Volume 41 [2006–07]

Class of 2007: The Dry Spells

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CLUBS Bulgarian Throat-Singing and Bare Trees Appreciation Society, Analog Tape-Cutter Pep Squad

SUPERLATIVE Most Likely to Run Away from Grad School and Join a Band of Gypsy Violinists

How did four fresh-faced young women with freshly minted bachelor’s-degree diplomas from New York’s Bard College and a yen for Left Coast adventure end up making music amid the fog banks, dim sum depots, and Russian sweet shops of San Francisco’s Richmond District? Pure chance, thanks to guitarist-vocalist Adria Otte, a music and Asian studies major who gravitated toward the Bay Area after the foursome’s 2004 graduation, magnetized by the experimental music and the Asian American communities, pulling her Dry Spells bandmates — vocalist-guitarist Thalia Harbour, vocalist-violinist April Hayley, and drummer Caitlin Pierce — into her orbit.

"After graduating, we all had our freak-out, like, ‘What are we doing?’ " Otte, 25, says, just leaving her job at Meridian Gallery. The four met at Bard — Harbour was Otte’s freshman dorm neighbor, and Pierce dwelled just down the hall and had befriended Hayley — and formed the Dry Spells in 2002 and, as Otte puts it, "just played for fun because we were all supposedly serious students." But as academic distractions peeled away and they ended up in the same Richmond-area house, they began to buckle down and play seriously.

The Dry Spells’ diligence has paid off, with a self-released, self-titled, and semimastered EP. Beautifully recorded on tape by the Fucking Champs’ Tim Green at his Louder Studios, The Dry Spells echoes with reverb-y lyric guitar, plinging bells, a touch of droning melodica, and baklava-sweet harmonies that evoke the minimal post-punk of Electrelane and the maximal ethno-folk-punk of Camper Van Beethoven. The band may cite Fleetwood Mac and Fairport Convention as primary sources, but they’re neither as pop-y nor as reverent as those groups. Imagine, instead, indie-rock babes in the woods, a short 38 Geary ride from a mist-strewn Lone Mountain, kidnapped by Romany rovers in order to study the dark, dreamy arts of folk song.

Yet who knows what forms the Dry Spells will assume or what sounds they’ll adopt or adapt in the future? At a Café du Nord show in July, bassist Diego Gonzalez — with whom Otte, Harbour, and Hayley performed in kindred Bard grad Ezra Feinberg’s Citay — joined the group on stage. He stuck out like a sore thumb, I joke, though Otte assures me that he’ll likely remain a permanent member. And now Pierce has departed to work on a sociology doctorate at Johns Hopkins University — the EP, it turns out, was a rush job preceding her move. "We wanted something that sounded more organic," Otte says, "because we definitely come out of a more organic place." (Kimberly Chun)

www.myspace.com/thedryspells

Class of 2007: The White Barons

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CLUBS Detention hall, Saturday school, Motörhead Appreciation Society

QUOTE "We’re all fuckin’ wasted. It’s one big van full of trouble, comin’ to a town near you."

"Yeah, I just rolled out of bed," Baroness Eva von Slut says when I give her a call at 2 p.m. the day after the White Barons’ show at Thee Parkside. Ah, the White Barons. The fuckin’ White Barons. They were a marketing machine of dubious T-shirt messages — rolled bills, razor blades, powder piles, and crossed keys — before they played their first show, and if I didn’t know von Slut from Thee Merry Widows, I might’ve been reticent to check them out: bands who have their swag down pat before playing out usually blow their nut before anything exciting happens.

Not so with the WBs. With von Slut on vocals, Baron Johnny One Eye and Nate von Wahnsinn from the Whiskey Dick Darryls on guitar and bass, respectively, and Baron Adam von Keys, formerly of All Bets Off, on drums, the group was pretty much a lock to achieve rock ‘n’ roll juggernaut status before playing a note.

Sure enough, when I caught them opening for the Dwarves during Noise Pop, though I thought I knew what to expect, I was laid out by their raw-boned punk ‘n’ roll brutality. I don’t mean to blow too much smoke up her ass, ’cause I’ll have to live with it when I see her around town, but von Slut’s got some goddamned pipes, like a ’65 Triumph chopper without mufflers, like Glenn Danzig if he drank more whiskey and weren’t three feet tall. Her vocals with the Barons are nothing like they are with the Widows: stripped of the comparatively genteel stylings of psychobilly, they range from a throaty wail to a flesh-peeling scream. Perhaps more surprising is that underneath the band’s power lurk solid hooks, as evidenced on this year’s Gearhead debut, Up All Night with the White Barons. The songs range from broken-hearted barnstormers like the opener, "You Never Were," with bassist Nate’s hilarious mongo-gorilla background grunts, to a battery of unapologetic drinkin’ and druggin’ party anthems — "Wicked Ways," "Champagne & Cocaine," and "How High."

So are the White Barons a one-trick-pony party band? Do you need a key bump and a shot of Jack to smell what they’re cookin’? I’d say no. In a town where people front so-called rock groups while sitting in chairs, where the vocalist’s outfit is often (intentionally) more memorable than the music, where freak folk acoustic scruffy beards in their grandpa’s shuffleboard action slacks have elbowed out the rock ‘n’ roll impulse, the Barons hearken back to a time when seeing a band live was like a good, honest fistfight, not a chess game with Noam Chomsky.

"Should I talk some shit?" von Slut says. "I would say the lamest thing about the SF music scene is some hipster-ass, girlfriend-jeans-wearing motherfuckers. That seems to have taken over — the most important thing is the image and the fashion.

"Man, we’re livin’ it. We’re livin’ the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. We’re down in the trenches. We’re making rock ‘n’ roll happen." (Duncan Scott Davidson)

WHITE BARONS Soapbox Derby preshow. Oct. 27, 8 p.m., call for price. El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF. (415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com

“Rembrandt to Thiebaud: A Decade of Collecting Works on Paper”

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REVIEW Dada artist Kurt Schwitters maintained that formal elements were second only to an art object’s ability to remain in flux — in spite of the static qualities inherent in his own work. No completed artwork could ever be fully finished but rather was kept open for future reinvention. In the current exhibition at the Legion of Honor, "Rembrandt to Thiebaud: A Decade of Collecting Works on Paper," which includes an approximately 5-by-7-inch collage by Schwitters, this constant plasticity of the art object seems to have come to the fore. Not only has the reception of such a variety of works — ranging from Michelangelo to John Baldessari, James Whistler to Richard Misrach — changed drastically since the inception of the art market, around the time of Rembrandt, but what might be considered an artwork and how its production affects this consideration has morphed as well.

The exhibition opens with a few 15th-century engravings by Albrecht Dürer, introducing us to hundreds of pieces from the largest collection of works on paper in the western United States via the golden ratio. This ideal is slowly dismantled throughout the course of the exhibit as it moves toward the contemporary, exemplified along the way by Yves Klein’s postage stamp, painted in his signature International Klein Blue. Matted and framed, this initially functional object has been elevated to the status of original artwork, which at this moment is perhaps more original than the Dürer multiple. Similarly, Edward Kienholz’s 1969 work For $146.00 was initially a direct illustration of the cost of the piece and has come to illustrate what the work is not worth today. Without making any physical changes, the transformative nature of the collection has led to an intrinsic modification of the artworks contained therein. (Ava Jancar)

"REMBRANDT TO THIEBAUD: A DECADE OF COLLECTING WORKS ON PAPER" Through Oct 7. Tues.–Sun., 9:30 a.m.–5 p.m. California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, near 34th Ave and Clement, SF. $5–$8, free for 10 and under (free for all Tues.). (415) 863-3330, www.thinker.org/legion

A fine ‘Mesh?

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A defining characteristic of the US imperial program in Iraq, we are often told, is the resolute refusal to learn anything from history. True to the TV-weaned attention spans of our triumphant culture, history here usually means the past four years — at least before stretching to include the eerily identical adventures of the British Empire less then a century ago, let alone anything going back any further. But as Bush’s recent Vietnam-Iraq comparison suggests with trusty ass-backwardness, it’s not losing track of history that the current administration does so well as it is roundly and brazenly bastardizing it to suit present purposes — namely, the perennial ones of greed and power.

It falls to others without quite so much of a vested interest in conquest to actually learn from history, by which we mean something more than crudely customizing it to serve nefarious opportunities. This is part of the impetus behind Berkeley-based TheatreInSearch’s exploration of the earliest of Mesopotamian adventurers: an ancient Sumerian king of way back in the BC who comes down to us via 12 clay tablets draped in legend and myth, in the guise of history’s first superhero.

But what exactly can we learn from so historically remote a text? TheatreInSearch’s production itself seems unsure. As if to at once employ and distance us from our own contemporary intellectual and aesthetic lenses, director George Charbak’s free adaptation of The Epic of Gilgamesh (retitled here The Epic of Gilgamesh with a Long Prologue) frames the ancient hero’s exploits with certain knowing modern references, including a comical couple of Beckett-like pseudo-philosophizing gadflies (Michael Green and Elias D. Protopsaltis) and, more centrally, a seemingly all-knowing, modern-day narrator (Ana Bayat).

The narrator, addressing the audience like a museum docent, literally pulls the veil from the archaic literary figure — seated statue-like at the summit of a pyramidal series of steps at the center of set designer Kim Tolman’s clean, uncluttered gallery of ancient artifacts — while furnishing the title’s not overly long but definitely muddled prologue. Half ironical and half indignant over her semidivine subject (played with an at times penetrating boyishness by the soon walking and talking Roham Shaikhani), she asks her audience in somewhat mocking tones to study Gilgamesh as a specimen of outrageous hubris and mindless destruction.

Rather statically staged and inconsistently acted, the more dramatic scenes get some added lift from off-stage musical accompaniment by Larry Klein on the oud. The more successful humor in the play, meanwhile, arises not from the strained (and overly intrusive) vaudevillian posturing of the two philosopher-commentators but from smart use of the text’s repetitive language and its human situations.

The serious aspects of the play are less consistent. Certain characters lack adequate definition, while some scenes could do with some judicious trimming. If, as the play’s narrator suggests, superheroes from Gilgamesh to Rambo (to real-life superhero manqués like George W. Bush in his flight suit) represent nothing so much as a flight from history, with its attendant lessons and responsibilities, then they deserve only our scorn. But a superannuated superhero like Gilgamesh, confronting death as man and myth together, would seem to provide other opportunities.

In this respect, our narrator is far from a reliable one. Perhaps intentionally (though in truth text and performance are too confused to really say), her one-note "modern" perspective is itself being held up for critique, as if to demonstrate the pitfalls of too superior an attitude to barbarisms past and present. Either way, by the time of the accompanying epilogue, the narrator’s indignation and sarcasm devolve into little more than an awkward rant that closes the play without any sense that the journey in between has counted for anything.

When at the end the veil is again tossed over Gilgamesh, however, his posture is no longer erect, and his features bleed through; he leans desperately forward, his face just visible through the gauze, twisted into a frightened mask of everlasting perplexity. Shaikhani’s expression tells us infinitely more here than any expert could and in doing so almost saves the show single-handedly at the last moment. A neat feat that would have been for a fallen superhero.

THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH WITH A LONG PROLOGUE

Through Sept. 2, $12–$20

Fri–Sat, 8 p.m.; Sun, 2 p.m.

Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk.

(510) 262-0584

Heaven’s kitchen

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As an unreconstructed autocrat of the kitchen, I was surprised to discover recently that two cooks working in the same space need not sting each other to death, like scorpions in a bottle — even if one of them is me. It helps, of course, if the space is adequate and the cooks have agreed beforehand as to who is making what. This is a matter of what lawyers like to call comity, which basically means trying not to step on other people’s toes, lest one’s own be trampled.

Two cooks were needed for our Mendocino idyll (complete with vegetable garden!) because the constituency of hungry people was larger than either cook was accustomed to providing for and included several small children who enjoy watching Hell’s Kitchen on Fox. If these children expected screaming matches and dismissal scenes mixed equally from scorn and tears, they must have been disappointed; our sounds were mostly agreeable ones, with the occasional foul word discreetly spat into a napkin, like a peach pit.

The feeding of children — even cheerful and well-mannered children who aren’t picky — left me humbled. How spoiled I have been all these years, running my little food fief with scarcely a hint of interference or meddling, stocking and cleaning it as I’ve seen fit, turning out a medley of dishes that have reflected my own evolving concerns about health, environment, and ethical responsibility with the full-throated support of my audience of one. When people agree about food, they are well on their way to agreeing about a great deal more, and agreement is a chief ingredient of that elusive state we often call happiness.

Children, it turns out, are subject to spells of intense, almost disabling hunger, which then have a way of subsiding after three or four bites of a burrito or some petrale sole, or half a Pop-Tart or a swig of organic lemonade or ball of chocolate-chocolate-chip-cookie dough from a ready-to-bake tray. Children, like birds, eat continually but lightly, leaving behind them a trail of half-consumed edibles with tooth marks, and it falls to the people in charge to collect these devalued but not worthless items and try to figure out what can be done with them. If the producers of "Hell’s Kitchen" need a fresh idea, I know a nice place on a hill overlooking the coast.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Trust anyone over 50?

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER As the summer squeezes out its last warmish days, we can safely say that we’re glad for one thing: that with the end of the season comes those last nagging reminders of the Summer of Love, all that was great and good about hippie Frisky, the perpetually remarketable, oh-so-remarkable boomer musical legacy, and how radical it was that so many acolytes drifted here four decades ago to gobble acid and find themselves. Yet are we in the clear to say that we’re all a bit weary of the free-floating miasma of hype? By Jerry’s beard, it happens only every five to 10 years, when the once anti-establishment boomer establishment turns on, tunes in, and pats itself on the back yet again as the 25th, 30th, or 45th anniversaries roll around. I know an overweening sense of self-importance seems to be an intrinsic part of one’s duty as an American citizen, but has there ever been a more self-congratulatory generation than the one that birthed the Summer of Love? Can we now unofficially rename it the Summer of Self-Love? Can I be excused from the creaky, walker-bound group grope that will accompany the big five-oh?

Yep, hippie-bashing, at this queasy, war-wracked juncture, is a tired, predictable, oft-rightie-instigated contact sport that’s far too easy to indulge in. Still, has there ever been a wave of so-called progressives so determined to look back, so intent in repackaging their relics for resale? You can stuff mewling protests against ageism in your tie-dyed Depends. Boomer rockers have been so busy crowing from the rooftops about their accomplishments for so many years that they’ve failed to notice how incredibly bored youngsters — and even not-so-young ‘uns — have become with Grandpappy’s zillionth sing-along to "Love Me Do." Indeedy, nothing can ever compare to your old-time rock ‘n’ roll, your first trip, orgy, no-nukes protest, Jell-O wrasslin’ bout, ad infinitum. But must we still hear about it? This from the same gen, captains helming a capsizing music industry, that turned the phrase “classic rock,” that has insisted on recognizing every anniversary of ’60s-era recording classics, from the Beatles to Sly Stone to Jefferson Airplane to brrrzzzzzzz …

Grrrzzzdhoooh-ha! Oh, were you saying? By the way, when the music’s over — turn off the light, OK? I know hippies weren’t the ones to self-aggrandizingly dub themselves the Greatest Generation. And perhaps we’ve all come to expect far too much from our self-promoting, self-obsessed, yet always self-critical forebears. Yet when word of bickering between competing SF Summer of Love events in August began drifting hither — rumors that Summer of Love 40th Anniversary producer Boots Hughston tells me are simply that: rumors (“We’d been promoting Summer of Love for a year and a half. They had been working on the Hope and Beyond AIDS project in other countries, but this year they decided to change the name of the event — we have a lot of respect for them”) — it seemed like a little peace was in order. After all, the entire purpose behind the Sept. 2 event, Hughston explains, is to “remind people there are other things rather than taking over other countries and going to war over oil — like compassion and understanding. Why not remind people where it all began in 1967?” That’s why Hughston says Country Joe McDonald, Taj Mahal, Canned Heat, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and others are performing free, in between the spiritual and political speakers.

Good intentions go far with even crankaholics like yours truly. But how did the event — which could have used some younger, relevant artists indebted to the San Francisco Sound in its lineup (look for a sampling at this weekend’s Ben Lomond Indian Summer Music Festival) — come to fall on the very day most of its younger demographic might be burning elsewhere? “There is a strong synergy between us and Burning Man, you’re right,” Hughston says. “But you can always go to Burning Man, and you can’t always go to the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love.” He believes some burners will be leaving early to return for his 40th event. Smokin’.

SUMMER OF LOVE 40TH ANNIVERSARY

Sun/2, 10 a.m.–6 p.m., free with flower

Speedway Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF

www.2b1records.com/summeroflove40th

EVERY BLOOMING SHRINKING VIOLET

One of the most seriously wonderful folk-rock LPs to come down the pike of late has to be Marissa Nadler’s Songs III: Bird on the Water, out last year on UK’s Peace Frog label and recently picked up for US distribution by Kemado. It’s anything but a purist artifact — "The reverb probably gives it that haunting quality. It’s something I’ve always used in abundance on my voice to many people’s distaste," Nadler, 26, says with a laugh, speaking from outside Boston.

Alas, Nadler has often struggled with intense shyness in presenting her creations. "Maybe it’s a masochistic thing that I want to put myself through the pain of performing," the songwriter says. "But at no point is the first song easy." Ever considered Blues Brothers–style shades? "I’ve definitely thought about it," she confesses.

MARISA NADLER

Wed/29, 9:30 p.m., $8

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

www.hemlocktavern.com

BURN TO SHINE?

BEN LOMOND INDIAN SUMMER MUSIC FESTIVAL


Is this where today’s summer lovers are really headed? Bay Area and Los Angeles creatives like Entrance, Paula Frazer, and Mammatus converge. Fri/31–Sun/2, $12–$18 per show; $40–$45 three-day pass. Henfling’s Tavern, 9450 Hwy. 9, Ben Lomond. www.myspace.com/benlomondindiansummer

BEYONCE


D-day for Bey? Fri/31, 7:30 p.m., $75.95–$143.57. Oracle Arena, 7000 Coliseum Way, Oakl. www.ticketmaster.com

CHUCK PROPHET


Sweetwater stemmed? The Bay Area singer-songwriter bids farewell to the historic club with its last show, the day before it shutters due to a drastic rent increase. Fri/31, 9:30 p.m., $15. Sweetwater Saloon, 153 Throckmorton, Mill Valley. www.ticketweb.com.

POLAR GOLDIE CATS


Paws for LA’s feral chamber post-punkers. Fri/31, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com.

Reasons for the season

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FILM On any given day, on any given Muni, you’re likely to hear John Carpenter’s Halloween theme trilling out of some kid’s cell. Sprung from one gloriously terrifying, terrifyingly simple idea (in a word: babysitters!), the seminal horror series welcomes its ninth installment with Rob Zombie’s remake of the 1978 original. I can hear you, horror snob: "Ninth installment? Remake? Why the fuck would I wanna see that?" Well, really, it’s simpler than a razor-bladed Snickers bar:

1) Halloween sequels are generally enjoyable — and I’m not even talking about the attempts to hipsterfy the series with entries starring Josh Hartnett (1998) or a webcam (2002, which also featured Busta Rhymes delivering the immortal line, "Trick or treat, motherfucker!") I’m talking the shit that nobody ever watches, except us late-night cable addicts: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) and Halloween 5 (1989), i.e. the Danielle Harris–as–Michael Myers’s–long-lost-niece era; and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), starring a pre-Clueless Paul Rudd. Don’t get me started on Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), or I’ll be singing about Silver Shamrock long past Oct. 31.

2) The Carpenter universe allows for remakes. One of the director’s best efforts is The Thing (1982), a most righteous reimagining itself. In recent years, The Fog (1980) and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) have been snatched up by a Hollywood that thinks nobody remembers the early ’80s. Halloween is his most sacred product, but it’s also his most unusual, taking on a life beyond the Carpenter canon. Michael Myers is a universally recognized movie monster, sharing Halloween Superstore costume-rack space with Freddy, Jason, and Austin Powers. If Tinseltown was molesting They Live (1988), we might have words. But Myers’s kill-crazy, supernatural blankness lets him roam different landscapes (Haddonfield, private school, the Internet) for different directors and remain reliably menacing.

3) Which brings me to Zombie. He’s a huge horror fan anyway, and if you’ve seen The Devil’s Rejects (2005) or House of 1000 Corpses (2003), you know he’s all about paying homage to terror cinema past. But he’s got his own style too — gruesome, jump-cutty, and nihilistic. He’s also inspired enough to cast Malcolm McDowell as Dr. Loomis (and Danielle Harris as Annie Brackett) in his remake. Hell, even Danny Trejo is in this thing. Is Zombie’s Halloween any good? Am I steering you wrong? I can’t even say, man. I’m seeing it the day before you do — right after I interview Zombie. Ass-backwards, yes. But it’s Halloween, a remake of my all-time favorite movie, not to mention my all-time favorite holiday. I’ll eat some razor blades myself if I have to. (Cheryl Eddy)

To read an interview with Rob Zombie, click here.

HALLOWEEN

Opens Fri/31 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

Concierges on the cheap

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› news@sfbg.com

The concierge desk in the lobby of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel was doing a brisk business on a recent Sunday afternoon. Located a few strides north of Union Square, the Drake is best known for its colorful doormen, who work the curb out front in cartoonishly red costumes. But on this day the doormen seemed to be just killing time, while the concierge, a tall blond named Jill Schultze, was dealing with the long line inside.

"How can I help you?" Schultze asked the elderly couple at the front of the queue. They told her they were interested in taking a bus sightseeing tour. She looked pleased, recommended a specific tour of the Napa wine country, then picked up her phone to make the reservation.

"That was easy," the wife said once the transaction was complete.

For the next half hour, Schultze — whom I watched from a nearby chair without her knowing that I was a journalist — set up one bus tour after the next. In fact, that’s all she seemed to do — or, at least, all she did well. When a party asked for a recommendation for Indian food, she suggested the nearby Naan-N-Curry on Eddy Street, a restaurant that (apparently unknown to her) closed down last year.

One might expect better of a concierge at a place like the Drake, which boasts a AAA three-diamond rating. But the Drake is one of many hotels in San Francisco that have decided professional, in-house concierges are too expansive to bankroll. Instead, the hotels are starting to lease their concierge desks to outside companies, often charging $1,000 a month for a spot in their lobbies. The outside companies, most of which are established vendors in the tourism world, happily incur the cost — and the responsibility of the desk — in exchange for exclusive access to the hotels’ clientele.

Tower Tours, the bus sightseeing company affiliated with the Drake, is the largest player in the growing outsourced concierge business. The company has created a sister enterprise called Tour Links, which runs the concierge desks at five San Francisco hotels: the Drake, the Argonaut, the Best Western Tuscan Inn, the Hyatt Fisherman’s Wharf, and the Hotel Whitcomb. Tour Links concierges like Schultze can range from longtime professionals to summer interns. They’re rotated from one hotel to the next, depending on how well a particular hotel likes them and where the holes in the Tour Links rotation might be. According to one former employee, Tour Links concierges are required to book Tower Tours bus sightseeing trips. The employee told the Guardian the concierges are required to book a minimum number of tours per month, although higher-ups within Tour Links deny there are quotas.

"Our tour desk do provide information about Tower Tours," Hagen Choi, the president of Tour Links and Tower Tours, conceded, speaking in choppy English. "But our concierge also provide high-level service. As long as guests get good service, it doesn’t matter who operates the desk."

Laura Meith, the assistant general manager at the Tuscan Inn, had high praise for the service Tour Links provides. She said her concierges are well-informed, loyal, and outgoing. But Meith also admitted that she worked for Tower Tours as a concierge in 2004 (before the bus sightseeing company formalized Tour Links). She said she was thrown into the fray with little training — "I quickly discovered Zagat and Google and really just utilized those resources" — and said she was denied tips and commissions.

"Basically, concierges can make commissions on anything they sell," Meith said. "At an outsourced concierge desk, the concierges don’t make the money, the company does. The incentive is to drive the sales." She added, "From the guests’ perspective, they don’t know, nor do they care."

The Holiday Inn at Fisherman’s Wharf and the Radisson Wharf both currently lease their desks to Airport Express, the mom-and-pop shuttle company that competes with Lorrie’s Airport Service. Like Tower Tours, Airport Express has created a sister enterprise, Concierge of America, to handle that responsibility. Gil Sherabi, Concierge of America’s head concierge, told us his company allows its concierges to keep their tips and doesn’t mandate any sales quota. They do, however, exclusively book Airport Express tours; it wouldn’t make financial sense if they didn’t.

"We only care about serving the customers," Sherabi said. "We don’t have any quotas on anything. As long as the hotel is happy, we’re happy too."

The Hyatt Regency has handed over its concierge desk to Presentation Services, the company that manages the hotel’s event technologies, such as stage sets, projectors, and audio-video. Presentation Services runs the desk in exchange for the business the hotel provides it. The four-star Westin Market Street leased its concierge desk to Tour Links until last week. According to several inside sources, SuperShuttle, Lorrie’s, and Airport Express are in a bidding war to fill the vacancy.

And then there’s Shell Vacations, the nationwide time-share company that owns the Donatello Hotel, the Inn at the Opera, and the Suites at Fisherman’s Wharf. Concierges at each of these locations are required to cajole guests into taking time-share tours for Shell Vacations. Shell Vacations also runs the concierge desk at the Sheraton Wharf, where its concierges pull the same stunt.

"Our concierges do have quotas they have to meet," Yvonne Merzenich, the assistant general manager at the Donatello, said. The sales center "has negotiated packages with local restaurants, so that if guests want a nice meal, we’ll offer them $100 off that meal if they go to one of our time-share presentations."

Professional, in-house concierges are understandably concerned about the long-term viability of their jobs and the impact of outsourcing on their reputations. I met with one member of Les Clefs d’Or, the prestigious concierge association, who called this new wave of outsourced concierges "un-American and absurd." Another told us that hotel managers need to get their priorities straight.

"It’s a difficult situation because the concierges do not generate revenue," she said. (All the concierges quoted in this story requested to remain anonymous, as they’re prohibited from speaking to the media without the consent of their hotels.) "But the concierges provide the services that the guests come back for. You can’t put a dollar amount on all that we provide."

Whether guests feel that way is a different matter. I caught up with Sandra Curtis, a tourist from New Castle, Australia, who was staying at the Drake recently. When I told her that the concierge who had just helped arrange her bus tour worked for a bus tour company, Curtis was unfazed.

"The concierge was very helpful," Curtis said. "And that’s the way it’s happening now, isn’t it? We’re from Australia, and everything’s outsourced there too."

Susan McDonough, a fellow Drake guest from Cairo, Egypt, was less enthusiastic.

"I question [whether] if I ask the concierge anything else other than about bus tours, will she work just as hard?" McDonough said. "It’s a way for the hotel to cut corners. I don’t like it."

Last year the Wall Street Journal was the first mainstream media outlet to identify the outsourced concierge phenomenon. In a story headlined "The Concierge’s Secret Agenda," the Journal revealed that many of America’s top hotel chains are leasing their concierge desks to third-party employers. The chains include Hyatt, Marriott, Starwood, and Kimpton. Online travel giant Expedia.com had already acquired control of 38 concierge desks when the article hit the streets. Ticket vendor Vegas.com had obtained control of six desks, with plans to open up shop in several dozen more hotels in 2007. As many as 15 hotels in Manhattan had already caved in, and there were more in places like Chicago, Orlando, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.

Unmentioned in the Journal‘s exposé was just how unruly the outsourced concierge game is in San Francisco. The national trend in the hotel industry is toward large-scale outsourced concierge providers, companies like Travelocity, Expedia.com, and Vegas.com. It’s the providers who are expanding their services and courting new hotels. But in San Francisco, midtier hotels are the ones driving the murky business. Many have leased their concierge desks multiple times, unsatisfied with the service they were receiving but unwilling to pay for better.

The Westin Market Street has switched four times, transitioning from in-house concierges to Gray Line Bus Tours, back to in-house, then to Tour Links. Last week the hotel fired Tour Links and is looking for another company to take its place. The Drake has switched outside providers four times as well. In just the past few years, it has fired Tour Links, hired Lorrie’s Airport Service, fired it, and rehired Tour Links.

Ed Gunderson, the Drake’s general manager, said his hotel outsources its desk because concierges are "pretty cost prohibitive" and "if you can find a really good [outside] company and can keep some autonomy over the concierges they bring in, it’s the best of both worlds." When asked if fluctuating from one provider to another is really the best of both worlds, especially for the guests, he replied, "Tour Links is providing a service we’re very happy with."

Adding to the turmoil is Choi. Most professional concierges we spoke to don’t like Choi. "He’s terrible and very litigious" was how one Les Clefs d’Or concierge described the Tour Links and Tower Tours president. "He’s scared the shit out of me." Many concierges associate the outsourcing phenomenon that’s costing them their jobs with Choi and Tour Links more so than with the hotels.

The Northern California Concierge Association has urged its members to strike back by enacting an embargo on Tower Tours bus trips. (There are three primary bus tour providers in San Francisco — Tower Tours, Gray Line, and Super Sightseeing — and each offers comparable sightseeing tours around the city, to the Napa wine country, and to Muir Woods.) The NCCA also won’t let Tour Links concierges join its ranks. "He can drink my blood, and I can drink his," one NCCA member said of Choi. "I think that’s a mutual feeling there."

Earlier this summer, I headed to Tour Links headquarters for a chat with the controversial Choi. I wanted to gain some general insights into the outsourced concierge phenomenon and some deeper ones into the operations of the city’s largest provider. No surprise: Tour Links and Tower Tours share the same headquarters, an impressive office on Beach Street with an unobstructed view of the Hyde Street Pier. I found Choi holed up inside, in a small, cluttered workplace. His desk was strewn with papers, and his walls were festooned with pictures of his daughter (a former Tour Links concierge) and a framed copy of the Wall Street Journal "The Concierge’s Secret Agenda" report. Choi had even highlighted his company’s name in the article.

To my surprise, I liked Choi immediately. He was funny and personable, and he spoke about his company with disarming candor. He told me that in 2003, Expedia.com came to town and started cutting deals with hotels behind the scenes. Once contracts had been finalized, he said, it approached tourism vendors looking for hands to run its newly acquired desks. With more than 20 years of hotel experience — among other things, he used to sell used furniture from hotels undergoing renovation — Choi recognized concierge outsourcing as the newest trend and jumped on the bandwagon.

"The industry is evolving all the time," he told us. "We have to go along with it."

Choi said Expedia.com is still the puppet master at most of the hotels where Tour Links operates. (Expedia.com officials didn’t return numerous calls requesting an interview.) Choi also confided that it’s financially tough to get by in the outsourced concierge business, what with having to pay a hotel for a service it should be paying the lessee to provide. He added that most outside concierge services in the city don’t have the financial resources to expand and that he didn’t know if Tour Links would still be around in a few years.

"We’ll see," he said, his eyes twinkling and blinking in rapid succession. "But if not me, it’ll be somebody else."<\!s>*

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

It’s all unofficial at this point, but I’m hearing that Mayor Gavin Newsom is (finally) getting ready to appoint a new city planning director, a fact that sounds like an uninteresting bit of bureaucratic business but is actually one of the most important decisions he’ll ever make. And it will impact everyone who lives in the city, for years to come.

The director of city planning holds an immensely powerful job in this town. You wonder why there are too many cars on the streets and too many tall office buildings downtown, why there’s not enough affordable housing and not enough open space, why Muni is overcrowded and doesn’t run on time? I can trace all of those problems back to decisions made by the city’s planning directors over the past several decades.

In theory, the director reports to the Planning Commission, which sets policy on things like desirable types of development, where offices should go, where blue-collar jobs should be protected, and how many new people can be crammed into a geographic area without overwhelming the capacity of the streets and the transit systems. The way city planning textbooks talk about the job, planners develop visions of urban space, looking at what patterns of land use and development will improve the quality of life in a community, then set zoning rules to foster those visions.

In reality, here’s what’s been happening under the incumbent, Dean Macris, in San Francisco:

A developer who wants to make a lot of money building a project — these days, probably a high-rise full of expensive condos — hires a fancy architect and comes to the planning director with a proposal. The fancy architect talks about (to use the sort of language you actually hear inside the Planning Department) "a tall, slender shaft rising between the mounds of the downtown skyline" — no, I didn’t make that up — and next thing you know, Macris is in love. Oooh, he wants that tower — so he and his staff devise planning rules and guidelines to make it possible for the developer to build it.

(Of course, the way the Planning Department budget works only encourages that sort of behavior. Much of the money to run Macris’s fiefdom comes from developer fees. No developers, no fees.)

Then the activists come along and demand that the developer kick something back to the community. So the developer — who stands to make an absolute killing on the project — throws a few dollars around for a little bit of affordable housing and a few community amenities. And next thing you know, there’s an enormous high-rise under construction.

Developer-driven planning is, by definition, terrible. It was under Macris’s prior reign, in the 1980s, that something like 30 million square feet of high-rise office space was built downtown, driving up housing prices, attracting more traffic, overburdening Muni, and, since high-rise offices cost more to serve than they pay in taxes, hammering the city budget.

And now the city is poised to make some absolutely critical decisions about the future. We need a real planning director who isn’t a developer toady.

The search is down to two or maybe three candidates, at least one of them truly awful. And I hear from good sources that Newsom is listening to Macris’s advice on the choice. I fear for my city.<\!s>*

Supes should run redevelopment

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, scrambling to blunt community criticism of the Redevelopment Agency’s activities in Bayview–Hunters Point, has appointed a new agency director, Fred Blackwell. But the problem was not with the top of the agency (the outgoing director, Marcia Rosen, was neither corrupt nor incompetent) but rather with the entire direction that redevelopment has taken in San Francisco under several generations of mayors. It’s time to take seriously the suggestion of Sup. Ross Mirkarimi — that the agency be taken out of the mayor’s control and given to the district-elected supervisors.

Redevelopment is a powerful tool that has been terribly misused all over the nation, and the scars in San Francisco are real and lasting. A rapacious Redevelopment Agency determined to wipe out low-income housing devastated huge swaths of the Western Addition and South of Market in the 1960s, and the communities still haven’t fully recovered. Some people argue that the entire program should be abolished — that redevelopment should be consigned to the dustbin of bad urban history.

But at a time when it’s terribly hard for cities like San Francisco to raise money for affordable housing, basic infrastructure (see accompanying editorial), and ambitious programs like public power, the legal advantages of redevelopment are too good to give up. A state-chartered redevelopment agency sells bonds and raises money with nothing to back up the bonds except the projected increase in property taxes expected from improving a blighted area. The city can’t do that on its own; if it could, then raising, say, a billion dollars for affordable housing would be relatively simple.

In theory, the redevelopment agency could also fund municipal wi-fi, public power, and all sorts of other major projects.

The problem, of course, is that a lot of people in low-income neighborhoods don’t trust redevelopment — and given the history, it’s hard to blame them. But part of the essential problem with the Redevelopment Agency in past years has been its utter lack of accountability; the Western Addition and SoMa plans were drawn up in secret and executed with little regard for community input.

As long as San Francisco supervisors are elected by district, they will be, by definition, more accountable, closer to the neighborhoods, and less corrupted by money than any citywide elected official. Giving the board control over redevelopment is a far better model.

Plenty of cities allow their legislature to run redevelopment. The city councils of both Oakland and Berkeley also function as the directors of those cities’ redevelopment agencies. It’s time to move San Francisco into that column. *

A vote on public broadband

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EDITORIAL It’s annoying that San Francisco progressives and good-government voters will have to spend time and money this fall trying to defeat Mayor Gavin Newsom’s phony wi-fi initiative. It won’t be easy, either: the mayor is, in the words of one blogger, Sasha Magee, promising free ice cream. He’s telling San Franciscans that they can have wireless Internet access everywhere in town without paying a dime. Hard to get people to turn down that deal.

But the mayor isn’t telling the truth — and when this battle is over, the progressives need to offer a much better alternative.

For many people, the promise of Internet access in the mayor’s plan will prove to be entirely false. The wi-fi deal that Newsom has put together will probably work fine for people checking their e-mail on laptops from park benches downtown and outdoor tables at sidewalk cafés. But people who live or work deep inside buildings, far from windows and walls, won’t get any signal at all. And anyone who lives or works more than two stories up won’t get a signal either.

And of course, the free signal, when it works, won’t be fast enough to do much but (slowly) check your e-mail, if there are no attachments to download. You want real broadband, you’re going to have to pay a monthly fee.

That, as we have reported over and over, is because this is a private-sector deal: the network (if it’s actually built) will be owned by EarthLink and Google, and the two companies will be trying to make money off it. They’ll do that by selling premium service (that is, service at a rate most people would consider tolerable) and by targeting everyone on the network with ads.

Although the ballot measure is vague and legally meaningless, it will be the vote of confidence Newsom can use to push the Board of Supervisors to approve his EarthLink-Google deal — that is, unless, as has been widely suggested in the business media, EarthLink shifts direction and decides not to pursue any more municipal wi-fi deals and the city is left holding the bag. So advocates of a true universal broadband alternative need to start working now to present another, better option.

And the best way to do that is to begin drafting a comprehensive citywide broadband initiative for the June 2008 ballot.

Broadband access is and ought to be part of the city’s basic civil infrastructure — something that, like water (and, someday, electricity), is offered through a publicly owned and controlled system at the lowest possible rates. Low-cost broadband would be an immense advantage to local businesses and a huge convenience for local residents and (unlike Newsom’s joke of a deal) would actually do something to address the digital divide.

Wi-fi would be a part of the package, of course, but the plan should also include a citywide fiber-optic network that would bring reliable, fast, and technologically up-to-date Internet access to every address in the city. And while it would cost the city some money up front to build it, the system would almost certainly pay for itself in just a few years. And it could be paired with the construction of a citywide public power system.

Next June may not be a high-turnout election statewide, but in San Francisco, Democrats will be out in force with one of the most contested primaries in local history, pitting Assemblymember Mark Leno against Sen. Carole Migden for the Third District senate seat. Both candidates will be pushing voter turnout — and both can be pressured to support publicly owned municipal wi-fi as a campaign issue (and to back the growing antiprivatization agenda in San Francisco).

Defeating the mayor’s plan is just step one — and the time to start with step two is today.<\!s>*

Green City: Nice day for a green wedding

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY The desire to go green is starting to color everything, even the traditional white wedding. There is an increasing desire to make an ecofriendly statement on the big day, according to the Feb. 11 New York Times article "How Green Was My Wedding?" In fact, the demand is large enough now that a directory called Green Elegance Weddings (www.greeneleganceweddings.com), which aggregates contact info for green wedding vendors and services in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, was created to satisfy it.

In her new book, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding (Penguin Press HC), author Rebecca Mead estimates that during her three years of research from 2004 to 2006, the US wedding industry’s annual revenue grew by $40 billion to $161 billion, twice the amount of 1990. With so many greenbacks going into weddings, it’s no wonder that everyone from brides to entrepreneurs is considering how to marry the ceremonies with a desire to do the right thing.

One enterprising environmentalist, Corina Beczner, started Vibrant Events, a planning service based in Marin that pulls together local resources to create resource-efficient weddings for like-minded couples who are about to tie the knot. She got the idea after witnessing the weddings of friends while in business school.

"I realized the lack of meaning in modern weddings … and that aligning values of sustainability with weddings was a great way to integrate a more meaningful experience for everyone," Beczner wrote in an e-mail to the Guardian.

Weddings planned by Vibrant Events and other green wedding planning agencies, such as Chico’s Love Events, are fairly similar in time frame, staff volume, and other traditional planning factors. But they also use fewer finite resources, offset any possible pollution caused by the wedding, and take other steps to promote localism and sustainability.

This can mean using locally grown organic flowers and ingredients (in hors d’oeuvres and the cake), local vendors, and shuttle services and venue selections designed to cut down on emissions. Those who want a green wedding must be committed to the cause before any planning gets done.

Kelly Nichols and Alan Puccinelli of Danville, who met four years ago at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, are set to get married in October and hired Beczner to help them create a sustainable wedding. "I had taken a class on global warming, and I just felt that a wedding was the best venue to show my friends and family what they could do" to combat it, Nichols told us.

Nichols says that Beczner, who holds an MBA in sustainable management, let her take the reins in picking vendors, a location, methods of transportation, and other expenses. "There wasn’t any specific part of the planning process that was mandatory. [Beczner] made suggestions based on what we wanted to do for the wedding, such as telling us where to go to offset our carbon emissions and get local and organic food."

The couple’s green choices include the wedding site, Wildwood Acres in Lafayette, which rents chairs, tables, and china plates to patrons, cutting down on the long-term waste of resources on those obligatory supplies. Also, the couple reserved rooms for out-of-town guests near the Lafayette BART station, meaning celebrants can take the train in lieu of polluting taxi rides from the airport.

But greening one’s wedding isn’t cheap. Beczner estimates that a green wedding costs up to 15 percent more for items like flowers, food, and alcohol; that increase comes on top of the Bay Area’s higher [tk: mean or median? average] total wedding cost of approximately $35,000, according to Beczner — 125 percent the approximate national average of $28,000 reported in Mead’s book. This money ends up in the pockets of an average of 43 businesses at wedding’s end, according to Mead.

However, all those involved in the industry don’t share the benefit equally. When asked how lucrative Vibrant has been, Beczner replies, "I’d have to say that I’m making less money now than I was when I worked for nonprofits."

Of course, the financial aspect isn’t the most important to Beczner. She told us, "I’m much more excited [about helping] the earth than anything else."<\!s>*

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

Web Site of the Week

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www.current.tv/burningman

TV Free Burning Man is a project of Current TV, the user-generated video network launched by Al Gore in 2005, that will set up camp on the playa and send footage back to the default world. Last year’s effort was well received even by burners wary of corporations — largely because it had an authenticity created by filmmakers who understood the culture — and this year promises even more extensive coverage.

Save the golf courses

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OPINION Public golf is a historically vital part of San Francisco life. Imported to the city by immigrants from Scotland around 1900, golf here has retained its Scottish character as recreation for all types and ages. This is fostered by one of America’s outstanding collections of municipal courses, from the flagship Harding Park to Sharp Park — designed by Alister MacKenzie, golf’s Frank Lloyd Wright — to Gleneagles, hailed as one of the country’s finest nine-hole courses.

Of all the city’s courses, Lincoln Park is the oldest and most charming — a signature San Francisco landmark like its neighbor, the Golden Gate Bridge. Beginning in 1902, Lincoln was built on a hilly former cemetery by Tom Bendelow, who was known as the Johnny Appleseed of American golf, and Jack Neville, designer of Pebble Beach. Ansel Adams took some of his earliest published photographs there. Every national poll recognizes Lincoln as among America’s top 10 most-scenic public courses.

But today Lincoln needs help. After years of deferred maintenance, it’s now unplayable for much of the winter due to the lack of a modern drainage system. The ancient clubhouse is dilapidated. So play at Lincoln has declined. Some detractors now call for Lincoln to be bulldozed and replaced by skateboard and BMX bike parks, a soccer field, a driving range, and an events center. Such high-intensity uses are unrealistic, incompatible with Lincoln’s extremely hilly topography, and unacceptable to the course’s neighbors in the quiet residential precincts of the Outer Richmond.

Those who attack golf as an elitist male pastime misrepresent the reality of public golf in the city and ignore Lincoln’s importance to our youths. Lincoln is the home of the city’s high school and junior golf programs; the course’s alumni include US Open champions Ken Venturi and Johnny Miller and LPGA stars Jan Ferraris and Dorothy Delasin. The First Tee program, based at Harding and with plans for a new learning center in the Sunnydale neighborhood, uses golf to uplift the lives of hundreds of children from the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. The city’s high school golfers now on university teams across the country — including Domingo Jojola (University of San Francisco), Katrina Delen-Briones (San Jose State), Keiko Fukuda (Brown University), and Elaine Harris (Indiana University) — are anything but male elites.

That the city’s golf courses need outside expert management is not seriously debatable. At the zoo, we hire professional zookeepers; at the museums, professional curators. What’s needed at our public courses is not more "wait and study the problem to death," as some politicians advocate, but an immediate injection of golf management expertise to prevent the terminal deterioration of the courses.

Improved public recreation cannot come by tearing down one sport to benefit another. We need to work together to improve all public recreation — including restoration of Lincoln and our other storied public golf courses. Visionaries of prior generations created these great civic assets. It is now our duty to preserve them for generations to come.<\!s>*

Lee Silverstein, Terese Cronin, and Tom Weathered

Lee Silverstein is a special education teacher and golf coach at Lowell High School. Terese Cronin is a fourth-generation San Franciscan who spent her youth at the city’s public golf courses. Tom Weathered is secretary of the Lincoln Park Golf Club.

Next week: why the city should look at other uses for Lincoln.

Redevelopment’s new face

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› sarah@sfbg.com

City Hall’s cavernous marble corridors echoed Aug. 14 with the footsteps of a band of sharply dressed African Americans, many of them ministers and all of them come to voice support for Fred Blackwell’s appointment as executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.

Blackwell, who has a master’s degree in city planning from UC Berkeley and has been working for the Mayor’s Office of Community Development since 2005, most recently as director, won’t be the first African American to occupy the agency’s top post.

But Mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to nominate Blackwell was seen by many as a hopeful sign that the agency might proactively address problems that have torn apart the Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point community in the past year and continue to dog the agency in the Western Addition.

These concerns include the suspicion that Newsom’s plan to fold Candlestick Point into the already controversial Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment project is less about wooing the 49ers to stay and more about jumping into bed with Lennar Corp., a deep-pocketed and politically connected development company (see "The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07).

The deal gives Lennar the right to develop 6,500 new housing units and take over the cleanup of Hunters Point Shipyard — a move mayoral candidate Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai described as "the dirty transfer of the shipyard" (see "And They’re Off," 8/15/07).

A growing body of Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point residents has asked the city to temporarily shut down construction at the shipyard’s Parcel A because of concerns about the toxic dust being kicked up (see "Dust Devils," 8/1/07).

And then there’s lingering ill will from the 1960s, when redevelopment caused the massive displacement of African Americans from the Western Addition.

So will Blackwell be able to solve the agency’s deep-rooted problems? Newsom described Blackwell as "an outstanding choice" when nominating him Aug. 10, while agency commission president Rich Peterson called Blackwell "smart, of high integrity, well known by community leaders, and familiar with the unique opportunities as well as important lessons learned of redevelopment in the city."

But while commissioner Francee Covington declared that "a new day is dawning at the agency" shortly before the commission voted 7–<\d>0 to appoint Blackwell, the African American community still has its concerns.

Minister Christopher Muhammad, who has led the voicing of concerns about the Parcel A dust, was proud to see an African American in a position of leadership. "But we are still going to hold your feet to the fire," he said. "Redevelopment is not just about the redevelopment of physical structures but [also] about the redevelopment of human beings."

Noting that Blackwell is a 1991 graduate of Morehouse College, Rev. Amos Brown said, "I find no fault in this man, and you will not find any either in terms of fitness for this office," while local resident Randall Evans voiced his belief that "the only folks gonna take care of black people’s business are black folks."

Activist-journalist Ace Washington observed that Blackwell is "coming into a very hot seat. He needs some ice cubes to sit down. Only time will tell if he stands by his convictions. It doesn’t matter if the director is black, Latino, Asian, or white. All of us here are saying, ‘Ah, a breath of fresh air.’<\!s>"

Rev. Arnold Townsend said, "We trust the resources are there to help community — and not to tell the community what to do. Because until that dynamic changes, it won’t matter who is executive director."

Blackwell conceded that he had misgivings about heading an agency founded in 1948 to remove blight, a mission that many say has been tainted by racism since its inception. "I admit I was not leaping and jumping when my name first surfaced, but I look forward to working with you all," Blackwell told the commission.

Blackwell later told the Guardian he hopes "to foster a sense of equity and opportunity and a broader vision of community development."

"The legacy of redevelopment and urban renewal is not a good one," he said. "The residue is still there, but trust is only built through action."

Describing the Western Addition and Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point as "two bookends in terms of redevelopment," Blackwell said he hopes "to close out the agency’s relationship with the Western Addition and make sure responsibility is transferred seamlessly to the appropriate agencies."

As for Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point, "we should take stock of what we should and should not do, get on the right track, and create opportunities for people who live there," he said.

But Sumchai wants to put the agency under the control of the Board of Supervisors: "You could appoint Jesus of Nazareth and still have problems as long as the agency is locked into its current structure."

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi says putting an African American at the head of the Redevelopment Agency "makes a lot of sense, considering the egregious and negative impact the agency has had on the African American community…. But no matter how well-liked Fred Blackwell is, that does not compensate for the deficiencies of the Redevelopment Agency’s aims and competence."<\!s>*

Anonymity trouble

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Pundits of the Internet age are fond of excoriating the Web because anyone can post on it anonymously. Andrew Keen, whose recent book Cult of the Amateur is a good primer on why people hate the Web, highlights the horrors of anonymity in his work, contrasting the millions of unnamed Web scribblers with honorable, properly identified writers of yesteryear. Keen’s point is that people who don’t put their names on what they’ve written don’t feel responsible for it; therefore they feel little compunction about lying or misrepresenting their chosen subjects. After all, an anonymous writer doesn’t have to worry that their reputation will be tarred — unlike, say, a writer at the New York Times, whose byline appears on his or her articles.

Every social stereotype has a caricature associated with it, and the "anonymous Web writer" has theirs. They’re always portrayed as a he, first of all. And he’s inevitably described as being "some blogger writing in his basement in his pajamas." In other words, this anonymous person is not a professional (hence the pajamas) and probably poor (he lives in a basement). He’s a nobody, a loner who lashes out at the world from his dismal cell, hiding behind his anonymity and destroying the good reputations of nice people.

Where does this sad little man like to post his anonymous invective? Wikipedia, of course. He can change any entry without leaving his name, adding lies to biographies of innocent mayoral candidates and spewing spam all over facts. And the best part is that most people take Wikipedia seriously. They regard it as a reliable source of knowledge, despite the fact that it’s written by unknown, basement-dwelling bloggers in pajamas.

That’s why I was so gratified when California Institute of Technology grad student and mad scientist about town Virgil Griffith released his software tool Wikiscanner, which you can use to quickly check on who has been editing Wikipedia entries anonymously. You see, whenever you edit a Wikipedia entry, the encyclopedia logs your unique IP address, which can often be tracked back to a physical location, including your place of employment. Even if you think you’re being stealthy with your anonymous writing, you’re not. Wikipedia sees all.

And now the public can see all if they visit Griffith’s Wikiscanner site (wikiscanner.virgil.gr). Turns out that all the anonymous propaganda and lies on Wikipedia aren’t coming from basement dwellers at all — they’re coming from Congress, the CIA, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Somebody at Halliburton deleted key information from an entry on war crimes; Diebold, an electronic-voting machine manufacturer, deleted sections of its entry about a lawsuit filed against it. Someone at Pepsi deleted information about health problems caused by the soft drink. Somebody at the New York Times deleted huge chunks of information from the entry on the Wall Street Journal. And of course, the CIA has been editing the entry on the Iraq war.

Wikiscanner allows you to search millions of edits, perusing a precise record of all the changes that have been made. While you can’t figure out exactly who at the CIA made the changes to the entry on the Iraq war, you can be sure the changes came from somebody on the CIA’s computer network.

Griffith created Wikiscanner for a frankly political reason. As he told the Times of London, he did it "to create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike." In the process, however, he’s revealed something far more fundamental than the fact that acolytes of Pepsi and the CIA will stop at nothing to propagandize on behalf of their employers: he’s undermined the myth of the anonymous blogger in the basement.

It turns out that the people who are hiding behind anonymity online for nefarious or selfish reasons are not little guys in pajamas but the very bastions of accountability that haters of the Web have deified. It’s not a mean dude with a grudge who is spreading lies on Wikipedia but rather a member of the federal government or a journalist at the New York Times. Cultural anarchy online is coming not from the hordes of scribbling bloggers but from the same entities that have always posed a danger to culture: corporations and governments who refuse to take responsibility for what they’re doing.<\!s>*

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who once had the urge to do an anonymous edit on Wikipedia but was scared people would find out she’d done it.

Counseling torture

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› news@sfbg.com

Ruth Fallenbaum, a private psychologist based in Berkeley, decided to withhold her annual dues to the American Psychological Association this year. She told us her "gut reaction" was to withhold support from the 148,000-member organization because it allows — and even advocates — the participation of its members in coercive prisoner interrogations at CIA-run sites like Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

While the American Medical Association, the World Medical Association, and the American Psychiatric Association have banned doctors and psychiatrists from participating in these interrogations, many American Psychological Association members argue that psychologists can help ensure subjects are treated in an ethical and humane manner. Others — like Fallenbaum and members of the group she helped form, Psychologists for an Ethical APA — feel that an "ethical interrogation" is an oxymoron.

At the APA’s 115th annual conference, held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center on Aug. 17 to 20, Fallenbaum and many other psychologists and activists spoke — and rallied at the Yerba Buena Gardens — in favor of a rule that would have banned psychologists from engaging in military interrogations at US military prisons "in which detainees are deprived of adequate protection of their human rights."

The moratorium they advocated — which only recently made it onto the APA’s agenda — was overwhelmingly voted down Aug. 19 at the APA Council meeting after an hour of public comment that was mostly in support of the moratorium. A competing motion that reaffirmed the organization’s position against torture "and other cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment or punishment" was unequivocally passed, leaving a schism between the organization and the rejected resolution’s supporters.

For the latter, concerns remain about what role — if any — psychologists should play in detention centers, which are notorious for human rights violations that are tantamount to torture. Can these health professionals, abiding by the medical field’s basic tenet of "do no harm," retain their integrity in such lawless centers?

According to the APA, the new resolution frames a context for interrogations that is free of fear tactics and actually prevents abuse. Psychologists conducting interrogations can assist in "rapport building with the detainees rather than abuse," Rhea Farberman, the organization’s spokesperson, told the Guardian.

In its approved resolution, the APA for the first time lays out 14 forms of inhumane treatment that it opposes. The list includes mock executions, water boarding, sexual humiliation, isolation, exploitation of phobias, and induced hypothermia — all of which have reportedly been employed by American interrogators. In May the Department of Defense released a previously declassified report detailing the Army’s use of psychological techniques on Guantánamo Bay detainees in 2002.

The approved APA resolution also calls on the US government to reject acts of torture and limits the psychologist’s role to providing therapeutic benefits, ideally keeping the centers in compliance with international human rights law.

As US Army Col. Larry James, who serves as a psychologist at Guantánamo Bay, told the crowd before the vote, "If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die."

But that point simply reinforced the concerns many have about sanctioning torture. "If psychologists have to be there so detainees don’t get killed, those conditions are so horrendous that the only moral and ethical thing is to leave," Laurie Wagner, a psychologist from Texas, said at the meeting, eliciting cheers from many audience members.

Another debate raged over the APA’s Ethics Code 1.02, which says that psychologists — when in conflict with their own ethics and the law — can choose to abide by the governing authority. Fallenbaum and other psychologists we interviewed felt that the code has an eerie resemblance to pre–<\d>Geneva Convention sentiments of crimes committed on the basis of "just following orders." But the APA states that the code, which was last modified in 2000, was originally intended to settle domestic debates, namely whether or not a psychologist should have sex with a client.

The approved torture resolution includes loopholes, according to Dr. Neil Altman, a former member of the APA Council who proposed and drafted the defeated moratorium. For example, it could still allow sleep deprivation prior to interrogations as a way to soften prisoners up. And its reference to "significant harm" is one Altman finds ambiguous. "It still leaves wiggle room," he told us.

Stephen Behnke, the APA’s ethics director, remains adamant that psychologists play a key role in a safe and sound interrogation process, something that might not occur if they are not present. "Some people say that a psychologist’s role should be picking up the pieces [of trauma]. Some say it should be preventing it," Behnke told us. The resolution "was a very clear affirmation that we support both roles."

Bruce Crow, head of the Behavioral Medical Department at the Brooke Army Medical Institute in Texas, assigns psychologists to detainee centers, although he was undecided about their participation. "I don’t have an answer about whether they should or shouldn’t be there," he told us. Nonetheless, the newly passed resolution "will provide better guidelines for psychologists assigned to detention centers."

On July 20, President George W. Bush issued an executive order to relaunch a coercive interrogation program at CIA "black sites." Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, said psychologically manipulative techniques — subject to medical oversight — will be part of the program.

Taking this recent history into account, the conference hosted eight workshops — before and after the votes on the APA resolution and Altman’s counteramendment — with a theme of "Ethics and Interrogations: Confronting the Challenge."

A few hours after the torture measure was defeated, many of the workshop participants gathered for two hours of heated discussion at an ethics town hall. When media outlets videotaping the event were asked to leave by APA officials after a 10-minute time limit, an outcry for "more transparent practices" resonated throughout the room, and the journalists were allowed to stay for the remainder of the session.

Another moratorium could take more than two to three years to get on the APA’s agenda, according to Altman. But Dr. Steven Reiser, a senior faculty member in the International Trauma Studies Program at Columbia University and the founder of Psychologists for an Ethical APA, remains hopeful.

"We have to stand up for human rights," Reiser told us after the town hall meeting. "If we can’t stand up to risks, then we’re colluding with the forces that [deny] human rights."<\!s>*

Low T, no T

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I read your column about potential causes of a husband’s lackluster performance in the bedroom [8/8/07]. You mentioned that the letter writer’s husband should talk to his doctor about low testosterone, and I thought you might be interested in more information on that. As you said, low testosterone (low T) and diabetes are linked. In fact, a recent study found that men with diabetes are more than twice as likely to have low T than other men. To educate men about the link between low T and diabetes, the American Association of Diabetes Educators created the "Take Charge. Talk T." program, which includes a pamphlet men can take to their doctors or diabetes educators if they think they are experiencing low-T symptoms.

[List of low-T facts here: an estimated 13 million American men have low testosterone; symptoms include low sex drive, erectile dysfunction and depression; treatment is available in various forms; obesity and hypertension are also risk factors, etc. — A]

If you would like more information, please visit www.TalkLowT.org. On behalf of my client, Solvay Pharmaceuticals, which markets the testosterone therapy AndroGel, I am including fact sheets. If you plan on covering low-T or T therapy in the future, I would be happy to set up an interview with a doctor or low-T patient.

Best,

PR Lady

On behalf of Solvay Pharmaceuticals

Dear PRL (be glad I didn’t call you PharmGirl):

I have to finish poking myself in the eye with these sticks first, and then I believe I’ll have lunch, but I appreciate the offer. (Seriously, I may take you up on it at a later, less summer-vacationy date.) Unlike many people I encounter while doing vaguely progressive work in a place where more people practice Tantra than go to church on Sunday, I don’t dismiss out of hand the idea that so-called "Big Pharma" can be a source of good. How can I, after all the intensive interventions that got my kids and me through a dicey beginning, not to mention my long love affair with antidepressants and a devoted fan-girl relationship with Viagra and the gang? While dispatches from Big Ph are best taken with both a grain of salt and a diuretic for the sodium sensitive, I’ll still take them. And I do like the idea of checklists the patient can take along to the doctor. What with the research being newish and the subject being vaguely sex-related, some doctors are just going to nod and smile and pretend they never heard a request for a testosterone test, and one may be able to catch their attention by waving a few brightly-colored pages about. There are some such available on the pharma-sponsored site to which Ms. Lady linked, www.talklowt.org, and I can’t see any reason not to use them, although they do contain a few quibbleworthy statements like "A simple blood test … will determine if your testosterone levels are below normal." From everything I’ve read elsewhere, this ought to be precisely untrue: testosterone may be bound by sex hormone binding globulin, so either high or low SHBG, both common, will produce inaccurate test results. You will want to wave around some pages about how to get an accurate testosterone test done along with the others.

Speaking of hormones, the other noteworthy note I got last week came from a trans woman (I assume) incensed at my — what else? — insensitive use of language. The subject was a recent "Why does my guy look at tranny porn?" question [8/1/07], and in case the one letter I got really was standing in for a thousand equally pissed-off people too lazy to write letters, I thought I’d clear up a misunderstanding or two while I’m waiting for lunch or a poke in the eye, whichever I was going to do first while avoiding a visit from a doctor or a patient with low testosterone. My correspondent took offense at the term transsexual porn, pointing out that some transsexuals are adopting the term "Harry Benjamin’s syndrome" (Benjamin created the well-known Standards of Care for patients seeking sex reassignment surgery) to avoid just such a sexualization of their identity.

Indeed, but then I have to point out that (a) people choosing this label are a very specific subset of a large and often fractious community, and (b) you may repeat "No transsexual would be comfortable being photographed displaying her private parts. And they certainly never identify as ‘chicks with dicks.’ What you are describing is something totally unrelated to transsexuals" as often and as emphatically as you like, and it’s still not going to be any truer than, say, "No Jewish American woman would ever go out wearing her husband’s underwear because she couldn’t find any of her own." The problem with umbrella terms like transsexual is that we may have to share them with people we think smell bad. My correspondent may prefer to think that all trans women don little skirts from Talbots and disappear into the genpop, but it just ain’t so. Don’t the nonops who pay for their estrogen by running ads in the back of papers like this one deserve inclusion? Where is the love?

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.

Switching sides

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS The whole time that Earl Butter was with us, from New Hampshire to New York to Michigan, there was something I wanted to ask him but couldn’t quite put into words. That is, until he and Phenomenon hugged me good-bye and drove away, leaving me, at 44 years old, for my first time ever at camp.

Then, as soon as it was too late, the fog lifted from my sentence and the wording was clear and succinct: "How do I learn hopelessness?" Huh? Help me. Bankrupts, scofflaws, dock rats, bottle dwellers, how do you give up and get on with it? Stop writing poetry and start living poetically. Be the poem, or the ball, or the song.

I crunched back into the woods and set up my tent. As usual, I pitched it as far away from everyone else as possible. And every day I kept moving it farther and farther away, until I wasn’t even sure I was in Michigan any more.

What do you do at camp? Besides feeling lonely and displaced, I mean, and plotting your way back to town, to a phone, so you can call your mommy or daddy and say, "Uncle! Come get me! Please!"

Well, the purpose of Camp Trans is to protest the official policy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival re trans women inclusion. However, nobody exactly knows exactly what that policy is! It’s the most beautifully twisted blur of swirliness since the US military’s famous "Don’t ask, don’t tell" masterpiece. To the best of my chicken farmerly understanding, trans women are, in theory, not welcome. They are asked but not forced to respect the festival’s womyn-born-womyn, cluck cluck. In practice, however, no one’s going to check your jeans or genes. You buy a ticket, you’re in. Some people might be mean to you, and their meanness might be backed by policy, but hey, welcome to the world. Right?

Right. So, Camp Trans aims to change all that. Peopled mostly, I think (but didn’t count), by trans men showing support for their homemade sisters, and open to anyone anywhere on or off the gender spectrum, Camp Trans is young, and strong, and beautiful, and diverse, and brilliant, and radical, beautiful, and very well educated, and young, and the main strategy, to the best of my chicken farmerly understanding, is to have 10 times as much fun as the festies do, and for 300 times cheaper, until people start switching sides and the Michfest bigwigs get real.

Off the top of my head, it’s my favorite political strategy ever. I say this without a trace of facetiousness, I swear, and as the least politically active person in the world, give or take Lars Fiffick.

By the end of the week I had a new favorite singer-songwriter (Lost), a new favorite spoken wordster (Katz), a new favorite lightbulb eater (Emily), and a new favorite lap dancer (Alex). All around me people were making out with other people, laughing hysterically, talking intensely, hugging, playing, partying, holding hands, and womyn-born-womyn from the festival kept crossing the road and saying, "Wow, it’s funner over here."

Personally, I can speak for the food. I did have lunch on Michfest one day. First I tried to sneak in through the woods but got busted. Then I tried to talk my way in at the entrance, where the problem wasn’t gender but economics. Somehow $310 seemed like a lot to pay for a vegetarian lunch. I told them I had a friend in the kitchen (which was true) and that I just wanted to see her (which was true) and eat lunch (which was true). I swore I didn’t want to see any shows (which was true) and wouldn’t stay on the land for one second longer than necessary to masticate my food in a manner conducive to healthy digestion and tranquility.

Then, when the truth didn’t work, I tried lying. "OK, you got me. I’m a journalist," I said. "I’m a food writer. I’m doing a piece on the food here and at Camp Trans."

They were so fuckin’ friendly! They said, "Oh, we have the food right here. It’s what’s for lunch." And they started dishing me out an awesome bean salad and a pasta salad with black olives in it, and a cream cheese sandwich, and a nectarine.

I sat on a hay bale, under an umbrella, and everything was great, but with apologies to my actual friend in the actual kitchen, the food was better, spicier, and healthier at camp. And I’m talking not just vegetarian, but vegan! How can it be?

One word: beets. Beets, and I did have a huge bag of beef jerky in my tent, without which I would have died.<\!s>*

Sudachi

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Trends fade, except when they don’t — and then you have hip. Sushi is hip food; its appeal to the cognoscenti is perennial. Tapas (a.k.a. small plates, little plates, or shareable plates) have been a trend for quite a number of years now and have assumed all sorts of ethnic guises while their claim to permanence has strengthened. At Sudachi, a new restaurant on Sutter Street at the edge of a still-sketchy run of Polk Street, the tapas appear in Asian guise: Eurasian fusion on a small scale. "Sudachi" turns out to be the name of a citrus fruit from the Far East; so, interestingly, is "yuzu" — which, capitalized, becomes the name of a Japanese-fusion restaurant in Cow Hollow. Do we bear witness to the beginnings of a trend?

Sudachi and Yuzu are similar in many ways, from food to interior design (lots of wood and splashes of green in each), but they are unlike in at least one important sense: their relation to their environs. Yuzu is a temple of young, well-to-do heterosexuals in a precinct of young, well-to-do heterosexuals. It is part of a euphonious whole. Sudachi, by contrast, is next door to a Yemeni mosque and just steps away from Polk Street, where the boy trade is diminished but not completely dried up. If its neighborhood is a neighborhood in transition, then signs are mixed as to what direction it might take.

But there’s always a place at the table for graciousness, and Sudachi is rich in modern graces, beginning with the host, who greets you with a youthful smile when you step from the street into the vestibule. The fluttering curtains part, and you find yourself being led into the front dining room, rather airy and loftlike and connected — via a length of burnished-fir bar, complete with a pair of cheery barkeeps — to a second dining room in the rear. The high brick wall behind the bar is trimmed with strips of steel: mementos mori of sorts, reminders of what can happen to unreinforced masonry in earthquakes. (What can happen? Fall down, go boom.) The bar itself is trimmed with youngish, dot-commie-looking people, waiting for a table or the rest of their party or just idling. They appear to be slightly edgier than their Marina counterparts, though clad in the same hideous designer jeans.

Chef Ming Hwang’s menu takes a step all seafood emporiums would do well to emulate: it tells us where much of the fish comes from. Not much of it comes from around here, unfortunately, and even an offering of albacore (which I love) labeled as local on the printed bill of fare turned out to be from Croatia. The specialty rolls, on the other hand, aren’t burdened with this information, which is unfortunate but also makes them easier to order: one less factor to weigh. Spyder roll ($9.50) — with its characteristic superstructure of (in this case, soft-shell) crab tempura — and California roll ($7), with crab, avocado, and cucumber, were both excellent if routine. Because the crab in them is cooked, they can help mollify the squeamish without completely putting off purists and sophisticates.

Still, said sophisticates — if not purists — would probably be happier with something like the Death by Sushi roll ($12.50), a very California combination of tuna, shiso leaf, avocado, snap peas, and gobo, rolled in rice and covered with a translucent blanket of salmon slices, with a throw pillow of sweet black sesame sauce. I liked the spicy tuna roll ($6) too, but I always do. It’s no-nonsense, a sushi equivalent to that Jack in the Box burger that’s nothing but layers of meat and cheese, barely contained in an envelope of starch.

As for the rawphobes, Hwang has saved some of the best for them, and it’s all cooked. One of the brightest stars of the tapas menu has to be the lamb lollipops ($16), a troika of frenched, broiled chops served with mint-edamame sauce, quartered new potatoes, and ribbons of pickled red onion. The red onion was too vinegary (pickling is a form of balancing, so add some sugar too, please), but the juicy tenderness of the meat obliterated that quibble.

Buddha’s pouches ($16) consisted of little piles of well-crisped Sonoma duck confit suitable for lading into a flotilla of endive canoes moored around the edge of the plate, along with a splash or two of sherry hoisin sauce. Potato croquettes ($8) were crunchy golden bullets laced with sweet corn, chive, and white truffle oil and served with a porridgelike shrimp sauce perfumed with basil.

I liked the shrimp sauce better than the shrimp proper: marinated prawns ($12) grilled on skewers and plated with jamón serrano, tad soi, bean sprouts, and a sesame caramel sauce. Shrimp are more forgiving of chefly neglect or mishandling than other forms of seafood; they don’t easily dry out or fall apart, but if they do dry out, they’re pretty dismal, no matter how gussied up. These shrimp were peeled, which probably contributed to their desiccation but also made it possible to eat them quickly.

Unlike many Asian-oriented restaurants, Sudachi offers desserts (all $6) to be reckoned with. Chocolate gelato, served as a pair of globes in a martini glass, along with strawberries and mint, was pleasantly ordinary, but the key lime ice cream — another set of globes, another martini glass — was an extraordinary blend of sweet and sour and a richness of texture that reminded me of well-chilled mascarpone. And chocolate decadence for once lived up to its much-used name, appearing as a hemisphere of brandy-scented chocolate ganache. A festooning of griottines cherries (pitted and halved) brought some color, but the overwhelming experience of the ganache was one of luxurious moistness, as if some kind of triple cream fudge sauce had been artfully thickened into a cake. And some people think decadence is a bad thing!<\!s>*

SUDACHI

Mon.–<\d>Thurs., 5:30–<\d>10:30 p.m.; Fri.–<\d>Sat. 5:30 p.m.–<\d>1 a.m.

1217 Sutter, SF

(415) 931-6951

www.sudachisushi.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

The curtain calls

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Theater is where you find it this fall. For instance, at a warehouse party where assembled guests — artists, authors, bons vivants, goatees, and rockers of all stripes — get so carried away that a play suddenly breaks out among them (it can happen). Or in the offices and cubbyholes where a group of Dutch actors retreat midperformance to mine universal truths about the minutiae of mundane alienation. Or hovering just above the stage, where astrocosmonautical new best friends, stranded like circus performers, orbit together after a space shuttle disaster. Or on a kitschy converted kid shuttler known as the Mexican Bus, which a trio of disembodied Chicanos use to cruise the Mission. Theater, in short, is going to be a ubiquitous presence, maybe even the stranger eyeing your canapé, so watch out.

Sweeney Todd Kicking off its national tour in San Francisco, John Doyle’s pared-down, blood-bespattered hit Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s musical thriller also begins the American Conservatory Theater’s new season on a guaranteed high note.

Aug. 30–Sept. 30. Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF. (415) 749-2ACT, www.act-sfbay.org

San Francisco Fringe Festival It’s the 16th annual array of 50-minute feats, under-an-hour undertakings, and terse tirades. Perennially fast, cheap, and out of control.

Sept. 5–16. Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF. www.sffringe.org

Expedition 6 San Francisco hosts the world premiere of playwright-director (and well-known actor) Bill Pullman’s theatrically stylized, documentary-based take on the real-life encounter between Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts stranded in space after the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster. Think of it as Apollo 13 with a trapeze.

Sept. 8–Oct. 7. Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, bldg. D, Marina at Laguna, SF. (415) 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org

The MagiCCal Mission Tour Albeit now in Los Angeles, the performers of Culture Clash (Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, Herbert Siguenza) are forever local theater champs with deep roots in the Mission District. In a unique take on the guided tour, they climb (virtually) aboard the rolling fiesta known as the Mexican Bus to act as your (prerecorded) guides through their own private Mexico (del Norte).

Sept. 10–16. www.mexicanbus.com

Kommer This Yerba Buena Center for the Arts engagement marks the Bay Area debut for Kassys, the acclaimed Amsterdam-based Dutch theater company. A physically exact multimedia work, Kommer (Dutch for "sorrow") begins as a comical and poignant play about a group of friends gathered in mourning, then shifts gears to follow the individual actors out of the theater as each returns to a separate little workaday world, shedding light on "private and public moments of human frailty."

Sept. 14. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org

Lies You Can Dance To Flyaway Productions — known for athletic, risk-taking, society-critiquing, and female-empowered dance performances in venues from rooftops to industrial cranes — previews a work in progress at the Marsh: Lies You Can Dance To, an investigation of "how the human body responds to lies told over and over at the level of national policy," by artistic director and Bay Area dancer-choreographer Jo Kreiter, with music by Bay Area composer-musician Beth Custer.

Sept. 14–16. Marsh, 1062 Valencia, SF. 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org

Continuous City This work in progress exploring postmodern interconnectivity and our changing sense of place in a global context is a tech-savvy performance piece that attempts to extend the reach of theater by, among other things, uploading video contributions from a social networking site. It’s a collaboration between Bay Area actors, UC Berkeley students, and New York’s the Builders Association (responsible for the visually stunning Super Vision at the YBCA in August 2006).

Oct. 5–14. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Lower Sproul Plaza (near Bancroft at Telegraph), Berk. (510) 642-9988, theater.berkeley.edu

After the Quake As part of its 40th season, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre hosts the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production of a new play by renowned Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle), helmed by Tony Award–winning director Frank Galati (The Grapes of Wrath, Ragtime). Adapted from Murakami’s 2000 collection of short stories, After the Quake is an intimate tale about a shy storyteller and registers the tremors of an unstable world while confronting the challenge of living with fear.

Oct. 12–Nov. 25. Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk. 1-888-4BRTTIX, www.berkeleyrep.org

Des Moines Campo Santo premieres Denis Johnson’s fast-paced, darkly poetic, hilarious, and fascinating multicharacter stream of confession and moral conflict. The brilliant author turned playwright’s past collaborations with the company include Psychos Never Dream and Soul of a Whore. In what Intersection for the Arts and Campo Santo are calling their take on dinner theater, the play will unfold amid a hip cocktail mixer in a warehouse not far from the company’s usual digs on Valencia.

Oct. 19–20. www.theintersection.org

Slouching Towards Disneyland Inimitable radio and stage personality Ian Shoales (a.k.a. Merle Kessler) and quick-fingered, ever-versatile musician-composer Joshua Raoul Brody team up for this wry, cranky song and rant, purportedly "a wild ride in words and music through world history from Genesis to George W."

Nov. 8–Dec. 1. Marsh, 1062 Valencia, SF. 1-800-838-3006, www.themarsh.org

Limber up

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Are you looking for edginess? Do you prefer subtlety to pizzazz? The upcoming dance calendar has it all, however exotic or traditional your tastes. Fortunately, presenters seem to be aware of the Bay Area’s knowledgeable and supportive dancegoing audience. Cal Perfomances’ monthlong focus on Twyla Tharp — with the American Ballet Theatre and the Joffrey and Miami City ballets — and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ presentation of international companies whose work circles around big ideas (reality, peace, identity) are particularly noteworthy. Two smaller venues deserve equal attention: ODC Theater, long a stalwart supporter of local companies, has restarted an excellent presenting series of touring artists who can’t fill larger spaces; and CounterPULSE, which, in addition to showcasing fresh works, offers ongoing postperformance conversations between dancers and their audience.

Nora Chipaumire Chipaumire left the Bay Area to join Urban Bush Women, the country’s preeminent African American all-female dance group. Nobody who saw her last performance at ODC could possibly have forgotten the fierce intensity of the statuesque Zimbabwean’s dancing. She returns with Chimurenga, her one-woman multimedia show in which she meditates on her and her country’s history.

Sept. 9. ODC Theater, 3153 17th St., SF. (415) 863-9834, www.odctheater.org

Erika Shuch Performance Project Shuch is never afraid of pushing sensitive buttons. She also does her homework and often works with collaborators. Her new 51802 looks at how incarceration imprisons and liberates those left behind.

Sept. 13–29. Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia, SF. (415) 626-3311, www.theintersection.org

Chris Black Black really wanted to be a baseball player, but she ended up a dancer-choreographer of witty and theatrically savvy dance theater works. In her newest, Pastime, she gets to be both, with nine innings, nine dancers, and three weekends of free shows.

Sept. 15–30. Justin Herman Plaza, Embarcadero at Washington, SF; Precita Park, Precita at Harrison, SF; Golden Gate Park, Peacock Meadow, JFK near Fell entrance, SF. www.potrzebie.com

Mark Morris Dance Group Morris choreographing to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has to be either sublime or a travesty. By all accounts, he has succeeded where just about everyone else (except George Balanchine) has failed. The West Coast premiere of the tripartite Mozart Dances will surely enthrall the Morris faithful; it may even convert a few straggling skeptics.

Sept. 20–23. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Lower Sproul Plaza (near Bancroft at Telegraph), Berk. (510) 642-9988, www.calperformances.net

Smuin Ballet One of Michael Smuin’s great accomplishments was the encouragement he gave to performers whose dances could not be more different from his own. Amy Seiwert is an exceptionally gifted choreographer whose reach and expertise have been growing exponentially. Her new piece will be the seventh for the company, joining works by Smuin and Kirk Peterson.

Oct. 5–14. Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.smuinballet.org

Armitage Gone! Dance In the ’80s, Karole Armitage’s steely-edged choreography to punk scores shook up the New York dance world. Now, after 15 years of self-imposed exile in Europe, she has come home. For her company’s Bay Area debut, she brings the enthusiastically acclaimed Ligeti Essays and Time Is the Echo of an Axe Within a Wood.

Oct. 13–14. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 392-2545, www.performances.org

Oakland Ballet Company At 72, Oakland Ballet’s Ronn Guidi won’t give up. He is bringing the company back with a splendid, all–French music program: Marc Wilde’s Bolero, set to Maurice Ravel; Vaslav Nijinsky’s The Afternoon of a Faun, to Claude Debussy; and Guidi’s Trois Gymnopédies, to Erik Satie.

Oct. 20. Paramount Theatre, 2025 Broadway, Oakl. (510) 763-7308, www.rgfpa.org

Marc Bamuthi Joseph When Joseph’s Scourge premiered at the YBCA two years ago, it was impressive though uneven. No doubt this hip-hop-inspired — and by now heavily traveled — look at family and society from a Haitian perspective has since found its groove.

Oct. 25–Nov. 3. ODC Theater, 3153 17th St., SF. (415) 863-9834, www.odctheater.org

Lines Contemporary Ballet Alonzo King opens his company’s 25th season with two world premieres inspired by classical music traditions that allow for improvisation, baroque and Hindustani. Freedom within strictures — leave it to King to find their common ground where none seems to exist.

Nov. 2–11. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 987-2787, www.linesballet.org

Faustin Linyekula/Les Studio Kabako For his return engagement, the Congolese choreographer is bringing his Festival of Lies, an installation–fiesta piece that both celebrates and mourns what his country has become. The Nov. 10 show runs from 6 p.m. to midnight and includes local performers.

Nov. 8–10. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 987-2787, www.ybca.org

Fall Arts: The year we turned to Glass

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Philip Glass fans are getting ready to camp out in San Francisco this fall.

The most influential composer of the late 20th century, Glass marked his 70th birthday Jan. 31, but the celebration continues throughout the fall in the Bay Area with concerts presented by SF Performances, Stanford University’s Lively Arts, the OtherMinds Festival, the SF Conservatory of Music, and the Cabrillo Festival in Santa Cruz in what has essentially become an ad hoc Glass festival.

At the center of this pan-Bay series of performances, recitals, lectures, and seminars will be the world premiere of Glass’s Appomattox, a major new commission by the San Francisco Opera. Set to a libretto by British playwright Christopher Hampton, the two-act Appomattox dramatizes the eponymous historical battle of the American Civil War and the events leading to the surrender of Confederate general Robert<\!s>E. Lee to US general Ulysses<\!s>S. Grant.

With a loss of 600,000 lives, the Civil War is easily the most devastating event in US history — but what have we learned? "The issues that were raised at the time are very much at the heart of social change in our country today: states’ rights, racism, you name it," Glass said recently from his home in Nova Scotia. "On the good side, we are still engaged in resolving these issues. That is one of the great things about our country, that we haven’t shied away from the issues. We embraced the difficulties as we tried to find solutions. We had some measures of success and some not. But [these issues] never stopped being relevant, because they were never resolved."

Glass’s previous operas, such as Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten, exude brilliant ideas and a sense of innovation, and in tandem with multimedia and experimental projects such as the high-profile cinematic Qatsi trilogy, they earned him a place among the 20th century’s great iconoclasts — not to mention a spot in the punch line to a joke on The Simpsons.

Yet Glass continues to evolve. With Appomattox, the composer has chosen a historical topic that lends itself to an arched yet linear narrative leading to a well-defined climax. And judging from his newer works, his compositional style has acquired a surprisingly lush lyricism. One might suspect Appomattox of being Glass’s first opera in grand 19th-century style, although the composer reassured those who fear he might be softening with age, "It is going to be a very confrontational piece. Some of the elements will be quite difficult for some people."

One such element is Appomattox‘s score, which integrates Old Testament hymns sung by black Southerners to welcome Abraham Lincoln during his visit to Richmond, Va.; military songs by the Arkansas First Brigade; and civil rights ballads.

"I wanted to include in the musical language the feeling and the musical culture of that time and of the present time," Glass explained. "While this was written for voices skilled in operatic singing, there are other kinds of music in this opera as well. This was for me one of the most interesting things, to try to bring together different music that would normally not be heard at the same time."<\!s>*

SELECTED PHILIP GLASS EVENTS

"Music of Philip Glass" Joined by cellist Wendy Sutter, Glass takes to the ivories in a recital of his chamber music, including the local premieres of "Songs and Poems for Cello," Etudes nos. 2 and 10, and "The Orchard for Piano and Cello."

Sept. 28. (415) 392-2545, www.performances.org

Appomattox

Oct. 5–<\d>24. (415) 864-3330, www.sfopera.com

Book of Longing Glass collaborated with singer-songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen on this multimedia work, staged by choreographer Susan Marshall, with the composer on keyboards at this West Coast premiere.

Oct. 9. (650) 725-ARTS, livelyarts.stanford.edu

OTHER TOP CLASSICAL AND OPERA PICKS

Il Rè Pastore Philharmonia Baroque opens the new season with a rare performance of this dazzling gem, written when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a mere teenager. Though the plot is a bit silly, the thrilling score is full of vibrant, infectious energy and includes a fabulous string of showstoppers that foretell the genius of the composer’s mature operas.

Sept. 22–<\d>28. (415) 252-1288, www.philharmonia.org

New Esterhazy String Quartet As part of a multiyear, comprehensive survey of Franz Joseph Haydn’s string repertoire in anticipation of the composer’s bicentennial in 2009, the local string quartet offers a fascinating exploration of Haydn’s quartets against a backdrop of early American history, finding unexpected associations linking the Old and New Worlds.

Oct. 19–<\d>21. (510) 528-1725, www.sfems.org

Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela The appointment of 26-year-old Venezuelan conductor Dudamel to the top post of music director of the LA Philharmonic shocked the American symphonic establishment, but Dudamel is the next great thing. He has proved his mettle as the guest conductor of major European orchestras and as the artistic director of the excellent Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, which recruits and grooms students from the poorest barrios in the country. They’ll perform works by Dmitry Shostakovich, Leonard Bernstein, and Latin American composers.

Nov. 4. (415) 864-6000,www.sfsymphony.org

For more Glass events and classical picks, go to Noise, the Guardian‘s music blog, at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Fall Arts: Fall on high

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Forget that catchy monster musical Avenue Q anthem "Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist" (isn’t there a dance remix yet?) — here’s something really tickly-tacky. Last month my inverse fabuloid, anti–drag queen amigo Downy (think hairy white Whitney with nylons over her head) threw a huge party in Manhattan called "9/11 in July." Business-suited patrons were doused with baby powder on entry, to the strains of Enrique Iglesias’s "Hero" and the post-tragedy oeuvre of Mr. Bruce Springsteen. Flyer tagline: "Too early?" It was packed.

Here in the Bay, our benchmark of club-style civic self-critique is still the slew of "Fuck Burning Man" parties that spring up right about now. (What, no Muni-meltdown tunnel takeovers? And how ’bout all those unguarded downtown construction-boom sites? IMHO, jes’ sayin’.) Still, autumn is smokin’ for clubbers, with enough sassy subversion and genre-bending events to make nighttime terrors of us all. Fall’s buzz: neon laces, wine cocktails, big scarves, duck rock, blinking LEDs, and cutoffs with fishnets. Party!

Start big — and in the daylight, when both the out-rave-ous San Francisco Love Fest (Sept. 29, www.sflovefest.org) and the fetish-fantastic Folsom Street Fair (Sept. 30, www.folsomstreetfair.com) converge on San Francisco in an — eek! — angel-winged orgy of fun fur and leather. This year the intertwined events have pulled a surprise musical switcheroo. The usually local-oriented and charmingly low-tech Love Fest goes steroidal, with a lineup of international ’90s kinda supastar dance acts: Chemical Brothers, the Crystal Method, Paul van Dyk, and almost a hundred more. Then Folsom — renowned for its circuit techno overkill — injects itself with some indie dance-pop cache, with live performances by Imperial Teen, Cazwell, and the Ladytron DJ Tour. The other giant, hideously glamorous switcheroo of the season, of course, will be the Miss Trannyshack Pageant, where fun fur and leather get drenched in competitive drag queen guts. But you’ll have to watch the Trannyshack Web site (www.trannyshack.com) for the date and location; it’s like a virtual game of hide the salami!

The clubs keep pumpin’ it out too. The promoters of the huge, fabled, much-delayed Temple Nightclub (www.templesf.com), with its three dance floors, six bars, and attached restaurant, assure me it’ll be ready for its Sept. 7 grand opening party — it’s already hosted a Hilary Duff meet and greet! Prepare for an onslaught of ginormous parties to fill the cavernous space. In the meantime, you can check out the club-oriented big time of Mezzanine (www.mezzaninesf.com), with night owls screeching for dyke punk-funk-crunk rappers Yo Majesty (Sept. 12), DJ Jefrodesiac and friends’ Robot Rock party featuring Kentucky’s (only?) house rockers VHS or Beta (Sept. 14), "Do the Bartman" remixer Diplo (Sept. 22), and Christ-obsessed French techers Justice (Oct. 10). And the powerhouse musicologists of Blasthaus (www.blasthaus.com) present, at various locales, the ambient mindfunk of Bonobo (Sept. 9), Argentina–via–Los Angeles global groove heartthrob Federico Aubele (Sept. 21), and post-punk techno god Superpitcher (Oct. 19).

Too big for you? Head down any night this fall to 222 Club (www.222club.net), which just revamped its system to become the hottest little tech-dance venue in the city. Also hottt, but newer: too-fab hotel haunt Bar Drake (www.bardrake.com), awesome Latino-tinged hang Cantina (www.cantinasf.com), and drunken queer craziness at Truck (www.trucksf.com). What to drink at all of these places? Hit up Camper English’s new, comprehensively tipsy Alcademics blog (www.alcademics.com). He says tequila bottle signings are in. That’s important.

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