Volume 45 [2010–11]

How California exports water

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How California exports water

By Patrick Porgans

In 2009, the last year of the so-called great California drought, a strange thing happened: Sacramento Valley growers produced a near record amount of rice, and down south, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (Met), the largest urban water supplier in the nation, experienced record-breaking water sales. All this despite repeated mainstream media accounts in 2009 of an economy-wrecking dust bowl water shortage.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the California rice harvest in 2009 was up 9 percent from the previous year and approached the record crop of 2004.

Rice consumes a great deal of water for its dollar value and produces little net income. According to a report by the University of California, Davis, the minimum amount of water required to grow a crop of rice is about 42 inches per acre. Unavoidable losses can add to this amount — so that the amount of water consumed (or evaporated) can be as much as 100 inches per acre, depending on the soil. That appears to be enough water to drown the tallest person on earth.

The California Rice Commission, a trade group representing 2,500 rice farmers, estimates that rice uses 2.2 million acre-feet of irrigation water yearly, about 2.6 percent of the state’s total water supply. According to records obtained from Met, that’s equal to the annual average water it supplied to all of its 19 million customers.

UC Davis data from 2008 show that California exported 52 percent of its rice production, much of it to Japan. For every pound of rice exported, about 250 gallons of embedded water used in growing and processing that rice leaves along with it, according to “Water Footprints of Nations,” a 2004 UNESCO study. (The report spawned the Web site www.waterfootprint.com.)

The rice harvest should be of great consolation to the chairman of the California State Water Resources Control Board, Charles Hoppin, who is also a rice grower, vice-chairman of the Rice Growers Cooperative, and immediate past chairman of the California Rice Industry Association. Chairman Hoppin, in a March 2010 speech in Yuma, Ariz., complained that the regulatory community, including much of his staff, doesn’t know or understand the issues facing agriculture and “doesn’t give a rat’s ass.”

According to the Environmental Working Group, rice subsidies in California totaled $2.4 billion from 1995-2009. In that period, the single largest recipient of subsidies was the Farmers’ Rice Cooperative of Sacramento, California, totaling more than $146 million.

Farm recipients of USDA subsidies in California totaled $9.1 billion from 1995-2009.According to EWG, “Washington paid out a quarter of a trillion dollars in federal farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009. But to characterize the programs as either a big government bailout or another form of welfare would be manifestly unfair — to bailouts and welfare.” Then there’s hay — another water-gulping product that’s getting exported, with much of it going to Japan.

Writer Melinda Burns, in a June 10, 2009 story on Miller-McCune.com, notes: “In the Imperial Valley of California, a region drier than part of the Sahara Desert, farmers have found a lucrative market abroad for a crop they grow with Colorado River water: They export bales of hay to land-poor Japan. Since the mid-1980s, this arid border region of California has been supplying hay and feed for Japan’s dairy cows and black-haired cattle, the kind that get daily massages, are fed beer, and produce the most tender Kobe beef.”

She quotes Patrick Woodall, research director at Food and Water Watch, an international consumer advocacy group with headquarters in Washington, D.C.: “There is a kind of insanity about this,” Woodall said. “Exporting water in the form of crops is giving water away from thirsty communities and infringing on their ability to deal with water scarcity.”

From second to first

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From second to first

steve@sfbg.com

In Oakland and San Francisco, the big story of this election was ranked-choice voting, a system that allowed Jean Quan to overcome a nearly 10-point election-night deficit to become Oakland’s next mayor and enabled come-from-behind victories in two races for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Those who never liked this system of letting voters rank their top three candidates — a group primarily affiliated with downtown and the moderates who did well under the old system of low-turnout, big-money runoff elections — felt validated by the outcomes. “Ranked-choice voting an undemocratic nightmare” was the headline on Examiner columnist Ken Garcia’s Nov. 11 column.

But for those who understand this system — a product of the progressive movement — and have supported it, this was a watershed election that showcased RCV’s populist possibilities. In Quan’s smart use of an RCV strategy and the huge gap she overcame to topple Don Perata, they see an opportunity for political coalition-building that could influence next year’s San Francisco mayor’s race and beyond.

Besides Perata, if there’s anyone who could justifiably be unhappy with how RCV worked in this election, it would be Tony Kelly. He finished in first place in the D10 supervisorial race on election night only to be defeated by Malia Cohen, who climbed out of fourth place on the strength of those who ranked her second or third. But Kelly is perfectly happy with how RCV worked.

“I supported it before and there’s no reason not to support it now, even though I’m on the edge of this,” Kelly told the Guardian. In fact, he said the only reason he ran for public office in San Francisco was because of progressive electoral reforms such as RCV, district elections and public financing of campaigns. “These are all things that help grassroots candidates.”

Kelly had a ranked-choice strategy; he and Marlene Tran each encouraged their supporters to rank the other second. The alliance might have been a way to overcome the strength of the district’s strong African American voting bloc, which favored Cohen (she got her biggest and most lopsided bumps when Dewitt Lacy and Lynette Sweet were eliminated). But most of Tran’s votes were exhausted when she was eliminated, meaning that many of her voters didn’t list any second and third choices.

“Without RCV, that black vote would have never come together. It would have splintered,” said Steven Hill, a progressive activist who helped design the system.

In Oakland, progressives and other blocs of voters wanted anybody but Perata, a Democratic Party power broker. So Quan reached out to all voters and was particularly helped by a progressive base that she shared with fellow Oakland City Council Member Rebecca Kaplan.

“One thing Jean Quan does consistently at events is say, ‘I would like your first place votes, and if I don’t get that, I would like your second place votes,” Kaplan told the Guardian. “It was striking to me that she consistently asked for No. 2 votes.”

That strategy, along with Quan and Kaplan running mutually supportive races and encouraging their supporters to list the other second, clearly paid off.

“It rewrites the textbook for how to win with ranked-choice voting,” Hill said.

Hill and Kaplan said Oakland voters proved themselves adept at using the ranked-choice system on its debut there. Hill noted how few exhausted ballots there were, showing that voters understood and used their full options — more so than have voters in San Francisco, which has had the system in place since 2004.

“I think what this says is that RCV worked. Voters overwhelmingly filled out their ballots correctly,” Kaplan said. She also noted how the election demonstrated the possibilities of political coalition-building: “It isn’t so much the coattails of the candidates as the coalition of the supporters.”

But many observers also say the situation in Oakland was a perfect storm of opposition to a single candidate, Perata, who professed ignorance about how RCV worked.

“I don’t think we’ll see something like this again, but it adds to what’s possible,” said David Latterman, a political consultant who works primarily with downtown-backed candidates.

Jim Stearns, a consultant who represents more progressive candidates, said moderate candidates with money usually prevail in runoff elections, and that probably would have been the case in Oakland if voters hadn’t switched to RCV: “I think you would have had a very different result if you’d had a runoff.”

Yet most political consultants still don’t like RCV, particularly those who work with downtown candidates. “RCV just probably won two races for me, coming from behind, and I still don’t like it,” said Latterman, who worked with Cohen and D2 winner Mark Farrell. “I like runoffs. I like candidates having to reach out and prove themselves.”

Of course, that system favored candidates who have the resources to reach out and target a voter base that is generally smaller and more conservative than in regular elections. But all the consultants are now trying to figure out how to make RCV work.

“The priority of any candidate in ranked-choice is to build your base,” Stearns, who is now working on Leland Yee’s mayoral campaign, told us. After that, the strategy is about identifying other candidates whose bases would also support your candidate and figuring out how to reach them. “Ranked-choice voting is a labor-intensive thing because you have to talk to everyone within that short window.”

But even Latterman said RCV will be a factor in next year’s San Francisco mayor’s race given what happened in Oakland this year. “For the first time a second place strategy worked and it can’t be ignored anymore,” Latterman said.

Hill said the progressive candidates and political consultants in San Francisco still need to learn how to work together to increase the turnout of their voters, sell swing voters on the progressive message and policies, and seek to win the race without undercutting those first two goals.

“How do you broaden your coalition and can you do that by having other progressives in the race?” Hill said. “These are the sorts of questions that progressives have to ask.”

Unfortunately, Hill hasn’t seen evidence that progressive campaigns in San Francisco have figured this out, noting how progressive supervisorial campaigns have instead criticized each other in the last few election cycles, such as this year’s D6 race between Jane Kim and Debra Walker.

“That’s the kind of behavior we still see from progressives in San Francisco, but that progressives in Oakland have already overcome,” Hill said. “Unfortunately, conservatives may figure this out first.”

Ultimately, Hill said that for progressive candidates to run strong ranked-choice voting campaigns against better-financed moderate candidates in a high-stakes election like the mayor’s race, they need to be a little bit selfless: “The progressive candidates need to care less about whether they win individually than that a progressive wins.”

War on drugs rages on

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War on drugs rages on

By Pamela A. MacLean

news@sfbg.com

The two Norton brothers thought someone was breaking into their Oakland apartment to kill them one pre-dawn day in October 2007. Instead, a couple dozen well-armed and screaming federal drug agents stormed the place, rousted the pair, and dragged them around the apartment before arresting them.

Winslow and Abraham Norton operated one of the most successful medical marijuana dispensaries in the Bay Area, the Compassionate Patients’ Cooperative of California, in Hayward. In just the first six months of 2007, the operation grossed $26 million.

But if they thought facing a federal indictment on charges of conspiracy to possess and distribute more than 1,000 kilos of marijuana and money laundering was their worst nightmare, the Norton brothers just weren’t dreaming big enough.

The pair — with all-American good looks, close-cropped beards, and infectious smiles — finish each other’s sentences when they describe their run-in with the federal justice system.

“We were 11 and 14 when medical marijuana was legalized, and we grew up in Berkeley,” Abraham said “It may be naïve, but we didn’t understand the legality. Now we know federal law a lot better.”

Abraham, 26, and Winslow, 29, played by the rules in California’s fledgling medical marijuana law. In 2005 they got an Alameda County permit to operate from the former Sheriff Charles Plummer, a seller’s permit from the state, paid taxes, and had random inspections by local police.

They even hired security guards to patrol the place to make sure patients felt safe. After abandoning a couple of security companies as “no good,” they hired a tough bunch that had former Navy SEALS, Marines, and cops in their ranks, SEAL-Mar Security. They rotated a crew of 44 different guards who patrolled outside and carried Glocks, Smith & Wessons, Sig Sauers, and Rugers to make sure no one caused trouble.

“We are very proud we were squeaky clean and examined under a microscope,” Winslow said. “We never did a deal out the back door,” Abraham insisted. They sold so much marijuana to legitimate patients “it never made sense and it would have hurt the company” to do any illegal side deals, Winslow said.

But selling marijuana is still a federal crime, and in negotiations the prosecutor insisted the brothers accept five-year minimum prison terms. They refused, offering to plead guilty to conspiracy and let U.S. District Judge D. Lowell Jensen set the sentence. Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Corrigan balked. Then, according to the Nortons and their lawyers, Corrigan upped the ante, threatening to indict their mother, who helped out in the co-op by opening up for the early shift.

“We had to tell her over a Thanksgiving,” Winslow said. “It was pretty miserable. We didn’t know what to do.”

Then, in February 2009, the government indicted their father instead, along with a coworker, and added a far more serious charge: aiding in the carrying of a firearm to further a drug crime. That charge alone carries up to life in prison, but no less than five years.

The Nortons had no guns. It was the gun-toting security team that was “aiding” in a drug conspiracy.

“It is plain and simple coercion, nothing less than that,” said Harold Rosenthal, Abraham’s attorney.

“When we heard the charge, we said ‘you must be kidding,'” says Doron Weinberg, the high-profile defense lawyer who defended record producer Phil Spector in his 2007 murder trial. “I have never before heard of a person charged with violation of a gun law because they hired a security guard.”

Although there is a new U.S. attorney, Melinda Haag, she isn’t talking. “It is an ongoing case so we have no comment,” said her spokesman Jack Gillund.

Sheriff Plummer, who retired in 2007 after 50 years in law enforcement, said of the weapons charges: “It’s bullshit.”

“While I don’t favor their type of business, it was legal. I wanted to make damn sure they were protected, people were protected, and the building was protected. I told them to hire a security crew,” he said.

Abraham says Plummer assured them during a county Board of Supervisors meeting that if they did everything he required, the feds would leave them alone. “I could have said that,” Plummer said when asked about that assurance.

Although the new charge is “aiding” use of weapons, the security crew was not charged with a crime. It had no effect on the guards or the company, according to Tom Turner, one of SEAL-Mar’s owners.

The indictment of their father, Michael, was no accident. Michael is a patient of the dispensary, but the brothers and his lawyer, Bill Osterhoudt, say Michael had no ownership interest in the co-op.

What Michael Norton does have is a criminal record. In the 1980s, he went to prison for two years in what was known as the Kona coffee caper. He bought low-cost Guatemalan coffee beans and sold them as pricey Hawaiian Kona coffee.

Piled on to the Norton brothers’ legal problems is a tax bill that went unpaid when the federal agents raided their apartment and the business. When the federal agents swept in three years ago, they seized the brothers’ two cars, a house they just bought, more than 300 pounds of marijuana, and an electronic deposit of nearly $340,000 in sales tax sent to the state Board of Equalization, according to Winslow.

“We thought the wire transfer cleared. We had confirmation, but the government still seized it,” Abraham said. “They stole the money,” Winslow said. That debt, with penalties and interest, is now close to $1 million, according to Abraham.

“The feds snatched the sales tax money and left the Nortons liable for it, and now they have liens against them for the money,” Rosenthal said.

The irony for the brothers is that they believe they were the first dispensary to voluntarily pay sales taxes. “We collected them for six months and took a check for $1 million to the BOE,” Abraham said. “They didn’t want to take money from medical marijuana sales and told us to call it something else,” Winslow said. “We refused. They wanted us to lie and say the bags cost $300 and the contents were free. But that would have screwed up our accounting.”

After accepting the initial payment, within a week the board issued letters to all the dispensaries in the state asking for sales tax, according to the brothers.

Judge Jensen rejected defense efforts to get the gun charges thrown out in September. But Jensen, a Republican former prosecutor, signaled he is not happy and ordered both sides to sit down Dec. 9 for formal talks before a magistrate to see if they can resolve the case.

“It’s not enough to say we want the case dropped,” Abraham said. “Our credit is destroyed. We can’t work.”

“Three years later we are still fighting it,” Winslow said. “We’ve been fighting this almost as long as the dispensary existed.”

As for the brothers’ chances to negotiate a resolution with the feds, Rosenthal said, “I’m somehow hoping the clouds are going to part and sanity is going to set in.”

Fighting dirty

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Fighting dirty

rebeccab@sfbg.com

One by one, representatives from California local governments who had gone toe-to-toe with Pacific Gas & Electric Co. recounted their war stories. They were weary, fatigued, and uncertain of the future. Their resources had been depleted by hefty legal expenses, and they were forever caught up in the game of trying to undo the damage of misinformation campaigns whipped up against them by PG&E. None had ever suspected that following state law would be so arduous.

At a Nov. 8 hearing of the California Senate Select Committee on Renewable Energy, held in San Rafael, officials from the San Joaquin Valley, Marin County, and San Francisco spoke about challenges they faced trying to initiate community choice aggregation (CCA) programs, which would create alternative electricity providers to PG&E.

In accordance with Assembly Bill 117, which allows local governments to purchase power in bulk and distribute it to a customer base using the infrastructure and billing systems operated by investor-owned utilities, representatives from local government agencies said they pursued CCAs to bolster local economies and benefit the environment — but quickly fell prey to fierce marketing campaigns.

So far, PG&E hasn’t faced any real consequences for trying to derail its competitors using unethical and sometimes illegal tactics, and the director of the California Public Utilities Commission, Paul Clanon, did not commit to imposing fines or sanctions against the company.

 

COOPERATING FULLY

Despite a requirement under AB117 that utilities must “cooperate fully” with CCA implementation, agency representatives testified that PG&E consistently tried to obstruct their success. The San Joaquin Valley Joint Power Authority’s CCA effort was suspended after a protracted legal battle, and has yet to be revisited.

At the hearing, Sen. Mark Leno listened attentively and offered sympathetic words of encouragement. “It is a superhuman accomplishment that you are even here with us today,” he jested after Dawn Weisz, interim director of the Marin Energy Authority (MEA), finished describing a litany of tactics the monolithic utility employed against Marin’s CCA.

Marin’s experience may foreshadow what’s in store for San Francisco. CleanPower SF, the city’s CCA program, is picking up steam again after an initial attempt to hire a contractor failed to yield an acceptable agreement. On Nov. 5, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) announced it had received four responses to a second RFP for an electricity service provider to administer the city’s CCA.

Already San Francisco has weathered some attacks. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who chairs the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo) and has been a key figure in moving CCA forward, characterized Marin and San Francisco as “brothers and sisters in arms,” saying, “We would share what we knew of what we could expect, because we were no strangers to these tactics.”

Weisz noted that early on, PG&E sent lobbyists to meet privately with local elected officials. Soon after, the company upped the ante with a negative marketing campaign, distributing mailers that contained misleading information about the program. Their activity prompted a rebuke — but no fines — from the CPUC. “I sent PG&E a letter to say knock it off,” Clanon said at the hearing.

PG&E also set up a phone-banking operation to dial up every prospective CCA customer in Marin County and encourage them to opt out of the program and used false information to persuade customers to stick with PG&E service, Weisz charged. “Many were led to believe that their lights wouldn’t go on if they didn’t opt out,” she said.

Once the CCA was in operation, PG&E imposed a delay on the billing process that made one month’s bill artificially low and the subsequent bill abnormally high, making it appear that CCA rates were higher than PG&E rates. This gaffe, which the company chalked up as a technical error, amounted to a sleight-of-hand: “Our rates were set to match PG&E rates,” Weisz explained.

PG&E did not return calls seeking comment.

Against all odds, Marin County is forging ahead with a power program that offers a 26.5 percent renewable energy mix, with 78 percent of its power generated without greenhouse gas emissions. State records show that only 14 percent of PG&E’s energy comes for renewable sources, failing to meet a state requirement that utilities get at least 20 percent of their power from such sources.

Charles McGlashan, a Marin County supervisor who chairs the Marin Energy Authority, noted that implementing a CCA was the most effective method the county could have employed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yielding an estimated 500,000-ton reduction of greenhouse gas emissions annually.

While the potential exists for other municipalities to follow suit, PG&E smear campaigns will likely discourage similar projects. “This is a powerful opportunity that has been virtually destroyed by the antics of PG&E,” McGlashan said. “It has had an extraordinary chilling effect on the political leaders to even embark on such an enterprise.” Later he added, “I’m only doing it because I’m so hell-bent on answering the children’s questions about climate change.”

 

STORM COMING

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, CCA advocates are getting ready to batten down the hatches. “We’re under no illusion — PG&E will compete fiercely,” San Francisco Public Utilities Commission spokesperson Charles Sheehan told the Guardian. He said the city was taking a proactive approach by conducting early outreach to residents and holding public informational meetings about CleanPower SF.

The SFPUC has received four bids from prospective electricity service providers. The respondents are Constellation Energy Commodities Group, Shell Energy North America, Power Choice Inc. (which was selected during the last RFP process but was unable to secure a binding agreement with the city), and Noble Americas Energy Solutions, formerly known as Sempra Energy Solutions. During the Senate hearing, San Francisco CCA director Mike Campbell noted that the city expected to complete a scoring process and select one of the four by the end of the year. The goal is to be fully operational by 2011, he added.

Leno predicted resistance from PG&E. “It’s like a storm coming in,” he said. “We have no doubt of its arrival. They have endless opportunities for nefarious creativity.” He queried Clanon on why the PUC wouldn’t levy fines or sanctions against the utility for the negative campaigns it waged in Marin, as a way to signal that such activity wouldn’t be tolerated in San Francisco.

Clanon did not commit to taking such an action. “That’s a choice about how you get the right behavior,” he said. He noted that the CPUC issued a decision last May preventing the utility from distributing false or misleading information about CCAs or illegally soliciting opt-outs. Clanon warned that PG&E might not be deterred by “fines and sanctions and specific rules.” Pressed on this point later, Clanon told the Guardian that imposing fines or sanctions “would take a lot of resources by us” at a time when the state agency is consumed with other pressing issues, such as the aftermath of the San Bruno explosion caused by a PG&E gas pipeline rupture. “If you set a rule, more people get around the rule,” he said.

Even if the state regulatory body doesn’t hold PG&E’s feet to the fire, Mirkarimi won’t hold back. “We’re tired of the thuggery. We’re tired of the bullying,” he said. He alluded to the Raker Act, a 1913 act of Congress that allowed San Francisco to build the O’Shaughnessy Dam and draw water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir under the condition that no private profit was derived from the development, saying the arrangement had been subverted by PG&E. “We should be able to chart our own energy destiny,” Mirkarimi said.

The perils of unaccountable power

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The perils of unaccountable power

By Saul Bloom

OPINION San Francisco has two redevelopment commissions that together have broad, sweeping authority over land use and development in the city. The Redevelopment Agency Commission and the Treasure Island Development Authority (TIDA) have more power in some respects than the Board of Supervisors — people you actually vote for.

There is no way to overstate the importance of the power of these commissions. The Candlestick Shipyard and Treasure Island projects by themselves account for an area the size of the Presidio. Over the next decade, the commissions will oversee the outcome of the Schlage Lock parcel in Visitacion Valley, the Bayview-Hunters Point Project Area, the Hunters Point Shipyard and Candlestick Point, India Basin, Mission Bay, South of Market, and Treasure and Yerba Buena islands.

Two important questions these commissions raise are: 1) Is It healthy for our city and county to vest so much authority into two essentially unaccountable authorities; and 2) Would it be better to vest this responsibility in the Board of Supervisors — considering that it’s the norm around the state for these local legislatures to also act as redevelopment commissions?

In San Francisco, redevelopment commissioners are appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the Board of Supervisors. The board cannot select its own representatives. The commissions wield the power of independent financial authority, multimillion dollar agency contracts, and the ability to destroy a community near you. This is a substantial amount of authority for an unelected body.

The mayor and six members of the Board of Supervisors are all that is required to allow a commissioner to serve for life. There are no term limits for commissioners. There are no meaningful criteria to judge a commissioner’s appointment. There is no yard stick by which to measure a panel member’s worthiness for reappointment every four years. The board’s confirmation and reappointment process is more a popularity party than a Supreme Court nominee review.

Other than the courts, there is no recourse to a commission decision. During the recent Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard debate members of the Board of Supervisors learned they actually has to seek the approval of these political appointees to modify an environmental impact report.

As a consequence, the appointment of commissioners is highly political. The power of the two commissions makes appointments prime objectives for influential sectors of the city’s political establishment. Those commissioners who disagree with the Mayor’s Office over important issues are not reappointed.

There’s no need to abolish the redevelopment authorities, which have unique legal benefits, particularly in project financing. But we can modify the way the city oversees the agencies.

In most counties in California the Board of Supervisors also serves as the Redevelopment Commission. While that could be a bit unnerving in a city as complicated as San Francisco, it is difficult to see how the process could become more politicized, less accountable, and less democratic.

Having the board oversee redevelopment would at least ensure that agency plans reflect the needs and interests of all 11 districts — and an elected body could be held accountable for those plans.

San Francisco deserves a dialogue about whether this is the best way to chart our course into a very foggy future. 

Saul Bloom is executive director of Arc Ecology.

Editor’s Notes

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Editor’s Notes

tredmond@sfbg.com

Imagine if the next mayor of San Francisco was chosen in public. I don’t mean the supervisors voting in public — they’ll have to do that at some point anyway. I mean the various possible candidates going through a process that allows the public to see who’s on the short list — and where those candidates are on the issues.

Sup. John Avalos, with the backing of his colleagues Chris Daly and David Campos, have started the process by suggesting that the board nominate candidates, soon. The idea, Avalos says, is to get a new mayor chosen early so that person can start on the transition process and get up to speed on leading the city.

But there are further steps here. When the supervisors nominate candidates for less significant offices, the Rules Committee holds a hearing and discusses the nominees. What if the supervisors, meeting as a Committee of the Whole, nominated, say, a half-dozen people for the job of interim mayor — then asked each candidate to appear before the group and answer questions?

The voters just overwhelmingly approved a charter amendment that will require the next mayor to appear at a board meeting once a month. There’s no reason the candidates shouldn’t do the same.

The supervisors have every right to ask someone who wants to be mayor what his or her position is on a long list of policy issues. And the pubic has every right to hear the responses.

I know, I know — the candidates would hate it. Standing in front of 11 people, from Chris Daly to Sean Elsbernd, and submitting to the mother of all job interviews would be unpleasant, perhaps unsettling. Some of the top contenders might bow out at the prospect.

But let’s be serious: In a normal campaign, the voters get to see candidates for mayor speak, take stands on issues, and engage in debates. I can’t see the supervisors choosing a new mayor on good faith alone (well, I’d take Tom Ammiano on good faith, but he doesn’t want the job). And if there aren’t any public discussions or interviews, then the only screening process is going to happen privately, with individual board members contacting individual candidates and (most likely) cutting deals.

I think it’s perfectly fair to say to the potential candidates: You want to be mayor of San Francisco? Spend an hour making the case for yourself and fielding questions from the people who are about to hire you. And let the rest of us watch.

Questions for the next mayor

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Questions for the next mayor

EDITORIAL The progressives on the Board of Supervisors are a long way from united on a possible mayoral candidate, and if they can’t come together, the person who finishes Gavin Newsom’s term will be a compromise candidate, either a short-term caretaker (not the greatest option) or someone who’s more in the moderate camp but a candidate the left can work with — for 2011 and possibly four years after that.

We’re glad to see the proposal by Sup. John Avalos to begin the mayoral selection process early. Picking a mayor in a mad scramble on the day Newsom steps down is a recipe for chaos — and potentially a bad outcome. And as the process begins, the last thing the city needs is a mayor chosen through a backroom deal.

But it’s entirely appropriate for progressive board members to set some standards and to ask the people who are angling for the job to make clear exactly what their positions would be on key policy issues.

In other words, anyone who wants to be the interim mayor — and possibly mayor for the next five years or longer — should have to answer, directly and without hedging, question like these:

How much new revenue does San Francisco need to solve its budget problems, and where, specifically, should it come from? This is the central issue facing the city, now and for the indefinite future. San Francisco’s budget has a structural deficit of at least $250 million, and it simply can’t be closed by cuts alone. What taxes will you pledge to support — and put political capital and fundraising clout behind when they go on the ballot?

What specific programs ought to be cut? Everyone likes to talk about the city living within its means, but that ends up leading to a series of death-by-1,000-cuts decisions that year after year devastate services to the poor. Don’t tell us you need to look at budget figures and work it out later; the big-ticket items are no secret. What’s on the chopping block — and what isn’t?

Will you work to promote public power? How will you expedite community choice aggregation, and will you support a ballot measure to replace Pacific Gas and Electric Co. with a full-scale municipal electric utility?

What are your law enforcement priorities? If money’s tight, should the San Francisco police be hassling nightclubs, or should more resources go into the homicide division? How important are foot patrols, and which neighborhoods should get them? Will the SFPD and juvenile authorities continue to turn young people over to federal immigration authorities?

Who should pay to fix Muni? Should the burden of paying for the transit system fall primarily on the riders (through fare increases and reduced services) or should big downtown businesses and retailers (the major beneficiaries of the system) pay more? Should car owners pay higher fees (including parking fees and congestion management fees) to subsidize transit? Which specific fees would you be willing to push for?

Who should the city build housing for? Right now, much of the new housing stock is aimed at the very rich — and San Francisco is turning into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. Would you set housing policy to conform with the city’s General Plan assertion that more than half of all new housing should be below market rate? How would you make that balance happen? Should the city spend a significant amount of money for affordable housing, and who should pay for it?

Do you agree that public sector jobs are as important as private sector jobs in San Francisco? Would you support the tax plan proposed by Sup. David Chiu?

Do you support giving the supervisors appointments to all major commissions?

Do you think the city should be doing more to stop TICs and condo conversions and to preserve existing rental housing?

That’s just the beginning of a long list of questions — but the progressives on the board should make sure they have answers before agreeing to support anyone, as a caretaker or interim mayor.

Appetite: Rare tequilas I sampled in Mexico

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Appetite: Rare tequilas I sampled in Mexico

In my travels last week through the magical land of Tequila, Mexico, I tasted, yes, a ridiculous amount of tequila from a wide range of distillers. After watching it being made and sampling it its homeland, I gained a deeper appreciation than I already had for the agave spirit. Here are three superb but uncommon tequilas only found in Mexico or here in the states with some investigative cunning. Of course, the incomparable Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant often stocks all of these by the pour if you wish to sample.

San Matias Gran Reserva Anejo
San Matias’ Gran Reserva Anejo is distilled in Ojode Agua, Jalisco, aged three years in French oak barrels, and is a shocking value in Mexico at less than $20 a bottle. Recommended to me by a restaurant owner on the outskirts of Guadalajara, I was pleased by its gentle amber color and subtle notes of orange peel, roasted apples and smoke playing off the herbaceousness it thankfully retains despite age (a fault I sometimes find with anejos). When asking locals why it’s so cheap compared to other anejos, they said it’s because it’s about 80% agave vs. a high quality 100%. Their website says otherwise, claiming to be 100%. I may never know the truth, but I can say this was a favorite find during my time in Mexico and certainly the best deal.

Arette Unique Reposado
Arette was one of the distilleries I visited in Tequila and has become a favorite, specifically for their fabulous, reasonable — around $60 a bottle in US, $30 in Mexico — Reposado Artesanal. (They also have a basic reposado). But the one everyone claims can only be purchased in Mexico is their Unique Reposado (there’s a Unique Blanco and Extra Anejo as well). Though I see K&L Wines can special order it and even if I actually prefer the Artesanal repo, the Unique impresses with its refined balance, aged 11 months in white oak bourbon barrels. Nuanced and subtle, it’s a fine reposado intro for the uninitiated.

I was more excited by the rare, small production Gran Clase Extra Anejo, aged over three years with woody mellowness yet herbaceous, agave properties… and the extra anejo El Gran Viejo with its artistic, unusual bottle. It’s warm with vanilla, almond richness, rested six years in bourbon barrels.

Reserva de los Gonzalez Blanco
Another sip recommended by a Mexican local, Reserva de los Gonazalez has Don Julio ties. Its directors are Eduardo and Francisco González, sons of none other than Don Julio González. Produced in Los Altos, Jalisco, and made from the Tequilana Weber blue agave plant, the Reserva Blanco is 100% pure agave, clean, reminiscent of Don Julio’s blanco with a gentle sweetness, floral, grassy notes, and plenty of agave.

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Oi yay!

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Oi yay!

MOVIES WITH MOHAWKS Punk and the movies met when the former was very young. When punk eventually grew up, the movies still insisted on viewing it as a child. Their union, nowadays perverted by mutual materialistic bloat, has been rather like an arranged marriage: long-lasting, with moments of real understanding, but fundamentally fraudulent.

Zack Carlson and Bryan Connolly’s hefty new tome Destroy All Movies!!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film (Fantagraphics, $35) chronicles this tragicomedic marriage in A-Z encyclopedic form encompassing more than 1,100 movies, 450 pages, and lots of vintage promotional imagery.

Eleven hundred? Really? Well, sorta. For every documentary, concert, film, or serious drama (1998’s American History X, 1986’s Sid and Nancy, etc.) reflecting some genuine subchapter of punk history, there are movies in which ersatz “punks” are cartoonish villains either intentionally funny (1987’s Surf Nazis Must Die) or not (retiree-terrorizers getting their sneers removed in 1985 by Death Wish 3‘s ever-vigilantic Chuck Bronson).

Let us not forget the many sci-fi futures in which everyone is kinda punk (most famously 1981’s The Road Warrior, 1982’s Blade Runner, and 1981’s Escape From New York). Punks seemed a natural fit — at least filmmakers thought so — for horror flicks, whether being sexy-scary (1987’s The Lost Boys) or zombiefied (1985’s Return of the Living Dead).

Destroy All Movies!!! fittingly spotlights such actual punk scene-bred, variably underground talents and movies as Lizzie Borden, 1984’s Repo Man, Jon Moritsugu, 1984’s Desperate Teenage Lovedolls, Derek Jarman, 1982’s Liquid Sky, and Penelope Spheeris. Many of these get the benefit of elongated discussion and related interviews.

But the book also has room for characters confined to just a scene or background — anyone remember punks in 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters or Crocodile Dundee? The editors do. They’ll likewise remind you when punks infiltrated After School Specials (1987’s The Day My Kid Went Punk), porn (1985’s New Wave Hookers), and the Linda Blair ouevre (too many to mention).

The Roxie hosts book-signing and screening festivities in honor of Destroy All Movies!!!‘s upcoming release. Festivities includes free mixtape and onstage punk haircut giveaways, punk trailers, and 35mm prints of two prime 1980s artifacts. Exhibit One is Times Square (1980), producer Robert Stigwood’s attempt to do for punk-new wave what 1997’s Saturday Night Fever had for disco. His editorial interference muffled the Sapphic tilt of the underage runaway heroines’ BFF relationship, but a guilty pleasure and great double-LP soundtrack (featuring XTC, Patti Smith, the Cure, and more) survived.

Pleasures guiltier still lie in 1984’s Surf II, whose title is the first anarchic joke (there was no Surf I). Its “plot” involves a mad scientist (Eddie Deezen) turning surfer bullies into indiscriminately hungry punk zombies (that again!) via radioactive Buzz Cola. It features a young Eric Stoltz, L.A. mod revivalist band the Untouchables, and Love Boat refugees Ron “Horshack” Palillo and Ruth Buzzi. Unleashed amid umpteen 1984 teen sex comedies, Surf II was dismissed as demented and arbitrary — exactly why we like it now.

DESTROY ALL MOVIES!!!

Nov. 19, 8 p.m., $10

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

www.roxie.com

The jazz don

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The jazz don

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC Adam Theis says his school teachers always told him that to succeed, he’d have to learn how to focus. Surely what they meant was that he’d have to find enough things to focus on. For like all great connectors, Theis finds his genius in the multitudinous.

At least, that would explain why Theis’ loose network of funky jazz bands and musicians, the Jazz Mafia, has expanded to 70 members over the past decade — and why he has difficulties naming all the instruments he’s proficient at playing. His primary toy is the trombone, followed in no particular order by the electric bass, keyboards, tuba, conch shells, didgeridoo, and laptop.

Theis thrives on the large scale, and his current project has more moving parts than any he’s attempted in the past. A recent grant gave him the means to take a break from his 30-gigs-a-month schedule to compose a 50-piece orchestral symphonic score, Brass, Bows, and Beats. It debuted at the Palace of Fine Arts in 2009 and has since been touring jazz festivals across the continent. The production gathers together some of the Mafia’s finest wind, string, and percussion players, seats them behind hip-hop vocalists and MCs, and does much to convince one of the epic grandeur of hip-hop — if anyone still needs convincing in this day and age.

Brass, Bows, and Beats does all this while mixing a lot of other genres into the pot. Theis says he isn’t bothered by critics’ allegations that the work doesn’t rightly fit into the hip-hop tradition. “We’re not trying to do something that’s pure,” he says. “That’s pretty much never been the trip with our groups.” A friend who caught the piece’s SF debut summed up the scene aptly enough: “It’s like you’re watching something that has maybe never been done before.”

In the early aughts, Theis and many of the original members of his networks played a regular Tuesday night gig at North Beach’s Black Cat Club. The theme of those nights — when the Mafia was conceived — was improvisation. “We would always invite musicians to jump up — we’d give them space to do something and we’d vibe off it,” Theis says.

A recent transplant to the city, Theis couldn’t stop inviting in more players. “I’d meet an amazing new musician every day,” he explains. From these impromptu sessions came many of the Mafia’s lasting artistic collaborations. Even now, most Shotgun Wedding Quintet (Theis’ touring group) shows begin with a jam — some versions of which have made it into the score of the symphony.

You’d think that the guy that holds the Mafia baton would have an overarching vision for the crew. They’ve reached symphony status, and another orchestral piece is in the works. What’s next, a jazz army? A hip-hop city-state?

For now, Theis seems happy to let the capable musicians surrounding him riff off his beat. When I ask him about plans for the decade to come, he envisions his network becoming looser (“more of a structure for other musicians”), and the Jazz Mafia website (www.jazzmafia.com) morphing into a blog where one can read news about the bands involved, perhaps getting more involved with youth music education. Theis already holds concert-classes for hundreds of schoolkids at a time.

Which, of course, could mean Theis is on the hunt for new lieutenants. What can the Cosa Nostra do for you, young trumpeter?

JAZZ MAFIA’S 10TH ANNIVERSARY SHOW

Featuring The Realistic Orchestra with Latyrx

Sat/13, 9 p.m., $15–$20

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

The designer as performer

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The designer as performer

MUSIC/VISUAL ART It’s late at night, and I’m sitting at my laptop transcribing an interview with visual designer Adam Guzman, when I notice the graphics on my screen, twitching along dully to the sound of our recorded conversation. A fuchsia tube made out of small crosses rises up against a black background, something between a digitized sand worm and a Slinky, and opens its yellow maw in a pointless sort of way that’s familiar to anyone who uses Windows Media Player. All I can think of is how much Guzman must hate these visualizations.

Guzman, you see, is one-half of Fair Enough, a design partnership with Julia Tsao. In the last year they’ve been working in creating concert visuals for musicians. But these aren’t your typical, canned images projected near the stage; stock footage and trippy clip art looped or automated to roughly coincide with the beat. “We wanted to do the opposite,” Guzman says during our phone interview. “We both hated that. You go to a concert and someone is playing, and the visuals have nothing to do with what [the sound] on stage. They’re just found clips of stuff. This doesn’t make sense, and I was sort of tired of that. We wanted to make simple things that were synced to [the music] and do it in a different way.”

The Fair Enough project started when Guzman was studying at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Through Tsao, Guzman was introduced to Jason Chung, who records and performs under the name Nosaj Thing. “I actually lived with him for a little bit,” Guzman says. “He got to talking, and he was really into doing a synchronized show inspired by [shows by the Japanese rock innovator] Cornelius. At the same time, I was starting my thesis and I was really into doing projects with music and sound experiments. It just made sense to do a project with him, and it turned into this thing that consumed me for a year.”

A great deal of Guzman’s process for the project is documented on his thesis blog, aleome.tumblr.com. But it began the way it does usually for him, with exploration. “When I started, I didn’t really know what direction it was going to go in,” he says. “I started drawing and shooting video, trying to edit it together, playing with MIDI controllers and stuff like that. I tried programming too, but wasn’t really into that. Julie had been gone, and when she came back, everything just sort of clicked and we decided to do something really simple. You know, embrace our constraints. Because I’m not a pro at animation or programming or anything. Neither is she. We just wanted to use that as a design tool.”

The final product is a stunning presentation, blanketing Nosaj Thing, his DJ booth, and the music under a series of graphic banners. Whereas typical concert visuals bombard your corneas with collages of disparate elements, each image of Fair Enough’s presentation is simplified down to an aesthetic essence. The displays range from organic suggestions with flowing blobs and swarming fireflies to geometric patterns shuttering crosses and a succession of colors. But each stands out on its own.

“We modeled the show after Jason’s set,” Guzman explains. “It made sense, because for his songs there’s pieces, and he calls them up when he’s performing. A bassline, or a synth, the drums, parts of the song. We thought it would be cool to do the same thing with the visuals and have parts of songs that we could call up as well. I was into the idea of the designer as performer, and what that [might] mean. I developed what the show is today from that. It’s the same. We have two MIDI controllers, and for each song there will be anything from three to seven clips that go with different parts, and we’re mixing and calling them up live.”

Guzman goes back repeatedly to the idea of the designer as performer. It was the subject of his thesis, Sound and Vision. Interested in musical artists who have pushed visual performances to the forefront — Daft Punk, Kanye West, U2, and especially the Talking Heads and Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense — he initiated the project as a way of exploring how sound influences visuals and how visuals create music. As David Byrne puts it: “Music is physical. The body understands it before the mind.” What Guzman and Tsao have created is a musical appeal to the sense of sight.

For Nosaj Thing’s November tour, they’re essentially members of the band, rehearsing, traveling on the bus with the other acts — Toro y Moi (who they also designed visuals for) and Jogger — and performing live at the shows.

Did Guzman see this happening when he was studying design? “I always knew I wanted to do something like this,” he says. “I didn’t envision this, though. I’m really excited about what’s happening.”

If Guzman wanted to explore the relationship between design as performance, he has done so — by becoming a performer. *

NOSAJ THING

With Toro Y Moi and Jogger

Fri/12, 9 p.m., $15–$18

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

www.rickshawstop.com

www.fair–enough.com

Bless the beasts and children

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Bless the beasts and children

HAIRY EYEBALL It’s hard not to look at Ryan McGinley’s road-trip photographs — in which his young, often nude, subjects, having ventured far from civilization, run through the woods, climb trees, dance amid a Vulcanic cascade of sparklers, and leap into the void — and not sigh a little. What now separates them from the images he shot for Levi’s current “Go Forth” campaign, seemingly plastered on every other Muni shelter, is frequently a conspicuously displayed pair of jeans.

McGinley has built his reputation on capturing Edenic visions of youth running wild. His pictures are gauzy and nostalgic, shot through with the sexy frisson of their in-the-moment documentation of a way of living that rebukes authority and throws caution to the wind. No one is at work in a McGinley photograph (an irony, perhaps, given the faux-literati, “we are all workers” sloganeering that Levi’s uses elsewhere in the campaign). Rather, people, such as the New York area taggers he started off photographing early in his career, create. Or, as in the road trip pictures, they drop out, escape.

No wonder Levi’s came calling. McGinley’s photographs deliver the promise of youth and all its freedoms in a sexy visual package. When McGinley is at his strongest, though, his pictures also offer up flashes of mystery and unaffected joy. Sometimes, when his subject’s eyes lock with his camera they seem to transmit the promise of a secret to be shared.

The road-trip photographs make up roughly half the images in “Life Adjustment Center,” McGinley’s current exhibit at Ratio 3. However much they dazzle — Tom (Blue, Pink and Orange), a male nude study, gives George Platt Lynes a glowing Technicolor kiss — they are not the true draw. The animals are.

The other half of the show consists of black and white studio portraits of models (again, nude) posing with all sorts of fauna: deer, a domesticated mutt, a peacock, a butterfly, and a coyote. They are the inverse of the road-trip scenes: nature has been brought inside. Both creatures and humans address us with unblinking stillness that, at first glance, gives the impression that the former are stuffed. However, the press notes inform us that the animals are real, which makes a photo like India (Coyote) all the more riveting.

The coyote is draped around India’s shoulders, her hands balancing it in place, in a pose that echoes classic depictions of Christ as shepherd holding aloft his allegorical lamb. The coyote — its tongue hanging out — appears at ease, as does India. Their proximity to each other is nonetheless unsettling (we are left to guess whether or not the scars that criss-cross India’s torso and legs were acquired while posing or before the shoot).

The photograph also makes me think of Josef Beuys’ famous 1974 performance in which he stayed in the René Block Gallery with a wild coyote for eight hours over three days. By the end of the piece, the coyote had become tolerant enough of Beuys to allow the artist to give it a farewell embrace.

In McGinley’s remarkable photographs animals and humans pose together, but there is no hierarchy of prop and subject. In these double portraits McGinley has captured a momentary, and intensely tactile, experience of trust and vulnerability shared between unlike creatures.

 

OF COWBOYS AND CARNIES

I have one thing to say to fans of 2005’s Brokeback Mountain and Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys (1968) who haven’t yet seen local animation wunderkind and 2008 Goldie winner Samara Halperin’s epic, stop-motion same-sex cowboy romance Tumbleweed Town (1999). Get thee to YouTube.

A brief plot synopsis is in order. As Todd the Tonka cowboy hitchhikes his way across the Texas desert he navigates a rugged world of plastic masculinity only to find true love in the arms of a two-stepper at a raunchy roadhouse.

Currently in residence this week at Southern Exposure, Halperin has been converting the space’s sizeable gallery into a set for West of the Wonder Wheel, her much-awaited sequel to Tumbleweed Town, which trades wide, open spaces for the enclosed, topsy-turvy world of the carnival.

Halperin’s miniature amusement park, complete with rides and games of skill, was greatly inspired by Coney Island’s recently demolished Astroland Park, one of the subjects of a Halperin-curated series of short films about amusement parks that is shown alongside the film set/sculpture.

The last tiny detail is set to be glued in place this Friday, and to celebrate Halperin is hosting a pre-filming carnival-themed party with live music, games, and, of course, cotton candy.

RYAN MCGINLEY: LIFE ADJUSTMENT CENTER

Through Dec. 11

Ratio 3

1447 Stevenson, SF

(415) 821-3371

www.ratio3.org

SAMARA HALPERIN: WEST OF THE WONDERWHEEL

Through Nov. 15 (carnival reception Fri/12, 7 p.m.–9 p.m.

Southern Exposure

3030 20th St., SF

(415) 863-2141 www.soex.org

Side of the road

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Side of the road

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Kelly Reichardt wrote and directed a pair of arresting short features in the 1990s — River of Grass (1993) and Ode (1999) — but it was the two poignant recalibrations of the road movie she made during the George W. Bush years that put her on the map. With so much American independent cinema gone upwardly mobile, Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008) were films that dug back in to that minor place that gives the 1970s cinema of Monte Hellman (1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop), Bob Rafelson (1970’s Five Easy Pieces), Barbara Loden (1970’s Wanda), and Eagle Pennell (1978’s The Whole Shootin’ Match) its plaintive appeal. Reichardt’s characters (the recent ones all developed with the help of Portland, Ore., author Jon Raymond) are side-winding, shipwrecked, or otherwise in limbo. The films do not engineer uplift, but instead reserve empathy for melancholy souls who, for one reason or another, feel themselves cut off.

Some of the elements of Reichardt’s “naturalism” include her subtle direction of actors (an emphasis on gesture and rhythm); her deceptively unhurried pacing which, as in the best short stories, reveals the continuity of life in its interruptions; her sensitivity to the emotional registry of politics; and the strong regional accents of all her films. If you’ve seen the two earlier movies, you know that Reichardt has a strong feeling for the southeast’s glades, but she’s since come to be associated with Oregon’s overcast skies (her new film, Meek’s Cutoff, was shot upon the state’s hardscrabble plains). Reichardt could probably make a good picture in any out-of-the-way place — a lot of America, actually.

Reichardt’s films unfold as ballads: a cast of two, with occasional walk-ons, observed from a near distance. The incremental addition of events anticipates heartbreak or worse, with context and emphasis left between the lines. Always, we find ourselves in an America where it’s hard to escape and easy to get lost. However the meaning of “escape” and “getting lost” might vary, the characters emerge similarly bruised: walking the strip, stuck in traffic, riding a freight train, or back at home without consolation. Many of Reichardt’s memorable scenes — and there are already many — might have been torn from Robert Frank’s The Americans.

Like all good ballads, the stories strike us as being emblematic. In interviews, Reichardt has made it clear that she intends her films to remind us of the times, whether evoking the left’s ineffectual ties in Old Joy or the lack of a public sphere in Wendy and Lucy. As with her ’70s forerunners, the films invite a pastoral daydream (renewal in the wilderness or out on the road) only to have it dissipate in responsibility or a dead end. Something Cozy (Lisa Bowman) says in River of Grass hangs over all Reichardt’s movies: “It’s funny how a person can leave everything she knew behind and still wind up in such a familiar place.”

Even before learning that Meek’s Cutoff (which premiered at the 2010 Venice Film Festival; no local release date has been announced) was to be set in 1845, it seemed reasonable to assume that we wouldn’t soon see a computer or text message in one of Reichardt’s films. Her characters all have difficulty communicating — this can be vexing, especially in Wendy and Lucy — but the films finally turn on the repressed energies and vulnerabilities that only surface in the midst of a genuine encounter. In Reichardt’s early work, intimate productions provided the right scale for these fragile relationships. That began to change in Wendy and Lucy by virtue of Michelle Williams, and now Meek’s Cutoff represents another enlargement of cast and budget. Reichardt will be in conversation with film scholar B. Ruby Rich following the Pacific Film Archive’s screenings of Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, and it will be interesting to hear whether the extra attention has made it any more difficult for her to keep to the byways. 

KELLY REICHARDT WITH B. RUBY RICH

Nov. 11–13, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

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

Viva l’Italia

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Viva l’Italia

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Boy meets girl. Boy marries girl. Boy cheats on girl. They yell. A lot. If the story sounds familiar, it might be because you’ve seen it in any number of contemporary Italian films. That’s not to discount modern Italian cinema as a whole — for every rehashed infidelity plot, there’s a subtler treasure.

Ferzan Ozpetek is one of those original voices. With his Turkish background and queer identity, he brings a unique perspective to the table. And his best films showcase aspects of Italian culture that might otherwise go unexplored.

The San Francisco Film Society honors Ozpetek as part of its “New Italian Cinema” festival — screening his most recent movie, Loose Cannons, along with some of his past work. For those unfamiliar with Ozpetek, this is a primo opportunity to get acquainted. And if you need added incentive, he has a knack for procuring plenty of Italian eye candy.

Ozpetek’s first film, Steam: The Turkish Bath (1997), is likely his most amateur effort — and that’s to be expected. But there’s still plenty to enjoy about this surprisingly restrained drama. The porny title is a tad misleading, though Steam does establish Ozpetek as a filmmaker who can make a film sensual without baring it all. It also introduces his recurring themes of sexual awakening and culture clash. The film’s protagonist, Franceso (Alessandro Gassman), is an Italian living in Turkey — a reversal of Ozpetek’s status as a Turkish immigrant.

Ozpetek really hit his stride with 2001’s His Secret Life. While it’s not screening as part of “New Italian Cinema,” it’s certainly worth checking out. The film has a charmingly unpolished feel, with great performances from Margherita Buy and Stefano Accorsi. You might recognize them from about a dozen other recent Italian movies.

Thankfully, the festival is screening Ozpetek’s best film, Facing Windows, a drama that manages to integrate the Holocaust, forbidden gay love, and voyeurism without becoming overwrought. The script, which Ozpetek cowrote with Gianni Romoli, is tightly woven. Much credit is also due to Giovanna Mezzogiorno, a welcome presence in all her films. Yes, there are extramarital shenanigans, but the story feels fresh. And who wouldn’t concede to a dalliance with Raoul Bova?

It’s regrettably tricky to find a balanced, thoughtful queer film — much less when it’s an Italian import. That’s why it’s important to honor filmmakers, like Ozpetek, who challenge their viewers and subvert the norm.

“NEW ITALIAN CINEMA”

Nov 14-21, $12.50–$20

Embarcadero Cinema

One Embarcadero Center, Promenade Level, SF

www.sffs.org

Rock rolled

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Rock rolled

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Danny Boyle is a director whose projects seem chosen largely to have nothing in common with anything he’s done before. Mid-career at 54, he’s been good at a lot of things. But what, exactly, is his ideal fit?

Falling in the “good” department are 202’s 28 Days Later, which revivified the zombie flick at the cost of subsequent overexposure, not to mention introducing that whole “fast-moving zombie” conundrum. Children’s fantasy Millions (2004) had real charm almost overwhelmed by ADD; Sunshine (2007) was sci-fi so gorgeous you could almost ignore the black hole its narrative vanished into.

Not so hot were 1997’s A Life Less Ordinary and 2000’s The Beach, the latter from a novel that “couldn’t miss.” Which proved Boyle is capable of seizing on an approach entirely wrong for his material, his confidence unflagging to the bitter end. Shallow Grave (1994) was a cunning debut that owed a lot to John Hodge’s screenplay, yet made sure you couldn’t miss the directorial panache.

Which leaves 1996’s Trainspotting, the one perfect match of gonzo content and hyperactive execution. Plus 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, of course — a Piccadilly masala of tragedy, coarse humor, melodrama, spectacle, outrageous fortune, grotesquerie, and whipped cream. Did Boyle and company truly fuse those elements, or just smash them haphazardly together? Most people were too dazzled by exoticism to care. But will its brief vogue eventually look like one of those pop anomalies more puzzling than nostalgic?

After that large-scale, Oscar-draped triumph, 127 Hours might seem starkly minimalist — if Boyle weren’t allergic to such terms. Based on Aron Ralston’s memoir Between a Rock and a Hard Place, it’s a tale defined by tight quarters, minimal “action,” and maximum peril: man gets pinned by rock in the middle of nowhere, must somehow free himself or die.

More precisely, in 2003 experienced trekker Ralston biked and hiked into Utah’s Blue John Canyon, falling into a crevasse when a boulder gave way under his feet. He landed unharmed … save a right arm pinioned by a rock too securely wedged, solid, and heavy to budge. He’d told no one where he’d gone for the weekend; dehydration death was far more likely than being found.

For those few who haven’t heard how he escaped this predicament, suffice it to say the solution was uniquely unpleasant enough to make the national news (and launch a motivational-speaking career). Yes, it was way worse than drinking one’s own pee.

Opinions vary about the book. It’s well written, an undeniably amazing story, but some folks just don’t like him. Alternating chapters between the canyon crisis and prior “hair-raising adventures,” Ralston is the life of every party, the apple of every eye. He’s forever leaping gung-ho into avoidable near-catastrophes (risking death by bear attack, drowning, etc.), then marveling at his luck in surviving them. Stuck passing long, possibly final hours in Blue John, he briefly experiences “regrets about not focusing on the people enough” in pursuit of “the essence of experience.” Example: once he lost two good friends by recklessly getting them near-killed in an avalanche. But oh well!

This being a Danny Boyle movie, it has of course has a much cooler soundtrack than Ralston would have mixtaped (it’s a no-Phish zone), albeit one sometimes quirky to a jarring fault. While hardly a pop-culture felon à la Baz Luhrmann, Boyle still easily errs on the side of excess flash. His 127 Hours has passages where the MTV-like cinematic gymnastics performed to keep us interested in a trapped hero are just trivializing and gratuitous.

Still, subject and interpreter match up better than one might expect, mostly because there are lengthy periods when the film simply has to let James Franco command our full attention. This actor, who has reached the verge of major stardom as a chameleon rather than a personality, has no trouble making Ralston’s plight sympathetic, alarming, poignant, and funny by turns. His protagonist is good-natured, self-deprecating, not tangibly deep but incredibly resourceful. Probably just like the real-life Ralston, only a tad more appealing, less legend-in-his-own-mind — a typical movie cheat to be grateful for here.

127 HOURS opens Fri/12 in San Francisco.

Uncanny Xsnake

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Uncanny Xsnake

marke@sfbg.com

>>Alas! We’ve just heard word that Tensnake has had to cancel his appearance here due to visa and family issues. Hopefully he’ll make it here soon!

SUPER EGO I adore history, it’s all so pointless. It’s fun to play around with, too — stick your mitts in the used fork drawer of the past and clatter about a bit, just to make new noise. Artists do this all the time, grab stuff from different eras and pastiche them together to create unique and dreamlike emotional states. Bygones!

That sensibility is making a comeback in dance music. Over the past few years, there’s been a fascinating wave of sonic rummagers digging through five decades of strobe-lit tunes, Frankensteining together ambitiously funky, mostly midtempo tracks that knock sample-trainspotters sideways. What these posthistorical freaks come up with, creating songs that sound like they belong to a not-quite-placeable era, is uncanny, just a tad left of reality, something the wordy Germans call unheimlischkeit. Think DJ Shadow in neon Ray-Bans, collaging together decelerated Minneapolis and Motown samples, Heaven 17-ish synths, early ’90s R&B basslines, rolling Balearic keyboards, and half-forgotten garage house vocal snippets.

Rocketing to the top of the history-shuffling heap is Hamburg tunesmith Tensnake, whose riveting tracks like “In the End (I Want You to Cry),” “Holding Back (My Love)” and breezy monster hit “Coma Cat” open little windows into an imaginary dance floor past. Take, for instance, Tensnake’s phenomenal remix of Azari and III’s “Reckless (With Your Love),” in which he transforms an already post-postmodern ode to late ’80s house into an insanely bouncy Soul II Soul homage that breaks, at the climax, into a full-on sample of C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat.” WTF? Which Midwestern gay bar am I wearing ripped jeans and a bolero jacket at?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v10CG_GYU3k

“Playfulness is key to who I am and what I do.” Tensnake, né Marco Niemerski, told me over e-mail. “Some of my music is more deep and dreamy, while other tracks are more open-armed and made for piano connoisseurs, ha. I do have a love and respect for dance music history but like any producer who cares about what they do, I want to look ahead, not back! Whenever I am referring musically to some old tunes, I think I am just trying to have a great time while producing a new one.”

Tensnake’s new double-disc mix for the Defected in the House series and his upcoming tour of the States are sure to expose a lot of European artists working with the new sensibility to American ears. We have our own reps in acts like Wolf + Lamb and Soul Clap, but it’s weird to hear such crate-digging audacity and soul sonics coming from across the pond.

“After the minimal sound, which was huge for a few years, people were hungry for more soulful stuff again,” Tensnake said. “I was never into minimal, so I’m glad that re-edits and classic tracks have come back to the fore. And I think this was always an American sound, the Chicago, Detroit, and New York sound. Very few house records from Europe were important to me. This trip will be the first time in America, so I’m very excited to see how my live show and tracks go down.”

Does he feel part of a revolutionary dance music movement? “I am not a big fan of labeling music or names and numbers — well, maybe apart from the number ten. I just like great music and melodies. To me a great song could be Saint Etienne, Prefab Sprout, or even Janet Jackson. There is just more of a melting pot at the moment and I think that’s incredibly healthy.”

TENSNAKE Fri/26, 9 p.m., $10. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF. www.publicsf.com

 

AMBROSIA SALAD’S DOBLE QUINCEAÑERA

Fluff up your pretty pink crinoline: “It’s like I’m becoming a woman again — except without the vaginoplasty,” drag princess Ambrosia tells me of her fab-sounding doble quinceañera birthday celebration. Including a mariachi band with accompanying live vocals from drag luminaries, DJs Javi en Rose and Juanita More, a traditional quinceañera waltz, Juanita Fajita’s fajita cart and the tamale lady, this will be one of the kooky-magical parties of the year. Doble the pleasure, darling.

Sun/14, 8 p.m., $8. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. myspecial15.blogspot.com

Paradise Pizza & Pasta

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Paradise Pizza & Pasta

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE The current pizza vogue reminds us that pizza is always in vogue. Pizza is timeless; have you ever met anyone, or even heard of anyone, who doesn’t like it? Yet the welter of new and ballyhooed pizzerias, in all their worthiness, can sometimes make us overlook the older, time-tested spots like Cathy and Sal Alioto’s Paradise Pizza and Pasta at the edge of West Portal.

Paradise has been “family owned and operated since 1989,” according to the menu card, and that’s a lot of restaurant years. (Restaurant years are even briefer and more brutal than dog years, which is saying something.) The restaurant also claims to offer the “best crust in the city.” This is a complex matter in which personal taste inevitably figures, as we shall see.

But first, the setting. It’s clean and modernish, with a semi-exhibition kitchen and bright green tabletops illuminated by a small spotlight in the ceiling — a mercy for those of us who were born before, oh, let’s say 1989, and now have difficulty reading menus by the dim light in so many of our more au courant restaurants. The interior design does contain one oddity, and that is the large fish composed of pizza pans mounted above the kitchen. It looks like some sort of Christian symbol while implying that the restaurant is some sort of seafood house, which it isn’t.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t glimpses of seafood on the menu. There are, including sautéed shrimp, fettuccine with shrimp, and shrimp on a pizza. Ahi even turns up occasionally, in tissue-thin flaps, almost like prosciutto — on a plate of bruschetta ($10.95) in the company of caramelized onions and juicy, late-season tomatoes.

The pizza crusts strike a nice balance between anorexic (in vogue at the moment) and foccacia-puffy, which I have always found to be bloating as well as flaccid when soggy. Paradise’s crusts are thin and crisp enough to hold a firm point (with good chewiness) while flashing some well-blistered puff along the edges.

As for toppings: they come pre-bundled for your convenience, under a variety of alluring names (all containing the word “paradise”), or you can put together your own consortium, starting from $10.95 and rising in increments from $1 to $1.50 per extra topping, depending on the size of the pizza. The ingredients, although not exotic, are fresh and vivid, the Italian sausage in particular, which skillfully balances the assertiveness of its two principal players, garlic and fennel seed.

The triumph of the pizza over the calzone in this country is something of a mystery to me. Does it have to do with the comparative ease of cutting up a pizza into slices for sharing, whereas a calzone is usually too big to be a finger or hand food? Paradise’s calzoni (all $12.95) are splendid to look at, each a sizable mezzaluna bulging with tasty goodies and with a subtle sheen, like that of a good (if blistered) brioche, on the outside. The salsiccia edition, filled with crumbled Italian sausage, chopped mushrooms, and mozzarella and ricotta cheeses, would pretty easily be enough for two people, especially if preceded by a starter course of some kind.

One such course we weren’t impressed with was a cream of artichoke soup ($4). The soup was certainly creamy — indeed, it seemed to be nothing but creamy, as though the kitchen had poured a carton of half and half into a pan and gently heated it. We did detect a faint hint of lemon in all that unorganized richness, but of the headlining ingredient … bupkes.

Paradise does a lively takeout business, which — as at every other such place I’ve ever been to — does slow the sit-down service. The servers themselves are attentive, knowledgeable, and prompt, but because the kitchen is busy baking pizzas for an unseen host as well as for the people sitting at tables, there can be a bit of a wait. But the beers and wines are moderately priced by city standards, and the crowd is spectation-worthy, a true neighborhood potpourri ranging from greatest-generation couples out for a simple dinner to packs of high school boys in their Giants regalia — black and orange, so reminiscent of Halloween. Halloween has just passed, but, like pizza, it never goes out of vogue in our town.

PARADISE PIZZA & PASTA

Daily from 4:30 p.m.

393 West Portal, SF

(415) 759-1155

www.paradisepizzaandpasta.com

Beer and wine

DC/DS/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

 

Flesh of our flesh

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Flesh of our flesh

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE When I think of the term “landscape” in a broad sense, it seems that beyond referring to any certain vista, the word connotes an integrated whole, a thing beyond its particulars. In this sense, a painting is a landscape. Its details are never separate from and exist to serve the whole. It was this feeling of watching a landscape that is most prevalent throughout ODD, AXIS/inkBoat’s new show, which premiered November 5-7 at ODC and continues Nov. 12-14 in Oakland at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts. Dancers enter and exit. Duets transpire. Bodies merge. Yet the individual elements feel inseparable from the entirety of the scene.

I had never heard of Odd Nerdrum before initially reading about ODD. An acclaimed Norwegian figurative painter, Nerdrum’s paintings are the source of inspiration for choreographer Shinichi Iova-Koga’s aptly-named piece. I Googled “Odd Nerdrum” after seeing the show, and as image after image filled the screen, I realized that although I ‘d never browsed through any of Nerdrum’s paintings, many of the images were strikingly familiar. I’d seen the living embodiment of many of them through the course of the show.

The paintings are dark. Flesh is a recurring element. There is also a distinctly Old World feel. These themes are found within ODD: the stage is dimly lit and at times almost murky. The motif of flesh is explored in the costume choices and particularly when many of the dancers bare their squirming muscular backs. I was particularly intrigued by the ways in which the androgynous quality of the paintings are recreated in the dance. No dancer stands out from the rest. Individual gender, color, personality, and physicality seem to disappear.

Perhaps the one exception is Iova-Koga himself. Assuming that the majority of his audience has little to no knowledge of Nerdrum’s work, he introduces quotes and personal thoughts on Nerdrum as a sort of prelude to the piece. Later, Iova-Koga walks into the choreography awhirl onstage and begins a monologue of hermaphrodite facts. As represented by the mythological Hermes and Aphrodite, a hermaphrodite was once considered a near-perfect being. In the popular song “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” by the Beatles, Desmond and Molly are switched in the gender stereotypical lyrics, adding a hermaphroditic element to the song.

Acclaimed cellist Joan Jeanrenaud provides musical score and accompaniment to ODD. At the point when Iova-Koga begins his monologue, Jeanrenaud incorporates snippets of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” into the instrumentation. While her music supports the androgynous landscape throughout the work, this pop culture reference in particular fuses music to motion.

The end of the piece departs dramatically from the meditative landscape of bodies floating in and out of each other. Iova-Koga is torn from his soliloquy, a stampede of accessory dancers storms the stage, and chaos essentially breaks loose. Although the piece hitherto had by no means been boring, I had definitely slipped into a reverie and was caught unaware by the explosion of action onstage. While ODD piece retains its landscape quality through to the end, this quality becomes more colorful and vibrant. The excess of bodies moving in tandem provides a unity and sense of completeness previously unfound.

Hermaphrodites, the Beatles, two dance companies, a cellist, and a painter’s body of work: ODD takes on enormous proportions, and the resulting piece is incredibly dense. There is the melding of dancers with mixed physical abilities. There is the fusion of dance and music. There is the dancing itself, a parade of overlapping solos, duets, trios, and group work. Yet it is the morphing landscape of bodies and sound that prevails. The androgynous bodies moving through space lose their individualism and become the landscape itself, creating a compelling live interpretation of Nerdrum’s work.

ODD

Fri/12–Sat/13, 8 p.m.; Sun/14, 2 p.m.

Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts

1428 Alice, Oakl..

(510) 625-0110

www.brownpapertickets.com

Dark power

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Dark power

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE With stunning classically trained dancers and a repertory that features emerging and legendary choreographers, it’s no surprise that after bringing four West Coast premieres to Cal Performances at Zellerbach Hall (Oct. 29-30), Hubbard Street Dance Chicago left audience members in awe. Under the artistic direction of Glenn Edgerton, former dancer and artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater, HSDC continues to uphold a long tradition of exceptional dancing and exciting contemporary choreography.

In the show’s opening piece, Nacho Duato’s Arcangelo (2000), warm hues of dark yellow and gold (lighting by Brad Fields) illuminate a lustrous gold backdrop as the dancers (Laura Halm, Alejandro Piris-Nino, Penny Saunders, Jesse Bechard, Ana Lopez, Kevin Shannon, Jacqueline Burnett, and Pablo Piantino) bathed in light move through a series of intimate duets and solos with grace and power. Duato’s choreography subtly juxtaposes severe movements — hunched backs, flexed feet, and jagged angular undulations — with an overall classical and streamlined aesthetic. In doing so, Duato emphasizes the heavenly lightness and deep emotional currents inherent in the music of Arcangelo Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti. The piece ends in ethereal light and grounded darkness, as three couples lie motionless on the floor while the fourth couple climbs a long dark silvery cloth and — hanging, bodies outstretched — is pulled upward toward an imagined heaven.

The middle portion of the evening featured two works by Hubbard Street dancer and resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo. The curtain rose on Cerrudo’s Blanco to reveal four spotlights (set and lighting design by Nicholas Phillips), each illuminating a woman beneath a billowing cloud of smoke. Even in stillness, the four exquisite dancers, Halm, Jessica Tong, Meredith Dincolo, and Robyn Mineko Williams, exhibited strength and conviction. Dressed in attractive blue-gray leotards, sometimes moving together and at other times breaking off into solos, the dancers remain for the most part contained in their own personal spotlight. While the four women move like sculptures of contained perfection, an organic fluidity and drive to break free lies beneath the calm. Precise arm gestures and firm shapes melt into subtle head rolls and seamless transitions to the floor. The dark, driving piano melodies by Mendelssohn and Charles-Valentin Alkan emphasize a raw, dramatic emotion at the core of Blanco.

In Deep Down Dos, Cerrudo, “inspired by imagery and sounds of tectonic plates, crystalline caverns, and blazing infernos,” launches his dancers into shadowy darkness and continual motion. The dancers (Lopez, Burnett, Saunders, Kellie Epperheimer, Benjamin Wardell, Pablo Piantino, Jason Hortin, Jesse Bechard, Kevin Shannon) run and leap across the floor in a fast-paced frenzy of activity. Although this extreme physicality generates a wonderful excitement, Cerrudo’s choreography in this work at times feels disconnected. When the four men dance together, their lighthearted jazz leaps seem to go against the piece’s dark atmosphere and the compellingly dissonant music score by Mason Bates. Is this disconnect between movement and atmosphere intentional or accidental? Regardless, Cerrudo’s work stands up well alongside legends Kylian and Duato.

The evening ended with Jiri Kylian’s 27’52”, staged by Christina Gallofre Vargas and Gerald Tibbs. Set to eerie and electrifying music by Dirk Haubrich, Kylian brings his six dancers into violent and vulnerable contact. Cutting though space like exploding glass, the dancers crash, clash, pull, push, resist, and manipulate their way through quick gestures and athletic partnering sequences. On Oct. 30, the way in which dancers Tong, Hortin, Epperheimer, Piris-Nino, Piantino, and Halm expressed a sense of human vulnerability amid such fierce and gutsy movement was perhaps the most awe-inspiring aspect of the entire night. After an emotionally intense duet between Tong and Hortin — in which the two beautifully intertwine, lean, and lift each other through a struggle of resisting and giving in — the pair ultimately end up lying alone on opposite sides of the stage as thick white sheets, used as scenery throughout the piece, come plummeting to the floor.

Buntology

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Buntology

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Where were you when the Giants won?

I was eating Buffalo wings at NY Buffalo Wings with the Maze and Kayday, and when it was over we decided to spill into the streets.

What a great city our city was! This was the way that I was feeling, that San Francisco was the best place on Earth and had the best pitching. All that remained was to set a police car on fire.

“That’s what they do in Philadelphia,” Kayday explained.

Yeah, but we’re not Philadelphia, or Texas, are we? No, we are not. Besides better pitching we have district elections, the view from Dolores Park, and bike lanes. We have Buffalo wings, Philly cheese steak, Texas barbecue, Chicago pizza and Buster Posey. We have players with pretty hair, dyed beards, and cool names.

I don’t really follow baseball anymore. Baseball lost me a few years ago. Oh, I still appreciate good pitching when I see it. And a sacrifice bunt — which is not after all “hit,” but “laid down” — is still my favorite Thing in the whole wide world of sports. Executed properly — which is to say, poetically (see Aubrey Huff, top of the seventh, Game 5) — the sacrifice bunt makes me all buttery inside, and crispy outside, like the fried yucca at Limon Rotisserie.

I will never get tired of it. In fact, thanks to the tingly feeling I still have for power hitter Huff’s li’l push-n-puff between the mound and first base, I might just become a baseball fan again. Fuck Edgar Renteria. Fuck the sweet and sour punch of Lincecum-Wilson. They all might have won the game, according to sports sections, but — even before his thong-related antics at the parade — Aubrey Huff had won my heart. And which, in the long run, is really more important?

Oh, yeah … I guess you’re right: probably for sure the game, now that you mention it. This is why you’re not supposed to answer rhetorical questions.

But why am I writing about a week-old baseball game in the food section instead of dates and shit? Don’t answer that!

I want to. Because, like a lot of other wahoos hanging out of SUVs and minivans or dancing in intersections, on boats, or flying through the air, I was and still am beside myself with pride and joy for the city I live in and the people I live in it with.

Kayday was right. It was almost our civic duty to set things on fire. I wish I’d thought of this beforehand, but I’ve never been in a city that won the World Series before. As a result, I didn’t have matches or a lighter and that’s why I was at the corner of 18th and Mission streets rubbing two sticks together when the party started.

The Maze, who had come straight from the airport to wings and still had his luggage in tow and isn’t much of a baseball fan (lapsed or otherwise) and was tired, went home.

Kayday had her iPhone out and was taking pictures or making movies.

And I, like everyone else who has ever rubbed two sticks together, eventually gave up and started looking around for something to tip over, or at least kick.

All mayhem-related kidding aside, I love how everyone loved each other and seemed to want to hug or at least high five me. As someone who errs on the side of eye contact, who tends to smile and/or say hello and isn’t always (or even often) requited in this, I was like a kid on a choo-choo train.

I’d never felt anything like it.

So I stayed out late, in some cases dodging glass bottles, because I guess I wanted one more hug. One more high five. One more woohoo, ain’t we great.

Yeah, we are.

But I forgot to tell you about dim sum. Last week, and now, nearly, again. There’s this one out on the avenues, in the Richmond, that claims to be “the Very First Chinese Restaurant on Clement.” I don’t care about that. I barely care how good the dim sum was, which was, for the record, pretty good. What I do care about: $1.95 per plate, weekdays.

Ergo: new favorite restaurant!

LEE HOU

Sun.–Thu.: 8 a.m.–1 a.m.;

Fri.–Sat.: 8 a.m.-2 a.m.

332 Clement, SF

(415) 668-8070

D,MC,V

Beer and wine

alt.sex.column: Love stinks

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
alt.sex.column: Love stinks

andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I am newly pregnant and confused. I’m wondering about “pregnancy nose” and why all of a sudden my husband smells so bad to me. I have subtly hinted that he should take a shower before bed, but he showers in the morning and thinks I’m crazy to suggest taking another one. Lots of things smell bad to me right now. Garlic is gross, and I usually love garlic. Cheese and meat are completely disgusting, so much so that that all of a sudden I’m mostly a vegetarian. I can live with that — but thinking my husband is disgusting is not okay.

Love,

Nosy

Dear Nose:

One of the many perks of pregnancy is that we get to announce what we require of other people, partners especially. I have certainly seen women abuse this privilege, becoming iron-fisted little martinets ordering coworkers to change their eating habits or insisting that strangers on the next park bench over extinguish all smoking materials. But I suspect such people were nasty pieces of work before they got pregnant. Nice people are still nice enough even under the influence of bonkers hormones. You may wish to leap up and spray the garlic-beef consumers at the next table with Lysol, but you wouldn’t do it, right?

Neither will you let loose on your husband and tell him to get his OMG-stinky-paws-off-you-Jesus-Christ he makes you sick. But you have my permission to let him know, gently, that your wacky pregnancy hormones have produced the phenomenon often referred to as Bionic Nose and, through no fault of his own hygiene habits, you are having a hard time dealing with his entirely normal mammalian pong.

The Bionic Nose phenomenon is a weird one. It’s pretty clearly estrogen-fueled — women in general, um, smell better than men do, and it’s heightened in pregnancy and during ovulation, when it almost certainly plays a role in partner-choice and the increased randiness most women report at midcycle.

Obviously a heightened sense of smell and its associated squeamishness can help steer a pregnant hunter-gatherer away from tainted or toxic choices, but it comes in less handy when it renders stomach-turning otherwise perfectly nice things like a roast beef sandwich or your husband.

All well and good, you say, but what to do now with Ol’ Stinky there? As we’ve already covered, ask him to shower. Blame it on the hormones. I’m actually opposed on principle characterizing hormones as funny little imp-things that possess you and make you do and feel ridiculous things. Hormones and neurotransmitters are why and how we feel things, and I’m sorry to say that the ridiculous things we do and feel are real; they both cause and are caused by the release and reuptake of body-and-brain chemicals. That’s how it works. But you are pregnant, and I’ll cut you some slack. Go ahead, blame the ‘mones.

Oh, here’s an interesting side note, and one you can use if you need to mollify a husband who now feels stinky and rejected: many women discover that postpartum (and perhaps throughout the entire breast-feeding period) they stink like goats. Maybe that helps?

Love,

Andrea

 

An Iggy Pop Woody Allen

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
An Iggy Pop Woody Allen

COMEDY Marc Maron is old school. He’s the kind of comic who will talk your ear off about the pitfalls of modern technology and the lost art of conversation while actually making a point. He doesn’t do characters or hide behind awkward self-consciousness. He criticizes YouTube and the oversaturation of stand-up comedy, hankering for a return to the “emotional thought” of comics he grew up admiring. And in what seems to be a symbolic “fuck you” to the modern world, the guy is still rocking his America Online e-mail account. “No numbers or any of that shit — nice and clean,” he says. “I’m trying to make it sound really cool and retro.”

Maron specializes in a type of stand-up comedy that seems to reject any kind of self-censoring, perhaps best comparable to the like-minded Louis C.K. He is brutally honest when discussing his own thoughts and opinions, and vehemently flustered while ranting about personal relationships, the state of the country’s mental health, or why the hell he felt the need to buy a Blackberry (he compares his text messaging ability to pounding out letters on a stone tablet). His success has led to the creation of “WTF with Marc Maron” (www.wtfpod.com), a podcast full of comedy bits, interviews with comics like David Cross, Sarah Silverman, Bob Saget, and Maria Bamford, and most recently, even a bit of Maron’s newfound love for performing music live.

SFBG I was at a comedy show last week and on the way out I heard this woman ranting to her friend about how offended she was by some of the comic’s material. I was kind of baffled that someone could take it so seriously. Do you deal with this very often at your shows?

MARC MARON Part of the tradition of stand-up comedy, and of the comics who I’ve enjoyed personally throughout my life, is challenging people and making them a bit uncomfortable. You want to make people think rather than just sit there passively. If you’re doing your job well, you should have two or three of those people a show.

SFBG You talk a lot about technology’s impact on communication and your struggles to constantly try to adapt to it. If you could go back in time and freeze technological advancement at a certain point, when would that be?

MM (Laughing) Shortly after the invention of the automobile.

SFBG Do you mean that personally or in the grand scheme of things?

MM I guess in the grand scheme of things.

SFBG It’s interesting listening to your comedy about technology, because you walk a line between hating having to constantly keep up and knowing you have to in order to survive and benefit from it. Like the podcast, for example — has that turned a lot of people onto your comedy who hadn’t heard you previously?

MM It’s a whole other world, man. I can be doing a show and get an e-mail from a guy in Chile who’s listening to the podcast while climbing a mountain, and that’s really cool. But too often, I think technology encourages cowardice. You can hide behind a computer, you can hide behind a screen name. Or if you have to talk to someone, you just think, “I’ll just text this guy.” It can be draining to deal with certain things, and that can make it easier. But at some point you need to just man up.

SFBG The podcast is a nice compliment to your stand-up in that you don’t always have to play things strictly for laughs and can often just pick the brains of your guests in a really open, honest way.

MM Yeah. The podcast is unique in that it’s often just two people sitting down, having a conversation. And it seems like sitting down with another person for an hour-and-a-half of interpersonal conversation is too rare or hard for some people these days.

SFBG You’ve talked before about your love for music and playing guitar, and you’ve recently started to perform live a bit. What do you find different about performing music on stage compared to comedy?

MM In terms of baring your soul, I think music is the ultimate form for that. It’s amazing how much you can lose yourself playing music. As for stand-up, I would say it’s definitely a more vulnerable and high-risk art form in that people might not laugh and it’s just you up there. You don’t have your bandmates to fall back on.

SFBG Do you find that it becomes more difficult to stay angry the older you get?

MM Sure. I’ve recently started to come to a place where I’ve learned to accept a lot of things for how they are. I haven’t been doing very much topical or political comedy over the past few years, which is something I used to do a lot of. To do that type of comedy, you really need to be up to date. I used to read everything and get pissed off, and at some point I think I got a little disillusioned with it all. So I don’t do that very often these days. But don’t worry, ’cause I’m just waiting for the shit to hit the fan. And it definitely will.

MARC MARON

With Ryan Singer and Janine Brito

Thu/11, Fri/12 and Sat/13

Punch Line Comedy Club

444 Battery, SF

(415) 397-PLSF

www.marcmaron.com

www.wtfpod.com

Dodging bullets

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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14
Dodging bullets

steve@sfbg.com

Progressives in San Francisco dodged a few bullets on election night, which was the highest hope that many held in a campaign season dominated by conservative money and messaging. The Board of Supervisors retained a progressive majority, Prop B’s attack on public employees went down, the wealthy will pay more property transfer taxes, and — perhaps the best news of all — Gavin Newsom is leaving for Sacramento a year before his mayoral term ends.

But economically conservative and downtown-backed campaigns and candidates scored the most election-night victories in San Francisco, killing a temporary hotel tax hike pushed hard by labor and several progressive-sponsored ballot measures, and winning approval for the divisive sit-lie ordinance and Prop. G, removing Muni driver pay guarantees, which had the widest margin of the night: 65-35 percent.

“Ultimately, downtown did well,” progressive political consultant Jim Stearns told us on election night, noting how aggressive spending by downtown business and real estate interests ended a string of progressive victories in the last several election cycles. He cited the likely election of Scott Wiener in District 8 and the strong challenge in District 2 by Mark Farrell to perceived frontrunner Janet Reilly, who had progressive and mainstream endorsements.

A preliminary Guardian analysis of reported spending by independent expenditure committees shows that groups affiliated with downtown or supporting more conservative candidates spent about $922,435, the biggest contributions coming from conservative businessman Thomas Coates and the San Francisco Board of Realtors, compared to $635,203 by more progressive organizations, mostly the San Francisco Democratic Party and San Francisco Labor Council.

That spending piggy-backed on national campaigns that were also skewed heavily to conservative and corporate-funded groups and messaging that demonized government and public employee unions, playing on people’s economic insecurities during a stubborn recession and jobless recovery.

Stearns said voters are having a hard time in this economy “and they don’t like to see the government spending.” He said national polls consistently show that people are more scared of “big government” than they are “big corporations,” even if San Francisco progressives tend to hold the opposite view.

And even that narrow defeat came after an almost unprecedented opposition campaign that included every elected official in San Francisco except the measure’s sponsor, Public Defender Jeff Adachi, and both the labor movement and many moderate groups.

“The campaign on this was extraordinary and caught fire at the end,” Alex Clemens, founder of Barbary Coast Consulting, said at SPUR’s Nov. 4 election wrap-up event. In particular, the message about how much Prop B would increase the health care costs on median-income city employees seemed to resonate with voters.

“We are really happy that Prop. B is going down because it was such a misguided measure. It was not well thought through,” Labor Council President Tim Paulson told the Guardian at the election night party labor threw with the San Francisco Democratic Party at Great American Music Hall. “San Francisco voters are the smartest in America.”

Paulson was also happy to see those voters approve taxing the transfer of properties worth more than $5 million, “because San Franciscans know that everyone has to pay their fair share.”

In the Board of Supervisors races, it was basically a status quo election that shouldn’t alter the body’s current politics dynamics much. Sup. Bevan Dufty will be replaced with fellow moderate Scott Wiener in D8 and Sup. Chris Daly by progressive Jane Kim in D6. The outcome of races to replace ideological wobbler Sup. Sophie Maxwell in D10 and conservative Michela Alioto-Pier in D2 may not be conclusively known for at least a few more days (maybe longer if the close races devolve into lawsuits), but neither is a seat that would diminish the board’s progressive majority.

Progressives could have made a gain if Rafael Mandelman had won in D8, but he was seven points behind Wiener on election night and even more after the initial ranked choice tally was run on Nov. 5. And in D6, fears that downtown-backed candidate Theresa Sparks might sneak past dueling progressive candidates Jane Kim and Debra Walker never materialized as Sparks finished far behind the lefty pair.

Consultant David Latterman, who worked for Sparks, told us on election night that he was surprised to see that Kim was the choice of 32 percent of early absentee voters “because we targeted those voters.” By comparison, Walker was at 20 percent and Sparks was at 21 percent in the initial returns, which tend to be more conservative. By the end of the night, Kim had 31.3 percent, Walker 27.7 percent, and Sparks just 16.5 percent.

“If she did that well with absentees, it seems like it was Jane’s race to win. If they choose Jane, they wanted Jane. It’s just that simple,” Latterman told us on election night.

At her election night party, Kim credited her apparent victory to a strong campaign that she said fielded 400 volunteers on Election Day, most wearing the bright red T-shirts that read “See Jane Run” on the back. “I feel good,” Kim told the Guardian. “What I’m really happy about is we ran a really good campaign.”

In the end, Kim’s campaign was put over the top by the second-place votes of Sparks’ supporters, with 769 votes going to Kim and 572 to Walker in the first preliminary run of ranked-choice voter tabulations. But despite the bad blood that developed between progressives in the Kim and Walker campaigns, Board President David Chiu, an early Kim supporter, sounded a conciliatory note, telling the Guardian on election night, “Given where Debra and Jane are, I’m glad that we’re going to keep this a progressive seat.”

How to fight the GOP

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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How to fight the GOP

OPINION Now what?

Now we need to build a grassroots progressive movement — wide, deep, and strong enough to fight the right and challenge the corporate center of the Democratic Party.

The stakes are too high and crises too extreme to accept “moderate” accommodation to unending war, regressive taxation, massive unemployment, routine foreclosures, and environmental destruction.

A common formula to avoid is what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the paralysis of analysis.” Profuse theory + scant practice = immobilization.

It’s not enough to denounce what’s wrong or to share visionary blueprints. Day in and out, we’ve got to organize for effective and drastic social change, in all walks of life and with a vast array of activism.

Yes, electioneering is just one kind of vital political activity. But government power is extremely important. By now we should have learned too much to succumb to the despairing claim that elections aren’t worth the bother.

Such a claim is false. For instance, consider the many hundreds of on-the-ground volunteers who rejected the paralysis of analysis by walking precincts and making phone calls to help reelect progressive Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Arizona). Grijalva won a tight race in the state’s southwestern district and will return to Congress next year — much to the disappointment of the corporate flacks and xenophobes who tried to defeat him because of his strong stance against the state’s new racial-profiling immigration law.

The mass-media echo chamber now insists that Republicans have triumphed because President Obama was guilty of overreach. But since its first days, the administration has undermined itself — and the country — with tragic under-reach.

It’s all about priorities. The Obama presidency has given low priority to reducing unemployment, stopping home foreclosures, or following through with lofty pledges to make sure that Main Street recovers along with Wall Street.

Far from constraining the power of the Republican Party, the administration’s approach has fundamentally empowered it. The ostensibly shrewd political strategists in the White House have provided explosive fuel for right-wing “populism” while doing their best to tamp down progressive populism. Tweaks aside, the Obama presidency has aligned itself with the status quo — a formula for further social disintegration and political catastrophe.

The election of 2010 is now grim history. It’s time for progressives to go back to the grassroots and organize with renewed, deepened commitment to changing the direction of this country. If we believe that state power is crucial — and if we believe in government of, by, and for the people — it’s not too soon to begin planning and working for change that can make progressive victories possible in future elections. 

Norman Solomon is co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death.

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