Volume 43 [2008–09]

Erin Mei-Ling Stuart

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When Erin Mei-Ling Stuart packed her bags to leave her hometown of Fresno in 1992, she included her viola — because she had won a scholarship to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Here, however, she played so much that she developed tendinitis and had to take a break. That’s when dance kicked in. Big time.

The viola went into the closet, and Stuart started to study modern dance — she had dabbled in ballet as a child — first at City College and then in just about every studio she could find. She turned herself into a liquid, sensuously vulnerable performer who learned to work with anybody who piqued her interest. Some were choreographers who sought direct input from their dancers — Erika Chong Shuch, Jesselito Bie, Stephen Pelton, and Chris Black — while others, like Nancy Karp, Jennie McAllister, and Deborah Slater, created along more traditional, formal lines.

Stuart learned from both approaches and expresses no preference. "There is such freedom when you can make up movement, but also it’s wonderful when you can just show up and dance," she explains.

Along the way, Stuart started to choreograph, often creating vignettes with casual looks that belie the attention to detail behind their making. These sketches and miniatures are frequently funny, evoking not a guffaw but a chuckle. They bring to life characters we probably have known or whose experiences we have shared. And Stuart does so without a word — she works purely through movement. Remember your prissy elementary school teacher and the know-it-all class brat? Stuart did in Continuing Education (2006). Have you ever been in an elevator with one other person so different from yourself that you felt creeped out? Stuart has, in Between Floors (2002). Do you walk in a neighborhood of lost souls who nonetheless furtively relate to each other? You’ll recognize its inhabitants in Songs for You (2004). And do you live with roommates? She does in her most recent work Keyhole Dances.

Stuart freely confesses that her commitment to create formally cogent dances "rubs up against a desire to examine often overlooked aspects of everyday life," and that she likes to work with "the shared intimacy of daily experience." She knows that she is old-fashioned that way. "I can’t help it," she says. "I like to make dances about relationships."

What she sees — on the bus, on the street corner, in the coffee shop — is us, more or less bungling our way through the day-to-day grind. That’s where she gets her material. If there is a political component to her work — and I happen to think that there is — it is an implied criticism of the social institutions to which we commit ourselves or by which we let ourselves be trapped.

Stuart does skewer, but does so gently, focusing on the mess humans manage to create for themselves. For her recent excursion into a mess — Sara Shelton Mann’s My Hot Lobotomy, which looks at the difficulty of staying sane given our environmental policies — the dancer took her viola out of the closet.

www.emspacedance.org

The Dodos

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At the beginning of 2008, San Francisco knew about the Dodos. Eleven months later, a lot more of the world does. This is largely due to Visiter (Frenchkiss), the group’s vibrant second album. Mojo, NME, Pitchfork, and a few dozen other musical arbiters have joined a chorus of praise for the 14-song collection decked out in kid-drawing sleeve art. Mention Led Zeppelin’s III (Atlantic, 1970) and Physical Graffiti (Swan Song, 1975) here, cite the influence of West African syncopation there, and you have the ingredients of a typical rave for vocalist-guitarist Meric Long and drummer Logan Kroeber. But the appeal and the rewards of Visiter transcend such reference points, tapping into something individually instinctive and collaboratively intuitive. It’s there in the spirit of Krober’s rhythms, a spirit which has nothing to do with the contrivances of the current indie Afrobeat vogue. It’s there in Long’s vocal melodies, which possess a rare, casually natural aplomb. It’s there in the way they work together.

"It’s a really slow process," Long says when asked about the sing-your-life quality of his tenor vocals. "Something has to sit with me for a really long time. I’ll happen on a rhythm or melody and take it with me wherever I go. It’s a practice."

Sequestered in his bedroom for much of the last month because of mono, Long has been writing new tunes in between the occasional trip to the corner store or walk around the block. "I have this [unfinished] song stuck in my head — it’s worked its way in and I don’t like it," he says. "But I’ll probably love it eventually and it’ll become my favorite song." While many critics might think that Robert and Jimmy or John and Paul are the songwriters Long aspires to match when he croons to a girl ("Jodi," "Ashley") or renders masculine foibles ("Men," "Beards," "Fools"), that isn’t necessarily the case. He’s just as likely to strive for the effect of a less canonical duo: Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. "I’ll know something is good because it reminds me of OMD," he enthuses. "It sounds like home."

The Dodos have recorded both their albums — Visiter and 2006’s self-released Beware of the Maniacs — in Portland, Ore., with John Askew. That producer’s past studio experience with the Northwest’s plethora of indie and punk duos informs the surprising scope and dynamics of his work with the Dodos. While labels like K and Kill Rock Stars and groups such as Beat Happening and the Spinanes have revealed the merits of a two-piece approach, the Dodos build upon that exploration, concocting a sound that verges on epic without ever becoming muddled. Long views the group’s initial formation as a matter of economic practicality as much as aesthetic tactics and, indeed, a third member, Joe Haener, has recently joined the group.

For much of this year, Long and Kroeber have been touring. "It gets to the point where you’re playing and performing and it’s all about muscle memory," Long says. The repetition of life on the road, of playing the same songs over and over, has something to do with that feeling. But Long and Kroeber’s music is physical — it gets down into the veins and bones and heart. It’s simple, really. The Dodos move you. (Johnny Ray Huston)

The Dodos play with Kelley Stoltz Thurs/6, 8 p.m., at Bimbo’s 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, SF. (415) 474-0365.

www.bimbos365club.com

www.dodosmusic.net

The Cutting Ball Theater

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If you were at the latest Cutting Ball show, avantgardARAMA!, you entered a theater that looked like an art installation, already buzzing and flickering with video images on a screen suspended in front of a shimmering mirror-box set, accompanied by a soundtrack of voices and droning tones. It was like some serenely wicked room in a purgatorial funhouse, where all you’ve been and all you might become could be reflected at you, from every possible angle, ad infinitum. As it turned out, it was an environment perfectly suited to the material sharply staged that evening: three short experimental plays on war, power, and betrayal by three women writers — Gertrude Stein, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Eugenie Chan — whose bold narrative loops and lacunae literally rebounded off the walls.

The stylish, jarring, exhilarating effect: our sleepwalking world was dramatically distilled into fractal-like figures that somehow made it real again. This is the oblique strategy of the Cutting Ball Theater, a passionately intelligent and skillful company with a declared commitment to poetic truths over superficial naturalism.

As it approaches its 10-year milestone, Cutting Ball transitions from dogged itinerancy into luxurious residency at Exit on Taylor, a satellite stage of the Exit Theater complex in the Tenderloin. Much as a ball rolls forward by turning full circle, the move marks something of a return for the company, which launched its career in a production of Richard Foreman’s My Head Was a Sledgehammer at the Exit-sponsored San Francisco Fringe Festival in 1999.

"That was the last time you had to stand outside at 3 in the morning and camp out," associate artistic director and actor Paige Rogers recalls of that time, before the Fringe established its lottery system. Rogers, and husband and artistic director Rob Melrose, established both the company and a family that year, more or less simultaneously. Melrose did the camping out and rehearsed the play by night at an Alameda Catholic school where Rogers was teaching music.

(As with many a start-up theater, overlapping accommodations was the name of the tune: when the school’s principal expressed surprise at happening upon a late-night rehearsal of Foreman’s madcap dream-world in the kindergarten, Rogers deflected further inquiry by joyfully announcing, "Marilyn! I’m pregnant!")

Cutting Ball has mixed new plays and "re-visioned" classics ever since. The visual metaphor is apt since Cutting Ball productions are nothing if not strikingly designed. For years, the company has had a talented core of collaborators that includes designers Heather Basarab (lights), Cliff Caruthers (sound and electronic music), and Michael Locher (sets). Together in close collaboration with the astute, Yale-trained Melrose, they regularly produce some of the best designs to be found on any Bay Area stage, large or small. Add artistic associates like playwrights Kevin Oakes (2003’s The Vomit Talk of Ghosts) and Eugenie Chan (whose A Bone to Pick was a highlight of this theater season), as well as dependably strong acting from Rogers, Felicia Benefield, Chad Deverman, David Sinaiko, and David Westley Skillman, among others, and you have the makings of some great small theater.

The new residency marks another return. Its ninth season will be inaugurated by a rarely staged early play by Eugène Ionesco, Victims of Duty, a work Melrose says he’s waited 15 years to direct. Centering on the abrupt crisis-ridden invasion of a bourgeois couple’s placid bubble-world and their equally staid conceptions of theatrical art, Victims is a fever-dream of a play that not only sounds strikingly contemporary but echoes the company’s own MO. When theater "holds the mirror up to the world," it’s often the warped glass that furnishes the truest picture.

www.cuttingball.com

Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books

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The first book I held close to my heart was Italian poet Antonio Porta’s 1987 Kisses from Another Dream, number 44 in the ongoing City Lights Pocket Poets Series. I bought it on a trip to the city from Santa Cruz when I was around 17, and I savored every line, whipping out the book at coffee shops and other high school hangouts, in attics late at night, at beach bonfires, and even for a speech at one friend’s funeral. It wasn’t just the eerily direct poems that turned me on, nor the delightful format (which has remained basically unchanged in the series aside from modernized cover designs), but a feeling of participation in a tradition that began with the first City Lights Publications book, founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Pictures of the Gone World in 1955, and that has continued with wordsmiths and thinkers from Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski to Tom Hayden, Terry Wolverton, and San Francisco poet laureate Jack Hirschman.

I am biased about City Lights, but isn’t that the mark of good publishers — to increase readers’ bias toward purveyors of quality writing and thought? To this end, City Lights has participated in a type of conscious branding of which Americans can be proud. The publisher and North Beach bookstore continues to be marked by fierce, heartfelt works that seem to emanate from their instantly recognizable Y-with-an-O-on-top logo of a human in a state of ecstasy, outrage, celebration, and/or soothsaying.

Having worked in numerous positions in the small press world, I continue to be annoyed by the oddly prevalent idea that putting out more books — including those of low quality which you think will sell — somehow guarantees success. Despite this type of bingeing, the information age has ushered in a new set of consumers whose interests, resources, and appetites run so wide that they crave guidance across the board. From the Slow Food movement to Bookforum.com’s daily online roundups, people are willing to research and improve most areas of their lives. Publishers have long served this need, and under the guidance of the current executive director, Elaine Katzenberger, and others such as editor and Guardian contributor Garrett Caples, co-owner Nancy Peters, and Open Media Series acquiring editor Greg Ruggiero, City Lights is increasing the potential of real and literary democracy.

At a publishing-world dinner a little while back, Katzenberger impressed me with her eloquent dedication to publishing good writing without unreasonable marketing goals. Obviously City Lights wants its books to sell, but there’s no reason to expect Oprah’s Book Club-type numbers. Part of the reason the press is still in business is that it has taken risks on good but unknown writers, not on bad but marketable mishmash. In his introduction to 1995’s City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology, Ferlinghetti writes: "The function of the independent press (besides being essentially dissident) is still to discover — to find the new voices and give voice to them — and then let the big publishers have at them." He goes on to remark that although City Lights initially tapped into the Beat scene, it has continued to respond to current circumstances: "From the beginning the aim was to publish across the board, avoiding the provincial and the academic, and not publishing (that pitfall of the little press) just our ‘gang.’ I had in mind rather an international, dissident, insurgent ferment."

In a recent column for Slate, Emily Yoffe noted that taking offense — especially taking offense at taking offense — has become a "political leitmotif" during the seemingly endless election season. Any actual discussion disappears into the mist. City Lights’ political output, whether you agree with individual authors or not, has certainly worked against the reactionary bullshit and political fluff that plagues politics everywhere. It’s been good to see them bringing this cultural literacy to more art-related titles of late, including 2007’s All Over Coffee by Paul Madonna and this year’s Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun by Wafaa Bilal and Kari Lydersen, a much-needed evaluation of Bilal’s controversial project.

One of the poems in that heart-close Porta volume is "You Continue to Ask What Silence Is." If poetry comes from silence, and politics from the space between dreams and reality, then City Lights knows what silence is, and this is why its authors scream so sweetly. A Lifetime Achievement award is as much a hymn to co-owner Ferlinghetti’s life and early organizational skills as to what City Lights has become. Though he has technically passed over the editorial reins, Ferlinghetti remains involved in the press and also, in terms of his own writing, intentionally uninvolved: he has kept New Directions, over on the other coast, as the publisher of his own writing, ensuring that in an age of celebrity and numbness, City Lights is anything but a vanity press.

www.citylights.com

Citay

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"There’s lots of ways to be a Guitar Hero. I just think it would be cooler if people tried to be real guitar heroes. I want people to find their inner guitar hero."

Amen, Ezra Feinberg. The Citay songwriter freely admits he’s never played the game, but we know exactly what he means: why add the competitive veneer of a sporting match to something as inherently pleasurable as playing guitar? Feinberg needed no prod when he started practicing. "I was really nerdy," he recalls of his hermetic early music-making sessions. "I wanted to learn my instrument really well, and I was really into guitar technique, and I used to sit in my bedroom and learn complicated guitar parts like Van Halen."

Then one day he realized, "Wait a minute, it’s much more fun and interesting and cool to work on songs and work on playing with different people and in different styles rather than sit in my room."

Metal, classic rock, jazz, fusion, punk, indie, and "weirder" sounds all left an impression, but after putting in time with the Piano Magic collective and the "stonery" Feast, Feinberg seems to have finally found his voice amid Citay’s fragrant blend of psychedelia, folk, synth-rock, and AOR. Taking its name from a Feinberg mixtape of songs utilizing that only-in-rock pronunciation ("The Journey song is included, but there’s also ‘Living for the City’ by Stevie Wonder and ‘Fool for the City’ by Foghat"), the onetime home recording project assumed a life of its own after Feinberg’s move in 2004 from Brooklyn to San Francisco, in collaboration with Tim Green of the Fucking Champs, who had previously recorded Feast.

Seemingly bursting full-blown from the brow of a rock ‘n’ roll Zeus, Citay’s startlingly excellent 2006 self-titled debut found a home on Important Records, inspiring Feinberg to tell people "we were their Partridge Family, next to all the found sound shit, Merzbow, Axolotl."

Naturally, Feinberg adds, "The next challenge was to see if these songs could be pulled off live because it was a studio-centric project." But no worries, he managed wonderfully, with the help of, at various times, Green and members of Tussle, Ascended Master, and Skygreen Leopards. The latest additions — following the amicable departure of Jesse Reiner of Jonas Reinhardt and Crime in Choir, and Adria Otte of the Dry Spells (Feinberg also drums with that band of kindred Bard graduates) — are Sean Smith and Josh Pollock of Daevid Allen’s University of Errors. And how does he rope in such talented players? "I’m pretty gregarious," drawls Feinberg, sounding like those nerdy homebound practice sessions are far behind him.

Still, judging from the sublimely interwoven acoustic and electric guitars and lushly appointed folk-rock streaked with sweeping synthesizer found on Citay’s most recent long-player, Little Kingdom (Dead Oceans), perhaps the onetime bedroom-rocker’s guitar hero — and musical visionary — days are here to stay.

Citay perform at the Goldies party, Tues/11, 9 p.m., free. 111 Minna Gallery, SF. (415) 974-1719

www.111minnagallery.com

www.citay.net

My kingdom for a dumpling

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› paulr@sfbg.com

As kingdoms go, Kingdom of Dumpling is a rather Lilliputian affair — a runt, actually, if that word can be used in conjunction with "kingdom." Dumplings are small objects, of course, even the Bavarian ones made from potatoes, also known as knödel, and they seem even smaller when described in the singular. Kingdom of Dumpling? Is there only one kind of dumpling, or only one permitted per customer, or (our worst-case scenario) only one of one kind permitted per customer? The answers are No, No, and No — but I leap ahead.

The Kingdom (an adjunct of Kingdom of Chinese Dumpling, on Noriega) opened last spring, in the snug Sunset space once occupied by the excellent David’s Kitchen. That restaurant was a culinary multilinguist, fluent in the major idioms of east and southeast Asian cuisines; it was like a miniature Straits Cafe. The new place has retained much of that spirit, right down to the Magic Marker board that hangs above one corner of the dining room proclaiming the day’s specials, such as duck curry. David’s Kitchen offered a similar dish, if I remember rightly.

What is different is the massive infusion of dumplings, steamed buns, and general dim-summery. If you’re a haunter of noodle bars, this is an alternate universe. It’s as if some restaurant geneticist created a hybrid by mixing the DNA of a pan-Asian place and a dim sum house — and did so in a space that would feel crowded with a dozen people inside. But the space is still an attractive shade of creamy yellow, the tables and chairs are comfortable, and the food is excellent.

The truly fresh, handmade Chinese dumpling is a revelation, when you actually find one and bite into it. KoD’s are warm and juicy inside their soft pouches of dough; eating one is like biting into a piece of perfectly fresh fruit that’s been warmed by the sun, except the flavors aren’t fruity but (in the main) meaty, with generous tweakings of ginger and garlic. I liked the pork dumpling with napa cabbage ($5.95) slightly better than the chicken dumpling with corn ($6.45), mainly because the chicken didn’t assert itself with quite the same quiet sensuousness as the pork, and the peak-of-the-season corn was a little too sweet. But either way, you get a dozen for about six bucks, and the individual dumplings aren’t small.

The appeal of warm food is primal — does the heat sound an ancient echo of fresh kill? — but cold dishes have their own charms, especially when they’re as tasty as KoD’s. Marinated seaweed salad ($3.95) is a treat I associate with Japanese restaurants, but KoD’s is just as good, if in a quite different way. The seaweed itself, for starters, isn’t a mass of green, crinkled threads but a bowlful of what look like julienne poblano peppers, or perhaps tiny eels that have only just stopped writhing. And while Japanese seaweed salads are typically dressed with some form of ponzu sauce, KoD’s carries another charge, more savory and with less citrus-tart balance.

A salad of bean stick ($4.95) consisted of flaps of bean curd — corrugated, like Ruffles potato chips — and tossed with plenty of chopped cilantro. With some minced garlic and grated ginger, this simple ensemble became addictive, and the fact that was served cold — not cold, really, more on the low end of room temperature — faded from one’s consciousness, bite by bite.

More minced garlic was assigned to enliven crispy lotus root ($5.95), an enormous platter of cream-colored disks punctuated by vacuole-like interior spaces. I had the brief sense of examining a cross-section of bacteria under a microscope. The root sections themselves were indeed tender-crispy, as if they’d been briefly stir-fried, steamed, or otherwise tenderly handled; lotus root is really a starchy rhizome, and while some authorities compare it to potato, it reminded me of a cross between jicama and daikon. The root is rich in various vitamins and minerals as well as dietary fiber and is widely enjoyed throughout east Asia.

XO sauce, as browsers at Asian markets may know, is an irresistible, if pricey, confection — a lumpy paste — of dried seafood (including shrimp and scallop) along with various seasonings and degrees of chili heat. It’s quite good right out of the jar, as I am embarrassed to say I know from personal (though not recent) experience. How much better, though, to use the precious XO to flavor a dish like beef chow fun ($6.95), a Cantonese festival of wide noodles, strips of tender meat, and bean sprouts. The color palette here was a little too thoroughly earthen to be ideal, but the glistening of the noodles and beef did bring a bit of joy to the eye.

It’s not surprising that a restaurant serving food this tasty, interesting, and carefully prepared at such modest prices should attract young people, nor that — given the restaurant’s location deep in the Sunset District — so many of those young people should appear to be of Asian ancestry. Their presence suggests that some kind of college or university campus must lie nearby, but we couldn’t think of one. City College? Not too close. San Francisco State? Closer, though hardly at hand. The Sunset might be a neighborhood not a kingdom, but it’s a pretty good-sized neighborhood that shows signs of reinvention and renewal — and now it has a place where you can eat like a king, for a lot less than the king’s ransom.


KINGDOM OF DUMPLING

Daily, 10 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

1713 Taraval, SF

(415) 566-6143

www.kingofchinesedumpling.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Bearable noise

Wheelchair accessible

Corporations do

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› steve@sfbg.com

No amount of feel-good advertising can counter the perfect populist storm that has been brewing around Chevron, the giant Bay Area-based oil company that for the last month has spent $15 million plastering billboards and the airwaves with slick, heartwarming appeals to use less energy.

Few expect the greenwashing campaign to do much good in a political climate that has had everyone from Barack Obama to Sarah Palin bashing "Big Oil." And in the week leading up to an historic presidential election, Chevron was looking bigger and badder than ever.

The week began Oct. 27 with the start of a landmark human rights and corporate responsibility trial in federal court in San Francisco, in which Chevron stands accused of complicity with Nigeria’s authoritarian government in the torture, murder, and abuse of those protesting Chevron’s exploitation of the Niger Delta.

And the work week ended Oct. 31 with Chevron announcing record quarterly profits of $7.9 billion, more than double what the oil giant earned a year earlier, when the company’s $3.7 billion in profits triggered calls by Obama and other political figures to levy higher taxes on such windfalls.

That’s exactly what city officials in Richmond were trying to do this election with Proposition T, which would steeply increase the tax Chevron pays the city for its Richmond refinery. The measure would assess a tax based on the value of raw materials being processed, increasing to about $26.5 million per year, 440 times what it currently pays the city through a payroll tax. (Election results were expected after the Guardian‘s press deadline, so check www.sfbg.com for more.)

Jamie Court, executive director of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer rights and the author of Corporateering: How Corporate Power Steals Your Personal Freedom and What You Can Do About It (Penguin, 2003), said the combination of events creates a moment that makes significant reform possible.

"They make a very juicy target for people who want to show that oil companies do not share the values of the American people," Court said. "I think this trial could very well become a defining moment for how public opinion moves policymakers in Washington to real energy reform."

The case, Bowoto vs. Chevron, breaks new ground in seeking to hold an American corporation responsible in US courts for atrocities committed half the world away. The complaint, first filed in 1999, alleges that "the military, at the request of, and with the participation and complicity of Chevron, killed and injured people, destroyed churches, religious shrines, and water wells; burned down houses, killed livestock; and destroyed canoes and fishing equipment belonging to villagers" who were peacefully protesting Chevron’s pollution and destabilization of the region.

The trial, which is expected to continue until December, was brought under the little-used, 219-year-old Alien Tort Claims Act. Unocal faced a similar lawsuit for its alleged abuses in Myanmar and settled the case in 2004. But the Chevron case is the first of its kind to make it to trial.

Michael Watts, a geography professor who directs the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley, said the political momentum has been building against big oil companies for a long time and the combination of this case, record profits, and the election create an opportunity for reform.

"The case is very important for a lot of reasons in and of itself, even if there was nothing else going on in the industry," Watts told us. "This is a big, precedent-setting case."

Not only could Chevron be hurt financially by the verdict, but the precedent could affect multinational corporations of all kinds that do business with regimes around the world with poor human rights records. And it could fuel political efforts at home to rein in corporate bad behavior.

"If you’re running up these kinds of profits, why would you let a case like this go to trial in the first place?" Watts asked.

Chevron officials did not return calls for comment.

Chevron is also facing another landmark trial in Ecuador, where Texaco (which Chevron bought in 2001) is being sued for billions of dollars to compensate for widespread environmental degradation of sensitive rainforests from its oil extraction efforts there, a case in which US courts have refused Chevron’s requests to intervene.

Will this perfect storm lead to reform? That depends on the social movements and the political leadership that takes office in January.

Can have

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Me and Boink at the counter, aprons on, hands washed, ready to go … "I’ve been looking forward to this all week," I said. "You’re my new favorite person to cook with."

He looked up from his step stool with all the earnestness in the world, which seems to be his for the asking, and asked, "Do you love me?"

"I do, Boink," I said. And I kissed him on the head. "I love you very much."

He said he loved me too, and asked if he could kiss me. (So polite!) I said that he could, and he gave me a cute little peck on the cheek.

You were expecting what? Diarrhea? Well, I did get sick again. The thing about working with kids is that you wind up with every communicable disease in the world, on a daily basis, especially if you kiss them and eat food right out of their mouths, like I do. Gotta stop that. I’m getting sick of being sick.

On the other hand: I, your chicken farmer truly, bought a new (as in new new) car. Thanks to Boink, and Popeye the Sailor Baby, and Big Chunk and Little Chunk de la Cooter, and all their various and sundry parents, I can now afford to make me a monthly payment or two, or 60. And, yes, for the first time in my farmerly life, I am the proud driver of an actually reliable motor vehicle.

All the gears work and everything! Horn … Check this out: it has seatbelts that actually lock when you get in an accident. And, most meaningfully to me, what with winter coming, you don’t have to pop the hood and leave the vehicle to turn the headlights on!

How stylin’ am I?

I know what you’re thinking. You’re going to miss my little tales of sitting on the side of the road for exactly 52 minutes, waiting for my old pickup truck to start, aren’t you? I know I’m going to miss all the colorful people one meets in such a manner. Tow-truck drivers, police, drive-by mechanics, and so forth. Yesterday, out of habit, or nostalgia, or both, I stopped at my local car parts store. I bought a roll of paper towels.

My new pickup, which I named Alice Shaw after my hero, Alice Shaw, is the ever-popular Honda Fit pickup truck. Light blue, almost silvery. It’s so beautiful I cold lick it, and often do.

Now I’m not a car reviewer, I know, but this Fit is the damnedest thing on four wheels. A miracle of modern engineering, it’s the first car ever to be twice as big inside as out. Even more cargo capacity than my old Chevy Sprint! You can carry two bales of straw at once, and still have room prolly for a sack o’ feed and a little load of scrap wood.

First thing I did, before I even drove it off the lot, I folded the back seats down. "Pickup truck mode," I said to the dealer, who nodded unknowingly and handed me my balloons, for the kids.

Then I drove around town looking for Dumpsters, playing with all the buttons, and just generally showing off.

"Wait till you put your first ding in it!" all my friends keep saying.

I don’t know what they’re talking about. I dinged the dang thing at the dealership, I was so nervous. I’ve never been in debt before, not even a credit card debt. Are you kidding me? I had to scratch the driver’s door with my key just to get myself to sign my name.

The idea here, so you know, is to teach myself that I can have and might even deserve something nice in this world. Because I didn’t grow up knowing that. You get so used to can’t have that you forget how to even want. I thought of this a lot, last few months, dating married men, creepy redneck couples, and other unloveables.

My new blue beautiful car = can have.

And I tell you this now so I can say I told you so when you see me, one day, walking around the world with a loving, shiny, and reliable man. With a ding in one cheek.


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My new favorite restaurant is Hometown Donuts #7. It’s in Richmond, off the same exit I take to go to my favorite Dumpster. So I needed a haul for my new car, and a haul for me. Check it out: two things, plus rice for under five bucks. Chinese. Fried and barbecued. I got spicy pork and a fried chicken thigh hot out of the fryer. Yum! A pretty plasticky place to eat, but I’ll take it. And a donut to go, please.

HOMETOWN DONUTS #7

2315A Cutting, Richmond

(510) 237-2652

Mon.–Sat., 5 a.m.–8 p.m.; Sun., 6 a.m.–7 p.m.

No alcohol

Cash only

Going topless

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

(Andrea’s on vacation! Check out this oldie but goodie, originally published in the Guardian 7/5/06).

Dear Andrea:

My girlfriend is really into BDSM. At first I tried and played a convincing (I think) top/dom, but it just wasn’t hot for me, so I looked some stuff up to get inspired. As I was reading/watching, I would really get off on it, but the sex with my girlfriend still wasn’t hot. Then I realized that when I was masturbating to all this, I was fantasizing about subbing. Oops. I am way in love with my girlfriend, but she is a bottom, period. She might switch it around if it meant a lot to me, but I would know that it wasn’t really making her happy. I don’t know what to do. Can I become a top? Can I teach myself to like it? I’m going to do it either way, but I really want to get into it, so please help! I want us to be good in bed together, but two bottoms don’t make a top. Help!

Love,

Topless

PS: We’re lesbians, if that matters.

Dear Tops:

It sure doesn’t, but thanks for the info!

I was just thinking about this last night when a friend was catching me up on her latest dating adventures. She was lamenting that some potential dates seem to come equipped with a set of kinks perfectly matching her own, and although that sounds good, it is, of course, no use at all.

As you have discovered to your frustration, one wants a date with a complementary set of kinks, not a matching one. It’s not an uncommon problem, and its most common manifestation is exactly the one that’s driving you nuts: there are too many bottoms in this world and nowhere near enough tops to keep them satisfied. Why this is (beyond the fact that topping is hard work), I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I bet any number of eager grad students are currently proposing theses on the subject to bored advisors who have read enough similar stuff already.

Here’s my theory. There are people for whom BDSM is a core part of their identity, running as deep as, say, homosexuality or monogamy. Some may always have recognized this element in themselves, even before they had the language to express it (these are the kids who always want to play pirates or whatever game involves somebody getting tied to something or the intentional infliction/receiving of pain, even when the other kids are long since ready to move on). Others don’t realize it until they’re exposed to S-M in some more adult context, but then it just clicks in, key into lock, and they know. Your girlfriend sounds like one of those BDSM lifers, who tend, in my experience, to be pretty set on their preferred role even if they do switch experimentally on occasion (a good idea, if only to find out how painful/exhausting it is to experience/produce any particular sensation).

Then there are the "anything goes" people who are happy to pick up a flogger or don a dog collar, what the heck, as long as it’s fun. This type of player may not identify as an S-M person per se, but may enjoy a little power exchange on the occasional Friday night, no biggie. You may fall more on this end of the spectrum, but even "what-the-heckers" usually discover some sort of preference, as you have. The perfect 50-50 switch is almost certainly as rare as the perfect 50-50 bisexual.

Plenty of people find something to like in either role, and I think you can develop an appreciation for topping and get some satisfaction out of a job well done (there are resources like The New Topping Book, by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy, to help you). But you can enjoy and get good at it without ever really becoming a top the way both of you are currently bottoms. Be careful about taking on a role that isn’t really "you." Nobody loves a martyr, and you’re still going to want to bottom sometimes. I worry about you starting to resent your girlfriend for getting to have all the fun.

I have a suggestion that might save your relationship or might strike you as all sorts of wrong and make you hate me, but here goes: you two find a willing top, maybe somewhere in your social circle, maybe online or in a BDSM social organization, and bottom together sometimes. This kind of shared adventure can be hot, hot, hot and very bonding, sort of like getting lost in the woods together and surviving through mutual trust and inter-reliance — but a lot more fun. I think if you do that sometimes, and play top sometimes, and stick with the vanilla sometimes, you’ll probably be OK, provided you both take care of getting your itches scratched. Love conquers … much.

Love,

Andrea

Got a salacious subject you want Andrea to discuss? Ask her a question!

Also, Andrea is teaching! Contact her if you’re interested in (sex)life after baby classes. Her new blog is at www.gogetyourjacket.com, but don’t look there for the butt sex. There isn’t any.

On the Obama campaign trail

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OPINION I live and have always lived in a bubble, isolated from most of America. I grew up in Los Angeles, where I attended a high school so liberal that almost the entire student population wore black the day after Bush won his second term. Now I attend UC Berkeley, a historically ultra-liberal university in one of the most progressive cities in the United States.

That’s why I decided to join 30 of my fellow UC Berkeley students and go to North Carolina to campaign for Obama the final week before the election. Not only did I want to make a difference I felt I couldn’t make from California, I wanted to experience first-hand what the rest of the country is like.

In some ways, North Carolina was exactly the way I expected it to be: full of white steepled churches, swirling autumn-colored leaves, and drive-through fried chicken restaurants called Bojangles. In other ways, it wasn’t. I thought I’d be talking mostly to undecided voters and people leaning toward the right. Instead I worked mostly with Democrats, making sure they know where their polling locations are and how to protect themselves against voter disenfranchisement.

I talked to all kinds of North Carolinians. I visited student dorms, low-income housing complexes, and beautiful Southern-style mansions. The Obama campaign was thrilled to have so many Californian volunteers at its disposal: there’s a large Hispanic community here, and few native North Carolinians speak Spanish. My Spanish isn’t perfect, but if I hadn’t gone around to Hispanic communities asking Ya esta registrado? on Nov. 1st, the last day to register in North Carolina, many people wouldn’t have gotten the chance to vote.

While I encountered a few ultra-conservative crazies (one man told me he wasn’t voting for Obama because he was "probably" the Antichrist), most people oozed Southern hospitality. I probably gained five pounds from all of the free food thrust at us at every polling station. One generous volunteer let all 30 of us stay in his house.

My cohorts and I snuck into a Sarah Palin rally one night. Unfortunately, we had to leave before she spoke (according to our campaign manager, there were more productive things for us to do than gawk at children carrying "Pro-lifers for Palin" posters). But I felt like I was a spy in an enemy camp, surrounded by people in pink "pitbulls with lipstick" T-shirts. I was definitely far away from my little liberal bubble.

Most satisfying was the feeling I got every time I inspired someone undecided to vote. I spoke with a man one day who was somehow under the impression that Obama was nine points ahead in the North Carolina polls. When I assured him that that was far from the case, he decided to vote. I’ve never felt so powerful before.

In completely unrelated news, I am no longer a vegetarian. I decided to sample a different fried chicken restaurant every night. I highly recommend the Bojangles fried chicken biscuit sandwich (with extra honey) if you’re ever in the area.

Guardian intern Katie Baker sent this piece from the campaign bus.

Shift happens

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› news@sfbg.com

Since the beginning of the presidential campaign, Americans have been bombarded with one big concept summed up in one little word: change.

It was Barack Obama’s slogan from day one and represented many people’s hope for the future, an idea that so appeals to beleaguered Americans that the Republicans eventually adopted it as well. Both parties recognized that the country would have to make big adjustments to salvage the economy, environment, schools, and health care system.

They each cited factors that point to the big changes that are coming — but they didn’t mention a huge one that has been bearing down on our species for nearly 5,200 years: the colossal transformation of solar system and our collective psyche that the ancient Mayans and their modern day supporters believe will take place Dec. 21, 2012, the day the Mayan calendar comes to an abrupt end.

Erick Gonzalez, founder and spiritual leader of Earth Peoples United, a nonprofit organization that works to bridge indigenous values with modern society, says the event will deeply disturb our minds and bodies here on earth. Nearly 300 people from around the world gathered Oct. 31-Nov. 2 during a 2012 conference at Fort Mason Center.

Some enthusiasts predict an apocalypse, while others foresee a shift in human awareness. Yet they all believe that big change is coming.

The Mayan calendar was developed by ancient astronomers who concluded that Dec. 21 was the sun’s birthday, noting that the winter solstice marked the beginning of the sun’s return from around the world.

Gonzalez, who has been studying Mayan culture for 33 years, says Dec. 21, 2012 will be a monumental birthday for our sun, when it will shift to the dead center of the Milky Way galaxy, on the galactic equator, for the first time.

The Mayans believed this was the precise spot where the sun — and all life — was created. Followers of the ancient theory claim the Milky Way will give birth to a new sun and a new galactic cycle on this day, marking the beginning of our world’s transformation.

"For the Maya, this is like the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve," said philosopher Roderick Marling, a Tantric yoga teacher who has spent the last 36 years researching yoga meditation and expanding consciousness, in addition to writing numerous papers on religion, mythology, history, and archeology. "The galactic clock will be set at zero point, and a new processional cycle will begin," he said.

As our planets shift overhead, believers say our awareness of the Earth, political issues, and each other will also change. Conference co-organizer Christian Voltaire says many of the changes in 2012 will be tangible, such as revising our current financial model or switching to alternative fuels. He points to former presidential candidate Ron Paul, who advocated for extreme change in monetary policy — abolishing the IRS and the Federal Reserve, for example — and Obama, who has pushed for transforming the economy with green jobs. "They’re at least conscious of the fact that something has to change," he says. "And, as we’ve been told by our prophesies, change is coming."

But skeptics have their doubts. Wouldn’t we be pushing for green energy anyway? And how could the shifting planets cause the financial meltdown — or even the actual meltdown of our polar ice caps? University of Florida anthropologist Susan Gillespie says the theory is a media myth and nothing more. Susan Milbrath, author of Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars and curator of Latin American art and archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, believes it’s unlikely the Mayans could have predicted such events.

Believers remain undeterred. Last Gasp Books employee and conference attendee Eliza Strack says her 2012 obsession started as an innocent topic of conversation many years ago. She believes alternate realms of existence and multiple dimensions of time could collide, allowing us to access our past, present, and future in one moment. "We spend a quarter of our lives in a dream state where alternate realities are playing themselves out," Strack says. Gonzalez backs her up, arguing that the alignment of the sun in 2012 will create a powerful magnetic force, and human protons and electronic will react to it.

Lifelong Mayan researcher John Major Jenkins, who has written several books on 2012, brings up the possibility of the sun inverting the earth’s magnetic fields. But according to Vincent H. Malmström, professor emeritus of geography at Dartmouth College, there’s no hard evidence to support Strack’s claim. Besides, how could a magnetic pull bring our dreamlike realities to life? Malmström writes in his paper The Astronomical Insignificance of Maya Date (www.dartmouth.edu/~izapa/M-32.pdf): "It would seem that Jenkins has advanced our understanding of the Maya from the sublime to the ridiculous."

Although we have four years before the astral shift, Voltaire says it’s crucial to hold 2012 conventions now. "The weekend before the election carries a vibration of anticipation of the future. We wanted to connect with that." The Southern Californian didn’t know much about the 2012 theory before last March, but he says he’s constantly alert and keeps a subtle ear out.

"I kept hearing the subject of 2012 in my consciousness — at events, on the radio, at yoga class," he says. "Everyone was talking about it." After making a few phone calls, he partnered with 2012 author and filmmaker Jay Weidner, a native Oregonian who has been studying the subject for nearly 20 years. Sponsored by Weidner’s company Sacred Mysteries Live, they organized their first convention in Hollywood in March 2008 and were blown away by the response.

Their conference last weekend was even bigger. With interactive panels and community circles, participants could share their ideas about 2012. Voltaire and Weidner say it represents something different for everyone: change, chaos — even beauty. In the midst of it all, the organizers premiered 2012-themed films and documentaries that filmmakers submitted along with an entry fee of — $20.12.

The conference also offered critical analyses of some related prophecies: the Mayans, Tibetan Buddhists, Incas, and the mysterious Cross of Hendaye. They lived in different times, and had different notions about the events that would take place around 2012. Conference organizers say Inca texts prophesized "a world turned upside-down" around that year, while Tibetan Buddhists predicted the mythical city of Shanballad would be constructed at the end of the current era.

Voltaire says the Cross of Hendaye — a 400-year-old monument in the coastal town of Hendaye, France — holds the key to the paradigm. The cross was first described in the 1926 book The Mystery of the Cathedrals, written by an alchemist named Fulcanelli. In 1995, before learning of the 2012 stories, Weidner was hooked on this book. He worked for years to decipher the messages behind the cross, deconstructing a Latin inscription carved into its top, and finally claims to have discovered its meaning: "It represents a world crisis that will end this time period.

There’s exactly one presidential term left before the end of this time period, which has witnessed everything from financial crises to homelessness to global warming. But will a new era end the problems of the current one? It’s hard to imagine how thousands of San Francisco’s poorest residents will acquire homes, or how our ozone layer will suddenly thicken.

After rifling through more books, Weidner says he discovered another secret behind the cross: that the Earth’s greatest changes will take place between 1992 and 2012. During that time so far, we’ve seen the birth the Internet, economic globalization and overextension, mass extinctions and global warming, terrorism and imperial hubris, exploding populations and rising discontent, and the end of the age of oil coming into sight. Then again, 20 years is a long time and life moves fast these days, with or without a mystical cross.

Nevertheless, since his supposed discoveries, Weidner has written two books and one film about the Cross of Hendaye’s secrets. In addition to a simpler belief that attributes a natural, geological pattern to these changes, three other prophecies predict some version of disaster or shift around 2012. Weidner admits this could be an incredible coincidence, but he thinks we should be aware of today’s experiences anyway. "There’s no doubt this is one of the most incredible time periods in human history."

While no one knows what will go down Dec. 21, 2012, Strack likes to put a positive spin on the brewing events. She wonders if 2013 will bring sweet-smelling city air, friendly neighbors, and tricycles for old folks to ride to the grocery store. After all, who believes that a shift in consciousness would be a bad thing?

Many followers even look forward to the date and equate it with the second coming of Christ, when they will be blessed with knowledge and euphoria. "Those are the happy thoughts," Strack says. "Yin-yang that shit and you find the darkest, most terrifying possibilities." She says she has had multiple apocalyptic dreams, leading her to ponder World War III, death, chaos, betrayal, and everything else that could hit the fan in 2012.

This sort of anxiety has led some people to use the term "doomsday" when describing the last day of the Mayan calendar. Although the theory has no solid academic backing, it is catching on. YouTube hosts countless videos of asteroids striking earth, tsunamis, tornados, and incidents of chaos linked to the date. Many devotees are preparing for hell on earth. But Voltaire says 2012 isn’t all about doom and gloom. "Our prophecies are about facing the facts and bringing up new ideas, acknowledging indigenous cultures of the past and present and truly listening to what they have to say, not brushing them off."

During our country’s time of change, we may not have heard many full-blown prophecies coming to pass, but we have all witnessed powerful people raising fresh ideas, such as rapidly shifting to new energy sources, developing international standards of human rights and controls on the use of force, and attacking poverty and disease worldwide. Like the 2012 followers, we’re listening and trying to remain open-minded.

If you chose to listen — to the prophecies or the new president — you might ask yourself how you’re supposed to prepare for the future. Voltaire says that "if you’re conscious of the changes, you’ll be able to roll with them, like if you’re in the ocean swimming with the tide. But if you’re unconscious and you suddenly wake up, it’ll be a lot harder to deal with."

Voltaire and Weidner say that our president will need to prepare too. They think that for him to be successful, he will have to address issues such as green energy and global warming brought forth at the 2012 conference.
Whether we’re believers or not, our country’s in for some big changes, whatever the solar alignment.

Bait and switch

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> sarah@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency has endorsed a draft financing plan for Lennar’s massive proposed Hunters Point Shipyard/Candlestick Point development project, one that increases the company’s housing entitlements and profits.

The agency’s endorsement came during a hastily convened Oct. 27 special meeting, raising the eyebrows of Lennar’s critics. So did the details of the agency’s non-binding financial agreement with Lennar, which two citizens’ committees in the Bayview–Hunters Point community had jointly endorsed a week earlier.

Bayview–Hunters Point resident Francisco Da Costa claimed that "there was almost no public notice of the plan," while Leon Muhammad, who sits on the Bayview–Hunters Point Project Area Committee, fretted that some committee members have business ties and connections with Lennar.

"A group that supposedly represents the interests of the community needs to have transparency and full disclosure," stated Nation of Islam Rev. Christopher Muhammad, who has been a staunch critic of Lennar ever since the developer failed to properly monitor and control asbestos adjacent to his group’s K-12 University of Islam school.

"Lennar never intended to do anything with this land but bank it," Muhammad opined about the public land that Lennar is getting for free. "And now they are hoping to squeeze more profit out of the deal, so they can hedge to where they can make it more attractive to sell."

Alicia Schwartz of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) observed that the deal is likely being driven by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s unrequited desire to see the Olympics come to San Francisco — a dream that was squashed two years ago, Schwartz recalls, "amid a hoopla around toxicity at the shipyard."

Sup. Chris Daly, who has argued that Lennar’s recent $500,000 settlement with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District over Lennar’s asbestos violations was "too small and poorly handled," said he wasn’t surprised by the latest deal: "That Lennar wants to pull a fast one is not news."

But with the financing deal likely headed for the full Board of Supervisors this month, Lennar’s critics are worried that the city is being rushed into a deal that has already changed since voters approved Proposition G in June, supporting the vague outlines of Lennar’s project.

They note that while Prop. G specified that the project would create "between 8,500 and 10,000 homes" in the depressed southeast sector, the financing deal that Redevelopment endorsed last week specifies 10,500 homes —and a demand that the agency and the city cooperate to help increase Lennar’s annual rate of return.

Stephen Maduli-Williams, the agency’s deputy executive director, told the Guardian that it was always the agency’s intention to finalize Lennar’s draft financing plan by the end of 2008. Asked if Lennar increased the number of proposed housing units by reducing unit size or increasing building height, Maduli-Williams told us, "They did it by finding a way to squeeze more units into the existing space. They redesigned one of the roads."

"Things are probably going to change again in the next year or two," Maduli-Williams said. "This is a living document. And overall, it is a really nice real estate deal."

Yet critics of Lennar are openly wondering whether it’s nice for the beleaguered company, which had rapidly plummeting stock value even before the recent real estate meltdown, or nice for the city. Maduli-Williams said the deal works for all parties.

"We have strong financial partners," he said. "Any investors that look at the deal know that is it really solid. It includes mostly $600,000 homes, which are cheap by San Francisco standards. And we are not looking to break ground for another three years, by which time the economy, hopefully, will be in good shape."

Maduli-Williams also observed that despite nationwide housing woes, San Francisco remains "one of two or three top destination spots where there is only so much land left and where folks have very high incomes."

But the health of the San Francisco real estate market (compared to the rest of the nation) combined with Lennar’s ongoing financial woes, including a June 8 bankruptcy at Mare Island, is precisely why some folks are questioning Lennar’s increased profit demands. But Maduli-Williams said, "San Francisco cannot be compared to Mare Island."

According to the draft financing deal (which is non-binding), Lennar, the city, and the agency "will work cooperatively to reduce risks and uncertainties" and "find additional efficiencies and values," to achieve Lennar’s proposed 22.5 percent annual profit margin.

As Maduli-Williams explained, if the developer puts up $800 million in equity and wants a 22 percent return, it would have to get $1.2 billion in land sales. "And just like any developer, they want to get the highest return possible," he said, adding that the project’s proposed community benefits are "hard wired into the deal" and thus are "not threatened" by Lennar’s proposed target return increase.

Lennar’s proposal, which represents a 7.5 percent increase over current project projections, has also received validation from CBRE Consulting, which is a subsidiary of CB Richard Ellis — a global real estate firm headed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum.

In an Oct. 15, 2008 memo (coincidentally written the day President Bush announced a partial nationalization of the US banking system) to Michael Cohen, who heads the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, CBRE’s Mary Smitheram-Sheldon and Thomas Jirovsky observed that, "Based on Consultants’ extensive experience in evaluating large scale mixed-use developments, including military base reuse plans, we are of the opinion that the proposed 22.5 percent per annum target return …is reasonable."

Earlier this year, as Lennar spent $5 million to support Prop. G, CBRE declared that 50 percent affordability in Lennar’s proposed mixed-use development at the shipyard, as was being recommended in Daly’s Prop. F, was "not financially feasible."

At the city’s request, CBRE analyzed Prop. F and concluded in a memo to Cohen that it would reduce Lennar’s revenue by at least $1.1 billion. Reached by phone this week, Jivorsky acknowledged that his firm has done work for different developers around the country for years, including Lennar.

"But we are not working on anything for Lennar in San Francisco," Jivorsky told the Guardian. "Our client is the city of San Francisco and we take our job very seriously. We would never make recommendations that we didn’t believe were in the city’s best interests."

Meanwhile, Cohen told the Guardian that the strain for real estate capital is likely going to push the rate of return demand up even more. Noting that the city agreed to 25 percent returns at Lennar’s previous Treasure Island and Hunters Point Shipyard deals, Cohen said, "Real estate is considered to be a greater risk than it was six months ago, even in San Francisco. So, it’s not so much that we have to negotiate this as have to understand what is required for private capital to invest."

Cohen believes that when the construction plans — which currently have few details spelled out — get more detailed, they will help increase the project’s rate of return. "Which is why," Cohen added, "the developer’s partners are willing to spend a boatload of money."

On Aug. 19, the Redevelopment Agency approved the addition of Kimco Developers and MACTEC Development Corporation as Lennar BVHP’s retail and infrastructure partners, and Scala Real Estate Partners, Hillwood Development, and Estein Associates USA Ltd. as Lennar BVHP’s equity partners.

Cohen also hopes that the 49ers’ intentions towards San Francisco will be resolved by November 2009, when Lennar hopes to enter into an agreement with the football team. The 49ers continue to pursue plans to relocate to Santa Clara, and have not signaled any desire to remain here.

To date, Lennar’s draft financing plan includes an agreement that the developer will contribute $100 million in cash toward construction of a new 49ers stadium, and that the city will enter a long-term $1 ground lease with the 49ers for a 17.4-acre Hunters Point Shipyard site.

Meanwhile, disgruntled community advocates claim that since January, when Feinstein, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mayor Gavin Newsom announced $82 million in federal funding for the cleanup of the Hunters Point Shipyard site, those funds have gone primarily to cleaning up the potential 49ers site.

Power possibilities

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By Amanda Witherell


› amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY San Francisco’s energy future is in flux. On Nov. 4, voters decided the fate of Proposition H, a plan for 100 percent renewable energy by 2040. On the same day, the Board of Supervisors was set to consider a proposal from Mayor Gavin Newsom to retrofit the 32-year-old Mirant Potrero power plant to meet a state mandate for local electricity generation.

The results of both votes occurred after the Guardian deadline, but either way, the city’s energy policy is uncertain, particularly after serious doubts about the viability of the mayor’s proposal were raised at an Oct. 22 Land Use and Economic Development Committee hearing.

The retrofit was hastily developed as an alternative to longstanding plans to replace heavily polluting units of the Mirant plant with new, cleaner, city-owned peaker plants. That plan was derailed after a meeting in May between Newsom and seven Pacific Gas and Electric Co. executives, who were apparently concerned about the city generating its own power.

The Mayor’s office calls the retrofit a "bridge" to a renewable energy future and contends it can be cheaper than and as clean as the city’s peakers. Yet at the hearing, Mike Martin, who’s evaluating the retrofit project for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, said no retrofits have ever reached the emissions goals cited in Newsom’s proposal.

Jeff Henderson, senior project manager for Mirant, defended the $80 million price tag for the project (which is about $30 million cheaper than the city’s plan) but also said that they were "giving a price on a project that’s never been done before." Martin said the permits alone would be twice the price stated in a Mirant-commissioned feasibility study.

Chair of the committee Sup. Sophie Maxwell, who represents the district where the plant is sited, cast cost aside, saying that human lives and the lowest possible emissions were more important to her. Her district has the highest incidences of asthma and cancer in the city.

The retrofit would still emit more nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter than the city’s peaker plants but the Mayor’s Office is banking on it operating less, thus emitting less overall. The numbers crunched for the study by CH2M Hill presume Mirant operating about 156 hours a year, though it is permitted for 877 hours. The city has sued the company in the past for exceeding its permitted hours.

When questioned if the 97 percent emissions reduction proposed was possible, Henderson said, "The only thing that leads us to believe that is we had vendors who would say they could meet that under contract."

Maxwell invited three potential vendors to the hearing. All said the industry standard was 90 percent emissions reduction and that it was infeasible, if not technically impossible, to reach 97 percent. To try may even result in a net gain of particulate matter emissions because the plant would need more ammonia catalyst.

But the Mayor’s Office remained confident in the project. "The experts that presented before the committee were all experts attached to the CT project, so I would not consider them independent third-party experts," Newsom’s director of government affairs Nancy Kirshner-Rodriguez told the Guardian.

Bruce Schaller, vice president of Kansas-based power company Sega, said he wouldn’t bid on this job under the current parameters because, "We would be associated with a project that was a failure."

Tom Flagg, president of Equipment Source Company, said the project was "completely illogical and impossible to do." He pointed out that emissions vary widely. "You have surges in emissions levels. Sometimes it’s 94 percent, sometimes it’s 84 percent … A 97 to 98 percent reduction is impossible because in order to maintain that they have 100 percent reduction at times. It’s an average."

The need for new power generation in San Francisco has been pushed by the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), but environmental groups have urged the city to challenge that mandate. Former California Public Utilities Commission president Loretta Lynch, who spoke against the retrofit plan at the hearing, told the Guardian afterward, "The ISO are ideologues, not engineers. They have no basis in fact that we need any peninsula power production."

Supervisors passed a resolution asking the SFPUC to develop a transmission-only plan to meet Cal-ISO’s reliability demands. The SFPUC said it will present something within the next couple of months.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

In Milk, the new Harvey Milk movie, the hero (as in real life) is well aware that he’s a target and faces regular death threats. He also makes the point – and it’s kind of a theme in the film — that the movement he represents is far bigger than he is. It’s about the movement, not any one person, he keeps telling his supporters.

And that’s what we have to remember now that the Nov. 4 election is over.

Thanks to the weirdness of old-fashioned print publishing schedules, I’m writing this well before election day, and by the time you read it, Obama will have won the election. It’s a giddy feeling, actually winning a campaign on this level after so many bitter disappointments. And that’s fine — we should celebrate while we can.

But we should also remember that the real work starts now — and that’s the work of making sure that President Obama is accountable to the people who put him in office.

No other candidate in my adult life has had the kind of grassroots support that put Obama over the top. From the early days of the primaries, he has raised money on the Internet from tens of thousands of small donors. People who have never worked in a political campaign came out to volunteer for him. He has offered hope — and that’s a dangerous commodity. Because now he has to deliver.

We can’t expect too much too fast — but we can demand that he gives the progressive side of the Democratic Party its due. We don’t want the war to drag on. We don’t want the rich to keep gaining market share. We don’t want big business to derail environmental programs. We actually want change, real change — and we have to keep pushing for it.

Electing a president is necessary, not sufficient. It’s still about the movement.

(And if I’m all wrong, and John McCain is the next president, we all better start singing "O Canada")

Nix Lennar’s higher profit deal

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EDITORIAL The troubled homebuilder that wants to develop the Hunters Point Shipyard and Candlestick Point has come back to the city asking for a higher profit level, more market-rate housing, more retail, and more office space. In essence, Lennar Corp. wants to change the deal voters approved in June. The supervisors should give this a hard look, hold hearings, and check the numbers, because the entire project is looking more shaky and dubious by the day.

Lennar is one of the nation’s largest residential development companies, but it’s been walloped by the drop in the housing market. A Lennar project at Mare Island recently went bust and is being auctioned off. The company’s stock has tanked. And some wonder if it will be able to get the financing necessary for a multibillion dollar project in San Francisco.

But Lennar is not only moving forward — it’s demanding more. In fact, as Sarah Phelan reports on page 16, the Redevelopment Agency just signed a deal with Lennar agreeing that the city and the project sponsor "will work cooperatively to reduce risks and uncertainties" and "find additional efficiencies and values" to achieve the developer’s proposed 22.5 percent annual return target.

That 22.5 percent — which is far more profit than many San Francisco businesses ever make and seems almost obscene in this economic climate — is up 7.5 percent from when the deal was first signed. And remember, Lennar gets the land — public land — essentially free.

Of course, a consulting firm the city hired to evaluate the deal finds that perfectly reasonable. The firm, CBRE Consulting, is a subsidiary of CB Richard Ellis, a global real estate firm headed by Richard Blum, who is married to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a big supporter of the Lennar plan.

The original plan called for 8,500 to 10,000 housing units; that’s now up to 10,500. There’s no significant increase in community amenities, affordable housing, or infrastructure payments.

If this sounds a little funky, it is. From the start, Lennar has been playing around with the numbers and promising more than it may be able to deliver. And if the project starts to go belly up before it’s finished, Lennar will walk away and leave the city with the mess.

We’ve always been a bit dubious about the way the Redevelopment Agency turns to a single "master developer" and gives that private outfit exclusive rights to build on a large piece of land. The deal always seems to be a lot better for the builder than it is for the city.

And this one was bad from the start. At the most, Lennar would offer 25 percent of the units at below-market rates; that’s less than half the amount of affordable housing mandated in the city’s general plan. Much of the land on the site is toxic, and Lennar has been steeply fined by the air quality board for failing to control asbestos dust. The whole concept of a suburban-style community of luxury condos with special freeway access in southeastern San Francisco is inappropriate, if not bizarre.

But voters approved the program after Lennar spent millions on a ballot measure campaign, so the city has to continue working with the developer. But there’s nothing that says the supervisors have to sign off on changes in the deal that don’t serve San Francisco’s interests.

The board ought to demand, at the very least, that Lennar devote some of its higher profit margin to increasing affordable housing — and that the funding for community amenities should be set aside before the builders break ground on the luxury condos. Ideally this entire thing should go back to the drawing board. But short of that, any changes need to benefit the city, not the private developer.

The Thousand Faces Ball

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PREVIEW Imagine the unsavory digs of the Mos Eisley Cantina of Tatooine stormed by a horde of previously barred droids and miscreants and forced to hold a variety show to stave off certain destruction — it’s a scene reminiscent of those generated by San Francisco’s OmniCircus, which has been simultaneously thrilling and troubling audiences for two decades. Founded by local surrealist artist and roboteer Frank Garvey, first as a film project, then as a live performance troupe, OmniCircus combines the high tech with the lowdown, propagating an environment where down-and-out robot performers and their human counterparts can come together under one roof, creating a spectacle part Transmetropolitan, part Captured! By Robots, and part The Black Rider. No mere vehicle for cream pies and contortionists, this darkly subversive one-ring circus has all the hallmarks of an ecstatically apocalyptic experience: music, mayhem, and mechanical mendicants. The Thousand Faces Ball marks the latest incarnation of the project, introducing the Moth nor Rust band starring OmniDiva Joan Loon, and retaining the talents of longtime DeusMachina collaborators, including Daniel Berkman and Geoffrey Pond, as well as an army of robotic riffraff: junkies, beggars, street preachers, and whores. Billed as the world’s first robotic theatre ensemble, OmniCircus is nevertheless no ephemeral vision of the future, but a thorough examination of the present through an unsentimental, yet curiously life-affirming lens.

THE THOUSAND FACES BALL Sat/8, 8 p.m., $10 donation. OmniCircus, 550 Natoma, SF.

(415) 701-0686, www.omnicircus.com

Alice Russell

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PREVIEW When I see the name Alice Russell, I think first of Alice Coltrane and Arthur Russell before I think of this Brighton, UK, blue-eyed soul revivalist. And I’m aware that this may unfairly predispose me to her music, which is not without its charms.

The two other major UK soul vocalists to make an impact stateside, Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse, arrived as self-generating publicity machines whose public images matched their respective styles. In contrast, Russell’s music is up without being overtly rebellious. The posturing’s explicitly enthusiastic, without the attack of Winehouse or the reggae-pop concision of Allen, on Russell’s fourth LP, and first bid for a wider audience, Pot of Gold (Six Degrees/Little Poppet), which are at their best and most unique on songs like "Let Us Be Loving," which stitches together a dubby, tumbling rhythm and gives Russell some space disco ethereality.

But the album also has moments of superfluity. I don’t get the sense that Russell felt compelled to cover Gnarls Barkley’s "Crazy" because she could coax some radical reading of it. Instead, it’s plunked down in the disc’s otherwise-decent closing stretch, as if another anchor wouldn’t do a better job of giving listeners a sense of how Russell stands apart from the nu-soul pack. In this light, it’s hard not to see nu-soul as a rockist backlash against the perceived inauthenticity of nu-rave, which ultimately isn’t inauthentic enough to bother anyone.

ALICE RUSSELL Mon/10, 9 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. (415) 771-1421, www.theindependentsf.com

Dungen

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PREVIEW Calling all Invisibl Skratch Picklz: one of your most unlikely acolytes is dying to meet you — and perhaps someday even be like you: Gustav Ejstes of Dungen, Sweden’s premier psych-rock band. "I’m a huuuge fan!" exclaims Ejstes by phone from the offices of his label, Kemado. "They’re definitely not underrated. I realized this when I went to a record store in New York. I was looking for scratch records, and this girl said, ‘No one listens to that anymore,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t care!’ This is the shit. I love it."

Scratching his hip-hop itch was the shaggy-haired band leader’s sole comfort after an intense bout of touring following the US release of Dungen’s much-praised Ta Det Lugnt (Subliminal Sounds/Kemado, 2004). "I went to this house and practiced scratching for a year and only did that!" he marvels. Only later did he get a piano from his grandmother and started playing during breaks from his scratching exercises. He started writing songs and soon realized, "’OK, here’s another album. Now I feel like I really enjoy this again.’"

The end result was 4 (Kemado): a passionate and, yes, piano-based recording brimming with eloquent, stretched-out jams and jazzy coloration, spattered by guitarist Reine Fisk’s touches of shred and aching, airborne lines of flute and strings, both played by multi-instrumentalist Ejstes. A new approach to songwriting and recording might have contributed to the disc’s loose and spacious bright sound. Instead of impatiently recording each tune the same day he wrote it, much as he had in the past, Ejstes let the songs breathe and mutate before bringing them to the rest of the group. These days he’s far from precious about the process — or many other things, for that matter. Asked about the bare-bones 4 title — for Dungen’s fifth album — Ejstes stammers, "I just felt like this was the fourth, the fourth piece of shit," before howling with laughter. "I have to write that down."

DUNGEN With Women and Social Studies. Mon/10, 9 p.m., $14. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

Vampire romance

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REVIEW If you see but one preteen vampire romance this year, make it Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. Rumor has it that Hollywood is looking to remake Alfredson’s adaptation of a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, with Cloverfield‘s Matt Reeves in the director’s seat. While Reeves might bring boffo box-office numbers, it’s safe to assume that he’ll either overlook or sledgehammer Alfredson’s sleight-of-hand talent for finding the art in pop iconography and vice-versa — areas where Alfredson rivals Bong Joon-ho. He brings fiery Carl Theodor Dreyer undercurrents to a Spielberg revenge of the nerds scenario, mining the dark heart of childhood with the same revelatory and musical assuredness that fellow Swedish director Lukas Moodysson (1998’s Show Me Love; 2002’s Lilya 4-ever) exhibited before falling into a digital black hole.

The story is simple: loner outcast Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) falls for Eli (the superb Lina Leandersson), a pale girl with a big secret. The pleasure of Let the Right One In resides in its flair for surprise, from the uncanny performances of the lead actors to humorous surreal motifs such as an enormous white poodle lapping at a plastic jug of blood abandoned in a forest. In one standout set piece with direct connections to the film’s title, Alfredson reverses the genuinely creepy window-tapping found in the original 1979 TV version of Salem’s Lot. Throughout, he explores the subversive age-spanning love scenarios in Lindqvist’s story with just the right amount of restraint, so that instead of provoking outrage, he unsettles assumptions. He’s not bad at executing decapitation and immolation scenes, either.

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN opens Fri/7 at Bay Area theaters.

“Relay”

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REVIEW Those of you who can remember them know that cassette tapes aren’t exactly sturdy. Forever getting tangled in car stereos or being left to bake on dashboards, during their commercial heyday they practically advertised their obsolescence — Maxell ads be damned. But anyone who has managed to wrest the audio from within a warped plastic shell knows that the metamorphosed sound can be strangely beautiful. Composer Daniel Basinkski has made a second career out of looping the death rattles from his magnetic tape archive, and Kevin Shields nearly bankrupted Creation Records while trying to make his guitars sound like so many corroded C-90 tapes.

Dan Nelson invokes the cassette’s history of planned obsolescence in "140 Ways to Make a Cassette Tape Unlistenable," his contribution to "Relay," a modest group show of sound-related art at the LAB. Nelson is no stranger to lists, as attested to by his handsome grimoire All Known Metal Bands (McSweeney’s, 300 pages, $22). Here, though, he catalogs his repeated and sometimes frustrated attempts at destruction rather than posterity. Lining the walls are vitrines and photographs displaying the remains of cassettes: encased in cement, mobster-style; wrapped in electrical tape; atomized from hammer blows; power-sawed in two. There are letters documenting Nelson’s attempts to send tapes over Niagara Falls and into outer space on a NASA rocket. Most hilariously, a missive to the Gagosian Gallery pleads for one of Nelson’s cassettes to be interred with Ed Ruscha when Ruscha passes on.

Nelson’s installation mines its laughs and its conceptual heft from a self-deprecatory stance: cassettes have long been declared a dead medium, despite whatever nostalgic eternal return may be planned by the Urban Outfitters cultural industrial complex. The ridiculous length to which Nelson is willing to pursue his mission only further underscores this fact. The flogging of a dead horse is rarely so much fun to watch.

RELAY Through Nov. 15. Wed.–Sat., 1–6 p.m. The LAB, 2948 16th St., SF. (415) 864-8855. www.thelab.org

The trouble with hairy

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HALLOWEEN SCREENING What’s most shocking about Oliver Stone’s W. — beyond anything in the too-mild movie itself — is that it’s simply dramatizing a still-seated US president. That still feels like a breach in our near-extinct public decorum, however much Shrub has degraded the office’s dignity.

Yet there’s precedent: one prior era brought a slew of movies about its Disaster-in-Chief. Once Watergate broke, filmmakers from late radical-left documentarian Emile de Antonio to future Roller Boogie (1979) director Mark L. Lester weighed in with parodies.

Little-noticed then, these films have only grown more obscure since. But one gets revived as the Pacific Film Archive’s Halloween choice this year. Despite all its flaws, it remains one of the more hilarious metaphors ever for political corruption. We’re talking The Werewolf of Washington.

Werewolf was the second and last feature by writer-director Milton Moses Ginsberg, whose Coming Apart (Rip Torn as a psychiatrist having sex with his female patients) created a minor splash in 1969. That film was an early exercise in faux-found footage narrative à la The Blair Witch Project (1999). By contrast, his hairy 1973 follow-up looks as stylistically square as the Nixon White House, last bastion of political Lawrence Welk-dom.

This is one of those movies hinged entirely on a crazed lead performance. Dean Stockwell, old-Hollywood child actor turned counterculture collage artist turned weirdo cult actor (1986’s Blue Velvet, 1984’s Dune) plays Jack Whittier, youngest member of the White House press corps. Sweetheart to the president’s daughter, Whittier jilts her by taking an assignment in Hungary — where something not-quite-human bites his ass. Returning stateside, he’s recruited as press secretary to a president (Biff McGuire) unlike Tricky Dick in look or manner.

But Werewolf‘s satire is indirect, if not exactly subtle. Despite pleas to be fired — even arrested — Whittier keeps getting kicked upstairs. He’s too much an asset to a paranoid administration under scandalized fire. That value is not unrelated to mysterious man-beast slayings of various loudmouths exposing the administration’s ethical canyon-gaps. Victims include critical journalists, inconvenient political wives, and ill-fated DC residents who stumble across supernatural murder scenes.

The Werewolf of Washington is crude, sloppy, aesthetically ugly, and deliberately ridiculous. But Stockwell is hilarious, particularly during those twitchy lycanthropic transformations where he turns shock-white haired and fanged. This genius turn floats an otherwise flimsy film.

THE WEREWOLF OF WASHINGTON

Fri/31, 8 p.m., $5.50-$9.50

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

No-brainer

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW The title of David Szlasa’s peculiar, compact, and appealing new work suggests one ready avenue of flight from a world gone mad, but in fact fantasies of escape take more than one form in My Hot Lobotomy, now up at CounterPULSE. And while escapism is exactly what the piece concerns itself with, the import is anything but apathetic or disengaged. A cheerfully quirky, Beckett-like duet wrapped in luxurious silences, snatches of recorded dialogue, short blasts of song and free-style dance, and a dreamy videoscape of environmental disintegration, My Hot Lobotomy is full of restive thought.

Like Szlasa’s installation-performance work on the atomic bomb, 2004’s GADGET, My Hot Lobotomy pokes at that psychic terrain joining the human capacity for denial with man-made catastrophe. In this case, the catastrophe is the rapid warming of the planet, which remains stubbornly just beyond the necessary concerted and rational response. But Lobotomy‘s approach is both more traditional and more oblique than the environmental strategy employed in GADGET, which had audiences wandering around a noisy club-like atmosphere enveloped by video projections and spotted with localized audio segments.

Quietly trained on the internal and external minutiae of its main character — a mute and semi-vegetative post-op named Joey (Erin Mei-Ling Stuart) — the play never feels crudely weighty or political, let alone like a piece of agitprop. Instead, it unfolds like a loopy, semi-looping trance, a restless and sardonic ditty, or a closet poem stashed away in Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Lobotomy‘s low-key faux naiveté bristling with caged energies and subversive instincts — much as Joey’s shiny turquoise sneaks, popping out from under a bland ensemble of sports coat and chinos, hints at dormant life beneath a numbed surface.

The play acts to slow us down almost immediately — almost as much as Joey, who does nothing for the first several minutes but stare back at us blankly from a chair in the center of the stage. This mirror effect, uncomfortably amusing, grows in significance when we learn that Joey — in shades of the Ramones — has given himself a homemade lobotomy. Well, you might ask, who hasn’t? Szlasa gives us plenty of space to ponder the question, gradually unfolding the method and motive behind Joey’s condition as we share in the meditative, vaguely bemused mood he projects.

It’s a knock at the door that disturbs this waking slumber. A guy (Spencer Evans) enters delivering a pizza, a slice of which Joey chews with silent satisfaction. The man then returns with a boombox and a cassette tape, careful to demonstrate to Joey how they go together. On the tape, Joey speaks to himself with prerecorded words of instruction, clarification, and encouragement. The delivery guy, we learn, has been paid in advance to bring all Joey will need in his new, streamlined life. Returning to the stage with a guitar, he also delivers something to the audience, at odd moments and even odd angles: a series of witty songs — variously contributed by Carrie Baum, Cody James Bentley, Sean Hayes, and Joshua Lowe — telling the story of Joey in terms that slyly critique what they describe.

The limited world Joey has structured for his new self — with its prerecorded, too certain insistence that everything is "gonna be really, really great" — eventually unravels among a clutter of pizza boxes and, more alarmingly, a series of fraught dreams, as the unstructured world outside, which appears as a video montage of global warming over a gentle cloudscape at the back of the stage, slips in with growing insistence. The increasing dissonance provokes another transformation in Joey, and another attempt to scurry for cover. It’s a rush of new life whose meaning may be ambiguous, but hardly empty-headed.

MY HOT LOBOTOMY

Through Nov. 2

Thurs.–Sat. and Nov. 2, 8 p.m., $25

CounterPULSE

1310 Mission, SF

1-800-838-3006

Bonjour joie

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Zut alors, where is the joie, mademoiselles? Judging from the current pop charts, rage is all the rage: girls just want to "start a fight" is the message from Pink, Brit, and Katy Perry, even as pop’s queen Beyoncé, a.k.a., Sasha Fierce, chooses the somber rather than ferocious path with "If I Were a Boy."

Maybe it’s too much to ask for a recession-wracked America to find a battered vein of real happiness. And perhaps that’s why I’m looking for bliss overseas. You have to be a crusty old croissant to not succumb to the wholesomely sexy, gallic-girls-just-want-to-have-fun charm of Yelle, née Julie Budet. In a year when every pop thang coming out of Francophone music-makers seems to exude a freshness that escapes rage-aholic American pop, along comes Yelle with the cutest bob this side of Rihanna and those prep-cool dancing boys in "A Cause Des Garçons." Not for nothing does Budet’s acronym nom de plume stand for "You Enjoy Life." Could this be the new yé-yé?

Resembling a sprightly Feist onstage, the jeune fille also coughed up the catchiest bit of whistle(-along) bait since Peter Bjorn and John’s "Young Folks": "Ce Jeu." Yelle’s palpable ’80s-throwback aesthetic crossed with the twirly-girly, smiley-faced nouveau-rave dancefloor vibe in the "Je Veux Te Voir" video — squeaky-cute aerobics, girl-gang dance moves, and a crayon-bright pop aesthetic, oo-la-la — evokes the seemingly last microsecond of dance-pop innocence when Her Madgesty, Salt-N-Pepa, and J.J. Fad ruled the school canteen. Who needs to speak the language when confronted with the inexorable, happy-sad-but-mostly-happy sizzle of "Tristesse/Joie," given a Reebok commercial makeover this past summer?

So why France and why now? According to Budet, "maybe because France is well-located between English pop, German electro, and American production! It’s geography!"

Mais oui, Budet enjoys life — and exclamation points! Though our trans-Atlantic phone tête-à-tête didn’t materialize, I managed to connect via e-mail with the Bretagne-born vocalist, who’s more comfortable answering questions in writing when she isn’t slinking around onstage like a T-shirted electro-pop whippet. Of course, she isn’t quite as wholesome as she might appear: her first MySpace hit — "Short Dick Cuizi," a poke at Cuizinier of French hip-hop group TTC and an early incarnation of "Je Veux Te Voir," famously samples the bassline of "Short Dick Man." "The songs are about our lives and our productions," she writes. "I think about everything in Pop Up [her new debut on Source Etc/Caroline/EMI]: dildos, but death, too."

Some fans might be taken aback by Budet’s live appearances, which are low on the diva-esque antics and high on the every-girl bounce. "We naturally worked hard on our show," she writes, predicting ghosts onstage for her Halloween appearance. "It’s normal for us to give a real show, not only the songs like on the album. Drums bring a lot of energy, and we build our live set like a DJ set, mixing the songs together, adding production. We have a compromise that seems to work: we rock the dancers and we dance the rockers!" So get your fill of Yelle because 2009 will be "the year of the break," Budet suspects. "We have to take time at home or people are gonna hate us, ahah!"

YELLE

With Passion Pit and Funeral Party

Fri/31, 9 p.m. doors, $20–$25

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

www.mezzaninesf.com

PRECIOUS, PRECIOUS

Forget Uncle Sam: the post-punk superstar among us, Blixa Bargeld, needs you. The Einsturzende Neubauten frontperson, onetime Bad Seed, and current San Francisco resident has a new project — this after his wonderfully wry, dry-humored Rede/Speech performance here in 2006: The Execution of Precious Memories. Bargeld composes a new libretto for each performance, using memories gathered from questionnaires filled out by anonymous denizens of the performance site. To create this piece in its tenth iteration — and for the first time since 2001 — Bargeld plans to collaborate with the musicians of Nanos Operetta and the dancers of Kunst-Stoff. "It’s a poetical process," says Bargeld by phone. "There’s something fictitious about memories. The moment you give away a memory and fix it in a form and have it seen by someone else it becomes a piece of fiction. It’s not connected to yourself any longer." So let go and risk seeing intimate memories transformed: Bay Area residents are invited to go to www.blixa-bargeld.com/VKESF to fill out the 50-question survey — give it at least 30 minutes, cautions Bargeld — before the Nov. 1 deadline.

NO REST

THE SPINTO BAND


The revered indie rockers definitely weren’t sprinting when it came to getting out Moonwink (Park the Van/Fierce Panda). Sat/1, 10 p.m., and Sun/2, 9 p.m., $12–$14. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

DIPLO, ABE VIGODA, TELEPATHE, AND BOY 8 BIT


Eclecticism? OK! The "Mad Decent" tour mixes the DJ-producer with NorCal’s art-punks, Brooklyn art-dreamers, and a London minimalist beatmaker. Mon/3, 8 p.m., $16. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

SECRET MACHINES AND THE DEARS


How do you turn a backlash around? Give a listen to the ambitious new space-psych Secret Machines (TSM). And the Dears continue to endear with Missiles (Dangerbird). Mon/3, 8 p.m., $22. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.independentsf.com

HUBERT SUMLIN


The blues guitar legend made a lasting impact on rock thanks to his work with Howlin’ Wolf. With Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox, Buddy Guy, and others. Mon/3, 8 p.m., $45–$79.50. Masonic Center, 1111 California, SF. www.ticketmaster.com

Shades of green

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› news@sfbg.com

California’s major environmental groups have long called for the state to do more to promote a switch to renewable energy sources, yet they widely oppose two state ballot measures that claim to do so, urging votes to reject Propositions 7 and 10 as false promises. On the local level, however, the environmental community strongly supports Proposition H, the Clean Energy Act, against well-funded attacks by Pacific Gas & Electric Co.

Prop. 7 would require utilities to acquire half their power through renewable energy resources, and Prop. 10 would provide $5 billion in alternative fuel research and development. Dan Kalb, policy coordinator for the Union of Concerned Scientists, believes the basic goal of Prop. 7 is great, but that its execution would not work. "It’s something that sounds very good," Kalb told us. "Everyone is concerned about renewable energy, but we can’t afford to pass a law that isn’t going to work."

Opponents of Prop. 7 have argued that it is poorly written, would decrease current fine levels for noncompliance, and has many loopholes that only the largest producers can take advantage of. Natural Resources Defense Council media director Craig Noble told us, "It just doesn’t make sense. It’s deeply flawed … it’s so poorly written."

Proponents claim that it’s not poorly written, but that opponents have simply misread it. For example, opponents say Prop. 7 could exclude small businesses that generate less than 30 MW of renewable power. But proponents say they have misread Section 14 of the proposition, causing this confusion. Yet on Aug. 7 a Superior Court judge ruled that Prop. 7 could exclude those small businesses.

In all, the Yes on 7 campaign has 25 endorsements from politicians, organizations, and groups while the No on 7 campaign has more than 400 from politicians, organizations, groups, and cities opposing the measure.

"We’re extremely concerned that [Prop. 7 will] set us back, not move us forward," Kalb said.

If passed, Prop. 10 will authorize $5 billion in general obligation funds for alternative fuel research and development, but require $10 billion to be paid back over 30 years once interest has been figured in. Richard Holober, executive director of Consumer Federation, called the measure, "a $10 billion raid on California’s treasury."

He went on to tell the Guardian that public support for research of this kind is important, but that, "Prop. 10 has no accountability. It is filled with incredibly huge loopholes."

Under Prop. 10, a rebate will be given to consumers who purchase clean energy cars. At the same time, they can keep their old vehicles and potentially sell them. Yes on 10 media contact Amy Thoma confirmed this. Holober stated that California already has programs in place that require owners to scrap or donate their polluting vehicles after they receive a rebate; they also require residency in California.

Opponents of Prop. 10 also point out that the proposition requires no net decrease in pollution, meaning that new vehicles can be as polluting as those they replace, as long as they do not pollute more. Yet Thoma claims the measure will reduce emissions by a total of 4.1 million tons per year.

Noble told the Guardian: "We need to be reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, but Props. 7 and 10 are not the way to do it."

As for Prop. H, the measure would require that by 2017, half the energy sold in San Francisco would be from renewable energy sources, rising to 100 percent by 2040. It also calls for the city to study how best to achieve that goal, including if public power projects could play a role.

Corey Cook, an associate professor of political science at the University of San Francisco, told the Guardian that "Prop H is a small but not insignificant first step toward public power in San Francisco. [It] authorizes, but doesn’t actually do anything aside from creating a study to determine the feasibility and cost of buying out PG&E’s electricity grid and having the city generate power."

Environmentalists have rejected Props. 7 and 10 because they are written poorly and counterproductive, but they embrace Prop. H because it simply increases renewable energy standards, includes numerous procedural safeguards, and, as Cook said, "takes a first step toward public power."

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