Volume 42 [2007–08]

Some hope for the UC site

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EDITORIAL State senator Carole Migden has stepped into the battle over a 440-unit housing development on the old University of California Extension site, and that creates some promise that the project can be taken off the fast track. State intervention may be critical; the university, which has a record of ignoring local land-use policies, wants developer A.F. Evans to get the project moving forward by the end of 2007, which has driven the San Francisco Planning Commission to schedule a Dec. 20 decision on the project’s environmental impact report. Migden, who isn’t afraid to play hardball, is contacting university officials to let them know she wants the EIR and the project approval delayed until city officials can negotiate a better deal for affordable housing.

Meanwhile, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi is demanding that the developer double the amount of below-market housing.

Mirkarimi and Migden are absolutely right here: the project site is public land that’s being turned over to a private developer for private use — and the city could be getting a much better deal. Evans is offering to set aside just 20 percent of the units for people who aren’t rich — and that’s nowhere near enough to justify turning over public land. Part of the fault lies with the UC, which wants Evans to pay a stiff fee for the use of the land; that’s something Migden ought to press university officials to reconsider.

In the meantime, the Planning Commission should take the EIR off the December calendar and give everyone involved some more time to negotiate.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

OK: a 26-year-old German exchange student was stabbed in the Outer Sunset two weeks ago by a man who appeared to be homeless. It was a terrible incident, an awful crime; we’ll all stipulate that. And although C.W. Nevius, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist, splashed it all over the front page of the Sunday paper Dec. 2, it really shouldn’t have anything to do with how the city sets homeless policy.

But it’s got me thinking.

Nevius is apparently shocked that there’s been a sudden increase in the number of homeless people living in the Sunset. I could have told him and the mayor and the police department a month ago that this was going to happen.

See, thanks to a series of Nevius columns about homeless encampments in Golden Gate Park, Mayor Gavin Newsom got election-year tough this fall and created special teams to go into the park and roust the residents. The mayor, of course, said that all he wanted was to get people into shelters, to get them treatment, to provide them the support that he insists his administration is delivering.

But the fact is, there aren’t enough decent places for all of these people to live. Some day, I still believe, the people in San Francisco (and the people who run the country and the state) will come to their senses and realize that it’s entirely possible to end urban poverty, but that it will take big chunks of money, multiple billions of dollars, and that the wealthy people who like to complain about the folks on the streets will have to pay higher taxes to make it happen. We live in a rich city and a rich country; we can afford to build housing and create jobs and fund welfare programs. We just don’t want to — because we’re Americans and we’ve been told for a couple of generations now that we don’t have to sacrifice for social progress.

In the meantime, no law-enforcement crackdown or Care Not Cash program or shelter system is going to end homelessness in San Francisco. There are going to be people living on the streets because they can’t afford to pay rent on even a nasty single room and they don’t want to deal with the rules and structure of the shelter system.

And I have to wonder:

Weren’t we all better off when we let them sleep in the park?

I know that’s not a terribly satisfying approach to public policy; I know there were and are problems (dirty needles, human waste, befouling of valuable and rare public space) associated with the camps. I know that in theory nobody should be camping in Golden Gate Park; as one city resident reminded me at a neighborhood forum not long ago, the park isn’t a wilderness — it’s a garden.

But nobody should be sleeping in doorways or on sidewalks or in makeshift shelters in industrial areas either. I refer you to paragraph five above.

I ask you (and Newsom and Nevius): where are these people supposed to sleep? No, the park isn’t a home, but a camp hidden in a rarely used corner is more of a home than a bed in a nasty, crowded shelter where you have no rights at all, not even the right to come and go when you want. I know where I’d rather sleep.

Maybe, in the spirit of harm reduction, we should just leave the park campers alone.

City Hall’s budget myopia

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom goes before the TV cameras and announces, grimly, that the city faces a massive budget deficit ($229 million) and all departments will have to tighten their belts. There’s an immediate City Hall hiring freeze, and every agency has to prepare for budget reductions of as much as 13 percent. Things are bleak, the mayor insists, and everyone in the city should be prepared for service cuts.

If it feels like you’ve heard this song before, you have. It happens almost every year, and it’s been that way since the 1980s. And it’s not going to get any better until the city takes a hard look at how it brings in revenue and how that matches annual expenses. Before everyone starts lining up behind the mayor’s budget cuts, that’s what the supervisors need to do.

It’s still early in the budget cycle, and the shortfall numbers are still tentative. So the deficit is really a moving target, and it’s way too soon for anyone to start talking about specific numbers for specific cuts. It’s also entirely possible that the doom-and-gloom budget talk is aimed in part at derailing efforts by Sup. Chris Daly to put a charter amendment on the June 2008 ballot that would set aside $30 million per year for affordable housing.

But we’ll stipulate that the numbers aren’t good and that once again the city will have an unpleasant budget season with worthy causes, organizations, and agencies fighting one another over small bits of available money.

It’s also clear that Newsom’s first response to the problem is entirely wrong. "Although he wants to trim the fat," Newsom’s spokesperson, Nathan Ballard, told reporters, "the mayor made it abundantly clear he doesn’t want to see a reduction in people sweeping streets or police officers walking beats."

In other words, it’s fine if poor people can’t get treated at San Francisco General Hospital or mental health and substance abuse services get eliminated or funds for homeless housing disappear — but the streets will still be squeaky-clean. And for the record, the mayor resisted all efforts to get cops to walk beats and was only forced into approving it after the supervisors overrode his veto.

The hiring freeze is a gimmick: you can’t possibly run an operation the size and complexity of San Francisco city government with critical positions unfilled. What’s actually happened is that Newsom told department heads they can’t hire anyone without getting approval from his office first. So in effect, Newsom has given himself a direct veto over all personnel decisions at City Hall. He’ll simply make sure that the jobs he wants filled and the agencies he wants to continue operating properly will be spared, and others will get squeezed.

It’s a way to set policy without ever publicly discussing it, a way to shift money around without public hearings or input from the supervisors. It’s not a way to solve budget problems.

In fact, balancing San Francisco’s books — now and next year and the year after that and into the future — requires something that’s in short supply at the Mayor’s Office: direct and honest communication.

Here’s the problem: San Francisco, because it’s a city and a county, does a lot more than most other municipalities. And because it’s a city with active groups pushing for humane policies, it’s a city that tries to provide services that ought be paid for by the federal or state governments. In a rational system, San Francisco wouldn’t have to come up with $30 million per year for affordable housing; billions of dollars would be coming out of Washington DC to address poverty, homelessness, and the housing crunch in American cities. San Francisco shouldn’t be setting aside cash from the General Fund for the public schools; the state of California ought to be funding the schools at a level that would make local support unnecessary. And wealthy people in the United States (including in California and San Francisco) would be paying higher taxes to fund those things.

But that’s not the real world. Right now San Francisco has to find local money for pressing needs — and the city is both unable and unwilling to raise that revenue from its wealthiest residents and businesses. So the city budget is perpetually out of whack.

There are only two choices, really: the city can stop trying to do what the feds and state won’t, can back down on its commitment to something resembling a livable community and some form of social justice — or the folks at City Hall can start talking seriously about bringing in another $250 million per year in revenue.

It’s tough to raise taxes in a California city; state law sets high barriers. But it’s not impossible, and if the mayor and the supervisors came up with and campaigned for a comprehensive and progressive overhaul of the city’s tax system — with the goal of making the local rich people who have benefited from the George W. Bush tax cuts pay their fair share — San Francisco could get out of these constant and painful budget problems.

We’re getting sick of waiting.

Where’s Michela?

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› news@sfbg.com

Michela Alioto-Pier, carpetbagger.

That’s what her Democratic primary challenger called her in 1996, when Alioto-Pier ran for the House of Representatives from the 1st congressional district, which hugs the California coastline from the town of Napa to the Oregon border.

Alioto-Pier, a San Francisco native, had spent the previous two and a half years at the White House advising Al Gore on telecommunications issues. After returning to the West Coast, the ambitious 26-year-old packed up her belongings and moved to St. Helena in Napa County, buying a home there in November 1995 and registering to vote the following month.

Her opponent, Monica Marvin, promptly attacked with a commercial showing a moving van heading across the Golden Gate Bridge alongside a photo of Alioto-Pier and a voice-over condemning outside candidates.

"I think the perception was that someone who’d lived most of her life in the district had a more comprehensive grasp of the issues and the culture reflected by those constituents," Marvin told the Guardian recently.

Alioto-Pier nonetheless won the primary, but she narrowly lost the general election to a Republican incumbent named Frank Riggs. He too assailed her for moving to the district just before the race.

More than a decade later, District 2 supervisor Alioto-Pier hasn’t managed to escape accusations that she’s detached from her constituents, nor has she succeeded in clearly reestablishing residency here since beginning a new political career at San Francisco’s City Hall.

THE SECOND-HOME STORY


Alioto-Pier is registered to vote at a Vallejo Street condo that she bought in 2005 for $1.9 million, and she told us that she, husband Thomas Paul Pier, and their three children make it their primary residence.

"Depending on the time of year, we spend some weekends at our St. Helena house, which is on the same street as Congresswoman [Nancy] Pelosi’s St. Helena house," she said in a written response to our questions.

An Alioto-Pier office assistant, Gene Eplett, left a voice message with the Guardian insisting that second homes are commonplace. "You probably have one as well," Eplett said.

Not exactly. Particularly not one with a taxable value of $774,793.

And in some legal documents, Alioto-Pier lists the Napa County house as her residence.

In August the supervisor formed a limited liability company for the purpose of "wine production" with Pier, called Alioto-Pier Vineyards, according to state business registration records. Both listed their home address as the three-bedroom, two-bath St. Helena home on Zinfandel Lane. Alioto-Pier paid $590,000 for the place, which sits on 2.6 acres of world-famous Napa County soil.

Within days of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s appointing her to the Board of Supervisors in January 2004, she signed a deed of trust for a $100,000 equity line of credit, again listing the Zinfandel Lane property as her home address, according to Napa County records.

In early May 2003, not long before she joined the board, former mayor Willie Brown tapped her to sit on the powerful San Francisco Port Commission. That same week she reregistered another wine-making business in Napa County she’d founded years before called Alioto Cellars, a.k.a. Alioto Winery. In the area of the original form asking for a residence, she began to list the St. Helena property but thought better of it, crossing it out and replacing it with a San Francisco address on Jackson Street that she appears to have used for at least two years, according to Napa County records.

In response to questions regarding the business registration records for Alioto-Pier Vineyards, the supervisor said neither she nor her husband signed the form and that it was filled out by their attorney.

"Alioto-Pier Vineyards LLC is a small wine producing business (approximately 250 cases per year) whose business address is more suitable to where our vineyard (approximately one acre) is located — at our St. Helena property," she wrote.

The form asks for the addresses of the company’s managers separate from the location of the principal executive office. For both Alioto-Pier and her husband, Zinfandel Lane is given as the home address.

DISTRICT ISSUES


As a supervisor, Alioto-Pier has exhibited savvy on emergency preparedness, mothers in the workplace, energy use, and the threatened demise of St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission, which treats primarily low-income patients.

Mick Suverkrubbe, president of the Marina Merchants Association, said the supervisor always has a presence at the group’s meetings.

"If she doesn’t show up, one of her aides shows up," Suverkrubbe said. "She’s always been real responsive when we’ve had questions."

But some critics say Alioto-Pier appears all too willing to take direction from the Mayor’s Office, well-financed business interests, and Democratic party functionaries rather than independently arriving at positions.

"She’s like the windup doll," said one City Hall insider who asked not to be named. "It’s fair to say every time I see Sean Elsbernd [her board ally] make a decision, I know that it’s coming from a policy perspective, not someone yanking his chain. It’s the exception, not the rule, that she comes up with her own policy perspective."

"She has three more years, and hopefully they’ll be better," Bill Barnes, an aide to Assemblymember Fiona Ma who formerly worked for Sup. Chris Daly, said of Alioto-Pier’s current board term. "The point of district elections is that supervisors respond to their neighborhood. The values and concerns in District 2 are going to be more moderate and conservative than some other areas, but you still have to provide that basic level of service."

ATTENDANCE PROBLEMS


Alioto-Pier’s attendance record has also caused her trouble and made her an easy target for political adversaries.

"I see her here on Tuesday afternoons," when the board meets, one City Hall staffer said. "She probably spends a full day here when she has a committee hearing with an item. Beyond that, her office is routinely shut on Fridays."

Alioto-Pier missed 17 of 160 board and committee meetings in 2004 and 2005 — that’s only about 10 percent. But throughout her tenure as a supervisor, she’s attended barely half of the meetings of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, where each of the supervisors automatically serves as a director, according to an analysis of the $100 payments the members receive for attending meetings.

"I missed Transportation Authority meetings related to the birth of my third child and the complications of that pregnancy," Alioto-Pier told us.

Alioto-Pier noted, as did others at City Hall, that she had health problems in 2006. She was pregnant with her third child, and there were complications. Further, she said, supervisors don’t get time off for maternity.

"All city employees with the exception of members of the Board of Supervisors are allowed to take a four-month maternity leave. I was the first member of the board in the history of San Francisco to give birth while in office. As such, there were no guidelines in place, and I had to place the health and safety of my newborn first," she said.

But for many months in 2004 and 2005, before that pregnancy, she missed all or almost all of the Transportation Authority meetings.

She also missed 16 of 20 scheduled meetings, including three public hearings, during the short time in 2004 that she spent as a director for the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District.

Alioto-Pier left the district before her term was set to expire after serving only six months, complaining that she didn’t have enough time for the position. In her resignation letter, she acknowledged that the bridge was adjacent to her district and "given my ongoing commitment to improving waterfront security in San Francisco, I hope in the future I will once again be able to work with you and serve as a director." She never has, but four other supervisors have served on the district’s board for years.

And she’s apparently not too busy to be running a winery in St. Helena. It’s a modest operation, but it has to take some of her time.

WHERE DOES SHE VOTE?


Alioto-Pier’s voter registration history is confusing.

She doesn’t appear to have voted at all in the November 1999 election — at least not in Napa or San Francisco counties — but, curiously, she did vote in that year’s December runoff, when Willie Brown won a second term over Sup. Tom Ammiano.

She cast a ballot as an absentee in Napa County one year later, even though she was registered at that time to vote in San Francisco under the name Michela Angelina Alioto-Pier, public records show. She voted here in November 1998 with the last name Alioto-Pier, but she didn’t marry her lawyer husband until May 2000, county records show.

In 2002 she voted in San Francisco during the primary and general elections under the name Michela Angelina Driscol Alioto, yet she was still registered concurrently under the name Michela Angelina Alioto-Pier.

Alioto-Pier said that she and her husband returned to St. Helena in July 2000 but moved back here in early 2001, reregistering in both places. She added that San Francisco and Napa counties were at that time slow to remove "deadwood" registrations from their rolls.

"Clearly, once one reregisters, the county has the obligation to cancel all previous registrations for that person," she said. Alioto-Pier insisted that she voted in San Francisco’s November 1999 election, but an office attendant at the Department of Elections asserted that the system "says she was eligible but she did not vote."

Her 1996 Republican opponent, Riggs, also castigated her for failing to vote in 1994 and 1995. Alioto-Pier’s explanation, according to press accounts? Her permanent residency wasn’t clear.

"As best as I can recall from the events of a decade ago, I responded to Republican Frank Riggs by saying there was a mix-up with my absentee ballots," Alioto-Pier told us.

She’s listed a string of San Francisco addresses in public records over the past two decades in addition to her St. Helena dwelling. But in 2005 she finally bought the condo on Vallejo Street in San Francisco. She didn’t file for a homeowner’s exemption on the condo in 2006, but neither has she taken advantage of the tax break on her Zinfandel Lane home during any year since 1997, according to property records.

Alioto-Pier said she was unaware of qualifying for the homeowner’s tax exemption. "However, we declare as a deduction the mortgage interest from our Vallejo Street home on our federal tax returns," she said. Taxpayers are permitted to benefit from the deduction on a second residence.

Whispers at City Hall surrounding the time Alioto-Pier spends in St. Helena and away from her District 2 constituents have dogged her increasingly since she replaced Newsom.

But she’s never faced the punishing regimen of banner headlines endured by District 4’s onetime supervisor Ed Jew. He’s also been suspended by the mayor and faces civil charges that he lied to voters about living permanently in the district he was elected to represent.

Alioto-Pier offered a few telling words in a recent robocall to San Francisco voters opposing mandated appearances by the mayor before the Board of Supervisors: "We need to get our house in order before we invite any guests."

Now, which house would that be?

You’re getting warmer

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>>CLICK HERE FOR OUR SPECIAL GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE REPORT

› news@sfb.com

I remember so well the final morning hours of the Kyoto conference. The negotiations had gone on long past their scheduled evening close, and the convention center management was frantic — a trade show for children’s clothing was about to begin, and every corner of the vast hall was still littered with the carcasses of the sleeping diplomats who had gathered in Japan to draw up the first global treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But when word finally came that an agreement had been reached, people roused themselves with real enthusiasm — lots of backslapping and hugs.

A long decade after the first powerful warnings had sounded, it seemed that humans were finally rising to the greatest challenge we’d ever faced.

The only long face in the hall belonged to William O’Keefe, chairman of the Global Climate Coalition, otherwise known as the American coal, oil, and car lobby. He’d spent the week coordinating the resistance, working with Arab delegates and Russian industrialists to sabotage the emerging plan. And he’d failed. "It’s in free fall now," he said, stricken. But then he straightened his shoulders and said, "I can’t wait to get back to Washington, where we can get things under control."

I thought he was whistling past the graveyard. In fact, he knew far better than the rest of us what the future would hold. He knew it would be at least another decade before anything changed.

TEN YEARS WARMER


The important physical-world reality to remember about the 10 years after Kyoto is that they included the warmest years on record. All of the warmest years on record.

In that span of time we’ve come to understand that not only is the globe warming but we’d also dramatically underestimated the speed and the amount of that warming. By now the data from the planet outstrips the scientific predictions on an almost daily basis. Earlier this fall, for instance, the seasonal Arctic sea ice melt beat the old record — by mid-August. Then the ice kept melting for six more weeks, losing an area the size of California every week.

"Arctic Melt Unnerves the Experts," the headline in the New York Times reported. And the scientists were shaken by rapid changes in tundra permafrost systems, not to mention rainforest systems, temperate soil carbon-sequestration systems, and oceanic acidity systems.

Planetary climate change has gone from being a problem for our children to a problem for right about now, as evidenced by, oh, Hurricane Katrina, California wildfires, and epic droughts in the Southeast and Southwest. And that’s just in the continental United States. Go to Australia sometime: it’s gotten so dry there that native Aussie Rupert Murdoch recently announced his News Corp. empire is going carbon neutral.

The important political-world reality to remember about the 10 years after Kyoto is that we haven’t done anything.

Oh, we’ve passed all kinds of interesting state and local laws, wonderful experiments that have begun to show just how much progress is possible. But in Washington DC, nothing. No laws at all. Until last year, when the GOP surrendered control of Congress, even the hearings were a joke, with "witnesses" like novelist Michael Crichton.

And as a result, our emissions have continued to increase. Worse, we’ve made not the slightest attempt to shift China and India away from using coal. Instead of making an all-out effort to provide the resources for them to go renewable, we’ve stood quietly by and watched from the sidelines as their energy trajectories shot out of control: these days the Chinese are opening a new coal-fired plant every week. History will regard even the horror in Iraq as just another predictable folly compared to this novel burst of irresponsibility.

A HINT OF A MOVEMENT


If you’re looking for good news, there is some.

For one thing, we understand the technologies and the changes in habit that can help. The past 10 years have seen the advent of hybrid cars and the widespread use of compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Wind power has been the fastest-growing source of electricity generation throughout the period. Japan and Germany have pioneered, with great success, a subsidy scheme required to put millions of solar panels on rooftops.

Even more important, a real movement has begun to emerge in this country. It began with Katrina, which opened eyes. Then Al Gore gave those eyes something to look at: his movie made millions realize just what a pickle we are in. Many of those millions, in turn, became political activists.

Earlier this year six college students and I launched stepitup07.org, which has organized almost 2,000 demonstrations in all 50 states. Last month the student climate movement drew 7,000 hardworking kids from campuses all over the country for a huge conference. We’ve launched a new grassroots coalition, 1sky.org, that will push Congress and the big Washington environmental groups.

All of this work has tilted public opinion — new polls have energy and climate change showing up high on the list of issues that voters care about, which in turn has made the candidates take notice. All of the Democrats are saying more or less the right things, though none of them, save John Edwards, is saying them with much volume.

THE RACE OF ALL TIME


Now it’s a numbers game. Can we turn that political energy into change fast enough to matter?

On the domestic front the numbers look like this: we’ve got to commit to reductions in carbon emissions of 80 percent by 2050, and we’ve got to get those cuts under way quickly and reduce emissions by 10 percent in the next few years. The marketplace will help — if we send it the message that carbon carries a cost. But only government can do that.

Two more numbers we’re pushing for: zero, which is how many new coal-fired power plants we can afford to open in the US, and five million, which is how many green jobs Congress needs to provide for the country’s low-skilled workers. All that insulation isn’t going to stuff itself inside our walls, and those solar panels won’t crawl up to the rooftops by themselves. We can’t send the work to China, and we can’t do it with the click of a mouse; this is the last big chance to build an economy that works for most of us.

Internationally, the task is even steeper. The Kyoto Accord, which we ignored, expires in a couple of years. Negotiations begin this month in Bali, Indonesia, to strike a new deal, and it’s likely to be the last bite at the apple we’ll get — if we miss this chance, the climate is likely to spiral out of control. We have a number here too: 450, as in parts per million of carbon dioxide. It’s the absolute upper limit on what we can pour into the atmosphere, and it will take a heroic effort to keep from exceeding it.

This is a big change — even 10 years ago, we thought the safe limit might be 550. But the data is clear: the Earth is far more finely balanced than we thought and our peril much greater. Our foremost climate scientist, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s James Hansen, testified under oath in a courtroom last year that if we don’t stop short of that 450 redline, we could see the sea level rise 20 feet before the century is out. That’s civilization challenging. That’s a carbon summer to match any nuclear winter anyone ever dreamed about.

It’s a test, a kind of final exam for our political, economic, and spiritual systems. And it’s a fair test — nothing vague or fuzzy about it. Chemistry and physics don’t bargain. They don’t compromise. They don’t meet us halfway. We’ll do it or we won’t. And 10 years from now we’ll know which path we chose.

Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, is an author and environmentalist who frequently writes about global warming. McKibben’s essay was commissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Approximately 50 AAN member papers will be publishing the essay this week.

All I want for Christmas …

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We asked some notable San Francisco personalities to recall their most memorable holiday gifts. Read on for the superlatively good, bad, and fugly (plus our recommendations for where to get the good stuff).

BRIANNA TOTH, CURATOR, COORDINATOR FOR THE CONCERT SERIES "NOISE IN MY KITCHEN"


WORST A sweater with pink elephants on it from Argentina, from my ex-boyfriend. It’s the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen … it has nothing to do with him as a person.

BEST Once, my friends accidentally ran over my Jawbreaker cassette Dear You because it fell out of my pocket when I got out of their car. They felt bad and bought the record for me for Christmas, on vinyl.

Find punk rock on vinyl at Thrillhouse Records, 3422 Mission, SF. (415) 826-0223.

MERIC LONG, VOCALS AND GUITAR FOR THE DODOS


WORST A small ceramic version of ET when I was six. It was terrifying…. I got out of bed and smashed it in the middle of the night.

BEST A tiny keyboard called the Casio SK-1. It can record sounds and play them back in different frequencies. I got it when I was a kid, and it still sounds great.

Find pianos and electric keyboards at Piedmont Piano Company, 660 Third St., SF. (415) 543-9988, www.piedmontpiano.com.

BRENDA KNIGHT, AUTHOR OF WOMEN OF THE BEAT GENERATION, ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER AT REDWHEEL WEISER/CONARI


WORST An unbelievably fugly wall planter called the Little Brown Jug, the most hideous gift imaginable. I got it at a party. When I opened it up, it stopped everything. You could hear a pin drop. I tried to sell it at a yard sale, but nobody would take it. It’s probably still there at the Goodwill on Haight.

BEST Jewelry from a store on Carl and Cole called the Sword and Rose. They sell exquisite, intricate, affordable, one-of-a-kind pieces.

Stop by the Sword and Rose, 85 Carl, SF. (415) 681-5434.

JONATHON KEATS, ARTIST, CURRENTLY SHOWING "MIRACLE WORKS" AT MODERNISM


WORST The worst hasn’t happened yet. My parents often threaten to give me a cat, apparently on the principle that an animal will make me responsible. The only thing worse than being given a pet is being the pet that gets given.

BEST I already have more books than I’ll ever read, which is why being given another one is such a luxury. I especially enjoy obscure old books, because they contain whole lost worlds. For instance, I was once given a well-worn hardcover called Around the World with Jigger, Beaker, and Glass. The title alone was as good as a month’s travels.

For rare and first-edition books, try Phoenix Books, 3850 24th St., SF. (415) 821-3477, www.dogearedbooks.com.

CHICKEN JOHN RINALDI, ARTIST, SHOWMAN, FORMER MAYORAL CANDIDATE


WORST My best and worst were at my annual Christmas Eve game show party. One year everyone left before the gifts were all used up. So I opened one. It was a Mexican magazine of horror and gore unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was chilling and haunting and real — a magazine of car-accident victims and people who had died from dog bites, bee stings, battery acid. It was totally out of control. With cute little captions in Spanish. I’m still haunted by that magazine.

BEST A random coupon for a kiss from a girl named Donna. I said into the mic that she could hang around until the show was over so I could collect my kiss. She was crazy gorgeous in a weird, giantess kinda way and was totally into biting. I like the biting.

Give the gift of looking at (if not actually kissing) gorgeous women: a tour of SF strip clubs through Slinky Productions. (510) 291-9779, www.slinkyproductions.com.

BERT BERGEN, ARTIST, CURATOR, DRUMMER FOR ASCENDED MASTER


WORST A series of Franklin Mint plates depicting football plays with nondescript football players. They had painterly guys in orange getting tackled by nondescript defenders. And what’s a 12-year-old supposed to do with decorative plates?

BEST That would have to be a hunting rifle, a .30-30, the same kind that the Rifleman uses. I killed my first deer with it.

We’re not going to support guns or killing living creatures, but if you want to find a dead animal gift of your own, visit Gypsy Honeymoon, 3599 24th St., SF. (415) 821-1713.

TED EDWARDS, VOCALS AND GUITAR FOR THE MUSIC LOVERS


WORST My first electric guitar, from my cousin Jane when I was 13 years old, because it set in motion a cycle of events that led to three divorces, despair, and debt.

BEST My first electric guitar, from my cousin Jane when I was 13 years old, as it led to an intimate love affair with the wonder of song, the glamour of the stage, and therein finding the one and only place I have ever belonged.

Find and fix electric guitars at San Francisco Guitarworks, 323 Potrero, SF. (415) 865-5424, www.sfguitarworks.com.

LIANNA HIBBARD, GENERAL MANAGER, UPPER PLAYGROUND


WORST Homemade leg warmers.

BEST Artist series Adidas Superstars — the San Diego edition — by Dave Kinsey.

MALIA, BARTENDER, THEE PARKSIDE


WORST A ceramic potpourri simmer pot with flowers painted on it.

BEST The iPhone I haven’t received yet (hint, hint).

Like you didn’t know: get an iPhone at the Apple Store, 2125 Chestnut, SF. (415) 392-0202, www.apple.com.

AMANDA CASKEY, GENERAL MANAGER, CAFÉ GRATITUDE RETAIL STORE


WORST A pink rhinestone charm bracelet with three-inch-long black rhinestone palm tree and taxicab charms.

BEST My grandmother promising to match the money my girlfriend and I save toward buying a house.

You may not be able to give the gift of half a house, but you can get hip, charming housewares from Egg and the Urban Mercantile, 85 Carl, SF. (415) 564-2248.

ABAI, DJ, BOUNCE REFLEX


WORST Fruitcake! I was a kid, and it was Christmas. I was so grossed out by it because it looked slimy and green. When the family wasn’t looking, my brother and I fed it to the family dog in the kitchen. He wolfed it down, then threw up all over the place a few minutes later. That was not fun.

BEST A sound system, gear to play on, an album, a trailer, and a van to pull it all in! Because that gave me the opportunity to travel around the country playing music I loved, which fueled my travels abroad to do the same thing.

DJs in the know shop at World of Stereo 2, 1080 Market, SF. (415) 626-1195. *

Shopping for slackers

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When it comes to holiday shopping, some people are planners. These are the types who keep an eye out for potential gifts all year long, who spend long, leisurely hours trekking through shopping districts and browsing through stores for that perfect gift — in June. But most of us are the other type of shopper: the oh-my-god-it’s-almost-Christmas, I-only-have-two-days-to-get-everything, it’s-too-late-to-order-online kind. For these people (you know, the rest of us), we’ve compiled this neighborhood-by-neighborhood guide to holiday shopping. Because as much as we’d all love to spend an entire week seeing what every little nook and cranny in the city has to offer, most of us need to get our gifts sometime before, oh, Easter.

Inner Richmond

Running the gamut from the cheap to the extravagant, Clement Street is an ideal place to do a bit of digging at stores whose owners sell what they like. On a gray afternoon stroll, you’re certain to come across at least a couple of rare finds, the sort that will meet the high-design expectations of both the classy and the kitsch-cool San Franciscan on your list.

PERIOD GEORGE


Donald Gibson buys a lot of his antique dining ware from Eastern Europe or "wherever the dollar is strongest," he says. The store runs on the model of highly organized chaos — expect to find collectible plastic napkin rings from the 1930s, mod place mats, and postcontemporary cutlery all hiding between colorful displays of centuries-old china. Check out the walls too.

7 Clement, SF. (415) 752-1900

FLEURT


Fleurt occupies an impressive, breathable space. Its focus is on interior decor and unexpected gifts, most of them from Europe. But don’t overlook the tres chic flower selection. Fleurt also provides on-site installations, so stop in and ask about custom wreaths and table arrangements.

15 Clement, SF. (415) 751-2747, www.fleurtstyle.com

PARK LIFE


At Derek Song and Jamie Alexander’s art and design shop, you’re welcome to pick over bunches of slick T-shirts, hoodies, underread zines, and original artwork, most of it created by the owners and their friends.

220 Clement, SF. (415) 386-7275, www.parklifestore.com

6TH AVENUE AQUARIUM


Good, clean fun. The 6th Avenue Aquarium presents a dizzying array of fish and flowers, and everything inside is bathed in superpop blue. It’s worth a stop just for the hyperstimulation — your kid will love you for it.

425 Clement, SF. (415) 668-7190, www.6thaveaquarium.net

GET THEE TO THE NUNNERY


A dress-casual boutique for the discerning madam, the Nunnery will help you find a smart, lively ensemble for your mom that promises not to outlive its wearability after New Year’s Eve. Owners Gerry and Billy Sher keep things interesting with an eclectic, mix-and-match approach to filling the racks.

905 Clement, SF. (415) 752-8889

CHEAPER THAN CHEAPER


The hilarious sign says, "Smile, your saving a lot of money." And dismal grammar aside, this place lives up to its awesome billing. You wouldn’t know it on first glance, but this shop stocks big, cheap, decent rugs in the back, next to the aging paper goods and the empty boxes of Manischewitz.

626 Clement, SF. (415) 386-1896

Mission and Haight

Everyone knows about Therapy and 826 Valencia in the Mission, and about Shoe Biz and Fluvog in the Haight. But for more unusual gifts from the usual shopping spots, try one of these new, off-the-beaten-path, or simply off-the-radar spots.

MIRANDA CAROLIGNE


This boutique’s owner wrote the book on San Francisco–style indie design — literally. The local couturier was chosen as the author of Reconstructing Clothes for Dummies (Wiley Publishing), and for good reason: her well-made, imaginative creations have helped define recycled fashion.

485 14th St., SF. (415) 355-1900, www.mirandacaroligne.com

PANDORA’S TRUNK


No underachiever, Caroligne also has her hands (and designs) in this collaborative art and retail space in the Lower Haight. The brand-new co-op (its grand opening was, ironically and intentionally, on Buy Nothing Day) features gorgeous, one-of-a-kind items by local designers, who can be seen at work in their on-site studios.

544 Haight, SF. pandorastrunk.com

FIVE AND DIAMOND


Holsters for your rock ‘n’ roll sis. Leather computer bags for your fashion-forward beau. Tribal earrings for your burner BFF. This circus–Wild West–postapocalyptic–global wonderland (or weirderland?) in the Mission has something for everyone — all designed by Phoebe Minona Durland and Leighton Kelly, the dynamic duo who’ve helped make the Yard Dogs Road Show and Black and Blue Burlesque some of the city’s favorite exports.

510 Valencia, SF. (415) 255-9747, fiveanddiamond.com

THE CURIOSITY SHOPPE


You know that creative uncle or artsy aunt who always gets you the coolest, most interesting gifts anyone in your family has ever seen? The ones you love but your grandparents don’t quite understand? This is the place to find something for them. In fact, the wooden mustache masks or stackable ceramics are exactly what you would’ve known would make the perfect gift — if you’d known before you visited the shop that they even existed.

855 Valencia, SF. (415) 839-6404, www.curiosityshoppeonline.com

LITTLE OTSU


This charming Mission boutique is cute-little-paper-items heaven: it has creative address books, miniature note cards, adorably funky journals, and much, much more. You’ll also find one-of-a-kind wallets, sweet magnets, and McSweeney’s T-shirts. In short? Stocking stuffers galore.

849 Valencia, SF. (415) 255-7900, www.littleotsu.com

CEIBA RECORDS


You can cruise the Haight for yet another hippie tapestry or stick of Nag Champa, or you can find something truly original for the alt-culture lover in your life. Ceiba stocks a dizzying array of inspired, fanciful clothing and accessories for men and women. Yes, some of the prices can be steep (though well worth it), but the smaller, cheaper items are just as gorgeous — and just as unusual.

1364 Haight, SF. (415) 437-9598, www.ceibarec.com

Chinatown

This neighborhood isn’t just for tourists and locals pretending to be tourists. It can be perfect for gift shopping — if you know where to look.

CHINA STATION


This is the place for cool mah-jongg and chess sets, opium pipes, and pretty little jewelry boxes. It even has clean, cute imitation designer bags — good to know if your giftees swing that way.

456 Grant, SF. (415) 397-4848

ASIAN IMAGE


This place is just fun to walk into. Plus, if you’re in the market for brocade photo albums or scrapbooks, interesting wall scrolls, or unusual night-lights, a stop here is all you’ll need.

800 Grant, SF. (415) 398-2602

CHINATOWN KITE SHOP


There’s a reason this store is a legend: it has every kind of kite you can possibly imagine. Keep in mind that kites are not only a good gift idea for outdoor fun but also perfect for decorating a big room.

717 Grant, SF. (415) 989-5182, www.chinatownkite.com

GINN WALL CO.


Not just one of the few places in town where you can still buy a cast-iron pan, Ginn is also a source of adorable garnish cutters, charming cake molds, and delightful cookware.

1016 Grant, SF. (415) 982-6307

West Portal

Everyone’s favorite hidden gem (well, it was until journos like us started writing about it), West Portal feels like a small town with the benefits of a big city. Sure, the shopping selection is limited. But it offers a lot of bang for the buck — in products as well as personality.

PLAIN JANE’S


This is one of those old-fashioned small gift stores that have a little bit of everything — and all of it carefully chosen by someone (or someones) with great taste. The items in the baby section and the Christmas ornaments are particularly good, but you just might find something for everyone on your WTF-do-i-get-them? list.

44 West Portal, SF. (415) 759-7487, www.plainjanesgifts.com

WEST PORTAL ANTIQUES


This antique collective is a treasure trove of vintage goodness — and has offerings in every price bracket.

199 West Portal, SF. (415) 242-9470, www.westportalantiques.com

LITTLE FISH BOUTIQUE


The only thing you’ll love more than this shop’s unique clothing and accessories for him, her, and baby is the phenomenal customer service.

320 West Portal, SF. (415) 681-7242, www.littlefishboutique.com

AMBASSADOR TOYS


You can’t talk about shopping in West Portal without mentioning this brilliantly unconventional toy store (which also has a location in the Financial District — but why brave the traffic?). Nearly everything here is educational or alternative in some way — finding a Barbie or a toy weapon will be harder than finding a wooden train set.

186 West Portal, SF. (415) 759-8697, www.ambassadortoys.com

East Bay

If panicked, harried customers noisily rushing to buy holiday gifts aren’t your thing, escape the city for the quieter, quainter quarters of the East Bay. Better parking and pedestrian-friendly districts mean you can enjoy the trappings of charming boutiques without the tourist hordes — or the headaches.

CE SOIR FINE LINGERIE


This cozy space in Berkeley’s Elmwood District offers bedroom playwear in a decidedly un–Frederick’s of Hollywood environment. The dim lighting and rich interior say "sexy" (not "sleazy"), as do carefully chosen boudoir goods by Cosabella, Hanky Panky, Princesse tam.tam, Betsey Johnson, and Roberto Cavalli. Add the complimentary fittings from Ce Soir’s sweetly attentive owner, and you’ve got the East Bay’s best-kept secret since, well, Victoria’s.

2980 College, Berk. (510) 883-1082, www.cesoirfinelingerie.com

AUGUST


Well-selected clothes vie for attention with wall-hung art at boutique-cum-gallery August, located in North Oakland’s Rockridge District. Both men and women will enjoy the laid-back staff, premium denim selection, luxe cashmere sweaters, and hard to find avant-garde labels — not to mention the sustainable housewares and nature photography.

5410 College, Oakl. (510) 652-2711

BODY TIME


Who doesn’t dig candles and lotions, preferably many and in a variety of different scents and permutations? (C’mon, men, don’t pretend you don’t. Isn’t that what the metrosexual revolution was about?) Body Time, with multiple locations in the Bay Area, provides not only the option to add custom scents to lotions and perfume bases but also nubby wooden massage tools and everything else to make it your body’s time, all the time. Check out the one en route to dinner in charming North Berkeley.

1942 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 841-5818, www.bodytime.com

ANTIQUE CENTRE


If you don’t mind riffling through the pack rat–style holdings of Oakland’s charmingly disheveled Antique Centre, head over with a car — a large one. Vintage furniture and home furnishings clutter the house, and you’ll often see full, undamaged wooden dressers or bookshelves for less than $10 (and sometimes free) on the front lawn. It’s a calamity of objects on the cheap and dirty.

6519 Telegraph, Oakl. (510) 654-3717

Marina

OK. So shopping in the Marina can be expensive and you may have to dodge assaults by sales associates desperate for a commission. But when you’re looking for that high-end dog collar or superstylie serving platter, there’s really nowhere better to look.

CATNIP AND BONES


This cute little pet shop features just the right mix of well-made necessities and ridiculously high-end luxury items for your giftee’s pets. Try the basic cat toys for the down-to-earth pet lover in your life or buy the angora sweater for the friend who carries her puppy in her purse.

2220 Chestnut, SF. (415) 359-9100

BOOKS, INC.


This store, one of several owned by a small local chain, is famous for its knowledgeable staff. Not sure what to get your grandparents or your best friend? Find out what they read last, and let Books, Inc.’s staff help you decide.

2251 Chestnut, SF. (415) 931-3633, www.booksinc.net

MODICA HOME


There’s always that time in the gift-giving season when you need to buy housewares — usually because they’re a safe bet. Why not try Modica, an eclectic shop full of cute items that look vaguely European, including a selection of gifts made by the owner’s sister?

2274 Union, SF. (415) 440-4389

INTIMA GIRL


This lingerie shop–boudoir simply rocks, thanks to helpful staff and a small but quality assortment of sexy items. How about getting your lover candles that, when burned, melt into massage oil? Or, for the girlie girl (or boy) who still blushes at the mention of sex, try a condom compact, complete with a mirror and a secret compartment for you know what.

3047 Fillmore, SF. (415) 563-1202, www.intima-online.com

WILDLIFE WORKS


This is the kind of place where you can feel good about spending too much money on clothes. The fashionable, comfortable clothes here are all ecofriendly, and a portion of the profits goes toward running wildlife conservatories in Africa. Plus, it has a killer 60 percent off section.

1849 Union, SF. (415) 738-8544, www.wildlifeworks.com *

Happy challah-days

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› molly@sfbg.com

It’s almost Christmas, and I’m the happiest little Jew in San Francisco. Well, OK. Half Jew. Semi-Semite. Hebrew-speaking nogophile with a passion for sleek menorahs and gaudily decorated pine trees.

Yup, I’m that special kind of American hybrid created by a Christian mom and a Jewish dad — and not just the usual Jewish-as-Jewish-can-be dad, but the kind whose family has also been celebrating Christmas for generations. (Dad said it’s because Christmas might as well be a national holiday. I have a theory about assimilation … but that’s another story.) Which means I have tons of experience appreciating both Judeo-Christian wintertime holidays, and also appreciating only the best parts of both.

With Mom, a music major who was skeptical about organized religion but always spiritual, Christmas has only ever been about Jesus inasmuch as the hymns that mention him are pretty. And since she spent my childhood years single, our Christmas traditions were based on convenience and good company — takeout Chinese and silly Blockbuster comedies on Christmas Eve — rather than convention. And with über-Reform Dad, it was traditional ornaments on a Douglas fir inside the house (yay, Christmas!) and blue lights hanging from the eaves outside (yay, Hanukkah!). But the holidays — and their particular ways of celebrating them — were always important to both my parents; and, not surprisingly, to me.

Of course, I learned all the crappy things about the holidays too: obligatory gifts (given and received), obligatory time spent with relatives you hate, and obligatory good moods when you feel like burning the tree right down. Bad Muzak. Obnoxious store displays. Unashamed consumerism that’s as sickening as too much Manischewitz. And that’s not even mentioning the annoying and arbitrary elevation of Hanukkah to a significant holiday so spoiled Jewish kids don’t envy their spoiled gentile friends.

But despite all that, and thanks to my upbringing, I’ve learned to love the parts of the holidays that are worth loving: twinkling lights and candles, the scents of greenery and cinnamon, perfectly crisp latkes and perfectly iced sugar cookies, and the fact that most people are at least trying to think of someone other than themselves, whether it’s starving Somalian strangers or their own significant others.

In fact, it wouldn’t be hard to argue that I’ve become more attached to this time of year than my parents ever were. As a kid, I’d get so sad when Christmas was over that my mom would keep a tiny tree in my room until February. And I continued celebrating Hanukkah with my college friends long after my Dad’s stepfamily lost interest. This year I fully expect to attend at least one progressive Hanukkah celebration, as well as burden my roommates with tinsel-covered shrubbery for at least a month. I’m also making my gifts and getting my St. Nick suit ready for some Santarchy on Dec. 15.

Which is to say, I face this holiday season as our guide does — with a good dose of ambivalence and skepticism, and an equal dose of cheer and goodwill. We hope it’ll help you do the same. May your gifts come from your heart, your celebrations feed your soul, and your attempts to ignore this season’s drawbacks kick some serious ass. *

‘Tis the season for getting even

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› culture@sfbg.com

Spending time with your family over the holidays can be difficult. Are you a vegetarian atheist with carnivorous, God-fearin’ folks? Are your grandparents racist? Then you know what I mean. But these special occasions don’t have to suck. Step one? Stop playing on their turf. Why spend one more holiday giving them the home-team advantage, biting your tongue to make them feel more comfortable? Instead, tell your relatives to get their asses up to San Francisco for a good old heathen’s ball. It may sound counterintuitive, but think about it for a minute: you’ll be in charge. It’s the perfect time to have the holiday you’ve always wished you’d had … or to just get even with your folks for all of those miserable dinners you’ve gritted your teeth through all of these years. The businesses listed below have everything you’ll need to either gently ruffle some feathers or send your folks screaming back to their safety nooks. How far you choose to take things is up to you — and your childhood trauma.

DECK THE HALLS WITH PAGAN ALTARS


If your parents’ wholesome holiday decorations are inherently offensive (even the average gender-"appropriate" angel ornament can seem oppressive to a student of gender-continuum philosophy), you can beat them at their own game by picking up a few things at Under One Roof (549 Castro, SF; 415-503-2300, www.underoneroof.org) in the Castro. Most of the holiday knickknacks you’ll find there, like rainbow-cloaked Santa Claus decorations and muscle-man bottle openers, will do little more than raise a conservative’s eyebrow. But they’ll provide valuable ammunition when the conversation turns political: just watch how Dad reacts when you counter his homophobia by pointing out that the cocoa mug he’s using comes from a boy-town volunteer organization that donates all of its proceeds to HIV-AIDS research.

If that doesn’t work, try riling your folks by jabbing at their spirituality with holiday decorations. They force you to stare down Christianity at every turn? Then shove your lack of belief down their throats this year by shopping in the Mission, where a cluster of small boutiques carries everything you’ll need for an offbeat — or damn near demonic — holiday party.

Start your spree at Paxton Gate (824 Valencia, SF; 415-824-1872, www.paxtongate.com), where you’ll find an assortment of unconventional home decor options, including carnivorous plants and a large collection of vaguely satanic household accessories. Although you might score some unwanted points with your hunting-aficionado brother with a few of taxidermist Jeanie M’s dangling mice angels, you’ll certainly lose plenty from your born-again aunt, whose collection of gruesome Jesus-dying-on-the-cross sculptures offend you as much as your ornaments will her.

After grabbing some choice roadkill art, you’ll want to head to Yoruba Botanica (998 Valencia, SF; 415-826-4967) for some Santeria-style pagan altars, spell candles, and heretical oils and scents, then to Casa Bonampak (3331 24th St., SF; 415-642-4079, www.casabonampak.com) for some Latin flair. A wreath made of chile peppers, some Virgin of Guadalupe party streamers, and a few discounted Día de los Muertos items will add a little subversive color to your thoroughly confusing collection of holiday decorations.

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY TOFU


If you’ve lived in the city for more than two years, you’ve probably adopted a cruelty-free diet and grown weary of your family’s annual flesh-eating parties. You know those relatives who always "forget" you don’t eat meat? Now you can ostracize them by serving an alternative smorgasbord from SF’s premier food co-op, Rainbow Grocery (1745 Folsom, SF; 415-863-0620, www.rainbowgrocery.org). There’s plenty to choose from here, including a full line of Tofurky products, organic cranberry sauce, and Tofutti brand frozen treats for dessert.

Even if your relatives don’t mind taking a short break from their irresponsible eating habits, you can still piss them off by directly attacking their morals with an obscene cake from the Cake Gallery (290 Ninth St., SF; 415-861-2253, www.thecakegallerysf.com), a hole-in-the-wall bakery that boasts the ability and desire to make "anything your demented mind can think up." Can the artists at the Cake Gallery make a dessert with a leather-clad transsexual peeing on the baby Jesus? You bet your family’s asses they can.

HERE COMES TRANNY CLAUS


With dinner out of the way, it’s time to expose your family to a bit of real SF culture with some quality time for them and your friends. You’ll want to invite an array of typical weirdos to rival your family’s usual assortment of nerdy cousins, creepy aunts and uncles, and stoic grandparents; we suggest at least one hippie, a lesbian couple, a club kid, and a few snobby hipsters with neck tattoos.

If none of your friends are willing to flaunt their earlobe plugs or perform a contact improv dance number, you might want to put some effort into background noise. Downloading a raunchy playlist will work in a pinch, but if you really want to shock your guests, how about visiting Amoeba Music (1855 Haight, SF; 415-831-1200, www.amoeba.com), which carries almost every holiday album ever made? Start with Run DMC’s single "Christmas in Hollis" (Fedor Sigel, 1987), then move on to something more unsettling, like the heavy metal compilation A Brutal Christmas: The Season in Chaos (SoTD Records, 2003). Amoeba also carries chapters 1 to 22 of R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet (Jive; 2005, 2007) and other parent-unfriendly classics like Wondershowzen (MTV2; 2005–06) — you know, the music your friends will love as much as your folks will hate it.

HARK! THE HOMO ANGELS SING!


Is everyone appropriately uncomfortable? Good. Now it’s time for the postdinner activity. Rather than listen to Grandpa’s drunken ramblings or watch Mom resentfully do all of the dishes herself, goddamnit, why not take the fam on a nice little trip through Yuletide SF?

If your folks seem to be planning a mutiny, you might want to appease them (i.e., ease them into submission) by booking a tour with Cable Car Charters (Pier 31, Embarcadero, SF; 415-922-2425, www.cablecarcharters.com), which offers a holiday lights package, complete with blankets and a man dressed like Santa Claus. But if you’re really out for blood, consider heading directly to the Castro Theatre (429 Castro, SF; 415-621-6120, www.thecastrotheatre.com), whose December calendar boasts an appearance by Crispin Glover, a disco-themed Christmas party hosted by an ex–Village Person, and six performances by the SF Gay Men’s Chorus (415-865-3650, www.sfgmc.org), who’ll be paying tribute to Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, solstice, and Ramadan, all at the same time.

SILENT NIGHT


Congratulations, you made it!

You can still torture your folks with shots of Fernet back at your apartment as punishment for all of the fattening eggnog nightcaps you’ve endured over the years, but if you ever want to see them again, you might just lead them to their half-deflated air mattresses and bid them good night. After eight full hours of tossing and turning on your floor, maybe they’ll be inspired to tone it down next time you come to visit — or at least remember to add a plate of steamed vegetables to the slaughtered-animal spread. And if they’re not, you can always bring a penis cake home with you next year. *

In the spirit

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› culture@sfbg.com

Beyond the lingering lines of the Westfield San Francisco Centre and past the furiously paced gift wrappers of Stonestown Galleria, like a lost menorah in a holiday haystack, there lies the oft-forgotten meaning of all of this mistletoe madness: the act of giving. The Guardian knows that decades of doling out dollars for obligatory gifts can make even the most blissful person feel like Scrooge. So this year, akin to the chain-clad ghost of Jacob Marley, we’re here to remind you that the Tiny Tims of the Bay Area need your help more than that tubby teen cousin of yours needs another toy. Here are some ways you can make a real difference for someone’s holiday:

HANDS ON BAY AREA


The local chapter of this international alliance of volunteer organizations is a great place to start for would-be civil servants. Its Holiday Help program connects prospective volunteers with various holiday festivities, like the Support for Families of Children with Disabilities skating party, which gives the city’s disabled kids a chance to get onto the ice for a little winter fun. Volunteers help them maneuver on the rink, whether in wheelchairs, on folding chairs, with tennis shoes, or on old-fashioned ice skates. Can’t skate? No problem — you can hand out desserts and gifts. Go to the Web site, register, then show the kids that pirouette you think you can still do.

(415) 541-7716, www.handsonbayarea.org

THE VOLUNTEER CENTER


This Bay Area organization serves more than 1,500 nonprofits in San Francisco and San Mateo counties, providing do-gooders with plenty of ways to make the world a better place. The preeminent local organization to find onetime and ongoing volunteer opportunities has far-ranging humanitarian prospects. Check out its Web site to make a real change in someone’s life — and see a real change in your own.

www.volunteercenter.net

THE SALVATION ARMY


A tried-and-true supporter of the holiday spirit, the Salvation Army has lifted hearts in the Bay Area for more than 120 years. Help one of the country’s most established and effective charity organizations by collecting donations as an iconic bell ringer, becoming a personal shopper for a low-income parent, or preparing and delivering holiday meals to the needy. Or play Santa at Toy ‘n’ Joy, an event that turns a warehouse into a wonderland where needy parents choose from unwrapped toys to give to their families. You can also ship toys to Santa Clara for the Caltrain Holiday Train Toy Collection. Contact Leya Copper at volunteer@tsagoldenstate.org for all of the info you need to help stuff stockings that would otherwise go empty.

www.salvationarmyusa.org

CITY IMPACT


You might not find Santa’s workshop in the heart of the Tenderloin, but you’ll meet plenty of his collaborators at this faith-based community center. During the holiday season, City Impact kicks into gear by enlisting hundreds of volunteers to help with its annual Christmas toy giveaway and Christmas Day Block Party, held on a closed-off street near Jones and Eddy and featuring a "message of hope," a warm meal, and grocery handouts. Check the Web site for information on how to register to help the homeless.

(415) 292-1770, www.sf911.com

SAN FRANCISCO SPCA


It may not deal in reindeer, but the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals does dip its paws into holiday cheer. The animal advocates annually decorate the windows of Macy’s Union Square store with adorable and adoptable critters. Volunteers greet the public, solicit donations, provide information about adoption, and, of course, frolic with all of the fuzzy little orphans. The event runs through Jan. 1, 2008.

(415) 554-3000, www.sfspca.org

Getting involved with any of these groups should add some good old-fashioned, what-it’s-all-really-about cheer to your holiday season. And if you really want to maximize your impact, keep these things in mind when volunteering:

(1) Always register for an event before showing up.

(2) Expect some dirty work. Volunteering isn’t all about handing out toys to kids. You may need to do a number of unglamorous duties associated with setting up big events.

(3) Consider volunteering more than two hours out of your busy year or making a contribution to an organization that speaks to your heart. How about Wavy Gravy favorite the Seva Foundation (1786 Fifth St., Berk.; 510-845-7382, www.seva.org), which gives aid to needy people internationally — from health support in Guatemala to eye care in Tanzania? Or Heifer International (www.heifer.org), through which you can send gifts of llamas, rabbits, and goats to communities that need them? And don’t forget local nonprofits, including those helping to clean up the oil spill. *

Fuck the holidays

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› culture@sfbg.com

Despite the cheery tinkling of those silver bells, Christmastime in the city isn’t always something that makes us want to meet smile after smile. Indeed, San Francisco has a reputation for being one of the loneliest cities in the world, with an average household occupancy of 1.3 people (you and the cat?) and all-too-common stories of people lying dead in their apartments until they’re discovered by the landlord two weeks after the rent’s due.

So what do you do if you’re not satisfied with Christmas on KOIT, Old Crow, and a glazed and crosshatched loaf of Spam for you and Ms. Katrina Marmalade Pussycat? Check out our ideas for making the holiday seem less bleak — or at least less boring.

CELEBRATE IT


What’s more San Francisco than spending the holiday with former mayoral hopeful (and possible candidate for supervisor) Chicken John Rinaldi? The artist and showman has been putting on a game show gift exchange (Dec. 24, 10 p.m.; 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF; 415-970-9777, www.chickenjohn.com) every Christmas Eve for two decades.

If you’re more of a traditionalist, visit Glide Memorial United Methodist Church (Dec. 24, 11 a.m.–2 p.m.; 330 Ellis, SF; 415-674-6000, www.glide.org). This beacon for the city’s disenfranchised and left behind hosts a prime rib luncheon every Christmas Eve. Sure, you can volunteer (they always need more help), but if what you need is a warm meal and some company, you can just show up and eat.

A glass of Christmas on the rocks doesn’t have to be an exercise in despair. In fact, neighborhood watering holes like the Gold Dust Lounge (247 Powell, SF; 415-397-1695), the Lexington Club (3464 19th St., SF; 415-863-2052), the Mix (4086 18th St., SF; 415-431-8616), and Sam Jordan’s (4004 Third St., SF; 415-824-0155) will not only be open Christmas Eve and Christmas Day but also feature drink specials.

IGNORE IT


For some people, it’s personal contact, not religious expression, that’s really being sought at the holidays. Why not go straight to the source? Whether you like the Power Exchange (74 Otis, SF; 415-487-9944, www.powerexchange.com), Eros (2051 Market, SF; 415-864-3767, www.erossf.com) or Steamworks (2107 Fourth St., Berk.; 510-845-8992, www.steamworksonline.com), a visit to one of these clubs pretty much guarantees a satisfying alternative to mistletoe modesty.

If you want to try a new spin on the classic Chosen People’s Chinese food–and–movie routine, visit the Jewish Museum’s Free Family Day (Dec. 25, 11 a.m.–3 p.m., free; RayKo Photo Center, 428 Third St., SF; www.jmsf.org) for music, stories, interactive exhibits, and tours, then Lisa Gedulig’s 15th annual evening of Kung Pao Kosher Comedy (Dec. 22 and 24, 6 and 9:30 p.m.; Dec. 23 and 25, 5 and 8:30 p.m., $40–$60; New Asia Restaurant, 772 Pacific, SF; 415-522-3737, www.koshercomedy.com/kungpao) for Jewish-themed stand-up.

For something a bit more pagan, head across the bridge to the Berkeley Partners for Parks’ Winter Solstice Celebration (Dec. 22, 5 p.m.; Cesar Chavez Memorial Solar Calendar, Cesar Chavez Park, 11 Spinnaker Way, Berk.).

FUCK IT


Think Clara’s an obnoxious Goody Two-shoes? See the rats’ side of the story at the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band’s Dance-Along Nutcracker: Ratified! (opening gala Dec. 8, 7 p.m., $50; Dec. 8 and 11, 2:30 p.m.; Dec. 9, 11 and 3 p.m.; $16–$24; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; 415-978-2797, www.sflgfb.org/dancealong.html).

Another option is the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco’s Christmas Crap-Array, (Dec. 20–22, 8 p.m., $10–$20; Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; 1-800-838-3006, lgcsf.org), a collection of songs and skits that’s the hilarious answer to Christmas clichés.

But best of all is Santacon (Dec. 15, 11 a.m.; location TBA; santarchy.com). Don a cheap Santa suit and join hundreds of other disgruntled St. Nicks for everyone’s favorite culture jam. Expect street theater, pranksterism, public drunkenness, and choruses of "Frosty the Cokehead" and "Deck My Balls."

And to hit the final nail in the coffin of Christmas 2007, visit Danger Ranger’s Post-Yule Pyre (visit www.laughingsquid.com for details) to watch the incineration of Monterey pines, spruces, and Douglas and noble firs. As the fog is cast in hues of orange, breathe deep the evergreen aroma and whisper, "Finally, this fucking holiday is over." *

Gluhwein by any other name

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› molly@sfbg.com

It all started with my mother. Every year we’d throw a Christmas party for friends and relatives, and every year she’d put out three Crock-Pots: one for hearty stew, one for hot apple cider, and one for mulled wine. Add the puffy-painted sweatshirts Grandma made for us and a house full of people (some reluctantly) singing carols, and it was inevitable I’d forever associate these three items with the holidays. Fast-forward to my college years, when I waitressed at a German fine dining restaurant and the highlight of the cold, rainy Portland, Ore., winter was glühwein (the name of this German mulled wine means "glow wine"), and you’ve got the early seeds of what is now my full-blown fetish.

So what, exactly, is mulled wine? Depends on where you’re drinking it, but the general idea is heated red wine with sugar, spices like cinnamon and nutmeg, and often some kind of citrus fruit all cooked together. It can be sweet or spicy, incredibly strong or boiled to a near nonalcoholic state, and any shade of gorgeous crimson. And although the original version was probably invented to mask cheap or bad wine, most modern recipes use quality wines that could stand on their own.

Point being? Yum, yum, yum. Whether you call it glühwein or Swedish glogg, French vin chaud or Chilean navegado, here are some places to look for that special warm-drink alternative when you’re sick of pumpkin lattes and you just can’t handle one more hot buttered rum.

LEHR’S GERMAN SPECIALTIES


You can’t get glühwein here, but you can buy the spice mix so you can make it yourself — plus all of the traditional Christmas (or, as they say in Germany, Weihnachten) chocolates and candies you never knew you needed.

1581 Church, SF. (415) 282-6803

GOURMET HAUS STAUDT GIFTS AND CAFE


From schnitzels to spaetzle, this is the place for all of your German favorites — including glühwein. Buy a bottle or two year-round, or visit during the holidays for a warm glass with your lunch.

2615 Broadway, Redwood City. (650) 364-9232, www.gourmethausstaudt.com

SCHROEDER’S


Go for the glühwein, stay for the polka. But get there this month — like most places in the home country, San Francisco’s oldest German restaurant only serves this specialty during the holidays.

240 Front, SF. (415) 421-4778, www.schroederssf.com

KAN ZAMAN CAFÉ


It’s as un-German as you can get, but this charming Middle Eastern restaurant has all the comfort and warmth you’d expect to find in a schnitzel house — even if it comes from low lighting and cushions, not wood paneling and leather lederhosen. Plus, Kan Zaman serves carafes of warm mulled wine all year long.

1793 Haight, SF. (415) 751-9656

BISTRO 9


Kan Zaman’s cousin in the Sunset also features a heated version of vino, along with a more distinctly Mediterranean menu. But the snuggleworthy interior is just as inviting.

1224 Ninth Ave., SF. (415) 753-3919, www.bistro9sf.com

CAFÉ FLORE


We all know it’s perfect for an outdoor brunch, but Café Flore also has mulled wine to warm our bellies when the weather outside is frightful.

2298 Market, SF. (415) 621-8579, cafeflore.com

Is this a comprehensive list? Oh, no. We haven’t even mentioned all of the city’s German and German-leaning restaurants, many of which are sure to serve the good, sweet, warm, red stuff this winter. Nor the myriad wine bars that may pour Polish grzane wino as a novelty item or the specialty grocery stores that stock their shelves with Hungarian forralt bor. But this list should get you started on a fetish of your own. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you. *

I’m dreaming of a green Christmas

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› culture@sfbg.com
In the words of Rev. Billy, mock evangelist and star of the newly released documentary What Would Jesus Buy?, the dreaded “shopocalypse” is upon us. If he and his Choir of Stop Shopping had their way, we would all be blissfully exchanging simple gestures of peace and love for the holidays rather than heaps of overly packaged plastic stuff.
But if you already know deep in your gut that peace and love just aren’t going to cut it for your demanding sweetheart, whining child, or needy pet, procuring green gifts from local Bay Area shops is the next best thing. Consult this well-edited list to help you navigate the buying frenzy, thrill your giftees, and sidestep some of the residual guilt. For extra points, pass on the parking pandemonium and try riding your bike or taking public transit to your shopping destinations.
ADULTS

  • Treat your pals or paramour to a rejuvenating treatment at Evo Spa (216 Strawberry Village, Mill Valley; 415-383-3223, www.evo-spa.com), a green, holistic beauty and wellness haven in Mill Valley. Evo also carries paraben-free and organic skin care products.
  • Keep everyone on your list well hydrated with SIGG nontoxic, ecofriendly water bottles (Lombardi Sports, 1600 Jackson, SF; 415-771-0600, www.lombardisports.com). They’re crack-resistant, reusable, and recyclable, and their lining is 100 percent leach free, ensuring all your giftee will taste is their favorite libation.
  • Help those busy parents in your life clean up their act with a visit from Greenway Maid (415-674-3266, www.greewaymaid.com), a local, worker-owned green cleaning service that uses only ecofriendly cleaning products.
  • Get your honeybunch a Gremlin clutch (Eco Citizen, 1488 Vallejo, SF; 415-614-0100, www.ecocitizenonline.com) to help her tackle those San Francisco hills in style. Made from recycled car upholstery fabric from 1975 AMC Gremlins, this hot-rod handbag will sizzle on your lady’s arm.
  • Invite your family and friends to hop on the localvore bandwagon with a subscription to Farm Fresh to You (1-800-796-6009, www.farmfreshtoyou.com). Each box contains seasonal organic produce — grown at small, local, sustainable farms and delivered right to your door.
  • Wrap your darling in a Flow Scarf (Branch Home, 245 S. Van Ness, SF; 415-341-1824, www.branchhome.com) by Hiroko Kurihara, handcrafted in the East Bay from European Union–ecologically certified virgin wool. For each scarf sold, one is donated to help those who are homeless or in transition.

KIDS

  • The Recycled Plastic Radio Flyer Earth Wagon (Green Home, 850 24th Ave., SF; 877-282-6400, www.greenhome.com) is the ultimate gift for that budding environmentalist in your life. The body of the wagon is made from 100 percent recycled postconsumer high-density polyethylene. More than 230 plastic milk jugs were diverted from landfills to make each Earth Wagon.
  • Bundle your baby in Kate Quinn 100 percent certified organic cotton clothing or entertain your favorite tots with Plan Toys (Lavish, 540 Hayes, SF; 415-565-0540, www.shoplavish.com), made from preservative-free rubber woods and decorated with nontoxic paints.
  • Warm the tootsies of your loved ones with Eco-terric 100 percent organic felt wool slippers from Kyrgyzstan (Green Home Center, 1812 Polk, SF; 415-567-3700, www.thegreenhomecenter.net).

PETS

  • Reduce, reuse, and rewoof with Planet Dog’s RecyleBone and RecycleBall (Bow Wow Meow, 2150 Polk, SF; 415-440-2845, www.bowwowmeow.net) chew toys, made from 100 percent recycled materials.
  • Thrill your kitty with a cat tree by Everyday Studio (Branch Home, 245 S. Van Ness, SF; 415-341-1824, www.branchhome.com). Made right here in San Francisco, these modern scratching posts offer good-looking design and a nontoxic paint finish.
  • Help a friend take care of their dog’s dirty business with Business Bags by Spike (Osso & Co., 501 Broderick, SF; 415-447-8543, www.eurocanine.com). These biodegradable poo bags are fully compostable and biodegrade.

STOCKING STUFFERS

  • Reduce your friends’ junk mail by up to 90 percent and have 10 trees planted on their behalf! Sign them up at Green Dimes (www.greendimes.com).
  • Wow them with one-of-a-kind wood rings by Natalie Trujillo (Paxton Gate, 824 Valencia, SF; 415-824-1872, www.paxtongate.com), handcrafted from found wood pieces and garden clippings.
  • Give the gift that keeps giving. Jimi Wallets (Branch Home, 245 S. Van Ness, SF; 415-341-1824, www.branchhome.com) are made from 100 percent recycled plastic, come in a variety of colors, and are priced so you won’t burn a hole in yours.
  • Send ecofriendly Night Owl Paper Goods holiday cards (Lavish, 540 Hayes, SF; 415-565-0540, www.shoplavish.com), made from sustainably harvested wood.
  • Surprise someone special with a super Kobo soy candle (Spring, 2162 Polk, SF; 415-673-2065, www.astorecalledspring.com). Each has a burn time of 70 hours and is healthier for indoor air quality than petroleum-based candles.
  • For the person who has everything, there’s Plant-Me Pets (Branch Home, 245 S. Van Ness, SF; 415-341-1824, www.branchhome.com). These squeaky toys have seeds for eyes and are made from compostable natural latex rubber. Should they ever outstay their welcome in the home, their owners can simply plant them in soil and watch ’em sprout.

Buy by hand

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› molly@sfbg.com

What do you do when you want something personalized, handmade, and one of a kind but don’t have a creative bone in your body (or the time to find one)? If the closest to DIY you can get is its lesser-known sister, SFIY (Shop for It Yourself), check out the following ideas for gifts that are made by loving hands — just not yours.

DIY help

Sometimes you know what you want but don’t know how to make it — or there’s simply no reason to start from scratch. That’s where businesses that help you do some of it yourself come in.

MY TRICK PONY


One of our favorite examples of this concept is Castro–Duboce Triangle screen-printing favorite My Trick Pony, where you can print your own graphics onto a T-shirt — and even get help designing one.

742 14th St., SF. (415) 861-0595, www.mytrickpony.com

BANG-ON SAN FRANCISCO


This Haight Street staple is the perfect place for a quick, down and dirty, trendy yet unique gift. Choose a plain T-shirt, messenger back, or pair of undies, then get it printed — within 15 minutes or so — with one of the dozens of images Bang-On has for you to choose from.

1603 Haight, SF. (415) 255-8446, www.bang-on.ca

To get in touch with crafty types who might not have retail spaces, check out the communities at San Francisco Craft Mafia (www.myspace.com/sfcraftmafia) and Craftster (www.craftster.org).

Retail shops

Good places to look for handcrafted items are retail stores and shops that cater to them. These are the museums, boutiques, and galleries that carry the kinds of items you’d make for your friends and families if, you know, you’d gotten an art degree instead of wasting all of that time in medical school.

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF CRAFT AND DESIGN’S MUSEUM STORE


This institution dedicated to the art of making stuff has finally opened a store that sells that stuff. Stop by for gifts like stoneware vessels and candleholders by Lynn Wood, square marbles by glassblower Nicholas Kekic, and mottled glass "bubble wrap" vessels by California artist Bill Sistek.

550 Sutter, SF. (415) 773-0303, www.sfmcd.org

ELECTRIC WORKS STORE


The retail arm of this art gallery specializes in items like naturally pigmented beeswax crayons, leather steampunk watches, Czech stationery, toys, books, and all things arcane.

130 Eighth St., SF. www.sfelectricworks.com

ETSY


Everyone’s favorite online mecca for homemade crafts has an office in San Francisco and a ton of designers who live here. Check out Quenna Lee (blissful.etsy.com) for gorgeous handmade bags and wallets, Joom Klangsin (joom.etsy.com) for whimsical pillow designs, and Hsing Ju Wang (silverminejwelry.etsy.com) for creative jewelry. Or simply use the site’s search function to find other Bay Area artisans.

www.etsy.com

PANDORA’S TRUNK


Don’t believe clothes this stylie and accessories this striking can really be handmade? Then watch the artists create these one-of-a-kind goodies in the on-site studios. (Also, stop by Dec. 8 for the store’s opening celebration.)

544 Haight, SF. www.pandorastrunk.com

Events

Sure, shopping events can be overwhelming. But the plus side? Someone’s taken the time to assemble in one place all the cool shit from a bunch of different vendors. That means you only use one day and one parking spot (or Muni ride).

APPEL AND FRANK’S STOCKINGS AND STILETTOS


Cult favorites Appel and Frank bring their hip holiday shopping event back to the city with goodies from emerging designers at below-retail prices. Plus, a portion of the proceeds benefits Friends of the Urban Forest (www.fuf.net).

Thurs/6, 5–9 p.m., two people for $15. Regency Center, 1270 Sutter, SF. www.appelandfrank.com

CREATIVITY EXPLORED’S HOLIDAY ART SALE


San Francisco’s premier gallery for the developmentally disabled presents work in various media by more than 100 artists, with half of the proceeds going directly to them.

Fri/7, 6–9 p.m.; Sat/8–Sun/9, 1–6 p.m.; during gallery hours through Dec. 29. Creativity Explored, 3245 16th St., SF. (415) 863-2108, www.creativityexplored.org

HAYES VALLEY HOLIDAY BLOCK PARTY


This fest features fun, games, and fabulous shopping in the neighborhood known for showcasing the Bay Area’s best and brightest up-and-coming artists and businesses. Donations benefit Camp Sunburst and Sunburst Projects, which provides support services to families living with HIV/AIDS.

Fri/7, 6–9 p.m. Hayes Valley, SF

BAZAAR BIZARRE


This craftacular shopping bonanza is brought to you by the same people whose book taught us how to turn cross-stitching and knitting into acts of punk rock. This is the event not to miss.

Dec. 15, 11 a.m.–6 p.m. San Francisco County Fair Bldg., Golden Gate Park, SF. www.bazaarbizarre.org/sanfrancisco.html

HOLI-DAZE


Those wacky burners have officially moved on from making boot covers for themselves to creating whole product lines for all kinds of people — playa loving and otherwise. This event features unusual gift items (fun-fur jackets or blinky toys, anyone?), live and electronic music, drink specials from the bar, and a silent auction benefiting the arts.

Dec. 16, 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Café Cocomo, 650 Indiana, SF. www.preparefortheplaya.com

She’s crafty

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› molly@sfbg.com

My favorite thing about a good gift is that it means something: it’s an expression of how I feel about you (or vice versa), what I appreciate about you, and the fact that I not only know you well enough to know what you like but also love you enough to want you to be happy.

A store-bought gift is capable of achieving all of these lofty goals, of course. For example, my sister recently gave me a copy of Beatallica (Oglio, 2007) she found while on tour with her band. And though seemingly small, this simple choice communicated these things: (1) My sis was thinking of me while in Denver. (2) She knows me well enough to remember I love (and I mean love) novelty rock. And (3) she cares about me enough to want me to feel joy.

But just like your mom told you when you were a kid (though she might’ve been lying about the ceramic ashtray), some of the best gifts are homemade. And they’re also the kind that are as much fun to make as they are to give. Case in point? The family-centric version of People magazine (complete with crossword, horoscope, and They’re Just Like Us! sections) my sis and I made for our pop culture junkie mom a few years ago. Not only did it mean more to Mom than yet another funky wineglass, but Sis and I also had a blast putting it together.

Problem is, how do you come up with a project that’s personal, doable, and original? (After all, how many decorated bowls from Terra Mia can you give someone?) Sure, you could invent something brand-new that’ll take you months to perfect and even longer to complete (hello, custom book I decided to make as a gift one Christmas and didn’t finish until the following Christmas). Or you can take the advice of crafty vixen (and personal chef) Larisa Chapman, who’s already figured out how to make this foolproof, flawless gift:

Miniature Altar

WHAT YOU’LL NEED


Altoid (or other) tins or boxes (smaller boxes are easier to work with)

Modge Podge (which now comes in sparkly and iridescent versions) or any polymer glue

Images from magazines, postcards, graphic novels, books, etc.

Good scissors

Small paint brush (for glue)

Jewels, beads, trinkets, ribbons, shells, other small decorative items

Small birthday candles

Blow-dryer (optional)

HOW TO PROCEED


Step One: Planning

The idea is simple: a small, cheap, fun, completely customizable art piece that can be either displayed open or kept as a small treasure trove — that’s up to you and the altar’s recipient. Most important, though, it’s something made specifically for someone. So your first step is to decide whom you’re making your altar for and what you want to communicate to them. This can be as simple as a rock ‘n’ roll theme for your musician sister (ahem) or as complex as references to the symbolism of the phoenix for a friend who’s trying to rise above a challenge. Chapman likes allegories, stories, and contradictory images — think Tarot card collages or an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe with a halo of porn — but you should figure out what appeals to you and the person who’ll receive the gift.

Step Two: Assemblage

What happens next is mostly up to you. Paste images to the top, bottom, and inside of the box (Modge Podge is fantastic as both an adhesive and a sealant, so don’t be afraid to use it for everything). Add fabric lining, beaded details, glitter, 3-D objects … whatever suits your fancy. And don’t be afraid of overadornment — think Mexican saint altars.

Step Three: Drying

More complicated altars may require several layers of assemblage, and therefore might need drying time between layers. Set the box in a well-ventilated area until the glue is dry to the touch. Or, to speed up the process, take a blow-dryer to the glue. When it turns clear, it’s done.

Step Four: Meaning

The last step is adding a candle. The easiest way to do this is to choose a bead or other object that can comfortably fit a birthday candle inside. Attach the bead to the box and the candle to the bead. Now you have an object that looks as sacred as it actually is. (Don’t forget to remind your giftee not to light the candle, as that will make your whole altar will go up in flames. Unless, of course, they’re into that.)

See? Simple. Cool. Fast. Now rinse and repeat. The more you do it, the easier it’ll get — and the more elaborate. Experiment with bigger boxes or containers of different shapes. Get creative with puffy paint or stencils. Use fun fur or punk rock patches to turn your friend’s whole automobile into an altar. (OK, maybe you should ask before you do that one.) No matter what you come up with, it’ll sure beat a gift certificate for Best Buy.

Nog on the noggin

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>culture@sfbg.com

For a drink that holds as much tradition as it does taste, one might think an integral part of the eggnog experience would be gathering around a pot and stirring up this year’s batch. For most, though, the experience comes from throwing a carton in your shopping cart and popping it open later that night. This year I figured, if I’m not making it myself, I should at least find out who was – and who was doing it best.

Straus Family Creamery Organic Eggnog www.strausfamilycreamery.com

If you woke up one morning and McDonald’s food was healthy and local, made only by well-paid workers, outside on warm days, would it still have that lingering gross taste? Or is that just a function of knowing about its production line? This is what I began to wonder when I learned about the Marin County creamery’s eggnog, which tastes like a rich, decadent McDonald’s treat but is also made with only four ingredients, all organic. (Unfortunately, the over-crisp nutmeg and yolk flavors also make it hard to drink more than a glass or two.)

The handsome, if not too wholesome, president of the company, Albert Straus, said coming up with his special recipe was simply a matter of trial and error. He tried a few variations of the basic ingredients – sugar, egg, milk, and nutmeg – in the company’s test kitchen. Once he found the right combination, he asked California Custom Fruit in Irwindale to make a concentrate, which Straus Family Creamery then adds to their milk.

Clover-Stornetta Organic Eggnog www.cloverstornetta.com

In the late seventies, says Herm Benedetti, Clover-Stornetta whipped up eggnog for friends and close customers, spiking it with bourbon. “People loved getting it”, says Benedetti, director of Product Research & Development and one of the sons of the company founder. But liability issues forced the Petaluma-based company to stop serving the alcoholic concoction.

Four years ago, though, Clover-Stornetta was finally able to source the ingredients to make an organic eggnog. The first test batch was too sweet and the second too flavorful, said Benedetti. But like the Goldilocks story, the third was just right. “We felt we had a winner,” he said. “So we stuck with it.”
Eggnogs are required by law to have six percent milkfat, and Benedetti’s version lets you taste it. The yolk and nutmeg are soft complements to a drink that makes you think you’re sucking down the middle of a huge Oreo. In fact, the greatest flaw of this eggnog, my favorite in the list, might be this eminent creamy drinkability. After all, if eggnog were supposed to be so drinkable, it wouldn’t be around just two months a year.

Organic Valley Eggnog www.organicvalley.coop

Maged Latif, Director of Research and Development for Organic Valley Coop, says the Flavor Order Profile for his eggnog starts with sugar and ends with nutmeg. It took Organic Valley 12 months to get the recipe right right, including time for market feedback research.

When I sipped it, I felt the egg flavor came first, followed quickly by a cream-brigade that put out the sweetened yolk taste before it got gross. The nutmeg came somewhere in between. But both Latif and Emily Strickler, Fluid Category Associate, are proudest of the nutmeg.

“What makes ours unique is that we don’t add [fake] nutmeg flavor,” Latif said. Strickler agreed, “We pride ourselves on our nutmeg flavor profile.” Because Organic Valley is a countrywide coop of farmers, including many in the Bay Area, eggnog provided the company with a great way to use more of the farms’ resources. “[It offered us] great synergy between poultry farmers where get our eggs with our dairy farmers,” said Latif.

Ultimate Holiday Guide

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The holidays don’t only have to be about stress and shrinking wallets. How about making gifts that mean something? Donating time and money to worthy organizations? Attending events that embrace your playful (or wrathful) antagonism against this consumerist season? Check out the Guardian’s ultimate guide to these options, as well as green gifts, efficient neighborhood shopping, and more.

Happy challah-days
Take what you like, leave the rest

‘Tis the season for getting even
Create a celebration that makes your family as uncomfortable as theirs makes you

In the spirit
The Guardian’s guide to holiday giving

She’s crafty
DIY mini altars

Buy by Hand
Places to make and buy homemade gifts

Good things, small packages
Nifer Fahrion’s step-by-step guide to making your own tiny hat


Shopping for slackers
Neighborhood shortcuts for an efficient gift search

All I want for Christmas…
Locals talk about gifts that keep on giving and the ones they wish they could’ve given back

Fuck the holidays
Celebrating, ignoring, or just plain flipping the bird at Christmas

I’m dreaming of a green Christmas
A guide to ecofriendly gifts


Gluhwein by any other name
A miniguide to mulled wine

Nog on the noggin
Jon Beckhardt explores local producers of the holiday treat

Buy local

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› lit@sfbg.com

WISH LIST There are two kinds of gift books: the coffee-table book and the bathroom book. One has the cool cover and arty pics for people to gasp over at parties. The other has teeny bits of content that you zip through while transacting your effluvia. Of course, rents in San Francisco being what they are, for many the toilet now doubles as the coffee table. We don’t judge. In any case, here are five new books from Bay Area authors and publishers that will make your friends feel sophisticated and brilliant.

Thea Hillman’s supercharged For Lack of a Better Word (Suspect Thoughts Press, 192 pages, $16.95 paper) is definitely more bathroom (or purse) than coffee-table reading, with lots of short, provocative essays. But it’s also a book your friends would be proud to have on display. Partly a memoir of Hillman’s child- and adulthood with a hormonal imbalance and the painful process of coming to identify as intersex, For Lack is also about Hillman’s evolving relationships: with the queer community, her lovers, and her mom. In Hillman’s world, the surer you become about who you are, the more vulnerable you get.

Instant City 5 (102 pages, $8 paper) straddles the privy–coffee table divide pretty handily, thanks to its gorgeous cover and interior art and some razor-sharp short fiction and essays. The literary journal’s focus is San Francisco, and the latest installment takes crime as its theme. So Stephen Elliott muses (in a fetish club) on the burglars he knew as a kid, and Sona Avakian explores how a husband’s illicit cigarette can turn into an affair with a snake woman. Morbid Curiosity czar Loren Rhoads leads readers on a tour of San Francisco crime scenes, and Richard J. Martin teaches the Fisherman’s Wharf hustle.

Another brilliant hybrid is Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance (Princeton Architectural Press, 176 pages, $17.50 paper). Edited by Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes and featuring several Bay Area contributors, Things is chock-full of gorgeous color illustrations, but the text is equally illuminating. Each miniessay details the writer’s love affair (often tortured) with a particular object, and the fact that it’s frequently a piece of mass-produced crap doesn’t lessen the revelatory power of this compulsive read.

Edited by Michelle Tea, the anthology It’s So You: 35 Women Write about Personal Expression Through Fashion and Style (Seal Press, 300 pages, $15.95 paper) is in a similar vein, its contributors sharing anxieties about having the "right" clothes, being taken seriously, sending "a message." The collection would be worth picking up just for the brilliant neuroses of Beth Lisick and Jennifer Blowdryer. But you also get Samara Halperin’s tragically failed attempt to fit in by wearing an Izod shirt and Ali Liebegott’s doomed romance with a pair of slippers. Plus, there are comics and cutout dolls. And wherever your giftee puts this book, people will linger over it, laughing as they identify with the sartorial traumas detailed.

Finally, your friends will probably want to put local science fiction hero Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular (Tor Books, 320 pages, $25.95) on public display — it’ll make them look smart — but they’ll end up reading it while curled into a little ball on the bathroom floor at 3 a.m. anyway. It’s fast-paced and subversive: nanomachines dismantle all life on Earth and send everyone to a virtual world, and you’re still only on page 20. Postsingular turns the singularity, the mythical moment when we all transcend our humanity and become cyberer, into something much weirder and more ambivalent. Just as other cyberfiction is becoming more cautious in its predictions, Rucker takes wilder and wilder leaps into outer possibility.

Seeing other people

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WISH LIST When I give a book as a present, I like to have a good story to tell about where it came from — about the author’s travels or secret family life or public stunts. Many of 2007’s best bets for worthy literary gifts tell such stories on their own. Curated, compiled, and translated, they have the marks of an outside force, concerning themselves with how other people — an author’s child, a lover from another culture, eccentrics from California’s Central Valley — secretly see the world.

Sexy, contemplative, elusive, and addictive, Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear (New Directions, 400 pages, $15.95 paper), translated by Margaret Jull Costa, is the first installment in Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow detective trilogy. Marías maps the sharpness and strange beauty of interpersonal relationships onto a larger relationship between Spain and England. The narrator’s intense observations of people expose the spooky ways in which we read our lives: "those who catch or capture or, rather, absorb the image before them gain a great deal, especially as regards knowledge and the things that knowledge permits."

Orhan Pamuk’s Other Colors (Knopf, 448 pages, $27.95), a collection of essays and one story, translated by Maureen Freely, is similarly a book that anyone interested in literature or love or cities or sounds or writers’ families will return to. "When Rüya Is Sad," one of several snippets about Pamuk’s daughter, ends so touchingly that the richly detailed worlds evoked in the Nobel Prize–winning Turkish author’s novels become more intimate, less imagined: "The two of us gazed out the window without speaking for the longest time, I in my chair and Rüya on the divan, and we both — Rüya sadly and I with joy — thought about how beautiful it was."

When Pamuk spoke in Berkeley in October, he noted that it can take him a long time to warm up to even the best translations of his work. New World/New Words: Recent Writing from the Americas (Center for the Art of Translation, 266 pages, $18.95), edited by Thomas Christensen, is a continuously exciting Spanish-English exploration of the passion of translation. "O body, love and Lord, / Show me a tree made in your image," poet Pura López-Colomé writes in "Prisma/Prism," translated by Forrest Gander.

The characters in the new edition of Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California’s Great Central Valley (Heyday/Great Valley Books, 592 pages, $18.95 paper) also ask the land to reveal divinity. Editors Stan Yogi, Gayle Mak, and Patricia Wakida present a fantastic stable of story makers, from Yokuts California Indians to Joan Didion. The resulting read is hot, dry, wet, and, ultimately, mythic — something hard to achieve on a road trip through Fresno. In "The Underground Gardens," Robert Mezey writes hauntingly of Sicilian immigrant Baldassare Forestiere’s underground gardens in Fresno (still maintained), remembering that Forestiere "clawed at the earth forty years / But it answered nothing." In the poem, the gardener becomes both Christ and seeker.

I wish that cultural critic Antonio Monda had trod similar earth-meets-human ground in Do You Believe? Conversations on God and Religion (Vintage, 192 pages, $12.95 paper), or at least asked his famous interviewees (Spike Lee, Grace Paley, David Lynch, and 15 others) to do what they do best: create something that more fully tells the story of their views of the divine. Either the editors cut out a lot to fit in so many interviews, or Monda was often in a rush; it’s hard to imagine the subjects really responded with one or two brief sentences to provocative questions and statements such as "What does death mean to you?" and "Religion teaches us to defend life to the last breath." Nonetheless, there are moments of clarity here. The book’s symphony of voices reaches a climax when Toni Morrison, pressed about her belief in an "intelligent entity," replies that when she thinks "of the infiniteness of time, I get lost in a mixture of dismay and excitement. I sense the order and harmony that suggest an intelligence, and I discover, with a slight shiver, that my own language becomes evangelical."

Of course, there are ways to be excited without being evangelical. Harold Bloom’s close reading of the gospels in Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (Riverhead, 256 pages, $15 paper) renews our faith in the value and spirit of the critic. A trio of photography books also transcend theological back-and-forth: The Black Hole, by Anouk Kruithof and Jaap Scheeren (Episode, 102 pages, $32 paper), is a delightful response to a series of newspaper articles of the same name about the future of art school graduates. Reading Jeff Wall, a collaboration between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art (168 pages, $50), is like strolling down the block with an old friend who happens to have curated the wide-eyed Canadian artist’s current retrospective at SFMOMA (through Jan. 27, 2008). Ghosts Caught on Film, by Melvyn Willin (David and Charles Publishers, 160 pages, $16.99), is a foray into the world of double-exposed — I mean paranormal — photography, more fun than a game of Balderdash in which you’ve already looked up all the words beforehand. And one last idea: Give everyone on your list the same book and you’ll feel like a City Arts and Lectures moderator, or maybe even the contented curator at an invite-only museum of life.

Shelf help

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WISH LIST My family of origin is so nuclear that on smoggy days a mushroom cloud can be seen above the suburb where my parents still reside. During the holidays we gather there to rehearse and stage the roles we will alternately perform and resist in the ensuing year. While Dad tracks holiday cards sent and received on an Excel spreadsheet, Mom dons a pair of felt antlers and holes up in the kitchen. As for me, I revert to fatigued, endless reading, as if by some cruel law of repetition I have returned to that sullen moment in junior high when my only friend suddenly became popular, leaving me with nobody but books as my companions. Without intervention, I might remain in this half-hypnotized state, rereading Flowers for Algernon until the world outside grows dim, like a dream I can barely remember. This year, however, I’m readying myself with an eclectic batch of new books, books that make me want to participate instead of turning into a listless blotch of angst. These titles provide critical frameworks for dissent, suggest avenues for engagement, and probe cultural blind spots — generating new aesthetic possibilities along the way.

I, for one, like to kick off the holiday season with a powerful dose of well-researched feminist analysis, supplied this year by Susan Faludi in The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Metropolitan Books, 368 pages, $26). It’s akin to taking vitamins to ward off the winter cold that’s going around the office. I read some Faludi, I ask my brother to help out in the kitchen. Faludi argues that a highly gendered mythology reasserted its virulent hold over the national psyche (as writ large by the national media) in the wake of Sept. 11. Drawing from an abundance of sources, she parses out the myth: strong male heroes rescue helpless girls, feminism is dismissed as a frivolous and dangerous mistake, and cowboys and manly men rise again to keep the home soil safe. In debunking this overblown narrative, Faludi demonstrates that it doesn’t actually help those it valorizes, nor does its rehearsal expedite an increase in national security or political accountability.

Investigating the symbolic construction of identity and myth from the angle of art, Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence (Leon Works Press, 167 pages, $15.95 paper) takes up "black presences in European literature, visual art, and film." Fusing criticism, film theory, and fiction with a keenly poetic ear, Bryant reenters cultural artifacts to open up these symbolically loaded but structurally silenced or backgrounded characters and motifs. Her stories trace the ways in which black subjectivity is distributed or denied within pictures and plots, between viewers and artworks and artists, and in acts of conversation and debate, of queer identification or refusal to see. What is most remarkable is how Bryant transforms these elisions into acts of imagination, restoring or reconfiguring partially glimpsed subjects via fleet and surprising sentences that traverse the distance between representation and meaning.

Renovating symbolic systems can be hard work, and nothing restores a fatigued body and mind like making changes to the physical infrastructure — such as sawing through your drainpipes to divert "barely used" household water from sewers to gray-water systems for gardening and washing clothes. Sexily linking the macro to the micro, the locally grown junta known as the Greywater Guerrillas has expanded its how-to know-how into Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground (Soft Skull Press, 416 pages, $19.95 paper), a collection of essays that examine the global plight of water misuse and attendant broad-scale ecological impacts. I don’t think it undermines the gravitas of the issue to mention that portions of the book are a sheer pleasure to read, especially when editors Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, July Oskar Cole, and Laura Allen (illustrations were supplied by Annie Danger) detail their efforts to "disengage from the water grid" by taking plumbing into their own hands.

What James Kochalka takes into his hands in American Elf Book Two: The Collected Sketch Book Diaries of James Kochalka (Top Shelf Comics, 192 pages, $19.95) is his life, tidbits of which he transforms into daily diary comics. Visually and verbally, Kochalka risks a silly, reckless sweetness — a sampling of titles includes "Romance of Life" and "Everything was fine until the old wakey wake." The strips are also a little bit perverted and weirdly honest, as Kochalka’s elf-eared stand-in catalogs a receding hairline, farty dairy hangovers, and arguments with his beloved and salty-mouthed wife. As the pages and days pile up, the effect is infectious, such that, while under the diaries’ spell, I began to sense secret fissures of creative potential and magic in the mundane flow of everyday life.

Isa Chandra Moskowitz, Terry Hope Romero, and the army of flavor lovers they run with have changed the landscape of vegan cooking. In Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook (Marlowe and Co., 336 pages, $27.50), Moskowitz and Romero draw inspiration from a variety of international cuisines, without making any claims to authenticity. The resulting recipes (mole, saag, and lasagna, to name a few) are adventures in surprising flavor combinations. A helpful foreword details how to stock a vegan pantry, and tips offered alongside the easy-to-follow recipes instruct on where to find specialty items or how to organize your cooking tasks — advice that, as an unskilled, distractible cook, I found particularly useful. An appendix of menus ranges from rich party foods to low-fat and easy-to-prepare options.

Printed in large type, so it’s easy to read when splayed open next to a bicycle, the repair-manual portion of the illustrated Chainbreaker Bike Book: A Rough Guide to Bicycle Maintenance, by Shelley Lynn Jackson and Ethan Clark (Microcosm Publishing, 256 pages, $12), builds from the ground up. Starting with the ethics and rewards of skill sharing, it moves on to detail parts, tools, and instructions for system-by-system checkups and repairs. The book’s second half comprises reprinted issues of the Chainbreaker zine, originals of which were lost when zinester Jackson’s New Orleans home flooded after Katrina. The zines complement the how-to portions with a wider view of the bicycle’s cultural impact — e.g., the role of bikes in the women’s clothing revolution, the democratizing potential of this low-cost form of transportation. Note: the book hits shelves in February, but aspiring bike enthusiasts can order it now at www.microcosmpublishing.com.

And to come full circle … Sherman Alexie’s first young adult (and graphic) novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown Young Readers, 240 pages, $16.99), reminds me that a return to YA reading can be the opposite of mind-numbing — when undertaken with a book that’s emotionally spring-loaded, linguistically gymnastic, and devastatingly funny in turns. Drawing from his experiences growing up, Alexie tells the story of Junior (a.k.a. Arnold True-Spirit Jr.), a comic-drawing Indian kid who leaves his reservation to attend an all-white high school. Between racism at school and conflict with friends on the reservation, Alexie nails the ups and downs of a young artist learning to navigate by his own radar, amid competing claims from family and a sometimes encouraging but often deviously indifferent world. Ellen Forney’s inspired illustrations channel Junior’s manic, tell-it-like-it-is sensibility and provide a visual anchor for Alexie’s loquacious narrator.

Lust and loss

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Many dedicated faggots have made the comparison between cocksucking and prayer, especially when knees are planted in the ground, eyes closed because of something too powerful to look at. But Christopher Russell’s Landscape, a book of black-and-white photos of men cruising San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, at first appears to take this assertion one step further — with the trees towering above and light cascading onto shirts, hands, exposed asses, it’s almost as if these men have stumbled into heaven. If so, they appear unaware — in one early photo, someone crouches forlorn in the shadows between trees; above him beckon three perfectly crafted beams of light. There’s an eeriness to many of these photos, as the sumptuousness of the foliage and the brashness of the sunlight render the sex acts comparably mundane: white T-shirts pulled up and white briefs pulled down like on a porn set; the spooky silhouette of a face pressed against a waiting crotch; baseball caps and dark sunglasses holding distance.

It’s when the images become fractured that they reveal depth of feeling — faces merging with leaves and light, heads blending into trees awaiting sky, the motion of hands and arms and legs conjuring a certain type of flight. When the camera pulls back, it’s the sky that’s shimmering, a brightness between branches and leaves with just a tiny figure below. We see a face turned, or the back of a head — yet the action is not where the figure is gazing but above and around, leaves swaying in the breeze and branches shaking underneath the glow of the setting sun. It’s here that we can truly appreciate the complex landscape of lust and loss, adventure and longing.

In one photo, the silhouette of someone’s coat blends so neatly with that of a tree that it resembles a sagging branch, and it brings to mind an image reproduced in the French writer Tony Duvert’s Good Sex Illustrated, a scathing 1974 critique of a five-volume "liberal" sex manual published the previous year in France. The photo, taken from the handbook in question, shows a park somewhat more groomed and far less picturesque than Buena Vista, but we see light reflecting off trees and a man in an overcoat standing to the side of a path, his back to us. Unlike in Russell’s photos, however, it’s the man who seems monumental and the trees a backdrop as a child gazes up from several feet away, apparently immobilized by what he sees. The image, from the volume aimed at 10- to 13-year-olds, is meant to illustrate the dangers of pedophiles who apparently lurk in parks. But Duvert indicts the motives of parents who warn their children about such violence, declaring, "What they are really trying to do isn’t to protect the child but their own exclusive right to do whatever they want with him."

In Good Sex Illustrated, published in English for the first time this month, by Semiotext(e), Duvert skewers the emerging field of sex education as nothing but "science taking charge of the old moral order." With a savage glee, he dissects the volumes of the manual allegedly geared toward helping young adults discover their sexual selves but instead intent on "libidinal dismembering" and centered on a "pro-birth obsession." Duvert is most hilarious when he compares what the handbook calls a "feeling of total fulfillment" from pregnancy to that of a teenager getting fucked in the ass: "Jean scrubbed his ass pensively: is this what they call a feeling of total fulfillment?" In a related footnote he brilliantly comments, "It goes without saying that as soon as the pleasure of having a cock inside your body stops being depreciated, the honor of having a fetus there won’t be over-emphasized." But if this is one of Duvert’s most skillful reversals, it also illuminates a gap in his analysis. After all, he’s comparing a woman’s alleged feelings during pregnancy to a man’s response to getting fucked (we hear nothing about a woman’s sexual pleasure). While Duvert incorporates a nuanced gender critique into many of his readings, he prioritizes male sexuality throughout the book, which ends up thwarting him in his overall mission of subverting the social order by encouraging the sexual freedom of all children.

David Halperin’s What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity has a similar aim of moving conversations about sexuality (and sexual safety) away from standards of "healthy functioning" and "rational" or "irrational" behavior. Halperin seeks to champion queer cultural traditions over the judgments of psychology and the false dichotomy between risk and safety. (In a homophobic culture, what gay sexual behavior, after all, isn’t risky?) In searching for a more comprehensive approach to gay male sexual splendor, Halperin revisits a vulnerable and challenging 1995 essay by Michael Warner in the Village Voice, "Unsafe: Why Gay Men Are Having Risky Sex," in which Warner at one point states that "abjection continues to be our dirty secret." If Warner talks about abjection as a sense of "dirtiness" due to societal condemnation, Halperin describes it as "an experiment with the limits of both destruction and survival, social isolation and social solidarity, domination and transcendence." In other words, "the more people despise you, the less you owe them, and the freer and more powerful you are." Halperin proposes, "Instead of worrying about the appeal of abjection to gay men, … what we really should be doing is trying to think concretely about … how to make it work for us."

It’s a provocative idea, but unfortunately Halperin here departs from his methodical (and meticulously footnoted) analysis of safer sex strategies to endlessly circle around Warner’s essay and certain passages from the writing of Jean Genet, resulting in a repetitive rhetorical jumble. To be sure, Halperin provides a few illuminating examples (including the writing of porn star Scott O’Hara and the brilliant and short-lived zine Diseased Pariah News), but What Do Gay Men Want? could certainly have benefited from an analysis of the wealth of queer world-making in the era of AIDS that has centered on the possibilities (and perils) of an embrace of outsider status — the work of David Wojnarowicz, Samuel Delany, Derek Jarman, Gregg Bordowitz, Justin Chin, or Essex Hemphill, to name a few among innumerable possibilities. Or, perhaps, an analysis of Christopher Russell’s photos, where the messiness of desire becomes landscape.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (www.mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is the editor, most recently, of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity.

LANDSCAPE

By Christopher Russell

Kolapsomal Press

70 pages, $49.95

GOOD SEX ILLUSTRATED

By Tony Duvert; translated by Bruce Benderson

Semiotext(e)

184 pages, $14.95 paper

WHAT DO GAY MEN WANT? AN ESSAY ON SEX, RISK, AND SUBJECTIVITY

By David M. Halperin

University of Michigan Press

176 pages, $22.95

Marginalia

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Reading a work of fiction is a little like getting into someone else’s car for a trip that someone else has planned without consulting you: it’s an act of trust. The car pulls up and you climb in. You hope that the headlights and brakes are in working order and that there is no liquor on the driver’s breath. You assume that the driver knows the route, even if you don’t; you assume the destination is a worthy one, even if you’ve never heard of it. Discreetly you fasten your seat belt. The car pulls away from the curb, perhaps smoothly, perhaps amid squeals of burning rubber.

You might soon find yourself bouncing along unpaved rural roads or roaring through hairpin curves in the mountains, wishing you’d remembered your Dramamine. Snow, rain, fog, sleet, sunshine, boring vistas of cornfields, stunning views from turnouts, all are possible — and eventually you’re there, wherever it was you were meant to be taken. You didn’t get lost, the car didn’t crash, no one was killed or maimed, the journey was memorable if not always agreeable, and this is what we call literature. If you don’t like the destination, you make a silent note to yourself and, thumb extended, wait for another car to come along.

In Philip Roth’s new novel, Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 292 pages, $26), there is a good deal of perseveration about the Library of America, our pantheon of literary immortals — of greatness, that great American obsession. Roth, notably, has already been admitted to this black-jacket collection, and his alter ego in the novel, the now-aged Nathan Zuckerman, a bundle of genitourinary woes and other peeves of the sort that afflict the solitary when they find themselves tossed into the simmering kettle of metropolitan life, is keen to see his late mentor, E.I. Lonoff, similarly enshrined. But Zuckerman isn’t the only character interested in Lonoff’s legacy; there’s also Richard Kliman, a 28-year-old literary ambitionist. Kliman wants to write Lonoff’s life and believes he’s caught an exciting whiff of incest in the dead writer’s story.

Zuckerman and Kliman, needless to say, aren’t fated to be chummy, though they do meet in an impressive shower of word sparks. Google tells us that Lonoff is probably a semiportrait of Bernard Malamud, author of The Natural and a friend of Roth’s, but the particulars of Lonoff’s fictive life — a house deep in the Berkshires, a flitting shadow of sexual transgression — struck me as a mingling of details in the lives of real-lifers J.D. Salinger and Henry Roth.

The other Roth — Philip — may or may not be a great writer, whatever that means (more anon), but he is certainly a good writer. He pulls up to the curb in an unassuming rig, and within moments we are under way, the scenery gliding by, the author in complete control, with a route and destination plainly in mind. The language is effective, not showy; its pull is strong and steady. The writer of these words has obviously thought about life as he’s lived it; the experience of growing older is rendered with vivid precision and an equally vivid lack of sentimentality. The author has nothing to prove, only something to tell, and we are only too pleased to listen, as the journey ticks by and the pages turn one after the other.

"Good writer," like "friend," is possibly too temperate an expression for our intemperate times. Gore Vidal once suggested that the good is the enemy of the great — a splendid aphorism — but he seemed to understand great as gifted, with good being highly polished, self-approving, and perhaps slightly resentful ordinariness, the glittering gemstone that turns out to be zircon. That is the truth about most glittering gemstones. Yet great, in our demotic culture, carries another meaning: it means "celebrated," and celebration is often the result of telling people, intentionally or not, what they wish to hear. Good writers can do this as well as bad writers.

Being considered a great writer in this sense is a political achievement, like winning the presidency. It’s a symbiosis that has to do with the writer’s times and the writer’s relation to those times. How does the writer see the times, and how is he or she seen by them? What if the relationship is adversarial? What happens if the writer is inclined to commit the unpardonable sin of telling the truth? Does the Library of America take these factors into account?

Long ago I noticed, and I continue to notice, that the animus at the heart of most unfavorable comment about fiction is You didn’t write the book I wanted you to! I am a disappointed consumer in a land where the customer is always right! Much favorable comment merely inverts this proposition; such noise is idiotic but at least doesn’t hurt the writer’s feelings. (Imaginative writers bruise easily, like peaches.) Lost in this welter of vainglory and petulance is the patient attempt to understand what was attempted, measure what was achieved, and describe the gap between the two. Some dare call this criticism, and while criticism might lack the autoerotic thrill of anointing the great or carrying out drive-by shootings on literary misfits, it remains our only trustworthy method of separating the good from the rest.

Brian on the brain

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RINK MASTER Even before South Park anointed Brian Boitano the coolest ice-skater ever to strap on blades, I was a fan. As a wee junior high schooler, I cheered his triumph at the Battle of the Brians at the 1988 Winter Olympics. (In your face, Brian Orser!) Now a full-time pro, the Bay Area native and resident is gearing up for one of his most ambitious undertakings: the "Brian Boitano Skating Spectacular," the first ice show to be held at AT&T Park, with rink legends like Dorothy Hamill and Viktor Petrenko — and a live performance by Barry Manilow. Naturally, I had to get Boitano on the phone for some inside dirt.

SFBG So are you stoked for the spectacular?

BRIAN BOITANO Yeah, I think it’s gonna be exciting! The ballpark’s really excited about it, and Barry’s really excited about it.

SFBG Will there be any baseball routines on the ice?

BB Yeah, we’re gonna do a baseball number. And since it’s a ’70s number, we’re gonna do a streaking thing. We’re gonna get a Barry Manilow look-alike and have him streak through the ball field.

SFBG [Stunned pause] Seriously?

BB [Laughing] No!

SFBG Dude, that would be awesome, though.

BB We did throw it out at the production meeting, because it’s a ’70s-themed show. But I don’t know if Barry would appreciate that!

SFBG How did you pick which Manilow songs to skate to?

BB It’s actually not all his songs. It’s a show with ’70s music, but there’s a lot of different ’70s music. He’s gonna sing eight of his songs. Four of them will be classics, and four will be from his new album, The Greatest Songs of the Seventies.

SFBG How’d you hook up with him?

BB I do shows every year with musical guests. I’m doing one with Seal this year and another with Wynonna Judd. I met [Manilow] years ago — he had a theatrical show called Copacabana, and I had a friend who was the lead in that. When we were throwing out names for the show this year, I said, "I wonder if we could get Barry. I would really love to have his music to skate to."

SFBG Being from the Bay Area, how did you get into ice skating? I mean, there’s the rink at the Yerba Buena Gardens….

BB That’s where I’m just leaving from! [Growing up,] I sort of was this daredevil roller skater, and I saw the "Ice Follies" one time at Winterland. And I was, like, "Wow, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life."

SFBG Where do you keep your gold medal?

BB It’s in my parents’ safety-deposit box. The last time I saw it was about 10 years ago. I think to see it every day would take away from the special quality of it. But I don’t forget what it looks like!

SFBG There’s one question I have to ask you, which I’m sure everyone asks —

BB "What Would Brian Boitano Do?"

SFBG Of course!

BB I still don’t know how that happened. I’ve still never met the [South Park] guys! It was funny because I went to the movie theater — it was that old movie theater on Sutter and Van Ness. I was scared! I didn’t know if they were going to trash me. And it was just sort of surreal sitting there watching a cartoon character of yourself with the whole movie theater laughing. The movie’s very funny, and I’m a big fan of their comedy. They’re so timely and so politically incorrect — it’s hilarious.

SFBG Do you get sick of hearing the song?

BB I still think it’s funny. People get a kick out of it — what the heck. All I can say is, thank god they were nice to me! (Cheryl Eddy)

BRIAN BOITANO SKATING SPECTACULAR

Dec. 5, 8 p.m., $50–$150

AT&T Park

801 Third St., SF

1-800-225-2277

www.tickets.com

For "What Would Brian Boitano Do?" T-shirts — sales of which benefit Boitano’s Youth Skate Program — visit www.brianboitano.com.

In and out

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Playwright Rebecca Gilman’s work has often courted subjects with ripped-from-the-headlines appeal, such as Spinning into Butter‘s take on racism at a small New England college or Boy Gets Girl‘s stalker scenario. Her latest play, The Crowd You’re In With, is no less timely. But at first blush it seems quieter and more understated in its choice of setting and subject matter: a backyard barbeque and a clash between three couples over whether or not to have children. By the end of a taut if laugh-filled 80 minutes, however, this successful comedy, enjoying its world premiere at the Magic Theatre, has uncovered the acute social import and anxieties behind a set of everyday characters and choices.

The play opens on a contemporary American idyll: a sunny Fourth of July afternoon in Chicago, where two thirtysomething white guys, Jasper (T. Edward Webster) and Dan (Kevin Rolston), hover beside a backyard grill in the archetypal pose (and perplexity) of the modern suburban male. Such a scene, including their young wives Melinda (Makela Spielman) and Windsong (Allison Jean White) arranging a table nearby, would seem to contain no more angst than the residual variety implicit in grill time’s spur to primitive masculinity. But there’s already a subtle cornered and concentrated effect in Erik Flatmo’s naturalistic scenic design, with its tiny swath of yard bracketed by the enclosing sharp angles of a two-story duplex and an adjoining high wooden fence. Reproducing Norman Rockwell is not going to prove so easy (if it ever was) in the age of global warming and unending war.

One of the first things we learn is that couple number one — Jasper and Melinda, the renters of the apartment whose yard this is — are trying to get pregnant. Five months and counting. This has Melinda, especially, nervous. Their friends Dan and Windsong, meanwhile, are already very pregnant, as Windsong’s eight-month bulge makes clear. Dan (a happy and good-natured but also slightly abrasive and unselfconsciously vulgar rock critic) and Windsong (the chipper, emotionally fragile, and determinedly conventional child of hippies) are more or less equally incurious and young beyond their years. Jasper and Melinda, by contrast, seem more mature and clever than their friends and yet, we come to suspect, are very much under the sway of their baby-making example all the same. Jasper (played with nicely measured intelligence and sympathetic earnestness by Webster) seems particularly uneasy with this dynamic.

Enter couple number three: Jasper and Melinda’s landlords and upstairs neighbors, Karen (Lorri Holt) and Tom (Charles Shaw Robinson), a pair of politically active progressive boomers without a baby or any desire for one. The genial but opinionated older couple soon evince a thinly veiled disdain for the crass yuppie ideals of their tenants’ friends and for the very idea of knee-jerk breeding under present social conditions. A final arrival helps stir the pot even more: a slovenly, cheapskate friend and bandmate of Dan’s named Dwight (Chris Yule), with a jaundiced eye on the overbearing culture of middle-class child rearing.

The ensuing tension leads to some very funny dialogue, oozing sarcasm, and slow-dawning insults. Ably helmed by Amy Glazer (who has directed all of Gilman’s work at the Magic) and beautifully brought to life by her thoroughly fine, enjoyable cast, the scenes build with a kind of chemical inevitability to temperatures hotter than the day or the barbeque. The fireworks not only start early this July 4 but also — in slyly showing up the repressed violence and bellicosity behind the national picnic and its whole rockets’-red-glare conceit — point to a larger, precarious pattern of denial.

Taking place in a single act in real time, The Crowd You’re In With proves a compact, genuinely entertaining, and provoking play. Even as it skirts stereotype, the types themselves are adeptly fleshed out and will resonate for most people with plenty of lived experience. Moreover, Gilman skillfully grounds her characters’ stories and dilemmas in issues of immediate and universal significance. The questions the play raises about them — like who is the more selfish given their respective life choices — reach down to deeper ones about conformity, consciousness, the meaning of happiness, and the fate of the world we live in.

THE CROWD YOU’RE IN WITH

Through Dec. 9

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2:30 and 7 p.m.; $20–$45

Magic Theatre

Fort Mason Center, bldg. D, Marina at Laguna, SF

(415) 441-8822

www.magictheatre.org

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