of Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, both of which have spawned second albums at a time when Britney Spears’s postpartum-postbreakup cue-ball cutes (uh, was she actually a musician, mommy?) score almost twice as many hits as Beyoncé or any ole artist who has actually issued fresh tracks in the last four years. How has blogosphere-borne hypey held up? Can the viral gospel survive, with or without fast-buck comps with the word "Hitz" in their titles? (Was I dozing through Now That’s What I Call Indie! Vol. 23?) Was there any substance to the sound of the mid-’00s when it comes to Arcade Fire and CYHSY — two indie taste sensations that musically mimed Talking Heads and, in their number, resembled villages more than singular villains? Can they bring sexy back sonically, even though they never bumped billiard balls with the naked-noggined queen of pop?

From the sound of the last CYHSY show I caught at the Warfield, the Philly–New York sprawl seemed well on its way to sell-out-by staleness. Out were the frothy, Afropop-derived David Byrne–ing campfire rhythms. Enter monotonous, monochromatic indie rock.

Yet although CYHSY’s new (and still bravely self-released) ‘un, Some Loud Thunder, peters to a dull roar by the time "Five Easy Pieces" rolls around, the full-length still impresses with its sense of aural experimentation. Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann throws fuzz, shmutz, and the noise equivalent of cat fur and tumbleweed over the proceedings, futzing the opening, title track into a cunning combo of foregrounded murk and tambourine-shimmy clarity. CYHSY cut through the fog of pop with the dissonance-laced sweetness of a cockeyed, choral "Emily Jean Stock" and the Dylanishly titilutf8g manifesto tease of "Mama, Won’t You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning?" Some Loud Thunder is a freakin’ busy record — with the emphasis happily on the freak — and it’s almost as if CYHSY were trying to reach beyond the easy, cumbersome cool of their name (always suspected to be a major part of their appeal) and toward, hoo-boy, depth. Too bad the lyrics aren’t often up to the musical intrigue on such songs as "Satan Said Dance" and "Goodbye to Mother and the Cove," making CYHSY sound like the E.E. Cummingses of indie, for whatever that’s worth. "Gravity’s one thing and / Gravity’s something but / How about coming down …," Alec Ounsworth whinnies. "Weird but you’re back talking." Wonderfully weird, yes, though is it unfair to ask if you have anything to say?

Back also, in priestly black, are Arcade Fire, who have plenty to tell in the three years since Funeral was unveiled. Amid the majestic choral sheen, synth pop flock, and Tijuana brass of their new album, Neon Bible (Merge), Win Butler and party have unearthed and dusted off the lost threads of connection between the teary tough-guy sentimentality of Gene Pitney and Roy Orbison, the jittery junked-up teardrops of "Little Johnny Jewel" and Suicide, and the quavering, coaguutf8g pop syrup of the Cure and OMD. Arcade Fire have crawled through a creaky, darkened looking glass and found a lost, perhaps losing world populated with forlorn soldiers, urban paranoiacs, rough water, guiding lights, lions and lambs, and idling vehicles.

Cloaked in increasingly trad folk and ’80s pop-song structures, engineering by Markus Dravs (Björk) and Scott Colburn (Sun City Girls), and contributions by members of Calexico, Wolf Parade, and Final Fantasy, Arcade Fire thankfully put lyrical clichés to work during Neon Bible‘s clamorous service, to the end of genuine storytelling. They’re preaching the gospel of transcendence through music and art — something that now seems unique to rock, in contrast to rap — questioning a holy war in "Intervention" ("Working for the church while my family died / Your little sister is going to lose her mind / Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home / Hear the soldier groan / He’ll go it alone") and the god-fearing hysteria of "(Antichrist Television Blues)" ("Don’t want to work in a building downtown / I don’t know what I’m going to do / Because the planes keep crashing, two by two"). Arcade Fire are far from the first to fire artful shots in response to wartime, but Neon Bible — as bold and beautiful, as hysterical and hopeful, as corny and acute as a rockin’ soap opera or Jesus Christ Superstar — feels like the best album of 2007 so far. *

ARCADE FIRE

June 1–2, 8 p.m., $31.50

Greek Theatre

UC Berkeley, Gayley Road, Berk.

www.ticketmaster.com

GET OUT

NICE BOYS


The Portland, Ore., upstarts with mighty fine shaggy rooster cuts step up with ’70s-style glitter pop. With Time Flys and Apache. Wed/7, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

OLD TIME RELIJUN


K Records’ wrecking crew just might find a deity at the bottom of a beer stein. With Tussle and the Weasel Walter Quartet. Wed/7, 10 p.m., $5. Knockout, 3223 Mission, SF. (415) 550-6994

BUNNY RABBIT


CocoRosie’s girly rapper protégé freestyles with a thumb-sucking bounce. Is her Lovers and Crypts (Voodoo-Eros) for reals? With Tha Pumpsta and Bruno and the Dreamies. Thurs/8, 8 p.m., $6. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. (510) 444-7263. Tues/13, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

EMPTY ROOMS


A new self-titled EP finds the Bay Area moodniks waxing gothily. With Worship of Silence and This Isn’t It. Sun/11, 9 p.m., $6. Hotel Utah, 500 Fourth St., SF. (415) 546-6300

Currant affairs

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The backs and bin bottoms of refrigerators are known hazmat zones: difficult-to-reach, easy-to-ignore regions where spontaneous composting occurs. Most of us, I suspect, have at one time or another fished a plastic bag from these sepulchral depths and wondered what once fresh but long neglected foodstuff could have produced the black-green goo inside.

The far reaches of kitchen cabinetry don’t generally host this sort of putrefaction, but they are venues for the forgotten bottle of this and overlooked box of that all the same. A few weeks ago, while urgently trolling my clutter of bottles for some mild vinegar — a key ingredient in Mark Bittman’s excellent recipe for vindaloo (see his indispensable volume The Best Recipes in the World for details) — I came across a dusty bottle of Vilux vinaigre de cassis, which I’d bought on sale years ago because … it was on sale.

"Cassis" means "black currant" in French — ergo, we are dealing with black currant vinegar, which is a lovely pale purple color (like that of weak pinot noir) and has a rich, fruity flavor. I’d occasionally made vinaigrettes with the Vilux, but over time the fullish bottle drifted toward the back of the shelf, supplanted by flashier or easier-to-reach newcomers, including a series of bottles of rice wine vinegar. Usually I use rice wine vinegar when making Bittman’s vindaloo (I also use chicken instead of pork; please don’t tell him), but I had managed to run out of it and further managed not to get more in time for dinner. So: a wing, a prayer, and vindaloo with black currant vinegar.

The result was surprisingly satisfying — even better, I thought, than the usual version. Emboldened (and still without rice wine vinegar), I used the Vilux to make a sweet chile sauce for the dunking of lumpia. (A good recipe for this simple condiment can be found in Taste of Laos by Daovone Xayavong.) Again, the result was notably better, with the vinegar’s fruit adding some richness and helping to take the harsh, hot edge from the cayenne.

Naturally this small success set me to searching the nether reaches of the pantry for unsung treasures. Among the archaeological finds: A jar of Harry and David’s muffaletta, doubtless a gift from someone years ago. Strange little cans filled with herb and spice blends, with directions in Italian or perhaps Armenian. No vindaloo mix; that’s still a DIY.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Axis power

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

It has been noted in the mostly laudatory press surrounding their collection of 10-inch EPs, Transparent Things (Tirk/Word and Sound), that Fujiya & Miyagi aren’t Japanese. Nor are they a duo. They are in fact three white friends from Brighton, England, whose openly acknowledged obsession with Neu’s motornik pulse and Can’s subdued funk has resulted in some very infectious, kraut-tinged electronic pop songs as well as gentle speculation about whether Fujiya & Miyagi are simply derivative or being cheekily open about their influences.

Anticipating their critics, the band even declare at one point as a chorus, "We’re only pretending to be Japanese!" But Fujiya & Miyagi seem too polite to be doing all this as a piss-take, yet too self-conscious to claim sui generis innocence by way of a strange musical synchronicity. After all, I don’t think I am the only person who thought they were Japanese when I first heard them.

To some extent, all bands wear their record collections on their sleeves early on. Some simply loathe admitting it. Initial Stereolab singles were basically remakes of Neu’s "Hallo Gallo" (although so were Neu’s subsequent albums) with vocal window dressing snatched from ’60s French yé-yé pop. It was the unexpected synthesis of the two that made them sound so fresh. By now Fujiya & Miyagi’s warm-cold instrumentation — guitars compressed into brittle chirps, warm analog synth washes, percoutf8g drum machines — is a familiar palette (again, think Stereolab or some DFA productions), but David Best’s vocal style fogs up the transparency of the homage.

Best’s clipped, affectless approach works well to underscore his distanced lyrics, whether he’s detachedly recounting the scuffs incurred while falling in and out of love ("Collarbone" and "Sucking Punch," respectively) or cataloging the commodities around him ("Transparent Things"). His rolled r‘s and staccato delivery also uncannily invoke the quieter Damo Suzuki of Can’s 1972 album, Ege Bamyasi, or the 1973 disc Future Days (both Mute).

Granted, James Murphy stands accused of swagger-jacking Mark E. Smith’s extra syllables (Smith, appropriately enough, donned Suzuki vocal drag for the Fall’s "I Am Damo Suzuki" — perhaps Fujiya & Miyagi’s chief precedent). And Beck’s skinny-white-boy take on Prince circa Midnite Vultures (Interscope, 1999) is no more or less suspect than Justin Timberlake’s Off the Wall falsetto.

Appropriation is an old and often circular debate in music, one inflected by racial politics as much as the vagaries and entitlements enabled by whatever strength so-called postmodernism still holds as a position. The earnest love of kraut Fujiya & Miyagi see reflected in their music may come off as a studied imitation to some, but when "Collarbone" hits its breakdown, and Best breathily beatboxes the old "knee bone connected to the shin bone" nursery rhyme like he wants to rock your body, Fujiya & Miyagi momentarily sidestep the anxiety of influence and become simply a great pop group. *

Pop goes Panther

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Prince may have his devoted popites canonizing those purple-clad jewels once again after his recent Super Bowl halftime performance, but in Portland, Ore., there’s an equally crude one-man dance-aster who could soon take the crown from His Royal Badass. This beat blaster and master, however, comes in the form of a scrawny gyrator whose elasticlike body rapidly contorts, recoils, and slams against walls during his pop-flushed freak-outs.

Since 2002, Panther, a.k.a. Charlie Salas-Humara, has administered a hip-spasming dose of what his press literature describes as "damaged soul," fusing pulsating drum machines and bassy hooks with disheveled synths and glass-cracking falsettos. MTV2 has even taken a liking to the 32-year-old, nominating "You Don’t Want Your Nails Done," the single from his debut, Secret Lawns (Fryk Beat), for Video of the Year. During the video a brown-suited Salas-Humara rocks the microphone in a room cluttered with cardboard furniture, cell phones, and iPods. The fidgety performer busts into the Robot like a Tourette’s-afflicted Michael Jackson and beatboxes, "When you’re making these fists / You don’t want your hair / When you’re making these fists / You don’t want your nails done." Watching the video makes you want to grab the sweat-drenched vocalist by his shoulders and yell, "Go, white boy, go!"

But according to Salas-Humara, Panther’s intoxicating bite hasn’t taken that much effort. "It’s a great project because I don’t have to think about it, and there’s no concept besides whatever shit I pull together in my basement," he says on the phone from Portland. "It’s just me, and I don’t have to be a Gang of Four cover band or try and be some pop thing."

And Salas-Humara doesn’t always sound like he’s in pursuit of pop. Songs such as "Rely on Scent" and "Take Us Out" evoke a free jazz and R&B artiness and rely heavily on organ to keep them afloat. Others, such as "How Does It Feel?" and "Tennis Lesson," recall the mechanized keyboard bluster of early-’80s Herbie Hancock and the Art of Noise while integrating densely arranged hip-hop beats as their driving force.

Born in Florida but raised in Chicago’s suburbs, Salas-Humara moved to Portland in 1995 with his band, the Planet The. The trio stuck it out for 11 years, though Panther had already sprung to life before the group’s demise.

"I started doing Panther because somebody asked me to do one of those solo performance nights where people from different bands get together and play acoustic songs," he says with a laugh. "I thought it would be funny to terrorize it with prerecorded drum machines."

Salas-Humara claims that he thought he would never perform as Panther again, but he continued producing new music because his friends kept egging him on.

"It was really fun to try and fill up a lot of space on a stage with one person, so I started experimenting with dancing and doing different things with the stuff I would choreograph," Salas-Humara explains. "Basically, I just get weird."

In addition to the MTV2 nomination, 2006 saw Panther embark on tours with the Gossip and Ratatat, and Fryk Beat released the lauded 12-inch Yourself.

Gearing up for his first national tour, Salas-Humara confirms he’s a bit nervous about the jaunt.

"You never really know where your fans are," he says. "I’m sure it’ll be pretty awesome in some places and dismal in others. I guess that’s the way that it goes." (Chris Sabbath)

PANTHER

With Yip Yip, Lemonade, and Like Nurse

Thurs/8, 9:30 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

>

Frosty love

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By Johnny Ray Huston


› johnny@sfbg.com

First things first: even if there’s been a Michael Mann remake of Miami Vice between the day that Pusha T and Malice first rhymed about Tubbs and Crockett and now, Clipse’s Hell Hath No Fury (Re Up Gang/Star Trak, 2006) also hath no shortage of extraordinary future-sounds. It never lets up, from the three tracks before the cold Clipse calypso of the new-money anthem "Wamp Wamp" through the seven tracks after the harp strum, extended and echoed for maximum shimmer, on "Ride Around Shining" — a startling use of the instrument that ain’t Alice Coltrane and sure as hell ain’t Joanna Newsom. On "Keys Open Doors," ah harmonies that wouldn’t be out of place on Philip Glass’s project-haunting Candyman soundtrack back up a title chorus that turns passage metaphors inside out.

Then there’s "Chinese New Year," on which Clipse’s Malice and Pusha T are joined by the hilariously named Roscoe P. Goldchain for a drive-by in which the ammo is punch-line rap: "Mask on face / Glock in hand," Malice is "in and out of houses like the Orkin Man," while Pusha T has a vixen who’ll "eat your face like Ms. Pac-Man." Speaking of white lines and dots and those who gobble and snort them, the Neptunes’ production backs these boasts with keyboard squiggles that aren’t far from the noises vintage video game monsters make when they’re turned into ghosts.

The trademark Neptunes sound has never been better than on Hell Hath, but their touch is a curse as well as a blessing for Clipse. It’s a curse because of Pharrell Williams’s overexposure and because the long-delayed Hell Hath finally dropped at the exact time that Williams and fellow Neptune Chad Hugo unveiled their worst overdecorated cake of a pop production — the yodeling monstrosity known as "Wind It Up," Gwen Stefani’s leadoff single from The Sweet Escape. Some East Coast bloggers have given themselves a hand for helping boost Hell Hath ‘s sales numbers, but commercially speaking, the album has underperformed like, well, a Pharrell solo effort.

But I’d much rather blast Hell Hath than Pharrell’s In My Mind (Interscope, 2006), not to mention all but a handful of other albums released last year. The reasons why are too many to be named in full. But one is that Pharrell takes a backseat, doing less MCing and fewer pint-size Curtis Mayfield impressions than on 2002’s Lord Willin‘. In fact, his misleading front-and-center presence on the first single, "Mr. Me Too," probably didn’t do Pusha T and Malice any sales favors. On Hell Hath, the track signals the arrival of a bottom end after two lean and mean cuts — the organ-based church of coke testifying of "We Got It for Cheap" and the polka minimalism of the accordion-laced "Momma I’m So Sorry." That bottom end goes Jules Verne deep, whereas Pharrell’s version of boasting — all Diddy parties and skateboard contracts — comes off cartoony and corny next to Pusha T and Malice’s dealing drama. The only category in which he’s fresher is a stale one, bling: he mentions "Lorraine" (Schwartz), and Clipse refers to the oft-cited Jacob the Jeweler on another track. On Hell Hath‘s closer, "Nightmares," it’s Bilal rather than Pharrell who does the Mayfield impression, just one reason why as a paranoid anthem — that rap paradox with Robert Johnson roots, an affirmation of sketchy solitude — it’s closer to the Geto Boys’ classic "Mind’s Playing Tricks on Me" than it is to Rockwell’s "Somebody’s Watchin’ Me."

"No hotta / Flow droppa / Since Poppa," Pusha T asserts at the kickoff of "Wamp Wamp." Though he follows that up with a truly terrific double-edged pun ("You penny ante niggaz see I know copper" — and also "no Copper"), it’s a bit of a stretch to claim he and Malice are in the Biggie leagues. Take Life after Death‘s "What’s Beef?" (Bad Boy, 1997), on which Biggie begins with a vainglorious "ha ha ha ha ha," declares himself the "rap Alfred Hitchcock," and rhymes "I see you" and ICU. On that track he also serves up the couplet "Think good thoughts, die while your skin starts to glisten / Pale blue hands get cold, your soul’s risen." In comparison, on "Chinese New Year," Clipse threaten they’ll turn you "Cookie Monster blue." Scary cute but no don’s cigar.

But they’re closer to Biggie than most anyone else these days, save maybe their rival, Bush-bashing Lil’ Wayne. Hell Hath is packed with almost as many cleverly phrased disguises for cocaine as it is amazing noises, yet Pusha T and Malice’s brand of brotherly love and hate is at its best when it surrounds the drug with an image-laden story, as on "Dirty Money." There, one track after his big bro demonstrates how to cook drugs like a "black Martha Stewart," Pusha T gets so high on his ability to transform substances and words that Benjamin Franklin’s face starts to look 3-D and silly on some "new crisp billies." By the time he and Malice are dealing with the inevitable comedown on "Nightmares," the substance of their words could turn the warmest smile upside down. *

CLIPSE

With Low B of Hollertronix

Wed/14, 9 p.m., $20

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

www.clipseonline.com

>

Blood money

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Most Americans are fairly sure they are being screwed where it hurts most: in the wallet. But if they think they know why, it’s usually a red herring, while the actual primary causes of shrinking financial stability remain obscured by propaganda, media inattention, and institutional stonewalling. By timely coincidence, three worthwhile documentaries opening this week shine some light on the matter. One profiles a longtime champion of consumer protection, while the others examine two realms in which lack of regulation is letting our dollars dance off a cliff of corporate profiteering and dubious ethics.

An Unreasonable Man is Henriette Mantel and Stephen Skrovan’s admiring yet critical portrait of Ralph Nader. The previous century’s most famous consumer advocate racked up a roster of triumphs that protected citizens against corporations — that is, until Ronald Reagan commenced ongoing deregulation trends. Famously starting with auto design safety in the early ’60s, then encompassing pollution, food and drug guidelines, nuclear power, the insurance industry, and workplace risk-protection, Nader did enough public good during his career — with worldwide legislative ripple effects — to merit secular sainthood. Then he decided to run for president, in 2000, as a Green. He won just enough votes for many Democrats to blame him for the catastrophic ascent of George W. Bush. Needless to say, the latter is no friend of Nader’s consumerist lobbying, which suffered a defection of support from nearly all quarters.

Lengthy but engrossing, An Unreasonable Man wants to reclaim Nader’s legacy, even as it admits that his black-or-white morality can be both admirable and mulishly exasperating. After all, in the end he didn’t rob Al Gore of the Oval Office: with familial help from the Sunshine State, Bush stole it.

If the current climate had allowed Nader’s Raiders as much clout as they had under the Jimmy Carter administration, could Americans possibly have been led into the shithole examined by Maxed Out? James Scurlock’s survey of the out-of-control credit and debt industry begins by informing viewers that this year "more Americans will go bankrupt than will divorce, graduate college, or get cancer."

Of course, thanks to our current president, they won’t be able to declare bankruptcy anymore — the lazy sods! Instead they can enjoy a lifetime of astronomical interest rates, threats, and continued solicitations to sign up for yet more loans and plastic.

Maxed Out includes personal stories of housewives driven to suicide, longtime homeowners tricked into foreclosure, and even underpaid soldiers targeted for exploitation by creditors after Iraq tours. The movie’s institutional focus spotlights the deliberate holding of customer checks until late fees can be charged (an executive from one company guilty of such tactics was Bush’s pick for financial-industries czar), spinelessness on the part of government investigative committees, and flat-out collusion by many politicos. Meanwhile, the national debt goes up and up, in good part owing to Iraq, making it unlikely that Social Security or basic social services will be around in the future.

Speaking of Iraq and bottomless money pits, for the first time in any major conflict, a great share of US military expenditure now goes to private security contractors. In less linguistically evasive times we called them mercenaries, or soldiers of fortune. Who are these people, and who are they accountable to? Nick Bicanic and Jason Bourque’s Shadow Company is a well-crafted grasp at answers, though that latter question is a hard one. Some of the people interviewed in the movie sound conscientious enough, and as some grisly footage attests, the risks they run are no joke. More private contractees have been killed in Iraq than all non-US military personnel put together. But the booming $1 billion-a-year industry of private military companies (PMCs) doesn’t operate under any strict guidelines.

We’ve already outsourced the running of many prisons and schools to private concerns. When war itself is a for-hire endeavor — and a hot job market, since PMC employees’ salaries dwarf those of actual soldiers — is there any doubt left that we’re fighting for venture capitalism, not democracy? *

AN UNREASONABLE MAN

www.anunreasonableman.com

MAXED OUT

www.maxedoutmovie.com

SHADOW COMPANY

www.shadowcompanythemovie.com

All three films open Fri/9 at Bay Area theaters

Quite an interview: a talk with Judy Stone

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"There’s no craft. I’m just curious." To which I respond, "Are you sure?" as if this respected journalist could be putting me on. I’ve just read Judy Stone’s new book of interviews, Not Quite a Memoir: Of Films, Books, the World (Silman-James Press). "How do you prepare your questions?" I ask. "I don’t," she replies as I stare down at my list of prepared questions. "But don’t let that intimidate you."

Because Stone was born into a family that "couldn’t resist a joke," her confessed lack of organization seems unconvincing. This is the woman who, during a colossal televised press conference for Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot, asked Hitch what he’d like on his gravestone. Later, Pauline Kael confronted Stone about her question, to which she responded, "Pauline, the whole movie was about that."

"I don’t include myself in my interviews because that’s not the point," Stone insists. Regardless, her priorities and ethics are clear in her writing. Take the subject of Israel: "I have always felt that I have ethical obligations," she says. "I’m not a Zionist. I’d like to see equal justice for Palestinians. My oldest brother [I.F. Stone] wrote a book called Underground to Palestine. He went with people right out of the concentration camps on the first ship to Palestine. In his articles he came out for a binational state." As if to suppress emotion, she fidgets with her copy of Not Quite a Memoir and reads a quote from her interview with Amos Oz: "Israel was a land for two people, not just one…. This particular national movement is the most stupid and cruel in modern history but we ought to do business with it…. You can’t make peace with nice neighbors." This quote, Stone says, is relevant today, not simply because the conflict in Palestine persists but because "it also applies to the question of negotiating with Iran. Their president is an imbecile and dangerous; so is Bush. So now we have two imbeciles making policy, and it’s a very, very dangerous situation. However, I hope that my interviews with Iranian directors show more of the human side of Iran."

Stone’s new book and her previous collection, Eye on the World: Conversations with International Filmmakers, should be regular fare in college film classes. But although her first book, The Mystery of B. Traven (about the enigmatic author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), has recently been republished, Eye on the World is currently out of print. And Not Quite a Memoir, boasting more than 120 interview portraits, including ones of Jean Genet, Leroi Jones, Donald Ritchie, Kathy Acker, Anne-Marie Melville, and Juan Goytisolo, has been publicized little and reviewed less. "It hasn’t even been reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle, where I worked for 30 years."

Partly guided by an interest in "how each person’s homeland has affected him," Stone’s interviews with writers and filmmakers have taken her all over the world. Although Bernardo Bertolucci didn’t like Stone’s review of his film Luna, he told her a critic is supposed to be "a bridge between the filmmaker and the audience," to which she replied, "I try, I try." Proof positive: her interview with novelist Orhan Pamuk helped American critics better understand his complex work The Black Book.

Today she feels as she did while writing "Encounter in Montenegro." The previously unpublished piece, written in 1959, concludes Not Quite a Memoir and is the only one in which she reveals the way she responds to people. In it she’s a young reporter riding a bus through the black mountains of Yugoslavia. She engages in a discussion with a student from Ghana who makes clear his contempt for Stone, a stranger, and worse, an American. "I still feel that way," she says now. "Feel what way?" I ask. "Feel what way?" she repeats, pausing to help me understand. "This man despised me because I was an American." "So you felt despised?" To which she replies, "Don’t you?" (Sara Schieron)

Super Modelo

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO The sun-bleached suede pump lay abandoned in a tattered jumble of grasses, beneath a grove of swaying palms, next to a ruined hacienda. Vermillion nasturtiums burst through the hacienda’s broken crimson bricks. Embossed on the pump’s inner sole, one word: predictions. Suddenly, a pair of untethered horses flashed into view — one black, the other sweet caramel, weaving their way to a freshwater lagoon at the tip of the white sand beach just beyond us. The grove lit up like a David Lynch interior. Both horses froze to inspect me and Hunky Beau, their glittering eyes four obsidian orbs, the clang-clanging cowbells roped to their well-muscled necks all echoing ancient disco and shit.

Ah, Mexico. Pass the lip balm.

Fearful of my sustained pallor — nightclub, laptop, nightclub, laptop, head shave, rehab — Hunky Beau had whisked me away for a week on the beaches of sunny Baja, to the tiny Pacific outpost of Pescadero, brimming with surfers who’d congregated for wave season. (Two words: Mexican surfers. Delicioso.) "But you’ll miss the season premiere of America’s Next Top Model! Church of Tyra! Church of Tyra!" a tiny voice in the back of my head had protested, the one I call Tiki La Shot. "Big whup, lady," said another, the one I call Mann Coulter. "You’re also missing the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. Wanna cry about it?"

Turns out I had the dates wrong for both. Then Anna Nicole collapsed. Predictions!

Despite my extended geography of lovers, I still can’t speak a lick of española — which of course only adds to my mysterious attractiveness. The language of sexy is silence. So the only information I could glean from the gorgeous local populace for you is this: if you ever find yourself in an old-fashioned paleteria in the dusty, delightful village of Todos Santos, don’t ask them to scoop your purplicious uva ice cream into a sugar conio.

Also, horrid faggot fashions have truly gone global. While the nuevo dinero flowing in from all the unfortunate American second-home development has triggered a growth market in mid-’90s gangsta baggies among the more macho Baja-anians, abruptly blooming on the street corners are packs of mincing teen Mexican queens with tie-dyed mullets, pink cell phones, and embroidered denim flares. Flacas, please.

Toward the end of our sojourn, we avoided the awful, gringo-polluted Disneyland of Cabo San Lucas and took off to the raucous Carnaval parade and festival in the state capital, La Paz. (Will someone please, please solve the riddle of Middle American female hair? Why are white ladies in Cabo still working the frizzy bob thing, squished into yellow Dress Barn stretchiness, and screaming for "peena coladas"? Tufted bangs, even! I almost had to love it.)

There we swooned over the hundreds of handsome caballeros who’d descended from their mountainside ranchos in impeccably spotless Stetsons, Wranglers, and mustaches to hoof it to banda sinaloense, the breathtaking polka-style Mexican dance music. There were so many tuba, trombone, and accordion ensembles oompa-pahing away mere inches from one another I thought I was being squeezed through an awesome Lawrence Welk mashup tube.

As the gangs of muy guapo musicians waltzed the night away and the blanket sellers hawked their tiger-striped and Virgin of Guadalupe–decorated wares, the pink sliver of the moon dipped below La Paz Bay. I turned to Hunky Beau and sighed. Fuck the fruitless Carnaval cruising, I thought. I’m the real princess here.

Funny how sometimes the hardest nightlife things to find are the ones right under the mirror beneath your nose. So I get back and want to hear some banda on the home team dance floor, right? But … where? Seems any night of the week I can get freaky to Southeast Asian, Brazilian, Moroccan, and Afro-Caribbean beats, but, despite the recent explosion of norteño music (the "gangsta rap of banda"), an early ’00s club interest in electronic-tinged banda by groups such as Nortec Collective, and our own estimable population of Mexican folk, the only reliable finds on my banda radar are occasional events at clubs such as El Rincon, Cancun, the Make-Out Room, and, of course, that reina wonderland, Esta Noche.

In this way, banda is like hyphy: everywhere in the media and streets but rarely on the dance floor. I’m the first to admit that I’m a mite too white sometimes. Just because I don’t know about it doesn’t mean it’s not banging. Therefore, I vow to go immediately to the Discolandia and Ritmo Latino record stores in the Mission and follow the plethora of flyers for live banda to Latinate bliss. Meanwhile, hey, all you worldly and alternative DJs: how about slipping some slices from Banda el Recodo de Cruz Lizarrága in your mix? Huh? *

Upside Woodside

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› paulr@sfbg.com

"Are we on the San Andreas Fault?" my companion asked uneasily as we stepped from the car and stood looking at the Bella Vista Continental Restaurant, lit up like something out of a Hans Christian Andersen tale in the soft winter gloaming. "No," I said. "The fault" — really a rift zone, so I’d learned in my college geology class — "is down there." I gestured vaguely past the rambling structure, perched at the edge of a woody abyss, toward the twinkles and shadows below, perhaps at Larry Ellison’s $27 million Woodside backyard. The fault, or rift zone, as I understand it, creates the long, narrow valley that separates Skyline Boulevard and I-280 for much of the northern length of the Peninsula. The valley’s chain of lakes look like Scottish lochs but are in fact reservoirs run by the San Francisco Water Department. Larry Ellison runs Oracle; would we find him at the bar at Bella Vista? Is he a regular?

When we stepped inside, we found no sign of him, but the bar was lightly populated by a quartet of young men in sweatpants and sneakers staring at a flat-screen broadcast of some Stanford game.

"We’re overdressed," my companion hissed, and my heart sank. I remembered the restaurant as being agreeably classy in an Aspen-ish, horse-country way, with a wealth of rustic, roadside-inn touches — exposed wood beams, picture lamps with their cords trailing down the walls, an unpaved parking lot among the cedars — but my last visit had been some years earlier, in the summer of 1980, when Jimmy Carter’s solar panels were still in place on the White House roof and the phrase "President Reagan" was still tinged with irreality. Had the past quarter century brought a down-market slalom to this handsome and atmospheric stalwart, which opened in 1927? Had it become a kind of Dutch Goose with a view, or a rival to Zott’s, the fabled hamburger stand and beer garden (once a stagecoach stop, now called something else) on nearby Alpine Road? We were led to our table, which was set with a red rose and a frosted hurricane lamp with a real candle, and our server shortly appeared in a black dinner jacket and black tie, speaking with an Old World accent we guessed might be Belgian. No, no down-market drift.

Cuisine described as "continental" might have had an alluring patina a generation or two ago, but nowadays it suggests museum cooking. Bella Vista is one of the Bay Area’s premier view restaurants anyway, and views tend to be conversation pieces. The view is why people are there, and the food only has to be good enough to keep them from getting up and leaving in disappointment.

As it turns out, Bella Vista’s food is quite a bit better than that, and while it is old-fashioned — I found myself wondering if the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton might offer a similar menu if it were moved to a lonely mountain road — it’s far from arthritic. Good food always does honor to a restaurant, of course, and is a sound fallback plan for any view restaurant in the event (at some point inevitable) that the view is temporarily obscured by weather or … other forces. We found the air hazy and smoke scented when we arrived; was Larry Ellison hosting a huge barbecue somewhere on the glittering carpet of lights below?

No grilling at Bella Vista. The kitchen’s main instruments are the sauté pan and the oven. New Zealand mussels ($14), for instance — gigantic ones — were arrayed on the half shell, slathered with garlic, parsley, and butter, and briefly roasted. This was fine by us, especially since the puddles of leftover melted butter were perfect for sopping up with the formidably sour sourdough bread.

For the relief of unbearable garlic breath, we were presented with an intermezzo of peach sorbet, spooned into sturdy sherry glasses that resembled dwarf champagne trumpets. Across the way: a birthday gathering of eight or so, with some off-key singing, which grew lustier as the wine disappeared. If we were at all tempted to join in, we were soon distracted by the arrival of our big plates, one of which was a simply gorgeous lobster tail ($55), shelled and sautéed in butter. The less done to lobster, the better; no fancy sauces, please, or incorporations into pasta or risotto. Just butter, and maybe some boiled new potatoes, a ration of seared green beans (squared off and stacked like firewood), and a smear of splendidly orange puree of roasted carrot.

Veal au poivre ($24) was similarly accompanied, except the potatoes gave way to a wild-rice pilaf. The slender, tender sheets of meat were bathed in a Dijon cream sauce dotted with green peppercorns, and while I have become uneasy about meat and almost always shun veal, whose production doesn’t bear much looking into, I was not at all sorry I failed to shun here.

Dessert production tilts toward soufflés for two ($18), and trayfuls emerge regularly from the kitchen. Raspberry was recommended to us (over chocolate and Grand Marnier); I found the soufflé itself to be eggy (with no burst of raspberry inside) but the swirl of sauce on the plate to be a winsome combination of butter, caramelized sugar, and whole raspberries. It could easily have been spooned over vanilla ice cream or pound cake or just eaten like zabaglione from a tall glass. Even if someone (not me!) were seen licking it right off the plate, it would be hard to find fault. *

BELLA VISTA CONTINENTAL RESTAURANT

Dinner: Tues.–Thurs., 5–9 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5–10 p.m.

13451 Skyline Blvd., Woodside

(650) 851-1229

www.bvrestaurant.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Pleasant noise level

Wheelchair accessible

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