Volume 43 [2008–09]

Anniversary Issue: A city transformed

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When I first started writing about sustainable cities in the Guardian, I was 28, the paper was 20, urban environmentalism was still considered an oxymoron in much of the mainstream political world — and we didn’t have a name for what we were discussing.

In fact, the story I wrote on Oct. 15, 1986 was called "The city reconceived — a radical proposal" It was part of our 20th anniversary issue, but it wasn’t on the cover, and it wasn’t the lead feature. It was just something I had been thinking about a lot at the time, and since I was reporting a lot on everything that was wrong with city planning, it seemed to make sense to step back and talk about the way things ought to be.

It’s kind of strange to look back at that article today. So much has changed; so little has changed.

"It’s easy to argue that the problems are national, even international in scope, and that no progressive economic policy is possible without basic, fundamental changes in the US economic system," I wrote. "I’m sympathetic to that sort of argument, but somehow, it doesn’t satisfy me. A transformation of the nation’s economic orders is a long way off — and it may not be possible at all unless the seeds are sown at the local level."

I can see from the interviews I did back then the beginnings of what is now known internationally as the sustainable city movement. In 1986, there were a few scrawny nonprofits and a handful of academics; today there are think tanks, institutes, reports, studies, commissions. Mayors all over the world talk about sustainability; here in San Francisco, Gavin Newsom has a full-time $130,000-a-year staffer dedicated to developing environmentally sustainable policies.

And yet, when you look at what the word really means, and what a truly sustainable city would look like, you realize that, 22 years later, we’re still talking about a city reconceived. It’s still — in terms of what politicians like Newsom are putting on the table — a pretty radical proposal.

Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former Norwegian prime minister, chaired a United Nations commission in 1983 that came up with what is probably the first official definition of sustainable development: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." An urban planning conference in Berlin in 2000 adopted a sustainability statement that talked about "the flow principle, that is based on an equilibrium of material and energy and also financial input/output."

The Vermont-based Institute for Sustainable Communities goes a bit further: "Sustainable communities have a strong sense of place … They are places that build on their assets and dare to be innovative." You can look on the Web and find a thousand more statements and definitions, some highly technical and some so hippy-dippy they’re painful to read.

But in the end, any real definition of a sustainable city starts with the second part of the phrase.

Cities are eternal. The world’s great metropolises have always outlived modest constructs like nations and empires. They are, as the late urbanist Jane Jacobs used to say, the building blocks of society.

But in the United States, and in much of the rest of the world, cities have become part of a globalized economic system that severs the use of products and services from their origin. Where did that burger you just ate come from? How about the lettuce at the supermarket? The clothes you wear to work? The electricity you use when you turn on your computer? Who controls the flow of money into and out of your community? Who controls the place you live, the money that comes out of the nearest ATM? What about your job — where does your paycheck come from, and where does it go?

How do those factors affect how you live — and how well you live — in San Francisco?

The thing is, you probably don’t know. And what you don’t know is hurting you.

Because a truly sustainable city isn’t just an environmental notion, and a sustainable urban policy isn’t just about planting gardens in front of City Hall. It’s about defining — and changing — the way we think about the economy, politics, business, and the local power structure.

That’s been part of the Guardian‘s mission for 42 years.

When you talk to progressive economists these days (and yeah, there are a few) and people who think about building sustainable local economies (and there are a growing number of them), they say three things:

Cities have to think about how to become more self-sufficient, how to provide locally things that we once imported, how to use local resources to create new jobs and economic activity. Those new jobs and sustainable practices are most likely to come from locally owned, independent businesses. And — particularly these days — the public sector has to play a major role.

That’s what the stories in this anniversary issue are about. A sustainable economy means encouraging start-ups and innovation, using public financing resources, and avoiding a reliance on big chains and giant corporations. A sustainable transportation and land-use policy means building neighborhoods with housing for diverse income groups and cutting down on cars and making the city a better, safer place to walk and bike. A sustainable energy policy means locally controlled renewable generation, not a monster private utility that ferries in nuclear and fossil-fuel power from out of town. Sustainable food means using community agriculture, right here in town.

It’s surprising how simple that sounds — and how politically difficult it is to implement.

See, in San Francisco — this great liberal city — policy decisions are still controlled to a stunning extent by a small group of powerful people who were never elected to anything. You can see how it looks this year by following the money chart we ran in the last issue. It showed how five downtown organizations have been raising and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to take control of the Board of Supervisors.

Or look at Proposition H, the Clean Energy Act on the November ballot. Prop. H is a prescription for sustainable energy; the measure would not only set aggressive goals for renewables, it would shift control of the city’s energy agenda away from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and give it to the people of San Francisco.

Big private energy companies may spend a lot of money on "green" advertising, but they never have, and never will, take the steps needed to create a sustainable system. Because that would mean undercutting their profits and limiting their growth.

A sustainable energy system would use much less electricity and import almost none. It would operate with thousands of small, distributed generation facilities, like solar panels on roofs. And power from the sun and wind is free. That doesn’t work for a giant profit-hungry utility; it works great for a community-based system.

So where is Newsom, who likes to call himself a green mayor? He’s against it. Where are the business leaders in town? Standing with PG&E. Where is the power structure? Fighting to prevent a sustainable energy future for San Francisco.

And the big chain-owned daily newspaper is right there with them.


There aren’t many locally-owned independent newspapers left in America. Even the alternative press has become chain-happy. In Boston, New York, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles … most of the nation’s biggest cities, the once-upstart weeklies are owned by big national chains.
But in San Francisco, the paper Bruce Brugmann and Jean Dibble founded in 1966 is still the paper that Bruce Brugmann and Jean Dibble run in 2008.
The Guardian was always both a newspaper and small business. Unlike a lot of the wild and wonderful publications that flourished in San Francisco in the 1960s, the Guardian was built to last. Bruce and Jean decided from the start that this would be their life’s work — and although it was a bit dicey at times, the paper has survived and grown into one of the most influential weeklies in the country.
The Guardian was always a part of San Francisco. We believe in this city, in this community, in its life and culture and grassroots politics. We’ve always taken an active role in trying to improve the place where we live and work, and we’re proud of it.
Over the years that has meant exposing the corrupt (and secretive) gang that was trying to turn San Francisco into another Manhattan. It’s meant publishing a pioneering cost-benefit study showing that high-rise office development costs the city more in services than it generates in taxes. It’s meant funding and publishing the first major local study showing that small businesses create most of the net new jobs in San Francisco. It’s meant revealing how PG&E violates federal law and steals cheap power from San Francisco. It’s meant competing with — and writing about — the local daily newspaper monopoly. It’s meant fighting privatization, from the Presidio to City Hall, and pushing for a Sunshine Ordinance to keep the politicians honest. It’s meant siding with the neighborhoods and the artists and the tenants against what we’ve called the economic cleansing of San Francisco.
And this year, it means promoting a real vision of what a sustainable city would look like. Which is, really, what the Guardian has been about all these 42 amazing years. *

Anniversary Issue: People’s power

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> amanda@sfbg.com

Living in a city like San Francisco, it’s pretty easy to advance your personal environmental prerogative. You can walk, ride your bike, or take public transportation almost anywhere you want to go. You can spurn the dominant consumer consciousness and buy used clothes and household goods at thrift stores. You can take short showers and drink clean Hetch Hetchy tap water instead of the bottled stuff. You can pick organic cornflakes over Kellogg’s version. You can even go to a worker-owned co-op that sells mostly organic goods and buy produce from Bay Area growers at the farmers markets.

But when it comes to energy, you’re stuck.

You’re stuck with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. You’re stuck buying electricity that’s 89 percent environmentally unsound, from a company that can’t even meet the modest state requirement of 20 percent renewable by 2010.

The $12 billion utility company offers absolutely no way for consumers to purchase 100 percent green energy, although some of its counterparts, including publicly owned Sacramento Municipal Utility District and Silicon Valley Power, make that option available.

Sure, you can use less electricity by screwing compact fluorescent light bulbs into your lamps, unplugging your cell phone charger when you leave the house, and hanging your clothes on the line to dry. But you can’t look at the diesel and gas-fired Potrero Hill power plant and say, "Nope, I’m getting my power elsewhere."

What if you could? What if you could hike to the top of Bernal Hill or Mount Sutro and look out across the skyline of San Francisco and no longer see any power plant stacks belching fumes? What if you saw solar panels shimmering on nearly every roof, and wind turbines spinning furiously in the late afternoon breeze, and you knew that your apartment didn’t depend on a distant fossil fuel plant polluting Antioch, or an aging nuclear plant menacing the people of San Luis Obispo?

That’s what a long-term financially and environmentally sustainable energy system for San Francisco would look like. The picture would include thousands of small-scale, locally-owned solar panels and wind turbines and geothermal home heating pumps and plug-in hybrid cars, distributed throughout the city, feeding into a grid that uses wireless technology to monitor and automatically adjust loads in tiny ways you don’t even notice.

It would also involve a new economic model that doesn’t require you to own a home to own solar power, and a system that uses off-the-shelf and emerging technologies to promote efficiency. The city would use its low interest bonding ability to invest in larger tidal power and wind farm infrastructure, and pay for things like burying power lines and training the next generation of city workers to run the new, smarter energy grid and maintain and install more renewable energy.

It isn’t pie in the sky, either — most of the technologies exist, the funding structures are there, and the goals are real: Al Gore has said the country could have 100 percent renewable energy in 10 years, and he’s right.

San Francisco is actually on the path to making it happen — with a November ballot measure, Proposition H, and a community choice aggregation system — if City Hall and the voters can get beyond PG&E’s lobbying and lies.

Imagine you’re a longtime tenant in a rent-controlled apartment with a landlord who hasn’t bothered to put solar panels on the roof because he or she doesn’t pay the electric bill (you do). But it doesn’t matter, because you actually own shares in a vast network of photovoltaic panels distributed all over the city, maintained and managed by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC).

You, along with the thousands of other San Franciscans who are part of this power cooperative, pay a flat rate for enough shares to meet your energy needs. Over time, as the upfront cost of the system is paid off, your rates decrease and your power bill drops so low it is barely a factor in your life. And the SFPUC helped you find ways to make your apartment more energy efficient, so that some of your wasted electricity could be freed for other people to use. That way, the city wouldn’t have to spend more public money building a new power plant. And the panels you own provide more electricity than you actually need — so you’re making a little money selling the excess to other residents.

This is the vision of what would happen under Proposition H and community choice aggregation (CCA), the city’s proposed plan for locally controlled power. "It unbundles the location of the resource from the ownership so renters can participate," said Paul Fenn, CEO of Local Power and lead author of the city’s CCA plan. That’s key for a city like San Francisco, where two-thirds of the population rents.

Right now, even though the city has some robust incentives for purchasing solar panels, buyers still need deep pockets to cover the upfront cost.

But the city can use its low-interest bonding authority to purchase panels in bulk and identify well-oriented, available roof space to install them. The roof owner could own the panels, rent the space, just buy the power, or opt out entirely. "It’s not just public power, it’s community power," Fenn said. "It’s not just owned by the government — it’s owned by the people."

SMUD — a model public power agency — offers its customers something similar, "solar shares" in an array of panels. Shares start at $10.75 for a half-kilowatt and, depending on how much energy you use, you would save between $4 and $50 per month.

California’s CCA law — Assembly Bill 117, authored by state Sen. Carole Migden and passed in 2002 — allows counties to become their own energy providers and buy or build their own power, then pipe it to residents using the existing transmission infrastructure owned by the utility company. As a CCA, the city could pursue green energy more aggressively than PG&E does, could set its own rates, and make rules about how people are compensated for their power.

For example, current metering laws allow you to be credited the extra energy your solar panels produce during times they aren’t producing. But if at the end of the year your system generates more power than you use, PG&E keeps the surplus — for free. The CCA could pay you a fair rate for it instead.

San Francisco’s current CCA plan lays out the financing and acquisition for 51 percent renewable energy by 2017.

That’s about 360 MW of energy — and the upfront costs for solar panels on homes, businesses, and city buildings, as well as a 150 MW wind farm and scores of other energy-saving measures, are financed by a $1.2 billion revenue bond. Assuming a good interest rate of about 5.5 percent and a 20-year payback, that amounts to $99 million a year for the city.

Rates would cover this and any excess revenue could lower bills or fund future renewable energy projects. And, if voters pass Prop H in November, the city will be required to provide 100 percent renewable energy by 2040. Prop. H builds on the existing CCA plan by requiring the city to look at owning its own transmission and distribution system — a program that would bring in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, enough to fund extensive conservation and renewable programs. How can clean, reliable, low-cost energy be right on the horizon? Simple: Public ownership and decentralized local generation.

The benefits of publicly owned, locally based energy are vast. Local distribution cuts the cost of building large transmission lines and saves a lot of energy that’s lost as heat from high voltage electricity traveling long distances. Renewable energy doesn’t use fuel, and fuel is what we’re really paying for from PG&E — which is also a natural gas company.

The city owns no fossil fuel-reliant infrastructure, but PG&E is deeply invested in natural gas, gets about 40 percent of its energy from it, and has four new gas plants under construction. "As a society, we have to decide whether we want to get on the up elevator or the down elevator," said Robert Freehling, research director for Local Power. "Over time, fuel costs more and more. We make all these investments in hardware and tend to forget that it’s a promise to spend more money later. With solar panels and wind turbines there are no risks that the cost of wind or sunlight is going to go up in five years."

Natural gas, as well as every other fossil fuel, definitely will rise in price. (PG&E recently raised rates 6 percent to reflect that.) If a carbon tax or a cap and trade law is implemented, it’ll go up even more.

"Ultimately what will happen is that fossil fuels will get more expensive and renewable energy will become more affordable," Freehling said.

Would the city do a better job of promoting energy efficiency than PG&E? Look at the record.

Between 2003 and 2005, a Peak Energy Program was undertaken as a partnership between PG&E and the SF Department of the Environment (SFE) with $16.3 million in state money. In an August 2006 report, the Office of the Legislative Analyst found that with only an eighth of the funding, SFE was responsible for more than one-fifth of the energy savings. In other words, the city used the money more efficiently than PG&E.

The major criticism of most renewable energy technologies is that they’re intermittent, meaning they can’t provide power all day and all night. The sun goes down; the wind fades. Nuclear, coal, and natural gas are always on because we need power. And though many energy experts have asserted that the grid still needs at least some base load power, this assumes we’ll never apply technology to the system in any meaningful way.

But those critics are talking about a stupid grid — and the days when energy was managed that way are over. Federal and state regulators began meeting as a smart grid task force this year.

In a smart-grid world with 100 percent renewables, intermittent resources are blended to meet the current load, and the load is tweaked in minor, unnoticeable ways to meet what the resources can provide.

Suppose, for example, that it’s mid-afternoon on a hot day and a cloud bank passes over San Francisco, causing the output from all the city’s rooftop solar panels to decrease slightly. The smart grid would instantly send a signal to 10,000 air conditioners and shut them off for 15 minutes until the cloud passes. Later that night, perhaps the output from the city’s wind farm dips from 150 MW to 100 MW — the grid would automatically turn down everyone’s refrigerator by one degree.

"It’s called capacity-balancing," Fenn said. "It’s part of how you go greener and stay cheaper."

But PG&E will never pursue real green energy because in the long run, there’s no profit in it. "That’s like trying to persuade AT&T, back in 1975, to pursue developing the Internet," Fenn said. "We’re not looking for a 20 percent improvement. We want a complete transformation." *

Sustainable San Francisco

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In honor of our 42nd year printing the news and raising hell, the Guardian imagines a sustainable future for San Francisco, with visions for energy, land use, food, transportation, culture, and the economy.

A city transformed: Fighting the power structure, and building a sustainable community, for 42 amazing years

People’s power: A sustainable energy system is well within San Francisco’s reach

First, do no harm: A sustainable land use plan is about what we don’t allow as well as what we do

Beyond the automobile: The road to sustainability has lanes for more than just cars

Just Food Nation: Transforming how we eat will address poverty, public health, and environmental sustainability

Culture isn’t convenient: Sustaining entertainment and nightlife in San Francisco requires awareness and a policy shift

The money at home: A sustainable local economy starts with small business – and the public sector

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: For 42 years, the Guardian has been writing about environmental issues, land-use issues, energy issues economic issues … and when you read back issues, you can see the outlines of what we now call a platform for a sustainable city. We’ve gone back through the archives and pulled out some of our anniversary issues that fit into that theme. You can see the covers and read the main pieces here (all files PDFs):

Oct 6- 13, 1982
16th anniversary issue

Oct 12- 19, 1983
17th anniversary issue

Oct 10- 17, 1984
18th anniversary issue

Oct 23- 30, 1985
19th anniversary issue

Oct 22- 29, 1986
A Bay Guardian study showing that as highrises have gone up, downtown SF has lost jobs.

Oct 7- 13, 1998
33rd anniversary issue

Oct 10- 16, 2001
35th anniversary issue

Oct 16- 22, 2002
36th anniversary issue

Oct 22- 28, 2003
37th anniversary issue

Sung and spoken wit

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PREVIEW Last year saw the re-release of performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson’s 1982 debut, Big Science (Warner Bros.). What a heady nostalgia its lo-fi cover invokes, a confidence now gone quaint with the one-time fad of robotic gestures, lab coats, and test-tube weirdness. It’s just cute the way the ’80s were catching up with the future.

But recently the recording’s opening track, the eerie and wacky "From the Air," has been on shuffle rotation in the iPod of the brain as one of the more apt commentaries on present madness. It’s hard to think of a better metaphor for the situation we find ourselves in than a surprise crash landing that seems somehow not to be a surprise at all. And while we’re at it, neither has time bled any of the force from "O Superman," the disc’s surprise chart-topper. How good to know Anderson is still successfully tackling this machine mother of an illusion, "America," in her latest venture: a witty, haunting, and even uncharacteristically irate collection of sung and spoken pieces under the spot-on title of Homeland. The tour makes its way to UC Berkeley this week. Possible bonus: punk rock’s grouchy godfather and Anderson’s companion, Lou Reed, reportedly has shadowed her shows and sat in on a couple of numbers.

LAURIE ANDERSON’S HOMELAND Fri/24-Sat/25, 8 p.m., $28–$56. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Berk. (510) 642-9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu

Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylor

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PREVIEW The 2008 San Francisco Jazz Festival’s Vanguard Series is screaming. There, I said it. Both neophytes and adepts need to turn out this week for what will be personal milestones — those moments of "aha" and inspiration you’ll want to crystallize in something stronger than words — starting with mystic saxophonist Archie Shepp at Herbst Theatre Thursday. Considered one of the inventors of avant-garde jazz, Shepp blended blues, spirituals, and free-form music into a sound that transcends classification. Those who are familiar with his recordings are not getting the full message. Bearing witness is the only way to truly see.

Bearing witness is the only apt term for Cecil Taylor playing at Grace Cathedral on Friday. Taylor, one of the most prolific, experimental, and daring pianists in jazz or any other music, attacks the keys, coaxes polyrhythmic twists out of the music, and chisels chords from the dissonant, while traveling to the sublime and back again. Mix Grace Cathedral’s seven-second reverberation and Taylor’s inviting, deflecting, infuriating, and always inspiring compositions, poetry, and persona, and you get a religious experience. Go now — or regret later.

ARCHIE SHEPP Thurs/23, 7:30 p.m. (pre-concert talk at 6:30 p.m.), $25-$65. Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, SF. 1-866-920-JAZZ, www.sfjazz.org
CECIL TAYLOR Fri/24, 8 p.m., $30–$50. Grace Cathedral, 1100 California, SF. 1-866-920-JAZZ, www.sfjazz.org

What’s Up

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PREVIEW Post-hardcore is as straightforward as it sounds: the bands that hardcore musicians started that drew on a broader range of music beyond the self-imposed limitations of hard ‘n’ fast. After those bands imploded or stagnated, new groups emerged to incorporate influences from so-called world music and the fringes of contemporary classical, making for a helping of instrumental, textural artists on the one hand (Black Dice), and hyper-technical indie rockers on the other (Dirty Projectors).

What’s Up, however, is that rare thing: a technical instrumental band with lots of feeling. When I tell keyboardist-guitarist Robby Moncrieff by phone that I sense a lot of positive energy in the way the music is packed with bright, run-on melodies, he replies, "It comes from just being fed up with how things were going in town in a sense." "Town" is Sacramento, though Moncrieff, drummer Teddy Briggs, and bassist Brian Marshall recently relocated to Portland, Ore. "Sacramento’s got a great little underground thing going on, but it’s too small to support itself," Moncrieff continues. "There’s a lot of moral support, and it’s a great starting point, but it’s hard to try to grow there."

What’s Up is prepping to drop its first LP, Content Imagination, on Chicago’s upstart Obey Your Brain label in the spring. Although people might hear traces of Moncrieff’s work in 8-bit interpreters the Advantage, this band is a different beast. Briggs’ and Marshall’s solid, lurching rhythm section gives plenty of space for Moncrieff’s hyperactive, distorted keyboards to turn out melodies that shimmer for a moment before contradicting themselves. If there’s a signature What’s Up track so far, it’s "Harper’s Introduction." There’s something in the way the melody rides on the dirty keyboard bounce and the jerking rhythm of the drums and shaker that makes it seem like it could be some of the best beach music ever.

WHAT’S UP Fri/24, 8 p.m., call for price. Red Door Gallery 371 11th St., SF. (415) 652-4054. Also with Zach Hill, Oaxacan, and Religious Girls. Sat/25, 8:30 p.m., call for price. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. (510) 444-7263, www.21grand.org

Never grow up

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REVIEW Azazel Jacobs’ portrait of the artist as a regressive thumb-sucker is a welcome antidote to Hollywood’s inane home-for-the-holidays pictures. Jacobs’ counterculture parents, the experimental filmmaker Ken and his painter wife Flo, were sporting enough to play Ma and Dad to Mikey (Matt Boren). The slouchy 30-something purposefully misses his flight back to wife and baby in New York, and lands back in the family nest in a deep funk. Momma’s Man‘s delicious comedy derives from Mikey’s fruitless conquests of the past: playing through a notebook’s worth of high school breakup songs, reading comic books, and, memorably, propping up in bed with his parents to watch Monsieur Verdoux (1947). The mother-son bond veers toward Portnoy’s Complaint territory when Momma Flo won’t stop asking if Mikey needs anything from the other side of a bathroom door, but elsewhere her gentle prodding strikes just the right homey notes. And after Mikey uses his parents’ aging as a cover for his own semi-consciousness, her final, wordless embrace of her son is enough to make you want to call home. Momma’s Man is a bleary-eyed nostalgia trip, mindful of the precarious limbo of post-adolescent reflexivity. As Mikey spins out in his black hole of comfort and culture, it becomes clear that Momma’s Man is a goodbye not just to childhood, but to the last echoes of bohemian New York. 

MOMMA’S MAN opens Fri/24 in Bay Area theaters.

Missing pieces

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NEWS/REVIEW At this point, any review of Gallery 16’s fifteenth anniversary show "These Are the People in Your Neighborhood" must revolve around its missing pieces. On the morning of Wednesday, Oct. 15, two paintings by Margaret Kilgallen were stolen. Of the 68 works on display, they were among only a handful not for sale. When one takes the exhibition’s layout into consideration, it appears that Untitled and Easy — a pair of small enamel-on-wood works that Kilgallen had given to gallery owner Griff Williams — were part of a behind-your-back theft.

Rough ironies are left in their wake. The first is the friendly title of the exhibition itself. "Please stop stealing the stemware," asks one page of Tucker Nichols’ line-drawing zine Fifteen Yrs Give or Take: A Commemorative Guide to Gallery 16. "One bad day in like 15 years," says another. With a show by Lydia Fong reaching the end of its run in San Francisco, and Barry McGee (whose work has also been stolen: check out a Luggage Store interview in an old issue of ANP Quarterly) one of the main focuses of a recent Artforum issue dedicated to "Art and its Markets," the Kilgallen theft is a high-priced mystery.

What remains at Gallery 16? For starters, I like: Michelle Grabner’s update of op art’s love affair with the circle; Gay Outlaw giving form to inversion with uncharacteristically Mission-like materials; a number of unassumingly beautiful watercolors by Cliff Hengst; Jim Isermann’s brash ’90s version of the understated loom pieces Ruth Laskey is making today; Alice Shaw’s hypnotic lenticular photos; Lauren Davies’ Dirtballs with Snow (a deal at $350 each); the Jerome Caja-eseque shrinky dink humor of Andrew Romanoff’s Ipod Sucks Brain Out; and Alex Zecca’s and Wayne Smith’s amazing ink-on-paper screens or patterns.

Regarding the Kilgallen pieces, here’s a message from Gallery 16’s Vanessa Blaikie and Griff Williams: "There is very little of Margaret’s original work out there for sale, if any, and so we are asking that everyone please keep their eyes and ears open with respect to these two works. Should they resurface for sale, or should you see these in a private residence, we ask that you please contact us immediately. Any information would be much appreciated."

THESE ARE THE PEOPLE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD Through Nov. 7. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Gallery 16, 501 Third St., SF. (415) 626-7495, www.gallery16.com

Live bait

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Thirty-something British band Wire secured its place in rock history with three soberly brilliant LPs released in the late 1970s. Born Ruffians, a much younger Canadian combo, gets steady attention despite having only two uneven releases under their belt. Both groups will be playing likely well-attended shows this week, to audiences who either cut their post-punk teeth on Wire’s Chairs Missing (Harvest, 1979) or got really into Born Ruffians’ Red Yellow and Blue (Warp) since its release eight months ago. As different as these outfits appear, something about the expectations hovering around their shows seems to call for a slight recalibration of the rock-crit machine — what people are going to these shows for might not be what they actually hear. Even if you don’t read the reviews and haven’t scoped the scenes, someone lodged inside the Web marketing machine has done it for you. The more dimly aware you are of it, the better it works.

And this is what bothered me about Born Ruffians. I like Red Yellow and Blue fine, but before I’d even managed to really hear the band, I’d been blitzed with ancillary information. These three Torontonians, led by a thin, raw nerve of a man named Luke LaLonde, play a jangly form of indie with lots of off-mic huddle-chants — something like a summer camp take on Animal Collective’s harmonizing. In a way, the critical air support that followed the LP release seemed premeditated, hard-pressed to point out anything really compelling beyond a checklist of standard genre tropes. Still, listening to the album later, I was surprised that, while longing gets mentioned, nobody else noticed that it’s the engine of the music. Which can make even their best songs, like the scribbly "Hummingbird," a bit of a painful listen — not because they’re not afraid to look like fools, but because it cuts too close to the raw experience. Born Ruffians don’t dwell on pain as much as they let it seep in, an approach that makes me want to run at first but resolves into something modestly beautiful.

Wire, on the other hand, is in the unique position that even their most dedicated fans haven’t listened to the bulk of their discography. Their latest full-length is called Object 47 (Pink Flag) because it’s the 47th thing they’ve released. Wire’s initial trilogy — Pink Flag (Harvest, 1977), Chairs Missing, and 154 (Harvest, 1979) — remain the high-water mark against which they’re judged, and rightfully so: they invented a formal vocabulary for punk and rock in a hugely inspired fit of art school imagination. Yet one doesn’t get the feeling that anyone who has bothered to listen to their releases since then has actually heard anything other than a lack of those three albums, or subtle tweaks on the fecund language they opened up. The most interesting qualities of Wire’s recent recordings have little to do with their early shirt-and-tie experimentalism. Object 47‘s linchpin is "One of Us," a sweet pink heartbreak confection whose compassion is miles off from "The 15th"’s relationship semiotics.

All of which is to say that both concerts are worth going to for reasons that have little to do with the narratives swirling around each group. It shouldn’t be too difficult to let go of the stories anchoring these bands and experience them as something both more and less than the sum of their facts. *

BORN RUFFIANS

Wed/15, 9 p.m., $8

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

WIRE

Wed/15, 8 p.m., $25

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.livenation.com

Independence day

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Labels come and go. Not long ago, Moedoe and Frisco Street Show were among the most important outlets for Bay Area rap. Now both manufacture energy drinks instead: Hyphy Juice and Hunid Racks, respectively. Rap frequently favors money over artistry, but eliminating the art entirely is a bit much. To pose the Jacka’s musical question, "What happened to comin’ the dopest?"

The answer may be found at 21st and Mission streets, home of SMC Recordings.

"Rap’s a hustle because of where it’s from," 26-year-old co-owner and A&R head Will Bronson says. "I understand that, but in the end it’s still about making good music."

A shocking philosophy in today’s industry, but SMC makes it work. Not only has the company released some of the biggest recent Bay rap discs — including 2007’s Da Baydestrian by Mistah FAB and Da Bidnes by PSD, Keak, and Messy Marv — but it’s also building a national roster. Atlanta acquisitions like Pastor Troy and Killer Mike, whose current I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind 2 received critical acclaim, hitting No. 16 on Billboard’s rap chart, have raised the label’s nationwide profile.

"It’s going well," Killer Mike reports. "Major labels spend money on you, but never listen. SMC entertains every idea." This includes everything from letting Mike executive-produce his disc to approving his risky lead single, "Bang," attacking what he sees as the present lameness of Atlanta hip-hop.

"In rap it’s OK to be yourself," Bronson says. "No matter what level they’re on, the artists we sign are loved by their fans. Our records sell longer due to their quality."

SMC’s success wasn’t overnight: it evolved from late ’90s imprint UTR, whose founders included SMC co-owner Ralph Tashjian. The industry veteran long dreamed of starting a label here in his hometown. When his partners bailed, Tashjian brought in former UTR intern Bronson to continue as the Navarre-distributed Sumday Entertainment, whose successes included Keak’s Copium (2003), co-released with Moedoe, and Messy Marv’s Disobayish (2004). Switching distributors in 2005, when Bronson became a full partner, prompted another name change.

"Independent distribution is the future," Tashjian says. "Independent distributors are all successful while the majors are dying. As that began, Universal launched its own independent distribution, Fontana. We were one of their first labels. We had no obligation to Navarre, but for appearances we changed the name to SMC: Sumday Music Corp."

Such powerful distribution and an artist-friendly environment — artists own their masters, for example, which the label licenses — have helped SMC score bigger acts. It’s even invaded New York City, signing Capone-N-Noreaga for their third album. In a late-breaking development, SMC has now entered into a joint venture with the legendary Rakim, though details have yet to be announced.

Such moves, unprecedented for an independent Frisco hip-hop label, come at an interesting juncture in the Bay’s post-hyphy moment. There are cross-regional promotional opportunities; Mess, for example, is on Killer Mike’s disc, which includes an ad directing listeners to Mess’ upcoming project. Most important, as it goes national, SMC has reaffirmed its local role, partnering with Thizz Entertainment to launch two series, Town Thizzness for Oakland acts and Thizz City for SF, at the consumer-friendly price of $9.99. Town Thizzness has already released the two hands-down best local discs this year, Beeda Weeda’s Da Thizzness and J-Stalin’s Gas Nation. And the Bay isn’t confined to these series, as the upcoming San Quinn album, From a Boy to a Man, due Nov. 25, attests.

These series, Bronson says, "testify to our commitment to the Bay. We’re in SF so we need a marquee Bay Area artist. We need to develop the new Quinns, new Messy Marvs, in some way." It’s about time someone made that commitment.

You can’t kill them

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

They’re on the fringe, and they don’t plan to leave it. Though mostly overlooked in their home country of New Zealand during the last two decades, the free-rockers in the Dead C will be the first to tell you that they’re not terribly bothered.

"We are not seen as plausible cultural ambassadors," stated guitarist Bruce Russell by e-mail from his home Down Under, citing the failure of the "laughable New Zealand media" to cover what’s artistically adventurous as one of the reasons his three-piece rarely can make it abroad to play shows. One would hope that Russell, Michael Morley, and Robbie Yeats would be more seriously considered for Kiwi government arts grants: indie rockers of yesteryear and the narcoleptic noisemongers of today repeatedly cite the Dead C as an influence on what they do. Just look who’s opening for them on their upcoming US gigs: Thurston Moore (who hosted them at All Tomorrow’s Parties’ "Nightmare Before Christmas" in England two years ago), Blues Control, Wolf Eyes, Six Organs of Admittance — all serious contenders on the experimental circuit, and all projects that garnered something, aesthetic or emotional, from the Dead C’s history of desperate clatter.

The Dead C got its start in Dunedin — members are located in Port Chalmers and Lyttelton today, about 225 miles apart — when the self-designated "AMM of Punk Rock" released its 1988 full-length debut, DR503, on Flying Nun, the infamous home to pop bands like the Clean, the Chills, Tall Dwarfs, and the Verlaines, for whom Yeats once drummed. A pop group the Dead C are not, but for an ensemble so ardently free-form and unmarketable, they’ve done nicely.

"The irony is, we’ve done very well in commercial terms by being ‘uncommercial,’" Russell explained. "I don’t know many of our contemporaries in New Zealand who are in better career positions than us. We make money. We can make any kind of record we like."

Much of their international clout was forged in their ’90s relationship with the Siltbreeze label, run and recently revived by Tom Lax of Philadelphia, with whom they released some of their most acclaimed discs, including 1992’s Harsh ’70s Reality, 1995’s White House, and 1997’s Tusk. This period saw them create what many consider to be their most vital material, flirting with darkly catchy riffs while always doggedly blazing space for noisy, alien buzz and scrape. Secret Earth is their brand new release, shortly following last year’s Future Artists (both Ba Da Bing) and recorded over two days, six months apart. Morley’s eerie exhale oversees a stupor-inducing slow grind that renders track titles a useless roadmap for proceedings: after a few minutes with the Dead C, one won’t notice such trifling details as the stops, starts, and riffs anymore. They are, after all, masters of mood. Morley and Russell’s guitars-at-odds and Yeats’ distantly mic’d drums consistently scare up an unsettling, deconstructed blues-groove that makes clear the precedent for Sebadoh’s stoned angst cassettes.

Regardless of influence, the upcoming US dates mark only their third outing to the States since getting together — damn! What do they do on the rare occasion they’re on a stage? "We approach live shows quietly, without undue fuss, so we can take ’em by surprise and wring their necks before they can fight back," Russell wrote, pointing out that there’s nothing static about a Dead C track — other than that staticky sound.

Any fan with the whoops and feedback screeches of "Driver U.F.O." committed to memory will hear something that sounds rather otherwise if that song shows up in the set. "We are ‘fully improvised,’ though every now and then we’ll attempt an item from our back catalog," Russell continued. "But we never, ever practice them."

This back catalog is becoming more available thanks to Ba Da Bing, their US label for the past few years, which will be reissuing DR503 and 1989’s Eusa Kills (Flying Nun) on vinyl. The band is, according to Russell, also hoping to reissue its pre-1990 work next year (working title: Complete ’80s Reality). Immediately available, however, is the tour-only 12-inch, which includes recent live recordings, and gives an added incentive to check ’em out this week.

Why not? It’s hard not to be charmed by their passive-aggressive, cavalier mode of operation. "We just do what we do and dare people to ignore it," Russell offered. "Which they duly do, and we could not care less."

THE DEAD C

With Six Organs of Admittance

Thurs/16, 8 p.m., $20

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

(415) 885-0750

www.gamh.com

Speed Reading

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DOWNTOWN OWL

By Chuck Klosterman

Scribner

288 pages

$24

Nothing ever changes. Until it does. Then everything is different.

Such is the case in pop culture laureate Chuck Klosterman’s first novel, Downtown Owl. It tells the story of a sleepy town that isn’t really there. According to Walter Valentine, the principal of Owl High, "You’re going to like it here. It’s not Monaco. It’s not like you’ll be phoning your gal pals every night saying ‘I’m living in Owl, North Dakota, and it’s a dream come true’. But you will like it here."

And he’s right.

Downtown Owl is not spectacular or life-affirming, but it is an engrossing, enjoyable read by a likable author who knows what he does well. For the most part, Klosterman stays within his comfort zone, focusing on quirky, amusing takes on culture and human interactions.

The story centers around three residents of Owl who have never met but know each other perfectly. In a town like Owl, where nothing ever changes, you don’t need to have any contact with someone to know exactly who they are. Although these characters lead outwardly banal existences, the reader sees the staggering complexity and depth that they hide from the world around them. Downtown Owl‘s well-rendered characters hide their pain, confusion, and isolation under the guise of hard work and perceived normalcy.

Though the narrative drama successfully builds to a crescendo, Downtown Owl‘s marrow results from Klosterman’s rare ability to find beauty and wonder in the face of overwhelming malaise. He makes conversations about ZZ Top, high school football, and grain prices engulfing. He does not pass judgment, and he realizes that discourse, no matter how trivial the subject, is what keeps us together and keeps us alive.

Garrison killer

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ISBN REAL On Aug. 15, 1914, seven people were murdered at Taliesin, the famed Prairie-Style Wisconsin house that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for himself and his out-of-wedlock companion, Mamah Cheney. The victims of the gruesome occurrence were Cheney, her two children from a previous relationship, and four men in Wright’s employ.

The Taliesin murders have been recounted many times by Wright scholars, but William R. Drennan’s Death in a Prairie House (University of Wisconsin Press, 232 pages, $35.95 hardcover, $16.95 paperback) centralizes the event, placing it compellingly within the context of Wright and Cheney’s complex relationship with the conservative locals. Drennan also adjusts many of the accepted details of what happened that day.

One detail that hasn’t changed in his telling is that the butler — perhaps to the embarrassment of the zealously unconventional Wright — did it. His name was Julian Carlton, a recent hire at Taliesin and one of the legions of people who probably would never have made history had they been born after the psychopharmacological revolution.

Drennan’s realignments are convincing enough. But still, when he argues that "the traditional reconstruction of the crime … insists on a quite different chronology than the one argued here" (namely that Carlton set the employees on fire only after having hatcheted the family in a separate wing), I can’t help but note that the constants — "fire" and "hatcheted" — seem disproportionately more germane.

Academic histories of minor events are funny that way. The anxiety over detail can often seem outsized to the event’s wider significance. Without hope of sending a ripple through the historical record, what purpose does a reordering of facts serve, in this particular case, beyond satisfying a morbid strain of OCD?

Yeah, I suppose history should be sorted out as faithfully as possible. Truth and all that. It’s just that the horror of the Taliesin murders — "her head belching blood," "hatchet crusted with gore," "he carried the box containing his children onto the train," etc. — renders the fussiness of the housecleaning almost comical.

The absurdity is slightly mitigated by the rubbernecking ingenuousness confided here and there through Drennan’s tone. That must sound awfully backhanded, but I wouldn’t begrudge anyone an interest in the gory details. After all, I didn’t pick up the book because the iffy chronology of the bloody holocaust was an itch I needed scratched. It just seems like Drennan could be more forthright about the real appeal of his subject matter, which I daresay is not its hastily argued effect on Wright’s creative output.

I guess I want the new assertions of Drennan’s Death in a Prairie House to have been presented differently, maybe as historical fiction or more overtly narrative nonfiction. Certainly there are plenty of sentences scattered about that suggest a man wanting to break free of his academic cocoon and become a fancy-writing butterfly. It’s incongruous in this forensics report of a book to write, "She urged the horse past patches of oxeye daisies and finally she neared the house, her young mind filled with horror and her childhood innocence falling away from her on all sides." But that sentence would make a crackerjack opening for a novel.

Bottom biscuits

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS My pickup truck died and this time the death was fatal. The clutch, the transmission … costs more to repair than I paid for the mighty ‘mobile four years and 60,000 miles ago.

I rolled into a legal parking spot, got out and walked to a restaurant I like, sat on a bench outside with my head in my hands, and cried. I had $8 and change in my purse, on my lap, and one bar of battery left on my cell. None of my city friends have cars. I called my sister in Ohio.

"When your car dies," she said, "that’s rock bottom. Now you have nowhere to go but up."

I didn’t think this was true, but my sister, this one — Carparts, I call her — is younger than me and therefore wiser, so I decided to take her word for it. Rock bottom. Depressed. Beaten. Hopelessly hopeful. Puked upon. And now wheel-less, an hour and a half from home. And cat. And chickens.

Sockywonk has a car. I called Sockywonk. But she’s had an even unluckier life lately than I have. She has to move from her great place, and was moving, so her car was already in service for at least a week.

Me, I didn’t want to sit on a bench for a week, so I called my brother in Ohio, and then my other brother in Ohio, and then my other brother in Ohio. If there’s a way to eke 75 more miles out of a clutch-fucked junkyard pickup truck, they would know.

So you know, before I say this next part: I do not embrace terms like "trailer trash," or "white trash," or even "college-educated fuck-up farmer trash" in reference to me and my family. We are "people of trash," thank you. We have dignity. We just also have rusted cars on blocks all over the property, it happens. And I know for a fact that any one of my brothers, and many of my sisters, could have and would have pulled the exact parts that my exact situation called for, and shipped them to me.

All I had to do was ask, but I didn’t. Because right now I don’t have any brothers or sisters or even nephews out here on the receiving end, and, while I can do some things myself, I have never replaced a clutch and transmission and had no interest whatsoever in learning how now. Call me unautomotivated.

What I really needed, I’m embarrassed to admit, was for one of my brothers, probably Jean Gene, the Frenchman, to say, "Wait right there, sis. I’m going to book a flight and pull the parts and … what day is street cleaning where you’re parked?"

I would have said, "Thursday," and Jean Gene would have showed up on Wednesday, taken care of it, and I’d buy him a burrito with my $8.

Let me have my fantasies!

How about this one … I open my cell phone contact list, first name: Alice. Hit send and she answers. "Hi, Alice. My car died." And she says, "I have an extra one. I’ll come get you."

Now, the cool thing about this particular fantasy is that it happened. I swear to my sweet sisters, one minute I was a wreck on a bench, publicly losing it, and the next minute I was sitting at Alice’s kitchen table eating biscuits and gravy, a lone car key on the Formica between us. It belonged to a Honda that is registered, insured, and mine until the end of the month, or, you know, longer if I want.

Those were some very important biscuits. For one thing, they tasted great, better than any biscuits and gravy I’ve ever tasted, and not just because my New Favorite Person had made them, from scratch!

They were bottom biscuits, highly symbolic and loaded with sausage chunks. It was easy to believe, eating such biscuits and gravy so soon after feeling so hopelessly fucked so far from home, that in fact I had bottomed out, and was well on my reboundingly upswung and cheerful way to, if nothing else, a second helping of biscuits and gravy.

Which I was. Alice Shaw, everybody!

——————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Yummie Fast Food on MacArthur Boulevard. It’s Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese and cheap cheap cheap. Steam table fare. I had chicken fried rice with teriyaki chicken and kung pao chicken, dollar-fitty a thing, that’s $4.50, and it was piled on. Everything was great! New favorite restaurant.

YUMMIE

Daily, 10:30 a.m.–8:30 p.m.

4104 MacArthur, Oakl.

(510) 482-1648

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

Hand it to him

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

A male friend recently told me that he finds it very frustrating when women try to please him in ways other than intercourse. According to him, during hand jobs and blow jobs, men are just thinking, "Get on with it!" He claims to have spoken to lots of other guys about this who agreed with him.

Is this really true? Are there men who feel like this, or is he winding me up? (I suspect that the sample of people he asked wasn’t representative — but it’s been on my mind anyway.) Maybe the skills of his sexual partners haven’t been up to scratch? Or maybe it’s just his problem?

Love,

Whose Prob?

Dear Prob:

His problem. My onetime boyfriend (we got married, and now I don’t get to have a boyfriend anymore) used to use the phrase "That’s not an MP, that’s a YP," though he never used it on me, and that’s a good thing, because it’s really obnoxious. Nevertheless, if this guy were your boyfriend, this would be a YP, too, so let’s be glad he’s just a friend and it’s an HP all the way.

No, I don’t think it’s particularly true, although the category "men" is rather large, and there are individuals and subgroups who do feel that way. Very young men, for instance, will usually have been waiting for years to "get on with it," and they tend to think of intercourse as "the real thing" or "sex" and feel like everything else is, I guess, the fake thing. The sad part is that this conviction often leads to fairly disappointing sex, especially, but not exclusively, for the girls involved, when teenagers trade in the usually gratifying heavy petting and manual and oral for the strictly genital.

Men who know a bit more about what they really like do tend to have a slightly wider repertoire, depending on and responsive to who(m), what, when, where, and why. Sometimes a man just needs a blow job. Sometimes everything is just too wet and soft to get the job done (although men are, admittedly, generally partial to the wet and soft), and only a hand will do the job. Sometimes the visual element (from above while partner kneels, from behind in doggy style) is the important part, with friction and tempo taking the backseat, as it were. In other words, as in all things sexual, it depends. Your friend, by assuming that all men are just like him, is lacking in imagination, and again I say good for you for not having to be his girlfriend.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I’ve been going out with a great man for a year now, and the sex is finally beginning to flourish in kinky and sensual ways. I can orgasm relatively quickly from a variety of methods. The problem is, recently he can’t come from oral or vaginal intercourse. We try different positions, but the only way he can reach orgasm is from his own hand. What is going on here? How can I get him to come with me?

Love,

Woman waiting

Dear WW:

I suggest that you don’t wait as much as file your preference under "fond hopes" and not make too big a deal out of this, since sexual response is not the sort of system that responds well to stress. I’d also caution you not to take it personally, if that’s possible, since assuming you are not doing anything differently, this appears to be an HP and nothing you can affect much one way or the other. I do wonder if perhaps he has started taking an antidepressant or a beta blocker, both common medications with nearly universal sexual side effects, at least at first. If so, give it a while, and if things don’t improve, he can go back to the doctor for a meds adjustment and a general checkup, since there are a lot of conditions, including diabetes, that could be causing this.

If not that or that or that other thing, the usual culprits are aging (possible; you didn’t say), anxiety, and, of course, boredom. Lots of people would rather hear that their partner has a dangerous, progressive disease than that he’s bored, but don’t freak out. If you’re just getting into the fun, kinky part together, it’s unlikely that he’s bored already. He may be worried about something, or fixating on something even kinkier that he’s afraid to ask for but that you might feel like offering if only you knew what it was. And he might simply be aging out of the sorts of stimulation that did it for him before and need rougher handling, which you can certainly provide. Watch what he’s doing with the successful handiwork — where is he stroking, how hard and how fast? Once you know what’s working, you can try re-creating the sensations in a way that gets and keeps you involved. Nobody said you can’t use your hand (or his) during a blow job, right? Or during what the guy in the first letter would insist all men like better anyway?

Love,

Andrea

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

The mirage

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>johnny@sfbg.com

America is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America.

— Dave Hickey, "A Home in the Neon"

If, as Oscar Wilde once claimed, a lie can tell the truth, then what Dave Hickey writes is truer than ever: looking at Las Vegas is a terrific way to see the United States. Paul Verhoeven knew as much when he made Showgirls (1995). The fact that his old-school Euro-Hollywood auteur vision of Sin City offended so many bourgie film critics only proved its lasting, um, value. Like Verhoeven, the Italian artist Olivo Barbieri also appreciates Las Vegas from a distance. But while Verhoeven maintains his distance even in the middle of a lap dance, with site specific_Las Vegas 05 (2005), Barbieri prefers literal remoteness. He appraises the bright colors and the neon glow of Las Vegas from up above, via a helicopter.

The resulting view of the Entertainment Capital of the World, another chapter in Barbieri’s ongoing project of urban portraiture, is one half of Henry Urbach’s well-timed exhibition "Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas." Within Urbach’s black-box presentation, Barbieri’s long-distance perspective trades off with the Tetris walls, distorted mirrors, and repetitious gambling-addict flurries of Stephen Dean’s warmer yet less resonant No More Bets (2004). At first glance, the amazing thing about Barbieri’s videos is how unreal and utterly toy-like the cityscapes appear, and Las Vegas is no exception — thanks to his tilt-shift lens 35mm photography, a rooftop antique-car rally looks like a kids’ collection of model cars, and the Luxor’s Sphinx and white-nippled Pyramid are mere parts of an elaborate toytown.

Today, as the US dollar seems more abstract and illusive than ever, Las Vegas’ playland presentation of all that money can buy has attained a new level of honesty. (It also seems endearingly quaint in comparison to 21st century "evil paradises" — to quote Mike Davis — such as Dubai.) "The whole city floats on a sleek frisson of anxiety and promise that those of us addicted to such distraction must otherwise induce by motion or medication," Hickey writes in "At Home in the Neon," from Air Guitar (Art Issues Press, 216 pages, 1997). When Vegas resident Hickey notes that "there is nothing quite as bracing as the prospect of flying home, of swooping down into that ardent explosion of lights in the heart of the pitch-black desert," he may as well be writing a description of Barbieri’s video, though site specific_Las Vegas 05‘s helicopter hovers like a dizzy bird above an old McDonald’s and the Stardust’s ’50s-luxe marquee (where Wayne Newton is missing an e). Barbieri’s debt to a site-specific avant-garde film tradition (such as pat O’Neill’s 2002 The Decay of Fiction) becomes clear when he reaches the fountains of the Bellagio. There, he wryly connects waterworks out of Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d’Artifice (1953) with soundtrack detonations that evoke Bruce Conner’s Crossroads (1976). Bathing in the sensory overload of "Double Down: Las Vegas," one suspects that — like the arcade in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s apocalyptic Pulse (2001) — Las Vegas would go on glowing and chiming long after all the people are gone.

Dave Hickey begins Liberace: A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz (BükAmerica, 16 pages, $1.49), a tribute to the ivory-tinkling owner of the world’s largest rhinestone, by describing his own balcony view of the Strip, where the neon logos of the Desert Inn, the Stardust, Circus Circus and other sites make the surrounding nature look "bogus as hell." As Hickey puts it, more wittily than Jean Baudrillard, "the honest fakery of the neon" trumps "the fake honesty of the sunset." Perhaps we should replace the face on the one-dollar bill. George Washington has done his time. Bring on Liberace.

DOUBLE DOWN: TWO VISIONS OF VEGAS

Through Jan. 4, 2009; $7–$12.50

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St, SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

FEAST Fall 2008

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@@http://www.sfbg.com/feast/fall2008@@

EXCLUSIVE: Downtown’s slate

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>>CLICK HERE FOR OUR EXCLUSIVE CHART TRACING THE DOWNTOWN AND PG&E CAMPAIGN MONEY (PDF)

Reports filed with the city’s campaign finance database show that six big downtown outfits — the San Francisco Apartment Association, the Building Owners and Managers Association, Plan C, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, the Committee on Jobs, and Pacific Gas and Electric Co. — are spending millions to stop progressive candidates and measures and elect a pro-downtown, pro-landlord slate for the Board of Supervisors.

These political action committees (PACs) use their huge war chests in several strategically significant ways.

They make direct monetary contributions to each other, with most paying directly into Plan C, which seems to stand for "Condo Conversion Complex" PAC. Almost $20,000 has moved between these committees in recent months.

They directly fund local candidate and ballot committees, pay for independent billboards, mailers and postage, write ballot arguments, and host fundraisers for their preferred slate. The Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) has spent $130,000 to date promoting its candidates.

They use Carmen Chu’s image on $11,500 worth of the No on H mailers. They have funneled $63,000 into the into the Yes on V campaign, which is being used against progressive candidate Eric Mar.

You can follow the money yourself at www.sfgov.org/site/ethics_page.asp?id=74890

But with the next filing deadline set for Oct. 23, and some committees willing to pay late fines, much of what transpires won’t be disclosed until after Nov. 4.

The city maintains an updated list of independent expenditures and electioneering or member communications at www.sfgov.org/site/ethics_page.asp?id=88183.

These show massive amounts of late money being spent to support Sue Lee, Alicia Wang, Joe Alioto, Mike Denunzio, Chu, Eva Royale, and Ahsha Safai and oppose Mar. Stay tuned. And vote early and often.

Endorsements 2008

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@@http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=7257@@

Reviving radicalism

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› news@sfbg.com

As the country’s economic, environmental, and political systems teeter on the brink of collapse, several Bay Area groups are reviving calls for radical solutions. And some are drawing parallels to the spirited political activity of 40 years ago.

“In my opinion, 1968 was the beginning of a process, an awakening of the questioning of social movements,” Andrej Grubacic, a globalization lecturer at ZMedia Institute and the University of San Francisco, told the Guardian.

The Great Rehearsal was a week of events from Sept. 17-25 that centered on the many protests, actions, and events of the 1960s and ’70s that are paralleled today. The event alluded to an ongoing struggle for alternatives to the failing institutions that are hurting the average American.

“Neoliberalism is this sort of clinching of the system. It is the last gasp of a dying system,” Katherine Wallerstein, executive director of the nonprofit Global Commons, told us. Wallerstein believes that deregulation is to blame for many of our economic woes, such as the housing crisis, job loss, and a volatile market.

Other recent events such as the Radical Women conference in San Francisco have highlighted the systemic causes of our economic turmoil, saying we should bail out people not banks, cancel student debt, and end home foreclosures. They went on to suggest that the bailout was just a form of jubilee for the rich.

Radical Women member Linda Averill announced at the conference that “if unions don’t take the offense now, we’re going to lose it all.” She went on to advocate mobilizing the labor movement, stating that we must band together against those sustaining the system. Other revolutionaries went even further, calling to abolish the capitalist system. RW member Toni Mendicino said the system of profit is inherently greedy and that reguutf8g it isn’t enough — we must get rid of it.

The Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) is a radical student-run organization focused on solving global climate change. Many of the initiatives taken by SEAC deal with less mainstream environmental concerns, including combating coal power and promoting clean water. These previously ignored problems are pumping new life into the environmental movement. Brian Kelly, former Students for a Democratic Society organizer who now does organizing work for SEAC, told us, “The problem is the fucked-up system. (We need to) carve out a decent life through an alternative to capitalism.”

John Cronan, an organizer for the radical union Industrial Workers of the World, advocates Participatory Economics (Parecon) as an alternative to capitalism. He highlighted Parecon’s values as a solidarity-based system that abolishes the market and replaces it with participatory planning. Parecon, he says, will take into account the social costs that goods and services create; something commonly ignored in today’s capitalist system, a system many claim perpetuates the environmental crisis.

“Climate change is highlighting the system flaws,” Kelly said. He went on to place the environment and climate change as the highest priority in the upcoming presidential election, proposing green technology as the answer to the economic turmoil and global climate change taking place. The Power Vote program, he told us, supports the investment in green technologies by politicians and citizens.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) has pushed local governments in many rural farming communities to create ordinances claiming nature as an entity that should have more political and legal prominence than property. These ordinances aim to curb pollution and provide communities with a safeguard against corporate influence.

Through similar efforts, grassroots organizations have managed to stop 59 coal-fired power plants in 2007 by persuading courts not to grant permits for the plants. This is one of many steps to contest the environmental degradation taking place.

“I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience,” said Al Gore, calling for people to rise up against the construction of new coal plants, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative in March.

Gore’s call to action has prompted many activists to battle corporations and self-interested government. “The current economic and political systems are out of whack with human and democratic values,” Kelly said. “The system is exposing itself.” According to many, the system is shifting dangerously close to totalitarianism.

There’s even been a resurgence of the old Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Program), an FBI-run spying and political sabotage program that was responsible for the arrests of 13 Black Panthers in 1973 in connection with the 1971 murder of a San Francisco police officer. The men were subjected to torture techniques similar to those used at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

The 13 Panthers were acquitted for lack of evidence and the case was closed. However, in 2005, with the help of the USA Patriot Act, the case was reopened and eight of the Panthers were re-arrested. John Bowman, one of the detained, announced to the press, “The same people who tried to kill me in 1973 are the same people who are here today trying to destroy me.” Former Panther Richard Brown warned audiences at the Great Rehearsal that the Patriot Act has given the government the ability to profile any ethnic group or organization, past and present, as terrorists.

“The Patriot Act was passed in the name of protecting us and our democracy. But it limits us,” Cronan said. Groups like New SDS have incorporated working against the Patriot Act through their antiwar work, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has consistently battled against the act.

Even the Communists are back. Earlier this month, the Revolutionary Communist Party held a demonstration in San Francisco, telling the small crowd, “The world today cries out for radical, fundamental change.”

Many radical groups see opportunity in the current moment. Grubacic told us that, “The future belongs to the ones creating it in the present.” *

 

Horror at home

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› news@sfbg.com

According to the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, 26 million people around the globe are currently seeking safety from conflicts within their own countries. Almost half of these internally displaced persons (IDPs) do not receive significant assistance from their governments.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says that 16 million people have fled to other countries in search of safety — many settling down in refugee camps that lack adequate shelter, supplies, and medical treatment.

Find it hard to grasp the enormity of these statistics? According to Dr. Matthew Spitzer, so do most people — which is why the Nobel Peace Prize- winning humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is setting up a refugee camp in the heart of San Francisco.

"So often there are news articles that say 100,000 refugees just did this, there’s famine in Ethiopia … it just doesn’t register anymore," Spitzer, who has worked with MSF around the world and currently serves as president of the MSF board of directors, told the Guardian. MSF’s interactive exhibit, "A Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City," attempts to combat what Spitzer calls "compassion fatigue" — and it does so with great success.

The camp is free and open daily to the public from Oct 15 to 19 between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. in Little Marina Green Park. During the exhibit, which has appeared on almost every continent and in more than a dozen US states, MSF aid workers act as tour guides, taking groups around the 8,000-square-foot simulation and explaining what refugees need to survive. Statistics come to life as visitors of all ages crowd into makeshift tents, taste high protein biscuits used by MSF aid workers to ward off malnutrition, and attempt to carry 44-pound jugs of water.

Maybe the reality of the global refugee problem will hit you when you try on the "bracelet of life," a piece of paper refugee children wear wrapped around their upper arms to identify their risk of starvation. Some 20 million children qualify for the most severe form of malnutrition — the bracelet’s "red zone," which notes a less than 110 mm (4.3 inch) upper arm circumference. "Can you put your arm through this hole?" a Doctors Without Borders postcard asks in stark white lettering above a thumb-sized cutout circle. "A child dying of starvation can."

The simple postcard has more impact than the sobering statistics on the back More than half the deaths of children under five are due to malnutrition — 6 million per year, or 12 children every minute. Or maybe after struggling to carry your daily ration of water — one five-gallon jug — back to your shelter, the fact that most Americans use 100 gallons of water per day will become more meaningful.

For Spitzer, the shelter area, where guides lead their tour groups into tiny canvas tents and ask them to try and lie down inside, is one of the most effective parts of the exhibit. "Twenty people in a tent and someone coughs — what’s the impact of that?" Spitzer asks. "Where are you going to cook? Where are you going to clean?" He relates the simulation to his experience working as a field coordinator in Liberia, where he was shocked at the refugees’ living conditions.

"There were 50, 60 people living in makeshift tents that were supposed to be transit structures," he told us. Unfortunately, due to lack of UN funding and organization, more and more refugees were forced to crowd into the small tents, resulting in numerous medical issues. "It was ridiculous … we take shelter for granted, but [refugees] are denied these basic rights."

In 2000, the Sacramento Public Health Department, whose staff often works with IDPs seeking shelter in the United States, sent its health care workers to MSF’s Los Angeles exhibit for training. MSF’s Refugee Camp exhibit is meant to shock.

Nevertheless, the tours are age-appropriate and strive to educate rather than scare. Elementary school students touring the water supply area focus on carrying the heavy jugs, while older visitors might learn about the sexual abuse risks facing young refugee women who walk long distances to collect water. Regardless of age, every visitor absorbs the information his or her own way. "Students giggle at the latrines at first," Spitzer told the Guardian, but grow silent when they are told there are only two latrines for 8,000 refugees. "They’ll ask, ‘Where is the school? Where is the playground?’"

Establishing a connection between the refugees and exhibit visitors is an important step toward social awareness. While you might not be that surprised to hear that Sudan is home to 5.8 million IDPs, did you know that 4 million IDPs currently live in Colombia? Probably not, because the US media rarely covers international IDP and refugee issues.

Iraq accounts for 2.5 million refugees; Afghanistan for 3.1 million more. Most of these people were forced to flee as a result of US intervention and warfare — although there is barely any US media coverage. Spitzer told the Guardian he hopes that if the public can "feel solidarity with the refugees" as a result of visiting the exhibit, people will start to question the lack of information provided to Americans. The purpose of the exhibit isn’t to receive donations or recruit members, but simply, Spitzer said, "to educate" — regardless of whether the attendee "goes on to volunteer or become politically active or simply raises consciousness among their friends and family."

The MSF Web site is full of comments from people who were in some way altered or illuminated by the tour. Apoorva Balakrishnan, a University of Manitoba student, wrote, "I felt in a slump about my medical studies — so much biochemistry and details that seemed so pointless. This exhibit reminded me of the real reason I am becoming a doctor: people."

Another note, signed "Alec," says: "Some people have yet to realize what happens in the world around them. I came to this camp. Now I am no longer one of those people. "

One anonymous author summed up his reaction in two words: "I’m speechless."

A real plan for safety in the Mission

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OPINION When I heard the news that Jorge Hurtado was shot and killed in the Mission District, I was doubly stunned. Not only was the 18-year-old my neighbor, he was shot on the same corner where Erick Balderas was killed a year ago.

Eleven years ago, Erick was a student in the fourth grade class I taught at Paul Revere Elementary in Bernal Heights. In fact, three of my former students have been murdered in the city in the last two years. None were gang members — and none of their attackers have been caught.

Violent crime in the Mission is on a huge upswing; the homicide rate is on track to double what it was a year ago. In just a few weeks there have been six killings in the Mission. It’s a tragedy that affects everyone: kids, parents, teachers, business leaders — the entire community.

That community has begun to take matters into its own hands after receiving no commitments from the Mayor’s Office. It’s going to take two things to overcome violence in the community: community policing to better prevent and solve crimes, and engagement around social problems that promote violence.

I am glad that Capt. Stephen Tacchini of the Mission Police Station will receive more reinforcements in response to these recent shootings. But it’s not enough. Beat cops get to know the people in the neighborhood, and vice versa. But it has to be done the right way: the officers have to be trained appropriately so that police and people in the community can feel comfortable interacting with one another. Especially in a neighborhood like the Mission, cultural competency training is critical.

In Chicago, the city creates incentives for police to live in the communities they patrol. We’re exploring new housing options for teachers in the school district, and we should expand the discussion to include police officers as critical members of the community.

We don’t need to go as far as Chicago, though, to find ideas that work: in District 5, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has pushed for foot patrols (the supervisors overrode a mayoral veto last year to make it happen). He has also gathered everyone around the same table — nonprofits, police brass, community leaders, city agency heads, small business owners — and these stakeholders have collectively worked on the problems. Because of these strategies, District 5 has seen a huge reduction in violence.

We also have to make sure that the organizations working with youth are engaged with one another, not competing for resources at the expense of getting the job done. There is $12 million available citywide for violence prevention, much of it spent in the Mission. But we’re not seeing results. Duplication of services, as well as filtering out the really troubled youth who are most at-risk, have diminished the impact of our CBO’s hard work.

I’ve already proposed that a Beacon Program be opened at O’Connell High School, which is near the heart of the violence. It would give kids a safe place to drop in as late as 2 a.m., where they could be referred to counseling services, if necessary.

Candlelight vigils are one way to help a community mourn their loss and begin to heal. But we won’t stop this endless cycle with vigils alone. Prevention needs to be our unified goal. *

Mark Sanchez is the president of the San Francisco Board of Education and a resident of the Mission District.

The land of the screen

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>johnny@sfbg.com

My flight to Canada was delayed, so I missed James Benning’s RR, the first film I planned to see at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival. Plane snafus kept me from seeing Benning’s film about trains, which had graced the cover of a recent Guardian issue devoted to life on the rails (and by extension, American capitalism off the rails). The first face to greet me in Canada was that of Sarah Palin, on TV screens by the arrival gate and above the luggage carousel. There she was, again, this time at the Vice Presidential debate. Since the airport TVs were muted, her lines of dialogue took the form of subtitles.

Even though I missed RR, Benning’s influence was present in a pair of sharp-eyed features by women who map personal visions of the United States. Train-hopping figures in the beginning and end of Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to 2006’s Old Joy. At the start of the film, Wendy (Michelle Williams, in a role that’s taken on an added subtext of grief) and Lucy (played by Reichardt’s dog of the same name) walk into a beatific but beat-up nighttime campfire scene that’s like a Polaroid Kidd photo come to life. By the end, at least one of them has forsaken fuel car for train car.

A different story involving one woman, a camera, and the land, Lee Anne Schmitt’s California Company Town takes a more direct look at the American landscape. Schmitt’s documentary adds another volume to a growing collection of rural and urban US portraits by Cal Arts alumni, from Benning to Thom Andersen (whose 2003 Los Angeles Plays Itself shares Schmitt’s focus on California history) and William E. Jones (whose increasingly significant 1991 Massillon might be the precedent for Schmitt’s mix of voiceover and radio chatter, as well as her use of 16mm film). No doubt about it: Schmitt’s dry, scathing report on the fatal nature of California capitalism and the greater American dream was the festival’s timeliest film.

The unsentimental relevance of California Company Town hasn’t kept some viewers from blaming the messenger, who aims to provoke by capping her survey of the state’s ghost towns with a voiceless look at Silicon Valley, where even nature takes on a sterile, cult-like ambiance. At Vancouver and elsewhere, Terence Davies has been praised for Of Time and the City, his voiceover-heavy screed against capitalism’s facelifts for Liverpool, yet Schmitt’s relatively low-key approach to similar subject matter pisses off more people. For some, maybe the truth — especially when accompanied by Irma Thomas’ "Time is on My Side"— stings most when spoken by a woman. Andersen and Fred Halsted have demonstrated that Los Angeles plays itself. Schmitt shows how California plays us.

Both capitalism and socialism are skewered with no mercy and maximum mirth by Jim Finn’s The Juche Idea, which takes the published film theories of none other than Kim Jong-Il as its point of entry. If the extreme solitude of Schmitt’s film demonstrates one type of (autobiographical) radical filmmaking ideal, then Finn’s madcap feature demonstrates another. It’s a playfully braided collaborative effort. The main actresses (Jung Yoon Lee, and Daniela Kostova — a painter, video artist, and "the lesbian" on Big Brother Bulgaria 4) wryly insert their authorial voices and visual creativity into the film’s world. And what a mad, mad, mad world it is: one where Korean language courses teach kids how to pronounce "Karl Marx was a friend to children" and instruct adults on how to relieve their "loose bowels."

This world — where shoveling duck dung together makes for a romantic first date — looks like North Korea, one has to guess, or at least "Dear Leader’s" ideal version. Still, reviewers who assume capitalism emerges unscathed from the uproarious Juche Idea are watching the movie with one eye closed. Finn spotlights hilarious propagandistic turns of phrase such as "the tiny dentures of imperialism." But with one capitalist land outside the movie screen saddled with a 700 billion dollar debt, a viewer is left to wonder who’s zooming who when passing through the film’s multi-faceted looking glass. Jaw-dropping stadium-size spectacle, punch line-worthy blue screen backdrops, a mural by SF painter Carolyn Ryder Cooley, and the type of absurd corporate training footage beloved by Animal Charm all figure within Finn’s one-of-a-kind picture. The closing titles credit more than one person with "Kim Jong Il Flyface Assistance." Make no mistake: The Juche Idea is a communal effort.

Communal cooperation and journeys through the looking glass are also at play in Albert Serra’s Birdsong and Vancouver International Film Fest programmer Mark Peranson’s documentary about Serra’s movie, Waiting for Sancho. If Schmitt’s California Company Town is near-academically reductive and definitive in its approach to land, Serra’s Birdsong couldn’t be less prescriptive: with help from Google Image, the director chose the Canary Islands as a last-minute setting for his idiosyncratic retelling of the birth of the Christ child.

Process is to the fore of Serra’s filmmaking, which combines Andy Warhol’s and Apichatpong’s interest in boredom (and Warhol’s carefree neglect of camerawork) with a comic view of the heroic quest. Serra’s more immediately pleasurable Honour of the Knights (2006) updated Don Quixote; this time, the Three Wise Men verge on Three Stooges trapped in a Beckett scenario. Birdsong improves after one observes its filming through the video camera of Peranson (who plays Joseph in Serra’s movie). The ancient Three Wise Men of Serra’s film multiply to become a contemporary crew in Peranson’s documentary, which charts an aimless yet instinctive search for just the right cinematic moment at just the right site.

Communal cinematic spirit also enlivens Brillante Mendoza’s Serbis, a day-in-the-life melodrama about a family that operates — and lives within — a soft-core porn theater where hustlers ply their trade. At Cannes this year, Mendoza’s movie inspired panty-twist outrage from critics rich enough to be proudly unaware that people have bodies and sex costs money. While Serbis definitely owes a debt to Tsai Ming-liang’s masterful Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2004) and Jacques Nolot’s Porn Theatre (2003), Mendoza charts out and navigates a unique meta-cinematic space that is somehow even sun-dappled. He’s helped considerably by the superb actress Gina Paredes — and by a last-minute cameo from a goat.

Cooperative efforts aside, Vancouver didn’t lack commercial films powered by old-school singular auteur visions. One such standout was Hunger, the directorial debut of the English artist (not the deceased American actor) Steve McQueen. The formal daring of McQueen’s rendering of Bobby Sands and the IRA — which veers from wordless passages into a one-take presentation of an extended conversation — doesn’t become apparent until the very end, when his film suddenly embraces the award-grubbing political docudrama clichés that it’s avoided. Regardless, McQueen’s talent for framing shots and constructing scenes is prodigious. Tomas Alfredson makes no such missteps with Let the Right One In. If you see only one Swedish preteen vampire romance in your life, make it this one. The planned US version by Cloverfield director Matt Reeves will almost certainly lack Alfredson’s pop translations of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s desire and fire. Likewise, the subversive preteen sexuality of Alfredson’s original is unlikely to make the trip from Sweden to California. Vampires bite, but Hollywood remakes really suck.

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