Volume 42 Number 27

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Ditching the paper cup

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Statistics show that Americans drink more than 400 million cups of coffee a day. While most buy the average Starbucks and Folgers blends, a growing number of consumers are beginning to care more about what’s in their cup and where it comes from.

I work part-time at Coffee to the People in the Haight, which specializes in high quality, Fair Trade products, and I often field questions from customers about the origin and certification of the shop’s java. But no one ever asks about the flush capacity of our toilets, or the environmental impact of our cleaning products, or whether all of our appliances meet Energy Star standards.

In the past, if they’d asked about such things, I would have told them that the toilet ran constantly, the petroleum-based dish soap we used probably killed fish in the Bay, and that the two refrigerators behind the counter had been around since before I was born.

It’s not that the owners never cared about having a greener business — they just couldn’t afford to pay attention. Stocking gourmet coffee and tea is costly, not to mention the astronomical rent and power bills they have to pay every month.

That’s where the Green Café Network comes in.

Environmental educator Kirstin Henninger founded the nonprofit collective a year ago to help its members achieve higher standards of environmental stewardship. So far, the network is composed of 10 cafés, including Coffee to the People. Owners meet periodically to discuss and share business strategies. Recently they went in together to purchase compostable to-go containers. They hope to do the same with eco-friendly cleaning supplies in the near future.

Henninger, 39, originally wanted to open a green coffee shop of her own. After surveying shop owners on their business practices, however, she saw a better way to make a difference. Many owners told her they had the desire to be more environmentally responsible, but not the know-how, staff, or money to put anything into action. So Henninger decided to do something to help them.

"Instead of me opening one more café, I realized a way I could have much more of an impact," she told the Guardian. "I saw potential to actually support a new movement toward a green economy, and that was much more possible by affecting multiple cafés instead of my one café."

Henninger said she chose to focus on neighborhood coffeehouses because they are often the center of close-knit communities. "By the process of cafés becoming green businesses, we aim to educate everyone in the mix," she said. "The owners, staff, customers, neighbors, other local businesses — this is a necessary part of the process of supporting a local, green economy." She also offers consulting to any business, coffee shop or not, that requests it.

Joining the group didn’t make Coffee to the People’s toilet stop running, but we are at least heading in the right direction. Henninger acknowledged that while customers notice changes in the products they pay for, other aspects of a green business go unappreciated. The ultimate goal for cafés in the group is to become certified green businesses (all Bay Area counties have a green business program). But the certification process can be misleading. Most localities only require that a business conform to five out of 20 guidelines, and once the placard is placed in the window, the motivation to complete the next 15 steps can tend to flag. Henninger hopes the members of her network, by working together and helping each other, will be as green as they can be.

"We need people striving to make the extra effort because it’s the right thing to do," she said. "I think that’s the challenge of the entire environmental movement."

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

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was away with the kids and missed the state Democratic convention in San Jose, but from what I hear, it was quite the show. The big local news, of course, was that Assemblymember Mark Leno blocked State Senator Carole Migden from winning the party’s endorsement for her reelection bid. That’s a big victory for Leno, who is trying to unseat her.

And the way a lot of my favorite blogs told the story, it was also a victory for the grassroots activists in the party: the Sacramento establishment, they say, was working for Migden.

I don’t think that’s entirely true; both sides had their heavy hitters. And I’m going to sound a note of caution here: Leno and his team papered the hall with some nasty negative fliers attacking Migden, not just for her travails with the Fair Political Practices Commission but for her driving record.

Leno told me he had to educate the delegates in a short period of time and that the fliers contained "nothing but facts." Which is true. But I don’t think he needs to go negative on Migden; she’s doing a fine job of that herself. And the attacks open ugly wounds in the community and could help the third candidate, Marin’s Joe Nation.

Leno needs to keep a tight leash on his campaign team as this heads for the finish.

And now we pause for a brief reflection on the First Amendment.

Matt Smith over at the SF Weekly took a shot at us last week, arguing that our lawsuit would somehow damage his paper’s ability to produce good journalism. Migden was in court this week to argue that the state shouldn’t prevent her from spending campaign money in violation of campaign-finance rules. Both claims rely on a dangerous interpretation of one of the most important pieces of law in the history of the world.

Smith’s theory: since we nailed the Weekly and its corporate parent for predatory pricing violations, we are somehow guilty of seeking to force the chain to cut back its editorial staff.

We heard the same sort of argument in court, and I suspect the Weekly‘s lawyers will trot out the First Amendment on appeal. Gee, they will say, the government can’t tell a newspaper how much to charge for its ads. That’s unconstitutional.

In fact, I think it’s pretty clear that the Weekly, not the Guardian, has been the paper attacking the First Amendment. The whole notion that James Madison had in mind when he introduced the Bill of Rights was that a free marketplace of ideas made for a more free and democratic society. Big chains that swallow independent papers limit that marketplace, particularly if, like the SF Weekly‘s owners, they enforce ideological consistency. Chains that try to kill other papers are even worse. That’s what our lawsuit was about.

Then there’s Senator Migden, whose legal papers cite one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of my lifetime, Buckley v. Valeo, which says that money is speech and that the rich can spend whatever they want on political campaigns. Again, the problem is the marketplace of ideas: if one side can corner the market with cash, there’s no free exchange. Campaign finance laws, properly written, don’t diminish the First Amendment; they enhance it. So do fair-competition laws in the media. Because both promote what Madison had in mind — a level (or at least relatively fair) playing field of ideas.

Rip up the mayor’s club-violence plan

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EDITORIAL Back in January, 34-year-old Clarence Corbin was shot and killed during a fight outside Jelly’s Dance Café nightclub in Mission Bay. Mayor Gavin Newsom leapt into action, announcing that this sort of violence was unacceptable. We’re with the mayor on that, although we wish he’d shown the same kind of energy in dealing with the epidemic of shootings in the Bayview and Western Addition over the past few years.

But his solution — a crackdown on nightclub promoters — is unlikely to do anything about violence and will almost certainly damage the creative underside of the city’s entertainment scene.

Sup. Sophie Maxwell is carrying the mayor’s legislation, which she introduced March 4. Some of the provisions just seem silly: the bill, for example, would ban "loitering" within 10 feet of a club between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. Of course, people stand outside clubs all the time — among other things, to smoke cigarettes — so the bill says smokers would be exempted. So would people who are waiting for cabs. People who simply wanted some fresh air or to make a phone call (or to make out away from the dance floor) would be subject to fines. The loitering law, like most similar laws, seems like a blueprint for discriminatory and illegal enforcement. (Will young African American men get cited more often than white people? Of course they will.)

How are the cops going to decide who’s really waiting for a ride (cabs can take half an hour to arrive on a Saturday night) and who’s just hanging out? Might potential troublemakers just light up a cigarette and thus be free from legal action? It’s hard to see the practical logic here.

Then there’s the provision that would require promoters who hold two or more club events a year to obtain a permit (and presumably, pay a fee). Applicants would have to have proof of $1 million in liability insurance.

That, frankly, would kill a whole lot of small-time events in San Francisco.

Although Newsom complained to the press about "fly-by-night promoters," the city’s full of well-established people who do shows at various clubs with various programs a few times a year or a few times a month — and most of them are small-time operators. Very few have ever had any problems with the law, or promoted a show that led to violence — but most of them would have to shut down, because the $1 million in insurance money would be too expensive.

The Bay Area Reporter suggested March 13 that the bill could harm nonprofit events promoters by forcing them to devote much of the charitable take from their shows to paying for insurance and security plans.

We just don’t see how any of this really addresses the problem of violence outside of San Francisco clubs (and we don’t really see that clubs are to blame for much of the violence in the city anyway). When Sup. Ross Mirkarimi tried to get Mayor Newsom to put cops on foot in high-crime areas, the mayor balked. When Sup. Chris Daly tried to create a violence-prevention program that might have actually gotten to the root causes of this horrible pattern of kids killing one another, the mayor rejected it.

Instead, he wants to create a strange and ineffective plan to give police an excuse to arrest the wrong people that will penalize the small promoters who every week give so much to the city’s cultural landscape.

If club owners are concerned about crowds fomenting violence outside their doors, then the problem needs to be addressed. But this is an ass-backward way to do it. The supervisors need to rip this plan apart and start fresh.

Sharing the pain

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EDITORIAL We’re generally not for cutting employee salaries to address the city’s budget deficit. And we’ve never been fond of claiming that doctors and lawyers who earn less-than-market wages working for the city of San Francisco should be penalized because they earn what appear in newspaper stories to be fat paychecks.

But Sup. Aaron Peskin was not on the wrong track when he suggested, only slightly facetiously, that Mayor Gavin Newsom ought to be looking for high-paid staffers to cut instead of slicing services for the poor. Peskin’s point was not so much that the top layers of city bureaucracy were outrageously overpaid (although a few of the mayor’s aides and some of the department heads he’s hired could fit in that category) but that all of the cuts have come at the bottom. Find 10 surplus bureaucrats making $150,000 a year and you could save the entire program that provides public-health nurse visits for chronically ill San Franciscans.

Sure, some of this is politics: Newsom is taking a stab at the mayor with a suggestion bound to win popular support. But it’s also a serious policy issue: when the city’s in the red, where should the burden fall? In Newsom’s current budget proposals, it falls almost entirely in the wrong places.

Eliminating a deficit of more than $300 million is daunting. Of course, the city wouldn’t have this problem if Newsom and his predecessors had been willing to look at obvious (and flexible) sources of new revenue. Public power alone would’ve brought in almost enough to cover this year’s shortfall (and would have earned the city so much cash during the better years that it could have been set aside in a rainy-day fund to prevent these kinds of budget roller-coasters). The city’s major taxes are a regressive mess; fixing the business tax alone (and making it more progressive) would help the economy and allow the city to raise cash from those most able to pay.

In other words, instead of axing nurses who help sick and housebound senior citizens, Newsom ought to be looking for money from the wealthy.

But right now, the mayor is talking only cuts — and for the most part, only cuts of lower-paid, front-line workers. The least the mayor could do is make a good-faith effort to share the pain. Looking for 10 useless high-paid execs in order to save public health nursing? How about former Sup. Bill Maher, who earns $144,838 out at the airport, where the last time we checked (see Here’s Bill; 5/26/06) he hardly ever showed up for work? Nine more patronage cronies, Mr. Mayor, and you’ll make the nut.

The price of gold

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› news@sfbg.com

Five years ago, the overseers of San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge were facing a $454 million budget deficit. That figure was larger than the gross domestic products of East Timor, the west African country of Gambia, and the Independent State of Samoa.

Investigative reporter Thomas Peele of the Contra Costa Times decided to try and figure out how a bridge in the United States could amass a funding shortfall that dwarfed the economic output of entire nations. For one, he reported in a 2002 story, the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, and Transportation District used money from the tolls paid by motorists to bankroll an expensive transit system that includes a network of buses in Marin County and a fleet of ferry boats that collectively cost millions per year to operate.

Peele also discovered that the bridge’s 19-person board of directors, some members of which live far from the Bay Area, spent more than $56,000 over a two-year period just to cover trips — including meals, rental cars, and hotels — to regular meetings at the Golden Gate’s administrative offices in San Francisco.

The embarrassed district promised reforms and vowed to get its economic house in order.

But five years later, we’ve learned, very little has changed.

The district touts its substantial cuts in overhead, insisting everything possible has been done to avoid raising the toll on motorists. But the Golden Gate Bridge District’s financial problems aren’t going away — and the only solution the administration can come up with is perpetual toll increases.

Even that answer poses huge problems. The bridge doesn’t expect that the actual volume of toll-paying motorists, or the ridership on its buses and ferries, will rise in the near future at the same pace as its expenses, which are largely consumed by employee salaries, benefits, and other perks that the district’s hundreds of workers, including its board members, enjoy.

Public records show today that the district pays for health insurance for 14 of the (very) part-time directors. Last year alone, that insurance combined cost $48,000 — even though several of the board members, including two mayors and four county supervisors, are already eligible for insurance coverage in their home counties.

The bridge district’s projections show vast deficits stretching off into the next decade — and if the problem isn’t solved, a public transit system will be at risk. Riders, among them a high number of business commuters, make 9.4 million annual trips on Golden Gate’s transit system. If the fiscal mess continues unabated, the board will either have to hike tolls to larger numbers ($10, $15, $20?) or start cutting back on the buses and ferries.

The only alternative, says Golden Gate board member and San Francisco supervisor Gerardo Sandoval, may be to ask state lawmakers for the right to change the district’s charter so it can raise money a different way, such as through sales or parcel taxes.

But many of the board members, who benefit from the lucrative sinecure and the power of this bureaucracy, don’t want to take that risk. "Their fear is that if they go to Sacramento, no one’s going to ask them their opinion," Sandoval told us. "The end result is going to be some legislation that significantly changes the way the bridge is run."

BUY A BIB, SAVE A BRIDGE


Bridge officials say the projected deficit was a lot worse five years ago, before they instituted cost-cutting measures. The biggest cuts came in the form of eliminating nearly 200 positions, about a fifth of the workforce. The district also instituted a hiring freeze and forced workers to negotiate wage rollbacks and share more of the costs of their medical coverage.

Bus services from the district’s fleet of 200 were reduced by 22 percent in March and November of 2003, and taking a bus from Marin to San Francisco now costs 34 percent more than it did five years ago. The weekday fare for a ferry from Larkspur to San Francisco was raised a whopping 118 percent, and available ferry seats were reduced 23 percent by cutting trips. It can cost between $7 and $8 one-way to ride Golden Gate’s ferries and buses today.

But over the next five years, the district still anticipates its deficit will reach $91 million.

So after raising the toll five years ago, bridge officials want to do so again as soon as September. Motorists would pay $6 in cash, $5 if using a FasTrak prepaid device, and $3 instead of $1.50 for disabled drivers.

"It seems pretty clear that the [bridge’s] staff is driving the board of directors, and not the other way around, toward infinite toll increases," Sandoval said. "It’s a ludicrous idea, but that’s the only one they have right now."

Earnest bridge staffers point out in reports prepared for the public that they’ve implemented "revenue enhancements," such as putting out a donation box for visitors who might be willing to give up some pocket change and creating special sales programs at the gift shop.

Online trinkets for sale have even been expanded. At Goldengate.org you can purchase a piece of the bridge’s original cable for $175 or an $8 baby bib that reads "Golden Gate Bridge: Big, Strong and Awesome, Just Like My Dad."

But that’s not going to add up to $91 million.

Meanwhile, the anticipated deficit doesn’t even include capital projects like the nearly $185 million the district wants to spend overhauling and replacing its buses and ferries, or the $36 million it hopes to spend over the next 10 years deterring suicides, which are perhaps the second best-known feature of the Golden Gate Bridge after its aesthetic beauty.

And, of course, the bridge constantly needs repainting, thanks to the wind and salt air. "There’s more [required] maintenance on the Golden Gate Bridge than any other bridge in the country because of where it’s at…. It has to be looked after everyday by a crew of ironworkers and painters and whatever else is needed," said board president John Moylan.

The district’s largest operating expense involves paying the remaining 836 full- and part-time workers at the bridge and granting them fringe benefits like insurance coverage and supplemental pensions. This year alone salaries and benefits will cost about $100 million.

THE RED INK MOUNTS


About 60 percent of the district’s budget goes toward keeping its ferries and buses running, but key performance measures show that Golden Gate’s transit system does poorly in three crucial areas, including cost efficiency and effectiveness. When compared with national averages, Golden Gate Transit has one of the top five highest operating costs per "vehicle revenue mile" — a barometer of efficiency — out of the 150 largest transit agencies nationwide, making it more inefficient than BART, AC Transit in Alameda County, and the transportation authorities in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, according to 2005 figures maintained by the federal Department of Transportation.

It’s common for transit systems to rely on government subsidies, and few environmentalists have sympathy for drivers who whine about toll increases from the comfortable interiors of their automobiles. Mass transit is the future of urban living.

"The Golden Gate Bridge may not be as efficient as other comparable systems," Sandoval said, "but if we abandon the investment we have made in mass transportation, it will really leave us with poor options in the years to come."

Alan Zahradnik, Golden Gate’s director of planning, adds that the bridge’s buses and ferries are dissimilar to other transit systems around the country because they tend to carry fewer commuter passengers over greater distances mostly during peak hours compared to transportation authorities like San Francisco’s Muni and AC Transit.

"It’s more expensive to provide suburban, fixed-route transportation," Zahradnik said.

Nonetheless, without an increase in the toll for motorists, the bridge expects to sustain annual deficits for each of the next 10 years until the red ink reaches $290 million.

So it would seem that if the district is asking everyone to tighten their belts, its board of directors should probably do the same. The extraordinarily large 19-member Golden Gate board contains more than twice as many directors as the seven-member board that oversees Muni’s trains and buses and the nine-member board that governs BART.

That’s a throwback to history. When the bridge district formed in 1928, several counties north and south of the span were asked to participate in the $35 million bond issue required to construct a road across the Golden Gate, and although the bonds were paid off decades ago, each of those counties still receives representation on the board.

"There have been attempts to topple the bridge district in the past, but they’re so hard-wired, it’s been impossible," said Susan Deluxe, a Tiburon resident and long-time critic of the district.

The list includes two counties located far to the north, Mendocino and Del Norte — the latter bordering Oregon. But the board’s structure hasn’t been tinkered with since its formation.

When asked whether the far-flung board has outlived its usefulness, the representative from Del Norte County, Gerald Cochran, explained that the distant jurisdictions help diminish tension between the representatives from San Francisco and Marin, who frequently argue over who should contribute more to maintain the bridge. Besides, he said, Del Norte stepped up to help make the Golden Gate Bridge happen in the first place.

"It’s not what we do today," Cochran said, "it’s what we did 75 years ago to get this bridge built. We make our contributions."

The travel expenses of the two directors representing Del Norte and Mendocino counties were the highest board-meeting travel costs he found back when Peele first reported on the board’s budget — $42,404 to cover trips from their home counties to San Francisco for regular board meetings over two years.

In 2002, bridge officials told the public that the district’s top-heavy administration would spend less along with everyone else to save money. The newest $6 toll was proposed "with the understanding that staff will continue to focus on finding internal cost savings," one staff report promised.

But that’s not exactly what new numbers we obtained from the district through a public records request show. Transporting distant directors to district meetings over the past two years cost more than $54,000.

Exasperated district staffers respond that travel for board members to conferences around the globe has already been trimmed and the number of regular meetings they hold in San Francisco were cut to save on the $50 stipends board members traditionally earned per meeting for serving.

A HEALTHY PERK


A majority of the directors receive health insurance coverage from the district, either Blue Shield or Kaiser — a perk that few other part-time boards in the state offer. Last year, that cost $48,000.

But many of the directors already receive coverage from plans in their home counties. The bridge paid $1,200 last year to cover Mike Kerns; he is also a Sonoma County supervisor, where he’s on a second plan that includes life, dental, vision, and health coverage — and costs taxpayers there about $63,000 annually, the clerk of Sonoma County’s board told us. Kerns was on vacation when we called his office at press time.

Board member Albert Boro receives health insurance through the bridge, but taxpayers in San Rafael, where he’s the mayor, pay an additional $19,000 annually to cover him there, according to figures provided by San Rafael’s city manager.

But Boro told the Guardian that the bridge coverage is "secondary and it’s only utilized when my primary doesn’t cover something…. It’s not a premium in the sense that it might be through the city [of San Rafael]."

Three San Francisco supervisors participate in the plan offered here for county employees, which annually costs taxpayers approximately $10,500 per person, according to the controller’s office. But the bridge also covers those individuals. The list includes Tom Ammiano, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval and costs a total of $14,000 to cover all three of them, according to district numbers we requested.

Ammiano said the benefit could be done away with if it truly became a burden on the bridge’s budget. "That would take the will of the board," he said. "[Doing away with it is] not something I would be against, but I can only speak for myself."

Board director Bevan Dufty, also a San Francisco supervisor, declined to sign up for the coverage when he joined the bridge’s board in 2005.

"I had insurance and it seemed duplicative to me … I meet with people every day who don’t have insurance from all walks of life and so I felt fortunate," Dufty said.

Only about 12 percent of the 450 or so special districts that responded to a survey two years ago asking about health coverage said they offered such benefits to their directors or trustees, according to Neil McCormick, head of the California Special Districts Association. The group represents around 900 waste management, utility, fire, and recreation districts across the state. The Golden Gate district is not a member.

The real problem here is that after the district retired its bond debt in 1971, it never came up with an adequate revenue source to cover all of its operating or capital costs. Bridge officials never sought from state lawmakers a mechanism, for instance, to borrow money at a fixed rate, like school districts do.

So what will the bridge do in five more years? Nobody seems to know. According to San Francisco board member Janet Reilly, "That’s the $64,000 question…. There’s only so much toll tolerance among drivers."

Complexions Contemporary Ballet

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PREVIEW It’s about time. This Saturday, Complexions Contemporary Ballet is finally making its Bay Area debut. The company is 14 and travels all over the globe, from Israel to New Zealand. Founded by former members of Albert Ailey American Dance Theater Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson, the company started out small, primarily with duets Rhoden created for himself and Richardson. In the Bay Area, Rhoden’s work has been seen most often during the Ailey company’s yearly gigs. In 2002, the Oakland Ballet (then under the leadership of Karen Brown) debuted his Glory Fugue to much acclaim. Meanwhile, Richardson, a principal guest artist of American Ballet Theater, is mesmerizing in whatever capacity he chooses to perform. In the Bay Area he is best known for the title role in San Francisco Ballet’s filming of Othello. Today, Rhoden is a hot item in musical theater, film, video, and jazz, as well as ballet and modern dance. Complexions’s 20-odd dancers continue to focus most of their endeavors on the prolific Rhoden’s choreography, which favors speed, angularity, and the kind of power attacks even a William Forsythe could admire. As performed by Complexions, the pieces showcase forceful dancers who draw their perspectives from a wide variety of backgrounds — both artistic and cultural. The program for this one-night stand includes a solo by Ailey dancer Abdur-Rahim Jackson; the rest of the program is entirely by Rhoden and features the recent Dear Frederic (2007), an homage to Chopin, and honors Marvin Gaye with the closer Chapters Suite (2007), which Rhoden peopled with a fabulously eclectic mix of street characters.

COMPLEXIONS CONTEMPORARY BALLET Sat/5, 8 p.m., $25–$40. Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium, 10 Avenue of the Flags, San Rafael. (415) 499-6800, www.marincenter.org

Gamelan Sekar Jaya

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PREVIEW A Balinese gamelan ensemble is a world within a world, where the very notion of time is freed from the banality of the steadily ticking clock and sent sailing on a twisting river of interlocking rhythms. The many facets of traditional percussion music from Indonesia can be hard to grasp all at once — dainty metal hammers flash as golden-robed performers, seated on the floor, sway back and forth to a hauntingly tuned scale. Suddenly, the tempo quickens, urged on by agitated drum beats, and a dancer shifts from slow graceful movements to frenetic gestures and theatrical facial expressions. Sinuous flute and metal clangs blend into a pulsing, shimmering wall of sound.

It is the Bay Area’s great fortune that Gamelan Sekar Jaya, devoted to presenting authentic performances of energetic, elaborate, and sonically enchanting Balinese gamelan music, calls El Cerrito home. For this concert, they’ll dust off three distinct sets of pitched metal gongs and marimbalike instruments from Bali, with guest bandleaders Dewa Putu Berata and Gadung Kasturi direct from one of the island’s most celebrated gamelan troupes. There’s a feast to be had here for gamelan enthusiasts, notably the appearance of Oakland’s adventuresome Balinese fusioneers, Gamelan X. And for the uninitiated, it’s high time to take that long-awaited vacation to Bali, right in your own backyard.

GAMELAN SEKAR JAYA With Gamelan X, Dewa Putu Berata, and Gadung Kasturi. Sat/5, 8 p.m., $10–$18. Julia Morgan Center, 2640 College, Berk. (925) 798-1000, www.gsj.org

DJ Mitsu the Beats

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PREVIEW In the same manner that Japan has had a history of appreciation and innovation in jazz, the Land of the Rising Sun has become a rising star in the hip-hop diaspora. From DMC turntablist world champ DJ Kentaro through the enduring DJ Krush, our counterparts on the other side of the Pacific Rim have steadily been holding their own. DJ Mitsu the Beats continues the new tradition, with a flair for head-nodding hip-hop and the odd broken beat jam, always keeping things on a jazzy tip.

Growing up in the northern Japanese city of Sendai, where he still resides, Mitsu first got hooked on hip-hop via a TV show that presented breakdancing and guests like Heavy D. He showed obvious talent once he took to the turntables himself and soon ended up doing battle with DJ Kentaro before making the inevitable transition to production. His work caught the ear of Jazzy Sport, a Tokyo record store and label that has gone on to release works by the likes of SA-RA, and in 2003 Mitsu released an eponymous EP for sub-label Planetgroove. In what would become typical Mitsu style, the record included guest vocals from such guests as Philadelphia soul siren Lady Alma and fellow Japanese artist MC Hunger, with the producer subtly choosing loops and rhythms that best suited each style on the mic.

That record and others found many fans abroad, and Mitsu went on to provide dozens of remixes for labels like Italy’s Irma and Canada’s Do Right! He also teamed up with Hunger and DJ Mu-R to form Gagle, which released an album for Jazzy Sport in 2005 and another for Columbia last year. Mitsu has never strayed far from the beats-plus-samples framework that has driven hip-hop since its inception. But with deft production skills and an uncanny ear for hooks that stick in your mind, he’s given new life to the old chestnut that being good is different enough.

DJ MITSU THE BEATS Fri/4, 10 p.m., $10. Poleng Lounge, 1751 Fulton, SF. (415) 441-1751, www.polenglounge.com

“Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg”

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REVIEW While most Americans equate 1968 as the ground zero of political tumult in Chicago, New York City, and throughout the South, the revolutions that spread across Europe that year were of equal historical importance. Largely a reaction to the political asphyxiation of post–World War II policy and a much larger rejection of the feudal monarchist, industrial-capitalist, and communist regimes that had subjugated the masses for many years, the continent was suddenly positioned at the precipice of deconstruction. To paraphrase a Nietzsche epigram that appeared in spray paint frequently that year, Europe was discovering "the chaos inside to give birth to a dancing star."

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum’s "Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg" relives and reveals this spirit through the incredible work of former Le nouvel observateur photographer Serge Hambourg. Capturing the protests that began in the suburbs of Paris in March of that year and quickly spread throughout the country by May, Hambourg’s lens centers on the students, artists, and anarchists who swept up and down the Left Bank.

Some of Hambourg’s photographs capture an air of comedy: one shows the very photogenic Nanterre student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit shouting down the superannuated Surrealist poet Louis Aragon before a delighted crowd. Other photos — such as the image of a gas grenade shown in close-up before being thrown into a crowd — convey how quickly the protests degenerated into violence. As with the Parisian nouvelle vague auteurs, Hambourg redefines the city’s streetscapes from the singular moments of Eugène Atget or Henri Cartier-Bresson as a kinetic intersection of bodies and machines — everything in the process of becoming. As the protests wound down and the Gaullists regained control, the photos depict a city picked clean of its history — a Pyrrhic victory for the government.

PROTEST IN PARIS 1968: PHOTOGRAPHS BY SERGE HAMBOURG Through June 1. Wed., Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m.; Thurs., 11 a.m.–7 p.m. UC Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft, Berk. $4–$8 (free first Thurs). (510) 642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Careers & Ed: The Roots of it all

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› culture@sfbg.com

Standing at the gate of my great-grandfather’s house in southern China, I was dumbfounded by how similar the gate looked to that of a house near my own. But that seemed to be the only parallel to my home. As I stood on the street in my trendy designer jeans and swanky flats, all I could think about was how out-of-place I was there, and how dissimilar I felt from the young woman my age holding a baby a few feet from me.

It brought up all the quintessential second generation questions I’ve always hated to ask myself: Where do I belong? Am I more American or more Chinese? It reminded me of my classmate Johnny Ho, instructing me that speaking too often in class made me more white and less Chinese, which only elicited disdain for myself and the little knowledge I had of my culture.

Perhaps that’s why I was so adamant about learning more on my own, and integrating the two parts of myself that felt like opposites. If only I’d had the help of a program like Roots.

THE ROOT OF ROOTS


For the last 17 years, native San Franciscan Albert Cheng has devoted himself to helping young Chinese Americans discover their heritage and culture through the In Search of Roots program. The program, run by the Chinese Culture Center, helps those whose families hail from south China’s Pearl River Delta trace their genealogy and return to their ancestral villages. A fourth generation Chinese American himself, Cheng is an avid genealogy researcher who took his heritage journey to Zhongshan, China in 1988, and has since traced his own genealogy over 123 generations — a total of 2,700 years.

Upon his return from China, he found such a strong interest in his work that he created the Roots program. The yearlong internship, affectionately known as the "Rooting" process, beings with interviewing families for oral histories, researching at the National Archives, and attending lectures on Chinese-American and Chinese history. Each of the twelve interns, or "Rooters," typically explores either their maternal or paternal lineage. After this extensive preparation, the group hops on sponsored Cathay Pacific flights to Hong Kong and wends its way, by train, into China to spend two weeks visiting each of the Rooters’ ancestral villages. When they return, the participants present their experiences and reflections at an exhibition at the Chinese Culture Center.

I joined Cheng on a guided tour of the recent interns’ impressive exhibition — each of their stories mapped in photos, with Chinese artifacts like pipes, chairs, and genealogy book pages strung together to create vivid descriptions of their journey. He told me how each intern painstakingly raked through endless documents and personal stories to follow any clues that might lead them to the villages their families originated from. The process isn’t always easy. For example, one intern, Theresa Chan, managed to find the name of her village, but concluded that her family couldn’t have come from there based on official Chinese records showing no one with her last name lived there. For interns like Chan, it’s often up to the student’s ingenuity and persistence, plus a healthy dollop of serendipity, to find out where they were from — and therefore where they’d be going on their trip.

For Chan, that serendipity came after many days of uncertainty as she attempted to find her village by way of a man on a bike. By chance, this man not only lived near the village, but confirmed that the surrounding area had many families with a surname similar to hers.

This kind of dilemma and happy resolution has been familiar to Cheng during his years of Rooting. For him, each Rooter’s predicament has been a challenge worked through as a group to help all of the interns learn more about their culture. "You have to know where you’re from. Strong roots leads to a strong character, and a strong character leads to a strong community. Strong communities make for a strong country," Cheng says.

Kristina Lim remembers how distinct, yet relatable, each of this session’s 12 Rooters’ journeys were. "Everyone’s story was different and everyone’s village was different, but there were similar themes of identity, sadness, and gratefulness," she says. "Something about going through that all together, and all 12 of us, that’s not really something you can do all on your own. They’re there for you in a sense that makes it a unique experience."

Another intern, Frank Lee, agreed. "It gives you the opportunity to compare and contrast," he says. "Sometimes you miss the full effect, the big picture, ’cause you’re so caught up in your own rooting experience. When someone else is rooting, you’re still a part of it, but you’re not the focal point — you can wander off and talk to other people, and see everything."

Rooters say they find understanding and acceptance about who they are while they’re abroad, and they bring it home with them — often resulting in unexpected, but strikingly similar, discourses with friends and family when they return. For Lim, the interaction was most significant with her family. "At family gatherings, we’d actually go through photo albums and bring up family stories. It became a dialogue my family was very excited about. And now they’re all talking about going back and visiting the village," she says. "Before I started the program that never would’ve even been talked about."

In many ways, the program opens doors that many young Chinese Americans are afraid to open themselves.

As I listened to each of the interns’ stories about their journeys through China — meeting the woman who carried your mother to the ship that eventually took her to the United States, or sitting on a ledge your mother once sat on — I sensed their pride and gratitude. They’d picked through endless documents and artifacts. They’d studied genealogical trees. They’d surmounted emotional conflicts. And they did it all in the pursuit of the essence of their heritage, the history that had always been with them but — until now — was invisible to them.

As Cheng says, "In the rooting process, you never know what’s going to happen, but you just learn to trust your instincts and go…. This is part of American history; we are a part of American history that needs to be learned." In Search of Roots helps to hone those instincts by imparting these individuals with a stronger sense of self, an ability to continue exploring who they are, and an opportunity to learn and teach others about a Chinese American history that is ever-changing and growing.

It’s worked for me. After hearing about these interns’ experience, the confusion I felt as a girl standing outside her great-grandfather’s gates feels further away. Knowing about others who are finding their way through the cross-cultural divide gives me faith to keep pushing to find out more, because for once I can say they’re just like me.

Careers & Ed: Photo pro

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A line snakes down Fell Street on a Friday evening in front of the Rickshaw Stop, where Meleksah Jurgenson cradles a large camera and surveys the over- and underdressed revelers in Hayes Valley. A man in bright sneakers and slouchy jeans calls her over: "Dude, Meleksah! You gotta take a photo of this!" He gleefully points to a poor shlub on the curb resting a weary head on his knees. The guy’s been there, immobile, for at least 20 minutes.

Jurgenson smiles apologetically. With her long brown hair pulled back and bangs cut straight across her forehead, her face is girl-next-door lovely: sweet, a little sly, and essentially nonthreatening. Like the sidewalk lush, her camera remains fixed in her hands. She doesn’t shoot.

"I want everyone to look back at the pictures and be just as excited [to see them] as I was to take them," she explains later. A native of Washington, DC — her mother is a photographer at the White House — Jurgenson is now a resident cameraperson at Mezzanine, as well as at the weekly Frisco Disco and Blow Up parties cohosted by her husband, Jeffrey Fare, at the Transfer and the Rickshaw Stop. (Fare, a former member of postpunk dance purveyors the Rapture, DJs at these parties under the names DJ Jefrodisiac and Jeffrey Paradise.)

A rigorously spontaneous career track — "I never make plans for the future," she says — found Jurgenson working as both a model and a party planner. "So it was a natural progression to move from booking and throwing parties to [hosting] nightclubs," she says. "And to move from shooting fashion editorials to being on the other side of the camera. I just fell into it."

As she walks around the Rickshaw Stop, the regular disco kids light up. Hugs and air kisses are exchanged; everyone poses, happily and extravagantly. The photos, tagged with a hot-pink stripe signed "Lady Meleksah," then pop up on the various outlets where she serves as contributor or founder: Blow Up’s official Web site, Jurgenson’s makeshift party-photo outlet friscodiscofever.blogspot.com, and electro-music blog Missingtoof.com, in addition to her personal MySpace and Flickr accounts.

But Jurgenson isn’t on the typical photographer career track. These days, young arts professionals are pushed to consolidate their work online, have extensive multimedia experience at their fingertips, and create profiles on sites such as LinkedIn to attract employers. So there’s something old school about what Jurgenson does: take photos, make friends, and get hired. The ease of social-networking sites comes along with random and uneven exposure, so she figures if you’re not being seen around town having a legitimately good time, then maybe you’re not the right person for the job.

In fact, Jurgenson, who only began shooting professionally two years ago, doesn’t even — gasp! — have an online portfolio. Despite this, she’s done some band shoots and magazine work. But her bread and butter is the nightclub scene. "I love the people, I love the music, I love the sex. I love the dancing. I love everything about it," she says. "Having the camera is almost secondary. I come home after these parties with bruises and beer spilled all over me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way." And the parties keep getting bigger: she shot the Winter Music Conference in Miami last month and will shoot at Coachella.

Perhaps one reason Jurgenson is so successful is that she has a slightly different take on club photography from the norm. For example, sites such as Los Angeles’s Cobra Snake or New York’s Last Night’s Party often court controversy for their photographers, who are criticized for taking advantage of the subjects’ inebriated states as much as for their photos. Visually, the images feature the short-range flash that briefly illuminates bleary-eyed faces and exposed bodies. Every so often, these bodies are shown lying next to a pool of their own vomit. But Jurgenson wants to capture people looking good and having a great time.

She also manages to get more intimate photos of people — and receives less criticism about her photos exploiting women — than most photographers (typically male) can get.

"I’m not an imposing guy shoving a camera in somebody’s face," she says. "I don’t think people are as threatened by me."

The people in her nightclub work appear as radiant as they must have felt at that very moment. Instead of featuring closed house parties and backstage antics with celebrities, her photos, laced with dazzling lights and brilliant colors, mostly take place on the open dance floor. Rather than exploiting blotto hipsters, Jurgenson shoots buoyant clubhoppers and exhibitionists unlikely to regret the posturing. "I don’t particularly like Cobra Snake or any of the other party photographers out there," she says. "I don’t want to capture pictures of a girl standing there making a silly face."

Jurgenson doesn’t bother photographing the aftereffects of the parties — the three-day hangover or the sore throat and lungs. Her work puts the most exuberant parts of the night on display — the parts that evoke carefree and careless times. It’s gloriously unapologetic and unabashedly playful. "Look, stop worrying about the ‘misspent youth,’" the faces seem to shout. "Just dance with us!"

"I think that’s what separates me from a lot of photographers," Jurgenson says. "I immerse myself in the festivities and shoot. To capture a party like I do, you have to be a part of it, not a photographer."

But when you’re a consummate hostess connecting and socializing with everyone around you, there’s no doubt that observing and participating in the environment changes it. But Jurgenson isn’t concerned with keeping photojournalistic distance. She likes to shake things up.

Other photographers are "sort of like birdwatchers," Jurgenson says. "But I’m on safari."

Careers & Ed: Degrees of separation

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Julia Cosart spends her days attending to San Francisco’s skin woes — unwanted hair, unwelcome wrinkles, and clogged pores — at Spa Radiance. Her calm, self-assured, soothing demeanor is not unlike the atmosphere of the spa in which she works. Which is why it’s hard to imagine her in the fast-paced, cutthroat world of advertising.

But that is where Cosart imagined herself ending up, having graduated in 2004 from the University of Nevada at Reno with a combined degree in advertising and journalism. After college, she tried her new career on for size with an advertising internship. "I realized I hated it," she says.

After working a few other jobs, including a stressful stint at a home for troubled youth, she decided to become an aesthetician by training at Miss Marty’s School of Beauty in San Francisco. Now, she says, "I love what I do. I only work three days a week, but make enough to live in a beautiful San Francisco apartment. Most importantly, I don’t go to a job I hate every day. There is very little stress in my life, and that’s no accident."

Cosart isn’t alone. According to experts like Alexandra Robbins, author of Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis: Advice from Twentysomethings Who Have Been There and Survived (Perigee, 2004), Cosart represents a current movement among recent (and not-so-recent) college graduates who are entering jobs that have nothing to do with their degree(s), or with a traditional four-year college at all. Generation Y is not one that leaves college to head straight for the embrace of the corporation that will keep them until retirement; people now in their mid-twenties will most likely change careers several times throughout their life. They are also delaying getting married and having children, deferrals that make it less appealing or necessary to immediately seek out a career-track job.

"I know someone who went to an Ivy League school and then became a mailman," Robbins says. "People are starting to realize that college isn’t a direct segue to the ‘real world.’"

TIME IS MONEY. SO IS MONEY.


For many college grads following this path, the appeal is both more money and more free time. While their newly graduated classmates work 50 hours per week to earn $25,000–$45,000 per year in typical post-BA employment, grads who take jobs that don’t require degrees (such as in the service industry) can earn much more.

That’s why Bert Ladner slings sushi to the Gucci-clad Financial District masses instead of using his degree in finance from San Francisco State University to be an entry-level accountant. In an ironic twist, he says, "I’ll definitely be waiting tables until I pay off my student loans. It would be impossible to pay those off on an entry-level salary."

It’s hard to track a server’s average "salary" — pay varies widely from restaurant to restaurant (and temperament to temperament) — but it’s estimated that a server could make $60,000 per year in a high-end restaurant. Ladner makes as much as $50,000.

Even better, he says, the lack of a set salary provides greater control over how much you make. "Need more money? Pick up an extra shift," Ladner says.

These jobs also provide more freedom about how you spend your time. Servers, aestheticians, and massage therapists all have control over the balance between money and time — and many seem to value the latter even more than the former.

"Quality of life is the top priority for the new generation for twentysomethings," explains Robbins. "It ranks higher than salary or prestige."

Some say this proves that Generation Y, widely considered to be navel-gazing, fun-loving, and responsibility-shirking, isn’t self-indulgent and lazy. It’s just that they’ve abandoned a Gordon Gecko-esque pursuit of status for a greater sense of equilibrium in life.

REAL CONNECTIONS


Another reason that service jobs seem to appeal to grads more than office jobs do is the increased level of human interaction.

"A trend I see a lot is students joining us after a few years in an office," says Rocky Hall of the San Francisco School of Massage. "In those jobs, they get tired of communicating electronically through e-mail, phone conferences, et cetera. They crave a genuine sense of connection with other people, which they find through massage."

Michelle Hamer, director of admissions for Miss Marty’s School of Beauty, agrees. "In a corporate world, it’s all done over e-mail and phone. There is an electronic wall between people. We are the last profession to touch people."

And even if grads aren’t actually touching people, they are meeting, talking to, and potentially spending social time with people they wouldn’t see in office jobs — both the clients they meet on the job and the friends they have more time for afterwards.

Riley Salant-Pearce says this is the benefit of waiting tables (he declined to name the restaurant). After earning his degree in biology from University of California, San Diego and guiding tours in Ecuador for a year, he found himself serving when he moved to San Francisco. Now, it’s hard for him to imagine doing a science job.

"I love the freedom of a restaurant job. I see my friends in 9-to-5 engineering and science-related jobs, and it’s too restrictive. They’re not having any fun. I make an equal amount of money, but I only work four nights a week," says Salant-Pearce, who estimates he makes about $40 an hour. "I make enough to live comfortably in San Francisco. Better than that, I can take time off to enjoy it."

He also likes the social environment of working in the service industry. "The restaurant was a great way to meet people," he says. "We all go out together when we get off. I realized I’m just too social to work in a lab."

Another selling point is that the interaction in these types of jobs tends to be of a happier, more relaxed sort. More often than not, those in the corporate world are stressed-out people dealing with other stressed-out people during work hours. The service industry sees those same corporate drones, but with their ties loosened at the bar or completely removed at the spa. Waiters and beauticians are salespeople, true, but they’re selling you something you already want. People want to buy drinks, eat lavish meals, enjoy massages, haircuts, and facials. This makes these industries sustainable.

"Beauty is a recession-proof industry," Hamer says. "People are always going to get their hair done. We maintain every other profession."

WHAT I COULD’VE BEEN


Yet many of these twentysomethings are consumed with self-doubt about "wasting" their college degrees. "Guilt does cause conflict for twentysomethings," Robbins says. "How do I weigh doing what I love with making enough money? A big part of that is image, thinking people judge them. It can take a big leap of faith to say, ‘You know what? This is how I’d like my life to be.’"

Christine Hassler, author of 20 Something Manifesto (New World), has been there. "After graduating from college, I became a successful Hollywood agent. By my mid-twenties, I had my own assistant," she says. "Agents are salespeople, and I don’t like sales. I was a nerd in high school, and the entertainment industry was the adult version of the popular crowd. I didn’t feel passionate about what I was doing. Now that I’m older, I realize that passion doesn’t come from external circumstances. But back then, I just felt lost."

So she decided to become a personal trainer.

"But I still felt lost. With all that education, I was counting to 12 in a gym all day. When people would ask what I did, I’d say, ‘I used to be an agent in Hollywood.’ I didn’t give value to personal training because it was frowned upon," she said.

Experts say part of getting over the guilt of having nondegree jobs is understanding they’re not just fun, easy, and carefree. Succeeding in them may not require a traditional degree, but they do require a certain amount of smarts and/or skill.

"Cosmetology requires an artistic background. You have to know people’s face shapes and what colors work on them," Hamer says. "Aestheticians approach skin from a medical perspective; they nurture and heal people with bad skin. And not everyone can do it. To be good, you have to be articulate and speak well to sell your product."

Cosart, who has been an aesthetician for three years, says she is "just now getting to the point where I’m really proud of it, where I’m not a little ashamed that this is what I’m doing with my college degree."

At the same time, Cosart is realizing that if she ever does want to rejoin the career track, it’ll take more than a BA to get her there. Since bachelor of arts degrees have become a dime a dozen, many twentysomethings feel pressure to get more advanced degrees to earn the prestige a BA might once have given them — and to distinguish themselves from the bachelor’s-holding lumpen. Cosart figures she’ll eventually go back to school, though she’s not sure what she’ll focus on. But if she does, she knows she’s learned a valuable lesson from this time outside the white-collar world.

"I’m grateful to have figured out early in life that in choosing a career, you must decide what you want your life to feel like, not what you want it to look like," she said. "Some people live for stress. I know because I listen their Blackberries buzz in their purses every 30 seconds even as I meticulously work the stress out of their pores and their shoulders. I’m not cut out for that, and I often wonder if they are."

Careers & Ed: Pedalheads

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For many of us, reminiscing to the warm spring days of childhood can be a tour adorned with dreamy bike rides through old neighborhoods or feverish races in back lot trails. But at some point, sadly, those plywood jumps crumbled, the mudholes dried up, our skinned knees healed, and ultimately, we bought cars and began our lifelong battles for parking. Well, at least some of us did. Others, such as the Oakland-based founders of Broakland Bicycles — Jason Grove, Jason Montano, and Steve Radonich — made biking their passion, zipping past the norm and into the bipedal future of urban transportation.

Handmade in Oakland, Broakland bicycles are fixed-gear bikes professionally designed to be sold for both the track and for everyday commutes. Reviving the triple-triangle frame made famous by GT Bicycles, the boys at Broakland have unleashed a uniquely Bay Area flavor of bike, complete with custom paint jobs by local graffiti artists. The old-school style and unquestionable quality of the work entrusted into these bikes dial them into that nexus where "great" separates itself from "good." But what really makes these cycles so special is the way the three unique personalities of Broakland’s classically East Bay designers shine through in their finished product.

BIKES BY THE NUMBERS


Jason Montano, also owner and chief mechanic of upbeat Oakland bike shop Montano Velo, is the numbers guy. He tweaks the fork rakes, offsets, bottom bracket drops, head angles, and seat angles, even if you don’t know what those things are. He hasn’t owned a car in eight years.

He’s as unlikely to be behind the wheel of a car as he is behind a desk. He’s more likely to be out riding his beauties or working on bikes at the shop. He admits that he doesn’t fit the classic model of a businessowner. "I don’t wear a suit," he said. "I am who I am. But if I couldn’t live doing what I’m doing, I wouldn’t do it."

So far, so good. The shop’s been open for four years and is doing well. And the Broakland line, unveiled a little over a year ago, has been garnering great reviews.

BIKE BUILDING AS SCIENCE


The ridiculously talented craftsman of the Broakland crew is Jason Grove, who is also the man behind Emeryville’s El Camino Fabrications. A welder who developed and refined his skills at the Seattle aerospace juggernaut Boeing, and he’s been building bikes for almost 18 years. Armed with his TIG welder, Jason prudently fashions the Broakland frames from high-grade aluminum and titanium tubing, utilizing a technique that fills the tubes with argon during welds to ensure extra durability and a longer shelf life.

His solar-powered shop, which doubles as his studio apartment, is impressively clean. He claims that clean air helps the welds gel. Confucians claim that a clean house creates good energies that help the mind think. In that vein, Grove prides himself on putting good energy into his product. "It’s all about good karma," he said. "And I think that goes into these bikes and makes them better for it."

THE ART OF THE BICYCLE


Broakland’s jack-of-all-trades is Steven "Stevie" Radonich. He’s the energetic hype man who makes sure that the bikes are as stylish as they are functional. Stevie, rider and art consultant for Broakland, has brought in East Bay graffiti artists Soul from the TDK crew and widely-known Goser to create custom paint jobs for these rides. Sleek marble, quintessential custom flame paint jobs, or graffiti-style lettering topped off with a beautiful finish elevate these high-end bikes beyond transportation or sport: they ascend into the realm of art.

THE PRODUCT


The prices on these masterpieces start with the Street Fighter model, a traditional track bike that runs about $1,350, including a base paint job. Things get pricier as you continue to trick them out. In the past, naysayers argued that spending so much moolah on a street bike is a fool’s errand for gearheads and overgrown kids whose cash burns a hole in their messenger bags. But that was before gas hit $4 a gallon. Now it makes as much sense to shell out for a bike you love as it ever did to do the same for a car.

And these designers are making sure their products are worth it. "Our bikes have to live up to our standards," Montano said. "If we build a bike we like to ride, then other people will like to ride them too."

The Broakland crew unveiled their first design in San Jose just over a year ago at the 2007 North American Handmade Bicycle Show, the four-year-old exhibition of the nation’s top designers and bikemakers. In February, the Broakland crew set up a display, including the cream-and-magenta-marbled Meat Wagon, now on exhibit in the window of Montano Velo, at the 2008 NAHBS in Portland, Ore.

When asked what these bikes mean to him, Jason Grove just laughed. "It’s nice having a solid ride."

Check out Broakland’s designs or pick up some gear at Montano Velo, 4266 Piedmont Ave., Oakl., (510) 654-8356, or at www.myspace.com/broaklandbicycles

Careers & Ed: Symphony of instruction

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It may have been San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, but at times it felt more like a Pentecostal revival meeting. Forget about rules or decorum: when the spirit moved them, this crowd let loose. Imaginary batons twirled. Heads tick-tocked. Feet tapped. Giggling and applause burst out at all the wrong times.

You haven’t really experienced the symphony until you’ve sat among 2,200 first and second graders at their first live orchestra performance, hundreds of them conducting the orchestra from their seats.

"Movement is exactly what we want," says Ronald Gallman, director of the San Francisco Symphony’s Education Programs, Youth Orchestra and Adventures in Music (AIM) program. "We wouldn’t be doing our jobs if they were sitting with their hands folded in their laps."

Not everyone acts like inspired little savages; others revel in acting like adults. One girl watched the performance through a pair of improvised opera classes — tiny binoculars she brought from an explorer’s kit at home.

It’s somewhat of a relief to learn that kids of the iPod generation can still appreciate classical music. It helps that musicians in the AIM program understand a few basic principles of child psychology: keep performances short, allow plenty of opportunities to shout out and move around, and throw in a fart joke or two for good measure (the tuba player who introduced his instrument with a flatulent blast got the biggest laughs of any joke in the performance).

Founded in 1988, the AIM program serves first through fifth graders at every public elementary school in San Francisco — an impressive 75 schools — as well as third through fifth graders in some private and parochial schools, totaling more than 22,000 children. Beyond the innovation, this is only possible because the AIM program is funded entirely by private donors, foundations, and events like the Black and White Ball — which means that it’s offered at no cost to the schools. According to Gallman, this level of commitment to building equitable access to music education in public schools makes the San Francisco Symphony stand apart as a national leader.

The symphony performance is just one piece of the larger AIM curriculum, which includes four ensemble shows per year at each school as well as comprehensive materials to help teachers build interdisciplinary lesson plans around the AIM performances. Each school is able to choose the ensembles it wants — with options including jazz and all varieties of world music — thus allowing for culturally appropriate programming at different schools.

At the Claire Lilienthal School in the Richmond District on a recent school day, the Drei Brass trio had been chosen to perform for a gymnasium full of first and second graders seated on the floor, each of whom had been given a brightly colored plastic kazoo.

"Our show today is about three brass instruments and vibration!" announced Alicia Telford, the Drei Brass french horn player, her eyes wide and one eyebrow arched. She showed the kids how to feel the vibration in their vocal chords when they sung by placing a hand on the front of their neck.

Each of the brass players introduced himself as "an ambassador of ppppfffft," demonstrating that the music coming out of their instruments begins with a simple pppfffft blown into the mouthpiece — the same ppppfffft sound that the kids blow into their kazoos.

They also peppered their classical performance with recognizable tunes that the kids could intuitively follow, like the finger-snapping Pink Panther theme.

Kazoo-induced hyperactivity aside, it seems that teachers by and large are nothing but grateful for the AIM programming in their schools.

"Music is a great way to keep some children engaged who might not be the best readers or [who are] a bit behind. It’s a great way to keep them in the school system through high school."

According to JR Jowkalsky, a reading teacher at Willie L. Brown Jr. elementary school in the Bayview, the number of students who pursue orchestra or band in middle school has "mushroomed" as a result of the AIM Program.

Keith Jones, who has been teaching for 20 years and currently runs the 40-piece band at Willie L. Brown, reports that about one-sixth of the potential band students participate in the music program. Anything over 10 or 15 percent participation is considered good.

"AIM has given me 10 violins, symphony tickets for the kids, concerts here at school," he said. "It provides things that I could never provide to my students."

While the AIM program alone cannot revive public-school music education in an era of restricted funding, it’s not a far stretch to say that exposing every single public school student by the end of fifth grade to five symphony visits and 20 ensemble performances must help pick up the slack.

Now, if only there was something AIM could do to preserve the sense of wonder and complete abandon with which these kids enjoyed the symphony for the first time, conducting wildly from their seats like no one is watching.

Mexico’s comeback kid

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MEXICO CITY — As Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), the leftist firebrand whom millions of Mexicans consider their legitimate president, made his way to the podium in the packed Zocalo plaza here March 18th, the 70th anniversary of the expropriation and nationalization of an oil industry now threatened with re-privatization, hundreds of senior citizens, AMLO’s firmest followers, rose as one from their seats of honor at the side of the stage, raised their frail fists in salute, and chanted that, despite the cobwebs of old age, they do not forget. “Tenemos Memoria!” We Have Memory!

What did they remember? Tiburcio Quintanilla, 83, remembers how when President Lazaro Cardenas called upon his countrymen and women to donate to a fund to pay indemnities to the gringo oil companies, he went with his father to the Palace of Bellas Artes and stood on line for hours with their chickens, their contribution to taking back “our chapopote (petroleum).” I was born in the same week that Lazaro Cardenas nationalized Mexico’s oil, I tell Don Tiburcio. I’m only a kid.

Up on the same stage from which he directed the historic seven-week siege of the capital after the Great Fraud of 2006 that awarded the presidency to his right-wing rival Felipe Calderon, AMLO looked more grizzled, weather-beaten, a little hoarse after two years on the road relentlessly roaming the Mexican outback bringing his message to “los de abajo” (those down below) and signing up nearly 2,000,000 new constituents for his National Democratic Convention (CND), which is increasingly embroiled in a bitter battle for control of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD.)

Now Lopez Obrador has thrust himself into the leadership of the movement to defend the nation’s oil industry (PEMEX) from privatization in the guise of Calderon’s energy-reform legislation.

Calderon and his cohorts seek to persuade Mexicans that PEMEX is broken, the reserves running out, and the nation’s only hope lies in deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Drilling for what the Calderonistas describe as “The Treasure of Mexico” in a widely distributed, lavishly produced infomercial, will require an “association” with Big Oil. But as many experts, such as Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, son of the president who expropriated the oil in the first place, point out, it is not at all certain that these purported deep sea reserves are actually in Mexican waters.

AMLO’s March 18th “informative assembly” of the National Democratic Convention was certainly the most emotional since he convoked the CND on Independence Day in September 2006, after the courts had designated Calderon as president. Poised under a monumental tri-color flag that furled and unfurled dramatically in the spring zephyrs, and addressing tens of thousands of loyalists in the heart of the Mexican body politic, Lopez Obrador told the story of Mexico’s oil.

Oil is a patriotic lubricant here, and AMLO is imbued in what historians once called revolutionary nationalism, the apogee of which was Lazaro Cardenas’s March 18th 1938 order expropriating the holdings of 17 Anglo-American oil companies who were about to secede from the union and declare themselves “The Republic of the Gulf of Mexico.” AMLO recalled how the companies had defied a Supreme Court order to pay $26 million USD to the nation’s oil workers leaving General Cardenas (he had been a revolutionary general) no option but to take back Mexico’s oil. How patriotic Mexicans like Don Tiburcio and his father lined up to pay off the debt with their chickens and family jewels. Cardenas’s subsequent creation of a national oil corporation, “Petrolios Mexicanos” or PEMEX, was seen as the guarantee of a great future for Mexico.

But things have worked out differently.

“Privatization is corruption!” AMLO harangues, “The oil is ours! La Patria No Se Vende!”

“La Patria No Se Vende, La Patria Se Defiende!” the crowd roars back, “The country is not for sale, The country is to defend!” “Pais Petrolero, Pueblo Sin Dinero” – “Country With Oil, People Without Money!”

Lopez Obrador, or “El Peje,” as his followers affectionately nickname him, warms to the task, outlining plans for a new “civil insurrection” that will be led by “women commandos” who will encircle congress on the day energy reform legislation is introduced, shut down banks, the Stock Exchange, the airports, and block highways. If all that doesn’t work, AMLO calls for a national strike. All of this projected and highly illegal activism would unfold “peacefully, without violence” – El Peje is a disciple of Gandhi and often cites Dr. King in his calls to action.

Indeed, Lopez Obrador takes pains to warn the petroleum defenders about government provocateurs and those who would foment violence, perhaps a message to the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), which has thrice bombed PEMEX pipelines in the past year.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is at his incendiary best as a leader of social upheaval. During the post-electoral struggle, he put 2,000,000 souls on the streets of Mexico City July 30th 2006, the largest political demonstration in the history of this contentious republic. Back in 1996, this reporter shadowed Lopez Obrador as he led Chontal Indian farmers in blocking 60 PEMEX oil platforms that had been contaminating their cornfields in his native Tabasco, a movement that catapulted AMLO into the presidency of the PRD, later to become the wildly popular mayor of Mexico City and the de facto winner of the 2006 presidential election.

Although Lopez Obrador once seemed assured of his party’s nomination in 2012, he is now challenged by his successor as the capital’s mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, who stood stolidly at his side during the March 18th convocation.

While Lopez Obrador held forth in the center of the republic, its titular president Felipe Calderon campaigned in El Peje’s home turf of Tabasco, the site of Mexico’s largest land-based deposits, touting the “association of capitals” as the key to the “Treasure of Mexico” and swearing up and down that he had no intention of privatizing PEMEX. The idea instead was to make the laws governing oil revenues more “flexible” (“flexabilizar”) and build a “strategic alliance” with the global oil titans.

To mark the 70th anniversary of General Cardenas’s brave act of revolutionary nationalism, Calderon shared a stage with Carlos Romero Deschamps, the boss of the corruption-ridden oil workers union, and Francisco Labastida, the once-ruling PRI party’s losing 2000 presidential candidate and now chairman of the Senate Energy Commission where the energy reform legislation will most probably be introduced.

In 2000, PEMEX illegally funneled $110,000,000 USD through Romero’s union into Labastida’s campaign coffers, a scandal known here as PEMEXgate, which has since been swept into the sea.

While Calderon embraced these scoundrels in the port of Paradise Tabasco, a thousand AMLO supporters were kept at bay a mile from the ceremony by a phalanx of federal police.

The most glaring absentee at the Tabasco séance was Calderon’s dashing young Secretary of the Interior, Juan Camilo Mourino, his former chief of staff who the president appointed to the second most powerful position in Mexico’s political hierarchy this past January to oversee negotiations between the parties on energy reform legislation. But Mourino’s creds were seriously damaged this past February 24th when Lopez Obrador released documents revealing that the then-future interior secretary’s family business had been awarded four choice PEMEX transportation contracts while he presided over the Chamber of Deputies Energy Commission.

The GES Corporation also won four other PEMEX contracts when Mourino was Calderon’s right-hand man during the much-questioned president’s stint as the nation’s energy secretary in the previous administration. AMLO accuses Mourino, who was born in Spain and may still be a Spanish citizen, of cutting a pre-privatization deal with the Spanish energy giant Repsol.

There were notable absences at AMLO’s big revival in the Zocalo too, among them Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the scion of the general and founder of the PRD whose moral authority has been greatly eroded in recent years. Estranged from his protégé Lopez Obrador, whose cause he did not leap to after the 2006 election was stolen, Cardenas chose to “defend the petrolio” in his home state of Michoacan, to which he has semi-retired and where his son Lazaro, grandson of the “Tata,” is the outgoing governor.

Although young Lazaro has endorsed “the association of private capital” in PEMEX, his father has hedged on Calderon’s privatization plans, reserving judgment until legislation is actually presented. Cuauhtemoc has, however, urged that Mexico and the U.S. first settle the ownership of deep-water tracts in the Gulf before any legislation is ratified.

Deep-water exploration requires an 11-year construction and drilling cycle before wells come on line. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Mexico has only ten years of proven reserves left.

Calderon’s legislative package is liable to steer away from constitutional amendment required for privatization and focus on secondary laws, a legaloid move that could take the wind out of Lopez Obrador’s sails. Manlio Fabio Beltrones, the PRI senate leader whose support Calderon needs to pass energy reform (not all PRIistas are expected to back it) once warned that a strong measure would “hand the presidency” to AMLO.

The other prominent no-show in Lopez Obrador’s revival tent in the Zocalo was Jesus Ortega, the front-runner for the PRD presidency in March 16th party elections. Ortega heads up the rival New Left faction, a group that is prone to negotiate with Calderon’s representatives despite AMLO’s insistence that the PRD continue to refuse to recognize what he labels the “spurious” president. Lopez Obrador backed former Mexico City interim mayor, the roly-poly ex-commie Alejandro Encinas in the race for the party presidency.

Ortega, a PRD senator, refused to attend the Zocalo rally because he said he feared for his personal safety after other leaders of the New Left faction (AKA “Los Chuchos” because so many top New Leftites are named Jesus – “chucho” is also an endearing name for a dog) had been roughed up by Lopez Obrador supporters during an anti-privatization demonstration at the PEMEX office towers some weeks earlier.

The head-to-head between Ortega and Encinas turned toxic overnight with mutual accusations of vote stealing, vote stuffing, vote buying, vote burning, voters “razored” from the voting lists, fake ballots and phony counts flying as if the March 16th debacle was a funny mirror reflection of July 2nd 2006, when Lopez Obrador was stripped of the presidency by Calderon’s chicanery. The PRD implosion has stoked the party’s enemies like Televisa, the TV tyrant, which devotes half its primetime news hour to the shenanigans. The television giant blacked out all news of similar fraud in the 2006 presidential election.

It is long-standing tradition that PRD internal elections will inevitably turn into a “desmadre” (disgrace.) Similar desmadres occurred in 1996, 1999, and again in 2002, the year Ortega first tried to take control after Rosario Robles, Cardenas’s successor as Mexico City mayor, bought the party presidency – her campaign was bankrolled by a crooked construction contractor who filmed videos of her go-fors pocketing boodles of bills with which he later tried to blackmail the PRD in general and Lopez Obrador in particular. “The horror is interminable,” laments Miguel Angel Velazquez who pens the “Lost City” column for the left daily La Jornada, a PRD paper.

The legitimacy of the March 16th results can be measured by the mechanism with which they will be determined. At the helm of the PRD’s internal electoral commission is one Arturo “The Penguin” Nunez, once the tainted president of the Federal Electoral Institute during his life as a PRIista, and the architect of countless PRI frauds, including one against Lopez Obrador in their native Tabasco.

In truth, Lopez Obrador has been running away from the “horror” of the PRD since the formation of the CND, a crusade to weld those who voted for AMLO in 2006 into a force for social and political change, and his base is now thought to be wider than that of the party. Should Encinas prevail in the brawl for the PRD presidency, Lopez Obrador’s hold on the party would still be tenuous – the Chuchos appear to have wrested many state elections – and he will look to the CND as he battles the privatizers. Indeed. The announced encirclement of congress by “woman commandos” will put pressure on the FAP – the Broad Political Front of left legislators led by the PRD – to pay attention and hold the line against privatization.

The Party of the Democratic Revolution was the Phoenix bird born in fire after the PRI stole the 1988 “presidenciales” from Cardenas. Its 16 original “currents” (now called “tribes”) included ex-PRIistas like Cardenas and Lopez Obrador, ex-communists (like Encinas), urban activists, peasants’ organizations, social democrats, and other left opportunists (like Ortega.)

In its early years, the party sought to define what it would be: a confluence of grassroots movements that ran candidates for public office as one means of achieving social change? Or an exclusively electoral formation intent on obtaining its quotient of power in which the party became an end in itself? Although the PRD has devolved into the latter, Lopez Obrador’s 2006 campaign reinvigorated the activist side of the equation.

Now, leading the defense of Mexican oil against the privatizers, AMLO has leveraged himself back into the political spotlight, and once again, is leading a reinvigorated challenge to the faltering Calderon who desperately needs to make good on his pledge to his Washington masters to privatize PEMEX.

John Ross is back in Mexico City purportedly working on a book about Mexico City. Write him at johnross@igc.org if you have further information.

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