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Volume 42 Number 03
October 17 – October 23, 2007
Our 41st Anniversary Special
This week, the Guardian celebrates 41 years at the forefront of the battle against dirty backroom deals, sleazy sellouts, illegal buy-offs, and underhanded intrusions into the public domain — and the fight continues. Click below for summaries, current updates, and histories of San Francisco privatization issues.
>> Editor’s Notes
A point-by-point list of Newsom’s privatization fumbles
By Tim Redmond
>> The privatization of San Francisco: an introduction
The city should be a loud, visible, proud, and shining example of a different kind of America
By Tim Redmond
>> The perils of privatization: a cautionary history
Ronald Reagan started dismantling government 25 years ago, but his privatization legacy is alive and growing — even in San Francisco
By Amanda Witherell
>> Blast from the past
A few choice selections from our archives
>> Wrecked parks
Chronic underfunding has made the Recreation and Park Department a prime privatization target
By Sarah Phelan and Steven T. Jones
>> Psych out
Newsom administration pushes plan to privatize mental health treatment
By G.W. Schulz
>> Private practice
The Department of Public Health has taken privatization to a bizarre new level
By G.W. Schulz
>> Connect the Connects
Newsom uses a shadowy private organization to shield his administration’s actions from public scrutiny
By Steven T. Jones
>> Bilking the links
Public-golf revenue is up millions of dollars. But a costly public-private contract has swallowed most of the money
By J.B. Powell
>> Bus Stop
Muni remains a lucrative target for the private section
By G.W. Schulz
>> Privatize the airport?
Will SFO go on the block in 2011?
By G.W. Schulz
Say Halo to my little friend
Halo 3
(Microsoft; Xbox 360)
GAMER I have a confession to make: I don’t like first-person shooters. Most of the ones I’ve played share the following objective: "Shoot the marines-aliens-terrorists-mutants and escape from the bunkerprisontop-secret facilitywarehouse full of crates." I find this a bit boring. I therefore believe myself uniquely suited to hack my way through the dense jungle of Microsoft-sponsored hype with a flaming machete. Lest you discount the following as being biased, I’ve gotten my FPS-playing friend Glenn Song to cover me and augment my experience with his.
In the Bungie-developed Halo 3 you play a futuristic marine named Master Chief whose mission is to destroy worlds reminiscent of Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Why? These worlds are the key to setting a killer parasite loose on the universe. I’m down with anything that showcases killer parasites. Humanity is working against an alliance of religious-zealot aliens called the Covenant. Halo 3 avoids reducing the story to cliché by maintaining a linear plot but keeping narrative revelations relevant so that they don’t interrupt game play, and by allowing free play over small areas.
The graphics are stunningly good. Even the crates are well textured. The environments are amazingly lush and realistic. The soundtrack is very well done as well, although I think it sometimes borders on melodramatic.
Both Song and I had big problems with the user interface of the game. It took me several minutes just to figure out which buttons to click to start a single-player game, and it took even longer to figure out how to play a level cooperatively with another player. The menus are all nondescript and not really labeled intuitively.
Several times while playing, I felt like throwing the controller in disgust and making this review. Really. Short. That’s because I couldn’t target any of the small, fast-moving enemies. Almost all console shooters are like this, but most console games also have a feature that allows you to lock onto your target. Halo 3 does not. The levels sometimes seem rather lazily designed. The mission on the second level involves going from point A to point B and then back to point A again. It’s monotonous on one level, but subsequent levels also seem to have a lot of backtracking.
Multiplayer is where Halo 3 really shines. There are a variety of minigames along with the traditional body-count competitions, and the games are populated with 11-year-olds up way past their bedtimes. The variety of exotic weapons and complicated terrains makes for pure, exciting mayhem.
As soon as I signed into a game, some kid asked, "Hey, are you really a girl?" I would like to say I beat the snot out of the little whippersnapper, but the reality is that I got killed in the first 30 seconds. Then I got respawned and chased a guy named Tastyporkchop around with a gun that shoots needles.
Moaning Lisa
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION She looked at me with her motion detectors as I rubbed the piezoelectric sensor between her thighs. Then I spun the potentiometers that jutted out from her chest like nipples. But it wasn’t until I stroked the piezosensor on the back of her neck that she began to moan, first quietly and then loudly, like a thousand women reaching orgasm together.
I was standing in front of a naked mannequin with the proportions of a porn star, her eyes replaced with fat lenses to detect motion, her nipples transformed into knobs, her ass and pussy and neck covered in thin sheets of metal that could detect pressure. Jutting from her left ankle was a USB connector, and through a hole in her back I could see the wires that had helped her respond to my attentions. Her voice had come from two small speakers at her feet. I had just jacked off a USB device.
Her name is Moaning Lisa, and I fondled her at Arse Elektronika, a conference in San Francisco last week devoted to pornography and technological innovation. Her creator, Matt Ganucheau, is a local artist and musician who likes to work with what he calls "novel interfaces." He designed Moaning Lisa specifically for Arse Elektronika, with help from conference organizer Kyle Machulis, to demonstrate the videogame-like properties of the human body. Ganucheau used neural network processing in her programming, and the result is that her responses are randomized. Each time you try to give Moaning Lisa an orgasm, your sensor stroking has to follow a slightly different pattern.
That’s what keeps me hovering around Moaning Lisa in fascination. Her interface, though attached to a strangely distorted female body, seems human. She’s a reminder that every woman has different physical sensitivities, and that sexual stimulation varies from person to person indeed, varies from encounter to encounter with the same person. She suggests we shouldn’t mystify sex, because after all it’s just like a game you play with piezoelectric sensors and potentiometers. Our bodies are a technology. Arousal is a program triggered by specific inputs.
Moaning Lisa is also a poignant conversation piece, inciting discussions you’d never imagine having with strangers. I got to chatting with Ganucheau about why he doesn’t plan to build a male version, and we immediately start talking about how men experience sexual pleasure, though in an oddly technical way. "Male sex sensors are biased, and not as spread out" over the body, Ganucheau said. "Sure, there are deviances in distribution, but overall it’s not as dynamic as a female. I find that if you go straight for male genitalia, the norm is that you’re guaranteed to get someone off." This situation, he asserted, would make for a pretty boring game. You grab the genitals and you win every time. I countered that men have sexual sensors and patterns as varied as women’s. Neither of us had any proof other than our own experiences.
Aside from some pretty graphic discussions of sexual sensors, Moaning Lisa inspired a lot of admiration from the women at Arse Elektronika. Many of us had suggestions for Ganucheau, especially what one could learn from people’s interactions with her. If he were to continue working on Moaning Lisa, Ganucheau said, he would want to track how women respond to men playing with her. "It would be interesting to have a study where you had one male in a room alone with Lisa, and five women behind a one-way mirror watching, commenting on the interaction."
I have less complicated ideas. I think Moaning Lisa would be a good educational toy for women who are shy about telling their partners what they like in bed. She would provide a lesson in how hard it is to arouse somebody who gives you no verbal feedback until you randomly "score" with an orgasm.
"I see the female body as an instructionless, interactive puzzle," Ganucheau explained. Moaning Lisa is like a Rubik’s Cube, a puzzle that you have to solve with your hands and your innate pattern-recognition ability. But with her exaggerated Barbie doll body shape giant breasts, tiny waist she’s also a parody of female sexuality. She meets our expectations for what a sex doll would be, then frustrates those expectations by responding to salacious touches in a chaotic and peculiarly human way. That’s what makes her a truly great piece of art. You cannot pin her down. You cannot forget her.
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who wants to give Moaning Lisa some actuators.
Historically challenged
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
The central scene in Appomattox, Philip Glass’s new opera now world-premiering with San Francisco Opera, is the fateful meeting of generals Ulysses S. Grant (Andrew Shore) and Robert E. Lee (Dwayne Croft) in a private residence in the Virginia town of Appomattox Court House, where Lee surrendered on behalf of the South on April 9, 1865, officially bringing the catastrophic Civil War to a dainty close. The opera’s lucid libretto (by British playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton) faithfully instills the gravitas, human drama, and personal idiosyncrasy associated with that eminently chivalrous encounter between formal enemies. And with two excellent performances from Croft and Shore, deft staging by renowned director Robert Woodruff, and not least Glass’s score with its immediately recognizable orchestral voice in a distinctly somber mood it’s a meeting that manages to be rather riveting.
That’s also why it has to be undercut, and this the opera shrewdly does, though with mixed success. It’s not just that the story of two great men with the weight of history on their shoulders will not do by itself not least because the Civil War is not the story of two people, or even three, if you count the imposing figure of Abraham Lincoln (Jeremy Galyon). As Appomattox‘s decentering portrait makes clear (in scenes flashing forward as far as the civil rights era, which literally burst in on the proceedings at Appomattox Court House), the Civil War belongs for better or worse to many more people, then and now. The opera’s seminal scene must be undercut because history would soon come to mock the grandeur and moment of Grant and Lee’s highly civilized encounter, made on the heels of their brilliant mutual orchestration of unprecedented devastation and bloodshed.
Thus, Hampton’s libretto (coming from a skilled dramatist with a global curiosity) is aware of not only the concentrated power of the intimate drama at the opera’s center but also the quasi-reactionary limits it threatens to impose on the work’s greater engagement with history, which is to say, with the burden of the past. And so, even before broaching the legacy of white racism and black struggle, the opera comes bracketed with the voices of women. In the semiabstract and fiercely deromanticized opening panorama, it’s the women who carry the refrain "War is always sorrowful," attributed to Grant by his wife, Julia (Rhoslyn Jones).
Glass’s score too recognizable at times but nonetheless mood altering in its characteristically descending bass lines, unduutf8g strings, neobaroque arpeggios, and delicately soaring melodies rolls on just as solemnly and purposefully, rising and falling like bated breath, anxious with anticipation and weary with private and collective grief. Racing to a few notable climaxes, the score’s sad and sinister tone is broken by alternately haunted and ecstatic choral sections. Elsewhere, in a layering of period texture, a marching song lends poignant revelry to Lee’s first entrance: "Many are the hearts that are looking for the light, hoping to see the dawn of peace."
Peace is not in the cards. Immediately following the surrender scene, Woodruff’s mise-en-scène deconstructs the mismatch of old-fashioned civility and confident optimism at the dawn of the industrial age and its refurbished caste system. A frenzy of greedy souvenir hunting leaves the owner of the house where the surrender happened dazed and helpless as his fellow Americans strip it bare, leaving only an empty frame through which the future rolls in on a shiny wheelchair in the solitary figure of Ku Kluxer and convicted murderer Edgar Ray Killen (Philip Skinner). An old man spending his last years in prison for his part in the notorious 1964 killing of three civil rights workers, Killen may be finished, but what he stands for is not. And stand he does, defiantly larger than life, as he rises from his chair and strides offstage into a gray-toned future.
APPOMATTOX
Thurs/18 and Oct. 24, 7:30 p.m.; Sat/20, 8 p.m.; $20$275
War Memorial Opera House
301 Van Ness, SF
(415) 864-3330
Bigger is (mostly) better
REVIEW Moving from the small ODC Theater to the much larger Kanbar Hall of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco seems to have been a good idea for Benjamin Levy’s LEVYdance. At the opening of its home season Oct. 12, a large crowd seemed curious to see what else the young choreographer has in his palette. The good news is that Levy has no intention of repeating himself. The two world premieres, Nu Nu and Bone Lines, showed him stepping outside his previously hyperkinetic fierceness and embracing a more imagistic approach to dance making. Nu Nu is a candy-colored romp for four dancers set to music by rapper Fabolous, jazz singer Peggy Lee, and British songstress Anita Harris. The more ambitious Bone Lines, however, looked curiously unfocused; it didn’t sustain itself, Colleen Quan’s transparent and fragmented costumes notwithstanding.
Nu Nu‘s fast-paced mix of clowning, glamour-puss posing, and blossoming and breaking relationships was clever, smartly paced, and unpretentious.
Oral imagery permeated Bone Lines, which suggests a physical though inchoate passing of knowledge from one body to another. The piece examines Levy’s relationship with his immigrant parents; he seems much more interested in the process of his absorbing that knowledge fragmentarily, unconsciously than in any specific facts. The music and sets were strong, and so were recurring motifs of connectedness, but structurally, Bone Lines felt shadowy.
Pay to play
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Some of the sweetest words to deliver to impecunious types like myself: pay what you can. This I can work with be it a noise show at 21 Grand or the new Radiohead album. After blowing my newspaper wage-slave paycheck on rent, ramen, recreational intoxicants like lychee jellies, and sticker pics of my homegirls in goth Lolita getups, there’s not much cheddar left to slap on surplus grillables. So taking a cue from Radiohead, what say we pretend this is a just world where we have the leisure and the leeway to bitch the would-be Hills cast member behind the counter down a cent or two for that Elvis Reese’s cup? How much would we fork out for these recent releases?
RADIOHEAD IN RAINBOWS (SELF-RELEASED)
They get at least $5 for getting us talking again about wiping the high prices of CDs and putting the music out there on the imaginary block: how much is this worth, unheard? More than a million queued up for a taste and an alleged average of about $8 per album download. A bargain compared to iTunes’ $1 per track.
But what about the songs themselves? The sly wink lodged behind the downloadable album’s flexible price has kept in check the ear-popping pressure of creating another masterwork on par with 1997’s OK Computer (Capitol). In keeping with the darkly miniaturist mode of Thom Yorke’s 2006 solo disc The Eraser (XL), In Rainbows is a subtle, contained meditation on love, trapped in a bell jar when it doesn’t soar into creamy, cumulous, string-strafed regions ("Reckoner") or dip into the red, bristling with distortion and thumbing its nose at wincing audiophiles ("Bodysnatchers"). Fidelity is the last thing on the mind for this band off the leash, as on "House of Cards," on which burly bass lines buzz, glassy synths shiver, and Yorke oozes, "I don’t want to be your friend / I just want to be your lover." How about $9.99 and rising as I find new reasons to love In Rainbows?
SOULJA BOY TELLEM.COM (COLLIPARK/INTERSCOPE)
"Crank That (Soulja Boy)" gets about $2.50 for putting a crystallized Caribbean spin on crunk and imbuing steel drums with a certain refried dementia. SB also snatches 25¢ for working Robocop into the rhyme. But I’ll take that 25 back for the doofus idea of writing an ode to a Sidekick, pandering to the ringtone market. I’ll drop another $1 for the album title, which triggers flashbacks to the late ’90s, when every new business felt the need to add a ".com" to its handle. The final price.com: $1.25.
CAVE SINGERS INVITATION SONGS (MATADOR)
The way these Seattlites juxtapose exHint Hint vocalist Pete Quirk’s adenoidal croon with skiffle snare, guitar drone, and nodding tambourine on "Seeds of Night" scores them at least $3, as does the barn-raising thrum of the eerie "Helen." But the group hug on the cover lands them in the $8 range. Is it ironic a poke at the freely folkish movement from onetime rockers like former Pretty Girls Make Graves bassist Derek Fudesco? "It’s pretty genuine, actually," Quirk told me last week from his native New Jersey. "It’s not supposed to be a joke. We don’t really take ourselves too seriously, and we usually have a good time with the things we do we do the group hug a lot!" Sounds like Cave Singers are actually pretty sensitive dudes. "That was our first band name, Sensitive Dudes, but it was taken," Quirk joked. My bid: $8 and a standing invitation to a friendly clinch.
THE GO! TEAM PROOF OF YOUTH (SUB POP)
I’d throw out $10 and a pint of blood for a daily dose of the superenergized Proof. Mastermind Ian Parton makes extremely aggro joy, collaborating with the rest of his band and working with Chuck D (embedding him in the bustling funk of "Flashlight Fight"), the Double Dutch Divas, Rapper’s Delight Club, and Solex. The up-on-the-upbeat Proof resembles a giddy kidsploitation action flick score on a Fruity Pebbles sugar high. Most important, the band has coalesced into a living, breathing entity. "The world doesn’t need another laptop geek onstage," a sober Parton explained from London. "I wanted to make it a real gang, if you know what I mean, with people who are quite different. I didn’t want to be just another indie band. I look beyond the NME." Kid’s rate: $10, give or take a box of Kix. *
THE GO! TEAM
Fri/19, 9 p.m., $15 advance
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
THE CAVE SINGERS
Oct. 24, 9 p.m., $12<\d>$14
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
SIDELONG GLANCES
VELVET TEEN, SAY HI (TO YOUR MOM), AND A-SIDES
Pop sublime from Santa Rosa, Seattle, and Philly. Wed/17, 9 p.m., $12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com
MATTHEW DEAR’S BIG HANDS
Motor City’s microhouse might finds an indie-pop thread with Asa Breed (Ghostly). Thurs/18, 9 p.m., $22 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com
MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO
The songwriter untethers a wide-screen ambition on her The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams (Emarcy). Mon/22, 8 p.m., $25. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com
AUDIBLE DELUSIONS ENSEMBLE
Free jazz, noise, punk, and electronica come out to play when XBXRX guitarist Steve Touchton brings together chums to celebrate ADE’s debut, Winter Weapons (Heathen Skulls). Tues/23, 9:30 p.m., free. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
JOE HENRY
Civilians (Anti-) issues timeless stories from the home front. Tues/23, 8 p.m., $20. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com
Autumn’s flowers
Most people rate summer more highly than autumn, and the reason is simple: summer means no school, autumn means back to school, and most people don’t like school. Therefore: summer over autumn. This straightforward syllogism manages to invert what is to me an elemental truth: that autumn is the most wonderful time of year, especially around here. Autumn brings warm days, holiday catalogues, apples, peppers, the last of the heirloom tomatoes, and nights cool and crisp enough to make turning on the oven a legitimate possibility.
Yes, the roastery is once again open, and roastables need not be meat. Many members of the vegetable kingdom take quite nicely to a turn in the oven, including some difficult cases. Asparagus, for me, is transformed by roasting into an irresistible treat; so is cauliflower. Cauliflower has long been a problem child in the kitchen, pallid-looking and quite cabbage-stinky if boiled or steamed, the usual methods of readying it for the table. I had nearly given up on it until my brother revealed to me that he’d been roasting cauliflower cut into florets, seasoned with just some extra-virgin olive oil and on a baking sheet in a hot oven until tender and lightly caramelized, to acclaim.
There was wisdom here, certainly. But I’d also clipped from the San Francisco Chronicle a recipe for spicy cauliflower from Pizzeria Delfina, which combined the florets with chili flakes, garlic, anchovies, and chopped pickled peppers. The fly in this otherwise tasty ointment was that the cauliflower was supposed to be fried, and I try to steer away from fried these days.
So, instead of frying, how about roasting the florets until golden and tender, then mixing in the ancillary ingredients? It works pretty well. The keys are an oven pre-heated to full blast, florets cut to a uniform size and laid in a single layer on a baking or cookie sheet with a generous splash of olive oil, and a careful turning (with tongs or a spatula) after six or so minutes, to make sure the florets brown evenly. When they’re well colored all the way around, add the other ingredients (mixing them in with your implement) and return to the oven for a last minute or two so the flavors melt together some. If your audience includes people who don’t like cauliflower, prepare to accept some surprised plaudits.
Paul Reidinger
› paulr@sfbg.com
“A cautionary tale, carefully delivered”
› duncan@sfbg.com
Make no mistake: Eugene Robinson is a throwback to a time when people used words like honor without being ironic or embarrassed. The vocalist for the 18-years-running art-rock-noise machine Oxbow, Stanford graduate, and Mac Life senior editor is also, to use his descriptor, a "fightaholic." As he says in the introduction to his forthcoming book Fight: Or, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid You’d Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking (Harper), he shares his "obsession with the eternal, unasked, ‘Can I take him?’" Contrary to what one might assume, people who beat the bloody hell out of each other for fun or profit Robinson is a mixed-martial-arts cage fighter are not suffering from antisocial personality disorders but often adhere to a strict moral code. Though, he confessed during our interview in South San Francisco, sitting in my car and looking out over the bay, "I definitely have antisocial reasons as well."
How much of this testing one’s mettle in the "crucible of conflict" is just a dick-measuring contest? Only in the movies, or perhaps in cage fights whose opponents are carefully matched, does the victor triumph because he wants it more. In any given fight a win can usually be attributed the basic physical facts of size and strength, so what’s the point of fighting if you’re merely measuring attributes?
Robinson told me about a fight he had with a Red Sox fan while loading Oxbow’s van in Maine. The Sox, who serve as the home team even for the New England hinterland, had just been humiliated by the Yankees to the tune of 192. Three Sox fans strolled by, and one inevitably asked the frontperson what the fuck he was looking at. Given multiple chances to bow out, the guy kept pushing, and ultimately had his ass handed to him. "At that point," Robinson said, "I was honor bound to deliver the lesson he had so aggressively been seeking. Whatever happened in that exchange, it wasn’t dick measuring. It was a cautionary tale, carefully delivered."
But do people really learn from being whupped on? My thinking on this subject has evolved along the lines of my employment. When I delivered pizzas for Pizza Hut in a hot pink Lacoste-style shirt, I was forced to eat spoonfuls of shit doled out by every disgruntled lard ass whose Meat Lover’s Special arrived 10 minutes late. "Someday," I thought, "someone is going to fuck that guy up." Needless to say, it was a precarious act to hang the smothering cloak of my rage on that altogether insufficient nail of "someday." When I moved on to working security at clubs, I realized that yes, someday someone will kick that guy’s ass, and it may as well be today. As the old activist saw goes, "If not now, when? If not me, who?" But after some time, I realized that the behavior of others wasn’t worth getting upset, let alone violent, over. Not because it wasn’t satisfying to deliver lessons, but because no lessons were learned. In this way, I found working in nightclubs as dissatisfying as substitute teaching.
If you fight someone and they win, then might is right, and whichever asshole behavior they were indulging in before the fight is justified. If you fight them and they lose, they will immediately work the victim angle for sympathy and punitive damages. Any attitude adjustment is clearly fleeting.
"This is a valid critique," Robinson told me, but it doesn’t derail his motivations. "The few seconds that we’re together, I’ve got to hope for the best." He recounts a situation when a member of another band was having a high-volume conversation at the edge of the stage while Robinson and Oxbow guitarist Niko Wenner were playing as an acoustic duo. After Robinson warned the musician to "shut the fuck up," things got heated. Audience members tried to cool things out, but, in Robinson’s words, "this evenhanded, kind of neutered approach didn’t pay heed to the reality of the moment. Which is, you had an enemy of art, and you had somebody who was trying to be the standard-bearer of Eros." He pauses. "Forget about all that. If I’m standing at a café and somebody is screaming at the top of his lungs next to me, I’m asking him 100 percent of the time to shut the fuck up. You don’t have to live all over me. It’s boorish. And rude. And uncouth. And in that way, it’s a form of bullying."
While it may seem excessive to put a spindly, long-haired dude in a Texas boogie-rock band in a submission hold called an ultimate head and arm, I can’t argue with Robinson’s reasoning: "Disrespect begets disrespect." In any case, the vocalist does allow for the possibility of walking away. But walking away for him has more to do with the Japanese concept of saving face, of avoiding conflict with honor, than with the Christian ethic of turning the other cheek. "Am I doing this out of graciousness or am I doing it out of fear?" he asked. "I think way too many people will choose to look the other way out of fear. My whole life has been a testament to avoiding base fears."
For this, I’ve got to respect the guy. Robinson may be derided on the Web as a prick, a sadist, and an egomaniac, but let’s look at the lessons: (1) You are honor bound to follow through on a promise. (2) Art is worthy of respect. (3) Fear should be avoided as a motivation. Sounds pretty fucking reasonable to me. Though, in my own top five, I try and sometimes fail to add: (4) Violence should be avoided as a teaching tool.
Really, though, we live in a time when shit talking is considered a sport in itself. Go to theoxbow.com and look at some of the live footage. Robinson trances out onstage and strips down to his underwear, and the band plays the sound of a psychological meltdown. Knowing what you know and seeing what you see, why would you fuck with him?
"To a certain degree, culturally, we’ve been neutered. And that’s what civilization is about: to get us to places of greater peace," Robinson said. "But clearly, that aspect of it is not working." I’d have to agree that it’s not working, especially in social situations, where people seem to assume a disconnection in the causal, karmic links between action and consequence. Witness the hapless Scotsman in the 2003 Christian Anthony documentary Music for Adults. He gets pantsed in front of a crowd by Robinson, who asks, with what seems genuine concern, "Did that hurt? Did I hurt your feelings?" before adding the rejoinder "It’s an Oxbow show. That’s what happens." *
OXBOW
Wed/17, 9 p.m., $10
12 Galaxies
2565 Mission, SF
EUGENE ROBINSON
In conversation with V. Vale and James Stark
Nov. 8, 6 p.m., $5
SF Camerawork
657 Mission, SF
Death balm
Thurston Mooreites still absorbing the noiseless acoustics of Trees Outside the Academy, his sophomore full-length released last month on his Ecstatic Peace imprint, may be unaware of another basement romp from the Sonic Youth guitarist, which the Los Angeles label Deathbomb Arc put out as a vinyl-only split in August. Delivered white hot and fresh to your record player at 33 rpm, Thrash Sabbatical includes three slabs of glossy vinyl designed and packaged by the artists of Not Not Fun Records in a large pizza box spray-painted in fluorescent hues of pink, orange, and yellow. The box set highlights Moore at varying degrees, ranging from the calming, breezy sensations of the acoustic instrumental "Petite Bone" to the free-noise guitar slayings of "Creemsikkle," and pairs him in three separate instances with the clattery lineup of Barrabarracuda, Men Who Can’t Love, and gasp! Kevin Shields?
Uh, no, not that Kevin Shields. The My Bloody Valentine leader’s name also happens to be the nom de plume of LA native Eva Aguila, a harsh-noise soloist whose crushing bursts of blackened tumult have, for the past three years, exceeded Shields’s drone-layer-and-loop blueprint at hair-raising volumes. Aguila started KS as a means to document her work and tour as a solo musician after graduating from college but has frequently collaborated with guest player Amy Vecchione under the KS moniker, and together the duo supply two powerful-sounding tracks to Thrash Sabbatical that merge roaring feedback and unrelenting chaos with shrill gadgetries. Aguila who is also a member of Gang Wizard and just started an electronic-dance outfit called Winners revealed over the phone that she’s into "aggressive music, even when listening to other genres," but is put off when people criticize harsh noise for being, well, just a bunch of goddamn noise.
"Lately I’ve really gotten into the idea that you can have abrasive music and still have it be beautiful," she explained. "Like, it can be kind of blissful, especially because a lot of people that are into harsh noise think that it can only be this one thing, and I strongly disagree with that. You can have different emotions from it and get other things out of it." She laughed. "I don’t know if it makes a difference that I’m a woman or something, but I’ve always been into it. It’s what gets me pumping."
KEVIN SHIELDS WITH BRIAN MILLER
With Sword Heaven and 16 Bitch Pileup
Sat/20, 9:30 p.m., $7
Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk, SF
(415) 923-0923
Ready to break out of the farm leagues
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
You can’t imagine all the types of shit I’ve seen in my life
You can’t imagine all the pain ’til you look in my eyes
Ike Dola, "This Is My Life"
I met Ike Dola two days after his father died. Not only did the 23-year-old East Oakland MC keep our appointment, but he’d also performed the same day his father succumbed to cancer. As Ike said, he’s "been strong through it all.
"I wasn’t going to do it, but Moms and my auntie told me to do it," Ike (né Isaac Walker) explained of his family’s show-must-go-on ethos. "They were both DJs. My daddy was a DJ and a truck driver. He’d come home late after driving the truck and still hit the club and DJ. He was real supportive. He’d knock my shit in the car. His favorite track was ‘Fuck What You Think.’
"Now I’ve got to take care of everything," he concluded. "It’s a little big for me."
ALL IN DA FAMILY
Ike’s increased responsibilities come at a time when his reputation has grown a little big as well. Having dropped his first two major solo projects the mixtape Dope Illustrated and the more albumlike Beast Oakland (Nickel and Dime Ent.), mixed by DJ Fresh in addition to guest spots on tracks by Husalah, Lee Majors, even Mac Dre himself, Ike is widely considered the next local MC who will blow up around here.
"He’s definitely next," said DJ Impereal, who, as a member of mixtape kings Demolition Men, touches all major Bay Area talent.
"He’s got his own style," Impereal said of the MC’s rapid-fire twang, delivered at a much higher pitch than his speaking voice. Ike’s unique vocals betray more than a hint of the Southern drawl that influences black Oaklandese, partly because his family moved to its ancestral Mobile, Ala., when he was 15.
"It’s hard out there," Ike recalled of those high school years. "It’s cool, though. At lunch we had the freestyle battles. A lotta guys knew me as ‘Dude from Oakland’ I was rippin’ it." If Ike had an unfair advantage, it was simply because his auntie’s son happened to be Keak Da Sneak, already signed to Virgin as a member of 3X Krazy.
"I was always freestyling with Keak and them," Ike explained. "But when I moved to Alabama, my brother-in-law was rapping, and he was raw. I was, like, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ He’s, like, ‘Nigga, you need to write some shit.’
"When I got back I had a song called ‘Try Me,’<0x2009>" he continued. "I spit it for Keak. He was, like, ‘You ready!’ I wasn’t going to school, though, so he was damn near not fucking with me. He said if I go to school, he’d start fucking with me. But my credits didn’t transfer. They tried to put me in a low grade. I was, like, ‘Fuck that,’ but I went back and got my GED."
FARM AID
After that, Ike’s career took off, particularly when Keak formed the Farm Boyz with Ike and Bra Hef.
"We’d go to my auntie’s farm in [Sacramento to record]," Ike said. "The Farm Boyz was big in Sac even before the album came that put me on the map." Their first, self-titled album (2002) quickly sold out and was never re-pressed. Their second album, Farm Boyz 2 (Thizz Ent., 2005), was even more successful.
"That was the time around Mac Dre dying," Ike said. "They were looking for something hot to put out. So we dropped that that was some songs we already did. I’d been in Lee Majors’s lab, writing songs. Keak had songs, so we put them together."
Now Ike is concentrating on his solo career, and his distinctive voice different from Keak’s but just as far out has earned him huge underground buzz as he prepares for his first proper album for Nickel and Dime, collaborating with in-house producers like Trademark Traxx and 17-year-old phenom Swerve. Currently touring with J-Stalin’s Livewire, Ike hopes to build his buzz beyond the region, and his distinctive flavor provides more proof that the Bay Area’s rap resurgence is far from over.
Imitation of life
› cheryl@sfbg.com
Lonely, socially awkward dude becomes obsessed with an eerily lifelike female doll. Uh, I’ve seen that movie before, when it was a horror flick called Love Object. But if you can imagine the same plot transferred into a bittersweet romance and with the kink factor dialed way down, you’ll have a grip on Lars and the Real Girl, a movie so softhearted it implies the silicone-worshiping misfit in question (Ryan Gosling) doesn’t even have sex with his sex doll. They do smooch on occasion, though.
From Craig Gillespie the director of Mr. Woodcock, a far less gentle 2007 affair and scripter Nancy Oliver (a frequent Six Feet Under writer), Lars and the Real Girl couches its outrageous concept in classic Amer-indie trappings, including a naturalistic setting that incorporates small-town vistas, snowy cinematography, and a Sundance Channelready cast. Besides genre darling Gosling, there’s Patricia Clarkson as Dagmar, a sympathetic doctor; Paul Schneider and Emily Mortimer as Lars’s concerned brother, Gus, and pregnant sister-in-law, Karin; and Kelli Garner as Margo, Lars’s endearingly dorky coworker. Margo’s sweet on Lars, but he’s so terrified of human interaction that he’d rather form a relationship with Bianca, the Angelina Jolieesque plastic vixen that arrives via UPS one chilly morning.
Naturally, Gus and Karin are horrified Gus is perhaps more mortified when they meet Lars’s much-exalted new girlfriend (he met her on the Internet, you see). Having an anatomically correct doll as a constant companion is spooky enough, but Lars believes she’s real and conducts one-sided conversations with her and tenderly looks after her well-being. Before long, Bianca trades in her fishnets and hooker makeup for sweatpants and bangs, settles into her very own wheelchair, and accompanies Lars everywhere he goes.
Surprisingly, the community comes to accept Lars’s new friend they all love Lars, a lifelong resident. His mother died in childbirth, and older bro Gus has only recently reentered his life, having moved away to sow oats while leaving Lars in the care of their cold, distant, now-deceased father. This is a guy who feels pain when he’s touched no wonder his dream girl is even less alive than Kim Cattrall in Mannequin (or, to cite my favorite movie with an inanimate humanoid as its main character, Terry Kiser in Weekend at Bernie’s). Thanks to the fact that everyone in town plays along with Lars’s Bianca-is-real delusion, the doll does begin to take on a life of her own. She volunteers! She gets a job! She’s elected to the school board! Much to Lars’s annoyance, she’s too busy to spend every waking moment with her boyfriend even though she is technically not awake.
Lars and the Real Girl has its moments of broad comedy, but its delicate tone demands that it underplay any sight-gag potential. After Half Nelson (and, perhaps no less so, The Notebook) cinephiles have come to expect great things from Gosling’s performances; he’s got a way of elevating even uninspiring material to a more meaningful plane, in the manner of Edward Norton or Sean Penn. As Lars he’s pudgy, slovenly (except for his perfectly slicked-back hair), and mustachioed, with a nervous blink and a hunched, shy demeanor. He interprets Lars’s overflowing reserves of fear and grief with subtle grace. At first a salve for loneliness, Bianca becomes both a coping strategy and a way for Lars to externalize his repressed anguish. Any actor able to transfer such complicated emotions onto a plastic costar is clearly as real as they come. *
LARS AND THE REAL GIRL
Opens Fri/19 in Bay Area theaters
Life sucks
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
By now it’s natural to expect a lot from the Arab Film Festival, which is opening its 11th annual survey of cinema from the Arab world and diaspora with veteran Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzid’s excellent feature Making Of, then presenting more than 80 features, docs, and shorts from 13 countries in screenings around the Bay and, for the first time, in Los Angeles. Ghassan Salhab’s The Last Man (2006), on the other hand, delivers something probably less expected: the first Lebanese vampire movie. As it turns out, a Lebanese vampire movie not only makes perfect sense but is also the best thing to happen to the genre in a long time.
That’s because Salhab (whose fine Terra Incognita screened at the fest in 2005) opens the field to new resonance with a deft artistry that recapitulates the vampire film’s enduring tropes while making nearly every shot a fresh, unexpected surprise. Like Terra Incognita (whose hip, desultory, and existential multicharacter drama remains a kind of companion piece), The Last Man unfolds in the limbo that is present-day Beirut. Here a handsome fortysomething bachelor doctor (a haunted, quietly mesmerizing Carlos Chahine) becomes involved in a rash of bizarre murders. Meanwhile, his personality appears to be undergoing a profound transformation, which leaves him progressively alienated from his surroundings.
The narrative unfolds masterfully, punctuated by a visual and aural economy and style that are immediately riveting, like those of a subtle hallucination or waking dream that takes hold of you on a lethargic and very bright summer day. As daylight slowly bleeds from the screen and night takes over, familiar themes at the heart of the vampire film the centrality of vision and the gaze, for instance, and the collision of scientific modernity with some premodern, even timeless mystery of nature return, ingeniously wedded to a specific social and political context.
Beautifully painted, The Last Man‘s context is the half-ignored backdrop of Beirut and the background of war, invasion, civil strife, political crisis, and looming uncertainty (aggravated by TV chatter about US-occupied Iraq) that constitutes what one passing remark calls "the situation" which has brought an existential malaise in its wake, a sense of heightened expectation that is also a socially paralyzing numbness. In this agonized slumber, this halfway world between life and death, is the last man the one who, alone and haunted, wakes fully to the visceral nightmare of being? *
ARAB FILM FESTIVAL
Oct. 1828, most shows $10
Call or see Web site for program info
(415) 564-1100
THE LAST MAN
Sat/20, 7 p.m., $10
Roxie Film Center
3117 and 3125 16th St., SF
(415) 863-1087
Seven up
1. Dans la Ville de la Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, France/Spain)
2. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada) My two favorites of the festival were both ghost stories in which a haunted protagonist (fey Xavier Lafitte in Sylvia and Maddin’s voice-over in My Winnipeg) traces his past in a city charged with memory. In Guerín’s detailed mise-en-scène and patterned compositions and Maddin’s loopy reenactments and smeared dissolves, we get nothing less than cinema as seeing, remembering, being which is to say, a cinephile’s dream.
3. Useless (Jia Zhangke, China)
4. The Unforeseen (Laura Dunn, US) Terror’s Advocate and Scott Walker: 30th Century Man have their strengths, but these two documentaries gave me the greatest hope for the state of nonfiction cinema Laura Dunn’s chronicle of an environmental crisis in Austin, Texas, for its plainspoken visual lyricism and Jia Zhangke’s observation of the fashion industry for its side-wind narration and flowering long takes.
5. Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, France/Iran). Sometimes all it takes is lively storytelling. Fingers crossed that this pitch-perfect adaptation of Satrapi’s graphic novel will edge out Ratatouille for the animation Oscar.
6. Fujian Blue (Robin Weng, China)
7. La France (Serge Bozon, France) My two dark horses, each in its way about a band of outsiders. Fujian Blue‘s tender portrait of a group of friends living on the edge in southeast China (a center for human trafficking) evokes Mean Streets, while Bozon’s chronicle of a troop of World War I deserters makes delightful, if often inexplicable, use of vintage Hollywood movies (the westerns of Howard Hawks and John Ford, the combat films of Raoul Walsh and Samuel Fuller) and sun-dappled musical arrangements that would make Wes Anderson blush.
For Johnny Ray Huston’s report on the Vancouver International Film Festival, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.
Visions of excess
Trucks of day-old bread emptied into landfills, a sea of chicks shoved through an assembly line the horrors of the global food industry make for wildly surreal and yet all-too-real images in We Feed the World, one of six feature documentaries at this year’s CounterCorp Film Festival. Erwin Wagenhofer’s movie views excess, waste, and animal torture from a European point of view, so you can only imagine how much more hellish an American counterpart would be though the cinematography’s attentiveness to the way slaughterhouse machinery robs adult chickens of their features wordlessly says as much as any commentary in 2000’s The Natural History of the Chicken. A final in-office meeting with the CEO of Nestlé, who sings the praises of "foodstuffs" (and uses Mike Tyson and "an undernourished Bengali" in one tortured allegory), adds a bitter layer of megaprocessed frosting to the movie’s paradoxes. You say tomato, farmers say you no longer know what a tomato tastes like.
Any movie that splices Bryan Boyce’s State of the Union (and its Teletubbies images of George W. Bush blowing up oil towers and little bunnies) into an opening-credits sequence is worth a look. Narrated by author Naomi Klein, Freedom of Expression is an effective primer on corporate censorship and culture jamming a window into movies such as Craig Baldwin’s creatively inspired Sonic Outlaws, one hopes. In addition to Boyce, Negativland (partly via the hilariously brilliant Ethel Merman track "No Business") and www.illegal-art.org are also featured. (Johnny Ray Huston)
COUNTERCORP FILM FESTIVAL
Thurs/18Sat/20
Victoria Theatre
2961 16th St., SF
1-800-838-3006
Pete’s Tavern
› paulr@sfbg.com
With the recent cashiering of Barry Bonds, the House that Barry Built goes into receivership, while the neighborhood pauses to reflect. Perhaps the foul odors that have gathered over AT&T Park in recent seasons bad-team and steroid-scandal stinks will now dissipate. Perhaps the park will be given a more euphonious name, one that actually has something to do with baseball, the team, and the city, and is not just a reference to the highest corporate bidder du jour.
Are people thinking these sorts of deep thoughts at Pete’s Tavern, a new venture by the canny Peter Osborne, who opened MoMo’s in the neighborhood before there was much of a neighborhood? I doubt it. For one thing, it is hard to think any sort of thought when you are a sodden sports nut in your Alabama sweatshirt, watching Crimson Tide football on one of the many flat-panel screens mounted high around the huge bar and bellowing like an agitated zoo gorilla at every first down and penalty flag sloshing beer on your sweatshirt too. Yes, Pete’s is part sports bar, and while it happens to be across the street from a major sports temple, it would be what it is no matter where it was. Sports culture, like cyberspace, is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, and the people who plug into it tend to float free from the reality-based community.
But Pete’s (which opened in August) isn’t just a sports bar, a place where postcollegiate men sit with pitchers of beer and luxuriate in periodic outbursts of boorishness. It’s also a restaurant, and it serves food I might be tempted to describe as "surprising" if MoMo’s weren’t so good. Osborne is obviously a savvy entrepreneur who understands the lure of sports in attracting crowds, but his restaurants (including, once upon a time, the Washington Square Bar and Grill) have been estimable despite their often raucous venues, and Pete’s Tavern, in a Falstaffian way, adds to this legacy.
"Tavern" suggests dim lighting, at least to me, and Pete’s can be very dim indeed. When we stepped into the place’s large vestibule over a recent sunny noon hour, it was as if we’d gone blind.
"If it were any darker, there’d be a lawsuit," said my friend. We halted for a moment to let our eyes adjust and thoughts of litigation clear. Then we mounted the half-staircase to the main room, where an enormous bar stands at center court, with tables and chairs lining the sidewalls. The noise factor at Pete’s is not inconsiderable; apart from the oft-madding crowd there is, even in moments of relative lassitude, a soundtrack of thumping music that reverberates off a world of hard surfaces, including handsome but rather chilly zinc-topped tables.
The mood, then, was distinctly unpromising in those first moments. Then the bruschetta ($9) arrived, and when I bit into a point of beautifully pillowy grilled garlic bread laden with chunks of fresh mozzarella, drippingly ripe slices of heirloom tomato, and julienne of basil the whole enlivened with a judicious flick or two of salt my spirits rose. Clearly the kitchen (under the direction of chef de cuisine Damon Hall) wasn’t stinting on ingredients nor sending out plates of food that hadn’t been properly seasoned.
The chili con carne ($5 for a bowl) was meaty as could be with what seemed to be high-quality, house-ground chuck, and it was nicely decorated with matchsticks of crisped tortilla. A tuna salad ($10), meanwhile, featured fresh tuna (mashed with mayonnaise and lightly browned so as to resemble a pat of goat cheese) nested in mixed greens, with cherry tomatoes, quartered hard-boiled eggs, and a creamy vinaigrette on the side.
Prices are not terrible for what you get and considering where you’re getting it, but they do seem higher than the pubby average. Zucchini strings were a little dear at $7, though the pile was haystack huge. (This dish, consisting of batter-fried shreds, was the only one we found to be underseasoned. A side cup of ranch dressing, for dipping, helped.) And $12 for an open-faced turkey sandwich? Well, all right, especially since the gravy, flecked with green peas and carrots, was intensely flavorful and the flaps of meat were draped over tasty cheddar biscuits.
On the other hand, $13 for half a rotisserie chicken seemed fair enough, given the snap of the house-made sauce and the moist tenderness of the bird, which wasn’t quite confitlike but was in the (sorry!) ballpark. By the time we were staggering toward the far end of this plate of food (which included quarters of roasted new potatoes, just to make sure), we were revisiting the wisdom of having opened with chicken and chorizo nachos ($10) in addition to the zucchini strings. The nachos plate was like many a nachos plate in many a sports bar: a great coming-together of tortilla chips under an oozy cap of melted cheese, with large mounds of sour cream, salsa, and guacamole on top, the last two house-made. The nachos, plus a pitcher or two of beer, would have been plenty to keep a couple of exfrat rats satisfied into extra innings.
But there were no extra innings that night, just another Giants loss, and an exodus of fans streaming forth into the mild evening as we stepped out of Pete’s. We waved at old Barry, but he didn’t see us, just as we hadn’t seen him. *
PETE’S TAVERN
Daily, 11 a.m.midnight
128 King, SF
(415) 817-5040
Full bar
AE/DS/MC/V
Very noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Oh, Donna
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
You don’t necessarily expect a choreographer to be interested in playing with conceits. After all, dancers work in an art form that is primarily nonverbal and movement driven. Yet Donna Uchizono’s imagination embraces ideas in conjunction with physicality. "All of my work is concept based," she explained over the phone from her home in New York. "The idea always comes first, and then I develop a movement vocabulary to support the concept. So the pieces are very different from each other."
Sometimes she takes off from a single word. When I asked her about an early work, Fault (1990) which had struck me as a puzzling combination of brain and brawn she chuckled. "The piece was terrible," she remembered. "But then [later that year] I made San Andreas out of it, which was very beautiful." It turns out that she had been inspired by the idea of "fault," as both a geological concept and the attributing and accepting of blame, as in "It’s my (or your) fault."
More recently, for last year’s Leap to Tall for Mikhail Baryshnikov, she thought about how his life has been full of huge leaps to the top of the ballet world, from the Soviet Union to the West, from ballet to modern dance, and from dancer to the founder of the Baryshnikov Arts Center. She also noticed that for many women Baryshnikov is still a matinee idol and that at his arts center he is surrounded by "strong, capable women." Leap turned into a trio for Baryshnikov, Hristoula Harakas, and Jodi Melnick, the last two of whom support him in his leaps, both literally and metaphorically.
Uchizono has been choreographing for close to 20 years, and her work has garnered just about every major dance award, from a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and a Bessie Award in 2002 to three Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund grants (to work in Argentina with indigenous musicians) and most recently an Alpert Award in 2005.
Uchizono is known for lush movement and intricate partnering that "takes months and months to learn." For Thin Air, with which her namesake company makes its Bay Area debut Oct. 18, she chose a different approach. "It’s very minimal, very transparent, and it takes a long time for something to develop," she said. "I am working with a very long time frame." She described the piece as having been influenced by quantum physics and the Buddhist concept of emptiness.
Cocommissioned by ODC Theater, Thin Air premiered Oct. 9 in New York City. Locally, it’s part of ODC’s expanded presentation series, which will continue to showcase local companies and also include national and international artists, similar to the way ODC operated in the 1980s.
Thin Air includes a score by Fred Firth and a video component, agreed to somewhat reluctantly by the choreographer. In principle, Uchizono doesn’t like video with dance. "I am so tired of how these large projections dwarf dancers, but since I am working with the idea that the observer is actually projecting reality into emptiness, video seemed appropriate. Video clearly is projected reality." Uchizono, who is not dancing in the work, relied heavily on her dancers’ input, particularly that of longtime troupe member Harakas, whom Uchizono described as being "her inside eye" and "like a great actor who gets involved in the part and [has] discussions with the lighting designer and the director."
As for the future of her project-based company, Uchizono is both a conceptualizer and a realist. She dreams of an installation project, but then she pulls back, noting that what she’d really like to do is provide her dancers with health insurance. Ideas may turn her on, but Uchizono’s feet remain firmly planted on the ground. *
THIN AIR
Thurs/18Sat/20, 8 p.m., $18$25
ODC Theater
3153 17th St., SF
(415) 863-9834
By any other name
› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS Fish chili is still chili. Everyone else was wondering or grumbling, but there was never any question in my mind. Fish chili is chili. It just is. If you call a thing a thing, then it is what it is. Ask Popeye.
It was chili because it had chiles in it, or chili powder, and because it was at a chili cook-off and, most important, because the guy who made it called it chili. We live in a free country, and even if we didn’t, fish chili would be chili.
You don’t like that, move to Texas. In Terlingua, at the famous annual "international" chili cook-off, you are not allowed to put beans in your chili. Or pasta. Or rice. Or "other similar items."
Fish? I wonder….
I love Texas-style chili. I prefer it by a mile to your average ground-beef-with-bean varieties. And I love that you can call a chili cook-off an "international" event and then disallow beans and things, pretty much eliminating all the other kinds of chili in the world except Texas-style.
Oh, but chili was invented in Texas.
Give me a break. If so, it has since migrated to New Mexico, where, in Old Mexican fashion, it’s more about the peppers than the meat or the beans or whatever they happen to flavor. Ever been to Cincinnati? Chili has. It’s cinnamony. Beans, onions, and cheese are optional; spaghetti is standard.
Not to blow its cover, but chili lives incognito in Providence, RI, home of the oddly named New York system, which basically means chili dogs slapped together in a line of buns on a guy’s arm. They don’t call it chili, but it’s ground beef with chili powder and cumin, somewhat distinctified by soy sauce, ginger, and my personal favorite celery seed.
Now, Oakland is not Terlingua or Cincinnati or Detroit or New York City or New York system or New Castle, Pa. or a lot of other places, if you think about it. It’s where Joe Rut lives, in a warehouse, and I’m jealous because he gets to vote for Barbara Lee and host chili cook-offs.
I get to go. I get to vote for my favorite chili. In a field of more than 20 contestants, which included a couple of excellent pork chilies, a wild-turkey chili (dude shot the bird hisself!), and an elk and bacon one, among the many beef-and-bean, just-beef, and vegetarian entries, my hands-down, hats-off, and belly-up favorite was the fish chili I’ve been trying to tell you about. It was ridiculously delicious, well stocked with several kinds of fish and shellfish, colorful with peppers, and just all-around pretty. Plus I liked its politics, and philosophy.
My only dilemma was whether to vote for it for best meat chili or best vegetarian. Joe Rut’s chili cook-off ballot, like life, gave me only two choices, neither one quite right, and I had to find my way around that.
This time it was easy: I put number five on both lines. The fish chili was the best meat chili and the best vegetarian one. This from a pork-barbecuing chicken-farmer chick whose favorite two things to eat are raw beef and green salad.
For the record, if there had been a line on the ballot for gumbo, I’d have fived that line too. Hell, if we were voting on pancakes, I’d have voted for the fish chili. You know how sometimes a bowl or plate of food just speaks to you, and speaks your language?
Well, apparently I wasn’t the only one listening. I just got forwarded a mass-mailed e-mail from Joe Rut announcing the winners: fish chili won best meat chili. I love the world!
My guess is about a hundred people voted. Very few were wearing cowboy hats. There must have been at least probably about 150 folks there, you gotta figure, because it was a warehouse and it was crowded. There were bands. There were pies for dessert and a big fruit salad just so everyone could at least have a chance of pooping the next day.
The name of the guy who made this fish chili, also for the record, is hold on a second Russ Leslie … and I publish that journalistic fact right here (of all the crazy places) in the wild but sincere hope that he will read this and invite me over for leftovers. Or next time he makes a pot, I guess, because it’s been more than a week.
I miss it.
Plus ca change
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
Why, umpteen zillion years into the AIDS era (I used to volunteer for Gay Men’s Health Crisis in the 1980s), is there still no useful data about the risks of oral sex for men? Have we really learned nothing since the first appearance of "Low risk but not no risk"? With the understanding that not letting someone come (or precome) in your mouth is a start (but also loses a lot of the appeal), is there any sensible way to assess and reduce the risks of the common American blow job?
Love,
Loyal East Coast Reader
Dear Loyal:
Actually, the relative risks of the Great American Blow Job have been much on my mind of late. I’m working on an article about whatever happened to the heterosexual AIDS epidemic and what straight, middle-class ladies should do about HIV when they start dating again after their marriages break up. (Quick answer: nothing. They’re not going to encounter any, but while they’re taking unnecessary precautions against HIV they’re incidentally protecting themselves from real menaces like human papillomavirus and herpes.) Not that this applies at all to your question or your demographic; what’s sauce for the goose, after all, is not necessarily sauce for gander and gander.
Back when you were first volunteering in New York and I was out here gearing up to become a sex educator, nobody knew nothin’, and the safest thing to do was to lump everything that might possibly be dangerous into "Thou shalt not" and try to get people to take a "100 percent safe" pledge. I suspect that then, as now, the people most likely to achieve 100 percent safety weren’t at much risk to begin with, while the hard partiers continued to party hard-ly, no matter what their T-shirts said. I know for a fact that politically aware womyn at the time would not shut up about woman-to-woman transmission, which turned out to be so much poppycock or poppyhen, as they might have had it. Likewise, the much-ballyhooed heterosexual AIDS epidemic never made it off the cover of the news magazines and into the bedrooms and bloodstreams of straight America.
So, your question. If there were a definitive answer to that, it would be coming out of a few labs here in San Francisco. But of course, HIV being a shifty bugger and human behavior being even worse, there isn’t. There are animal studies (using simian immunodeficiency virus, which is similar but by no means identical) demonstrating that you can easily spread the virus by swabbing monkey tonsils with an infected Q-tip. Then there are the epidemiological studies like HOT, the HIV Oral Transmission study, dedicated to finding those cases in which a guy gave blow jobs but never, ever, ever had unprotected anal sex and seroconverted anyway, and that is so complicated a business I’m going to let one of the researchers explain it:
"I’m going to conclude with the HOT study, in which, again, we interview men who we screen and rescreen to ascertain that, in fact, their only risk is oral sex. So they are a special population, and they are screened and rescreened, and they get their HIV test, and eventually we do another very in-depth interview, and after three corroborating screenings, or two screenings and one interview in which they say they’ve only had oral sex, 25 percent later report a higher risk exposure anal sex in the same time period after we get them in another environment with a different questionnaire and a face-to-face interview, and this is after they’ve been told that, in fact, they’re negative. And so we see this working many ways, and they’re, like, ‘Whew! Well, now I can tell the truth.’ But in fact, of those 363 men, we estimate that up to a quarter of them probably weren’t having only oral sex, and so I think that we have huge problems in terms of self-reported risk behavior."
That was from a very informative experts’ roundtable discussion I found on HIV Insite (hivinsite.ucsf.edu), a UC San Francisco site I have just declared required reading for the interested. The good news is that the best work currently being done is readily available to us for free. The bad news is that, due not to bad science or lack of science but to the vagaries of human memory and human motivation, they still can’t really answer your question. How many new HIV infections are caused by fellatio to ejaculation? I’ll let the above experts answer that. It’s funny but not, you know?
JK I think we agree it’s less than 5 percent, don’t we?
SB Uh, … yes, I’d probably say it’s it may be less than 5 percent. I’d say 5 percent or less. But I wouldn’t say 1 percent either.
JK Well, 1 percent is less than 5 percent … [Laughter]
KS Well, I wouldn’t say "5 percent or less."
SB So I don’t know that we’re going to come to consensus on that.
And what’s the best way to reduce whatever risk there is? Not going down on HIV-positive men. Easy for me to say, sure, and awfully glib, but you can’t say it ain’t so.
Love,
Andrea