Volume 45 [2010–11]

Passion Cafe

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Passion Cafe

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Although I deplored Julie & Julia — a dreadful bit of movie pap, except for the scene where Julie discovers that Julia hates her bloody blog; priceless! — I was mesmerized by the al fresco dinner cooked and served by the unsinkable Julie on a Brooklyn rooftop. There is a magic like no other in floating motionless above the nighttime city, with a soundtrack of soft conversation, gently clicking tableware, and the odd horn honking on the street below.

The street below the rooftop dining patio at Passion Café — opened not quite a year ago by Steve Barton and Jacques Andre — is Sixth Street, between Market and Mission, and it has more than its share of honking horns, along with speeding traffic, trash spread like autumn leaves in sidewalk tree wells, and a Dante-esque population of the shattered and lost. Sitting under an umbrella at a long picnic table 50 feet above all this on a rooftop patio framed by trellised vines and with a tall potted ficus at the end of the next table, is slightly surreal (though pleasant). If there is indeed a stairway to heaven, as Led Zeppelin once suggested, it might well begin here.

Passion Café will never be confused with the Fifth Floor, a few blocks away. Fifth Floor is higher up, totally enclosed, and all but lacking a ground-level presence. Passion Café, on the other hand, has its feet solidly planted on terra firma: there’s a large ground-level dining area, complete with exposed brick and oil paintings (for sale), just inside the door. But the draw of the place is definitely the roof, which you attain by climbing two flights of wide wooden stairs that creak. At the landing between the flights is a small tea table set for two — the perfect spot for a civilized break up, or maybe (for the less civilized) a discreet shove.

The food carries mostly French nomenclature and takes a variety of familiar French forms — the menu offers a variety of tartines, along with plates of charcuterie and paté — but the execution is strongly Californian. Many of the plates come heaped with mixed green salads, and white rice is served on a scale I have never remotely seen in France.

The ratatouille ($14), for instance, included a berm of rice that looked like something left behind by a Tonka-truck snowplow working its way through a blizzard. The vegetable stew itself, meanwhile, wasn’t a stew at all but more of what appeared to be a stir-fry of long, rather tough eggplant strips, lengths of red bell pepper, zucchini chunks, and tomato, but not enough tomato. It was as though the kitchen had thoughts of transforming a peasant’s dish, a way of using up the end-of-summer surplus from a vegetable garden, into a gourmand’s delight, as in the movie Ratatouille, but lost its nerve after a few hesitant steps. I would have liked a bit more thyme and garlic, too, but the dish was still flavorful.

Napoleons are typically confections of layered pastry one finds on the dessert cart, but Passion’s version ($14.50) was savory and made with pasta — lasagna, basically, with ground beef, baked in an oblong crock. Beside it rose a low mountain of mixed greens dotted with olives and croutons and dressed with a cumin-inflected vinaigrette.

Cumin, an easterly breeze, reminds us of the French connection in the Middle East and so it wasn’t completely surprising to find yet another hint of it in Passion’s paté ($5). The spice added a note of exotic excitement, but the paté itself (mounted on yet more salad) fell short of an ideal creaminess; despite the thinness of the slice, its texture was almost leathery. It was like a bit of old shoe sole that had fallen away into a clump of wet grass.

Views were mixed on the tomato-mozzarella salad ($5). You might wonder how anything could possibly go wrong with such a straightforward preparation — slices of ripe red tomato alternating with slices of cheese, and perhaps a drizzling of balsamic vinegar over the top — and the answer would be the bits of arugula the kitchen scattered about. Arugula has a nuttiness with a slightly bitter edge, and here the bitterness seemed to assert itself to the dismay of the table, though once we figured out what the little green flecks were, I came to admire their feistiness.

Desserts weren’t served with mountains of rice or salad (yay) or even dribblings of berries (boo). Chocolate mousse cake ($5) was fluffy and light as laundry taken fresh from the dryer, though on the sweet side, while a Granny Smith apple crisp ($5) could have used more apple character. Maybe they should look up one of Julia’s old recipes.

PASSION CAFÉ

Tues.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Fri., 11 a.m.–10:30 p.m.;

Sat., 9 a.m.–10:30 p.m.; Sun., 9 a.m.–9 p.m.

28 Sixth St., SF

(415) 437-9730

www.passioncafe.net

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Pleasant noise

Wheelchair access to ground floor

Holy high whoreiday

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Holy high whoreiday

caitlin@sfbg.com

SEX It started with a serial killer. Porn star-feminist Annie Sprinkle was reading about mass murderer Gary Ridgeway slaughter of, on his count, 71 prostitutes in the 1980s and ’90s. She came across this in Ridgway’s explanation of his choice of victims: “I picked prostitutes because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they … might never be reported missing. I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”

It was a wake-up call for Sprinkle. “We don’t have equal protection,” says the busty self-termed “ecosexual,” who was a sex worker for 20 years and now serves as a role model to many in the radical sex community. Sprinkle reacted by organizing the first International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers on Dec. 17, 2003. It’s an event that is now recognized in cities around the world.

In San Francisco, Sprinkle’s “whore holy high holiday” will be marked by a City Hall vigil for all the sex workers affected by discrimination and violence this year and performance art, followed by a march to the Center for Sex and Culture (sexandculture.org). All the events are free and open to anyone who wants to stand up for those that get paid to lay down.

This year, event organizers have a dangerously prude city policy in their sights: the toxic San Francisco Police Department practice of checking suspected prostitutes’ pockets for condoms to serve as proof of intent to have sex for money. It’s a policy that Mayor Gavin Newsom and the state’s first Latina attorney general, Kamala Harris, support. Sprinkle finds it completely at odds with the mission of promoting safe sex among anyone who could be walking down the street with a rubber in their pocket, as well as dangerous to sex workers. “It’s nasty, and really stupid, and so counterproductive — is that the message that we want to be sending?”

Which is not to say that Friday will be devoid of sweet, sexy joy entirely. After all, where would be the fun in gathering up SF’s sex-positive community if no one got naked? Later that evening, the Center for Sex and Culture will host a special edition of the national literary series Naked Girls Reading showcasing — yep — naked girls reading literature written by those who spread their legs to make their living.

“It’s a great opportunity for feminism and art,” says event organizer Lady Monster, who heard about Miss Erotic World 2005 Michelle L’amour’s original Naked Girl Chicago series and thought it a perfect fit for our pervy-intellectual burg. She held the first event in April and “it took off like wild blazes,” packing venues across town.

An ex phone sex operator who dabbled in private peep shows in her home state of Ohio without being told that the work was illegal, Lady Monster notes that the poor economy and demise of Craigslist escort ads in response to outside pressure has introduced even greater risks to sex workers, pressure that can lead them to accept unsafe working conditions. She feels that the nationwide observance of Dec. 17 “is a way to give people an opportunity to celebrate sex workers’ rights.”

On stage, her reading event will celebrate their contribution to arts and literature. Sexologist Dr. Carol Queen will be leafing through a book at the night’s nudie show; as well as burlesque star Dottie Lux; sex worker activist Robyn Few; Lady Monster herself (who’ll be reading from Some Girls, the memoir of Jillian Lauren, the American who lived and worked in a Brunei harem); and Sprinkle, among others. Lady Monster says the requirements needed to be onstage fall into three categories: readers must be accomplished writers, have public speaking experience, and — perhaps the most obvious — they’ve got be down to make the scene in the all together.

“Three hundred and sixty-four days a year we talk about how much we like our work, and one day a year we take time to realize that there are real victims out there,” Sprinkle says. It may be the oldest profession, but even in Gomorrah by the Bay, sex work is still a far cry from society’s respected elder.

INTERNATIONAL DAY TO END VIOLENCE AGAINST SEX WORKERS

Fri., Dec. 17

4 p.m., free

City Hall

Civic Center, SF

www.swopusa.org

NAKED GIRLS READING

9 p.m., $15–$20

Center for Sex and Culture

1519 Mission, SF

(415) 552-7399

www.nakedgirlsreading.com/sanfrancisco

UM alert!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
UM alert!

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS While we waited for our tacos, I crammed pickled jalapeños, carrots, and onions into a cup to take to the bar with us. Coach was riffling through the pile of rolled up complimentary calendars on the shelf above, muttering, “Hot babes hot babes hot babes.”

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Do you need a calendar?”

I thought: new year new year new year. “Yes,” I said. More than ever, I needed a calendar. You only get one picture with this kind; that’s why they’re free. I didn’t care about the pic. It was the new number I wanted, 2011, and all those clean, square, tear-away one-through-31s.

“Well,” Coach said, “do you want a hot babe, or the Virgin Mary?”

The ease with which I made my decision surprised me. I mean, 365 days is a lot of days to look at a picture. Albeit I intend to do other things as well, next year. “Virgin Mary,” I said.

And that was that. Well, when I got home four hours later, not so much drunk as oniony, and unrolled my Taqueria Virgin on the kitchen table, I was surprised to find that the Mother of God looked mighty fine in her own right. She wasn’t by any stretch a hot babe, like many of the angels surrounding and adoring her. But she seemed a little bored, bemused, and all-in-all like someone I might like to kiss.

Whether this makes me Catholic or a lesbian I don’t know, but anyway this ends the first part of the story.

The second part takes place next afternoon. I had four hours to kill between gigs, and thought I would spend at least most of that time contemplating barbecue. There’s this new one in Alameda, see, not so awfully far from where Boink and Popeye live.

It was the meat of the afternoon, and I wasn’t particularly hungry except that I’m always pretty hungry. So instead of erring on the side of lunch, I erred on the side of dinner. Check it out: $13-fucking-75 for pulled pork, comes with two sides and cornbread. I figured I would probably end up taking half of it home, making two meals out of it, or — dare I dream — three.

I had a book. It’s a pretty comfortable place, not crowded at all, midafternoon on a weekday, two TVs showing sports talk and highlights. Sweet tea refills. I took off my coat and scarf and made myself comfortable.

The sweet tea came. It was barely sweet at all.

Then the food. “I hope you’re hungry!” the waitressperson said on her way to my table. She said this with a knowing smile, which I took at first to be in my best interest.

“Oh, I’m hungry all right,” I said. “I might need a takeout container,” I added, for the sake of realism, “but I’m hungry.”

“Good,” she said, proudly sliding my plate before me.

For a moment I just stared. My brain went fuzzy, and then I wanted to cry. “Um,” I managed to sort of say. Then, when I found my vocabulary again, “What is this on my pork?”

First of all, it was the smallest portion of pork I have ever seen. Most place have sandwiches with twice as much meat on them as this dinner did. More urgently, however … what little meat there was snowcapped in an entirely creepy, pinkish creamy thing.

Now I’ve given a lot of benefits of a lot of doubts to a lot of restaurants in my day, but, as you may know, there is one thing I can neither tolerate nor forgive, and that is um … well, it’s UM: Unannounced Mayonnaise. You learn to ask, with sandwiches, salads, and even sushi. But … barbecue?

Sure enough, that’s what it was, a mixture of barbecue sauce and (gag, puke, spit) mayo, thus the pink. Oh, they remade my plate for me, but it came back with even less pork than before. The greens were okay, the fried okra was good, and their barbecue sauces were great, but the cornbread muffin was inedibly dry from either overcooking or staleness, or both.

I couldn’t fathom, let alone eat, the cornbread, but otherwise cleaned my plate. Counting tea and tip, it was a $20 snack. At my new least-favorite restaurant. *

BONNIE’S SOUTHERN STYLE BBQ

Mon.–Thu. 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Fri. 11 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Sat. 9 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sun. 9 a.m.–9 p.m.

1513 Park., Alameda

(510) 523-7227

MC,V

No alcohol

alt.sex.column: Squirmy

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
alt.sex.column: Squirmy

Dear Andrea:

I have a weird question. I have been with my boyfriend for two years and our sex life was great until recently. But I have started to get really ticklish when he touches me, and it’s putting us both off sex.

Literally when he touches my leg, I squirm away and giggle. I’m embarrassed, and we’re both bemused and frustrated. What’s going on?

Love,

Squirmy

Dear Squirm:

Giggling or getting ticklish is, of course, very common among teenagers and other young folk, and due, just as obviously, to self consciousness, unfamiliarity, and nerves. The cure is time and practice. I’m going to take a guess and say practice is your best bet.

Whatever set this off, it’s not, in a sense, real. You’re not nervous or anxious, and you’re not actually being tickled. It’s all in your mind, more or less.

The evolution of tickling does seem to have it origins in social interaction (most tickling is done by adults to kids, and only jerk parents keep going after being begged to stop). But the reaction — laughter — appears to be purely physical, not dependent on social factors like wanting the tickler to like you.

Anyway. Something has gone funny with your wiring. Probably something he did once set off a ticklish response and the next time he did something similar, the same nerves expected the same sensation and sent the same signals they would have if your boyfriend actually tickled you. Now every time he gets near you, the whole thing happens again.

I can think of two approaches that might help you.

1. Have him approach very slowly and entirely within your vision. Don’t try to “have sex” of any sort, just have him touch you and leave his hands there while you take some deep breaths and relax and let yourself feel how not tickly it is. Repeat until he can begin to move them around a little, and proceed like that till you’ve retrained yourself.

You might also try doing this in the dark. Darwin, delightfully, had some theories on tickling, observing that “tickling provokes laughter through the anticipation of pleasure. If a stranger tickles a child without any preliminaries, the likely result will be not laughter but withdrawal and displeasure.” You, clearly, are not experiencing pleasure, anticipated or actual, but there is still an aspect of anticipation at play here. If you lay down together in the dark, with no touching, until you are entirely relaxed, you might find he can touch you without your nerves freaking out.

2. Go ahead and let him do whatever he’s been doing that is eliciting the tickle response. Do this a whole lot. Hope it gradually desensitizes you. This may sound unbearable, but people do report training themselves out of over-ticklishness.

Try whichever plan sounds less odious. At least you’re pretty safe with your nice known-and-trusted boyfriend to experiment even with approach No. 2, which would be terrible at the hands of one of the many assholes out there who do not understand that in some cases “hahahahaha!” like “no,” means “no.”

Love,

Andrea

Got a question? Email Andrea at andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Let’s get budget priorities straight

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Let’s get budget priorities straight

OPINION Who will pay for California’s budget woes? For the last three years, Californians have put up with cuts to programs that are critical to our state’s future and our social safety net. Public education, HIV and AIDS programs, state universities, and CalWORKs have all come under the knife. The elephant in the room, as state and federal governments try to balance budgets on the backs of the working and middle class, is the billions of dollars we are wasting on a misguided war in Afghanistan.

Fresh evidence that the war in Afghanistan is failing rolls in on a daily basis. While the administration justifies the cost in lives and dollars as necessary to fight Al Qaeda, it also acknowledges that there are only 50 to 100 Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. Every soldier in Afghanistan costs U.S. taxpayers $1 million per year. With 100,000 soldiers on the ground, that means we’re spending as much as $2 billion a year on each Al Qaeda fighter.

Would we dream of spending $2 billion on every needy child in California? Or even $1 million? As U.S. and Afghan casualties rise along with the dollar amounts, with little success to show for it, we need to get our priorities in check.

At Governor-elect Jerry Brown’s budget forum this week, we were staring down a $28.1 billion budget deficit over the next 18 months. Compare that to the $46.4 billion Californians have already spent on the war in Afghanistan — $1.2 billion of that right out of San Franciscans’ pockets.

The Obama administration is conducting a strategy review this month that is expected to rubber stamp an approach that keeps soldiers in harm’s way — when doing so is not likely to make Americans or Afghans safer. At the same time, the president’s deficit commission chairs are also passing down recommendations to save money by cutting benefits for our most vulnerable citizens.

I would like to tell the taxpayers in my district who are shelling out these dollars that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but the president is now proposing ending the “combat mission” in 2014, which could mean there will be tens of thousands of troops on the ground even after four more years have passed.

I will continue to fight for our real needs in Sacramento. But it’s time for our representatives in Washington to put an end to this disastrous war and bring our troops home as quickly and responsibly as possible. Our tax dollars should be making life in California sustainable and safe for all. We can’t afford any other way.

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano represents the 13th District.

Hiring at home

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Hiring at home

sarah@sfbg.com

The lame duck Board of Supervisors made history Dec. 7 when it voted 8-3 to approve mandatory local hire legislation for city-funded construction projects. The measure ends a decade-long effort to reach 50 percent local hiring goals through good-faith efforts.

“That’s a sea change in our local hiring discussion,” said Sup. John Avalos, who launched the legislation in October as part of the LOCAL-SF (Local Opportunities for Communities and Labor) campaign, which seeks to strengthen local hiring, address high unemployment rates, and boost the local economy.

The veto-proof passage of Avalos’ measure comes in the wake of a city-commissioned study indicating that San Francisco has failed to meet good-faith local hiring goals for public works projects even as unemployment levels rise in the local construction industry and several local neighborhoods face concentrated poverty.

Although Cleveland also has a local-hire law, the Avalos measure will be the strongest in the nation. Avalos’ legislative aide Raquel Redondiez told the Guardian that Cleveland’s 2003 legislation requires 20 percent local hire.

“This legislation doesn’t just have a mandated 50 percent goal,” Avalos explained, noting that San Francisco will require that each trade achieve a mandated rate and that 50 percent of apprentices be residents.

“This will ensure that our tax dollars get recycled back into the local economy, and that San Franciscans who are ready to work are provided the opportunity to do so,” Avalos said.

Avalos’ groundbreaking legislation phases in mandatory requirements that a portion of San Francisco public works jobs go to city residents and includes additional targets for hiring disadvantaged workers.

 

WHO GETS $25 BILLION?

The legislation replaces the city’s First Source program, under which contractors were required only to make good faith efforts to hire 50 percent local residents on publicly-funded projects. But the measure begins slowly by mandating levels some contractors are already reaching. According to a study commissioned by the city’s Office of Employment and Workforce Development and released in October, 20 percent of work hours on publicly-funded construction projects are going to San Francisco residents.

Avalos’ legislation, which is supported by a broad coalition of labor and community groups including PODER, the Filipino Community Center, Southeast Jobs Coalition, Kwan Wo Ironworks Inc., Rubecon, and Chinese for Affirmative Action, comes at a critical moment for the recession-battered construction industry.

Under the city’s capital plan, more than $25 billion will be spent on public works and other construction projects in the next decade — and two-thirds of this money will be spent over the next five years.

The measure has environmental benefits too. Transportation still accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions generated in the Bay Area than any other source, and San Francisco residents are more likely to take transit, walk, or bike to work than residents of other Bay Area counties. “When local citizens are able to work locally, there are fewer cars on the road and less air pollution,” Avalos said.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi said that Avalos’ legislation is “just a start.”

“People have talked a good game about local hiring,” observed Mirkarimi, whose district includes the high unemployment-affected Western Addition.

“We are going to have to go beyond construction and start thinking about delving into the private sector,” Mirkarimi continued, pointing to the need to build 100,000 housing units over the next 25 years if the city is to keep up with a projected population increase. “Who is going to build that housing?” he asked.

Sup. Eric Mar noted that “the Sierra Club endorsed the measure early on because of the environmental benefits of having people work close to where they live.”

Sup. David Campos, whose district includes the Mission, said the measure was one of the most significant pieces of legislation to emerge from the board in recent years. “In the past, a lot of obstacles got in the way, including some legal challenges,” said Campos, who credited Avalos for navigating a complicated legal structure. “At the end of the day, I think this is going to benefit everyone.”

Mike Theriault, secretary-treasurer for the San Francisco Building Trades Council, told the Guardian he remains opposed to the legislation because the union presers to allocate jobs based on seniority, not residency. But he said the amendments make the measure “less harmful and more survivable in the short-term.”

 

THE ECONOMIC GAP

Termed-out Sup. Sophie Maxwell, who represents the city’s economically distressed southeast sector, has often noted that the construction industry provides a path to the middle class for people without advanced degrees or facing barriers to employment. She thanked Avalos for pushing legislation that promises to provides opportunities for “growing the middle class instead of importing it.”

“This industry closes the economic gap,” she said.

Board President David Chiu and termed-out Sups. Chris Daly and Bevan Dufty also supported Avalos legislation. But Dufty, who is running in the 2011 mayoral race, cast the eighth vote, which gave the measure a veto-proof majority.

The board’s Dec. 7 vote came a few hours after Bayview-based Aboriginal Blacks United founder James Richards and a score of unemployed local residents rallied at City Hall in the hopes of securing Dufty’s vote.

ABU has recently been protesting at UCSF’s Mission Bay hospital buildings site on 16th and Third streets. Its members also triggered a shut down at the Sunset Reservoir last month after a court ruled that locals promised jobs installing solar panels at the plant be replaced by higher-skilled engineers,

“It’s been too long that we have been protesting and fighting this good faith effort,” Richards told the Guardian. “We need a mandatory policy.”

Dufty is also hoping the Avalos measure could spread to other cities and benefit workers nationwide. “At a certain point I looked at labor and said, ‘Yes, I’m going for this legislation. But not just for San Francisco — you want to take this concept to other cities,’ ” Dufty said, as he made good on his promise to Richards to vote to support Avalos’ law.

Dufty seemed hopeful that Mayor Gavin Newsom would get behind the legislation. “But I respect that there may be a little bit of coming together between now and the second reading.”

Newsom spokesman Tony Winniker told the Guardian that the mayor has 10 days to review Avalos’ legislation after its Dec. 14 second reading. “He supports stronger local hire requirements but does want to review the many amendments that were added before deciding,” Winnicker said.

But will Newsom, who is scheduled to be sworn in as California’s next lieutenant governor Jan. 3, issue a veto on or before Christmas Eve on legislation that has been amended to address the stated concerns of the building trades?

That would be ironic since the amended legislation appears to match recommendations that the Mayor’s Taskforce on African American Outmigration published in 2009. The California Department of Finance projected that San Francisco’s black population would continue to decline from 6.5 percent (according to 2005 census data) to 4.6 percent of the city’s total population by 2050 — in part because of a lack of good jobs.

 

WILL NEWSOM VETO?

Avalos originally proposed to start at 30 percent and reach 50 percent over three years. But after the building trades complained that these levels were unworkable, Avalos amended the legislation to require an initial mandatory participation level of 20 percent of all project work-hours within each trade performed by local residents, with no less than 10 percent of all project work-hours within each trade to be performed by disadvantaged workers.

He also amended his legislation to require that this mandatory level be increased annually over seven years in 5 percent increments up to 50 percent, with no less than 25 percent within each trade to be performed by disadvantaged workers in the legislation’s sixth year.

A Dec. 1 report from city economist Ted Egan estimated that the local hire legislation would create 350 jobs and cost the city $9 million annually. But Egan clarified for the Guardian that this cost equals only 1 percent of the city’s spending on public works in any given year.

Vincent Pan of Chinese Affirmative Action, which supports Avalos’ local hiring policy, suggested that the mayor “check the temperature.”

“It would be leadership on the part of the mayor not to veto legislation that’s about San Francisco,” Pan said.

And Mindy Kener, an organizing member of the Southeast Jobs Coalition breathed a deep sigh of relief when Dufty’s vote made the law veto-proof. “It’s gonna go across the country,” Kener said. “We just made history.”

Mysteries of the death-drug scramble

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Mysteries of the death-drug scramble

news@sfbg.com

The California prison system finally released some documents on its efforts to procure the chemicals it needs to execute prisoners, and the 1,000 pages show the desperate lengths state officials have gone to procure the death drugs.

At one point, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation looked at importing drugs from Pakistan. In October, prison officials sent agents on a secret midnight mission to Arizona to acquire sodium thiopental, one of the drugs used in executions, from that state’s supply.

In the end, CDCR wound up buying an extraordinary quantity of the stuff from a supplier in London — potentially putting California in the disturbing position of serving as the death-drug dealer to the rest of the country.

The protocol for lethal injections in California, and 33 other states, calls for three drugs — sodium thiopental to put the condemned inmate in a coma; pancurium bromide to paralyze the muscles; and potassium chloride to stop the heart.

But sodium thiopental, also known as Sodium Pentothal, has been in short supply in this country, in part because the one company that currently makes it, Hospira, has production backlogs. There’s not a whole lot of need for the drug in modern medicine — it’s largely been replaced with other anesthetics — and Hospira has made it clear in repeated press statements that it doesn’t want its product used in executions.

So when the last batch of the stuff in the state’s hands expired in October, California had to put executions on hold while prison officials scrambled to find some more.

 

HIDING THE TRUTH

The whole process was cloaked in secrecy. Nobody at CDCR would tell us where they were looking for the sodium thiopental, who would be procuring it, or how the supply chain might work. That, of course, is crucial, in a grisly way: If the anesthetic didn’t perform properly (that is, if the state got a bad batch from an unregulated supplier), a prisoner could go through unspeakable agony as the second batch of drugs made it impossible to breathe.

The Guardian filed a request in October under the California Public Records Act seeking details on the purchase attempts, but CDCR stonewalled. The American Civil Liberties Union, also seeking the documents, filed a lawsuit, and a judge ordered the release of a large volume of material.

Those documents, now available at aclunc.org, is heavily redacted, and much of the material we expected to see is missing. But the documents contain some remarkable revelations.

For starters, there’s an internal timeline going back to 2007 showing that CDCR officials knew back then, while the drug protocol was being developed, that there would be problems. The Drug Enforcement Administration will only allow a doctor to order the class III controlled substances. And the federal receiver overseeing the prison system wouldn’t allow any of the three doctors on staff at San Quentin State Prison to sign the order forms, although the documents didn’t say why.

In January 2007, CDCR tried to recruit outside doctors to order the drugs — but physicians in California have traditionally declined to assist in executions. Indeed, the American Medical Association policy bars doctors from participating in capital punishment in any way, including “prescribing or administering tranquilizers.”

It wasn’t until May 2010 that CDCR was able to find doctors willing to order the deadly drugs; the names of those physicians are not in the documents.

The timeline shows that in June 2010, CDCR became aware that there was a shortage of sodium thiopental, but there was no public discussion of the situation. Plans to execute Albert Greenwood Brown, a convicted murderer set to die in September 2010, went forward.

But the courts weren’t rushing the execution — and the last batch of sodium thiopental in CDCR’s possession expired Oct. 1.

As the clock ticked down toward that expiration date, the documents show, CDCR officials — all the way up to Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate — were involved in an all-out scramble to get more of the drug.

At one point, a Sept. 16 e-mail — from an official whose name is blacked out — notes that CDCR had contacted between 80 and 100 hospitals to try to buy some sodium thiopental, but “none of them have a drop.”

The documents note that CDCR officials even suggested that there were supplies of sodium thiopental in Pakistan. An Aug. 17 e-mail from John McAuliffe, a contract worker helping CDCR with executions, says the agency is trying to get federal government approval to import the drug.

One e-mail even suggests that an unnamed CDCR employee was in the area and could make a side trip to Pakistan to pick up the stuff.

 

THE LONDON CONNECTION

There are, of course, serious issues with importing controlled substances into the United States, and the documents show efforts by CDCR to get the DEA to approve imports. The Pakistan deal apparently went nowhere — but later e-mails show CDCR officials contacting a supplier in London. The name of the supplier is blacked out on all the documents, but CDCR’s deputy press secretary, Terry Thornton, later confirmed that the manufacturer was Archimedes Pharma.

Immediately after the California order for 521 grams of sodium thiopental went through, Britain’s secretary of state for business, Vince Cable, issued an order barring any further exports of the drug for use in executions.

Like most of the civilized world, the United Kingdom does not allow the death penalty.

In the meantime, Scott Kernan, CDCR’s undersecretary for operations, was trying to get enough of the death drug domestically to carry out at least one execution. A series of e-mails show contacts between California and Arizona, which recently had imported its own supply — and there are indications that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was willing to call his counterpart in Arizona to help consummate the deal.

“I’m sure either the secretary or even the governor could make a call,” a Sept. 9 e-mail from Kernan to McAuliffe notes.

Then on Sept. 29, Kernan sent an e-mail to Assistant Secretary Anthony Chaus discussing a “secret and important mission.” Kernan wanted Chaus to send a team to a state prison complex in Florence, Ariz., a desert town about 40 miles southeast of Phoenix, to pick up 12 grams of the death drug.

At midnight Sept. 30, the warden in Florence gave the CDCD agents 24 vials, each containing half a gram of sodium thiopental. The agents drove it to Bakersfield, where another team picked up the vials and drove the rest of the way to San Quentin.

In a stomach-turning e-mail, Kernan sent a note Sept. 29 to an unnamed Arizona official saying “you guys in Arizona are life savers” and offering to “by [sic] you a beer next time I get that way.”

By then, a federal judge had delayed Brown’s execution until 2011.

Among the most startling revelation was the sheer quantity of sodium thiopental California eventually ordered from the firm in London. Even with training supplies and backup, it only takes between six and 12 grams of sodium thiopental to render a prisoner unconscious — meaning that the 521 grams that CDCR purchased for $36,413 are enough to kill between 43 and 86 people. The expiration date on the chemical is 2014.

It’s highly unlikely, given the legal hurdles and time involved in even one execution, that California would schedule more than three over the next three years. What possible use could the state have for so much death drug?

Thornton, CDCR’s press person, wouldn’t respond to our queries. But Natasha Minsker, the director of the ACLU’s Death Penalty Project, said she’s concerned that California will try to become a supplier for other prison systems. “It certainly raises questions,” she told us.

There’s a lot missing from the documents. In many instances, the names of the officials who sent and received e-mails are redacted. And there are obvious pieces of the puzzle missing from the files CDCR has released.

“There’s no e-mail from the DEA or the FDA,” Minsker said, “although CDCR was clearly contacting them. There’s nothing from the governor’s office, although it’s likely they were also involved.”

Overall, Minsker said, the documents “show how sneaky CDCR was trying to be about all of this.”

The ACLU filed another suit Dec. 13 seeking the release of some of the redacted material as well as records of CDCR’s efforts between October and December.

If those documents are ever released, they may address some of the looming questions about the material the state uses to kill people.

Local hiring — and purchasing

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Local hiring — and purchasing

EDITORIAL The local hire ordinance that the Board of Supervisors approved last week once again puts the city on the cutting edge of progressive policy. San Francisco’s law, sponsored by Sup. John Avalos, is the strongest in the country, and ultimately will mandate that 50 percent of all the people hired on public works projects live in the city.

The politics of the bill were tricky; the local building trades unions opposed it on the grounds that many of their members live out of town and that hiring decisions should be based on seniority, not on residence. But eight supervisors recognized that a local hire law not only benefits the large numbers of unemployed San Franciscans; it’s also good economic policy for the city.

Numerous studies have shown that money paid out to local residents gets spent in town, and circulates in town, and creates more economic activity. That translates into fewer social and economic costs for the city and increased tax revenue.

There are costs to the law. Someone has to monitor compliance, and that requires additional city spending. Training local workers for union jobs may raise the price of some projects. But in the end, the studies all show that keeping money in the community is worth the price.

Avalos deserves tremendous credit for negotiating with labor and other interested parties, accepting compromises that don’t damage the impact of the measure and lining up eight votes to pass it, so even if Mayor Gavin Newsom vetoes it, the board can override the veto.

Now the board ought to apply the same principle to a local purchase law.

One of the major complaints small businesses have in San Francisco is their inability to get city contracts. The qualifying process is complicated and expensive — and when big out of town corporations with plenty of resources to put together bids can also offer lower prices, locals get left out.

The city spends vast sums of money, hundreds of millions of dollars a year, buying goods and services. Every dollar that leaves town translates into far more than a dollar lost to the local economy.

In fact, a 2007 study by Civic Economics showed that 38 percent of the money spent on locally based retailers in Phoenix, Ariz., remained in town and recirculated in the local economy; only 11 percent of the money spent at chain stores stayed in town.

That’s a huge difference, and would translate into many millions of dollars for the San Francisco economy. (Over time, the impact of local hire and local purchasing laws would be much greater than the one-time burst of income expected from the America’s Cup race.)

There are complications with any local purchase law. Not everything the city needs can be bought locally. Nobody in San Francisco, for example, makes train cars or fire engines. But on everything from office supplies and cars to uniforms and consulting contracts, there are (or could be) local companies handling the city’s business.

As with the Avalos law, there would be costs. Some small local suppliers would be unable to match the price that big chains offer. But the overall economic benefits to the city would greatly exceed those price differentials.

San Francisco currently gives a modest preference in bidding to local firms. But if the supervisors applied the Avalos principle and mandated that, within five years, a certain percentage of everything the city buys would have to go to local firms, city officials would be forced to do what they ought to do anyway: look local first.

Every year during the holiday season, the mayor and business leaders urge residents to shop locally. When the new Board of Supervisors takes over in January, the members should start looking beyond rhetoric and start working on legislation that would keep the city’s money in the city.

Race against the clock

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Race against the clock

rebeccab@sfbg.com

City officials were poised to finalize an offer to host the 34th America’s Cup after amending a sweetheart deal that had city taxpayers heavily subsidizing Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison’s yacht race. But the question now is whether Ellison will accept the new proposal.

The original deal negotiated between representatives for Ellison and Mayor Gavin Newsom called for ceding 35 acres of city-owned waterfront property to Ellison’s America’s Cup Event Authority (ACEA) rent-free, but it was criticized as too expensive for a city facing massive budget deficits (see "The biggest fish," Nov. 30).

So at the Dec. 8 meeting of the Board of Supervisors’ Budget & Finance Committee, that deal was jettisoned in favor of a cheaper alternative that shifted the race venue to the city’s Northern Waterfront and promised long-term leases on commercially reasonable terms. The new agreement appeared on track for approval at the Dec. 14 Board of Supervisors meeting, after Guardian press time.

At the same time, new doubts arose at the last minute when race organizers stated publicly that they were more likely to reject the new option than the original plan because the financial terms were not as attractive. Although expectations have been high all along that San Francisco would be selected to host the next Cup, the team cast doubt on the outcome by publicly criticizing the new plan. According to a source familiar with negotiations, that move came as a jarring surprise to city officials. Nonetheless, supervisors approved the proposal at a Dec. 13 special meeting and sent it on to the full board.

Newsom’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development (OEWD) spent about four months in negotiations with Ellison’s BMW Oracle Racing Team and the ACEA to hash out a host city agreement. The Northern Waterfront scenario emerged in late November after Budget & Legislative Analyst Harvey Rose cautioned in a fiscal impact assessment that the original deal would have cost the city an estimated $128 million, including impacts to the general fund and losses from entering into rent-free leases.

The fundamental shift in the plan at this late stage, less than three weeks before the deadline for a final decision, reflected some deft maneuvering on the part of the board even in the face of intense pressure to approve a binding long-term agreement on an unusually short timeline. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and Board President David Chiu, who expressed reservations about the original proposal but strongly favored the idea of bringing the race to San Francisco, were able to deflect a deal that would have harmed the city in favor of a wiser alternative by reshaping the proposal at the 11th hour.

"I was a little bit surprised by some of the recent press," Mirkarimi noted at the Dec. 13 meeting, referencing reports that the team was considering rejecting the bid. He asked everyone to keep in mind that "we’re working with public dollars and purse strings."

But the Mayor’s Office supported the modified deal. Press Secretary Tony Winnicker told the Guardian: "The Northern Waterfront bid is good for the city, great for the port, and will provide a spectacular experience for the America’s Cup. Hosting the America’s Cup will bring more than $1 billion in economic activity and thousands of jobs to San Francisco and showcase the city unlike almost any other event."

Speaking at the Dec. 8 committee meeting, Chiu also voiced his support for hosting the Cup. "Obviously this will have enormous benefits," Chiu said. "If this were to come to San Francisco, this will mean $1 billion and likely $1.2 billion in economic activity during the greatest recession since the Great Depression. We cannot ignore this opportunity."

The difference in the two scenarios amounts to tens of millions of dollars in savings. According to a fiscal feasibility analysis released Dec. 13 by the Budget Analyst, the net loss to the city under the Northern Waterfront alternative would be $11.9 million, compared to $57.8 million under the prior agreement (not including costs relating to the rent-free leases proposed earlier). However, that impact doesn’t account for a $32 million contribution that the America’s Cup Organizing Committee is expected to provide to the city to defray municipal costs.

Under the Northern Waterfront plan, Piers 30-32 and Seawall Lot 330 would be leased to race organizers for 66 and 75 years, respectively, on "commercially reasonable terms" with development rights included. The race organizers would receive a rent credit in exchange for investing an estimated $55 million for infrastructure improvements.

Rose’s office also found that the city would realize a net gain by transferring development rights for Piers 30-32 and Seawall Lot 330 with commercially reasonable rents, generating a net $12.3 million in new tax and lease revenues.

"This deal has significantly improved from the prior deal that went before you," Rose noted at the Dec. 13 Budget & Finance Committee meeting. The main reason for the reduction in costs was that under the original plan, ACEA would have been granted rent-free development rights to Pier 50, a 20-acre waterfront parcel needing costly renovations, for 66 years. Removing that costly improvement and shifting dredging costs from the city to race organizers made the prospect more feasible for San Francisco.

Piers 26 and 28 were added to the equation late in the game, too. Under the new plan, ACEA has the option to spend an additional $25 million renovating those piers in exchange for leasing them for 66 years with rent credits. Ted Egan, an economic analyst with the City Controller’s office, noted that the piers were expected to last for only 15 years if they weren’t renovated.

"Without the America’s Cup stepping forward, we lose them, and we lose any potential development that could take place at those piers," he noted. Port Director Monique Moyer also praised the plan at the Dec. 8 meeting, saying piers that would have continued to deteriorate could now be revitalized.

Chiu amended the agreement to secure greater assurance that the city would receive a $32 million contribution from the America’s Cup Organizing Committee (ACOC), the fund-raising arm of the race organizing team, to defray municipal costs. Prior to Chiu’s amendment, there was no guarantee that the city and county would receive that money, Rose pointed out.

Jennifer Matz, director of OEWD, noted that ACOC was "committed to using best efforts" to raise $32 million over the course of three years. Under the agreement, if the committee hasn’t successfully raised $12 million by one week after the environmental review has been completed, the city reserves the right to call off the deal.

The new plan seemed likely to pass muster even with Sup. Chris Daly, the most vocal opponent of the original plan. "One thing that’s clear is that it’s a whole lot better than the previous proposal," Daly said.

Ellison, who captured the 33rd America’s Cup off the coast of Spain and holds exclusive power to choose which city will host the next sailing match, has set Dec. 31 as the deadline for his final decision. But a source familiar with the negotiations told the Guardian an announcement was expected even sooner.

Ironically, there was little doubt that Ellison would select San Francisco until the very end of the process, when the city finally reached an agreement that seemed to satisfy the Mayor’s Office, the Board of Supervisors, and the economic analysts. At press time, it was still an open question whether Ellison will go for it.

"With this latest bit of vetting by us, I think the city has done the utmost it possibly could do in putting forth the best plan it possibly could craft in such a short period of time," Mirkarimi said at the close of the Dec. 13 meeting. "I think that San Francisco stands to be the best contender for hosting America’s Cup, and let that message ring well toward Mr. Ellison, and around the country, and abroad."

Appetite: Blue Ribbon classics

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Appetite: Blue Ribbon classics

Two of the nicest chefs you’ll ever meet, Bruce and Eric Bromberg (brothers), spread the warmth of their NY Blue Ribbon Restaurants globally. I have happy memories of late nights at the original Blue Ribbon Sushi on Sullivan Street long before Blue Ribbon grew to multiple restaurants around NYC. As I write, they are on their way to Las Vegas to open their first restaurant outside NY. They are also touring the world to launch their Blue Ribbon Classics menu at Renaissance Hotel bars… a brief menu of some of the most popular plates and cocktails from their NY restaurants. In SF, the menu just launched at the Stanford Court on Nob Hill, a recently remodeled, chic lobby bar with a youthful hipness (not your typical Nob Hill).

None of this sounds particularly down-to-earth, I’ll admit. During a media dinner last week, I went in expecting a tasting and brief “meet and greet” with the chefs. I took stairs down to the now-defunct but historic Fournou’s Ovens, an intimate space with the famous stoves lining one wall where whole ducks were roasted daily. The Bromberg bros happily recall their dad bringing them here as kids. There was a long table glowing with candles and fruits, as if at a friend’s intimate dinner. The Bromberg’s oldest brother was present, as was their dad, cousins, and childhood friend (they grew in New Jersey, so we have that in common). As media, we spent an engaging couple hours with the chefs themselves.

The titular ovens from now-closed Fournou’s Ovens

As for the menu, it is glorified bar food, including white bean hummus toasts ($10) drizzled with lemon oil, and their famed fried chicken in the form of wings ($12) with their own Mexican honey. I do have three words I want you to utter when at the Stanford Court bar: pork chip nachos ($6). These are not nachos but tender chicharrones. Yes, it’s a pile of pork rinds, soaked ever so subtly, giving the usual crisp a melting factor, tossed with queso fresco, red onion, cilantro and jalapeno. Addictive. Sip a bright Michelada ($10) using Napa Smith pilsner, fresh lime, hot sauce, garnished with a red and green chile, and you have yourself a happy hour indeed.

Pick up the Bromberg Brother’s recent cookbook to create their elevated comfort food recipes yourself, like their popular spicy egg shooters (also on the menu at the Stanford Court), baked blintz souffle with brown sugar bananas, or “really good brisket”. As the brothers spoke of their mission when founding the first restaurant many years ago, the Blue Ribbon name came from a desire to treat each person, whether a diner or staff, as ‘first place’: important, welcome, cared for. With some restaurateurs, this could come across disingenuous, and not entirely realistic. As I experienced the way we were treated that night by the Bromberg family, I can see they have not only built their success on this philosophy but that they mean every word.

–Subscribe to Virgina’s twice monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot: http://theperfectspotsf.com

Violence please!

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Violence please!

Christmas is here early, horror geeks: not only is a brand-new print of 1980’s Maniac playing the Castro Theatre, but director William Lustig will be in attendance. After the big-screen experience, make sure Santa knows you want the extras-packed 30th anniversary DVD, released by Lustig’s own Blue Underground label, wrapped in bloody butcher paper under the tree.

For the uninitiated, Maniac — the tale of a mommy-haunted New York City creep who stalks and kills women, using their body parts to accessorize his mannequin collection — features a tour de force performance by the late Joe Spinell, who co-wrote the screenplay. Spinell was a grindhouse favorite who also appeared in the first two Rocky movies, the first two Godfather movies, and Taxi Driver (1976). Lustig directed Spinell in 1983’s Vigilante; he also helmed the Maniac Cop series. He hasn’t directed a feature since 1997’s horror comedy Uncle Sam (“I want you … DEAD!”), but he’s still very much involved in the world of genre films. Since I’m a Maniac maniac, I gave him a call at his New York City office to talk about exploding heads and other topics.

SFBG How long have you been planning Maniac‘s 30th anniversary celebration?

William Lustig About 18 months ago, the idea popped into my head that it was time to freshen up the movie. Six months ago, somebody came up with the idea of testing it as a theatrical release. We started playing it in Seattle, New York, and Los Angeles, and it’s done quite well, so we’re going to be rolling it out over the next three or four months in about 50 cities throughout North America.

SFBG Are most audiences already familiar with the movie, or are you getting some first-timers?

WL People who have seen it on video make up a good portion of the audience, but the other portion are seeing it for the first time. It’s amazing — you know, when you make a movie like this, I guess it’s like somebody who makes a comedy. After a while, you don’t find it funny anymore. As a person who made a horrific movie, I can’t imagine anybody finding it scary, and yet people do. They still respond as strongly as people did 30 years ago. It feels great!

SFBG Are you surprised that Maniac became such a cult favorite?

WL Somebody recently asked me, when did I realize it was a classic? I guess it must have been about 18 months ago when I realized that this movie continues to sell, continues to intrigue people. I think a portion of it is the mystique of its star, Joe Spinell, who’s become kind of a cult figure for people who are rediscovering movies from the ’70s. But Maniac is not a film that was lost and now it’s been found — it’s been around and it continues to attract audiences and to please them.

SFBG What was Joe Spinell like in real life?

WL Like any great actor, there was a part of Joe in every role he played. Joe was a loner, and he was an insomiac. He would roam the streets of New York and be at bars until all hours. He was a troubled soul, but at the same time, he was one of the most brilliant people I ever met. He had a charisma that would attract beautiful women even though he wasn’t a classically handsome guy. He had a magic about him. So when you see Maniac, there are aspects of his personality in there.

SFBG Maniac was quite controversial when it was released. Did that surprise you?

WL You know, when you’re making a movie and you’re throwing ketchup around, it’s almost kind of comical. It’s not intended to be serious — you intend it to be a kind of roller-coaster ride for an audience. And when people take a movie like that so seriously, and look at it as being a political statement, and look at it as being some kind an outcry for violence against women and things like that, it kind of takes you aback. When I made the film, I was 24 years old and I was just trying to survive the experience. I wasn’t thinking about the wider implications of what we were doing. And I think we’ve gone beyond that in the world today. I think we kind of look at it as being make-believe.

SFBG I have to ask you about the famous exploding head, courtesy of effects wizard Tom Savini. Did you realize that would be Maniac‘s defining moment?

WL I think after we made the movie, we realized it had a tremendous impact. But when we were doing it, we were like burglars in the night. First off, there is no permit in existence, in any part of New York City, or I would imagine in any part of the country, that allows to you fire a live gun on a movie set and on public streets. Which is what we did — we actually filmed that in that parking lot, under the Verrazano Bridge, with a live shotgun, double-loaded. That was our major concern: would we get busted? It wasn’t until later, when we saw the dailies, that we realized, “Holy shit! It actually turned out to be something!” We rigged up three cameras and we just went for it.

SFBG You’re the owner of Blue Underground, which has released top-notch DVDs and Blu-rays of Maniac and other grindhouse movies. Why did you become such a champion of these films?

WL It was kind of satisfying my own need. I always loved having people over to my house, showing them these obscure grindhouse movies that I had seen on 42nd Street in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and I would see their [enthusiastic] reactions. One of the things that bothered me back in the ’80s and the ’90s was that these movies were never really treated with any respect. So it was my intention to treat grindhouse movies the same way Criterion treats its Fellini movies.

MIDNITES FOR MANIACS: PUSH IT TO THE LIMIT TRIPLE FEATURE

Just One of the Guys (1985), Fri., 7:30 p.m.; Point Break (1991), Fri., 9:30 p.m.;

Maniac: The Restored Director’s Cut (1980), Fri., midnight, $12

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120 www.castrotheatre.com

‘Nutcracker’ and beyond

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‘Nutcracker’ and beyond

You don’t have to be into winter solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa celebrations to realize that there’s something about December — the end of another decade this time around, the darkest part of the year — that calls out for treats either for yourself or a friend or two. Here are a few dance-related suggestions between now and the end of the year that won’t bust your budget.

Born in Imperial Russia, The Nutcracker has become a peculiarly American institution. Almost against my will, it pulls me in every time. Though bifurcated, the masterful music — no matter its commercialization — pulls together the story of a brave little girl and her adventures. Reasonably priced options exist. San Francisco Ballet’s (through Dec. 27; War Memorial Opera House, SF) starts at $32. Take binoculars, you’ll be fine. The Oakland Ballet Company’s highly acclaimed version by new Artistic Director Graham Lustig (Dec. 23-26; Paramount Theater, Oakl.) starts at $15. Berkeley Ballet Theater’s (Dec. 10-12 and 17-19; Julia Morgan Theater, Berk.) has a one-price ticket for $26. After 20 years, this will be former ODC dancer Brian Fisher’s last Fritz.

If you like your Nutcracker to have sharp edges, the Dance Brigade’s mashup of politics and fun, The Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie (Dec. 11-12; Brava Theater, SF; $15–$17), has been reimagined by another generation of grrrl dancers and friends. The Dance Along Nutcracker (Dec. 11-12; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF; $16–$50) was a hoot the first time around and continues to be a splendid mix of circus, dress-up, and community celebration. This year the revelers have invited the Twilight Vixen Revue. The SF Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band does the musical honors — fabulously.

Stepping outside of Nutcracker territory into original holiday fare, Kirstin E. Williams’ all-female Strong Pulse company hooks up with CCSF students for Be Cool, (Dec. 10-11; CCSF Performance Theater, SF; $10–$15) a jazz/ modern dance/hip-hop concert that is guaranteed to resonate all over the Phelan Avenue campus.

If you have never seen ShaSha Higby work her magic with phantasmagoric concoctions of human-made and natural materials, be prepared to being pulled into a world as dreamlike as it is tangible. In Folds of Gold (through Dec. 10-11; Noh Space, SF; $12-20) examines deep winter issues surrounding life, death, and rebirth.

The circus-based Sweet Can Productions newest show, Candid (Dec. 17-Jan. 9; Dance Mission Theater, SF; $15–$60), is sweet but not saccharine-sweet. These performers juggle and subvert cherished concepts as well as objects — brooms, dinner plates, hula hoops — to stretch credulity and the imagination. It’s what happens when life meets art.

With Lo Clásico, (Dec. 17-19; Cowell Theater, SF; $15–$35), Caminos Flamencos — 22 dancers and musicians — are performing Spain’s two major historical dance forms. There is, of course, flamenco, including Yaelisa’s breathtaking Soleares, but also examples of lesser-known Spanish classical dance choreographed to Ravel and de Falla.

WestWave Dance (Dec. 13; Cowell Theater, SF; $22–$68) closes its season with another quintet of new choreography by Pam Gonzales (from L.A.), Alyce Finwall, Christy Funsch, Carolé Acuna, and Ingrid Graham. The festival curates promising work by artists who can’t on their own afford the professional production values WestWave offers.

How about insight into dancers’ thought processes? For free? Chime Live (Dec. 11; Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab, SF; free) offers conversations and showings of work from Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab’s mentoring program. In the monthly program “2nd Sundays” (Dec. 12; CounterPULSE, SF; free), artists show pieces-in-progress and invite feedback. “Dancemaker’s Forum” (Dec. 19; SF Conservatory of Dance, SF; free) workshops new choreography by Manuelito Biag.

Contact improvisation has become a valued tool for choreographers, but it’s also a glorious performance art that redefines the concept of being “in the moment.” One of its originators, the masterful Nancy Stark Smith (Dec. 18; Eighth Street Studios, Berk.; $10–$20) is in town to connect with local and guest practitioners.

The connection between the Odette and Odile characters has puzzled Swan Lake lovers forever; the roles used to be danced by two different performers. SF Ballet’s recent production hinted at one interpretation. For another take, you might want to go to the movies and see Natalie Portman in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (now playing; Bay Area theaters; prices vary).

Pass the DREAM Act, now

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Pass the DREAM Act, now

by Eric Mar and Eric Quezada

news@sfbg.com

OPINION Imagine for a moment that you are 14 years old. Your parents, stuck in perpetual poverty and unemployment (or perhaps worse), move your family to a foreign country to begin a new life.

You work hard, struggle to fit in, study constantly, and fill your spare time with school activities. Maybe you even work a little on the side to chip in. You are a parent’s dream, and a model of young citizenship.

Except that you’re not a citizen. And one day, even as you’ve mastered English and flourished in school and in the community, you are stopped like a criminal by federal authorities.

This is what happened to Steve Li, an engaging and industrious 20-year-old student at City College of San Francisco and a graduate from George Washington High School. He always thought he was an average San Franciscan until the morning of Sept. 15, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents suddenly raided his home and arrested him and his parents. Steve was incarcerated in Arizona for more than 60 days, far from his friends and family. Through a full-court legal and legislative press, and a groundswell of immigrant community organizing leading to a private emergency bill by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Li has temporarily staved off deportation. But Li and thousands of other hard-working young immigrant Americans could soon be summarily tossed out of the country if Congress doesn’t act now to pass the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act.

The DREAM Act is a common-sense, bipartisan measure that is urgently needed to avoid countless other Steve Li cases. Despite congressional wavering on comprehensive immigration reform (which a consistent majority of Americans support), everyone should be able to agree on the basic right of undocumented immigrant minors, who are moved here by their parents, to gain steps toward obtaining citizenship.

In brief, the DREAM Act would enable some immigrant students who have grown up in the U.S. to apply for temporary legal status and to eventually obtain permanent status and become eligible for U.S. citizenship if they go to college or serve in the U.S. military.

According to the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), about 65,000 U.S.-raised high school students could qualify for the DREAM Act’s benefits each year. As NICL puts it, “These include honor roll students, star athletes, talented artists, homecoming queens, and aspiring teachers, doctors, and U.S. soldiers. They are young people who have lived in the U.S. for most of their lives and desire only to call this country their home … they face unique barriers to higher education, are unable to work legally in the U.S., and often live in constant fear of detection by immigration authorities.”

It makes no moral, economic, or social good sense to continue tearing apart families and communities and disrupting young people’s lives — all at great expense to the American public and taxpayers.

The time to act is now: please call your congressional representatives today and urge them to vote yes on the DREAM Act — without any amendments that might undermine its effectiveness. Although Nancy Pelosi and most Bay Area Democrats support the bill, Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Stockton) and the Republicans are either on the fence or opposed. There’s no time to waste in giving hard-working young immigrant students this most American ideal — the opportunity to make their dreams a reality.

Eric Mar is a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Eric Quezada is executive director of Dolores Street Community Services in San Francisco.

Class of 2010: Jane Kim

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Class of 2010: Jane Kim

steve@sfbg.com

Despite fears that a candidate backed by downtown could replace firebrand progressive leader Sup. Chris Daly in District 6, in the end it was the two progressive candidates — Jane Kim and Debra Walker — who finished far in front of the large pack of candidates, with Kim winning the race. And she thinks that says something about how the progressive movement has matured.

“To have the two leading candidates be progressives says a lot about the progressive political community,” Kim said. “The race was really between Debra and me in end.”

Kim, a 33-year-old attorney and the outgoing president of the San Francisco Board of Education, has been active in progressive politics in San Francisco for many years, from doing community organizing with the Chinatown Community Development Center to running the short-lived San Francisco People’s Organization, which Daly helped create.

Yet part of her campaign strategy, and the message that she’s sending in the wake of an election that divided the progressive community, focuses on issues and themes that are more common to political moderates: job creation, clean streets, public safety, and neighborhood services.

“I think it’s important for progressives to cross over, and I don’t think it should be viewed as selling out,” Kim told us. “Progressives need to do a good job at maintaining voters’ faith in the progressives’ ability to lead.”

In addition to courting progressive groups and voters, Kim’s campaign aggressively targeted residents of the residential condo towers in Rincon Hill and Eastern SoMa, voters who are generally more affluent and newer to San Francisco than the typical progressive constituencies.

“It’s a lot of new residents who don’t feel like they’re a part of any political faction and they’re really open,” Kim said. “People just want to see that things are better. They want the streets to be clean and safe.”

With a new mayor and new blood on the Board of Supervisors, Kim said this is an important political moment for San Francisco, “a huge opportunity” to redefine San Francisco politics in the wake of Mayor Gavin Newsom and progressive supervisors such as Aaron Peskin, Matt Gonzalez, Tom Ammiano, and Daly.

“The Class of 2000 was able to show how progressive we can be with policy. They really pushed the envelope,” Kim said, citing new worker and tenant protections and programs such as Healthy San Francisco. Now, she said, the challenge for progressives in the Classes of 2010 and 2008 is to show that they can provide effective leadership in realms like public safety and economic development. “If we’re able to lead on those two issues, it would really firm up our leadership of the city,” Kim said, noting that it would also affect the dynamics of next year’s mayor’s race.

While Kim didn’t go into detail about how she intends to deal with what she says is the biggest challenge facing the new board — a budget deficit of $700 million over two years, coming at a time when all the easy cuts have already been made in recent years — she said the city needs to be aggressive in boosting the local economy and ensuring San Franciscans get most city contracts.

“We need to figure out how we can partner with small business to create a diversity of jobs in San Francisco,” she said, noting that the average San Franciscan has more faith in the moderates’ ability to create jobs, something that progressives need to address. But how can she help break the grip that the conservative San Francisco Chamber of Commerce has on small businesses?

“Part of the problem is that small businesses aren’t organized,” Kim said, noting how that hurt Sup. David Chiu’s ability to win support this year for his business tax reform measure that would have helped most small businesses and made some large corporations pay more taxes. “They’re busy running their businesses and they don’t have the time to look at the details, so they just read the briefing of the Chamber of Commerce.”

Kim said she respects the leadership role Daly has played in progressive politics and that she’d “like to be part of the moral compass of the Board of Supervisors.” But she also said that Daly’s sometimes abrasive style unnecessarily hardened the opposition of moderates to important progressive issues.

“He made it harder to talk about affordable housing,” Kim said, noting that the city’s dearth of affordable housing should be an issue that’s important to middle class voters, noting that it includes housing for people who earn up to 120 percent of the median income for the region. But after Daly hammered on the issue, “It was like a bad word coming out, and people would turn off to the issue.”

But she thinks it’s a fixable problem if she and her allies do the hard work, an ability they demonstrated this year by defeating Walker, who had been running for the seat for years and lining up all the key endorsements. “Voters do respond to campaigns that work really hard, and that bodes well for progressives,” Kim said, noting that she intends to reach out to Walker’s supporters. “I don’t think I can be successful as a supervisor if I don’t work with all the camps in the progressive community.”

Class of 2010: Scott Wiener

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Class of 2010: Scott Wiener

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Scott Wiener, who is 40, gay, soft-spoken, and remarkably tall, seems to have made an impression on voters with his successful campaign for District 8 (the Castro, Noe Valley) supervisor. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, several patrons of a Market Street café stopped to say hello and congratulate him. “I saw millions of signs about you!” one exclaimed.

A deputy city attorney, Wiener claimed one of the most decisive victories among contenders vying for seats on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He’s more fiscally conservative than Rafael Mandelman, who was his progressive opponent in the race, and is more in step politically with Mayor Gavin Newsom than San Francisco progressives. Yet Wiener stressed to the Guardian that he should ultimately be viewed as an independent thinker. “For me, it’s about having mutual respect for everyone,” he said. “Even if you disagree on some issues, and even if you disagree on a lot of issues, you can always find areas of agreement.”

Asked about his priorities in office, Wiener put public transit at the top of the list. Over the next few decades, the population of San Francisco and the Bay Area will dramatically increase, he said. “And at the same time, we’ve been underfunding public transportation, and particularly our roads. It could potentially be a catastrophe if we’re not able to not just keep the system as it is, but actually expand it. That is a really big priority.” To raise money for Muni, he doesn’t support extending parking meter hours, but does support a local vehicle license fee. There’s some question surrounding that prospect since California voters approved Proposition 26, which requires a two-thirds majority vote for fees. But Wiener said he wanted to be involved in efforts to implement a VLF in San Francisco.

Another priority is finding ways to stimulate job growth. He approves of the city’s move to use a tax credit for biotech industry businesses as a means of encouraging job creation, but said that mechanism should be used sparingly since it creates a revenue hole. Instead, Wiener said he was more in favor of looking at payroll-tax reform — but only if it doesn’t result in a tax increase.

Wiener also places importance on supporting the city’s Entertainment Commission and preserving San Francisco’s vibrant nightlife. “That’s an issue that I’ve always worked on and I’ll be speaking at [the California Music and Culture Association] next Friday, which I’m hoping will become a really effective voice for that community,” Wiener noted. “It needs a really unified and strong voice. and I want to make sure that we are really prioritizing having a vibrant nightlife and outdoor festival scene, and that we’re not blaming the entertainment community for societal ills like gun violence.” He also mentioned bolstering the Entertainment Commission’s budget.

But might that pro nightlife stance place him at odds with the San Francisco Police Department? “In some ways, I’m from a public-safety background,” he said in response. “I’ve been involved in a lot of safety issues on a neighborhood level. I’ve worked closely with SFPD and I am supportive of Chief [George] Gascon. In a way, I think that gives me some credibility.”

Speaking of working closely with people, whom does Wiener see himself forming alliances with on the new board? “I definitely have a great relationship with Sean Elsbernd and Carmen Chu, and I will be working closely with them. But I don’t agree with them on everything,” he said. Board President David Chiu and Sup. David Campos were both his classmates at Harvard, he noted, so he feels confident in his ability to work with them even if they don’t always see eye to eye. “One thing I see about this board that I’m optimistic about is that I think it’s going to be a more collegial board,” he added.

On the question on everyone’s mind — who will succeed Mayor Gavin Newsom to serve as the interim mayor? — Wiener said he thinks the best idea is to appoint a caretaker mayor. “Next year’s going to be really hard year,” he said and a caretaker mayor could “help make some really hard choices that need to be made. I may not like all of those choices, but they can do something that someone who’s a brand new mayor seeking reelection may be timid about doing.”

Who might he support if the new board selects the successor mayor? “There are some really solid names that have been bandied about, like [San Francisco Public Utilities Director] Ed Harrington or [Sherriff] Mike Hennessey,” he replied.

Wiener’s going to be mostly a fiscal conservative when it comes to the budget. Any new revenue, he said, “should be very policy-based,” for example transit-oriented instead of raising business taxes.

And he has plenty of cuts in mind, including “the way we contract for nonprofits,” looking at shared overhead, and consolidation. He also said that “we need to continue moving forward with pension and benefit reform [and] aggressively address overtime in all departments.” And what can voters expect from Sup. Scott Wiener that’s different from Sup. Bevan Dufty, a mayoral hopeful who currently represents D8? Wiener didn’t go too far out on a limb on that one. “There have been some tenant issues that Bevan voted against and I supported,” he said. “We’ve had times where he’s been to my left, or I’ve been to his left, but I can’t speculate as to the future. It’s going to be case by case.” *

Class of 2010: Malia Cohen

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Class of 2010: Malia Cohen

sarah@sfbg.com

It took two weeks and 19 updates of San Francisco’s ranked-choice voting system before Malia Cohen, a former Mayor Gavin Newsom staffer and partner in a firm that helps businesses and nonprofits create public policy, was declared the winner of the hotly contested race to represent District 10, which includes Bayview, Hunters Point and Ingleside. The nail-biting time lag was a byproduct of complex calculations that involved 22 candidates, no clear front-runners, and a slew of absentee and provisional ballots.

But when the RCV dust settled, the results proved that the D10 vote continues to break down along class, race, and gender lines. These RCV patterns personally benefited Cohen’s success in picking up second- and third-place votes.

But they also helped D10’s African American community, now smaller than its growing Asian community but still larger that the black community in any other distinct in the city, send an African American supervisor back to City Hall. And it avoided a run-off between Lynette Sweet and Tony Kelly, who won most first-place votes.

Some chalk up Cohen’s victory to her polished appearance, the middle-of-the road positions she took on the campaign trail, and an impressive list of endorsements that include the San Francisco Democratic Party, the Labor Council, the Building and Construction Trades Council, state Sen. Leland Yee (D-SF), Assembly Speaker Pro Tempore Fiona Ma (D-SF), Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, SF Democratic Party Chair Aaron Peskin, and BART Board President James Fang.

But Cohen told us she thinks coalition building was the key. “Endorsements only account for a quarter of the reasons why you win,” she said. “It’s all about building an organization, a net that goes deep and wide.”

Some progressives were alarmed by a Dec. 1 fundraiser to help settle Cohen’s campaign debt whose guest list included Newsom, former Mayor Willie Brown, Sup. Sean Elsbernd, Ma, Building Owners and Managers Association director Ken Cleaveland, Kevin Westlye of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, and Janan New of San Francisco Apartment Association.

Cohen dismissed concerns over this conservative showing of après-campaign support. “Fear not,” she said. “It is a fundraiser event. And now that I’m a newly elected supervisor, I look forward to meeting everyone. And I will do a great job representing everyone.

So what should we expect from Cohen, who ran as a fourth-generation “daughter of the district from a labor family” on a platform of health, safety, and employment — and will soon represent the diverse southeast sector, which has the highest unemployment, crime, recidivism, foreclosure and African American out-migration rates citywide and is ground zero for Lennar Corp.’s plan to build thousands of condos at Candlestick and the shipyard?

“I’m a bridge-builder,” said Cohen, who attributes her surprisingly tough but open-minded edge to being the oldest of five sisters.

So far, she’s not going out on a progressive limb. She told us she favors a caretaker mayor: “I’d like someone to maintain the business of the city, someone who has zero political ambition,” she said. “That way it creates an even playing field for the mayoral race.”

Cohen says she is determined to address quality of life concerns, including filling potholes, re-striping crosswalks and introducing traffic calming measures, and taking on critical criminal justice issues, including City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s gang injunction in the Sunnydale public housing project in Visitacion Valley. She opposes Herrera’s strategy but notes: “If not gang injunctions, then what? I can’t dispute that they get short-term results, but what about the long-term impacts? We need long-term solutions.”

Cohen supports Sup. John Avalos’ efforts to pass mandatory local hire legislation but is open to “creative solutions” to help get it over the finishing line. “People who live here should be working here,” Cohen said. “But is 50 percent the magic mandatory hire number? I don’t know.”

Cohen, who just survived a foreclosure attempt, has promised to be a “fierce advocate” for constituents facing similar challenges, including those who met predatory loan brokers at church.

But asked how she would cut spending or raise revenue to address the city’s massive budget deficit, she had no specific answer.

Yet Cohen disagrees with detractors who say she lacks experience. “I may look cute, but don’t be misled. I have a public policy background and fire in my belly. I’m a union candidate, I’m smart, I’m talented, and above all, I love the people in D10 and the rest of San Francisco. I want everyone to prosper and receive benefits. So give me a shot.”

Class of 2010: Mark Farrell

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Class of 2010: Mark Farrell

steve@sfbg.com

Mark Farrell is a 36-year-old venture capitalist and political newcomer who will represent the wealthy neighborhoods of District 2 (Pacific Heights, Sea Cliff, and the Marina) after narrowly beating Janet Reilly, whose extensive political endorsements ranged from the Guardian and local Democratic Party Chair Aaron Peskin to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinsein and Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Challenging the city’s political power structure is why Farrell said he ran for office, playing up his outsider status and investment banking experience. He told visitors to his campaign website, “I am running for the Board of Supervisors to bring common sense back to City Hall” and railed against “career politicians who run for office again and again.”

In an interview with the Guardian, Farrell said he was motivated to make his first foray into politics by the dysfunction he has heard about at City Hall. “I’ve been frustrated with City Hall over the last few years, from the personal antics to the policies that have come out,” Farrell told us. “I humbly believe I have something different to bring to the table.”

Farrell calls himself a fiscal conservative who believes “our city government has gotten too large and we need to look at that,” a task he thinks he’s well-suited for given his background in finance. Yet when asked what government functions he would eliminate or cut deeply to help close a projected $700 million budget deficit over the next two years, Farrell said he can’t offer any specifics yet, saying only, “We need to make tough decisions.”

Would Farrell be open to new taxes or other revenue-side budget solutions? He told us that he won’t completely reject the idea of new taxes, but that he generally opposes them. “I don’t believe in raising taxes. We can’t raise enough revenue to get out of this problem,” Farrell said. “We need to learn to live within our means.”

Although he opposed Prop. B in this election, Farrell said public employee pension reform needs to be a part of the city’s budget solution, as well as scaling back how much the city gives to nonprofit groups, which provide many of the social services the city supports.

Farrell was born and raised in San Francisco — except for his college years, he’s spent his whole life in D2, where his parents still live — and has been friends with Sup. Sean Elsbernd since high school. Politically, Farrell also identifies with Elsbernd and fellow fiscally conservative Sups. Carmen Chu and Michela Alioto-Pier (who endorsed Farrell to replace her in D2), but he says that he doesn’t want to be politically pigeon-holed.

“I’m very much my own person and I look forward to working with everyone,” Farrell said. Indeed, part of Farrell’s frustration with City Hall politics has been the divisive relationship between the progressives and moderates, which he sees as a hindrance to finding “common sense solutions.”

“The progressive and moderate labels have been relatively destructive to San Francisco,” Farrell said. “We need to get beyond that to focus on issues.”

Yet people’s political values and worldview determine what issues they care about and the solutions they favor. For example, progressives decry the dearth of affordable being built for San Franciscans and cite city studies showing that deficit will get worse as developers build ever-more market rate housing (see “Dollars or sense?” Sept. 28), particularly in a city that is two-thirds renters.

Farrell said he supports rent control (saying he was unfairly attacked during the campaign as anti renter) and sees the dwindling rental stock and lack of new affordable units being constructed as problems, but he doesn’t have a solution to those problems. In fact, Farrell supports allowing more condo conversions, which would make the problem worse, telling us, “I believe home ownership is something we should promote.”

He was also vague about how he will approach land use issues and how tough he’ll be with developers in having them meet city design guidelines and provide affordable housing and other community benefits, saying only, “We need to have sustainable development in the city.”

Yet the issues that do animate Farrell are those typically focused on by conservative D2 voters. Farrell lists his top priorities as seeing to his district’s needs, promoting private sector job creation (“I think a lot of lip service has been paid to it, but not a lot of action by City Hall,” he said), public safety, and quality-of-life issues (he supported Prop. L, the sit-lie ordinance, calling it “very reasonable”). Generally Farrell sees San Francisco as a city in he midst of a serious fiscal crisis, “and I want to create a San Francisco that is secure for the future over the long haul.”

America’s next top band

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America’s next top band

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Gary Gregerson of Puce Moment has made an important discovery about bears of the human variety — many of them used to be new romantics. “Back in the day, they were wearing broaches, long shirts, and stirrup pants,” he says, discussing friends’ teenage photos in the kitchen of bandmate Jon Rueter.

The season finale of America’s Next Top Model is about to begin, but for now, it’s interview time, and there’s no better moment than the present to discuss the origins of Puce Moment. “I wanted to do an Altered Images-type band, and I told Jon, because he knows how to synth it up,” Gregerson explains, when asked about the group’s beginnings. “I said, ‘I want to be Claire Grogan!’ Then we decided we’d be more like Belinda [Carlisle] and Jane [Wiedlin].”

“Right, you said, ‘As long as I get to be Belinda,'” Rueter concurs.

The referential and the reverent (and irreverent) commingle in the world of Puce Moment. It couldn’t be any other way, considering Gregerson’s and Rueter’s intense and specific appreciations of pop music and culture. (When it comes to vintage TV, Rueter is a Knot’s Landing and Family guy, while Gregerson favors Police Woman.) Their band — with bassist Suresh Chacko and drummer Tom Marzella — takes its name from a 1949 fabric-fetish film by Kenneth Anger. It’s a brash gesture, considering Anger’s hostility toward those influenced by him. “Someone was like, ‘You don’t want to be cursed by Kenneth Anger!’,” Gregerson admits.

Puce Moment’s name is emblazoned on not one, not two, but three new four-song cassettes: Ready for a Date, Essence of Mann and Avoiding Certain Topics. Recorded at Wally Sound in Oakland, the collections showcase a sound that Gregerson labels “neo-psychedelic” and Rueter calls “swingin’ and groovy.” Ironically attuned to what one song title calls “Changing Formats,” as well as the current tape revival, the releases also suit Puce Moment’s affinity for C86-era Creation label bands such as Revolving Paint Dream. Rueter’s numbers use striking everyday images to tell stories of wavering friendship and love. Gregerson directs his attention to specific memorable characters: an activist named Maryanne; a prissy and meddlesome downstairs neighbor; and the artist Christo, who his lyric deems an “active Greek” just for the fun of it, since Christo is actually Bulgarian.

Puce Moment’s two songwriters trade off lead vocals in a manner similar to the early days of Orange Juice, when comical Edwyn Collins (that would be Gregerson) and effete James Kirk (that would be Rueter) took turns at the mic. The pair’s very first songwriting effort became Ready for a Date‘s opening track, “The Citrus Smelling Man with a Tight Wristwatch.” Its lengthy title is inspired by a real-life person. “Jon figured out [the background of] that song when we recording it,” says Gregerson. “It’s about having sex with a married man who wanted me to drive him and his wife and kids to the mall when I had a van.”

Both Rueter and Gregerson have performance punk backgrounds, Gregerson in Sta-Prest and Rueter with way-ahead-of-their-time new wave revivalists the Primadonnas, the best band from “Sussex, U.K.” ever to be based in Austin, Texas. Rueter’s moniker in the Primadonnas was Nikki Holiday, but he insists that when he was singing with crushed-velvet Martin Gore softness about being “stoned like a white balloon,” he was serious. “It’s harder for me to depersonalize lyrics, though our song ‘Girl’ is actually about a boy — a gay friend.”

“Even in the Primadonnas, my lyrics were sincere,” Rueter continues. “There was this contrast of my bandmate Otto being an asshole, a total jerk, and I was his foil. I still feel like I’m doing that, a little bit.”

“Um, I’m the hyper asshole?” Gregerson asks.

“No, but I’m the straight man, for sure.”

Lyrically, some subject matter is off-limits for Gregerson. “I really try not to write about love, and definitely not about wieners,” he says. “That’s why I like it that Puce Moment is starting to get into ’60s baroque pop, because it’s all about the path of humankind.”

True, but the time has come for Puce Moment and me to turn our attention to the path of model-kind. As Andre Leon Talley makes his guest judge outfit more and more voluminous, what Rueter labels the “high fashion cycle” of America’s Next Top Model grinds toward an inevitable a conclusion. During one commercial break, Rueter talks about Tyra’s performance as a Barbie-come-to-life in the 2000 Lindsay Lohan vehicle Life-Size. During the next, Gregerson says my imitation of Ke$ha’s rapping sounds like Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies.

So, who won ANTM? High fashion Ann, of course. Still, Tyra and company’s antics pale in comparison to the final star of our evening’s viewing: YouTube guru Katherine Chloé Cahoon, author of The Single Girl’s Guide to Dating European Men. Want to date a Bulgarian man like Christo? Cahoon will explain how — with an accent that’s pure East Coast private school lockjaw.

PUCE MOMENT

Thurs/16, 9 p.m.; $5

with Bronze, Sam Flax Keener and the Higher Color, and Lairs

The Eagle

398 12th St., SF

www.myspace.com/pucemomentsf

Sound and silence

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Sound and silence

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC/FILM In the latest chapter of the San Francisco Film Society’s ongoing efforts to present silent-era films with live musical accompaniment, John Darnielle — head honcho of the Mountain Goats — will be scoring the 1919 Mauritz Stiller film, Sir Arne’s Treasure. The beauty of this particular series, which has yielded original scores from Yo La Tengo (Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painleve), Stephin Merritt (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), and Superchunk (A Page of Madness) among others, lies not only in the conceptual simplicity of marrying music and film, but in the freedom of approach given to each film’s handpicked composer. In Darnielle’s case, scoring a film meant digging up some relics of his own past.

“I don’t generally revisit stuff of mine that’s old,” he says. “But then I realized, soundtracking a silent movie is revisiting stuff that’s old.”

Digging through old notebooks full of unused songs and lyrics, Darnielle stumbled on the blueprints for an unfinished and unreleased collection of songs he’d written in the mid-1990s. The songs were originally to be used as a sequel of sorts to the Mountain Goats’ 1995 album, Sweden. But after rediscovering them, Darnielle realized that the songs’ moods and lyrics meshed well with the themes of the film.

Set in the 16th century, Sir Arne’s Treasure‘s story begins with the murder of a clergyman at the hands of three escaped mercenaries who are after his treasure. Eventually finding themselves trapped in the town — and among its vengeful inhabitants — one of the men becomes drawn to a survivor of their own killing spree, and the lines between justice and love blur.

After a few minor adjustments to his newly unearthed songs, Darnielle knew he’d found the material that would make up the bulk of his film score.

“It’s pretty exciting to dig up these old notebooks, very much like watching an old movie and seeing people dressing and doing things in a different manner,” he says. “Digging through those things for me at this point is like combing through public records or something. I tweaked them a little because I’m a better writer now than I was then. But yeah, I’m expanding this whole album I’d made about loss and catastrophe and incorporating it into the movie which is about loss and catastrophe [laughs].”

Darnielle will be pulling some other songs from the Mountain Goats catalog to use during the film, but he hopes his fans will understand that his approach to this project is different.

“I hope people don’t come expecting a sort of huge, surging Mountain Goats show type thing,” he says. “That’s my biggest fear, because it’s much more contemplative and patient in the presentation. I’ll be singing, but I won’t be stomping around or talking between songs.”

Darnielle’s got a couple tricks up his sleeve as well, only one of which he would reveal during our conversation. He’ll start the score solo on piano, but around the halfway mark he’ll switch to guitar as John Vanderslice joins him onstage for the remainder of the film. The two have worked together in the past, and Darnielle hopes Vanderslice and the two musicians he’s bringing along with him will help amp up the intensity in the latter stages of the film and bring it all to a nice “crescendo.”

His biggest challenge has been in finding that perfect balance between when a score should directly and forcefully impact the film, and when it should take more of a quieter backseat.

“Hopefully there will be sound almost the entire time, just because it’s hard for me to imagine dropping in and out of a silent movie completely,” he says. “When a soundtrack drops out of a current film, it’s fine because there’s dialogue. If the sound drops out of a silent movie, there’s dead silence.”

Whatever the result, Darnielle says this is a one-and-done type deal and has no plans to do anything with the score after this one live performance.

“I like things that exist and then stop,” he says. “So yeah, this will be it.”

SIR ARNE’S TREASURE, WITH THE MOUNTAIN GOATS IN SOLO PERFORMANCE

Tues/14, 8 p.m.; $17–$22.50

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 561-5000

www.sffs.org

Get her if you can

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Get her if you can

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC “Where’s the costumes, bitch?”

The voice behind the inimitable Carletta Sue Kay, Randy Walker, has joined me at Deco Lounge in the Tenderloin for costume karaoke. The atmosphere is conjuring memories. “I worked at a self-storage place two blocks from here called Fort Knox,” Walker says. “I worked with every fucking junkie in San Francisco — recovering, mind you.

“This lady, let’s call her Christine, was 59, with long gray lion’s-mane hair. She was very sweet. She’d come in popping Xanax like candy. One day, right before I got fired, Gonzalo who I worked with came up to me and said, ‘Lady upstairs, sleeping — money.’ We jumped on the private elevator and there was Christine, laid out in the middle of her unit, covered in $100 bills. I asked her about it the next day and she said, ‘I had a date!’.”

Though Carletta Sue Kay is familiar with the most delicate strains of Parisian heartbreak, a real-life character such as Christine would not be out of place in a Carletta song. If Antony Hegarty occupies darker rooms, and Baby Dee finds secret places of unsettling whimsy, Carletta more than matches the best of both in a very San Franciscan way, combining a formidable voice with a restless and freely honest — as rock ‘n’ roll as it is chamber-bound — approach to being a singer. One listen to “Sleeping with the TV On” is all it’ll take for her to convince you.

Tonight I’m getting convinced in-person. “Pardon my obligato,” Walker says on his way to the Deco Lounge’s stage, where he’s soon comfortably issuing commands for more reverb to KJ Paul De Jong, who it turns out has booked lucrative hooker-hotel music gigs for Carletta in Port Costa. “It’s not standup,” a boozy wise-ass yells, and then Walker proceeds to sing the hell out of the Patsy Cline classic “Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray,” expertly using silence to magnify the sound of sorrow. Afterward, the wise-ass walks over to our table to praise him.

Thanks to Walker, Carletta Sue Kay is the kind of dame who knows Nashville as well as she knows Paris. “My favorite drag queen in the world is in Nashville,” Walker says, when I ask about one of country music’s homes. “Remember the figure skater Oksana Baiul? This queen’s name was Oxona Barstool. She wore this big green M&M outfit and she sounded like Tom Waits.”

Walker has also sung in Memphis’ Sun Studios: “I asked where Roy Orbison stood, and they said, ‘Honey, Roy was all over the place.'” Still, the next Carletta Sue Kay recordings are a homespun Bay Area affair, painstakingly produced by band member Doug Hilsinger. “We’re doing two collections,” Walker explains. “One is an album of ballads titled Incongruent. There’s an also an EP called Incongruous, and all of the songs on it will be up tempo. ” The wordplay in those titles comes naturally to Walker, who shares his boyfriend Lee Reymore’s deep love of literature — particularly Southern Gothic fiction — and lucrative love of book collecting.

At Reymore’s urging, Walker uses the moments before his next turn at the mic to tell the story of his encounter with the late Michael Jackson. “You know [the 1988 movie] Moonwalker? I was in that,” he says. “I come from a theater background and grew up 50 miles outside of L.A. in Fontana, hometown of Sammy Hagar.”

How was Michael? “He was a sweetheart. One day Bubbles got loose on the stage, and another day Yoko was there. I made $18,000 for a 12-day shoot, and I was only an extra.”

Carletta and the man behind her have a lot of stories to tell, whether they’re shared over a cocktail or through the stereo on songs such as the glam-anthemic “Joy Division.” Carletta can knowingly name check Beethoven, Crass, and Echo and the Bunnymen while reminiscing about a doom-laden boy with an Ian Curtis fixation. Walker has no hesitation about visiting the treasure troves of soul.

“My fangs are dripping looking at these costumes,” Walker jokes, after likening Deco’s wardrobe rack to the bars maneuvered by gymnasts. Finally, after someone sings “Killing Me Softly” and someone else sings “A Whole New World,” it’s time for his final costume-karaoke number. The song is “Get Here,” and though it was made famous by Oleta Adams, he makes a point of explaining on stage that it was written by Brenda Russell. This is in keeping with his musical , which is rooted in an appreciation of ’70s singer-songwriters like Tim Hardin, Townes Van Zandt, and Karen Dalton, as well as contemporaries like Kath Bloom.

Important names, one and all — but what did Walker’s real-life cousin Carletta Sue Kay think of her musical namesake? “She didn’t know anything about it until two years into it,” Walker says. “She found out about it through the Carletta Sue Kay MySpace, and wrote verbatim, ‘What the fuck is this!'”

What the fuck is this? Something well worth a listen, bitch.

CARLETTA SUE KAY

With M. Lamar

Sun/19, 8 p.m.; $10–$15

Community Music Center

Capp Street Concert Hall

544 Capp, SF

(415) 647-6015

www.myspace.com/carlettasuekay

Where everybody knows your name

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Where everybody knows your name

arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL It can be easy to get cynical about the business side of art, so it’s always refreshing when a local labor of love such as Romer Young — the small Dogpatch gallery formerly known as Ping Pong — demonstrates that growth doesn’t necessarily entail compromising one’s vision.

That vision has always been driven by husband and wife team Vanessa Blaikie and Joey Piziali’s commitment to work that is consistently smart, challenging and often surprisingly personal: from recent Goldie winner Amanda Curreri’s conceptual prompts at forging new social connections, to, most recently, James Sterling Pitt’s table-full of sculpted art-related books and ephemera, an affectionate take on how material possessions can shape creative practice.

“We’ve had very special relationships with our artists because this has always been about putting their work first,” explains Blaikie, when I meet with her and Piziali in the gallery’s cozy back room, which adjoins Piazali’s studio. Inspired by the work of many of their classmates in San Francisco Art Institute’s MFA program, but dismayed by the lack of spaces willing to take a chance on art that was more conceptual or performance-based, Blaikie and Piziali took matters into their own hands and started putting together exhibits.

The gallery’s unusual former name came from the quarterly, ping-pong happy hours Blaikie and Piziali held, a nod to 1970s Bay Area conceptual artist Tom Marioni’s famous statement, “Drinking beer with friends is the highest form of art.”

“We were really trying to activate the space as social sculpture through a non-art event,” Piziali recalls, “but we also had our share of calls asking about equipment rentals.”

Five years later, as the partnerships Blaikie and Piziali formed early on have led to a roster of repeat-showers and a more prominent profile, they decided it was time to change names and reassess how best to shift their operation. “Once you’re not an exhibition space, you start looking at the model of ‘gallery’ and see what that means, “explains Piziali. “But you don’t start a space like this with blood, sweat, and tears only to ask every time, ‘Did we make the bottom line?'”

Though the paddles have been hung up in favor of the, let’s face it, more professional-sounding Romer Young — a combination of Blaikie and Piziali’s mothers’ maiden names — Blaikie’s and Piziali’s core commitment hasn’t changed. Fittingly, they have decided to inaugurate the newly christened space with a solo exhibit by the now New York City-based conceptual artist Chad Stayrook, who contributed one of Ping Pong’s earliest shows.

“It felt only right to honor the growth we’ve undergone,” reflects Blaikie. “When we started, we were doing it because we loved it, and now we’re doing it because we love it and we want it to make sure it can keep growing.”

 

DOWN MEXICO WAY

Upon entering “Disponible — a kind of Mexican show” at SFAI’s Walter and McBean Galleries, you hear Manuel Rocha Iturbide’s sound installation I play the drum with frequency before you see it — what you see is Hector Zamora’s massive arrangement of hanging metal drying racks. Suspended with fishing line in tiered formations, the drying racks play off of the Brutalist, concrete interior of the Walter gallery while imbuing the space with an ethereal density. The ricocheting clinks, low-end buzzes, and sonorous clangs emitted by Iturbide’s piece — installed in a lofted area above the main gallery — bring Zamora’s installation to life as a fog bank-turned-carousel organ.

Both pieces are less impressive, however, when you attempt to view them individually. Without the extra visual accompaniment, Iturbide’s deconstructed drum kit — played via algorithmically-controlled speaker cones whose vibrations sound the cymbals and drum heads they’re attached to — loses its initial impact. Likewise, separated from Iturbide’s soundtrack, Zamora’s piece resembles the forgotten remains of a half-finished install job.

This creeping feeling of “is that all there is?” that both Zamora’s and Iturbide’s pieces evokes seems, at least partially, by design. The exhibit takes its name from the text on empty advertising billboards throughout Mexico, in which disponible is followed by a phone number. Playing off the double meaning of disponible as “available” and also “potentially changeable” or “disposable,” the curatorial team of Hou Hanru, SFAI’s director of exhibitions and public programs, and Guillermo Santamarina, an independent curator based in Mexico City, aren’t so much devaluing the pieces they’ve selected as they are loosening the conceptual strictures implicit in putting on a show of contemporary Mexican art. I can’t wait to see what Hanru and Santamarina have in store for phase two of the exhibit, which opens in February.

CHAD STAYROOK: UNATTAINABLE BEAST

Fri/10 through Jan. 15, 2011

Romer Young Gallery

1240 22nd St., SF

(415) 550-7483

www.romeryounggallery.com

DISPONIBLE — A KIND OF MEXICAN SHOW (PHASE ONE)

Through Jan. 22

Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute

800 Chestnut, SF

(415) 749-4563

www.waltermcbean.com

Hollywood ho-hum

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Hollywood ho-hum

FILM Some mainstream filmmakers grow so encumbered by the industry-within an-industry they’ve become that they profess yearning for those “small, personal” projects they started out with — often vowing they’ll get right back there just as soon as they’ve finished the obligatory Behemoth IV: The Next Generation in 3-D. (Coppola actually did it; Lucas needs to stop saying he will until he actually quits finding new ways to commercially reanimate the charred remains of Star Wars. Meaning never.)

It is exceedingly rare to find a director who over the long haul has managed to make nothing but small, personal projects, particularly if they’re American and within orbit of Hollywood influence. How could you resist admiring such a person’s determination and purity of intent?

Well, there may be exceptions. For nearly four decades, Henry Jaglom has been creating “personal” movies like other people make home movies — privately, prolifically, perhaps indiscriminately. He uses the same stable of cronies, some short-termers and some long, as well as their homes (or his own) as settings. His method (or Method — he did train under Lee Strasberg) echoes the semi-improv, amorphous ensemble feel of Robert Altman movies like Nashville (1975), albeit in a manner that seldom transcends the bubble of participants’ very Hollywood-centric perceptions of reality.

These features no doubt delight those actively involved — their self-satisfaction is tumescent — but can become an exasperating bore for anyone else forced to watch. The last good movie Jaglom made was the uncommonly disciplined Last Summer in the Hamptons 15 years ago. His new Queen of the Lot doesn’t change its status.

After her second DUI, improbable action-flick star Maggie Chase (Tanna Frederick) is placed under ankle-bracelet house arrest. She chooses to spend it at the impressive hilltop manse of her manager, along with a vain married actor boyfriend (Christopher Rydell) and a posse of personal assistants. Then she moves to the equally expansive digs of said BF’s historied showbiz family, all either industry players or dedicated wannabes. There, Maggie finds herself attracted to her ne’er-do-well mate’s supposedly worse brother (Noah Wyle, so thoughtfully restrained you wonder how he strayed into such company).

This shrill, shapeless enterprise lurches from feeble satire to clumsy melodrama, never seeming more credible or necessary than another excuse for Jaglom’s pals to indulge themselves in public. The cast includes faces from the past (like Dennis Christopher from 1979’s Breaking Away), Jaglom perennials, several children of stars, and miscellaneous industry insiders. When exactly was it that Jaglom decided anyone on his dinner party list was automatically fascinating enough to play a “character” onscreen? His first four features, all flawed but interesting, at least tried to be about other people. Since 1984, with a couple exceptions, they’ve become like the windbag who clears rooms upon arrival, because no matter whom he talks to or about, the overweening subject will be the World of Me and Mine.

Playing a famous director here is famous director Peter Bogdanovich, who once was criticized for making indulgent movies that foisted then-girlfriend Cybill Shepherd on the public in unsuitable roles. Yet he never made films as insular and irrelevant as most of Jaglom’s. Nor did he ever showcase a talent as effortful, unappealing, and limited as Frederick, “discovered” when she wrote Jaglom a fan letter some years ago — having heard that anyone who flattered his movies might get cast in one. (She pretended to worship the unerringly titled 1997 Déjà vu, which she hadn’t even seen.) Is that a cute story — both director and actor never tire of telling it — or the symptom of an atrophied imagination?

Queen of the Lot is a sequel to 2006’s Hollywood Dreams, in which Frederick’s hysterical eagerness to please was somewhat apt for the role of a delusionally ambitious, alarmingly pushy Hollywood newbie. Now we’re supposed to believe that toxic figure has “made it.” This is the actress’ third starring vehicle for Jaglom; a fourth is imminent. This creative partnership demonstrates a judgment-impaired loyalty that is perhaps one part chivalry to nine parts WTF.

QUEEN OF THE LOT opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

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